Combat and Classics is a series of podcasts and online seminars that explores the nature of man in conflict and cooperation through socratic dialogue and the great books. For more info visit Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:15 — )
I beheld the wretch – the miserable monster whom I had created. –Frankenstein
Why did Victor Frankenstein create his monster? What role did beauty, love, science, and education play in his endeavor? Join Lise, Brian, and Jeff in a discussion of this classic, widely known novel.
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I always felt like the obvious reason that the monster was ugly was because Frankenstein created this monster and it was ugly. In other words the significance was that the Father created this ugly creation. There is the tension that occurs between father and son or creator and created. In the way that Frankenstein’s monster is abandoned by him because of his ugliness and is also ugly because he was created by him. And how a parent/creator will turn away from their creation unable to face what they have created and all that it means. The ugliness represents the call to action in parenting which is to accept the parts of another being in the way we are only asked to with our kids because it requires us to accept the ugliness within ourselves since parenting most often reflects back to us the least desirable parts of who we are. In that acceptance, we usually disarm the “ugly” parts or transform them to their rightful state. Ugliness in that sense is just parts of the psyche gone awry.
Pardon, I should have started out by saying that I really enjoyed this podcast and I loved what Lise brought to the conversation about the idea of rejecting an origin. I am considering the point of view of Victor and his frustration with with his life’s work being “ugly”.
Insightful, Jenn; well done. I don’t know enough about Shelley to guess whether that was her intent or not, but maybe it doesn’t matter finally, per the discussion PEL guys had in their last episode. Your intuition seems credible.
Thanks, Luke. I thought the same after listening to PEL episode 182. I thought, all this time I have been feeling as though there is a right and wrong interpretation. While I do think some are more substantiated and more credible than others, I think they are right – anything goes as long as you are willing to defend it. I had no idea about the French Revolution interpretation discussed in this podcast, but it makes a lot of sense now that I understand Shelley’s history more. I’d like to think that if it is indeed her intent, there is still that universality of the more Freudian interpretation I am reading into it; same patterns on a different scale. And of course there is the old adage about never reading the same book twice – this point in my life in addition to being in a Freud reading group gives my interpretation a big bias in that direction. All in all, this podcast gave me more food for thought that I would never have gotten on my own and I really like that.
Yeah, Jenn, and I guess probably this subject matter (i.e. the interpretive space afforded by a piece of fiction writing) will be taken up in earnest later by our PEL podcast hosts. If I had to hazard a guess, however, perhaps one key thread we are pulling at here is how fiction writing, or let’s just say, non non-fiction writing (more on that in a bit), stands in counterpoint to what we would normally understand as straight, conventional non-fiction literature.
Let me explain some, please. We all have been trained to have specific and certain expectations when we read non-fiction; I don’t know, let’s say a biography of Abraham Lincoln, which don’t obtain when we pick up a deliberate piece of fiction. That is, non-fiction arguably possesses interpretative bounds that the fiction genre does not, though even a canonical choice from your local library’s Fiction section itself has to observe a set of rules and guidelines for its reader to (1) credibly suspend their disbelief, and (2) maintain interest long enough to finish the author’s story.
This is just to say that writing fiction is an intentional choice taken by an author, to carry with them greater narrative license, and so the question for us maybe is: Therefore, what reciprocal license or permission or discretion does this, in turn, grant the reader? Meaning, if the fiction author gets a wider berth to play with, by default, are we (his or her readers) then just meant to stay caged up in our little hermeneutic chicken coup? Or should we be able to wander a little bit, too, to go search for that extra potential meaning? If so, it seems only natural that, we all being individuals, none of us should seemingly trace the exact same interpretative path… if some of those paths are still found to be more favored or renowned or enriching by the numbers.
Well, I’m drowning in analogies and metaphors by now, but all I want to suggest is that the implicit contract – existing between any reader and any author – changes when the terms of the contract (i.e. the genre) change themselves. And much as a stricter contract (my non-fiction example) calls for stricter observance of boundaries and rules by its counter-parties, a more liberal contract (e.g. fiction, or epic history, or historiography, or folk wisdom literature, or even sacred texts) conveys to its counter-parties more liberty with how they should observe this relationship.
