Phi Fic #3 Frankenstein (PEL Crossover Special)

0:01 Unknown speaker: You're listening to a Partially Examined Life special episode. What makes it special is that it's not an episode of Pel but an episode from Phi Fic, which is a new PEL sponsored podcast that focuses on fiction with philosophical themes. This podcast grew out of pel's Not School program, which is a way for our fans to meet and have their own discussions. In fact, it was started by our former Not School coordinator, Nathan Hanks, along with some other Not Schoolers. This podcast will also have the occasional guest from the Partially Examined Life and elsewhere.

I, Wes Alwan, am the guest for this episode, which is on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Go to fiveficpodcast.com to see other episodes. That's P H I F I C podcast.com Topics include Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy with Dylan as a guest in the Penal Colony by Kafka and the Moviegoer by Walker Percy. And you'll find a list of soon to be released episodes@PartiallyExaminedLife.com upcoming. You'll also find upcoming episodes of Mark Linsenmayer's Nakedly Examined Music, which is also part of pel's podcast network. So we hope you enjoy the show and if you do, please remember to go subscribe on itunes.

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1:21 Nathan: Hey, this is Nathan Hanks with the Phi Fic podcast, episode three on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In this conversation we have a special guest, Wes Alwan from the Partially Examined Life podcast. He'll be speaking with us along with Daniel St Pierre, Laura Davis, Mary Claire and Cezary Baraniecki. Coming in a little late to the conversation. If you want to find out more about us, you can@fifigpodcast. That's.com or mail. If you want to send us a suggestion for reading or book book quotes or anything else, you can do that there. Anyway, I hope you enjoy and thanks for listening.

2:01 Unknown speaker: This is a spoiler.

You can't listen to this and not have spoilers.

2:28 Nathan: And maybe we should introduce ourselves because we've got a guest today.

2:33 Unknown speaker: Okay, go ahead.

2:34 Nathan: I don't know if we've talked before, except maybe one time, Wes, but I'm Nathan and I've been running this fiction group for a little while now.

2:42 Unknown speaker: Okay, Everybody can just take a.

2:45 Nathan: We never have an introduction. So. Okay.

2:47 Unknown speaker: I'm Laura and I've been part of this forever and done many things on Pel and I mostly know Mark, so. Hi Wes.

Hi. Yeah, I've seen your comments and yes.

Oh yeah.

Hey, I'm Daniel

and Mary.

Hi.

I know both of you.

We've talked before, I think, on after shows or this or that, but appreciate you coming on. I was excited when I saw that you were doing the live group on Frankenstein, because I've just had a drive to want to read it for the last few months, and it gave me a good excuse to propose it to the group here, and I have really enjoyed it.

Why did you have the live group on it, Wes? Just out of curiosity.

I had studied it. I take these classes at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis occasionally, and we had done that in a psychoanalysis and literature class. And then I wrote a long essay on it, so I thought a lot about it. And so when I set up the book group, I just knew it was something I was prepared for and didn't have to do a lot of work for.

Right, right.

Well, I thought with that in mind, that. And also, since a lot of people are probably already familiar with Frankenstein, that maybe Wes and I, or even just Wes, can just say a little bit about what we found interesting about this story and why we might want to treat it to a discussion about literature, because maybe some people who only know it from the movies or popular incarnations might want to cast a glance aside at why Frankenstein was worthwhile.

Well, I mean, it's very different from the Mass, but go ahead.

Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing.

I became interested in this. I was reading it for class and I'd actually never read it before, but I was immediately taken by the book just because of the. It's kind of a thing I have with any old book. It's a window into something alien, and it's always very fetching for me. And then it started to get tedious with all the descriptions of nature and things like that. So that was my first read. I was a little irritated by the end of it because it's written in this sort of emotionally, let's say labile, or all the narrators in this are sort of hysterics, let's put it that way.

Way. So that element of it just sort of the enervated style of it got to me. But then I started to think about it, and then I became interested in a new way. And actually, I really, actually enjoyed it. I also. I listened to it on tape once, and then I reread it or re. Listened to it as an audiobook. And both times I actually enjoyed it even more because I won't say the first reading, I didn't enjoy it. I just. It Wore on me after a while. In the other iterations, I was just. I was interested in writing about the ideas behind the book because I found those really, really fascinating because there's lots of really interesting themes.

Mary Shelley is only 18 when she writes this, I think, and it starts out as a sort of artistic competition. And so there are obvious parallels between the creator of the creature or the monster and being an artist, for instance. And there are lots of other things to say about it. I won't jump on that yet. It's just endlessly fascinating in that sense. And so that's what I. I'm a huge fan of this and it's kind of shocking and envy producing that a 18 year old could accomplish something like

this and never did anything like this again. I mean, she wrote, but she didn't write to this level again.

I thought that the. There was. I mean, I love the book, but there was one part when I read through it the second time that kind of bummed me out. I thought it was lazy writing. You know how when Elizabeth writes the letter to Victor, she writes a letter to him when he's off at school and she introduces the character Justine. I just thought it was kind of lazy. Like, why wouldn't you just go back and write her in? Even as an aside, earlier in the book? Cause she goes through all this expository. She actually. Oh, of course you remember her, but maybe you don't. So let me give you a little background on her. It was just like, really? That's just lazy. Just go back and rewrite.

This wasn't a time when, yeah, people thought of themselves as crafting these tight little workshopped pieces. Like, it's not a Jonathan Franzen approach to writing. It's just a. This is a story. And I'm going to worry about the poeticness of some of the language, but it doesn't have some of those other elements of craft. I think you're right about that.

Like I said, I love the book. I really did enjoy it. But there was just that one. It was like this one little thing because there are other things in it that I think, oh my God, this is just amazing. But yeah, that part was just like, why? Why would you do it this way?

Well, that's kind of heartening in a way, I think, because like Wes was saying, I also, I also was a little intimidated by, you know, the thought that an 18 year old pulls this off and it's just so. I mean, who knows? I think there's an open question a little bit about how much influence her husband had on it. But I think.

Really?

Well, I mean, at least there is to me, I'm not sure. I know that he had some influence and worked with it.

Well, he did some editing and there's a scholarly debate about how much editing and actual writing he did. So it's a.

You know, really.

It's been a long.

Yeah, I mean, I read the 1818 version. Yeah. Is that what everyone else read?

I did too.

I just read.

Yep, one and a half.

I read the other one and then I read the first half of the 1818 version last night, because I haven't

read the other one. And so what I've heard or read or whatever is that her husband had more input into the second one. But is that right? Or did he have a lot of input into this first one?

I think it was into the first one.

Really?

Yeah.

That's upsetting. Not only am I. Was I amazed, I mean, aside from the concepts, putting aside the structure of the writing. Okay. For the moment, because we can find a lot of problems there. The concept is one of the major things has to do with the fact she's a woman. And I know a lot of writing has been done about this, scholarly discussion has been done about this, but that she's a woman and she wrote this story that is male oriented. And so. And it is. I mean, the monsters are male, obviously. And I know that there are other similarities, like the fact that Victor Frankenstein's mother died young.

Right. Like Mary Shelley's mother died. So I know that there are similarities like this, but the fact of the matter is that she is this woman who's written this very male oriented book. And so I know that there's ought to have been discussion about the question of the creator and the question of motherhood, the question of giving birth. I mean, all of these things.

We can say that the main characters are nominally male, but it's an interesting fact that for all the different narrative layers in the book, they're all written in the same voice, I think, and the characters are in some sense indistinct. And I think that's actually thematically appropriate. Right. When we think about the monster as sort of a part of Victor, but also all of this is a part of Mary Shelley, in a sense. And so it seems like in a way it has something to do with her voice, just the sense in which it's not like these are well characterized manly men in all the different scenes. So I just wanted to say that. So there's a sense in which it's nominally male, but I'm not sure it's at a psychological level. You can think of this as male oriented, which is up for dispute, but I'm just saying that's something I would put in there.

Okay.

Also the fact of editing, I don't think we should be too worried about that because for instance, any literary novel that goes to an editor, editors take a heavy hand in crafting these things. And I think that's a good thing. It's hard to be a writer in a vacuum. So, for instance, just a recent example, Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman was recently published. And it's like basically a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's a totally different story. So I think we can assume that there was less editing on this than there was with Harper Lee.

Yeah, I certainly don't think that it's anything to lose sleep over. And I think that there's probably a lot of sexism in the idea that people want to come out and say that, you know, an 18 year old woman wasn't bright enough or talented enough to do this. And of course it was, you know, it was Shelly who wrote it or some shit like that. Who cares?

No, it's very clear. She wrote so many other things. It's very clear. She's an accomplished writer, so that's not in question or that it's hers. I don't think that's a real question whether Frankenstein is essentially hers.

My concern wasn't so much that the theory that her husband edited it significantly, but rather that he wrote more. And I know you're like, okay, Mary, so what? Right? And I see your point, but I don't know, just concerned because I mean, it does jump out at people that this book, which is hugely famous and has had this amazing effect in society over all these years, was written by an 18 year old woman. And so when you tell me that, anyway, we don't have to go on about this, we can. I'm just saying I wonder if, Daniel,

12:00 Nathan: if you have anything that you wanted to add in on top of Wes's there.

12:03 Unknown speaker: Well, maybe only that my interest in it kind of came more from a technology and science fiction kind of line of thought. And I just kept hearing more and more about this book from some of the authors that I follow. And I think there was a couple teaching company courses that I listened to lectures on it and it just really fascinated me. And the idea, you know, a sort of view on science and technology from that era, that voice and that perspective is very interesting to me because you get a sort of style and a sort of emotional center and just this perspective on it that I don't think is really around that much today.

And if the emotion was a little gushing at times in the book, I think it was palatable to me because of the fact that it's so absent in today's landscape of technology criticism and maybe some philosophy of science to and from my limited experience. But, you know, if it went a little bit far on the other end, then, you know, I guess I can live with that a little bit. But I found it just very interesting in the way she was holistic in describing things and the way she brought the emotions and her social sphere and, you know, the outer and the inner into the whole thing without really losing the more rational or the critique of rationalism that is in there, I think also.

And so it was kind of a refreshing voice and I can see why it's been so influential. And then the form, from what I understood from the professor in that lecture, I put in the Dropbox, the form of moving the big reveal, that innovation of moving the big reveal from the ending to the beginning and sort of flipping the whodunit into the broad strokes form that so much science fiction has been built on ever since then, is apparently a major innovation that starts right here. And so I think that that's a really interesting thing too, that is worth commenting on and kind of giving her credit for, because, I mean, that's sort of an act of genius and it's something new.

