Neoliberal contradictions, necrocapitalist nightmares: questions of human agency and free will in Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the major fantastic conceit, the Whatsitname (the shisma), in Ahmad Sa'dāwī's novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, functions as an allegory for the repressed totality of necrocapitalist rationality in the postcolonial global South. Sa'dāwī's novel seemingly privileges postmodern and neoliberal ideologemes such as individual choice that blame the death and violence in Iraq on people's actions and representations. Nonetheless, the novel paradoxically attributes the human condition and the consequences of human actions to invisible structural forms of power and larger-than-life supernatural powers namely, the Whatsitsname as an allegory for necrocapitalism, that ultimately undermine human agency and freedom. I will examine the ways in which this tension is articulated in the novel through the production of the fantasy of a unified nation, homoerotic desire, and class politics. The novel ultimately reflects Iraqi subjects' deeper ontological anxieties about the circulation of their bodies in the necrocapitalist market.

KEYWORDS:

• Frankenstein in Baghdad
• necrocapitalism
• national fantasy
• homoeroticism
• revolutionary subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Zangana, “Al-muthaqqaf wa al-iḥtilāl.”

2 Zangana, “Al-muthaqqaf.” Other scholars have also criticized the political and ideological agendas underpinning the “instrumentalization of history and memory” among the Iraqi intelligentsia, while others provide a critical historical context for understanding the role of Iraqi intellectuals in the development of these political and ideological crises. See: Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, eds., We are Iraqis (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013), xxix; and Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism, Intellectuals, and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

3 In some of his early journalistic writings about the American invasion, Saʿdāwī’s rhetoric seems to coincide with triumphalist neoliberal discourses that celebrated the invasion as ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy in Iraq. For him, the short-lived freedom that was secured, however briefly, for Iraqis through the American invasion and colonial occupation was a disruptive event that opened up new future possibilities that had never been foreseen before. In contrast, the novel interrogates these triumphalist discourses and their neoliberal and postmodern premises through an exploration of the problematic of human agency and free will, especially the complicity of Iraqis in the violence and the responsibility they bear for the ubiquitous death and destruction in the country during the post-invasion era. See: Saʿdāwi, “Ṭaʿm al-ḥurriya.”

4 The relationship between postmodernism and neoliberalism has been described as either complementary or evolutionary. See: Hans von Zon, “The Unholy Alliance between Postmodernism and Neoliberalism,” Vlaams Marxistisch Tijdschrift 47, no. 2 (2013): 112–13; and Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 23.

5 In an interview, Saʿdāwī notes that he was not familiar with Shelley’s Frankenstein, but merely with the “vast cultural space” of the Frankenstein myth (Najjar, “Baghdad Writes!”). However, the paratext, structure, and content of his novel reveal the extent to which Saʿdāwī is intimately familiar with the thematic intricacies and subtleties of Shelley’s text itself. Although I read the novel in the original Arabic, I opted for interpreting the English translation because the translation brings the novel closer to the hypotext namely, Shelley’s novel itself. In this sense, following Žižek’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, the translation makes it impossible to read Saʿdāwī’s text only within its Arabic cultural and literary heritage (Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 143–44). Rather, reading the translation forces us as readers to reject any attempt that might deceptively aim at restoring the text’s organic wholeness or cultural completeness, while also maintaining a critical stance towards the translation of the novel in the context of the wider Arabic literary translation industry. For further studies of the translation of the novel, see: Quentin Müller, “‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ Sparks Hollywood Elite into Life,” The New Arab, 2018, English,alaraby.co.uk/features/frankenstein-baghdad-sparks-hollywood-elite-life.; Angiola Codacci-Pisanelli, “Ravages of War: Frankenstein in Baghdad,” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1818-2018, ed. Maria Parrino, Alessandro Scarsella and Michela Vanon Alliata (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 154–61; and Christina Phillips, “Ahmed Saʿdāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Case Study of Consecration, Annexation, and Decontextualization in Arabic–English Literary Translation,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 58, no. 2 (2023): 375–90.

