 All right, welcome everyone. I thought I would start off in the middle of things here, with just a very bit of a small bit of reading. So today we're talking about Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And if you want to follow along on page 49, you may know that there is, of course, a lecture inside of Frankenstein, or a little excerpt. So since we're lecturing here, I wanted to give us a bit of an idea about what it is that Mary Shelley and her, I suppose, compatriots in her own particular time frame, would think about what it is that lectures do, what an academic education might be all about. And we have to decide, too, how it is that we're supposed to receive this kind of information and react to it. Much of this text is about certain kinds of reaction and making things play out in the world, making texts play out in the world. So here's a lecture from Professor Waldman at the University of Ingolstadt. The ancient teachers of this science said he promised him possibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little. They know that metals cannot be transmuted, but the elixir of life is a chimera. We're talking about alchemy here. Remember that Victor Frankenstein had been reading alchemical texts early on. And his other professor, the grumpy ugly one, Professor Krempa, didn't like that. So this is Professor Waldman, anyway. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places. I'm hearing certain kind of erotic sexual overtones here. They ascend into the heavens. They have discovered how the blood circulates and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers. They can command the thunders of heaven. I'm hearing Spiderman there, right? With great power. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers. They can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. So that's what I should just maybe leave it there. There's the lecture that he's getting at the university. Such were the professor's words, he says. Rather, let me say such the words of the fate announced to destroy me. Wait a minute. I thought this was a good lecture. So now it is, you go to these lectures, and they're going to destroy you, apparently. I hope that's not what arts one does. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy. One by one, the various keys were touched, which formed the mechanism of my being. Chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So this is what arts one does to you too. You come in and hear the lecture, and you say, ah, you grapple with an enemy in your brain, and then you, ah, you have one purpose, right? You're supposed to be groaning like that, I think. I'm not sure. But notice, the word I wanted to pick out here was palpable. He says a palpable enemy. This is Victor's, and remember, this is an embedded account, too. This is Victor recasting a lecture that he took some years earlier for Robert Walton on board a ship, and then Walton, of course, is communicating this by a letter to his sister, who has somehow given it to the author of the text, who has then given it to you. So we're actually quite a far removed from that lecture. But nonetheless, there's something about palpability. Does anyone know what the palpable means? A palpable enemy. Palpable. I picked up on this word. So we're at quite a remove. You're made to feel like you're at a bit of a remove from me. What is it you do, yeah? Yeah, even more than sense, you can touch it, right? So what it is, is he feels as if whatever this lecture has done to him, it makes corporeal, embodied, physical contact with him. So sensation is not wrong. But in a certain sense, it's kind of a material or bodily sensation. What is it, of course, that Victor's gonna do, too? Soon. The next sentence, he's conceived of a project, right? So the alchemical ideas, the ideas of modern science, he's gonna put them together. And he's gonna do what? You all know this, what does he do? It's really bad. He makes somebody, a kind of humanoid guy who is eight feet tall, yellow skin, black lips, messy hair, right? And builds this human being. He becomes kind of God-like himself. It's a body, though, right? So palpable is a really significant word here. Inasmuch as this book is trying to make you make contact, in a way, with a certain kind of corporeality, a certain feeling of embodied presence, and a monstrous embodied presence, a palpable enemy, right? It's trying to make you feel an antagonism. So, too, maybe this lecture ought to do that. I ought to make an enemy out of this book for you. Maybe? Or maybe you can feel some kind of palpable, embodied truth. That's what she wants here, anyway. Is she being Mary Shelley? That's what she wants us to do. There are other hints of this throughout. Just, if you skip back a little bit on page 41, this is Victor reading. He says, here were the books, and here were the men. This is the bottom of 41, which is just chapter two of the first volume. Here were the books, and here were the men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they had avert, and I became their disciple. What is it that books do to you? A little bit above that, I've described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. That's three times we've had the word penetrate in the last five minutes. So, something he's going to do is to get into that material, physical, probably embodied space. He wants to get into the human body and to do it by reading books. To do it by reading books. Just one more little hint here. I'm going to come back to the more general parts of the lecture in a second and we'll sort of set things in motion. But I wanted to get us reading a little bit to start with. How is it that the creature, the creature starts to acquire a sense of himself or of his place? If you look on page 123, 123. So, he's learned by sitting beside that cabin, beside the Delacy's cabin, in a kind of a hovel, a lean to, sort of hiding there, he's learned to speak, right? He says, of what a strange nature, this is the creature in the middle of 123, of what a strange nature is knowledge. It clings to the mind and when it has once seized it like a lichen on the rock, I wish sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling. But I learned that there was about one means to overcome the sensation of pain and that was death, a state which I feared yet did not understand. I admired and so on he goes on. What is it that he's hearing through language? Notice how it's very much about feeling, about sensation. It's extremely embodied and further than that, further than that, it's not just kind of generally hearing people talk although that's what he's been doing but as he becomes more sophisticated, this is chapter seven of volume two or page 130 or so in your edition. He says, one night during my custom visit to the neighboring wood where I collected my own food and brought home firing for my protector so he's always putting wood. He's being friendly. The friend is a very important word in this text. He's always being friendly to his protectors as he calls them. I found on the ground a leather and portmanteau, a sort of a briefcase containing several articles of dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately, the books were written in the language, the elements of which I'd acquired at the cottage. So he's been hanging out by the cottage. He can read it now sort of. They consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives and the Sorrows of Verter by Goethe. So sort of a romantic text. Actually staged a version of this here last term. So you could have seen it on stage, the Sorrows of Verter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight. Notice how it's all about feeling here? I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupation. So they go away for the day he's reading. I can hardly describe to you, and this is also a significant phrase in this book. He can't describe it though he's actually doing it. I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. What does it that books do then? They impact on you somehow. They give you feeling. Again, this is think about this lecture with Frankenstein at the University of Ingolstadt that's imagined here, or maybe even this one. We're getting you to read books. This is kind of a great books course. You've got them here in front of you and they're supposed to penetrate into your mind, make you feel ecstatic for a few moments, and then really depress you according to this model. But somehow you're going to react to these directly. You're gonna respond to these. Now this idea of palpability then becomes really important. How is it that your body and these words on the page interact, intersect? How do they move into each other's space? How do you take words and ideas? How do you take knowledge into yourself through language? So one more pass through the text and then we'll get to sort of the general overview of things. But if you look at page 19, so very early. This is Robert Walton in one of these letters. He's sending back to his sister. So we haven't even got to the story yet. We're outside, we're in a frame, a version of which I've depicted there for you in this graffito that's up on the screen. He's writing to his sister Margaret, Mrs. Saville, and he says, I shall commit, this is the middle of the page, middle of page 19, I shall commit my thoughts to paper. It is true. But that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. All right, so all those books that have been moving, Victor have been moving the monster, the creature, however you wanna call it, have been changing lives somehow. Here Walton says, I write stuff down, but it doesn't really work that well. It's not that great, it's not that great a medium. Nonetheless, that's of course what he's going to do. If you go right to the, skip right to the end of this sort of preface, these letters that come before us, this is page 32, he's, or maybe 31, what has he been doing? I'm trying as nearly as possible to record in his own words what he, that is Victor, who's been in the cabin of his, the captain's cabin at the ship, what he has related during the day. If I should be engaged, I will at least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure, but to me to know him and to hear, who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it some future, in some future day? So when you write something down then for Walton, it's a poor echo, right? A poor second rate transcript of what actually happened, of events. And in particular, he's sort of enamored of Victor in his cabin. He says, I've discovered potentially a true friend for myself, I, who was so alone, heading for the North Pole, unsure of myself and of what I would do out here on the icy wastes. A friend comes to me. So this is kind of close emotional bond. Apparently that at least Walton conceives of and he tries to get some of that on paper, to get Victor's own voice on the paper. Of course, you can't do that. These are still transcripts. So it doesn't really carry itself off for Walton, but these are nonetheless sort of echoes, bits and pieces through which he can sort of pass in his memory to recall what it was that he shared with Victor. Again, notice that there's a break then, a kind of a gap between experience and language, right? The two are sort of separated, except if we come to the very end there, at the end on page 32, the very last word of his letter, he's about to shift, change gears and move into Frankenstein's own voice. And what does he say? Thus. So as if he's launched you off into his text, right? He says, here we go, I can't do it, but thus. And when he says thus, what we are sort of positioned in what we could call a kind of textual present. What's fairly mediated and distant offers itself imaginary, in a kind of imaginary way, as if it is present, right? It's got an