Welcome back to New Thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always is Greg McBrayer, who always looks forward to Halloween. This is our Halloween episode. Last year you did racers and apples.
What are you doing this year Greg? Methamphetamine's. Okay. Well, you want to get the kids excited.
Alex, your daughter's an elf. He's too young. What are you doing? Just, I don't know.
I'm going to go with something very scary. I'm a white male, but the scariest thing there is. Somebody goes myself. Actually, here in the World Headquarters of Nice People, I'm actually going to hang out with some friends and we're going to get candy to kids.
We'll give out some coolers of banquets to the adult males and females I suppose. Yeah. We'll trick for everybody. That sounds awesome.
I have a fire going. Hopefully it rains. Thank you. So I'm excited.
So this is our Halloween episode. And I wanted to do the Charlie Brown Halloween special, but I guess we went with something more serious. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And, well, I think Alex and I agreed to do Shelley's Frankenstein.
Craig pushed back on it. You remember Alex? He said that women couldn't philosophize and the novel made no sense to him because of the author. And so he told me he'd seen a movie and he doesn't understand what's so interesting about this green guy with the flat top and the bull.
We brought him around. And I think we convinced Greg because of our guest today. It was our guest tonight. Yeah, our guest is Justin Gachak.
He was a political theorist, most recently translated for the University of Chicago press. What is Nietzsche's Arathustra? That's a book by Heinrich Meyer. He went to Yale as an undergrad where a skull and bones did unspeakable things to him and that kind of led him to interest in political theory and really uncovering what was.
The book goes on in the world. But he recovered and ended up in the University of San Diego where he wrote his dissertation on Meyer, I think. Heinrich Meyer, who's the University of Chicago professor. He has a new book coming out.
How do you pronounce that, Greg? Its book. It's book. Be OK, David.
That's how you pronounce book. It's another translation of a... Oh, that's the actual title of Nietzsche's Vermachines, which we're going to translate as what? Nietzsche's legacy?
Is that what you want to do? Justin? Yeah, I think he has a book on Nietzsche's Antichrist and Eke Hommel. Yeah, also by Meyer.
So we're excited today. Justin knows Shelley's Frankenstein inside and out. So we're thrilled to have you. Thanks for coming down to expertise.
That's what he said in the build-up. I think he called all the scholarship. What was it? Word for fecal matter, I forget.
Yeah, yeah. So, Justin, if there's anything inaccurate in the bio, it's just presented. Yeah, I know that also. That also sounds good.
OK. Badly outmoded. All of the excellent prisons. We're going to fix that.
Yeah. Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. How did we even...
How do we make your comments? Justin, Alex, how do we... So I met Justin with a couple of my advisor, Ron and Berg, and we're going to ask him at the end. Justin and I were on a couple of those together.
And yeah, he was struggling as smart as a way. But then when we were throwing out on Twitter ideas for a Halloween episode, one of them was Frankenstein. We started DMing about it. What does that mean?
And realized that Justin had quite a lot more to say than either of you would. So I figured it might as well. It's fair. Again, actually, Justin, have you written on this book yet?
No, I have not written on this book yet. No, no. I think so far down the rabbit hole now that everything we found out, I'll forget every stage leading to my... You should write it on your notes on this book.
Yeah, because usually we'll email with guests ahead of time. We'll say, here's a draft run of show. If you feel anything and feel free to float some ideas, that's terrible. And people send us these unpolished drafts.
Michael Zookert sent us a chapter and all these notes from Catherine Zookert being like, come on, Michael. But these were just an offhand email. They were polished and clear. I wrote it in a numerology.
You went into calculus. It was really, really interesting. Yeah. Well, numerology, I talked about that from the official editor, Charles Robinson, who can be trusted.
Tell us a little bit about the book, Justin, who's the author in the office. Oh, no. Actually, let's see. It's like Mary Shelley, who is the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wilson Pratt, the famous berests.
And at the time, she wrote this book, she was eloped, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley. And I don't know if he has another story, right? It's the famous story where they go to Geneva and they're welcome to continent and they bring Claire Claremont, who is Mary's half sister, and she is afterward vibrant. So it's this wild time in Geneva with the four of them.
And she, you know, Claire Claremont is pregnant and so on. And Mary's a great pirate. By Byron. Yeah, Byron was a rushed about.
I don't know. And they have this famous challenge to see if we can write this area of start and then reproduce this. Who's just practicing? Can I just read a quick?
Justin, is that lore? Sorry, Greg. Is that lore? That's true.
That's true. And other texts that come out of this, these polygories, the short story called the vampire thing, comes out of this and provides basis for a change flight and then, you know, also for Dracula and so on. Oh, wow. Yeah, even from the very beginning, Frankenstein vampire thing.
That's cool. This is cool. David is actually not a fan of Percy at all, so he doesn't like Percy at all. But the rest of us all do.
And I was just wondering if you could, maybe for the folks at home, everyone knows the Frankenstein story, right? He gets the little German guy to go get the brains out of the jars and all that stuff. But for the folks at home, can you just give up briefs and notches? Greg, he's not talking about Walker Percy.
What? I think that David, you're bearing the lead. Greg, there's no e-gore in the book. What do you mean?
All right. Oh, anyways, Justin, right. That's interesting because, you know, in the very first stage play, which is called Presumption, 1823, there's a character called Fritz, who is the kind of incompetent assistant who becomes e-gore. So from the very beginning of the staging of this, they kind of needed somebody else.
Thanks for saving me, Justin. I appreciate that. I guess I watched the wrong movie. Maybe you could help us out though.
Like, what is this? I mean, everyone's kind of a story like a man scientist creates a monster, but like, what is this? Like, what is it? What kind of a book is it?