6 Necrocapitalist theories develop Marx’s critique of the political economy, exposing the extent to which death, destruction, and expropriation of labor and workers’ bodies underlie capitalist accumulation (Banerjee, “Necrocapitalism;” MIAsma, On Necrocapitalism; Tyner, Dead Labor; Valencia, Gore Capitalism.)

7 My use of allegory here draws on Jameson’s definition of it as an analytic that foregrounds the totality or “multidimensionality of globalization,” including the class struggle in a given national context and the “globalized forces at work outside it” (Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 195).

8 See: Jani, “Violence as the Abject in Iraqi Literature;” Alhashmi, “The Grotesque in Frankenstein in Baghdad;” Abdalkafor, “Frankenstein and Frankenstein in Baghdad;” Murphy, “Frankenstein in Baghdad: Human Conditions, or Conditions of Being Human;” and Davies, “Concrete Stories, Decomposing Fictions.”

9 Elayyan, “The Monster Unleashed.”

10 Sabeeh and Kiaee, “Reconsideration the Corpse.”

11 In his more recent articles and interviews, Saʿdāwī insists that all Iraqis are complicit in the killings in Iraq and that the Whatsitsname embodies every Iraqi’s collusion in destruction and death (Saʿdāwī, “Naḥnu jamīʿan musāhimūn bi-l-qatal.”)

12 My analysis of this problematic of human agency benefited from Hannah Arendt’s existentialist reflections on the human condition (Arendt, The Human Condition; and Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social).

13 In line with the Lacanian terminology I use in this analysis, the ontological anxiety provoked by necrocapitalism can be understood in relation to Lacan’s critique of capitalist discourse. For Lacan, capitalist discourse treats the ontological status of the subject as a divided and lacking subject not as the individual’s inherent truth but as a terminable condition or a crisis that must be overcome and resolved. Necrocapitalism exacerbates this crisis by exploiting this subjective division for profit, leaving subjects in a state of perpetual unease and disconnection from their own commodified and monetized bodies. Vanheule, “Capitalist discourse.”

14 This human-animal mashup can be traced back to Shelley’s novel, in which the “materials” Victor Frankenstein used to create the Creature were collected from “charnel-houses [ … ] the dissecting room and the slaughter-house.” The signifier “materials” was used by vivisectionists to refer specifically to animal parts. Shelley, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, 54–55; and Anthes, “The Heated 19th-Century Debate over Animal Experimentation.”

15 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 160.

16 The animation and assembly of the Whatsitsname unfolds in Bataween, the religiously multicultural neighborhood and the historically Jewish neighborhood in Baghdad. The animation scene, in which the elderly Assyrian Christian widow Elishva animates the Whatsitsname, draws on Jewish folktales of the golem and invokes ceremonial magic and rituals that foreground these subjects’ libidinal investment in the creation of the Whatsitsname. The golem provides a source for Shelley’s Creature and could have inspired the mythic depiction of the Whatsitsname in Saʿdāwī’s novel (Rowen, “The Making of Frankenstein’s Monster;” and Bertman, “The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein”). For these reasons, among others, I have opted to refer to the Whatsitsname in the third person inanimate singular, “it,” even though the novel mostly refers to it in the third person masculine singular, “he.”

17 Baker, “Global Capitalism and Iraq.”

18 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 12.

19 Ibid., 157.

20 Tyner, Dead Labor.

21 Valencia, Gore Capitalism.

22 The criminalization of Iraqi citizens in the novel can be directly linked to an important theme in Shelley’s novel, which associates Victor’s collection of bones from charnel-houses, dissecting rooms, and slaughter-houses with contemporary representations of criminality (Marshall, The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 66).

23 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 146.

24 Ibid., 115.

25 Ibid., 214.

26 Ibid., 156.

27 This is especially the case in novels awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the Arabic Booker, including Frankenstein in Baghdad, and that are specifically marketed for global audiences. In this market, there is a clear preference for postmodern novels over realist representation of the American invasion and occupation (al-Sālim, “al-Iḥtilāl al-amīrkī fī al-riwāya al-ʿirāqī;” ; ʿĀbid, “al-Riwāya al-ʿirāqī;” Bahoora, “Writing the Dismembered Nation;” Al-ʿĀbidī, al-Ansāq al-wāqiʿiyya wa-l-ramziyya fī al-riwāya al-ʿirāqī mā baʿd 2003; Al-Nāshiʾ, Tamaththulāt al-iḥitlāl al-amrīkī fī al-riwāya al-ʿirāqiyya; and Al-Janābī, al-Riwāya al-ʿIrāqiyya baʿd al-iḥtilāl al-amrīkī; hashāshaẗ al-maʾwā wa-azmaẗ al-huwīya.