exclamation point there. That tells you important, that it's important, but he says thus, right? Here we go, you're gonna be reading now and it's going to be as if it's happening now, thus, boom. You'll see, I hope towards the end of this talk today, I'm gonna come back to some moments when this textual present, right? When the present tense of the book itself, the act of reading it, or perhaps kind of in your imagination listening to it, is foregrounded, right? It comes forward and you sort of feel something happening now. Those are moments when this distance between experiences that are being recounted in the text and the words printed on the page start to come closer together and perhaps even be assembled. They seem to happen at the same time. We reach what's called maybe a narrative present. Narrative just is a word for the kind of pattern of a story. So as you're unfolding that story, the story itself seems to be happening now, thus, right now, as I'm writing it. Okay, so this is kind of what we're sort of looking at today and I'm thinking about the idea of framing, of what might constitute a particular frame on which, or then through which, this kind of contact between the experience of a life lived and its transcription, its writing out, start to come closer and closer together. We put frames around things to try and contain, to shape, to hold together that relationship. So there you have it, that's what I'm aiming for. So here's Mary Shelley. We should have a little bit of, I think, biographical background. Certainly if what I've been saying carries any weight, the idea of the biographical is really important. If you kind of break that down, you break down those words a little bit. It's roots or, it's a little hard to see here. It's etymology, where it comes from. You have two, these are transliterated into Latin characters, but we have two Greek words, bios, which means sort of shaped or structured life, like biology, life, right? And graphé, which refers to language, particularly to, I think, the written words, where you have graphs, the graphical, graphic novels, all that kind of stuff. So something that's on the page. In the biographical, we're assembling the two. In a way, because it's a first person account, at least we imagine it to be this way, the fiction of Frankenstein, because it's I. Victor is recounting his own life, it's being transcribed by someone else, but he's recounting it. That assembly of life and writing is built into the form, right? It's as if this is an autobiographical piece, a confession or a journal that's happening here in front of us. So thinking about Mary Shelley's biography and the biographical circumstances of this novel are appropriate. You'll see as well that there's a connection, a direct connection between the way in which this novel is conceived and its subject matter. She sees a direct link and in fact, seems to think of this text as a kind of monster, her monstrous progeny, she'll say, it's like her child in a way, that she sends out into the world. So there's a real connection for her between the act of writing, the activity of writing, and the monster that you're encountering here in this text. So most of you will have encountered this before. We're gonna talk a little bit about that in a second. Have most of you heard of Frankenstein? Yeah, so I mean, this might be a little bit of a rehash for you, although I've heard of it too and I've gone over it many, many times. And I find that it doesn't get tired, so hopefully it won't be tired for you as well if this is your second or third time through the book or encountering it in another context. It should still in some ways be kind of fresh. And one of the reasons we tend to, we being whoever has to lecture on it, tend to think that this novel has a kind of freshness is because of the age of its author when it was composed. Mary Shelley, when she wrote this book in 1816. And you know, you should never leave your cell phone on in class. Monstrous. When she composed this, she was about 18 years old. And in the summer of 1816, and she had been having a very tumultuous affair. Her name is Mary Godwin. She is the daughter of William Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft to intellectual giants in many ways of the late 18th, early 19th century. And she had been having an affair with a poet who was a follower. He had kind of an aristocratic background. He was a follower of William Godwin's radical political kind of thinking. Her father's political thinking. His name's Percy Bish Shelley. And Percy Shelley is one of the most celebrated of a second generation of romantic poets in English. So we're gonna talk a little bit about romanticism in a second and that's part of this background. But you have to remember then that this novel is written by someone kind of in the flush of youth who is also engaged in, like I said, an affair, kind of a erotic affair with a poet in his time who's kind of a really sort of a radical, scary to some people, kind of a radical thinker who's transforming things and kicking against the conservative standards of his day and trying to be somehow progressive and different and new. So have a look at Percy Shelley's poetry in fact some of it is quoted in the novel. You can see a little bit of it there. There was some thought as well that Percy Shelley was engaged a little bit in the revising and rewriting of this text as it came from manuscript. Mary Shelley had lost a, she had been pregnant. Shelley, Percy Bish Shelley was married at the time to his first wife Harriet. When Harriet committed suicide in 1816 shortly after this novel had started to be put together, Mary then married Percy. So they have a really kind of a dire sort of, there are a lot of dire circumstances surrounding their affair and their life but she had also been pregnant the year before in 1815 and lost the child that lived two weeks and in some ways the kind of focus on birth and death Frankenstein the novel deals with, it's thought to be affected by her loss of a child. And so in fact all of her children with Percy save one who was also named Percy died in infancy. The William, one of the children I think made it to five years old but for most of her sort of familial things her work as a, her life as a mother was cut short by tragedy repeatedly over and over again. She lost most of her children. So this is sort of characterizing what's going on in this novel. Now she's also 18 years old when she's writing it. So she's already lost a child by 18. So I was very young and there's a kind of youthful energy in this but a sort of a dark kind of youthful energy I guess. Now one of the things that you can notice in the passages I was starting to quote for you. If you skip ahead in fact, so we're at the end of the letter section at the beginning of the text just before we get to the first chapter before we enter into Victor's voice you learn that Walton as I just read for you is transcribing. He's writing down Victor's words and trying to make notes on his voice in a way trying to get his voice on paper. If you skip ahead to the end, page 215. So near the end. We're back in our letters and that's the wrong page reference. Well, I've got the wrong page. We will, I'll find it in a second. Oh sorry, 213, that was it. It's messy writing. Frankenstein's in the middle of the page discovered that I made notes concerning his history. He asked to see them. So he'd been transcribing everything this chunk of 200 pages that Victor had been saying and then he's caught out. He asked to see them and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places. So in a way just as Percy is gonna play a little bit with Mary's manuscript, so too is Victor correcting Robert Walton's transcription. But principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his enemy. So notice what he wanted in other words to sound like, what the guy here transcribing wants it to be like. It's as if it is happening now. Give life and spirit, give energy to my words. It's as if the words themselves can somehow again embody that particular lived experience. Now you'll notice here, this is actually Mary Shelley's handwriting and this is a manuscript page from the manuscript of the book. It's interesting to see, you can see her handwriting, but in fact that's what manuscript means. Hand, it's manuscript writing. In a way this is a nice kind of framework for thinking about this idea of getting experience on the page. You want to feel the textures of, because that's what Victor calls it here too, where Walton does my manuscript, he's gonna correct manuscript. There's an idea somehow that the touch, the palpableness, the touch of that hand on the page is being communicated. Or what is it that the creature does? To poor William, let's say, the child. William, who was also the name of this child of the Shelleys who would eventually die. Turns out coincidentally. He strangles him. The hands are the agents, both of creation. That's what Victor is doing, building someone, and of death. So this idea of the manuscript is a coupling of these two ideas, particularly in this instance. And this double tendency, life and death, life in death, Colleridge is mentioned, that's a phrase from Samuel Taylor Colleridge, that's connected to this whole sense of trying to write down what it is that's happening. One more note too. So the summer of 1816 is when this is being composed in Mary Shelley's 18. And she and Percy have run away to the continent with our sister Claire, which is not her actual name, as the name she adopted. And they've gone to a villa to stay with Byron, who is another of the younger generation of romantic poets. And they have a kind of a ghost story contest. Byron, you may know as the phrase, he is mad bad and dangerous to know. So here's another guy who's sort of living life on the edge, very privileged, full of money, as was Percy Shelley, although they're constantly sort of scraping for funds, I think, but they come from money. And they lived this life of decadent privilege in many ways and tried to find experiences and so on. So one of the things they did, they don't have TV, they don't have radio, they don't have anything else, they told ghost stories one night. And it turns out, and this is described in Mary Shelley's own preface, you have this text in your copy of the novel. But they told ghost stories and it took her a while, but somehow out of that brief experience of trying to think of a story and maybe not being able to and trying to say, what can I talk about? What can I talk about? This novel, the germ, the beginning of this novel starts to arise. So it is about a kind of telling, an act of telling. Yep, Sarah. Yes. Yeah, and you'll see in fact in this text that there are a lot of dreams, that dreaming is really significant. Victor does a lot of fainting, you'll notice, but he also, especially around the creation of his monster, falls into this kind of semi-conscious state where he has a kind of waking dream and he sees, you may remember after he's created his creature, he sees visions, phantasms of the creature around him. It's as if he can't distinguish between the fantastical, the imaginary, the dream state and the living state. And this is exactly right. We'll come to this in a second, but Mary Shelley describes this sort of moment kind of beginning this novel as a kind of a dream. And it's a dream that she then awakes from but can still see in front of her. She pictures it all. And in fact, seeing is another key word here. The monster isn't given too many characteristics, but one of them is, he has, and in fact, Shelley in this passage describes it. He has watery speculative eyes, yellow eyes, right? So there's a lot of attention here paid to seeing and to the organs of seeing. Seeing in a couple senses, one in the physical sense or the