What is the plot line? Can you just give us like a brosomoto? Like, what happens? I mean, it's not complicated, actually.
It's an epistolary novel, so it's written in letters. And the letters are from a guy named Walton, who's trying to find the North Pole or the Northwest Passage and is writing to his sister, Margaret, who has the initials MWS, like Mary Wilson Cretchelli. They get stuck on the ice and he sees this apparition of this giant man driving a dog sled. Eventually, they find the next morning, you know, they find Victor, who is in terrible shape chasing this monster through the Arctic, you know, ice.
And so then Victor comes on board and Walter's very grateful to have a friend and Victor tells his story of how he ended up in this crazy situation. And that's the novel, right? The novel is Victor's telling Walton this story of his life. And so he's born in Geneva, lives as kind of a deal of childhood, although his mom ends up dying and he ends up living with us.
So then he's moving parts. So the sister is his cousin, Elizabeth, who's in with him. So he goes off to the Ingle side. He gets into science, he goes off to Ingle side, and he goes off to Ingle side, and he's in this dark, you know, experimentation.
He starts wondering about the origins of life. So he's been reading early on these alchemists, paracelsis and grippa and Alberta's Magnus, and it kind of fires his imagination for what can be done by science. So when he goes to college, he's the rest of his, you know, this ridiculous science is going to do sort of things, you know, it's not quite practical. But he doesn't really give up his dream.
So eventually, you know, laboratory many nights. And it's really skipped over in the text. It comes up with the secret of life and then somehow creates the person. And that's it.
It's not a lot of the tail given in that regard. But at the moment, he creates this monster. He's repulsed and, you know, kind of realizes how horrible he's not actually is. And he goes to the reverie, he goes to many reveries, stumbling around.
And the monster escapes. And so for a while, we don't hear from the monster. It's just kind of Victor, you know, meeting up with his friends and kind of having a secret. And his brother ends up getting murdered back in Geneva.
And then the housekeeper, Justin, is framed for this murder. And Victor knows it was really the monster that did it. And then finally, the monster finds him on an ice-flow and the monster tells him his story. Although second book is the monster telling his story to Victor.
And the various episodes and the monster story, which I guess we can get into. But eventually the monster says, you know, I want to make, I have to make a make. Victor agrees, you know. But Victor later, came into book three, says now in fact, you know, he convinced me with his own feelings, but you know, I really shouldn't be making this monster a make, you know.
You could populate the world with monsters. It's horrible, horrible, I guess. So he decides not to do it. And the monster gets really mad, right, and says, I'll be with you on your wedding night.
And the trick I think means he's going to kill him, Victor, but obviously that's not what he means. And then, you know, monster. Very disappointed. I thought there was going to be monster on Victor, sex scene.
Has did I? So he doesn't create or understand where Brida Frankenstein comes in here. That I'm just confused. Well, no, that's, you know, that's fine.
That, you know, possibility. You know, it's interesting. All right, everybody, before going further, I think we should take him to step aside and think our sponsor, the ancient language Institute. Now, I owe the ancient language Institute and our listeners a deep apology after last week's ad.
I got a lot of emails saying, I don't want to learn my languages from some ancient Institute. I want to learn them from a thoroughly modern Institute. This is the 21st century. I think I must have said something like the ancient language Institute rather than the ancient language Institute because, let's be clear, there is nothing ancient about the Institute itself.
It's just the languages, the languages. Yeah, they're ancient, right? We got land, ancient Greek, both coin and attic, and we have biblical Hebrew, but the antiquity of the Institute stops there at the languages. What's modern about it?
Well, a lot. First of all, that's an acronym that's very modern. We have a lot of dispenses with long vocalist and grammar charts. Instead, they get you reading and speaking on day one.
The courses are not by horse and buggy. They're not by means of hieroglyphics, but they're live and they're online and they have flexible schedules. The curriculum, in addition, is innovative, what's more non-ancient than that, and interactive and the readings fun. In addition, they have a happiness guarantee.
Let me tell you something. Aristotle Plato never guaranteed you happiness, that's the moderns. So much is this Institute modern that they give you a happiness guarantee, a full refund after your first class if you decide it's not for you. Registration for the spring term is open until December 18th.
Classes start in early January though. So if you want to get your ancient language on, go to ancientlanguage.com. And now back to the show. I actually remember, I actually remember I wrote in the text.
I remember being so obvious and maybe my surprise is maybe it's not warranted, but he sees himself as a male. I thought I sort of found fascinating. Well, yeah, I mean, it has something to do with what you've been reading. So he read the stars with young professor, so he kind of understood that long.
And also, this is played out more on the 1831 edition. When he frames Justine for the murder of William, he has a moment in the edition, we read it was the 18th edition, original edition. This doesn't really come out, but she's sleeping in the barn and he takes this moment and says, basically, you can make me happy, but you won't. And so here's your punishment.
So it's like this verdict delivered on all women. They could make it happy, but because they won't therefore he spits. He's an incel. Wait, he's not in the first incel.
Yeah. They just know really quick, how does it end? Can you talk just for five seconds about versions? Sure.
Yeah. So finally, Victor, you know, Swimmer is vengeance telling after the monster and says, you know, I'll chase you all, you know, all the world, I have to kill you before I can die. So the monster starts running, but he's then leaving, you know, Neil's and stuff for Victor, like, come on, follow me, Jason. You know, I mean, Jason's all the way up to the arctic, and that's where he runs into Walton, and then we kind of get back into the frame story at the end.
And you know, this is the end of the book. Now the frame story is sort of Walton's crew who's starting to revolt. We find out now that they've been trapped in the ice all along, even though it kind of seemed like they had gotten free previously. And Victor is in a bad state and eventually dies on the boat.