Bottom line? It finally has to be genuinely reciprocal, in some sense, because it takes both parties for generated meaning to be shared and socialized, the original work which otherwise would merely turn into that proverbial, unheard tree falling in the woods, no?
also – just red Wes’s articles on Frankenstein. Really worth checking out. It’s funny how I gravitated to all this and I happen to be reading the Ego and the Id right now. I don’t even love this story that much. I am liking it more now that I am discussing it.
Luke, thank you for that excellent expansion on the topic! It got me thinking.
Firstly, I write. It’s a thing I do for myself. By that I mean that many times I don’t know what I am trying to express until I have expressed it in writing. I don’t see all the underlying themes. I often write to understand myself better. I write to organize my brain. I don’t know how actual writers go about the process, but I imagine many of them work in a similar fashion at times. If this is the case it makes me think that to limit the ways in which meaning can be extracted from a piece would be arbitrary. Even the author takes the position of reader and extracts, likely much less easily, different meanings from the new vantage point. I’ve read things I have written years ago and realize that it wasn’t about what I thought it was about.
Certainly there are authors who have a very specific plan and outline and hope for a story. This makes me think of the hermeneutics of Joseph Campbell. In his comparison of mythology he discovered that regardless of the details, each one contained universal archetypes and a common human identity. In some ways, I think all good stories are like this. They each draw from the same handful of human experiences we all have. With regard to Shelley’s Frankenstein, whether it is about the experiences of being a human within a dysfunctional family or whether it’s really about the French Revolution or whether those things are even mutually exclusive is a non issue for me. In some ways war is really about dysfunctional family dynamics and there really are just a few elemental ideas in the world which authors are working from. Certainly this is a bit reductionist but my point is that – to your point, there is a shared meaning and the more it is shared the more universal it becomes. There are lots of entertaining monster stories to read I am sure; this one has endured for reasons far beyond entertainment value.
They mentioned reading Brave New World and I read that book not long ago along with Fahrenheit 451, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and The Shallows all around the same time. What was most interesting to me was how F451 is sort of the ham-fisted version of Brave New World. And for me The Shallows and Amusing Ourselves to Death are the non-fiction counterparts to those books in a lot of ways. Brave New World is not exactly subtle but then again, neither is Frankenstein. What is so inspiring to me about writers who do what Huxley and Shelley do, is how there are layers for every reading level. They create a story in which you can get the theme pretty easily yet, there are gems to uncover the more you are able to read between the lines. Trying to write a story with that intention is probably the death of ever actually doing it. I don’t know a ton about Rousseau’s theories, but on the whole I can agree with the notion that one can be sort of beaten down by society. And maybe it’s a big stretch, but isn’t that so much of what Freud is about? We are whole but then with all the socialization and expectation we start repressing ourselves and stop being accepting of our natural state and end up really messed up in a lot of ways.
Anyway – thanks for sharing your thoughts. I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Hi again, Jen.
So I’ve thought some now about your latest post. I want to concede to you, off the top, that any author – fiction writer, non-faction writer, poet, playwright, song lyricist, diarist, whomever – can be a spectator to their own work. It certainly conforms with my own personal experience, and all I ever write are boring memos to a vast chain of ascending superiors.
I have difficulty getting behind Freudian explanations for this kind of phenomenon, but let’s just hypothesize that the limits of human cognition perhaps circumscribe the volume or scope of potential meaning that any one of us can ascertain, in our own writing, at any time. We’re not gods after all, or demigods even, and – though that rare few of us may be brilliant, indeed – even this elite cadre won’t be able to account for all the ways their creation will be received… because they are not the everyone else consuming it!