So that's interesting to me. And I think it's also this book to me is more and more relevant now all the time, I think, because the individual, even the amateur individual, I think, is more and more empowered in terms of technology and science at their disposal. So you don't necessarily need these big Manhattan projects or anything like that to have a major impact at a global scale. And so the critique of isolation and that sort of attitude that Victor has when he's creating the creature I think is very relevant to today. How isolated we are and yet how

you mean that he felt he could do it?

Well, information is available like never before. And you know, in terms of chemistry and biotechnology, in terms of computer programming, in terms of lots of things that make the individual very, very powerful. But we're also isolated in ways that we aren't really prepared for right now, I think. And this book really gives an early kind of window into that mentality, the way that community and a sort of Broader social life, a more rich social life, can give a check on that kind of myopic attitude that Victor Frankenstein had. Yeah. And what happens when that's absent, which

resulted in him creating, quote, unquote, this monster. Yeah, I see.

And also, not just him creating it, but the attitude he took immediately upon its creation, why he was so surprised.

Yeah. We should also note that the way he approaches creation. Right. Is a very impatient way. And so he cuts corners, for instance, because the process of putting together parts of a regular sized human being is just too difficult. So he creates a larger. It's just easy to work with larger parts. So he creates someone who ends up being gigantic. And I think in other ways, we're given the sense that his impatience leads him to. Despite the fact that he's so ambitious and he's discovered this way to create life, the execution of that. That discovery is amazing. But on the execution side, it's hasty and it's a botched job. I think the creature calls himself an abortion at some point.

Yeah, he does.

So that's an interesting factor here, this contrast between the scale of his ambitions and. And the sort of paltriness with which he approaches the creative process and then the fact that he will run away from it.

Yeah.

16:39 Nathan: Well, we've got a lot of interesting threads here, and I wonder if we could start from just some kind of summary that would get us all on the same page and see if we can fill in the blanks and maybe dive in a little bit from there. Because I know that personally, I was taken away with this story of Frankenstein having only the movies and basically Young Frankenstein and, you know, Turner Movie Classic flashbacks to Young Frankenstein. You know, no matter what I say, do not let me out of this room whenever I go in there, Let me out. But it's incredible, you know, because we've talked about these narrations with.

In narrations, and, you know, it opens with a letter, you know, someone on a ship. And, like, there's not supposed to be ships in Frankenstein. And then you see Frankenstein on a bobsled. You know, Frankenstein's not supposed to be on a bobsled. And then you get this story from Victor Frankenstein, and there's almost none of the science present that we see in the Hollywood manufacture. Right. There's not the electric instruments, and all of these are just vaguely alluded to. Things like the spark of life was necessary, but there's not a lot of science there in this science fiction.

17:47 Unknown speaker: Right. The creature is created the way Facebook was created, in a college dorm, essentially.

I've never understood why someone hasn't made

a movie of the book, of the real stuff.

Yeah. Because it's such a great story.

Well, did you see the Robert De Niro version? It's much, much closer.

What? A Robert De Niro version.

There's also Benedict's Cumberbatch in the play that was done in England, and you can find, if you search hard enough, a bootleg video of that. There's no official video, of course, but.

Wow, I did not know that.

And it was actually turned into a play shortly. It wasn't long after she publishes. Was turned into a play. I don't know a lot about the play itself, but I'm pretty sure it significantly diverged even in that first iteration. And there's a whole history to how we got to the bolted. You know, the Frankenstein with the bolts coming out of his neck and moving ponderously instead of moving, as the creature does in this book, which is very. Lithely. Very. I don't know if that's the right word, but, you know, quickly and adeptly. Yeah.

Did she do the dramatic adaptation herself, or did somebody do that?

Someone else did them. I once looked all this stuff up, and now I've forgotten it, of course.

All right, so let me ask you this question back to what you were saying, Nathan, about. Wait a minute, there's ships.

19:05 Nathan: Yeah.

19:06 Unknown speaker: Right.

My question then is, then you can take off from there. Nathan is. Okay. Why. What is the name of the man who's essentially telling the story? Who wrote the. Is it Walton? What's his name? Walter? Okay, why was it. I mean, in terms of structure, why was it set up this way? And is that tied to the Prometheus thing?

Someone had to be there at the end to tell you what happened. There was going to be. You know, Frankenstein was going to die, so someone had to tell the story. Why was he. I mean, like, technically, why was he there to tell the story? There are a lot of. I think that one of the big things in this for me and one of the ways that makes it seem very feminine to me, is the idea of friendship. Throughout this, there's just this tremendous longing for friendship and something that I think has really fallen away in our modern lives. I think that a lot of times we, you know, we form friendships based on convenience rather than some sort of true simpatico or whatever you wanna call it.

And I am deeply enamored of the idea of friendship in a much deeper sense than the people you meet at work kind of shit. Not that the people who you meet at work can't become great friends. But I think that there's a lot more to friendship than we allow ourselves these days.

Well, there are some sinister overtones to that. So, for instance, Walton is longing for his soulmate right before Victor shows up. And Walton has problems with the crew. He can't relate to the crew. And there's some obvious parallels. Clearly, the narrative frame is meant to have parallels to the other, because Walton Wright is writing letters back to his sister. And then there's Victor's relationship to the sister that he marries, the stepsister that he marries. So what's interesting here is Victor himself, there's a lot of tension with his domestic life.

He talks about losing interest in his friends and family as he's in his workshop of creation. And it's clear in other ways that he's reluctant to go through with marrying his stepsister. So, for instance, when he gets to the point of marriage, he postpones it. He goes off on an adventure which has to do with the creature. But I think this idea of waiting, there's an idea here of being something to do with this Walton waiting for a soulmate and not being able to relate to his crew, that's not quite so wonderful.

Meaning that he couldn't relate to his crew because he didn't think anybody was on his level intellectually.

Well, he's looking for some sort of ideal other. So in Victor, he seems to have found it. But the problem with that is the downside is the inevitably disappointing part, which is that Victor shares a lot of Walton's qualities. Right. So Walton is on a sort of his own crazy, ambitious quest to the North Pole.

Right.

So in a way, he's being visited with a little bit of a cautionary tale, let's say, in the form of Victor. So Victor being his soulmate is a way of showing himself, you know, putting a mirror up to himself of the negative parts of himself and its potentially disastrous consequences.

Right.

The hubris of his journey.

And that's something he's asked for because he says at one point that what he's after in a friend or a companion is a sort of paternalism. He wants somebody that he can look up to and who can sort of give him advice and he can sort of take some command from, or maybe command is a little strong, but he wants somebody who he can check himself against and who is going to have a perspective for him. You know, he doesn't want someone who is going to be a subordinate or who's going to be his intellectual inferior. He wants somebody who, you know, he could sort of look up to a

little bit and who also call him on his shit. I mean, I think that that's something that goes missing frequently. I mean, friends who are good enough friends to actually say, no, no, that is not a smart thing to do.

I'm wondering if this is why Hollywood obviously has not jumped on this or anybody has jumped on really making the movie of story. Because this is a whole nother, it's really a whole nother level of this story, of this book when you're bringing in Walton and the way it was really way. It's really narratively laid out. Right. I mean, they go right to the monster, obviously. I mean, not that I really care about Hollywood, but my point is, is that it's interesting when you think about all of the different levels and dimensions in this story, that everyone's focus is on the monster. Whereas really there's a whole other level here.

Well, there's a whole lot of padding around the monster, let's say. Or it's like a. Think of it as a kind of a containment system. If the monster is the radioactive core of this and it's that scary, then you need these narrative layers in a sense to insulate ourselves from that. And it's a way also of insulating the author, I think. So if you're a first time author and you have some anxiety about your creation, your book, it helps to have it not directly be your story, but to have these narrative frames where, oh, is it me, Shelley, who's the author?

Or is this really just a set of letters that, that I'm. Yeah, am I a reporter? You know, it's the letters that Walton's sister got. And then inside these, it's Victor's narrative to Walton and then the creatures narrative to Victor. So you have all those interesting frames and all of them are arguably, and this is a stretch, a relationship between creator and created. So if we see Walter's sister as Shelley's sort of invisible Persona, you know, if we're somewhat skeptical about that and we think of Walton's sister as just a stand in for Shelley, then Walton is really talking to his creator, his authorial creator in those letters.

And then likewise, the creature talking to Victor is obviously, you know, it's someone talking to his creator and then Victor talking to Walton. There's a line where there's something like, you know, Victor was restored to animation by Walton. In other words, he's resurrected, he's brought back to life. So this Whole idea of being created or having restored to life by. So each narrative frame sort of repeats this whole creator creation aspect. So I think that's thematically really important. It's not just accidental that it happens,

that it's that way. I mean, I may have missed this argument on your part, but I think you were kind of saying it also protects Shelley.

Yeah, I think so.

And why would she want to be protected?

Because it's enormously anxiety producing, or at least in my experience it is to try and write, to write, to be a creator. And there's the anxiety that it's going to come out to be monstrous and that it's going to reflect one's own monstrousness if it's too personal. So it depersonalizes it to some extent.

Well, it depersonalizes it, obviously, because she's created. I mean, okay, aside from the, I guess, the structure or the structural problem of creating your own work and wanting to protect yourself from whatever it is you're creating. But the fact is, she did create a monster within this work. Whether the work itself is a monster itself, but within the writing, she created this monster. And so, yeah, I could see that she'd want to protect herself in a way, she might think that she is the monster. I mean, how can any. Because I'm a writer, too. And so you think about these things and you think, how can you conceive something like that? I mean, if it's not within you.

Well, there's another aspect, too, I think that anything you create, if you care about it, it can hurt you. It makes you vulnerable. And she knew this very well because her own mother died in childbirth. And she had one child, I think, who was already dead at the time of this novel, and one child, I think, who was dying. So there's a reading of this book, too, that's all about postpartum depression. And it's understandable that she may have been gun shy about putting anything out into the world that she had an emotional investment in that could come back and hurt her.

And in that sense, I think. Wes, talk about the insulation of the narratives makes sense to me. And I think that theme of birth runs through the novel, too, in the characters. And the guardedness of what one is going to care about and what one is going to allow to make one vulnerable is a running theme. And there are various defenses, I think, that the characters put up against that vulnerability. A huge thing is like Victor's denial, right? I mean, that is his primary defense.

It's almost comic. The level to which he's in denial. Right, I agree.