And right after he dies, the monster actually comes into the room with Victor's body, kind of gives him, you know, long, you know, well, you know, siege and tries to convince Walton of his own perspective. And, you know, the creature, the monster, the fiend, the rat, whatever my palm is rather persuasive. So he convinces, well, not to kill him as Victor had tried to get Walton to do before he died. And the last thing we see is that his creature have floating away on ice, an ice flow.
You know, going to going north, which is interesting. Well, that's what he wanted. Yeah, there's a number of that's, yeah, that that issue that the monster is able easily to do on his own, but Walton needs to be able to sort of rally a team around and he fails at it. I often, this is not what I want to mention, but I often think, okay, the monster should have lived Walton's life, Walton who lacks friends, but has some scientific inclination to live Victor's life.
And Victor, who really his life gets ruined by science, should have just after his mother died instead of trying to seek for how one could keep alive or reanimated a dead person should have just done what most people do, which is make babies with his cousin, wife, Elizabeth. So it's interesting, the ideal, like each one gets set off on the wrong path, but a path that would have been well suited for the other. But to go back to what you said about, you know, the monster is incredibly well spoken. He's accused of softness.
He can weave a tail. And I think this is deeply related to his ugliness right before he tells his story, right? Victor's like, I can't look at your nasty. And he covers his eyes.
He's like, Hey, now can you hear me? Right? And I think he understands because of his peculiar ugliness, the power of speech, right? When he's talking to the blind man.
Also, something I noticed this time through when he's in like incoherent upon his first animation, the first thing he tries to do is reproduce the sounds of the songbirds, but he can't. There's, I think a desire to sound beautiful related to his painful awareness that he's, you know, hideous, right? And that's, I think an undercurrent in this is poetry, you know, you know, bookwriting, rhetoric, sophistry, whatever you want to call it, but the power of persuasive speech. Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, it's surprising in that stuff, I said, like Peter Brooks, who was also a professor at Yale when I was an undergraduate. And it puts us in terms of like, the monster kind of rejects his mirror, narrow self, right? He rejects the imaginary and has to sit right himself in this symbolic, right? And so because of when he sees himself in the mirror, when he sees a monster, he has to do everything just by inserting himself into discourse somehow, right?
And by creating kind of persuasive persona through discourse. But it's also that, you know, he's super, you know, he's super human in many ways, right? I mean, he's, he can climb up sheer cliffs, you know, and it's not, it's not this big lumbering carloft, right? Where it's kind of like, you know, strong, but that's it.
He's also like, in some ways really smart and in search of it in that way too. You know, so that's something that kind of, I think, you know, is one of the things that gets really played down in the, in the tradition of stage points, right? Where he's again, he's no longer seeking, right? And that's something that really is so different from, from the book, you know, there's no Frankenstein on stage.
I think that's sort of, I know that it's anywhere near as elegant. You know, we sing a few songs here. I also think that's a good idea to give him Gerta. I mean, why are they making this monster?
Why are they giving him intellectual things, Justin? He finds it. I mean, you know, they say he found it in the woods and, you know, you wonder what it'd have been left for him by the family because they know that, you know, he's kind of the wood and all that, you know, so you wonder if they left that. So what he finds in the, in the, in the forest are, you know, Gerta stars young, Burta, um, um, Milton, the forest, Burta's lost and Plutarch's lives.
Right. And he says that, you know, he learned kind of high thoughts from Plutarch's lives and he learned, you know, the spondency and, and, and, you know, more romantic sort of feelings from Burta. But it's interesting to think about, you know, how those three texts, not student education. It's not just Milton.
It's Milton that really grabs him, right? Which is interesting because I usually think, I think, okay, Plutarch is about great men who accomplish something politically, right? And then, uh, the source of young Burta is about, it's a love story. It's a romantic story, right?
Uh, really? Yeah. Lost is really a combination of the two, right? Adam, and he is a love story that leads to the founding of the people, like perpetuating the species.
And that seems to be one of the things that they're worried about with them or Victor's worried about them is that they're going to be the first Adam and Eve and they're going to litter the earth with these monsters, these generations of monsters. So it seems so, uh, you know, pregnant in that direction. Under the stage play thing. Uh, but wait, wait, wait, but the monster doesn't, uh, he doesn't glom on to any of the Christ stuff, does he?
Like, oh, Adam and Eve, it's interesting what he absorbs from the books. I don't disagree with you, Alex. Some of the ideas, but with Milton, I don't understand what he takes from it. I mean, yeah, I think that that's like, that's something I was wondering this time, too, because it's like, you know, I think about this book.
It's, it's very time you can put it in a Christian context and say, okay, this is, this is about somebody who's trying to, you know, get, you know, become too godlike and he's punished and it's very simple. And so if you know who Mary Shelley was, you know, she's raised, she's raised like these very progressive parents, or at least her father, you know, but her mother was a poor, she died, too. Her mother dies 13 days after she's born. She's in something that was on those, tended to be at this point.
But she's flying around with Percy Shelley, who is, you know, about atheists, had a Lee Voxer writing book called the necessity of atheism, I think. He's signing guests books all over, you know, Switzerland, in bad Greek apparently as an atheist and so on. Viren simmel is, is not in any way, you know, govern my Christian's even value. So, so, you know, you have on the land of subtitle, modern pernipius, right, which obviously Greek.
And on the other hand, you have the epigraph, which is from from Milton, right, which is, did I request the maker from my place and mold me man, did I solicit the from darkness to promote me, right, that's imperative, I love it. So it seems right away, right, like we're being kind of given both, we're being given the Greek and the biblical and it's just, it was hard for me to situate exactly where we were supposed to kind of, or how we were supposed to navigate those influences. One thread, maybe that's just to complicate things a bit. This book, this time around reminded me so much of Rousseau.
