The Mad Artist

When I first read “My Style of Drawing Birds,” I was struck by what I would call the text’s feeling of “literary-ness”—its almost Poe-like fascination with the grotesque and the Gothic, and its curious, often frenetic, narrative voice. The more Audubon that I read—with his constant appeal to the trope of imploring the “kind reader”—the more that I also notice Audubon’s self-consciousness and self-fashioning not only as an artist or an ornithologist, but as a storyteller.

At the same time as he explains to us his philosophy of drawing, “My Style of Drawing Birds” can also be taken as definitive of Audubon’s style of writing. Here he constructs himself as a highly stylized character, a figure who resembles, in some of his behaviors, one that we know well in pop culture nowadays as well as in nineteenth-century and earlier fictions—the mad scientist. Bear with me here, because this comparison may sound a bit strange at first, especially since I’m about to introduce Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into it, and even pronouncing the names Audubon and Frankenstein in succession intuitively sounds like the set-up for a joke. Hopefully, though—my kind readers—by the end of this post you will be convinced, if nothing else, that there are some meaningful alignments in both formal and thematic content in these two first-person accounts. To this end, I’ll juxtapose some Frankenstein quotations from the excerpt in our anthology alongside passages from “My Style” so that you can decide for yourself. I’d also like to suggest that these points of intersection (and of deviation) matter, that they contain insights into a larger cultural consciousness of the time pertaining to several pressing issues—including questions of representation and originality (which harken as far back as Plato), man’s relationship to—or estrangement from—nature, as well as the relation of art to science when both are concerned with acts of “creation,” and ideas about the proper proportion of aesthetic liberty to realism.

I’m sure that Audubon never read Shelley’s work, though he would have been in his mid-thirties, I gather, when it was written; he was probably far too busy gleaning the secrets of nature himself and trying to bring his own dead subjects to life through drawing. (Why else so much obsession with the lifesize image? It's as if he were hoping that one day the birds might get up and sail away on paper wings.) And when Victor calls his laboratory of butchered body parts a “workshop of filthy creation” (147), well, these words speak just as well for Audubon’s room of bird marionettes (and sometimes even human cadavers for paid portaiture) that he moves about on wires trying to force them to most closely resemble life; this, too, is "filthy creation," far messier than taxidermy.

I think it might be a conceptually rich thought experiment to consider the practice of drawing from the dead, as Audubon does, as a form of artistic “re-animation”—perhaps one to rival prevalent scientific theories about spontaneous generation and attempts to literally “draw life” out of dead matter. Also, it's worth looking at the similar mental states that both of these acts of creation are depicted as fostering, how both Shelley and Audubon dip into this common pool of romantic language about the experience of individuals supposedly on the verge of discovery and revelation, whether scientific or artistic or both (which also hinges on the spiritual and thus the applicability of the word "revelation").

So now for that direct juxtaposition of the two passages:

Principles of Life and Nature:

Victor: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?” (144)

Audubon: “My Manner of Drawing Birds formed on Natural principles” (762)

Audubon: “…to study Nature was to ramble through her domains, Late and early and at every hour, that any where there I might if capable obtain a serviceable Lesson…” (762)

Victor: “...with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places” (147)

Model of ‘Total Immersion’ in order to obtain exclusive knowledge

Audubon: “…by fastening the threads securely I had something like life before me, yet Much was wanting—when I saw the living bird I felt the blood rise to my temples and almost in despair spent about a Month without Drawing, but in deep thought and daily in the company of the feathered inhabitants of Dear Mill Grove” (760)

Victor: Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses…I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain (145)

The Big Moment of Realization / Revelation:

Victor: “…from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple…” (145)

Audubon: “A thought struck my Mind like a flash of light, that nothing after all could ever answer my Anthusiastic desires to represent nature, than to attempt to Copy her in her own Way, alive and moving!”

