Adam despairs when studying humans through our literature. He is amazed by us, and abhorred:
These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.
Through our narratives he learns a great deal of what it means to be someone who we decide is insufficient or disabled. We choose those whom to ostracize, despite all of their other capabilities, because we create a category for entities who, no matter what else there is to them, they just aren’t enough like us to count as part of the moral community. Adam weeps for the Indian other: “I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.”
He knows what fearful violence we will bring upon those who we can, and we will justify it by refusing to grant them personhood. I am not convinced that the creature’s best reason for violence was the individual harm he suffered at Victor’s hands, but instead the realization, given our history, that he will never be accepted, nor will any of his kin . . . all those who we decide are disabled, inferior, or foreign Others.
_________________
1Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Monist 57:1 (1973).
2Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Clarendon, 1993).
16
What Love Means to a Creature
MIRKO D. GARASIC
If you’re a fan of Frankenstein, you can’t have missed (and if you did you should try to catch it as soon as possible) Tim Burton’s animated movie Frankenweenie. Genius that he is, Burton’s rethink of the Frankenstein tale has a number of witty and perceptive elements (accompanied by some hilarious cameos such as the tomb of “Good-bye Kitty” addressing the popular brand).
One of the tributes that Burton skillfully pays to Mary Shelley’s novel is his use of electricity and kites, with its obvious reference to Benjamin Franklin. But the electricity connection to Frankenstein is also very strong, in more than just the “animate the dead” kind of a way.
The connection between the two can be found in the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s novel. Shelley seriously considered calling her novel “The Modern Prometheus” but instead that became the subtitle. And it’s through that subtitle that we can discover what love means to a monster.
The Ancient Frankenstein
In the old Greek tale, Prometheus is the wisest of all the Titans. He brings mankind technical knowledge and enlightenment through the gift of fire, stolen from the gods.
Plato tells us that, after having created animals from earth and fire, the Greek gods asked Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip each of them with appropriate qualities. To avoid the extinction of any of the animals, Epimetheus gave quickness, strength, wings, and other powers to each species. However, not being very wise, he distributes those qualities carelessly and when he reaches humans, he has nothing left to give them. To make up for this, Prometheus decides to give humans fire and the technical arts, which he has to steal from the gods.
For this blasphemy, Zeus punishes him horribly: Prometheus is chained to a rock and every day an eagle tears out his liver and eats it. Every night his liver grows back and the cycle repeats. Because he is immortal, Prometheus is damned to suffer this dreadful punishment for all of eternity. Fortunately, he is eventually spared this suffering by Hercules.
Prometheus cared so much for humankind that he suffered horribly to help us. He loved humanity and would have liked to provide us with the political wisdom we needed, but unfortunately, this was out of his reach. And so human beings sadly remained unable to co-operate properly as a society. After some attempts to come together for safety in cities, humans returned to isolation because they were treating each other too badly to co-exist. Although the technical abilities to progress as a society were within their reach, the absence of the capacity to coordinate their actions made co-existence a hopeless dream, or so the myths suggest.
The Modern Prometheus
The parallel between Prometheus and Victor Frankenstein is clear in the painful consequences suffered by both and in their quests for technological advancement. Although moved by different goals, the Ancient Prometheus and the Modern one (Victor) link their names and their lives to the power of electricity—be it in the form of fire or that of electric current. Both create new life and both suffer, but Victor’s sentence seems to be even worse than that of Prometheus due to the fact that he’s not at peace with himself. Prometheus at least knew he had done the right thing.
Immediately after bringing the creature to life, Victor is disgusted with the result. His self-loathing increases significantly as time passes because, having already behaved wrongly, he further degrades his moral character by indulging in hate rather than love. Everyone dear to Victor dies, killed by the very creature he created but was never able nor willing to love for what it was.
Despite Prometheus’s gift, humans were still too busy fighting each other to create a workable society. Moved by the incapacity of his creation to co-operate harmoniously, and fearing the extinction of humanity, Zeus eventually sent the god Hermes into the cities to confer justice and reverence upon people, so that humanity would prosper through the implementation of virtue. Hermes himself wasn’t sure how such things should be given to human beings, should he follow the same system used to distribute the technical arts and favor only a few, or should he adopt a different method? So he asked Zeus:
“Shall this [the distribution of the arts] be the manner in which I am to distribute justice and reverence among men, or shall I give them to all?” “To all,” said Zeus; “I should like them all to have a share; for cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts. And further, make a law by my order, that he who has no part in reverence and justice shall be put to death, for he is a plague of the state.” (Protagoras, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/protagoras.html)
Plato expands on Zeus’s idea, and agrees that, while in the case of technical arts, Athenians—as well as humanity at large—are reluctant to hear the opinion of anyone but accredited experts in the field (be it a master chef or an architect), when discussing politics this attitude changes. When deliberating about political virtue, the very use of justice and wisdom requires the involvement of the community. He continues, explaining that Athenians or humans “think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue, and that states could not exist if this were otherwise.”