And it's comic also because of the sharp turn that he makes the minute the creature is born, for lack of a better word. I mean, because he's so driven and so obsessive in his own sense of agency and power and ability all the way up to that moment. And then it snaps back. And from then on, he spends the entire rest of the novel denying his own power, having fits of being overcome and just throwing his hand across his face and having to be nursed back to health. Every time anything gets a little thick. From then on, he's falling apart. And he just completely denies that he has any culpability. He denies any power to act. As the situation progresses.

Yeah. As things are getting really bad, he basically takes a vacation to Chamonix. Instead of trying to solve the problem that's essentially going to murder his family, he takes a vacation.

Well, I mean, I'm thinking of this postpartum concept you brought up, Daniel, and the idea of giving birth. And I mean, and I've done that, and I don't remember after I gave birth, feeling that kind of wanting to be in denial of giving birth.

Well, she had a miscarriage, but she did have. Didn't we say that?

Right, right.

So this idea of the monster being a kind of miscarriage, I mean, he calls himself an abortion, but he could have called himself stillborn just as well.

Right.

And I think childbirth was probably a little bit more intense in her days.

A little slightly. A touch.

Yeah. I thought about all that and I don't know, after a while, I think I just started to feel like the monster was some sort of internalized thing. I mean, I started thinking of it as some sort of internalized thing. Like this is just some sort of, you know, the horrors that we create for ourselves in our own minds. And I kind of stuck with that at some point, just thought, okay, yeah, there, you know, you can take it as art, you can take it as children, you can take it, you know, all sorts of things. But I think I got most cozy with the idea that what she was pointing to was, you know, some fear, some sort of, you know, things that we hate about ourselves, the things that we create in ourselves that we hate, you know, that kind of self hatred and self loathing.

And so that running away seems like a really good idea. You know, until the monster rears its head again, it's never really going to go away.

Well, it's a good idea if you want to. Want to see your family members gotten out of the way if Victor had come to us and told us this story himself, we might see him as a murderer, a psychotic murderer who's making this stuff up. Right. How is it that his family members are dying one by one, and his friends are dying one by one? So that's actually something else the narrative frames do is they turn what would be a totally unreliable narrator, Victor, into someone reliable, because Walton sees the monster. Now, it's not that Walton is entirely reliable, I think, but he's reliable enough that we get this confirmation that the monster exists, but Victor himself. I don't think we could take Victor's word for it that the monster exists.

31:25 Nathan: No, because it seems that within the universe of the story, it is some kind of manifestation. I saw the monster as something like, with Walton, and ambition, a drive that was tearing him away from his family and that would ultimately consume him in his isolation. It's the monster that kills his, you know, family. And he doesn't realize it at first, and it slowly takes everyone away from him. First his little brother and then his friend, and then his, you know, half sister and wife. And he's unable to have anything. But he also put himself into that position far before he even had a creation.

There were letters for him to come back and just awaiting his arrival. And yet his entire pursuit was of the highest aims, to recreate living matter, to be a creator. And he was looking back through the arcane at first, and his inspirations were alchemists that were considered nothing by professors of the science at the time. And then turning his attention that seemed by going into the arcane and then going into the contemporary sciences, he was able to come up with something new that hadn't been discovered before. And I think that it is very interesting at that moment, because the novel, I think, turns just on a dime right there.

I have a hard time understanding Victor Frankenstein in this story because he is successful, and the creature that he makes becomes so rational and reasonable and is able to appeal to him just as another being might be able to appeal to humanity. But whenever he's confronting this human, his creator, he sees nothing but equal monstrosity. You know, you created me and abandoned me. You would kill me, but you're upset that I killed out of a, you know, misunderstanding, and won't you try and understand me? And the injustice of it all. And all he asks for is, you know, not to dominate his life any longer except by giving him the task that he wants.

He does, but he wants a partner. He wants someone who can understand his world and that's where you get the Bride of Frankenstein. That never happens. It's whenever he is able to partially create her with Frankenstein's monster looking over his shoulder, and then he decides to just scatter the whole project and destroy it. And that's whenever the monster goes off in a rage. And his reasoning is that it would maybe add a logarithm to the damage that he's already inflicted on the earth, that it would maybe create a race of these monsters that maybe together they would create hellish offspring.

And so his value judgments from the beginning are that if it came from his hand, it's not good enough, or something like that. There's this treatment towards the monster as an aberration from very close to the beginning. And it's so fast that there's almost beauty in what he selected. I mean, it's not like rotten teeth on a corpse. I mean, it's pearly white teeth and lustrous black hair. Yet whenever it's animate, it takes on a life of its own, so to speak.

34:37 Unknown speaker: Well, the skin is yellow and translucent.

Yeah. And the eyes. Right.

I found it conspicuous also that it seems like, I mean, Victor's judgment is so often so wrong and so self serving. And it's not that it in destroying the Bride, that it isn't also self serving there. But I did find it conspicuous that he's the one who is able to consider that this other living being who he's potentially about to create, might also have averse feelings to being created, which for all of the creatures, hand wringing and agony, he seems to fail to consider this creature who's potentially going to be made as anything but a utility for him, a companion for him.

It's always directed towards him, which is sort of the mistake that Victor made in creating this creature to begin with. Which is ironic because, you know, the creature throughout is a sort of moral voice for this huge vacuum or this huge chasm that is there, this blind spot in Victor's judgment, you know, in his moral sense. And yet here in this moment of truth and, you know, turning point, he, you know, he's got his own kind of blind spot. It's oriented towards him as well. And he's incapable of considering that this being may also feel that their existence is repugnant to them and that they feel agony and feel repulsed and may not look on him as beautiful either.

You're saying the creature is failing to empathize with his creator, Is that right? Yeah, I'm just getting the which direction you're going Here who's not empathizing with

who the creature is failing to empathize with the potential bride and the experience.

Oh, the potential bride. Okay.

Yeah. That her experience may have the same agonies and torments that his does, which seems almost certain he somehow fails to miss that in all of his own torment, which is usually Victor's character trait. Victor is usually the one who's saying, no, you know, my agony is the worst punishment, you know?

Yeah. They both complain a lot about their agony. But I think just coming back to the way the creature and the potential bride, it's kind of funny the way the creature asks for her. It's sort of like a demented online dating ad where he says, I want you to create me a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself. The same defects with whom I can live in. Interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. So it's a very necessary for my being. It's a very self centered, you know, the creature is also self centered. I mean, there are reasons for that. He's a product, Right. Of bad parenting, essentially. And it's a contrast. You know, the whole book starts out right, with Victor talking about what a great childhood he had.

I was shocked by his. I thought, wow, here's delusional. You know, no one's life is ever that good all the time.

Well, we get a lot of hints that it's not as great as he thinks. Right. Like being slated to be married to his stepsister, which is insane.

Yeah. Well, that's a big difference too, between the 18. 18 and the other girls.

I was going to say that maybe the time.

Because in the one she's actually his cousin and in the other version, she's an orphan that they adopt.

Yeah. But in both cases she's his stepsister. Growing up with someone from a young age creates that sort of incest taboo.

So, yeah, it's kind of creepy.

I couldn't get the incest angle that was running through the book. I mean, I don't know if it was just a plot thing that drove him to this mad journey of creating Frankenstein, but it was also sort of mirrored in the whole structure of the novel with, what is it, Walter? Because he. The entire book is Walter writing to his sister. Right. And also saying how, like, he loves her more than anything and all that stuff.

Right. And the monster wants a mate from the same creator, so she would ostensibly be his sister too.

So this idea of having an ideal family can be turned on its head and to the idea of having Parents who don't have the proper boundaries with you. And that's really what incest is about. So he talks, for instance, of, you know, his parents were really beneficent and self sacrificing, the creators of all my delights. And they weren't tyrants. And. But it makes them sound not like parents, not like people who are establishing rules and boundaries. And so those boundaries and rules are what you need to individuate. And individuation is really the opposite of incest.

The products of incest are deformed in the sense that they're not individuated. So that's the biological result, but at the psychological, I think holds just as true. So, you know, the creation of the monster is a recapitulation of Victor's own incestuous creation and sort of a very highly incestuous family situation. So that's one way of getting at the incest theme. And it comes as no surprise, right, that Victor wants to get away from his family, or that Victor sits by while his family is being murdered. There's ambivalence there. He wants to escape his family.

It's interesting. It's also, I just see how in the mirror image between Victor and the monster, how he is supposedly this happy person, but he's fleeing from all these relationships in his pursuit. And then Frankenstein sort of being created as this innocence, though monstrosity is sort of thrust into the world. And his attempts at making connections with people are all, you know, thrown into space with that first family that basically tries to kill him and move out onward and onward.

Yeah. And that's a very idealized kind of fairy tale family that the creature comes up against. Right. So Victor's idealizing of his childhood is kind of recapitulated. There's the creature finds the perfect little fairy tale family. And that story sounds very much like a fairy tale.

Right.

A kind of a version of an Arabian princess is involved. And so it's a crazy little story within the whole story. But anyway, I just wanted to emphasize the paralleled idealizing of the family situation. And then it goes wrong. Of course.

One thing that's interesting too, I think, about him going off on his own is that he seeks solitude and sort of falls into this completely isolated state. And it becomes so myopic in that state that, well, it seems, like I said before, there's a critique going on there about the isolated individual. And this runs throughout, I mean, from Walton and his men and the mutiny and everything, to, you know, anyone who fails to Take heed, you know, of the needs and the warnings of others, is in for disaster. But it's the inverse of what the monster's seeking throughout the whole book, too.

He wants companionship and community. And Victor stumbles into Good Samaritans almost at every turn without deserving it. And the monster, despite trying to actively create situations in which, like with the cabin, that he's gonna be able to be well received. And he tries to create goodwill for himself, and he's rejected over and over and over again. And so it's part of this process, as the novel goes on, of the two of them becoming mirrors of each other and Victor becoming the sort of monster. And I don't know that there's a smooth progression there, but there's definitely this sort of symbiotic relationship.

41:52 Nathan: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of interesting parallels that you guys are all bringing up. That didn't occur to me, the family relationships as well. And to think that it would be his sister, another creation, or that Victor Frankenstein is the father of everything that he would create with his ideas is a really interesting one as well. There's just an injustice, though it seems in one direction where there isn't another. Maybe it's a universal injustice. And Victor Frankenstein didn't ask to be born, but Frankenstein's monster didn't either. And my personal feeling about the story or my connection with it was just in the empathy with the monster.

And I think that Harold Bloom's piece that you sent us over, Daniel, mentioned something about Victor Frankenstein being not nearly as sympathetic as the monster is in this situation, and that's some sort of a key or that points to a sentimentality in the story or maybe a feeling about creations as well. It's so sad, and not only because it's not like he's a monster from the beginning, but he learns that sojourn he has in the woods with the family, and he's watching them through the boards and learning language and learning relationships, and if only he could go there with the blindness on everybody's eyes, like the blind man, and he's able to get affection there.