physiological sense, I can see you here now using my actual eyes. And another kind of seeing that comes in a kind of, has a kind of metaphysical sense to it is to say the visionary, the visionary. So if we, I guess a good way to remember that would be to think about a word for poet in another language. This is the Latin word for poet. Poetry in its etymology, right? Where it comes from is, has a Greek root, right? So poetas, I guess in Greek is, in ancient Greek, is a maker, someone who makes things. In Latin, the word for poet, one of them is wates, V-A-T-E-S, wates, which means not maker, but seer or visionary. So it's a different conception of what the poetic or what the artistic can do. You see other realities. And in fact, this is, this is an image of a sculpture that was made to memorialize both Mary and Percy Shelley. I don't think they kind of looked like this or dressed like this, exactly. This isn't what it looked like at Byron's Villa when they were composing Frankenstein. But you do have a kind of overblown, sort of backward looking, this looks like a kind of a Greco-Roman statuary in some ways. In hyperbolic, that is to say, inflated, notion of feeling and experience. You notice how passionately the body of this, I suppose this is supposed to be Percy Shelley, is sort of sprawled back along the stone here and so on. So he's in a state of, he's probably dead, but in a state of impassioned feeling at least, right? It's a kind of peculiar monument in that way. But the exaggeratedness of it is really key here. So this kind of dream state, this visionary state, is often echoed in the works of art, and in fact, inside this text as well, that surround their artistic practices, how it is that they do things, right? They want to see into other realities or the word was again for Victor, he wants to penetrate into another space. He wants to be a visionary, a scientific visionary, and also a metaphysician engaged in what he calls natural philosophy. So this is his word for science, but it's not science in the sense that you might do over here in some of these other buildings. It's science in the sense of seeing to the core of existence itself. He's able, after all, to create life. All right, so I got a little bit of definition again of this kind of background, so we know what we're looking for. Romanticism is a fairly broad word and a little difficult to define, right? Because it's used differently by different people. You'll notice that Walton himself is self-critical because he thinks that he might be romantic, right? This book is written by someone who's in the throes of late-generation romanticism, young romanticism. So she's a part of it. Mary Shelley participates in this movement in a very direct way, but the book is also highly critical of romantic states of feeling, romantic idealism, and these kinds of things. So you've got a kind of double-sidedness that it's expressing throughout. Again, I mentioned a double-sidedness to you before. So we have to define, I think, what we might mean by romanticism, as I said, it was a lot of stuff, gets lumped under that label. So we're looking at a kind of literary period that at least in the English sense comes up to about the early reign of Queen Victoria. So the 1830s or so in Europe, in Western Europe, a lot of romantic texts produce all the way through to the mid-19th century. So it's really hard to draw a line here exactly, but we're talking first half of the 19th century. 1789, did anyone know why? Again, this is arbitrary, but why I might pick that date from people who have just come from a lecture last week on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This might be helpful. French Revolution, at least at the beginning of the French Revolution is 1789. And this is a key moment for a number of European romantics when the world seemed ripe for transformation and change. It goes bad in France pretty quickly, but nonetheless, that moment of change is really important. We might date it back to 1776 in a way, although the American Revolution takes a slightly different turn and seems to embody enlightenment kinds of principles. We heard a little bit last week about the enlightenment and so on. The romantic period, romantic thought, it's thought to be a kind of reaction to enlightenment classicism. So if anyone talks about classical music, for example, they'll often go dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, right, say classical music. In fact, that's wrong in a kind of strict sense. Beethoven is a romantic composer or maybe in a transitional space between classicism and romanticism. Beethoven's music is full of feeling. His ninth symphony, right? Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, you all know that, right? What's that called? Ode to Joy, right? It's feeling, passion, joy, extreme states of feeling that Beethoven is interested in in his music. So he's actually a romantic composer. So those of you who start to study music history will see how this distinction gets made. Classical composers tend to be very ordered, very structured. Think of, I don't know, Haydn or something like that, if you wanna. So this romanticism is reacting in music, in visual art, in literary arts, in dance and all kinds of things, to classical formalism. And there's a quotation there, The Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings. This comes from William Wordsworth, who's a first-generation English romantic, a little older than the Shelleys. This is from his preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. So this is from 1802, is when he wrote this, but this is a very famous and frequently quoted phrase, The Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings. He defines poetry in those terms. He doesn't think of it as having iambic pentameter or having a certain kind of form, a certain kind of genre or anything like that. He says poetry, he identifies poetry with spontaneous, powerful feeling. And again, look at how many times Walton and then Victor, I said, why is he fainting all the time? How often they are overcome with moments of intoxicating, powerful feeling, sensation. That's what it's all about for these people. Okay, so it's reactive. Inspiration is a keyword, also feeling or emotion. Inspiration is the sense that something comes to you from beyond. You'll see how, how is it, Sarah just mentioned this, how is it that Mary Shelly conceives of this text in a dream, and where does your dream come from? Are you in control of your dreams? Yeah, well, Freud, we're gonna read Freud in a few weeks. So there's this idea somehow that they come from a dark space within you or they come from beyond you. They're outside of your control. They're outside of your conscious mind, right? So they're inspiring in that way. So again, this connects to this whole romantic idea. That's why it would come from a dream. Sometimes these are artistic reactions to industrialization too. In the case of this novel, there's not so much industry in here as we have science and scientific rationalism. So that kind of the enlightenment thinking is sort of co-present with industrial progress and often scientific progress. Say the emergence of the science of chemistry, for example, which has a history. Chemistry doesn't exist exactly in, I don't know, the sort of enlightenment, pre-enlightenment times, but as industry starts to require chemical kinds of precision, right? That the science of chemistry sort of evolves alongside that. So now you have Victor studying at a university and he studies chemistry. Chemistry is one of his key topics, but it's connected to this kind of industrialization and to a kind of rational notion of progress and development and that kind of thing. There are also political revolutions going on that emphasized freedom and individuality. And alongside that you have, and this is a phrase from Percy Bisch Shelley. This is Mary Shelley's soon to be husband at the time of the composition of this text. He says in his own defense of poetry, he says, the poet is solitary and alienated. That is to say other or alone. And he tends to be gendered for Shelley, although that is to say Percy Shelley, although Mary reacts to this, is an unacknowledged legislator of mankind. Say humankind, if you wanna forgive Percy Shelley, this gender bias, but an unacknowledged legislator of humankind. There's no one sees him or her, the poet writing all alone in their garret, somewhere transcribing visions from beyond. Wordsworth would say you've come into this world trailing clouds of glory, so we try and write those down. We try and transcribe them. Think about Robert Walton trying to transcribe the visionary words of Victor Frankenstein, trying to get his voice onto that paper as closely as he can. That's what poets are engaged in, in this kind of context. But they're all alone and people don't understand them. No one can understand Victor, right? He's a madman. He's kind of insane. He's otherworldly. He's alchemical. He's from beyond somehow. He's touched things that he shouldn't be touching. So he is unacknowledged, but somehow what he does changes the world, right? It's like you're kind of a politician, a legislature. You deal with the laws of space and time. This sounds a bit like Doctor Who. You deal with the laws of the world, but no one knows it. That's what poetry does. Everyone thinks poetry is just this kind of weird stuff that no one can read and who buys it anyway. Well, for the Shelleys, it's the key to everything, right? Because you're touching on these kinds of eternal truths. So you're unacknowledged and you're alienated, but you are nonetheless doing important, wonderful things. If you skip back to Walton from where we were, this is, yeah, how he starts to describe himself. He says, it is true, this is the top of page 20, that I have thought more, that my daydreams, again, think of this idea of dreaming, so he's a daydreamer. And he's also, as an explorer, a kind of dreamer. It's a version of Christopher Columbus in some ways, right? My daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want, as the painters call it, keeping. And I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind. I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean. He's got people around him who're sailing on his ship. He's all alone on his ship, dreaming his thoughts headed towards the magnetic North Pole, he thinks, or maybe to find the Northwest Passage or who knows what he's doing. He's going North and he's going to have to experience it all by himself, because nobody understands him. If you look at the bottom of 21, I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It's almost about to happen. He's getting really intensely excited. It is impossible to communicate to you. Notice how this is gonna become another phrase, we've heard it a couple times already, that runs throughout this book. I can't say it, even though they go on immediately to say it. They will start in any kind of description by saying this is indescribable. It is beyond words, words won't do it, right? It's possible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful. There's that dividedness as well, with which I am preparing to depart. I'm going to unexplored regions to the land of mist and snow. There's a footnote there, but your editors have supplied as if I were the ancient mariner a little bit. She says, I've often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for the dangerous mysteries of the ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. What drives him to explore is its scientific curiosity? No, right? Is it just needing to know stuff? No, it's poetry, particularly Samuel Taylor Colleridge, makes him go north. There was something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious, painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labor. But