If we are to rise again from the political impasse of our time we must keep in mind this important message contained in Frankenstein through the re-use of the Promethean tale: no matter how advanced our knowledge can become, nor how good our intentions are, scientific progress alone is not sufficient to guarantee a better society. We need to find the just and right way of dealing with progress through the interaction with others.
Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman claims that, in this late modern era, we have moved away from a “heavy” and “solid” modernity (focused on hardware), to a “light” and “liquid” version of modernity (based instead on software).1 In the “liquid modernity” described by Bauman, the individual is detached from some of the communal characteristics that make us a social animal. The different, the foreigner, the outsider (the “other” like Victor’s creature) are all seen as a threat and, consequently, in our post-modern society we have lost trust in the community as well as the ability to rely on others to achieve greater goods. According to Bauman, society today exalts the affirmation of the individual, but only in theory. In practice, we are more alone than ever. Post-modernity has led us to become so individual-centered that we now resemble many different forms of being a Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein thinks that his own self-imposed isolation will bring him closer to humanity. We are now often in the same room as our loved ones, ignoring them while su
pposedly having improved our means of communication with the rest of the world via texts and social networking. What’s even more striking when comparing our society with Shelley’s novel, is the fact that unlike Victor (and so we may be even worse off) we are not putting our hands directly on the world we’re trying to create.
Today if we need something fixed, we usually don’t know how to fix it ourselves, so we call someone else to fix it. We don’t really have to interact with the things, or people, surrounding us. We walk into the store, wave vaguely at a clerk who utters the same required words to every customer, and lurch, creature-like, towards the stuff we want, ignoring the others, and offering reflexive thanks to the cashier who has already moved on to the next “person” as we check out.
Bauman provides us with a new picture of what it means to be a human being in the Western post-modern world. Although we’re surely more connected with the rest of the global community by technological means that were unthinkable until a few decades ago (Skype, Facebook, and the Internet in general), we have also given up on features that defined our interactions with other human beings as a way of expressing our individual preferences. One result is the dramatic fall in the birth rate. We aren’t willing to dedicate as much time, effort, and connectedness as previous generations to another human being who jeopardizes our “freedom to be detached from all others.”
This disconnectedness from others sooner or later catches up with us, and creates a deep discomfort produced by the awareness that, somewhere along the road, we have lost part of our identity. To fulfill our potential requires the interaction, the involvement with the other. To deny this is to deny what Victor’s creature understood very well in a very instinctive manner.
Love and Hate
Prometheus’s character is moved by two driving forces: the first one—most often stressed—is indeed his striving to gain technological and scientific knowledge. In itself, this might be a noble ambition, but it can easily turn into a search for power that blinds the initial goodwill. The resulting price paid by Prometheus (with his liver eaten by the eagle every day forever) and Victor Frankenstein (with his inability to stop his creature from destroying his life) represents the failure that we’re bound to face if we are to follow our desire to overcome nature and change the order of things through science. This is a form of intellectual egoism: we love to prove to the world how smart we are for the sake of it, not out of actual necessity. But, there’s a second force that is present in the original Prometheus story as well as in Frankenstein: love.
Due to our contemporary focus on “Frankenstein” as a synonym for “monster,” we often forget that the emotion of love is central to Mary Shelley’s novel2 as it was for the original Greek myth. Prometheus ends up suffering eternal damnation specifically because he loves the humans he made out of clay. It’s his concern with the unfairness of letting humans enter into the world without any of the appropriate qualities necessary to survive that pushes him to steal the secret of fire from the gods.
After rejection by his creator, which produced different forms of hate on both sides, the creature seeks love and asks Victor to create a female with whom he would finally have a chance for happiness, promising to leave and disappear forever. But Victor is incapable of doing this because he fears creating a “monstrous race” and—blinded by his hate for the creature—he destroys the unfinished female partner in front of the creature’s eyes. This produces a second wave of hatred that will eventually end in the death of both.
This dualism between love and hate fits perfectly well with contemporary society. We use technology to achieve higher and faster results at work, but we do not seem to win any of that time back. On the contrary, we are constantly pushed towards accepting to lower our expectations of what we can be guaranteed as workers. Our flexibility is supposedly beneficial for the overall enterprise of the economy, but it does not help our human interaction.