But then everybody comes in and they use their eyes and they see and everybody screams and the whole thing is blown apart. And it seems like he was so close to being taken in and cared for by humanity. But I think that fact of his exile or his being spread is a critique of humanity within this story, because it seems that Victor could have brought him close. I would have loved to have read the story where he nurtures his creation, and they can go hand in hand. But it seems that the creation is looked at as a kind of mistake from the beginning.

Very quickly, from the moment of life, it's a mistake.

43:47 Unknown speaker: Okay, I have to step in here.

43:49 Nathan: Go ahead.

43:50 Unknown speaker: And I'm going to step in here, and I'm going to say, this is why if we need licenses to drive cars, we should need licenses to have babies. This is why when you create another life, you are doing something that creates enormous obligation on your part. And in some ways, that's what this Frankenstein creature is telling us.

Yeah, Victor is the ultimate deadbeat. Dead.

Ultimate. Ultimate. I mean, isn't that what he says? He says, why did you create me? Why am I here? And like you pointed out at the beginning, he was not murderous. You know, he was just created. Right. And then he became murderous because of the way Victor treated him or, you know, refused him.

I think you're getting at an important theme, which is. So she calls this. What's the subtitle? The Modern Prometheus. Modern Prometheus. I was gonna say the new Prometheus, but. So the Promethean theme is often taken to be this sort of idea of, you know, Prometheus gave fire to mortals, which is essentially, ultimately science and technology. So the perils of that. But the Promethean theme is also about the idea of being a creature. And, of course, the monster is actually called the creature through much of the novel. And a creature is just someone who is created.

And beyond that, as a creature is subject to all these influences. So who you end up being is a matter of all these different environmental influences, including especially the parents and the early family scene. And there's always the possibility of, if your parents are bad enough, ending up as a monster of some kind. So this is also about a failure to mature, which obviously. And Victor failed to mature, which is why he becomes he's a bad parent to himself, and he's a bad parent to the creature. And so it just. The cycle goes on.

So nature versus nurture.

45:40 Nathan: Well, here. This is on 104. I think this is the fiend talking to Victor. You know, you're in the wrong. Instead of threatening, I'm content to reason with you. I'm malicious because I'm miserable. Am I not Shunned and hated by all mankind. You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph. Remember that and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me. You know, you call it murder, but you would destroy your own work with your own hands. Shall I respect man when he condemns me? And I think that's the Promethean mark out a little right there as well.

46:14 Unknown speaker: He makes it even more condensed, and he offers the way to retrieve it, too. He says, I was benevolent and good. Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall be virtuous again. And so he really gets to this way that the external stamps the internal. I thought of Rousseau here, right, because there's that sort of polarity between isolation and community. And you see, sort of when he comes into his own and he's getting the sense of his senses, and he's out in the woods eating berries and nuts and stuff, and he's kind of in this natural Edenic state.

He's all right, and he's not hurting anybody, and he's not hurting himself. He's not really happy. But it isn't until he experiences so much pain and so much rejection that he becomes evil. But then you have, like, this counter like I was talking about with Victor, who. It's this isolation that drives him to do the bad things that he does. And so I found that a little bit interesting. It seems like she's giving us two examples there of the ways. And maybe one of you guys can pick out, like, the thread there for me. But it seems like, you know, there's a peril to isolation and just evil in only being subject to oneself.

And then there's the peril, too, of the negative aspects of human contact and being social.

47:39 Nathan: Well, something that occurred to me, I have a slightly different reading with the letters, I think, with Walton writing back to his sister about the ship, and then Frankenstein being compelled back to Elizabeth. I think that the theme that I see is this kind of going away on your own and desiring to come back or to be in the fold. So from all those perspectives, it looks like you have a woman at home missing someone dear to her and calling him back and wishing that he would be back, and if only they would be back, then things would be right and good yet.

However, their brother is on a ship in the middle of the Arctic or whatever, and their brother is away, you know, in a castle somewhere doing experiments. And. And I think what the monster calls out for is by being a single creation, he can really stand in creation shoes. And what he calls for, what he wants, that community, is something that everybody wants, but it's kind of obscured because everyone around you in society has it to one level or another. And we usually don't see abject loneliness in the way that we do with the creature. And I think that his sympathy is a call toward some kind of humanity.

And I think that there's a strong streak of anti. Not intellectualism, but anti knowledge. There's a line on page 31 where he's talking about a lesson that Walton can learn from him. I think this is Victor talking to Walton. He says, learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. And there's a little hope that Victor holds in his heart that he'll be able to rejoin Elizabeth in an afterlife.

I don't know if it's explicitly religious, but it seems like he hopes to join her in another world.

49:35 Unknown speaker: And what you just read is basically original sin, right? That's what happens when you eat the apple in the garden. You acquire knowledge and, you know, you aspire to be God. And he's created something. You know, he's done a godlike thing in creation. I thought that it was interesting. I think it was a little while before that where you get to the part where, like, I've always thought that the ideas of alchemy were hilarious and wonderful. And, you know, of course, they're the basis of, I guess, all of our modern science. But when he gets to the point where science doesn't equal magic, he's really pissed off. His professors tell him, like, you know, he was like, yeah, yeah, right. You know, I know. And then he goes ahead and does it anyway.

So this is really interesting, actually, because he wants a shortcut, right? And alchemy, in a way, is that shortcut. And he. Remember, there's that first professor who's basically, look, this is a hard science. Alchemy is bullshit, okay? And his father also told him alchemy was bullshit. So it's. That's.

But he still blames his dad for not saying it strongly enough.

Yeah, right. And then he finds the second professor who helps him in a way. Because what the second professor tells him is that, you know, yes, alchemy is bullshit, but hard science can be magic, too. Even though science is kind of ordinary. I forget the name of the second professor, by the way. But even though science is kind of ordinary, it can produce extraordinary results. And that captures Victor's imagination, and that actually sets him on the path to accomplishing something, because he doesn't do it through alchemy. He does it by discovering that he can use electricity to animate things, which is far fetched, but it's meant to be, right? An actual mechanistic explanation of things. It's not magic, it's science.

51:23 Nathan: Well, I also think that alchemy has an importance in the story to in the first place inspire his imagination. I mean, he's taken with the, the possible outcomes of the alchemy, even if they're not fruitful avenues for science. And I think that the physics of the universe here, where a science fiction of actually reanimating matter, I think is borrowed from some kind of sentiment or aspiration of the alchemical.

51:48 Unknown speaker: Well, it's grandiose. The alchemy is the grandiose version of things. I'm gonna turn lead into gold or whatever it was. And it eschews all the hard work of science in the same way that being a narcissist, a grandiose narcissist and having these overweening ambitions is a way to short circuit the hard task of maturation, of growing up, which is another thing I think this is sort of about. It's about ambition as an attempt to short circuit real maturation. And that's, you know, when you short circuit maturation as a human being, the growing up process, you get the poor results that you do.

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we talked a bit for the difference between aspirations and reality. I think one of the. I have a Penguin version. There's a essay at the end of it, and it mentions how her husband talked about poetry as being like a dim version of what the poet actually had in mind. The second that you start to put words on paper, the inspirational magnificence you had in your mind is no longer there. The same way that Frankenstein is or the monster is obviously a dim version of what Victor had anticipated.

54:32 Nathan: Yeah. And since we were talking about Adam, this is on 92. It's interesting that the monster read Paradise Lost. He says that it really inspired him. He said that, like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence, except that he had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy, prosperous, guarded by special care. He was allowed to converse and acquire knowledge from beings of superior nature. But I was wretched, helpless and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition. For often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.

55:13 Unknown speaker: And by the way, if you look at Paradise Lost, the creature does talk quite a bit like Satan. That's where I ought to reverse one of my previous. Where I talk about, you know, the writing style for the characters or the dialogue style is all the same. I think actually, the creature does talk in the most ornate way. And also just the bitter way he talks is very Satanic, and, as in Milton, Satan.

So his big monologue is by far my favorite part of the book. I think it's.

55:44 Nathan: It's so great. And, you know, it's like, well, if humanity's gonna turn on me, then I'm gonna turn on humanity. Like, it's this really, like, just bold proclamation, you know, with. They're on the tundra, I think, right? And the wind's just, you know, whipping snow everywhere. And it gets more and more heightened. You know, I think that you get a couple of these moments of their conversations just across the world, you know, after everyone's dead and gone, and they're just, you know, he's just chasing his monster to the farthest reaches where there's no humanity and almost dying and then getting, you know, found on the ship. And then, you know, how can this

56:18 Unknown speaker: not be a movie. Right.

56:20 Nathan: It's so good, and it would blow everyone's mind. I mean, you know, the name Frankenstein doesn't come up until about 70 pages in or something like that. And it's incredible. I think that people would really be surprised at what other realities there are in the story. I think there's a lot of good emotional ones. I think that, again, the monster watching the people through the walls is just heartbreaking. And whenever he's finally turned away, it's just so unfair. I mean, I'm more than the horror of something being created. And, oh, look at this zombie that we've unleashed. I really felt my deepest sympathies, and in a way that the Frankenstein movie is not articulate. This monster is just phenomenally articulate, and he's able to put his reason before his creator.

57:04 Unknown speaker: All right, stop there.

Oh, all right.

Okay, stop. I have to say something. I'm like, here, I've got to step in here.

Stop. The monster love. Are you not on board with the monster love?

Yeah. No, no. Two things I want to say. First of all, I'm going to read this. I don't know what page it's on because I'm on kindle and I'm 39%, so whatever. But this is the paragraph that I want to read. Okay, I'm going to read this. Listen. I expected this. Reception said, the demon, all men hate the wretched. How then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things? Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties, only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. Your purpose to kill me? How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death until it be satisfied with the blood of your remaining friends.

Okay, now, satiated. Is satiated the word in your text, or is it satisfied?

I'm going to tell you this, okay? The Oregon shootings this week, the shootings in Connecticut.

Absolutely.

I mean, think about this. Think about what this demon is and think about what we see happening around us.

This is a prototype of the mass murderer. The lonely, isolated guy who goes on a murder spree. Not a spree, but because since that's technically different. So I'm actually fascinated by these. Horrified and also fascinated by these mass murders. So, for instance, there was the Mass Murder in California by Elliot Rodger, another shy, isolated kid who finally exploded and he left a manifesto. And you can find that online. And it is just insane how similar that manifesto is to Frankenstein in the plaintiff way that he talks there, even thematically.