They keep getting locked out of Geneva. He has reveries on a boat, right, the romantic link, obviously with like Kerta. And it struck me, but then on the other hand, you want to say, there's obviously this Baconian element, right, where the whole idea of doing through natural science, what had earlier been dreamed of through alchemy is a huge theme in the New Oregon. And so it almost feels like at the same time as there is this sort of biblical and Greek thread, there's also this modern thread, like look at what modern natural science can do.
And then also look at how we're trying to come up with human meaning in light of that, how Victor in light of his Baconian accomplishment is struggling with a very resilient problem, right? How do I live in a real human life, you know, human being in meaningful sense, when I've just discovered that I can reduce everything inanimate stuff, right? And get at some common basic stuff. So yeah, even the books, even the books that the monster reads, it's very resilient, right?
I mean, it's Rousseau as a fan of Plutar, right? There's only only the handful of books, right? And I guess the difference of Bacon would be big. Actually, I mean, no, it would be the big difference.
But yeah, Justin, so be back in Alex's kind of interpretation there. Do you know anything about the history of interpretation of this book? I mean, did the earliest readers kind of, did they zero in on the metaphors, the danger of modern science? Did they go in different directions?
Do you know anything? Yeah, well, I can talk, like I know how the play was, I mean, the book was very popular. And but because it was known who she was, it was kind of less, you know, immediately moralizing people more likely to kind of see the kind of monstrosity and godlessness of it, even if it ultimately, you know, is appropriate in some sense as a morality. And especially when the plays come out, there's a big fur over, you know, whether this sort of Obama agency put on a stage at all, but it's so popular that, you know, it doesn't really go anywhere.
There's like flyers and counter flyers. And the defense is basically, oh, look, this is what happens when you, when you're, you know, plays whole presumption, right? So it happens when you're too presumptuous. You're punished.
And so therefore, you know, it's going to be the same thing in the right of Frankenstein, where apparently Wales having a lot of trouble with the censors and just putting everybody on a bunch of Christian stuff, you can convince them, no, look, in fact, you know, the monster being Christ, that's pious, you know, and, and, you know, the old Christian, the old white man is a Christian, actually is a kind of good, you know, he's the only guy that is sympathetic to the monster. So there, I think there is this kind of imbalance, you know, do we, do we kind of reject this because of the intrinsic darkness of the subject matter, or do we even, you know, go the other side, I know that this is hyper moralizing and, you know, which I'm more likely to do now. I have a question, then I don't know, this is for everyone, David now, too. And if it leads us down to that, then we can have Jake, the can and blast it out.
But this is kind of piggybacking on what you just said. So two questions. One is what accounts for the popularity of this has been an incredibly popular sense. I mean, I feel like a movie or a play version has come out every dozen or so years since it came out, right?
But related to that, is it connected to it being somehow terrifying or fear inspiring? And I guess, so first question, why is it popular? Same question. I guess the same question I'm more interested in is, do you see this inspiring fear?
Is this somehow, what's terrifying about this? Because I suspect that that's part of its popularity. I don't know. I think that's the answer to your question is, you know, we read this or even have a watch that's not that scary, right?
It's not scary, right? It's, you know, it's not scary. Right. But by all accounts, especially the movie and the book, you know, we're, we're scary.
To the initial readers and viewers. And then I think what happens is you see the same kind of progression between when the book comes out in 1818, so I was going to mention the original 18 edition. Now there's an edition of the notebooks that you can get from 1816 and 1817. So that's almost the pre edition, right?
But then the first edition 1818, it's reprinted 1823 because of the success of the play presumption. And then and pretty similar to the first version, although now in 52 volumes, instead of three. And then finally, there's an 1831 edition where Mary Shelley has done that. I can make kind of a lot of, not big changes, but she's not a lot of things, made a few plot point changes and kind of spiffed up the language and so on.
So but regarding that question of, you know, whether it's scary or not, I think what happens is in these waves, it starts off scary. And then by 1840 something is farce. It's the generating of farce. And you can see that too in the 20th century, right, where these universal monstromaries come out in the early 1830s and they scare people.
And then by the end of the 1930s, and then by the end of the 1940s, you got out in Costello, meat, frankins, right? And it's being played for last. So in a way, it's a kind of, you know, I think of it coming in some little harp on this evil, right? So you're taking something that really seems harmful and making it various ways harmless.
The question is, what is it that you're doing that with, right? And the kind of trope of the monster that is escaping the creator's grasp, you know, has been overlaid on every kind of scientific advance from the moment this book was written until now, right? I mean, you know, obviously cloning and genetics, but also, you know, Darwin and atomic things and anything you're meddling with the secrets of the universe, right? If that happens, it's a fauce, you know, it's, so I think a big part of it's not already just, you know, the mythic kind of character and the quality of that.
Yeah, very good. I also think on the point of the scaring is such a good question, because one of the things that I've recently been coming around to is there's something lost when you put the monster on stage or on the screen, specifically the mystery. You don't have any direct access yet, correct? Oh, just a small point in that.
I mean, I, you know, I read this recently and I think the Greeks are on to something right where they would pull the scary stuff off stage. Like it's more scary when you don't see it. And just the imagination of the thing is worse than then seeing like a presentation of the thing. I think that's absolutely right.
Yeah, right. So even so if you're Walton's sister, you're reading the letter that's a story told by Victor who sees him very rarely, he really doesn't see him that much. He's a handful of times for maybe a couple hours, you know, at the most. And it's this very little thing, whereas when you stick it on the stage and then you make it inarticulate, that's another thing, right?
Part of the mystery of this book to me is, wow, the monster really tells a good sob story. And you're kind of uncertain whether it's a monster, even you want to say, well, he's so well spoken. What if you actually saw it, that mystery of, is it actually monster? Is it just a sophism or is he actually confessing his heart's wish?