besides this, there is a love for the marvelous. That was a key word also in Columbus, right? A belief in the marvelous, intertwined in all my projects which hurries me out of the common pathways of men. So he's not in with everybody else, he's all alone again. Not a common person, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore. So even as you're physically going there in a ship, it's your mind that's being transformed. Off we go. So there's Frankenstein now. This is the cover page of the first edition, just so you can see it. And one of the things I wanted to have you note is the fact that it's got an epigraph here. It's a very famous one. And this is, of course, from one of the texts that the creature reads and through which he learns to start to understand himself. So Frankenstein are the modern Prometheus is the title. And then did I request the maker from my clay to mold me man, Paradise Lost by John Milton. It's a text we haven't read in this course, but a key poem from roughly around the time of Hobbes, in fact, that's when, a little later, but that's when Paradise Lost is being composed. So we're, it's a poem from about 120 years before this text, 130, 40 years before this text is being written. But nonetheless for Shelley, it kind of sets the tone. It's one of her moments of sort of self-education. And it's also that for the monster. But the thing to really remember is that it's poetry that's driving this text, that poetic sensibility somehow. So we can see it there on the title page. Of course, we just quoted the ancient Mariner and there are other poems, including texts by her own husband that are quoted inside as well. All right. So I was saying, you've already done this, right? Boring, boring, boring, right? And it doesn't want you to be bored. But how many times can you hear about Frankenstein and Frankenstein's creature? In fact, even if you haven't read it for the course or hadn't read it before, you probably knew what the creature looked like, right? You got the neck bolts and the sloppy hair and the square head and all this kind of stuff, right? And the enormous size, kind of described in there. The black lips are described. So we get some of that. And we sort of have this in our mind. It has a kind of cultural pervasiveness, ubiquity. It's there for you, right? As a kind of sort of, well, in our old English term, since we dealt with Beowulf last day, sort of part of your cultural word horde, right? You got a horde in your head, kind of a set of things that you can draw on and Frankenstein is there even if you haven't read it. It has this kind of purchase on our imaginations. Again, imagination, a key word in this text as well. It gets to you. This image, although it's not copyrighted, there are parts of it that are, it's very interesting. If someone else sort of wants to produce an image of the creature, they have to pay, I think it's universal, whoever owns this, if they put bolts in the neck, right? You owe them, they've copyrighted the bolts. So, you know, and I was a little concerned about this. This has actually fallen out into the public domain this particular image. But this idea of pervasiveness, of course, that is a public domain, isn't it, right? Everybody kind of owns this image. At the same time as it turns out, you can't quite. There are corporations that have a stake in this. Still, I thought I should draw my own. So, that's what I, I think I got the hair wrong. What happens when you look at a monster like this? This monster in particular, what happens? He is described, isn't he? Like I know, yeah, so this is chapter, where are we here? I'm skipping around a little bit. This is on chapter five in volume one, page 58. This is when we get details. How does Walton see him? You can answer. At the beginning, we get a glimpse, don't we? How does Walton see him? Yeah. Yeah, that's all we get. Why do we only get large guy or thing? Because? Yeah, he's too far away. How are they seeing him? I think visionary seeing here, there's a visual apparatus. You're on a ship, how do you imagine you're seeing this guy? He's half a mile off? Yeah, that's right. We're going like this, like pirates or something like this. Or think of Columbus, right? We're always seeing creatures floating in the waves. So here's a Columbus moment, right? When he's about to lie to his crew, maybe, if he's Columbus, but he's looking out there and he says, aha! And then he says, I am alone on the sea with my ship. And there's a huge dude out there with a carriage sitting on a sled pulled by dogs going across ice. What? He's kind of surprised. And then, of course, shortly after, Victor floats up as the ice gives way the next day, right? But all we have is gigantic size. All right, and notice that he's distant as well. Think about the ideas of proximity and distance, of being close to this image or not, right? So on, this is also a manuscript, by the way. That's kind of why I wanted to do this. It's hand drawn. Beautiful, says Victor. Great, God! No, his yellow skin, I didn't get the color on here. His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. Whose work was that, by the way? Victor's, come on, man. His hair was a lustrous black and flowing. So I kind of give him a brush cut there. His teeth of pearly whiteness, yep. But these luxuriances, that's a plus, right? Beautiful luxuriances, only formed a more horrid contrast with what? What's the worst part of this guy? His watery eyes. I think he's looking at me. That seemed almost of the same color as the done white sockets in which they were set. Yeah, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips. Yep, got it. So pretty close, except for the hair here and maybe the color, it's a black and white drawing. So we get some description here of this guy. What does, how does Walton describe him? Or maybe even on the next page. Victor's just described him to you and what's he gonna say? Middle of 59. This is the, in fact, dream scene that is inside the book. So we'll come back to this in a moment or two. But below that, oh, you see the paragraph beginning, oh. Usually when a romantic writer says, oh, right? This is a moment of, what does oh mean? Yeah, I just about gave it away when I was thinking of it. What is that? Oh, if I came in and lectured, I said, Mary Shelley, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Like what does oh mean? Yeah, isn't it, right? It means zero, right? I'm kind of investing it with tone there, but of course on the page, remember when you hear Victor's voice, you wanna hear it, you can't hear it, it's just like a circle. With an exclamation point to say it's a really intense one, but it's actually, there's no word here, right? This is like a placeholder in some ways. Romantic poetry, look at Percy Shelley's poetry if you want to, look it up on the internet, excellent. Lots of ohs, right, lots of intense. I fall upon the thorns of life, says Shelley. I bleed, right? He's always bleeding into his poems, always full of intense feeling, and lots of times he's saying oh, right, whatever it is. So oh, this is like what, right? Oh, no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. Okay, wait a minute. So he just described him, right? He's looking at him, this is, he's lying in bed and the monster's leaning over, so he's looking at you. This guy is looking at you, and what do you do? You describe him? You say I recognize that guy? No, you say oh, right? It is insupportable and nondescribable, even though we just got a bit of a description, right? You cannot look at him. What happens when Walton looks at him? We finally get the creature, right, present to Walton. So he kind of jumps out of Victor's story and into that cabin, right? We saw him at a distance, so he was far away. He's coming back, eight feet tall. Walton looks at him, and what does he do? Can you look at the end? It's somewhere around 220 or something, if you want to. If not, did you get to the end? This is a spoiler, if you didn't. It's a really important part of the story. The creature's there, he's leaned over the corpse. Yeah, Victor does. The corpse of Victor, or something. He's actually very articulate. The only guy who doesn't really say oh much is actually the creature, right? He'll actually say I feel kind of full of sensibility and sensation. You can string words together, and Victor's going oh! So it's backwards. We tend to think of that Boris Karloff creature, for example. Some of you saw young Frankenstein, Frankenstein, earlier last term, right? What does the creature say there? Errr, right? So more oh. So the articulate idea is flipped around. But so Walton finally lays eyes on the creature. Eyes, seeing, vision, and he says, yeah, he says oh, he says, I can't describe this guy. That's what he gives you. He doesn't even give you the yellow thing and the white teeth and the black lips. He just says, I can't look at him. I cannot look at this guy. Anybody who looks at him, what happens in the DeLacy's cabin when the creature comes in finally reveals himself, right? He's been skulking around at night, gathering firewood. His friends are there. He finally makes himself known to the DeLacy's, to the father, who is what? Eyes, right? Can't see him. My friend, he says. He gets invited in. He crosses the threshold and then what happens? Story, spoiler again. The kids come back. Felix, Agatha, they come back and they do what the poor old creature? They go after him, right? Because you can't look at him without feeling revulsed. He's disgusting to look at. He's horrifying. He makes you sick. He is not describable. You cannot put what he looks like into words even though Victor kind of did it there. You can't get it on the page. And think about this idea of handwriting, of manuscript. I can't get the corporeal experience, the experience of seeing his body. You cannot put that into words even though I'm gonna keep trying, it looks like. All right, this has something to do with what a monster is, right? Now we know monsters are bad things. So this is just a whole chunk of stuff seized from a dictionary, I dunno, skipped down through. But one of the things to notice, we were talking about etymology here, about the roots of words. So it turns out, and we've mentioned this a little bit before, that the word monster and the word demonstrate have similar roots. They come from the same source. This is one way to think about what a monster is. A monster is a portent, an omen, a warning, or here's my favorite word for today, a sign, a sign. Monsters represent something, or they are representation. Representations and representation. They are demonstrations, right? Something is showing you something or pointing it out. This is another key word here. A sign that shows you, shows you, okay? So think about that. We tend to think of monsters as these yucky things, right? Things that are gonna kill you, bad people, and so on. That's monstrous. Here it's not loaded negatively exactly, maybe in the idea of a warning or a portent, but it has something to do with seeing, right? Seeing a sign, perceiving something, and it has to do with being shown, okay? With showing. So signs that show something to us. Those are monsters, all right? So what does Frankenstein, here he is again looking, this is a pulp cover of a kind of pulp version of this. Again, a popular version, right? The story circulates all over the place. Complete and unabridged, it says. What's he looking for? What's being shown to us? Let's make it go forward. Frankenstein, I'm gonna say, he's demonstrating to you what happens when you go too far. Back to the kind of framework, the outside with Robert Walton here, and Victor says to him, and he writes this all down, there's lots of exclamation points again, unhappy man. That's Victor talking to Robert. Robert's supposed to be the unhappy man. He's just said, I'm going north. That's why Victor gets on. He's gonna pursue the monster, right? They can't understand. Wouldn't you wanna go south, back home? Why do you wanna keep going north? So he gets on the ship, and then Walton confesses these romantic aspirations, need to go north, to discover, to pursue visions. Do you share my madness, he says? Are you insane? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draft? That is to say of the wine of metaphysics of the beyond. Hear me! Just like we had, remember we had Walton saying, thus, in a few pages here, thus, we go on. Victor says, hear me, listen to me. Let me reveal my tail, and you will dash the cup from your lips. See, they're going like this, pretui. Right, you will throw that away once you actually listen to what I have to say. Who's the monster here, then? What does Frankenstein do? What does his book do? That's being transcribed into manuscript or written out? It? It's a warning. So who's giving you the warning? Victor, right? So who's the monster? In that sense. Think about this a little bit. Victor's gonna dash the cup of aspiration, right? He's the anti Oprah Winfrey. He's gonna dash the cup of inspiration from your lips. You do not wanna progress, he says. You do not wanna go on. All right. There's a little bit more background here, but this is a nice way of starting to frame. Remember I said I was gonna talk about different techniques of framing? This is one way to frame this discussion. It's in terms of some Greek ideas that come to us through Aristotle. So these aren't in any particular space, but they come from two of his texts, particularly his text on rhetoric, but also the poetics, which is a study of tragedy. Oedipus Rex, in fact, or Oedipus the king is studied in Poetics. So Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric. Remember Aristotle is a student of Plato. So we've read the Republic. So you have an idea of where this is. There are two terms that kind of come out that can be juxtaposed. So mymesis, you see a lot of this in Plato. What does mymesis mean? Something is memetic, mymesis, imitation, right? So, or it can have a number of other senses, but when you mime something, you sort of act it out, right? Or it showing would be another translation for this. One way to remember this pairing, mymesis and the other term is diagesis. Diagesis, the diagedic, is show and tell. Show and tell. Memetic writing shows, diagedic kinds of texts tell you. They're about the act of telling. Maybe this doesn't, doesn't make sense yet. But Victor as a demonstrator, as sort of a monstrous figure, is trying to show you his meaning, right? He's showing, he's a portent. He's trying to, how does he show you stuff? Asks you there. How does he show you things? What's all that 200 pages he's showing you? What's he doing? As Walton, it's like, yes, Victor, yes, yes. One moment, go back, can you say that again? He's writing it down, right? Is he showing? How is he showing anything? He's telling, isn't he? Isn't he lying there in states of feverish exhaustion saying, listen, I was born in this time, Geneva Island, to school at Engleston, right? And he's getting him to write it all down. He's telling, not showing. These are his words, right? Not his actions that you have here. They represent actions, but it's telling. It's a story, it's a narrative. So showing and telling, he's trying to show you, but he's doing it by verbalizing it and by having that transcribed. How does telling, there's a good question for you, then become a kind of form of, we would say bearing witness or a testimony, right? This is a testimony for his last willing testament, in a way, the testimony of Victor Frankenstein. Witnessing testimonial, this kind of stuff, is another attempt to assemble the shown and the told. I talked a little bit earlier about sort of generally language and bodies in a way or experience and trying to put them together. Here is a way in testimony of trying to, in linguistic terms, assemble these two ideas, both to show and to tell or to show through telling at the same time. Speaking, in other words, becomes an act. It becomes an experience. And again, think back to that last word of Walton's before we jump into the narrative. Thus, there's a moment when the speaking is also a happening, call this a speech act, right? Speaking is happening at the same time. Thus, or maybe, oh, all right? You don't even know what I'm saying, something's happening there inside the speech. Okay. This is near the end. This is 221. This is the passage I mentioned to you that I hadn't, didn't quote directly, but so he enters, this is Walton. I entered the cabin where lay the remains of my ill-fated and admirable friend, a form which I cannot find the words to describe. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face. Of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness, I shut my eyes involuntarily, right? I can't look at him. It's so hideous. So if we're going to testify if Walton is going to bear witness to this, and this is a moment when he can see him with his own eyes, what does he do? I can see it with my own eyes. No, I can't, because I'm not going to look. Isn't this the kind of standard response of kids to monsters like, oh, I got to look like that, right? That's what Walton does. He comes in, he goes, whoa! Right, he can't look at him because it's too awful. It's too overwhelming. This is a moment when that witness wants to offer itself and can't. We've got a kind of a contradiction built into this kind of narrative, the way in which this is presenting itself. All right, why don't we leave it there, and we'll take a 10-minute break, and we'll come back to something a little more specific, how that narrative is itself constructed, and how it is that it tries to produce this kind of assemblage. All right, 10 minutes. We sort of set up the lecture in the last hour, framed it, and now we're going to reframe and talk about the text a little more specifically. So, there you go. The question I asked at the end of the first half before we went on the break was to ask about what kind of framework, what kind of framing does Frankenstein do? How is it put together? And how does this frame try to assemble these two directions? One that has to do with text and representation, it's two kinds of interest in the work. One that has to do with text and representation, of getting something into words and of making words work, and this is a wordcraft after all, this is a text, and on the other hand, a kind of interest that has to do with the corporeal and with experience, with lived embodied stuff in the world around you, being a part of it. This is a poem that's not quoted in the text, a sort of early romantic text. Blake, William Blake was a figure who was really a kind of outsider and his work wasn't even sort of well-known and certainly not recovered for a kind of public reading until a good 80 years after, 70 years after it was sort of appeared in print. One of the things that's characteristic of Blake's work, William Blake's work, is that he does it himself. So just as I drew you a little monster there, so I'm like Blake here, so too does Blake do, he doesn't use typeset, right? He writes onto metal plates all of his poems. So that's kind of a handwriting as printing that Blake undertakes there. So famous poem by Blake from the songs of experience. So just as we've been looking at sort of counterposed or opposing or antithetical tendencies, starting to look at them in Shelley's text, so too is Blake very interested in what he would call contraries, contrary states of mind. So there are songs of innocence and songs of experience. They kind of look like nursery rhymes when you first pass through them, they turn out to be much more complicated than you might think. This is one of the more famous and frequently quoted of the songs of experience that Tiger, Tiger, Tiger burning bright in the forest of the night. You can hear how it sounds like a nursery rhyme. But this is the couplet here. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? It's also one of the great bad rhymes of English literature. You wanna say symmetry, but a fearful symmetry. So there's some kind of antithetical form here, opposites, that is fearful. Notice how Victor's portent, his warning, his 200 page confession, is also intended to inspire fear and trepidation to make you stop rather than to make you go on and think, or to no essays, in other words, if you're Victor, you don't have to think anymore, you just cut it out. Here, notice how the word I wanted to pick up on though is, and this is one of its most famous usages in the English canon is frame. Frame thy fearful symmetry, it means two things here. One is contain. What God, what kind of person could contain? How can we contain the horrors of the tiger, the kind of monstrous animal power that a tiger or some other kind of beast might have? Try and keep up on these. The other is, it has to do with sort of the, not containing, but it's opposite with creating. What kind of God made a tiger? Is what that question could be. It could mean a couple of things, but it could be that. Who made this? And again, notice how Frankenstein is concerned both with containment, right? With keeping that creature in check somehow or killing it. And on the other hand, with making it, it's what it is that Victor produces. So this is one way to kind of think about this idea of framing. Here's how I wanna outline it and what I wanna do. One has to do with, so there are three things here. Three ways I wanna take framing and they really assemble along this kind of dyadic, antithetical, oppositional structure that I've been sort of hinting at all the way through. One is the semiotic. So semiotics is the study of signs. We left with the word sign at the end of the first half of the lecture we left off with thinking about the idea of representation and sign making. So when we're thinking about the semiotic or the process called semiosis, which is sign making, how is it that, well a semiotician wouldn't say meaning, but I think we can sort of blur a little bit here. Where is it that meaning comes from? How do you attach meaning to an event? How do you make, how do you read something that actually happened, right? How do you, another sense might be put a narrative, read a narrative or a story onto your life. Your life has no story, it has no pattern, it's merely unfolding in the present. But in order to give it pattern, in order to make meaning of my life, I've got this job, this happened to me, I do this, I talk to history, I go through my memories and I try to see patterns. I try to see repetitions, I try to see things I'm interested in, things I do, things that happen again and again, and I attach meaning to those repetitions, right? So I engage in a process of reading or of semiosis in a very broad sense of kind of attaching language and story to what it is that has happened in order to make sense of it. So in a very broad way as well, the right word for this, since we had this ancient Greek kind of vocabulary that I've been invoking, the right word for this is it mymesis or diagesis, showing and telling, but poesis, making, making, that's what that means. So a poem, poesis, the Shelley's very interested in poetry, right? A poem is a made thing in this sense. It's constructed. How is it that meaning is constructed? This is one sense of framing, how the frame constructs meaning. The second I wanna talk about is the corporeal or the embodied. Victor uses the word frame in the text a number of times in this sense. My human frame, my body, that's what he means. So when he's talking about a frame, an eight foot frame, he's talking about the skeletons and the muscle, skeletal, your bones, right? The parts of your skeleton, the muscles, the