So, for instance, he finds solace only in nature, which is one of the bright spots of this book is that everyone loves nature, even the creature, and has a good relationship with it. And of course that's predicated on the fact that nature doesn't have to love you back. Right? It doesn't have the same problems that you have with other human beings. It can't scorn you for looking monstrous or something like that. So it's the same sort of thing going on in this Elliot Roger manifesto where he's sort of alternating between his love of the beauty of nature and the fact that he's despised by all humankind and must take revenge on them.

But I think that's absolutely. You're spot on with this idea of the psychology of this as being the psychology of mass murder.

Yeah, it's amazing to me. Sorry about that.

Nathan, I love you, but not that we can't, you know, love the creature anyway.

No, I do love the creature. In fact, that's the one I love the most.

If you had to complain about the creature, other than his mass murdering tendencies, there is the neediness factor.

Well, I mean, if you look at the creature and what happens with him, aside from laughing about loving him, the reason why we love him is because when he. And again, I don't remember exactly the page, but when he was first created, he wasn't murderous. See, back to the nature versus nurture. We should have a license to be able to have kids. Okay? It's that idea that when you create and bring life into the world, whether it's from death, you know, you're taking on huge responsibility. I mean, enormous.

We can blame his parent, Victor, and we can also blame Victor's parents for doing a, you know, supposedly ideal but really terrible job of Victor.

And also the other concept that's fascinating to me is when you create life, you create death. And here Victor created life from death, which I sort of find anyway, just little concepts I'm playing with.

We should bring up the scene where the dream. You guys remember that?

The dream. Which dream?

So there's a dream about his mother where she.

Oh yeah.

Basically it's something like his mother has died and it's on her deathbed that she says, well, Elizabeth is going to be the new mother of the family. And Elizabeth, by the way, is the sister. So basically the mother nurses Elizabeth back to life and then contracts scarlet fever from her. And then. So she starts to die. And then on her deathbed, asks Elizabeth to take over the role of the mother of the family and become wife to Victor. So just more of this incestuous stuff. And then the dream later on, I think he's kissing. Okay. So he's kissing Elizabeth and then Elizabeth turns into the corpse of his dead mother. And of course, the corpse. There's an obvious parallel between that corpse and the creature. You know, this dead thing.

You mean when she's killed on their wedding night?

No, the dream is him. He kisses Elizabeth and then Elizabeth turns into the corpse of his dead mother. Which is not surprising in that his dying mother said, here's the replacement mother, Elizabeth. So there's this sort of interchangeability.

Yeah.

And you marry her. There's the interchangeability between the two and then there's the amplification of the incestuousness of it. Oh, it's not just your stepsister, but now she's also the mater familias, so.

Right.

And there's also that just creepy. You're my dolls. In my whole life, I've just wanted to, you know, dress you up and marry you. This gross. You know, you're my little creations. Pop you down the aisle.

Yeah.

He's even possessive with Elizabeth. Right. When I think they mentioned. When he first meets Elizabeth, his mother says, I have a present for you. And he took it literally and just assumed that she was his.

His little doll.

Oh, Jesus.

So the reason why I brought up the dream. I forgot who it was. Was mentioning the. Sorry, I forgot what you were saying exactly about bringing something inanimate to life.

That's Laura. I said that creating life from death.

Remind us of where you're going with that. Sorry.

When you create life, you create death. I mean, you do. When you give birth, you're also giving that child death because they're gonna die. And then I was just looking at that with the fact that Victor actually created life from death. And also this grave robbing stuff was very big at that time, by the way, as I understand it.

What do you mean? Oh, big in the. Yeah. People were doing it for the money. Not.

Yeah, that was. Yeah.

Not for the potential monsters. Not for the potential.

Not for the potential demons can create. But. Yeah. No, yeah, that's what I was talking about. I was just looking at the difference between it and just, you know, thinking about the different concepts. But the reality is that when you create life, you create death, even today.

So what I was on was that when you said talking about bringing life from death, I was thinking of the sense in which creating the monster is an attempt to resurrect the mother who has just died. So he starts off on this whole life kick in a very manic way after the death of his mother, as if, even though it's never explicitly said, you know, I'm never going to lose anyone again. No one's ever going to die because I'm going to learn how to bring things back to life. It's sort of. It's like that. What is that short story, the Monkey's Paw? Is that what it's called? Where someone has a wish and they can bring their lost loved ones back to life? But then it's horrific. It's sort of that same kind of cautionary tale.

Make sure you ask the genie the proper question.

Right.

Well worded. I thought that some of the Christian and slightly stoic overtones were interesting. Just the idea that, you know, passion equals sin. It's somewhere in chapter three, I too, kindle. So I have no idea where a human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. It's kind of the opposite of my tranquility. I'm only tranquil after I've had some sort of, you know, passion and transitory desire disturb me. So I found that part. It's like, whoa, okay, let's just have a big cosmic breath.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up though, because last night I was noticing as I was going through, I think anytime you see the words tranquil, calm or serene, that's a major red flag. Yeah. And once I started looking for it, I was seeing it over and over and over again. And you see phrases like being excited toward the truth. And anytime there's tumult or violence, it's a sort of uncovering. When he first sees the monster and the lightning storm, he goes from this serene state to this state of where nature is becoming more and more violent. And then suddenly the monster is illuminated.

And often whenever you see him talking about being calm or serene or tranquil, he's reaffirming his denial of what's going on. And he's seeking out. Usually it's in conjunction with him seeking out these natural places which are tranquil, in order to sort of get a handle again on his own narrative and his own version of things without interference

and Also, this use of tranquil in this context is actually somewhat ironic. Because what's going on at this stage is that his father has rebuked him for not responding to his letters. So he's neglecting his domestic duties. He's neglecting his duties to his family. Because he's so obsessively involved with trying to create this creature. So what he says is, so human being in perfection ought always preserve a calm and peaceful mind. So I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. Although in his case it is an exception because he's not tranquil at all.

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful. That is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed, if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever. To interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections. Greece had not been enslaved. Blah, blah, blah. And remember the part that one of you quoted where he says, knowledge isn't worth it. Stick to domestic affections.

This is one of the fundamental conflicts of the book between knowledge and the original sin. In that and growing up, which involves the acquisition of this forbidden knowledge. And then domestic affections. And the extreme of that, the incestuousness. Or not growing up, not leaving the family. Of course, what we want to achieve is sort of something in between that. But that's what genuine maturation is. But in this case, Victor has come from this cloying family scene. And he's obviously trying to escape it. And now he's neglecting his family and not responding to their letters.

And he's obsessed with undoing the loss of his mother by creating this creature. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that about tranquility. Because the idea of tranquility here is intimately, so to speak, tied to this idea of domestic affections.

1:08:33 Nathan: Yeah, that passage is on 34 and on 162, there's this. Seek happiness and tranquility and avoid ambition. Even if it be only the apparent innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet. Why do I say this? I have been blasted in these hopes yet another may succeed.

1:08:53 Unknown speaker: I was wondering if, you know, the. If all of this was just fear of sex, but he's gonna create a monster. He doesn't have to have sex to create life. He just has to succeed where the alchemist failed. But he's running away all the time. And, yeah, maybe he's running Away from. He doesn't want to have this relationship with Elizabeth, despite the fact that he tells us over and over again how much he loves her. But what's he waiting for?

Well, you might be afraid of sex, too, if you're supposed to marry someone you grew up with, in the same household with.

1:09:31 Nathan: I wonder about that as well.

1:09:33 Unknown speaker: I don't think the psychology of it actually changes, though. I mean, the people you grew up with, you form incest taboos with. That's the psychology of it.

Well, also, it's hard for me to divorce that part of the story from a little bit of the biography, too, because what's going on when she's writing this is. Okay. She's eloped with this guy who's one of the most famously temperamental Romantic poets out there at the moment, and she's gone off to Lord Byron's house, you know, another den of, you know, debauchery. And they've left behind his wife. She's had kids out of wedlock with him. You know, she's run off against her father's wishes.

They're supposedly in an open relationship, but really what it means is just that Shelley cheats on her all the time, so.

Yeah. Right.

But her dad was a big proponent of free love. Yeah.

And she's tortured by this, so. Yeah. Yes.

And also, again, like we were talking about with the postpartum thing, you know, to the idea of maybe creating life without sex, I think ties into that tranquility versus tumult kind of thing, too, because sex is tumultuous. It's violent. It's a process in which there is a sort of feedback. You know, there's a responsiveness. It's not that isolated environment of nature where you can project your own meaning and your own understandings onto things. And that's the environment in which Victor creates his monster.

Yeah. And Victor didn't have to push him out either.

Mm.

And the minute that he becomes his own entity, there's a violent reaction of this sort of. It's a mitosis, you know, now there's a witness. Now there's another source of cognition to butt up against. And that is appalling.

The feedback you mentioned is interesting, especially in how you can't, like, project your will completely onto another person. And it just reminds me of the sort of pep talk that Victor gives the ship when they're planning on mutiny later in the book. It's on chapter seven, 221 of my book. There's a whole.

Actually.

Awesome. It's Like a page long. And it reminded me of, like a football coach at halftime, you know, getting the troops up. But I'll just read this one bit. Be men or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be. It is mutable and cannot withstand you. If you say that, it shall not. So in that same sense that he really thinks that he can completely project his will onto nature, and then maybe at this point, being later in the book, he realizes that humans are not made of the same stuff.

Right.

And I was thinking. I was just wondering if that part of that was her trying to affirm her own situation and say, you know, well, you know, what if you could create this thing, you know, in isolation that was just of you? And, you know, her situation may be tumultuous and difficult. And, you know, I think Percy's wife killed herself and Byron's wife decided to cheat on him, too. And maybe that's all wearing on her a little bit. But what you have in the novel is this sort of reaffirmation of contact and community and family and sharing and all of that. And I wondered if that was sort of maybe a little bit of her psyche trying to make, okay, this sort of difficult situation that she was in.

Tranquility does seem like a sort of reactionary impulse from something traumatic like that, because it doesn't seem satisfying like the prognosis to, oh, we just shouldn't. We should just chill out and move to the suburbs and live out our lives. That's the best way. That doesn't seem satisfying.

1:13:06 Nathan: Yeah, well. And once the process was finished, you know, it had this culmination, you know, he turned back on all of this pursuit of knowledge and all of his science. And whenever he goes back to make the Bride, you know, he says something paraphrasing here that, you know, the work that he had done with such passion was now a chore and a labor of horror. And it seemed like there's this story that this is just a similar relationship. And I'll try and make it a brief anecdote here, but there was this scientist who was working on artificial intelligence or compatibility programs for elder care, and she had, you know, finished her work and had this, you know, kind of sense of accomplishment, only to realize that, to her horror, what she had actually done was create an inhumane distance between people that ought to be cared for in a humane way with this system that she had developed.