That uncertainty gives you a little bit of a chill, right? Not knowing what it would be like, what the face of this creature would tell you. So it seems like, yeah, making it a big dumb lumbering green thing that you see and then get scared at fire, right? And then it goes, ah, it's easy to turn that into farce, right?
Whereas the thing that you don't see that might kill you, that also betrays some secret about yourself, that you're just a corpse with a spark. That's a much more scary thing. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you know, this description is very, like you said, very, very little way of description of the monster, right?
And so all we get in one form where, you know, he creates the monster, very first description. You know, I selected his features as beautiful, beautiful, great God, is Yellum sin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath, which sounds like a bad thing. But I think it's supposed to be a good thing here because it's connected with his hair was of a luster's black and flowing, his teeth that have pearly whiteness. Those even be the three beautiful features.
And then, but these luxurions, it's only formed and more hard contrast with his watery eyes that seem also the same color as the Dunwhite sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips. And the eyes always like yellow, you know, the yellow eyes, the dim eyes and so on, that's always on precise. But it's really, you know, it's this contrast, right? This beautiful, this kind of travesty, you know, something beautiful that that really is so horrific seemingly.
And that's all you get. And from that moment on, like Victor's done, he's done with this monster. Like, that's it. You know, it's just that horrible contrast of the features that is it for him.
There's no way he's going to nurture air, you know, try to do any kind of paternalist, paternal, you know, duty to what this time. Yeah. On that line, I think that connects to the Rousseau bit pretty well, because after he animates it, he's horrifying once it moves, right? In a way, it's this wonderful thing that, you know, you think scientific discovery and power is going to be beautiful.
And, you know, it is a crazy monster. But then he kind of goes into reveries of these dreams, one of which is he goes to kiss Elizabeth, his cousin wife, his two be wife, and her lips turn dead and black like the monsters, right? And I think it's interesting because what you get there is, okay, you animate some flesh and you create life. That means that you are not a body with a soul, but you're like a body with a spark.
Because this monster, by the way, is made from like slaughterhouse parts. So it's got like cow parts. It's only making me so big, right? So you're basically, I think you get the sense of, how do you have love?
How do you have romance? How do you have these fundamental human relationships in an age where this is all that life is? And it seems like a very Rousseauian problem, right? You know that nature does not give you your purpose.
How are you supposed to find a purpose? How are you supposed to love the situation? No, I'm sorry, Justin. A quick question.
Based on what Alex was saying, does a victor ever turn toward the divine for answers to his creation? Does he ever say, well, because one response would be, well, this is just mixed up in the old Petri dish. And he can explain it that way? Or does he blame the heavens for the monster?
Or does he say, look, I've looked gods and things got out of hand. I could really use you right now. Does he, how does he deal with the creation? Or does it just, I have to run?
I don't recall him ever appealing to God. It's all very strangely material. I mean, it's, I mean, there's the mystery of life, but everything else, I mean, there's all this language that's, I mean, I think Alex is right here. The approach is that the monster is simply matter that he somehow reanimated, he's reput into motion.
And that's at least my impression. Right? Like he's, I mean, he speaks about material, he speaks about science, he speaks about natural science, it's chemistry, there's the mystery of life, he keeps the mystery. So maybe that's kind of stuff on him, but yeah, he doesn't, not at all.
But I never said something like, Oh, well, you know, I created this, this, you know, this goal and this monster, you know, but it lacks the divide. So it's not, you know, it's not really cast in those terms. And you know, the resource thing is interesting too, because you know, apparently, Mary Shelley wrote an encyclopedia entry on Rousseau, which was very critical of Rousse's the abandoned several children. And, and she's very critical of that.
And it seems like that's this like master motif that's running through all of this, right? It's the father, the parent, and some of that being not an accident that somehow maybe really is what Alex was saying, you know, you can't love your child in the same way, if it's just more neat or something, there's no soul or something, right? It's just another real body. And you know, this is, you know, her parents both advocated free love, right?
And, and practice that's, you know, and you know, that once she runs away with Shelley, William Babbner, father's angry, because Shelley has married and has, you know, is himself abandoned in a young child. So it seems like that's a big part of friends I was, you know, this something essential has been lost. And it's symbolized only, but essentially by this willingness of fathers who abandoned their children. I'm not even sure.
My own opinion, I read this with a student a couple years ago who was working on a thesis, an undergraduate thesis on this. And there were a few things that sort of, one of these we can transition to another thing you want to talk about. But one of my questions was whether or not the monster is even a human being, even, okay, good, right? He asked that question 1.0, and I was trying to look through and find the passage where he was going through it.
But I'm just, I'm not convinced that obviously it's fictional, but even within the fiction is, is he, is he reanimated human being or is he some other kind of human being, right? And part of that is right, he's, I mean, he's, he's not quite double, but he's almost double the average human size at the time, right? He's eight foot tall, and you figure most people probably what five, two, five, four, five, six, you know, five, six, like that, right? So at least one and two thirds.
But does he have this easy capable of generation? That's, I mean, Alex keeps hammering it that he wants, that Frank is not as scared at the monster's every popular year, but it's not clear for me that that's what the monster wants kids to see, that he wants a companion that he longs for friendship or something like this, in some strange way. Correct if I'm wrong, and I don't remember much mention of like, I think your first one has a different species, right? Right?
Right? That's something like, you know, I would like a one of my species or something, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, there is a different species.
Yeah, yeah, there is a sense of being different. And again, like, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, you know, Frank says, I learned how to put, I learned how to construct bodies out of, out of charnel house, you know, remains and slaughterhouse remains, but I can't reanimate the actual dead, I can't reanimate, like reanimate dead people. I don't know why that would be, you know, besides, you know, some, you know, sine, hand-weighted science thing. But it means that, right, in some sense, the monster has never actually been a human, right?