flesh, everything that goes together to assemble into a body. So we can talk about framing in that sense as well. What a mortal hand or eye, as Blake said, could frame night fearful symmetry. It could make a tiger body, right? That's one. And finally, and this is gonna seem a little close to the second, but it's sort of an extension of it and really assembles the two in some ways. I wanna think about what we could call in a very broad sense, materiality or ideas of history and action. So the frame in this sense is the world out there. The context that holds text. Paratext is a word for like title pages and things like that. Text that's attached to text that you're reading, like an introduction, a preface, all that kind of stuff, a letter. So the frame is kind of the space outside of your principal text. I've sketched it here. You can sort of see it, it's in the dark, but this is one very rough sketch. These are the page numbers from your text of the various frameworks that start to shape this particular text in a very literal way. So here's some paratext, that title page I flashed for you. And then we have the prefaces that the Shelleys wrote, both of them. We have kind of the ghostly figure of Mrs. Margaret Seville somewhere in there. We have Robert Walton writing those letters and transcribing. We have the words of Victor Frankenstein spoken on a ship apparently, who's quoting his creature that he chased into the mountains one day, right? Who's telling us stuff about, say, the DeLaces and others, right? So you've got all these kinds of forms of embedding. So if I want to know what Felix actually said, I've got to pass through seven filters in order to get to that. These words are highly shaped. Have you ever played the game Telephone? What happens in Telephone? I can say we have seven people playing Telephone. There's you, there's Mary Shelley, there's Mrs. Seville, there's Robert Walton, there's Victor Frankenstein, there's the creature. And we want to hear what Felix said one day in his cabin about his love for Safi, right? So I say, Felix said, I love you. And when we go through seven people, what happens to Felix said, I love you? That's right, it becomes freaky seven above you, something. He goes like, that doesn't mean anything. What's he talking about? But notice how words as they pass from filter to filter from consciousness to consciousness. Now of course this is a fiction, so Mary Shelley wrote whatever she wanted to. There's no real filter here. But the idea of this kind of transformation upon reception is brought to the foreground for us. We don't know and we can't quite trust exactly what happens here because it's been communicated at such a remove. It's not palpable, it's too far from us. Lots of people are passing this on. When does that frame get broken? We're talking a little bit in Shakespeare about the fourth wall a little bit, that's called breaking the frame sometimes. When does the frame get broken in here? Is there any proof that anything that's said is actually real? Why don't we suspend that question for a minute. Think about this. Is there any way to get to something that's not so untrustworthy? That's something we can rely on. I wanna go back just for a moment to Russo and the discourse that you had, the second discourse that you had to read last day. For Russo, and Russo would have been a powerful influence on Mary Shelley's thinking. She may not agree with him, but his terms and his thinking have really helped to set the tone for what it is that she wants to do here, right? So remember this is a kind of a critique in a way of kind of enlightenment scientism, the interest in scientific knowledge and where that can lead. Or a critique of progress. Just as Russo offers, what does he think of the present day in the second discourse? Civilization, you can put it in scare quotes like this, right? Clues and answer to that. That's a leading question. He doesn't like it, right? So the second discourse is a critique of the present and Shelley herself seems to have taken up this critique in another way and to rewrite it. About 60 years later, right? For Russo, and this is from the text, there's an immense divide that separates the pure state of nature and that's not Hobbes' state of nature, right? But Russo's the pure state of nature, a state of innocence from the need for language. That is to say, and if you look back, those nascent humans or the prehumans that he imagines existed that he kind of reconstructs through his writing and through his discourse are, do not speak. They have no need for words. They have no need for semiosis, one thing standing for another. No need for representation because the things are what they are. They are immediate, they're not mediated. That experience is undifferentiated, right? It's just happening. They live in a constant present tense, right? They simply experience. So if you live in the present, you don't need words. That's what Russo says. Language, when you start to talk, it's a mark that you are a sinner in his terms, that you have fallen, that there's a disconnect between you and real experience, that you don't have that kind of immediacy that he seems to crave. He imagines nascent humanity in a kind of precognitive state, say, of undifferentiated sensation. They don't have reason. They don't even, says Russo, they being these kind of prehumans. They don't think, right? They don't have imagination. They don't know things. They simply are and they do, right? They're doing and there's the page citation if you want to find it. Compare what happens to the creature who is also created out of a kind of a blankness, right? His mind is, we would say in 18th century terms, tabula rasa, tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which his experiences start to imprint themselves, start to write, right? He's two years old, as was pointed out to us in one of his Tweet series, two years old by the time he re-encounters his maker so that he's just a baby, although he's a very eloquent baby, but he's just a baby. So he starts off blank and tries to acquire his sort of experience. He says, and this is page 105, he is experiencing a strange multiplicity of sensations. He can't differentiate one thing from another, right? He doesn't have words for anything. It's just a blur, everything coming at him. He learns language, remember, when he is at the DeLacy's when he's started to learn to read and tries to affect some kind of relationship with them, tries to communicate with them. Communication, remember, is actually not necessary in Rousseau either. There's no such thing as communication in nascent times. The closest you get to, and again, these are imaginary, this is an imaginary time for Rousseau. He's making this up, he's conjecturing this, I think. Maybe Rob can correct me, but he's conjecturing this. All you get in terms of language is, man's first language, he says, most universal and energetic language is, what does it sound like? A cry of nature, inarticulate cries. Think of Walton saying, I can't describe this, or Frankenstein looks at his creature and says, oh, there's nothing there. Inarticulate cry, this kind of impassioned, animalistic almost sound. That doesn't quite have meaning, but is embodying this emotional state. It's vague, it doesn't have a meaning that, oh, it's a bad sign. In a sense, you want to make a kind of equation in a sign. You want to represent something clearly and say one thing stands for another. That doesn't work. All right. This is a bit of a joke, but remember, Rousseau's under trees and everybody's under trees. This is, there's a Magritte painting, again for copyright reasons, I'm not going to show it to you. It says, Soussinie pas un pipe, he's drawn a pipe, and he was written under it in a kind of very formal handwriting using his brush. This is not a pipe. So this says in French, this is not a tree, right? Or maybe I should, I don't know what I should draw. This is not a tree. Is it or isn't it? This is how signs work. There's a game that Rene Magritte and his painting plays and I'm trying to do pretty badly here. But of course it's meant to represent a tree. It's supposed to look like a tree. What is it that the creature wants from people? So we think about how this idea of semiosis of representation works. What does he want? He can't find anyone who is blank him. What's the word he uses? Like him, right? He cannot see anyone who bears his likeness, who is similar to him. This is how signs work, right? They want to find likenesses. So this is like a tree. Is an iconic representation, a pretty bad one of a tree. But I'm telling you it's not a tree. Seems obvious, it's not a tree. That's a bunch of squiggles on a page. But somehow, representationally, they indicate to you that this should be a tree, right? That I'm trying to communicate tree. Remember how Russo, one of his early examples, is the tree. When words evolve, we have to generalize the idea of tree. Tree's a really famous example. If you look at the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, S-A-U-S-S-U-R-E, you'll see that he talks about the Latin word for tree. Arbor, it's his key example. Everybody loves trees as the basic kind of notion of what, when you're interrogating, the basic notion of what a sign might be. So this is not a tree is kind of a key example. I think we could do something better here, though. So this is not a monster, or is it? It is demonstrating, isn't it? There are certain kinds of particular instances when signs are given to reflect on themselves, when we ask ourselves how it is that meaning can arise. The monster is a very specific case, especially given this idea of demonstration, right? Of showing, monsters are signs. They are portents, right? They have meaning and they try to communicate meaning. At the same time, this creature refuses to be communicated about. He occupies a kind of hollow space. Jill was saying at the break, she was reminding me of a famous passage. It's actually in the, as a kind of epigraph for the course outline, for this course online. If most of you have looked at this, it comes from Nietzsche, whom you're gonna look at next day. Genealogy of Morals we're looking at. The epigraph comes from an aphorism. It's an aphorism from beyond good and evil, beyond good and evil. And what it says is that he or one, but it's male in Nietzsche, but he who fights with monsters should look to it or contends with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. We have a kind of hollow space around this figure of the monster, right? The sign. If you fight with meaning, you should, certain kinds of meaning, you should watch that you yourself do not have your own notions of meaning, your own centers of meaning destabilized, your own sense of who you are. Nietzsche that you will see as a troubling kind of thinker. Shelley at this text, in this text 80 years earlier, is troubling the whole idea of meaning and of the pursuit of knowledge, right? This is a monster that's telling you, read the signs. I am a warning. Victor's made it this way. But what he's saying is do not read, right? Do not pursue knowledge through reading. Read me, do not read me is what this creature says. So this is not a monster is actually quite an appropriate kind of way to think about this. He is and is not precisely that. So we're looking at, by listening to stories, we look at this idea of likeness or resemblances. He wants to find someone like him. We want to see ourselves, our likenesses in particular moments of the text. What is it that Walton wants from Victor? Friendship, right? He wants someone who is like him, right? We're trying to produce that kind of connection repeatedly. This is what this frame is doing if you think about it, right? On the one hand, think back to this idea that you all know what Frankenstein is. You've already