Individual So Consumed by Work, No Time for own Basic “Consumption”

Victor: “My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated, with confinement” (147)

Audubon: “Think not reader that my want of a breakfast was at all in my Way, no indeed—I sat to, outlined the bird, aided by compasses and My eyes coloured it and finished it without ever a thought having crossed My Mind as regarded the alleviation of Hunger” (761)

Others May Think Me Mad (but it’s not true)

Victor: “a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (147)

Audubon: “there seemed to hover around me almost a mania” (792)

Audubon: “the wife of my Tenant I really believe thought that I was mad” (761)

Victor: “Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman” (145)

(Note, in the first set of quotes, the hesitation of both speakers when they insist on using the qualifier “almost”—almost a mania, almost frantic—and the passiveness of the words “seemed to”; both narrative voices here are excited to point to the romanticized resemblance that their mental state bears to madness, but are keen to point out that it stops at appearances).

So what do we extract from all this? Well, to start with, that looking at this rhetoric side by side, it eventually became difficult (at least for me) to distinguish Shelley’s language of fiction, told from the voice of Victor Frankenstein, from Audubon’s own “real” discussion of himself and his artistic principles. And that often the narrative voice in both felt so similar that often what one could have said the other also could have said (if you allow yourself to forget the fact that Audubon is talking about birds) so close were both in the dominating “frenzy” or “mania” that they assumed. With only a tweak in the particular subjects they refer to—dead birds or human cadavers, isolated woods or isolated cemeteries—their tone could be interchangeable.

Not to say that there aren’t ideological differences. There are many possible jumping-off points for major disagreement in the nuances of what it means, for instance, to “pursue nature to her hiding places” (Victor) versus to “ramble through [nature’s] domains” (Audubon) For instance, although the attitude of the rambler/pursuer is one of similar passion, the rambler sets himself up as one who can learn from Nature at her own designated pace, while the pursuer sets himself up as one who will force Nature to be his teacher as he sees fit. And yet it’s also somewhat deceptive rhetoric, too, that Audubon calls himself a mere “rambler,” implying that he never imposes on Nature, but lets her take the lead and “teach” him, considering that he is such an avid hunter and in his lifetime killed countless thousands of birds. Killing them first, then letting them “teach” him.

But back to this business of representation. The words to “imitate nature” are crucially important to Audubon in his work (to imitate nature as well as possible, to draw a bird as close to life as possible) and also to the mad scientist creator. The closer he gets to life or the resemblance of life (Audubon ecstatically moving aside his King Fisher’s eyelid and Victor seeing the “dull yellow eye” of his creation open for the first time) the higher the creator’s excitement, or nervous energy, mounts. In a sense, Frankenstein’s monster is alive, but in another, he is nothing more than a representation of life. He had to be created, not just born, and the idea of what he was supposed to look like preceded and dictated even this second “birth.” As a (very poor) representation of a living human, he is a composite of assorted artistic materials, a pasty collage of different bodies, doomed to walk amongst those who are the true “Originals” of that thing he can only shabbily represent.

But here there is another question: is the bigger issue that Victor “overstepped” nature in attempting to do the same thing that Nature does, or is the real issue that Victor is just an awful artist? That if he could have just imitated Nature better, paid enough attention to the total harmony of his composition, he could have circumvented the ensuing tragedy? Then, on the other hand, let’s think about Audubon: he wants to be known for his scientific eye and his first-hand knowledge of birds in nature. He doesn’t consider himself an artist in the “art museum” sense, as we discussed in class last time, but eventually becomes an artist in the art museum sense after his death. At the same time as he is devoted to realism and being "true" to nature--which Victor is not--Audubon is undeniably concerned with the aesthetic pleasure of the viewer (he considers not only a creation, but those who look at it); this is exactly what Victor neglected to account for in his own work (and, oh, the consequences). It makes sense that Shelley, as a writer, would warn scientists of the danger of forgetting about humans' existence as aesthetic beings.

Artistic mimesis, versus the “simulation of life” that drew audiences to watch scientists (also performers) like Galvani perform electric experiments that made the limbs of corpses jerk, is not one that is generally condemned, at least in the same way, for being transgressive. Art is criticized for being societally or ethically or morally transgressive; it can be insensitive or in poor taste, but less often do you hear the more epic statement that it is “against nature.” If there’s an overarching message in this post—and I’m still just musing very abstractly—maybe it’s that art is capable of going one step further than even the most speculative science in permanently “re-animating” its subjects, offering that elusive fountain of youth or a “second life” to the dead. Perhaps the mad scientist's mistake is unwittingly attempting to use the body as his canvas, when it is the task of the mad artist to translate the body onto a canvas (or the written page).