He's a positive parts put together by, you know, so that again removes it even further. Right, right. I think this is him at one point, right? A cursive creator, why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned away from me and discussed God and pity made man beautiful and alluring after his own image.
But my form is his ability type of yours, more horrid, even from the very resemblance. So he's even Satan had his companions, but not me, I'm solitary, longs. He's a distinct, so he's generous, like he's his own kind of being. Okay, I guess where you want to ask.
I was when I read this with a student two years ago, it had been years since I read it. And the first time I read it was for a class in college that almost turned me out entirely reading because it was one of these classes where the professor says, oh, well, interpretation is equal. But then gave me like a C minus on the paper. I was like, how was my interpretation?
Anyway, but so I just do that with him. And in any event, like, we get to the end of the book and I, you, in some of the correspondence between us that you mailed beforehand in this kind of stuff, I remember being deeply suspicious that the whole thing was made up. And I sort of was the end of the semester I was trying to advise in students, my students like, no, no, it's all not made up. But you sort of persuaded me and you made me see something that I had missed before.
I remember rushing through it, like I said, and I sort of thought, you know, the whole story seems made up by Victor. But then at the very end, I sort of said, well, you know, Walt and C is the monster, so I must be wrong. But it didn't occur to me because I was surprised I was referring to it. I should have stuck with my initial gut, right?
Like, it seems the whole thing seems made up and I didn't think about it not being made up by Victor, but being made up by the C captain. So tell the folks at home. Yeah, I kind of, but also Justin, if we grant just to explore Greg's thing, we talked about this before the show started. If the thing is an invention, how does that shift the interpretation?
What's gained by that? Great question. That's a big question. That's a big question.
Depends who's doing the inventing and then you really have to get into what's being kind of hinted at with the symbols and so on. Where are the show to do that on? Yep. So well, the first thing is, you know, I have the same experience, right?
Where you're reading Victor's account and it starts to become clear that something's a little miss, right? It's these same things that didn't really add up. He's, you know, he needs to curve all the more than the next morning after making the monster just random. He's also, he takes a knife, he keeps falling into these reveries, you know, where people don't know, he doesn't know what's real and what's not real and can explicitly figure it.
And then, you know, he keeps saying these things like, I'm the real murderer, but only before I, you know, start wondering, like maybe he's just nuts and, you know, a general hiding situation, right? You know, this is the dark side of one piece of personality that's coming out and then, you know, that can be read anywhere from the monster doesn't exist at all to, you know, the monster exists, but it's in many ways, embodying the dark side of trying to sign something. So anywhere within it, but my impulse is always to try to kind of push it, you know, as far as you can and say, okay, well, you know, can we make this monster not existing thing makes sense. And the real reason that he doesn't, as you said, right, is that, is that wall and sees the monster, right?
He's the monster in the first part of the frame, so like, on the dog sled going into the wastes and then at the end, he has a conversation with the monster. So the first one, I explained to myself, I was like, oh, I could have been an apparition and a big man, but then the last one was like, oh, crap, already saw him for real. And he does use the word apparition. In fact, that comes at a very interesting time, right?
Because if you go and look at when that was, they were trapped in the ice and we perceived a low carriage fixed on a sled and drawn by dogs, pass on toward the north, and this is half a mile of being much out of shape of a man, but apparently gigantic sasch or sat in a sled and guided the dogs. We've disappeared and excited our unqualified wonder. We were many hundred miles from land, but this apparition seemed to know that it was not as distant as we had supposed. Two hours after this occurrence, we heard the ground sea, which is great, great, great development.
We heard the ground sea. And before night, the ice broke and freed our ship. We however late to it's a morning and then the morning is when they run across Victor, okay? And then this is when all this crazy starts.
So it all kind of starts with this moment and then in the night after there's a very thick fog, about two o'clock and this clears away, right? And we see this apparition and we see this looks like a giant man. And of course, there's always stories at this time of marge's in the polar regions that in fact I think this very year 1818 when this was published, it was an exhibition getting Ross who turned back because he thought he saw mountains right. He had actually found the northwest passage.
He realized that because he got, he's like, now I know I was in mountain there and we can't get past that. And a lot of people on the boat subsequently were pissed. It was the opposite situation, like where he wanted to turn around and others wanted to press on. But yeah, so you have this kind of, you know, in the middle of the night, we're surrounded by ice, right?
And all of a sudden, the mist bleears, the ice breaks up and starts to get into that hot, right? Maybe that happened. Maybe this is him sitting there sucking the ice for the time it takes to narrate this entire thing because, you know, in the final letters at the end of the frame slowly, you have them still sucking the ice. There's no sense that they ever broke up.
And so, you know, either it broke up only little and then solidified again, or that was all just not true. And they've just been stuck in ice the whole time. And he's been talking about how he needs a friend. You've only got somebody to talk to and lo and behold, this perfect person shows up who, by the way, has kind of a very similar drive to the frontiers of exploration and knowledge as well as them.
So when you kind of, you know, start putting those things together and asking about Walden's motor, he says he'd been public early on his life. And I also, why would he mention that exactly? The field, yeah, the field pallet. Yeah.
And Frankenstein was criticized. The book was criticized for the characters all speaking in the same way, like all having a similar style, which is exactly what a bad push would do. Now, now, let me add to what you just let me throw out a couple of things. One, Walden could make it all up, right?
So there's that layer. Victor could make it up and then maybe Walden sees a apparition or something like that, right? There's that layer. Victor seems to many times be lying to himself about what's actually going on.