read it. It's comfortable. It's familiar. It's a story that you understand the meaning of. Culturally. Put on a mask at Halloween. It's fun, right? Or it's a part of a movie that you see that warns you against technology or it's a whole bunch of other things. A story that you tell to scare people at bedtime or I don't know, all kinds of things like that. It has all kinds of meanings and associations already. At the same time, that story, so that's familiarity, that story wants to defamiliarize you. Wants to push away from that kind of comfort zone. Wants you to think. The sort of trope for this, I guess, the figure that I want to come to at the end, so I'll just look ahead, is the idea of the interruption. Interruption. This story wants to interrupt itself and that's one of the other things that this frame does. So just hang on to that idea. It has to do with this whole notion of likenesses, resemblances, or the other meaning of it, mimesis, right? Of one thing imitating another. Are you supposed to imitate Victor? No, he says precisely, do not imitate me, do not be like me. And yet all the way through, characters, figures are constantly seeking likeness. They're trying to produce meaningful spaces for themselves by identifying, by seeing themselves kind of mirrored back in some way or another. So familiarity, comfort, as we see ourselves in here, and defamiliarization, discomfort. We have ourselves kind of upset. Notice how the creature as well, this is the point I wanted to make here, inside of this kind of reflection as you're trying to see yourself, one of the ways in which this creature tries to produce himself is actually through the act of reading. He reads all of these texts. We had the epigraph at the beginning of the book that comes from Paradise Lost. So one way to think about this creature, this creature that we don't actually know exactly what he looks like or we can't, has something to do with representation and likeness. Trying to really see ourselves in him. And one of the things that Mary Shelley herself does, so I quoted part of this, if we can go back and have a look on page 59, this is actually the first part of the novel that was read. Mary Shelley identifies herself with the creator of this kind of creature, this imperceptible creature who's both there and not there at the same time. A creature who's made out of a kind of poetic or literary sensibility in a way. So Victor has completed his creation. He says it's horrifyingly not beautiful. And then on 59, right at the top, at length, lassitude succeeded to the tumult. I had before endured and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavoring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. Trying to go to sleep. But it was in vain. I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her. But I was imprinted the first kiss on her lips, this erotic dream. They became livid with the hue of death. What color are the creature's lips? Black, right? So notice there's kind of an inverted perverse kiss going on here. He thinks it's Elizabeth who he's going to marry and in fact, it's the creature. Her features appeared to change and I thought I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms. Very Freudian moment. A shroud enveloped her form and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of flannel. I started from my sleep with horror. A cold dew covered my forehead. My teeth chattered. He's been, you know, he's always in a fever. And every limb became convulsed. When by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch. The miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened and he muttered some inarticulate sounds while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear. One hand was stretched out. There's that hand seeming to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. And of course he's gonna be listening attentively just as he's invited us to listen through Robert Walton to his story for the sounds that this creature makes. But notice that inside the intimacy, the intimate space of his bed chamber, he has a creature reaching toward him and he's just had this kind of erotic and I would say fanatic, this deathly dream as well that's all bound up in this kind of set piece. How is it that, Mary Shelley? So this is the first chapter that's written of the novel. This is in manuscript, this is where she starts. Not here, not with the frame or anything like that. She starts at this point. If you skip back to her own preface, this is on page nine in your edition. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. So it's exactly as Victor was doing there. So as if she recasts this dream scene into her own novel. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw, I saw, I saw. And off she goes with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. So just as Victor wakes and looks into the eyes of his creature, so too does Mary Shelley awake and imagine she's looking into the eyes of this creature that she's going to create. She sees it all happening. You get a praise, see a summary of your whole novel there in that paragraph that I just skipped. I opened mine in terror, she says. So what is it that your eyes do? They open in terror once you've experienced this. Okay, so that's what's happening here in a way. The early, this is the first film of Frankenstein that was ever made, right? It isn't the, you know, the James Whale one probably, but this is much before that. So the first film version of Frankenstein, there's a still from it there. It's silent, of course. It's made by the Edison Company. And you can see what the creature looks like, in fact. I don't know if this is how you pictured him in your mind, but this is long flowing hair and he's got a kind of a goofy, crazy face. But if you skip over and look at this other side here, to the other image, this is this bed chamber scene. This is the scene. Now this will actually, a scene like this will be implied when we read Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So you might want to look ahead through this scene as well. But notice how there is a kind of homoeroticism depicted here, a kind of forbidden intimacy between these two, between father and child, between man and made man, right? Where he's been having this dream of kissing Elizabeth. She turns into this creature, this corpse. He's carrying his mother, another kind of forbidden desire. And then he wakes up and he looks into the creature's eyes, who's trying to not kiss him so much as talk to him. He's trying to speak. He's trying to produce meaning in a way because he wants to meet his creator, I think is the implication here. He wants to reconnect with him. He wants to find some kind of likeness. So this is how this was initially depicted. It's kind of an interesting cultural artifact. One of the things to sort of come back to in the kind of failure of this relationship has to do with the work of naming, right? So I said, Nietzsche describes this encounter with the monstrous as looking into an abyss. This attempt, we're still thinking about semiosis and sign making of making meaning. This attempts to sort of assemble things together has to do with looking, right? And then giving a name to what you see. The creature has no name, of course. Hideous monster says William. This is accounted by the creature, so you notice there are three sets of quotation marks here. Hideous monster, let me go, my papa is a syndic. He is Mr. Frankenstein. He sort of speaks German, French and other things at once. He will punish you, you dare not keep me. Notice there's like a force of law, right? And this is a proclamation, do not keep me. What happens when little William says hideous monster to this creature? What does he do? You can look on 144 if you want to find out. What does he do? Chokes him, he kills him. He cannot hear the words, right? He says I want to stop him from speaking. Remember the creature leaning over the bed is trying to make sounds, trying to speak. Victor is speaking all the way through this, recounting his tail and so on. So words are suppressed here and they're suppressed around the idea of the name as well. So here we go. What is the monster the creature called? If he has no name, what does that suggest about what he is or who he is, right? I have a name, yep. Definitely non-human, right? Of course he's made out of human beings. But if I can't sign my name to anything, I could still be sort of human. Maybe think of Russo, I could be kind of nascent. You know, I don't need a name because I'm just eating fruit and hanging out. Yeah, he can't participate in the social, right? There's no social space for him to participate in. That depends on language. Absolutely depends on it, right? But here it is. If with no name, he can't be a part of anything. Think about this idea of the abyssal as well. With no name, what he is is a kind of hollow space into which other kinds of names, Milton, Goethe, Werter, Plutarch, Volney, Shelly, whoever start to pour themselves all this text, all this language falls into his abyss. He actually does, I'm just gonna let this thing play out. He actually does have a name. At least for Mary Shelly, when she was sort of presenting the book and when she talked about it, so how's it doing? Takes a while, this is a semiosis in action. So you know, right? You're trying to figure out what the words are. This is exactly what the creature was doing, assembling it bit by bit, piece by piece. So he has no name and I can't cite that because there's no place where he's named. Or is he, right? Mary Shelly, as I said, did name him. It's gonna come up in a second and building the suspense. What do you think she called him? Hint, hint, there's a Frankenstein-esque creature on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he has season four and he has the same name. No, it's not vile insect. That is what Victor seems to call him but it's Mary Shelly called him Adam, right? Why would she call him Adam? It doesn't say that in the text. When she's reading from the text or talking about it, she names him on occasion or two, Adam. Yeah, isn't that it, right? That's of course the Paradise Lost quotation, right? That starts it all off. That's Adam after having fallen, sort of being angry back at his creator. So it sort of makes sense. Another thing to think about, of course, is that Adam is, as it says up there in the note, the Namer, right? Adam is the one who gives names. So one of the things that this creature does is both make us think about the idea of naming and call it into question. Call it into question the stability. You think you are your name, right? You think who you are. That tells you, have you ever had identity theft take place, for example? Or I like to do this. I Google my own name just for fun. What comes up? Bunch of other people. Pictures of, I get a guy who's been out hunting. He's got a beard and his checkered shirt. You Google my name, he came up first and I thought, cool, right? Doesn't look anything like me and I didn't do that. There's somebody else who has my name. Of course there is, right? There are plenty of people who share our names. We tend to think of it as attached to us individually as a person. But in fact, identity theft and other things would suggest this. The name is something that's a little more constructed and a little less stable, the proper name. The idea of an identity or of a stable self is much more fluid and unstable than you might think. All right, so what happens nonetheless? With language, we've been questioning it here. This creature problematizes, makes into a problem the whole idea of stable meaning. And we have, this is the creature speaking himself. He says, I swear by the sun, and by, I forgot a quotation mark there, in the blue sky of heaven and by the fire of love that burns in my heart