I found myself, while reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” for the first time (I finished the novel this week) meditating on the above line from Victor Frankenstein. To this human mind, that’s the line that best describes the novel’s theme.
For reasons that I’d always found a little baffling, when it comes to the monsters we know as children – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf – I’ve always been drawn to Frankenstein. Now, after reading Shelley’s slim but powerful volume, I get it.
“Frankenstein” is as relevant now, it seems to me, as when it captured the public imagination after publication in 1818. (The one I read – at right, the Signet Classic paperback version, 1965 – is a reprint of the 1831 republication, which was heavily revised by Shelley [when she was in her early thirties)]. Next, I’m going to read the first one – before the revision. The one that came to her in a dream.
“This one was working,” Gertrude Stein said of Picasso. Maybe that’s what makes a classic.
What is birth but change? My daughter, K, is coming home next Thursday. I will go and pick her up at the airport. When I see her I will think of what it felt like to read those first tortured yet graceful thoughts of the demon (in the novel, Frankenstein is the creator, his creation never ranked above “demon” or “beast” as a third-person reference). As children, we don’t have the luxury (the torment?) of sharing our deepest feelings with our creator. Instead, we must settle for a poor second, our parents, a poet’s task.
One of the chief tragedies in “Frankenstein” is the change the demon implied mortally threatened the humans he encountered during his brief time on earth. If they could have seen him, as he was inside, his life would have changed for the better, one that did not take him off to the ends of the earth (the far north, which is another story …).
Like an acolyte before a teacher, I’m drawn to the demon, to his capacity to feel and value the idea of being the best a man can be. “This one was working,” I’ll say to K when I see her.
Next: Cross Train, No Pain