Then you get the monster's sob story, right, which he goes into right after talking about how he if you can just get somebody who's normally looks, I can convince them of anything, right? I'll be a sweet, you know, speaker. Now, what's the story? He runs into a German family in the woods in France or something like that, right?
And so it's like, oh, how lucky you found a German family there? They're in French family in the woods. Oh, is it a French family? I think it was French family.
Okay, yeah. So that's how we speak French. Their names are all allegorical, right? It's Agatha, Safie, and who's the last one?
Felix. Felix, yeah. So happiness, goodness, and wisdom, right? In addition to that, he accidentally murders Frank and Victor's brother and it so happens to plant the bit of jewelry.
And I mean, so either there's a lot of chance going on here or there's a really deliberate confusion or like lie, a elaborate story being told by the monster to get Frank and so he's maybe was trying to get revenge and then he realized, okay, no, the real way to get to revenge is to get a mate or something like that. But the whole thing, there's so many layers at which the discourse like threatens to just fall apart under like deception or idleness or, you know, curiosity and it's all this fictive thing that there's this there's this strange, you're kind of unmoored from reality, not just from the reality of the monster, but even from the reality of what actually is happening here, whether this is all Walt's dream or the monster's real and he's doing his thing. There's just this sort of, you're just really left like wondering what the hell is actually happening. Yeah, I mean, you don't want to just say, well, this is just, you know, it's not a great book, because you don't want to just be an avocirative or reason.
I think, you know, your answer is, yeah, I mean, it's Walden trying or somebody, Victor or Walt, somebody's trying to make these things up and they don't always work, right? Like, you know, how is it that you can make all these discoveries, make, you know, have the final enlightenment and forget everything that led up to it doesn't make any sense or, you know, you have the monster learning French, right, from this family, presumably, one is your English, right? Is it just pick up paradise, lost, and they can read it, like, you know, like, is, is, are all these conversations with Victor in French and because just translating them for Walton? Like, it's, all this stuff, you know, none of it is explicitly mentioned at all, but when you kind of push at it a little, the tissue starts to kind of fall apart pretty easily.
And Walden says early on that he learned a lot of a few different languages, though he wasn't that good at them. Right. So if it's invented, Alex, we'll read you were saying before the show. So one thing I, this is where I would, I still think you get the Rousseau element out of this.
So one thing I'll emphasize that Justin mentioned, right, is that Walden has kind of two problems. His sister, who he wants to have a close relationship, we never hear that there's much of a return in the letters, right, or the same sentimentality. They're not included. It's a one-sided, a facility exchange from our perspective.
On top of that, he wants to have a friend. Now, Victor comes along, if we say that he's his poetic concoction, what does he have? He has a great relationship with his sister, cousin, wife, Elizabeth, and he also has a deep friendship with Henry Clairvall, Henry Clairvall, right? So there's that as well.
Now, one persistent theme of the book, which would be why he would go for this allegory is that when human beings try to plan out their happiness and try to create a vision of what it would look like to sort of rise above their poor selves, right, whether it's Victor discovering life, Walden going through the North Pole with a monster trying to get it made every time they do it, at least to their unhappiness. And it might be that in a post-Maconian world, we have to invent our happiness. And it looks like the necessary consequence of that is making monsters. And Walden might have been stuck in the ice thinking about how his stupid ambition got stuck in some dumb ice and he's thinking, I'm a, I'm a, like, what kind of monstrosity is, is man that this is what they need to do, right, to achieve some kind of greatness, whereas in a pre-Baconian, you know, Aristotelian world, happiness would be far more concrete and rooted in particulars, right, in particular kinds of deans and qualities rather than these sort of grand ambitions.
So that would be one way of the, it would be almost like Walton Sol's searching and realizing that he's, you know, he's playing with fire or spark, so speaking, making a monster. All right, folks, today's episode is also brought to you by ISI. Now, you probably listened to the new thing, because you love thinking deeply about important texts, authors, and ideas. Perhaps you're a professor at a university.
If so, I think you need to check out the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or ISI David, what is the ISI? Thanks for asking me, Alex. ISI is built to provide ideas and community for thoughtful, conservative faculty like our listeners. ISI faculty members are given free print subscription to ISI's quarterly journal, the excellent modern age, opportunities to attend exclusive faculty only weekend seminars and opportunities to lecture and teach at ISI events.
That's not even to mention that faculty members are routinely featured on ISI's podcasts, which is called conservative conversations with ISI in another podcast called Counter University Classroom. If you are a conservative college professor head on over to the ISI today, that's ISI.org slash new thinkery sign up and become a member today. And now, back to the show. Well, what was wrong, Greg?
I just didn't like his little joke about fire, but the interesting, I mean, I don't know if this is, I'm not prepared to speak and tell something about this, but like the time Greg tried to have Amherst relations with the fondue in like the hard way, but I'm not to the cheese. I guess one of the interesting parts here is if Walton is inventing all of this, we seem to be attributing some sort of intelligence to it, right? Like, I wonder if he's not going crazy. And he's sort of doing all this, like he's stuck in the ice, like you said, and he's, I mean, the whole store, this is not to sound super ridiculous, but this story is his monster.
Like, he's, he's creating this thing that's kind of, yeah, I mean, like, he's, I mean, like, it's sad. He doesn't have any body. So he's inventing people. He doesn't have any relation to the sisters.
Like, something does. It just sounds. I mean, he doesn't have a strap right? He doesn't have his dream.
So he's a poetic kind of replacement pleasure, right? For the reality of, you know, the expedition that he wants to go on. Wait, Justin, does that mean that within the dream, they're interesting things and even profound things that we can pull out of the dream, but the superstructure itself is, it doesn't amount to much more than inventions of the lunatic? Well, I mean, I don't know.