And so she kind of turned heel on it. And went after it this other way. And I think that the dehumanization of science or a creation wrought completely out of science and knowledge is a part of the fear here in this book.

1:14:09 Unknown speaker: Isn't that where we are now? Absolutely.

1:14:10 Nathan: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that something like Ex Machina, the movie that came out recently, is a really strong parallel to this in Frankenstein, where, you know, someone has, in this case, a rather beautiful monster. Yet at this. Well, you'd have to see it. But, you know, there is this way in which we are making our creations now. The average person, through technology, has more creative control. And yet some people are ending up, I don't know, coming up to the end of what I think Walker Percy said was the vertical search. There's a kind of leftoverness to life that people are struggling with now, even with all the abilities to create and et cetera.

1:14:52 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think that's what Daniel was starting on earlier. Right, Daniel?

Hey, Wes wrote a really good paper on Ex Machina, and I think it's at 3am magazine or something like that. Wes?

Yeah. And I'm giving a talk in Boston on it, which I'll try and record.

Okay, great.

Yeah. Well, I mean, to that end, I thought about Joseph Weizenbaum and his Eliza program, too. Anybody know about that at all? He was a guy back in the. I think it was the 70s, early computer programmer, and Eliza was a therapy program. And basically what it did was it sort of, you know, turned your statements into questions and shot them back at you as a form of interaction. And so you would say you're unhappy or whatever, and it would say, why are you unhappy? And look for keywords and things and ask you about your parents or something like that, too.

It's very rudimentary. And he wrote it not entirely as a joke, but not serious either. But he was immediately upon showing it to people like his secretary, sort of aghast at the fact that people took it seriously almost immediately. And despite him showing him the code or his refutations and trying to tell them how it worked, they insisted that it was actually conscious and responding to them. So I think exactly what you're talking about, Nathan, is a fear there that me and Mary were talking about AI a little bit before we started the call. And one of the things I was just about to mention before we started is that one of the popular conceptions is that we're going to get this big program that's going to, you know, be smarter than all of us and better than all of us.

And take over the world, but really to cause a lot of problems. I think Weizenbaum's experience illustrates that you don't need to really have anything all that complicated. You don't need to have success even. You just need to have confusion. And I think that really is the problem that we're running into. And I think Victor's attitude really illustrates that very, very well, because it's this sort of procedural thing, this sort of rational sort of instrumental reasoning where functionality is the prime motivator.

What do you mean by that?

He's concerned with whether or not his experiment is going to be a success. And it's ego driven, certainly, but his attention is on putting parts together. And it's not until the parts become the whole and that moment of galvanization that it becomes repugnant to him.

Well, he wants to be great, right?

Yeah, definitely. There's that ego, and I think that is important to recognize, too. It's at play. And take a look at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference or something like that. I mean, you see it. That entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, and it takes the form of this technological creation these days in a lot of ways. But I don't think there's a lot of attention given to what the ends are going to be in the larger networks. It's very compartmentalized. And I think not being compartmentalized is one of the morals of this story, that letting the alloys mix, or letting things mix into the alloys, your family network, you know, your social network as well as your ambition.

Can I say something about the demon, please?

Talk about demons.

Okay, I just want to quote something here. From wherever it is inside this Kindle, this is a demon speaking. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, A blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned. And I want to just bring up two. One, the Elephant man and two, Stephen Hawking. My point of bringing them up is this concept that exists within this society, certainly American society, and probably the world. Yeah, the world is what you see is all that matters. I'm not saying I agree with that. I'm just saying it seems to be the way it is. But that's not what it is, obviously.

Well, it's reflective of a broader problem that we all face huge, which is that there isn't really unconditional love out there for us. So in the creature's case, it's more cute because people value physical appearance and he looks Monstrous to them. But all of us have to deal with that on the level of to win a mate or to win friends and influence people. You have to be able to please them. You know the Kantian dictum, right, is to treat people, not treat people merely as a means to your end. But that doesn't mean that we don't treat people as a means to ends all the time.

We treat them as pleasurable. If we, you know, their conversation is pleasurable or emotional intimacy or sex. Those are all sort of use relationships, even if we have the decency, you know, treating them not as a means to the end means not having sex with them without their permission or respecting them, respecting their boundaries and so on and so forth. So I just wanted to bring that up, that the whole problem of deformity and people's reaction to that is actually evocative of a problem that we. That every human being faces.

Well, I mean, are you saying every human being faces by nature or as designed or set up in this society?

Is there a society in which people will only treat each other as ends and never a means to an end? Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I know what you're saying, and yeah, I know.

1:20:03 Nathan: I'm wondering, I hope.

1:20:04 Unknown speaker: Are you gonna hang out with people

who you hate because they look good?

Because they need your. No, because they need your company. Because otherwise they would be lonely even if you can't stand them.

Isn't that work?

Yeah, if I go to the office, sure.

Yeah, but then you're compensated, supposedly.

Well, that's actually a pretty interesting comment, though. I mean, aren't the economic bonds standing in for the old sort of religious bonds in exactly that way these days?

Good point. Yeah.

They force us in together where our own guilt used to.

Our own guilt used to. Now, come on, everyone loved church.

I really am interested in this too, Laura, though, because I think. I mean, just from high school, you know, and from other, you know, personal experiences, I know that people who are considered ugly and the more intense this is, the worse it gets. I mean, really are hated. They're really despised. And for no other reason than for being aesthetically unpleasing.

Well, as I recall, in the Story of the Elephant man, that was his cry is that he's like, you know, I am a human being.

1:21:21 Nathan: Yeah, well, there's. I wanted to bring this up thematically, but also now it makes a lot more sense in this concept that we're talking about, about the hated wretched. I don't know if anyone's read The Phantom of the Opera, the, you know, original book by Gaston Leroux. It's very similar. It's a lot of narrative talking. But anyway, the character is not some person who was deformed later in life by, you know, an accident or something, but who was born hideous to his own mother's eye and was spurned. And in that, found this abstract power by being unseen and by manipulating man. In that story, he really does the project that the monster claims to do. He sets himself against anybody that would stand in his way. He sets himself up against humanity as pariah in a way that the monster just really only haunts Frankenstein.

1:22:15 Unknown speaker: Yeah. Except he's now haunting all of us and he's on Facebook.

Think about it.

I mean, he's on Facebook and he's haunting all of us. If what you were talking about, Nathan, about how the demon, or, you know, let's say he was born as a horror to his mother's eye, and he developed a way in solitary, you know, sort of separate from society. Right.

1:22:39 Nathan: Yeah. And he gained power by his masks, which were theatrics or magic.

1:22:44 Unknown speaker: Isn't that what Facebook are you talking about?

Internet trolls?

Well, I mean, no gap.

You're talking about the President.

No, I'm not.

I'm talking about. Actually, I'm not. I wish I was, but I'm not. I'm actually talking about everybody. I'm talking about my kids. I'm talking about everybody on Facebook. Facebook is the mask.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I thought you were just talking about people setting themselves up as pariahs because. Yeah,

but no, I mean, that's what's concerning. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, obviously I'm going to take all of this and apply it to our way we live now. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, that's Frankenstein the demon. The monster is on Facebook. I mean, really, what are we? You know, that's how this whole world, how this whole technological structure that we live in now has created. Who are we?

Yeah. It's the prosthetic that removes that vulnerability.

Yeah.

So this is the idea that technology is a defense against intimacy.

Exactly.

Right. Between human beings.

It's really fucked up.

So we can use Facebook to be in contact with people without actually being in contact with them.

Right.

It would have been the perfect solution for Victor, who was so torn between wanting to get away from his family.

1:23:57 Nathan: But it's really hard to send a text sometimes, and.

1:24:00 Unknown speaker: Yeah, yeah, I see.

I mean, I see something like Facebook. More like. Like what the monster would want to do while he's peeking between the boards or talking to the blind father. Because, you know, Facebook is really this idealized version of your lives. And then you're poking around through these hundreds of other idealized versions of your lives, which in turn makes you feel maybe more like the monster because it obviously doesn't live up to all the smiling vacation photos that are up there.

Very good. Yes.

Oh, yeah, that's excellent. Because eventually you do want to go up to the door.

Right?

It's not enough.

Well, the monster's sort of stuck at the Facebook level.

Right.

Because people run away when he meets them in person.

1:24:40 Nathan: Yeah. And I mean, and that's important, I think, too, to realize that he's not just a murderer. Well, I mean, he is a murderer, but if you go into the circumstances of that first death with Frankenstein's brother, you know, he's in the woods alone and wants, you know, after. After being rejected, you know, he's freshly angered and repulsed by society again. And he sees this kid and, you know, he wants to have a relationship with his child. He's a child himself, you know, even though he appears to be a giant man. And the kid starts screaming and he just wants him to stop screaming about him. And, you know, he just closes his throat to stop him from screaming. And that kills him.

1:25:17 Unknown speaker: And puts the fingerprints where the locket was pretty mean. I thought that was interesting.

I think he's got more problems than being bad looking.

Well, I wanted to ask you guys about the theme of responsibility in this novel too, because there's this question of what Victor is responsible for insofar as the creature acts out. But to me, this. I mean, religion is in this novel, but it's in it in a very weird way. I mean, there's no real story, supernatural machinery, as it were. But it sort of raises the question then, so where do you.

Yeah. Where do you see religion in the novel?

Well, it's brought in in the context of one of the stories. I think it's the story of Felix. Right. And the father, is it Safie, that he's. Yeah, okay. Her father. There's a dispute about religion there.

She can't marry a Christian. Yeah, his daughter.

Right. And then also I think it's Justine. Her religious morals are praised as well. And if you're looking for a sort of Jesus figure, I would nominate any of the women in this novel, for the most part. I mean, definitely the mother or Justine or Elizabeth. The women are always seem to be depicted in this saintly way. But other than that, the question then becomes, you know, for me, man has. Or mankind, humankind have origins as well. And immediately, if you start to consider the question of the responsibility that Victor has for the creature's actions, you go back to that epigram, which is from Adam, I think, in Paradise Lost, did I solicit thee to promote me from darkness?

It raises the question of humankind's responsibility and, you know, from where we came. And I think there's a question of human nature there. And Paradise Lost is a big referent for this story. But there's another one from Dante that happens when Victor is first meeting Frankenstein, you know, after he's. Or first meeting the creature, after he's learned language and seen the cabin and sort of. Kind of come into his own, and he is scaling this mountain, and there's a sort of direct allusion to the Purgatorio. He's going up to the summit before he sees the creature and hears his tale.