So, arbitrary boundary(s)? Yeah, maybe. But then, if I may ask, what are your expectations – for your original work – when you write? If it’s not meant to be shared, does that change the context enough to inform intended readings? What if you had a public audience in mind, when you sit down to this practice, in other words? Surely that would color differently the way you organized your thoughts and ideas. In which case, I expect even the most stubborn and independent-minded of us would have a more self-conscious awareness of the final consumer (meaning, not yourself).
My intuition is the same you point to with your reference to Joseph Campbell. It’s been many years now since I picked up any work by him, but I think I must have consumed (10, 15 years ago now) everything he ever published, finding it extremely compelling and revelatory. Great auteurs do map their stories to these seemingly-eternal archetypes, and the older I get, the more I suspect that is not accidental. It may not be 100% self-aware, either, but no one creates a best-seller or classic by such chance.
It’s hard work! It’s a craft. It’s writing something, and rewriting it, and then rewriting it again. Then editing that, tearing up your original, and starting all over completely from scratch. The unusually talented but undisciplined make a splash with one amazing work, and then are never to be heard from again. But the truly successful are those that pine and dote after their authorship like a first-born child.
Okay, maybe that’s a tad bit over-the-top, but it is also manifestly the difference (that you point out) between Shelley’s monster story and all others. Frankenstein, so far as I know, is the canonical monster story, at least since modern time. Was Shelley mindful of the Rousseau valence, the quasi-Qedipul valence (you suggested to begin), the flawed, impatient, estranged artist valence (that Combat & Classics podcasters speak to in this recording), or just the pure sci-fi fun and novelty of her story? Heck if I know, but it’s a pretty tall order to put on someone just trying to make something a tiny bit original and interesting. As you say, pithily, “Trying to write a story with (such) intention is the death of actually doing it.”
Also – if you haven’t read Brave New World – I ran across my notes from it. Here is a quote that will knock your socks off – or at least it did mine!.
“That is the secret to happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.” DHC (director of hatcheries and conditioning)
Hi Luke!
Thanks for the response.
I’m with you on Freudian interpretation. Sometimes it feels all make-believe. As I read him, I’m trying to place myself into a non-Freudian world where these things aren’t so second nature. To me his work is like pink for girls and blue for boys. I’ll explain; those two colors are so deeply encoded in my brain as gender specific that I believe there must be some gender quality to them. That is, however, not the case. It’s just been socialized into us. Freud’s ideas seem similar. His idea of repression and the unconscious are so much a part of what we accept as fact that we don’t even realize that there was a time when those ideas were new and foreign. Feud didn’t come up it’s the idea, but no doubt he popularized it. I think of this so much because as I read him he always seems to have this tone of – listen folks, if you don’t buy the idea of repression or unconscious thought then the rest of what I’m about to say will not convince you. And I am thinking – who doesn’t believe this nowadays!? And as much as I like Freud, I often get the feeling of ex post facto reasoning. But then, I would. We all would. That’s a whole other conversation. And if Sartre can misread Freud, then my feeble mind is surely missing layers and layers of meaning. I’m junior varsity squad for sure when it comes to any kind of hermeneutics, especially Freudian.
As far as my own writing goes, I have so many hang ups I can’t even begin to tell the full story. Suffice it to say that I do agree that writing for an audience is its own animal and no more like writing in a journal than writing a grocery list.
If you read Wes’s piece you may remember that part where he compares writing to Frankenstein’s creation and how the childish part of V.F. didn’t understand the process. He wanted to be awesome right out of the gate; we all know how that went! The issue here is that he did work very hard. It was his life’s work. So for me the story is less about the hard work we put in rather it’s an understanding of our limits as human beings. And it’s also about our limits as creators. What we create is out of our control once we put it out into the world. And that’s scary because it may reveal to us flaws within our character that we don’t want to see, that we’ve worked very hard to not see. And seeing what we don’t want to see it really painful at first. And spending a lifetime trying to unsee it is the suffering.
I could rattle on forever probably and since I have no good stopping place, I’ll end here and say thanks for engaging. It is most appreciated.
Jen –
Replied to your latest via private message.
cheers,
Luke
me too. Thank you!