that if you grant my prayer while they exist, you shall never behold me again. He wants what? What is it that the creature wants Victor to do for him? He wants somebody he can, in his words, sympathize with, a companion. He wants a mate. Someone who can, who will be like him and who will help him to, I guess, have children and build a sort of a world of creatures like him. But notice what he says. If you give me a companion, you will never behold me again. So there's an idea of a promise here, swearing. A word that's absolutely stable. Think about Hobbes talking about covenants or Russo's contract or something like that, the social contract, right? The some notion of promising that feels stable, that feels absolute, I swear I will do this or I will, you know, wreak vengeance on you, he says. So there's the flip side. But I swear I will do this, I promise it. My words are true. And what happens when words become true is that you don't have to look at me anymore, right? This idea of the unseeable and the indescribable kind of vanishes, all right? So we're seeking this idea of likeness. Just Walton does this as well. And you can see resemblance is the key term here. So friendship, likeness, resemblance, all this go into sort of producing this particular figuration of meaning and of meaningful life. And yet it's a kind of bond, remember, that will cause the trouble that the creature produces in your life. He's gonna kill everybody. And the disturbance that he represents to vanish. It will secure your world if he's gone again, okay? I'm just, you can, we've talked about this already. I'm just gonna pass on a little bit here. So if we think about this idea of presence and absence, what this has to do with is the second sense of the semiotic that I was talking about a little bit is embodied meaning, right? That his presence, we see, so when is it that the test is put to representation in the text? I asked you to think about this and did not answer it, this question. When is there any proof offered? We sort of saw this already, in fact. At the end, the frame is broken and Walton sees him, right? Walton, although he says he can't look, but he sees the creature. So somehow the embodied presence of that creature, he jumps out of the text, he jumps out of the account and he's there, right in front of him now. Of course, that's still inside another text, so we haven't quite broken the whole frame, but we've jumped a little bit there outside of the sort of inner frame to the one that starts on page 15. We've bounced out to Walton's frame. So that creature, that embodied presence is somehow able to fracture it. The other thing to think about is that is the nature then of this body that you can't look at, but which nonetheless we're trying to add meaning to and trying to describe. I want to suggest that you can call him an assemblage. I mean, he's built out of other people's body parts, right? So genetically speaking, I don't know how, I mean, this is 1815, so we can work with this, but how the kind of rejection of organs or the way in which bodies are assembled, how that could be managed, but somehow this creature is assembled out of others. So who is he? Is he named after each little cell that's been drawn from somebody else? Exactly what constitutes his name on those grounds, right, as a kind of new atom. In the Edison film, this is how the creature is made. It's kind of interesting, I think. He actually kind of swirls up, they reversed some film, so he swirls up out of fire and this kind of creature who's built out of sort of very elemental basic kinds of things. But this is another way to think about how it is that that guy is formed and how it is that meaning is produced, right? We've already had a look at these passages, but one thing to think about in terms of the creator-creation relationship has to do with, right, how it is that the idea of the creature is given embodied form, right? He emerges out of the imagination of Victor or of Mary Shelley and into the real world. You think back to that lecture affecting Victor at the beginning, how real does this imaginary creature become? How much can he be said to affect you, to affect you as a reader, to affect some kind of change or to have some kind of impact on the outside world? We've already had these notes a little bit, I jumped around a bit, so there's his yellow eyes and how are we made to see this creature, sort of what we're getting at here? Again, I'm gonna pass ahead a little bit here because I'm moving towards the end of things. But if you just wanna take a note of these page numbers, this is the kind of vocabulary that's attached to likeness, to friendship, and it's attached in a particular kind of embodied present. So he enters, for instance, the creature, by his own account, enters the cabin where the delays he's are and says you and your family are the friends whom I seek, think of Walton seeking a friend. Everyone seeks friendship and likeness. And yet he's rejected from this kind of inner room, just like the room in which he sort of reaches out towards Victor as he lies on the bed, so too we have a kind of enclosed space in this tiny cabin far off in the woods and he's rejected from that little sanctum, from that safe space, from that comfort zone because of what he looks like once he is perceived. He is not like them, in fact. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how he reconstructs himself, no matter how he reassembles both himself physically, which isn't too much, or, more importantly, cognitively, reassemble by reading. I keep reading new things, keep trying to sort things out. I make myself of that textual assemblage. No matter what I do, though, I can't affect the world to my advantage, says the creature. These are just some notes. I'm gonna pass over these because I'm gonna run out of time. So I will put this up online if you wanna find these page numbers. But basically the, well, here, there. This is all that stuff that came before. I suggested that there's a kind of, if we think about the embodiment of this semiotic relationship and trying to draw things together, right? Meaning with action, with kind of living entity, a living present onto this frame, trying to frame this kind of experience in words. What happens is that it's depicted as a kind of consummation, as erotic bonding. I suggested that the creature in Victor in that room have a kind of homo-erotic link. Two men. Remember, there aren't any mothers really in this text. Victor's own mother dies, right? Mothers are doomed. Elizabeth, who represents his pretty present, the gift he's been given to propagate the race of Frankenstein in the world later in life. I mean, she's commodified here. She's turned into a trade object. She herself is doomed, right? The feminine inside, the female, really, inside this text is largely doomed. And friendship is a relationship between men. Father to son, that's Parthenogenesis. He doesn't have a mother, the creature, right? And he has a creator, a father who sort of assembled him. That's Parthenogenesis. Male birth. Or, think of like Arnold Schwarzenegger and all that kind of stuff. Or, you know that movie? What's it? Junior. So, okay. Or, that's a monstrous example. But, if you think about this idea, what happens to this kind of idea of marriage? And this is, here's, I wanted to do this, I got a special effect. Is everyone ready? Oh, I went the wrong way. Sorry. Okay, wait. Pretty good. There it is. All right, so he wants to be with you on your wedding night. The last gesture I wanna make is really an extension of this idea. So when he declares that he will be with you on your wedding night, he's declaring a kind of close, a desire for that kind of violent immediacy of the lived experience and his identity, the meaning of his life, right? And he promises this, of course, because he's refused a bride. It gets extended, too. So this sense of event, right? Of experience and of writing it down, of transcription, of text, get put together in what we could call the material. And this is kinda where I wanna leave us. So, give me another minute or so. We're just at the end of class here. I wanna just invite you to think about how it is, maybe one way to think about this is, how it is that all the kind of portents, all the kind of ideas that are offered in this text about enlightenment, about the extent of the human imagination, about how far your mind can go, how is that rendered worldly? One of you was asking about our essays, right? How can I use this lecture in my essays? Well, one way is to think about how it is that some of these ideas that are circulating have any kind of impact, how they impact on the world itself, how they have a certain kind of materiality. So a few of these page references are gesturing at materiality, right? The materiality of history when it's sensed in the novel itself. There's all kinds of horrors and all kinds of stuff happening here. Mine says Victor has been a life of horrors so he wants to stop us, right? The impact on the world is in fact a withdrawal from the world. Do not do what I do, he says. But the one I really want to concentrate on and what I want to leave you with here is the very last phrase I've got up here. Do you want to? Sorry, I need to show you all. No, no, this is what, in fact, throwing me off is actually what I want to leave you with. So go ahead. Okay. Right? This is material history, anyway, of the book. It was, I cut this out of the lecture. It was badly reviewed at the beginning, particularly by, you can see this in the editor's preface. In your own edition, some of this is mentioned, particularly by other gothic novelists. This is a word I didn't use in the lecture but this part takes of a kind of gothic romanticism. So gothic horror is its genre in many ways and other writers said, oh, it's awful, sloppy, womanish. You know, there are all kinds of bad epithets attached to it in their time. So its early reception was not particularly good except, of course, she was known as the author of Frankenstein and it was what made her reputation and continues to make her reputation. So there's a sustained interest in this text as well. All right, my last point actually has to do with what you just did and that is it happens in the text and if you think about this thus, this narrative present that occurs there, there's a moment on page 221, right at the top of the page in our edition. If you look there, he's been writing his account and then he says something extraordinary has happened and he finishes the sentence and then the next sentence says, I am interrupted. Now, when is that happening? I mean, this is, I don't know if you, I just rewatched The Lord of the Rings and when they're in the minds of Moria, one of the dwarfs is transcribing it and his handwriting appears to get really messy as he's being killed. It's like in the Holy Grail when you go to the castle of Amr, right? This is senseless. I am interrupted. He's writing it, right? Think about this. This is a peculiar moment and in terms of this kind of idea of semiosis, this is a disturbance in the narrative that's actually in the narrative. So this is one model. I can't give you everything, I'm sure, but one model I want you to consider for how it is that this text is promising to enter the world. It wants materially to interrupt you. It wants to interrupt your thinking, right? As a speech act, as a text, it wants you to feel the force of that interruption. Makes sense? Maybe not. In fact, it wants to disturb your whole idea of making sense. So I'm gonna leave you kind of open-endedly there at that moment when the text, not quite at its end, says, wait a minute, I gotta stop writing and I gotta live. That's what it's kind of inviting you to do. Kind of. All right, good luck in your seminars and with your essays. We'll see you later.