28 Elyachar, “Rethinking Anthropology of Neoliberalism in the Middle East;” and Anne-Marie McManus, “Scale in the Balance: Reading with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (“The Arabic Booker”).”

29 Steger and Roy, Neoliberalism, 68.

30 Underlying the representation of both the Whatsitsname and Iraqi subjects is the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary fantasy of the “body in pieces” and fragmentation that define the subject in the mirror stage especially, under experiences of “the aggressive disintegration of the individual.” This fantasy operates psychically to express the subjects’ unconscious anxieties about “castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body” (Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 78; 85). While Annie Webster examines the representation of the dismembered body in the novel, she ironically erases the Iraqi dismembered body, recentering instead narratives of “miraculous accounts of experimental science being used to regenerate the bodies of injured US soldiers returning from military campaigns such as the Iraq War” (Webster, “Ahmed Saʿ’dāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad,” 439). Nonetheless, understanding these medical technologies in the context of necrocapitalist (ir)rationality can help show that even the lives of American soldiers are not a priority.

31 Alkhayat, “Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saʿ’dāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013);” Bahoora, “Writing the Dismembered Nation;” and Booker and Daraiseh, “Frankenstein in Baghdad or the Postmodern Prometheus.”

32 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 97.

33 Ibid., 111.

34 Ibid., 112.

35 Ibid., 147.

36 Saʿdāwī’s novel reconfigures the Creature’s conundrum in Shelley from the Symbolic to the Imaginary order. While Shelley emphasizes the Creature’s desire to be integrated into the symbolic order through education, family, and marriage, Saʿdāwī’s novel foregrounds the Whatsitsname’s entrapment in its specular image (Collings, “The Mother and the Maternal Thing,” 331–32).

37 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 26.

38 Ibid., 153.

39 The Whatsitsname’s familiar face here stands in stark contrast to the Creature’s terrifying face in Shelley’s text. Victor remarks that “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance” (Shelley, Frankenstein, 86). However, as Mladen Dolar argues, it is the monster’s gaze not his visage that terrifies Victor, since it is seen as “the opening of a hole in reality” (Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’,” 20).

40 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 186.

41 Ibid., 97.

42 Ibid., 108.

43 Ibid., 111.

44 Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 252, 208.

45 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 85–100.

46 Žižek , The Parallax View, 182.

47 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 193.

48 Copjec, Read My Desire, 28.

49 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 98.

50 Ibid., 55.

51 Hook, “Of Symbolic Mortification and ‘Undead Life’: Slavoj Žižek on the Death Drive,” 250.

52 Just like Shelley’s Creature, the Whatsitsname is an adult stillborn. They are both fully formed at the physical level, but it is not clear whether the Whatsitsname is also a tabula rasa like the Creature. Shelley’s engagement with education and its role in the formation of the Creature’s character is completely bypassed in the Arabic hypotext. For Shelley’s position on education and her critique of Rousseau, see McWhir, “Teaching the Monster to Read,” 73–92.

53 This repression of sexual knowledge in Saʿdāwī’s novel can be compared to Shelley’s Frankenstein, where homoerotic desire is also displaced. For a discussion of homosexual desire in Shelley, see William Veeder, “The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys;” Daffron, “Male bonding: Sympathy and Shelley’s Frankenstein;” and McGavran, “Insurmountable barriers to our union.”

54 Jani, “Violence as the Abject;” and Alkhayat, “Gothic Politics.”

55 According to Pitkin, Arendt associates the devouring mother with the social as the blob. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 174.

56 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 23.