And he says, I resolved to go alone to the summit of Montanvert. I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. I determined to go alone, for I was well acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene.

And if you've read the Purgatorio, you know that this is, like, in direct conflict with how it works, right? Because what happens in the Purgatorio is the process of climbing the mountain to the summit, where you're then raised up to heaven, is a process of conditioning. You're sort of doing beat into holiness through all of these trials, stones weighing upon your head. And the whole time, you're singing songs with other people so that you learn how to cooperate and collaborate. And it's a process of socialization, maybe a sort of growing up kind of the way Wes was talking about.

But in any case, you get the sense that your nature and how you learn to be good and holy is a matter of conditioning, and it's a matter of so socializing, and it's a matter of like, these outside things coming in and engaging with them. And so Victor's statement that solitude is what he needs in order to Appreciate it is directly antithetical to that. But to me, that gets back to this question of responsibility. Because if the things outside of ourselves have so much power over who we are, then that question of responsibility is very complicated, I think.

And so I was just wondering if anybody had any thoughts about how that line comes down, you know, from maker to made, and then, you know, the thing that it makes you mean the

responsibility of the creator?

Mm.

Well, the sense in which we are the product of influences. Right. So when I mentioned before the Promethean theme, you know, according to the myths, Prometheus created humankind or he gave us our natures. It kind of varies from myth to myth and the broader meaning of myths like that. And I think the story is that we are the product of influences outside of our control and that the plight of that, like I said, our potential, we can turn out badly. We can become monstrous. We might end up as mass murderers. And then there's the question which I think is right. You know, it's very apt of. Is your question the extent to which it relieves us of responsibility or.

Yeah, that's part of it. It's one of them. And, you know, how much agency is there and you know, in how much these influences play on our choices. And maybe there's no answer. I don't know.

Can you get away from the fact that, I mean, like, the monster. Is there any amount of wrong that could have been done to the monster? And I think it's hard to, like, get an analog or reason because he really had a shitty life. But is there any point where you, like, excuse him for his actions or even though his creator, Victor, just has to hold partial responsibility for the terrible things that happened? I think you have to give credit to the autonomous nature of human beings. And the ultimate source of responsibility has to be within them, despite whatever wrong happened to them. Otherwise we can think of some formula, like after X amount of trauma, you are allowed to lash out in crazy ways.

1:31:07 Nathan: Well, I think that he's trying to illustrate something about being maybe more generally. And it's something that Victor, he doesn't go that one further. I think that if you were to allow something like a monster of, you know, a created being, then you would be opening the door to a lot more interesting moral questions. Questions on 161. He's thinking about helping the monster. But he says that my duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refuse to help.

1:31:42 Unknown speaker: Well, this is his line of bullshit. Right. Because why does he have to produce a fertile female? And the creature never asks him for someone he can reproduce with. He's worried about the monsters reproducing and taking over the world.

He just wanted to mate a friend or someone. Right.

He just needed a girlfriend, didn't necessarily want kids. That box was unchecked on his dating profile.

But it was the creator's concern that

he would reproduce well, but the creator creates the female and presumably doesn't have to create a fertile female. This seems to fall in line with this whole denial thing. It seems like a very thin excuse for not doing the thing that's going to save his family. Does he really care about humanity more than his family?

That's very inhuman.

I think that that's correct in that it is self serving there. And it's a thin excuse from his perspective. But I think if we extrapolate into a more general social sense, it becomes a much more robust consideration. Consideration?

What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean that that choice between the particular and the general, the motivations is a difficult choice to make. And when it comes to a creation that is going to empower someone, you're not going to be able to determine in what way that creation is used. And if you have some immediate benefit to gain from going ahead and doing that, you know, like people are attacking your town and so you make some new weapon like a machine gun or

1:33:15 Nathan: something, or the atom bomb. Right. I mean, that's a huge creation and

1:33:18 Unknown speaker: it's going to solve some immediate personal end for you. But then from there you don't know what's going to happen to it. I think that is talking about the

unintended consequences of technological creations.

Yeah, I tend to go back to that lens on this because it was sort of how I got interested in this story.

So you're saying that there were unintended consequences that he didn't know would happen and then that kept him from protecting his family?

Well, I'm saying that that is a personal motivation for him and withholding that information. And he also withholds it from Walton.

Right.

For the same reasons. The procedure of creating life through that galvanization. But I think that if we extrapolate into, away from the story, into today's sort of technological environment, I think it's, you know, that law of unintended consequences is very much relevant.

1:34:08 Nathan: Yeah, I mean, it certainly is. I mean, he would be unethical. I mean, he should have thought about that to begin With, Right. Did he know it was going to work? No, he was probably in a fevered pitch and it was just his imagination was keeping him going. And then whenever he finally gained actual reality with his creation, it changed everything.

1:34:25 Unknown speaker: I mean, but he was, he got sick for like nine months when he realized what he had created. And there was no indication that he had created a monster or a being that would murder.

1:34:35 Nathan: Oh, exactly. It was just a pitiful creature through

1:34:37 Unknown speaker: him, was the way the guy looked.

Yeah, he had a nervous breakdown because it, because it was bad looking.

Yeah, it's a bad looking.

And was it really nine months? Was it really the, the amount of a normal pregnancy?

1:34:48 Nathan: Okay, yeah, that was a little bit of an overlay.

1:34:51 Unknown speaker: Yeah, Well, I, I kind of came out. I didn't mean. I don't know. Yeah, good, good point, good point, good point.

No, it might have been. That's a really good.

That would be interesting.

It was a while. Yeah, but it was a while Clerval comes and nurses him back to health.

Right.

Just on that note, also, the creature didn't change in appearance, I'm assuming, once he, you know, did his electricity thing. Like, he was talking about how it's hideous with yellow skin and black lips and watery eyes. But like that would have been the chunk of flesh on the table before he started. I don't know what he was expecting.

Well, I mean. Yeah, and plus, I mean, you expecting something nice when you take it out of a grave.

Well, he was, I mean, he was expecting reanimation. I think that he was expecting that, you know, so this is, I don't know if you've ever seen anyone who's died, been reanimated, death, you know, very different looking. And you think. I watched someone die once and when she went, it was like there was like this gray pallor that just kind of descended on her. It was so bizarre. And I suppose that if you've seen that, you might think, well, you know, the spark of life would actually turn them back to what they were. So maybe it wasn't so far fetched for him.

Well, there's that phenomenon too, of the uncanny valley.

Right, yes. Sorry. It just brings me back. We were talking about AI before, so Just brings me back to that discussion. Yeah.

1:36:26 Nathan: Well, I just want to say this is just business end here. I wonder if maybe there's some final thoughts or key things that we didn't get to that just. You absolutely feel like you had to.

1:36:36 Unknown speaker: So I will give my closing.

Closing remarks.

Yes. As we do on the podcast. So in Which I'm going to try and convince you because I know you're skeptical and people always are, that the incest theme is actually quite explicit. So when he first meets his sister, when she's first given to him, he calls her. So he says, no word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation which she stood to me, my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only till death, Elizabeth. And then in another passage, Elizabeth Lavenza became the intimate of my parents house, my more than sister.

This phrase more than sister repeated, the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and pleasures. And then there's the part where. So when he is off on his adventure, I think, trying to figure out how to make the girlfriend for the creature, his father writes him a letter saying, you perhaps regard her as your sister without any wish that she might become your wife. They're trying to figure out why he seems to be postponing the marriage. Nay, you have met with another whom you may love. And considering yourself as bound in honor, Elizabeth.

the struggle may occasion you poignant misery, blah, blah, blah. And then Elizabeth at some point writes him to say the same thing. She says, but as brother and sister, often entertain a lively affection towards each other without desiring a more intimate union, may not such also be your case? So I wanted to point that out just because I don't think this is a reading of the text. I think it's an explicit thing that Shelley was.

Well, why would she do that, though?

Working on and thinking about. Because the whole idea of incestuousness is at odds with maturation. Incestuousness is what prevents you from leaving the family scene and growing up. And in some ways this is a story about a failure to grow up. Victor's failure to grow up because of his overweening mother. And by the way, this is something that is in common with mass murder cases. When you look at the profiles, they often have these overly close mothers, I know. And they fail to go out into society and fail to make intimate relations with other people, to become individuals and form intimate relations with other people.

And that becomes the problem and the overreaction for Victor. He overcompensates by doing something which seems like individuation. On the one hand, leaving his family, making them concerned. Why aren't you answering my letters? Sort of abandoning the domestic scene for the sake of knowledge, which again is the leaving of the Garden of Eden and is the leave taking of the ideal early family situation. But on the other hand, he's trying to undo the death of his mother, pretty obviously. So he's not actually escaping, he's recreating an attempt to escape.

This incestuous family situation recreates the horror of that as the product. As the monstrous product of incest, which is the creature. So this dynamic between being too bound up with family life or trying to go out in the world and be an individual, or maybe being too much of an individual individual, I think is really one of the important themes here. Yeah, so that's my closing statement on that.

Do you think that she consciously wrote that? Do you think that that was her intention?

I get the impression she. This is pretty well thought out. It may not be conscious, but that wouldn't change the validity of the interpretation because I don't think interpretations require authorial intention. But the only way this could have been more explicitly incestuous is if it would have been too horrible. Because it would have been a brother marrying a sister. And then it doesn't matter what happens after that. The monster is no longer the most horrifying thing in the story. So this idea of a sister who's not a sister, that's as close as she can get to the incest theme.

And she, it seems to me with those passages, tries to make it as explicit as possible. And it's Victor's the supposedly ideal childhood, which is obviously not an ideal childhood. The recapitulation in the childhood of the creature, you know, the sort of quasi childhood with the supposedly ideal family. You know, all of these things are too well crafted, as far as I'm concerned, to be just accidental.

I mean, I think it's a good reading. I just think that it would be amazing that an 18 year old woman would actually sit down, you know, at that time, like pre Freud, and write that into a story. I do think it's a good reading, but I would be shocked if she did it consciously.

Yeah, well, you think she wrote about incest without being conscious of it?

Yeah, because I mean then you have the monster and he is the primary concept in this story, in theory, one of them. So I think the incest. Even though. Yeah, like Mary said, it's a great analysis. I think that that's unconscious.

Yeah, I think it's very explicit and I think there's reluctance to acknowledge this. So even I wrote something about, for instance, back to the. The future, in which.

Great.