I wonder. I mean, that's, you know, when you have, I mean, just, you know, I think if we go to Alice's point regarding the first Victorian, you know, science and the post-oponation kind of perspective, what do you want? Why bother? Right?
Why is it that you're trying to give yourself, right? But, you know, Victor Frankenstein ends by saying, I myself have been blasted in these hopes yet, in these hopes, yet another may succeed, right? So there's still, I mean, at the end of this book, there's a sense of this is worth doing somehow. Like, there's, you know, a kind of, sort of, romanticism or, you know, enlightenment or, you know, what exactly, what they're, what they're gesturing out there.
But it seems like a kind of heroic ideal that's not totally, you know, jettison or petite, or anything you can say, maybe she's maybe she's self-attending at that point. But I don't know. I'm intrigued by, you know, knowing what we know that Shelley was steeped in Greek things, of course, poetry being related to making and doing. I do wonder what I've said, this novel or whatever one to call it, this book is, I mean, is itself showing that, I mean, is, is poetry and is this scientific, is science becoming poetry?
Is that kind of what's being said? They're both like these really, what intentional acts are trying to make, if that makes sense? I don't know. I mean, so then some of the distinctions that most of us are accustomed to making this interesting science and poetry, since breaking down a certain way to, yeah, all science is productive, right?
Right. Right. Right. Right.
Right. Right. Right. If you're contemplating there's a sort of given sort of, you know, unity to nature or kind of a natural integrity that you contemplate.
But if, like Bacon says, you break it down to the most subtle parts in your capable of magic, then the forms, like the forms that you see in nature can be superimposed or super induced, you can make a new nature, right? You know, and the monster would be one thing, but I think, you know, designer babies, like, you do you imagine one day, like 3D printing, like DNA, you design on your computer, sticking in every area, and you create some monster? I mean, that's what this would be, right? You know, sort of more contemporary jargon.
Yeah, and I think that would account for as well. So, I mean, it's, you know, it's a question of being able to create a new life is much, much more immediate than pressing. It's one thing that was doing the other thing, you know, they can see that problem rising. Yeah.
And what such creatures do human? I think that's a great, yeah. Yeah. Remember this experiment, Greg did where he tried to get a dog and made so he can make a seal.
And I was like, I'll think of how it works, Greg. I don't know if you know, I'm wondering, can you talk about, you know, a lot of the things, political philosophy and so on, there's a sense of, you know, an actual order, right? And even if there's no, you know, set of recipes that can lead you always to the best outcome, there's a quarter of ends, a natural order of ends or something. And, you know, the question is just, you know, we talk about a lot about human nature, the nature of the soul.
And it just seems so easy at this point to imagine that changing so radically, the circulation of DNA and so on. You know, how does that, what's left in terms of a nature? Maybe there is something left, maybe, but I don't know, maybe not to great. That's a great question.
Yeah. That might be a good, good point to that. Yeah. This is great.
This is a really, yeah. Thank you, Justin. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think I'm sure I think you asked. What do you guys think about asking Justin some questions and winding around questions? Yeah, I like to have him on again for Nietzsche.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Or anything you want, Justin, but yeah, there's more on my real house. So cool. This is like, this is like, lighting around for everybody, including, you're going to go with guests first.
I would say a favorite scary movie, Justin. Shining. Shining. Ooh, cause I'm going to have to have a good one.
Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Alex. Let me see.
Come back to me. David Barr. There's this one where I think, like some David Lynch thing, probably. Okay.
I don't know. I feel like the Shining is a great answer. That is a great answer. He just, I just, someone really scared me.
Like really, maybe another, you know, you got Alex? No, no, no. There's one. That's a book, that was it.
Okay. Fair enough. What's the best Halloween costume you ever had? Yeah, that's right.
Halloween. I have a Halloween costume. I once went as a robot as a kid and my mom made my costume and I was very self-conscious about it. You know, and then, and I won an award.
I don't know if it was everybody who gets an award, but I remember because I was like, sobbing at a self-consciousness like happy robot costume. But then I was, you know, I was going up and receiving an award and I felt better about it. So now I realize that, you know, he says, I'll make costumes. I really, you know, yeah.
Speaking of costumes. What's the best costume you ever had? In high school, out of party, I was Jean Simmons from Kiss. Very interesting.
David Barr. All right. Two quick ones. I graduated college in 2006.
There was an oil spill, I think in 2005. So I dressed up in all black and I bought these little secretures and I pinned them all over my body. That was the oil spill. And then I think around the same time I jumped in a Ramsey's merger.
That was way earlier. It was like 90. Yeah. Yeah.
But people were still talking about it. It popped up in the news. It's like, I worked our classes. So I was the killer.
I'm so glad I asked that question. I didn't have one out to. You do the answer either question. Yeah.
Greg, what were you scariest movie was legally blonde. And I was scary. I mean, I don't know. Attractive women, scarrow.
That's right. I had some good ones as a kid. My mom made a lot of my costumes. So did mine.
Yeah. I was that actress Reese. She was her husband. Did she really?
Yeah. Was it me? No, it was with a knife. What's her name?
Yeah. All right. Justin, what's your favorite work of literature? Well, the changes a lot.
But most recently it's, well, I'll give you two. Okay. Daffes and Chloe by Longus, longest, longest, you know, Daffes and Chloe, which you've never read. No.
I'm just love stories. Wonderful. And more recently, I also have really, really loves Heron by Thomas Mention and Heron by Thomas Mention and Heron by Thomas Mention and Heron by Thomas Mention. Only mention could have written that.
Only what? Only Thomas Mention could have written that book. It's like Raymond Chandler, but Southern California, like the hippie, you know, 70s. Very cool.
All right. Uh, last, well, let's see, favorite philosopher. Me, she by knows over play. Well, he knows what's big.