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I have just come across the most wonderful and amazing story. It’s worthy of an entry in Teemings, but it’s not really very long. Besides, it’s apropriate to have this appear in the same month as Halloween. So here it is.
In the 1975 Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein the following odd exchange takes place. It’s during the very first scene with Frederick (Gene Wilder), after he has just given the emonstration of “voluntary versus involuntary nerve impulses” – the one where Liam Dunn gets kicked in the groin.
Afterwards, Frankenstein delicately washes his hands in the big metal fingerbowl, and the Eager Beaver student addresses him:
Student: Dr. Frankenst…(stops as he recalls Frankenstein’s hatred of that pronuncation) Doctor Fronk-on-steen.
Frankenstein: Yes?
Student: Isn’t it true that Darwin preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case until, by some extraordinary means, it actually began to move with a voluntary motion?
Frankenstein: Are you speaking of the Worm…or the Spaghetti? (general laughter at the Student’s exense)
Student: (undaunted) Why, the Worm, Sir.
Frankenstein: Yes, it seem to me that I did read something of that incident when I was a student. But you must remember hat a Worm…with very few exceptions … is not a Human Being. (Laughter again)
This always struck me as a very odd exchange. Recently, however, I obtained a copy of The Annotated Frankenstein, with Annotations by Leonard Wolf*, and it answered my questions in a very surprising way.
In the first place, the Student’s quesion is a line drawn verbatim from the Mary Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel Frankenstein (not the initial 1818 publication, which had a Preface by her husband). The Darwin referred to is not Charles Darwin, who we would first think of, but the grandfather of the evolutionist, physician Erasmus Darwin who was a famous author in his own time, and friend of Mary’s family. Nevertheless, the reference is obscure. Wolf himself asked Erasmus Darwin’s biographer, Desmond King-Hele, about it, and received a letter in reply that contained the following:
“Mary Shelley’s remarks can, I think, be regarded as recording a mixed-up remembrance by (Lord) Byron and (Percy?) Shelley of what Darwin wrote in his first note to The Temple of Nature. It is entitled “Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic Animals”…Darwin does refer (p. 3) to a ‘paste composed of flour and water’ in which ‘the animalcules called eels’ are seen in great abundance and gradually became larger, even in ‘a sealed glass phial’. He also refers (p. 7) to the vorticela comng to life after being dried. Put this lot together and stir it, and you might arrive at Mary’s report.”
In other words, the reference is the result of confusion between a report of Spontaneous Generation (life from previous non-living matter) and the reviving of a dried organsm. The correct answer, then, to Dr. Frankenstein’s question “the worm or the spaghetti?” would thus seem to be “Both”
Except that even this is not correct. There is no worm called “Vermicelli” --the word only refers to the spaghetti-like pasta. The dried organisms Darwin referred to are “vorticella”, which are bell-shaped one cell organisms, and not wormlike at all. This, I have to admit, surprised me – I seemed to recall there being worms called “Vermicelli”. No doubt the screenwriters did, too.
So, when all is said and done, the correct answer to Dr. Frankenstein’s question is “The Spaghetti”. There is no worm by that name. So the Student got it wrong after all, but so did the Professor. And Peter Boyle’s monster was a sort of kin to Chef Boy-Ar-Dee’s Spaghetti-O’s.
- Wolf also annotated The Annotated Dracula. Years later he re-published these as The Essential Dracula and The Essential Frankenstein– I assume he had some sort of falling-out with the “Annotated ----” People. He added to these The Essential Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde and The Essential Phantom of the Opera.