1:41:41 Nathan: Okay, let's hear it.

1:41:41 Unknown speaker: He is nominally. He's trying to. His mother is after him, his mother is trying to have sex with him. And most people just simply do not accept that. There's an explicit incest theme in Back to the Future. Despite that.

Are you kidding? I thought it was so creepy. I never understood why people liked it so much.

I always just was freaked out by it. I love it.

I think it's great. Anyway, I don't wanna.

Right.

You know, when his sister says, you know, brother and sister often entertain a lively affection towards each other without desiring a more intimate union, he's may that not that also be your case. In other words, she's saying, are you not marrying me because I'm your sister? Because there's an incest taboo that's pretty explicit. He's running away from his family. That's harped on too many times in the novel not to be.

You know, if anybody is asked, what do you think of Frankenstein? Incest is not in their mind. Although I think you're right, and I think it's an interesting analysis, and I think you're correct. I just know that nobody's gonna. It's just not.

Yeah, but they're not gonna think about most of what we talked about.

1:42:47 Nathan: Yeah. Postpartum or mass murder or.

1:42:49 Unknown speaker: I agree. Anyway, I want to just say final. My final thought is what I found a very important theme in this book is what he looks like. About the fear of how he looks. About how when he would be going through the back of the woods, you know, and around various neighborhoods, and when people saw him, they completely flipped. I think that that's a very important theme about looking at the value of what a human being appears as and how the rest of society or groups respond to that. I think that that's a really important part of this.

I totally agree with that. It reminded me of, like, being back in high school, acne and how, like, you'd feel like a monster when people just looked at you.

Yeah.

Yep.

I agree. But I think that that is also something that's at work with these mass shootings that we see. And I don't mean I'm not being. You know, I don't want to downplay all of the other levels that are at work with these mass shootings or with mass murderers. But, you know, I think that that's something that's been created in this society. I do think that as a result, people are feeling, you know, like they're monsters, and this is how monsters behave.

But it's also isolation. Right. Which technology enhances.

Yeah, except we had some big mass murderers before technology of this level.

Right.

The question that we're trying to answer is why they're so Frequent now, which partly has to do with guns, of course, but I think also it's a matter of.

Obviously, but I think you're right, isolation is a big part of it. And then, yeah, okay, that can come out of the high school thing or whatever, but even if it doesn't, I think that that's an important theme in this book. That's what jumped out at me throughout reading this whole thing. That idea, the idea of the Elephant man, the idea of even Stephen Hawking, who is amazing, man, amazing. But you know, everybody talks about how he looks. I mean, that's like the first thing you see in an article. Okay, I know how he looks. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in what he has to say.

Mine's along a similar theme. I was just thinking about how a lot of these books that we read is usually just very bright, articulate people. Also lamenting the danger of knowledge and intelligence and how happiness is actually being simple and tranquil. It remind me of a conversation I remember I had with friends in high school and we had the standard dumb, would you rather this or that? And it was, would you rather be good looking or smarter? And I think we actually had limit. It was like 20 IQ points or whoever the good looking kid in class was at the time.

And I think we all came down to we take the looks because like, no one who's smart is actually happy. But then when we turn the question around, would you rather, like, would you rather lose the IQ points? Would you rather lose the IQ points or lose some looks? Then we said, ah, well, you know, I don't want to be dumber than I already am. So. So I'd have to take, you know, I'd have to lose the looks. So it's kind of a weird, weird, weird thing to get into there. And that's what I tied back to Frankenstein. And that's my closing.

Okay, nice.

1:45:58 Nathan: I mean, I guess I'd like to say that what stood out for me was the accusation the monster holds against Frankenstein as the representative of man, that he knows he becomes the father of him. But also he starts to inherit the rest of the world of man by being brought into the world by another man. And it's this world of humanity that he's able to see from the outside that he really turns on. And there's this passage on 84 that I really liked. This is after he spent some time with the family and learned a bit. And he talks about man and indeed he's at once powerful and virtuous.

Magnificent, yet so vicious and base. He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle. And at another, as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike. To be great and virtuous appeared the highest honor. Yet to be base and vicious, as so many have been, appeared the lowest degradation. A condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time, I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow or even why there were laws and governments. But when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

And, yeah, I feel tremendous sympathy for the monster's perspective.

1:47:25 Unknown speaker: He has a change of heart about violence, but, yeah, well, he turns.

1:47:31 Nathan: He becomes a violent person himself after. Again, this goes back to what we've talked about.

1:47:36 Unknown speaker: Right. That intensifies the tragedy of his downfall. But that's set up with him being so innocent and sweet in the beginning.

Yeah, I love that. I love the way this novel picks up on the ways that the activities and the engagements and the events in our lives make us who we are and how much power they have over the things that we do. It was right there in the beginning, one of the first parts with Walton, and Victor's talking to him. And it might have been Walton talking to his sister, I can't remember. But one of them is talking about, you know, just the preposterous nature of the tale. I think it's Victor talking to Walton. And he says, you know, under certain circumstances, you may not believe me, but perhaps out here, you know, surrounded by all these majestic glaciers and this kind of otherworldly surroundings, what I'm saying will seem more believable.

And I just love that right there because it just encapsulates the ways that our surroundings influence just the ways that we think. And, you know, what is acceptable and what isn't, and it's just wonderful. And all the things that you guys have said I just found really interesting and apt as well. My closing pretty much was given at the beginning. I think it's relevant now to our current situation. I mean, Lone Gunmen are a problem, obviously. I mean, that amplification of power without the ability to amp up our ethics and our sense of morality and empathy is a dilemma that seems like it's only intensifying.

And, you know, we. Guns give you a lot of ability to wreak havoc and kill and, you know, then. But I mean, beyond that, we've got, you know, individuals and garages and laboratories with power in genetics and programming and things that would put the destructive power of the Manhattan Project to shame as the world becomes more and more networked. So I think that this is going to become a very practical problem, and it already is, but it's only going to get more so that we're going to have to find ways to deal with if there are such ways. And I think this novel speaks to that.

And that's probably my primary interest in it.

Just on the mass murder thing, I think also there's a lack of understanding in the, you know, the way the press treats these things, as if they are incomprehensible. But these mass shooters are people who feel like monsters and they feel precisely the way Frankenstein feels, which is that the world has rejected them and the world deserves their revenge. And it's an enormously narcissistic, messed up point of view, obviously, but it has its antecedents in various causes. Psychological, physiological. Bad parenting, I think, is a bigger factor than people want to admit.

1:50:14 Nathan: Well, and who's the worst parent? Right? I think that's already been established. I think you've put it pretty well, Wes. Pretty great. Bad father Frankenstein.

1:50:24 Unknown speaker: We didn't talk at all about government. And I gotta say that I think that, you know, Ronald Reagan, bad dad. Both the Georges, bad dad. Bill Clinton, bad dad. And as it's turning out, Obama not the best dad.

And culture going, culture itself is a bad dad.

Yeah, yeah. Culture is not your friend.

So Ronald Reagan and Frankenstein somehow makes

what, Mary, you're talking about violence, about people with one gun, right? I mean, when does it not. How many people is it not okay? You know, at what point, you know, so somebody, one person goes out and shoots 20 people and that's not okay? We go out and destroy a country, that's okay. You know, it's just. Sorry, I'm not going to talk into it, but I think that it's, you know, the fact that the United States

killed, What is it, 19 Doctors Without Borders.

Yeah. Recently.

People, you know, at the same time that there's a. Much less of a reaction to that than to the. To the shooting in Oregon.

Yeah, of course, drones. You know, just trying to. Ma. There was a. When I was out, I thought I was so smart going over to this park I used to live near to see the eclipse. And then apparently all the hipsters in town had found out about it. So like 300 people showed up on this hill and somebody flew a drone over the crowd. And I was enraged. I was just like. It came over me like fire. I just wanted. I just. Oh, my God, if I had a gun, I'd shoot that thing, you know, and obviously this person wasn't sending a drone to kill us, but hey, they're drone, you know, but whatever. I think that the whole idea of power and, you know, who we look to for our moral guidelines is. I don't know, I think we're kind of screwed.

That's your reaction? That's your final remarks?

No, my final remarks is that we're monkeys with big brains. It always strikes me when I read something that's so heart wrenching like this, how, you know, how close we are to our base natures, how close, you know, it doesn't take much to push us over the edge and, you know, hey, a drone. I was feeling murderous, so I don't think that I'm that special a case with that kind of thing. I do go back to, we're not that far removed from monkeys yet. And we.

It's.

It's hubris to think that we can take the kind of responsibility that we would need.

That Victor Frankenstein took.

Yeah. Or that, you know, Oppenheimer took. You know, anybody knows that.

He knows that or he knew that.

Yeah, I know, but still there is hubris, so. Yeah. But I loved it. I love remembering that we're.

Blast.

Yeah.

As always.

1:53:24 Nathan: There's one more thing I'd like to add here, and it's a little bit of spiritualism that I think comes in. It's where Walton is talking to his sister in the letter after Frankenstein's gone, and he talks about, you know, how much in pain he is, and then he just says this. Yet he enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude and delirium. He believes that when in dreams he holds converse with his friends and derives from that communion consolation for his miseries, or excitements to his vengeance that they are not the creations of his fancy, but the beings themselves who visit him from the regions of a remote world. This faith gives him a solemnity to his reveries that render them, to me, almost as imposing and interesting as truth.

1:54:09 Unknown speaker: Wow.

Bad idea.

Also, very nice writing.

Yes.

1:54:16 Nathan: Well, I'd like to do something just a little bit different here at the end. We're going to be reading The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft coming up soon. But I wanted to, just for everybody, if you have any recommendations for another book, just here at the end, I

1:54:30 Unknown speaker: have to say I wrote it in the thing, but Joy of Man's Desiring, which I haven't read in 20 years or something, it's just. It's so gorgeous. It's so beautiful. If you have time and the inclination, it is well worth it.

I'm reading the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood right now.

I still want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which we briefly discuss.

1:54:54 Nathan: Well, we will do that. It's one of my favorites on the

1:54:59 Unknown speaker: subject of isolation and science and all that. I'm reading Matthew Crawford's the World beyond your Head and Man. It's the best thing I've read in years. I highly recommend it.

Cool.

Are you reading any fiction, Wes?

Goethe's Faust for my book club.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, light reading. Great.

Well, it is, you know, it does have a lot of rhyming.

Do not open this door or you will undo everything I've worked for. Do you understand? Yes, Doctor. Nice working with you.

Let me out. Let me out of here. Get me the hell out of here.

What's the matter with you people?

I was joking.