57 Ibid., 25.

58 Ibid., 160.

59 In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor’s pursuit of the wishful fantasy to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” is also motivated on the surface by his traumatic reaction to the loss of his mother after she contracted scarlet fever. This wishful fantasy reflects Victor’s infantile desire to resurrect his mother’s corpse. Shelley, Frankenstein, 82; and Brennan, “The Landscape of Grief in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” 121.

60 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 25.

61 Op. cit.

62 Ibid., 144.

63 Ibid., 100.

64 Hadi’s terror invoked in this scene echoes Victor’s terror in the animation scene, which he describes as a “catastrophe” (Shelley, Frankenstein, 85).

65 Lacan, Ethics, 270–91.

66 Zupančič, Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax, 38.

67 Ibid., 39.

68 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 25.

69 Ibid, 48.

70 Ibid, 192.

71 Dolar, “‘I Shall Be,” 329.

72 As Rosemary Jackson contends in a different context, “naming the double is impossible,” since the double is the subject “themselves in alienated form, an image of themselves before they acquired names” (Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 46).

73 The Whatsitsname’s ceaseless asexual reproduction can be related to Victor’s asexual creation of a “new species” in Shelley. Shelley endorsed Darwin’s belief in the superiority of sexual reproduction over “solitary reproduction,” because as Anne Mellor states it “allows not only for variation but for the blending of masculine and feminine traits” (Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, 100). The progeny of asexual reproduction are thus the exact double of their male progenitor. Hence, as L. McDonald and Kathleen Scherf note, “the common interpretation of the monster as a sort of double of Victor is solidly grounded in Darwinian biology” (Shelley, Frankesntein, 82, 21, 22).

74 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 64.

75 Ibid., 62.

76 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 193.

77 Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 171. The feminization of the Whatsitsname echoes Shelley’s representation of the Creature as a woman. See Hirsch, “The Monster Was a Lady;” and Zonana, “They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale.”

78 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 66.

79 Ibid., 111–12.

80 Ibid., 109.

81 Echoing Shelley’s Creature, the Whatsitsname dismisses Hadi’s paternal authority as useless and unnecessary, without grounding it in the same rebellious Miltonian subtext of Shelley’s novel. For more on Shelley’s engagement with Milton and especially the creator-creature and parent-child relationships, see Wade, “Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;” and Claridge, “Parent-Child Tensions in Frankenstein: The Search for Communion.”

82 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 67.

83 Ibid., 37.

84 Mahmoud’s misogyny can be compared to Victor’s in Shelley, who uses the Creature as a conceit to warn against the patriarchal desire to circumvent or annihilate women. Mellor, Mary Shelley; and Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and the Female Experience in Nineteen-Century Women's Writing.

85 Boothby, Embracing the Void, 24–29.

86 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 89.

87 Ibid.

88 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 145.

89 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 89.

90 In Arendt’s political theory, the masses are gendered feminine and are often depicted as “devouring” and symbolized through imagery related to excess such as “ooze, swamp, and flood.” Quoting Andreas Huyssen, Pitkin notes that the fear of the masses in political discourses during the early twentieth century was closely intertwined with the fear of femininity, nature, the unconscious, sexuality, and the loss of individual identity and “stable ego boundaries” (Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 170).

91 Elayyan, “The Monster Unleashed;” Murphy, “Frankenstein in Baghdad;” Jani, “Violence as the Abject;” Abdalkafor, “Frankenstein and Frankenstein in Baghdad;” and Sabeeh and Kiaee, “Reconsideration the Corpse.”

92 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 781–801.

93 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 108.

94 Ibid., 105.

95 Ibid., 143.

96 Ibid., 106.

97 Marx, Capital, 784, 782.

98 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 96.

99 It is interesting to juxtapose Saʿdāwī’s critique of proletarian politics with Shelley’s representation of radical revolutionary politics—her erasure of the proletariat and her ambiguous position on the French Revolution and its mobs (see Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders; Montag, ”‘The Workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein;” Weissman, “A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife;” Sterrenburg, “Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein;”; M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel; and Randel, “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

100 Saʿdāwī, Frankenstein, 97.

101 Ibid., 100.

102 Ibid., 185.

103 Ibid., 200–201.