We must not make the same mistake as Victor, and sacrifice all the beautiful things in our lives for the sake of destroying an external entity because it does not meet our standard of right enough. Firstly, we miss out on what we have (recall that if Victor didn’t so stubbornly keep trying to kill the creature, he would not have lost all of his dear ones). In our case, we would be advised to consider a standard of “good enough”: if we’re obsessed with having more endlessly, we’ll never be happy. A natural boundary for this excess has been historically represented by the community.
A parent, for example, might care more about preserving the environment once he or she has produced a child, because a better world is better for the child. The parent is now ready to enter a different phase of interpretation of the Promethean tale: giving up one’s comfort and commodities for the sake of justice and love. Prometheus was ready to give up his own comfort and life for something not directly related to him, we too face such a challenge.
Good and Bad Science in Frankenweenie
In Frankenweenie, the dualism between love and hate present in Frankenstein is more neatly divided. The dimension of love is romantically represented by the tear that the young Victor drops on his dog (note the dog’s exquisite self-referring name that links fire and electricity—Sparky!).
The counterbalancing emotion of hate (constantly present in Shelley’s novel as well) is external to the main character, rather than in the young Victor: it is the surrounding society that is hate-filled. His frustrated and jealous classmates are obsessed with winning the first prize for the science project. The mayor is focused only on more power and incapable of loving his niece for what she is. And the community (including Victor’s parents) are unwilling to accept the fact that Sparky might still be morally good although half-dead.
The one person capable of understanding the limits that we should impose to scientific research, is the very unconventional—and yet deeply committed—science teacher Mr. Rzykruski. Not surprisingly, given our natural tendency to exclude the unknown, he ends up being expelled from the school for providing the children with “too much knowledge.” Before leaving the school, though, Rzykruski speaks with the young Victor, urging him to become a scientist, but not light-heartedly. Science is often thought to be related only to our rational side, but that’s not so: we need to remain in contact with our emotions and our human nature in a more complete and loving sense.
Love is why the experiment with Sparky works while the others don’t. In direct contrast with the original character of Shelley’s novel, here the young Victor is moved by love, rather than by pride and arrogance. The way in which Burton portrays the boundaries of science deserves particular attention now, as we are enter a phase of human history where certain technological innovations could cause a permanent change, for better or worse. Genetic engineering, human cloning, and other science-fiction dreams are not far away, and we must guide our progress.
We don’t have to fear science in itself, but science doesn’t tell us the meaning of life. In the original novel, the creature gradually deprives Victor Frankenstein of his loved ones, and ultimately kills him. It is only then, when he is completely alone, that the creature realizes that killing his maker does not cure his alienation. His unhappiness, in fact, increases because his only real link with others—as well as his only hope to have someone like himself to love—has disappeared, leaving him alone.
Burton’s Frankenweenie splits the themes of love and hate (and of good and bad science), through the parallel monsters created by the young Victor’s classmates at the end of the movie. Unlike Sparky—who remains pretty much the same aside from some holes here and there and the flies buzzing around him—all those monsters are hybrid creatures that represent a deformed version of the initial animal meant to be rescued from death. In the case of the hybrids, the passion is present (all Victor’s classmates want to win the first prize), but it is greed for power and fame, not love. And those are characteristics that—when taken to the extreme—represent a confronting attitude towards society. Being in constant competition
with everyone is likely to leave you alone. Similarly, if the obsession to achieve personal glory becomes more important than ensuring a decent quality of life, things are likely to go very poorly indeed.
Love bonds are those that form communities, and lead us to experience happy lives together. Had Shelley’s Victor been willing to love his creation, the story might have been a happier one, like Frankenweenie. And, we (despite our insistence that we’re better off alone) need other people. And this is so, not just to produce the things we want and like, but—more important still—to give our lives meaning and purpose.
This is shown in the parallel love story of Victor and Elsa and their respective dogs, Sparky and Persephone. Even with this peripheral character, Burton is able to provide valuable links to both cinema (Persephone’s post-electric shock hairstyle is a delicate reference to the film Bride of Frankenstein), and that ancient world to which Shelley constantly refers: the very name used is that of another forced lover in ancient Greek mythology—Persephone, the woman who was stolen by Hades to become the queen of the underworld, the kingdom of dead people (and dogs I guess!).
From Frankenstein with Love
In contrast to Frankenstein, Frankenweenie has a happy ending and finishes with the whole community of New Holland—including the formerly xenophobic mayor stripped of his prejudices through exposure to evidence—joining in the admirable effort of providing Victor with sufficient electricity to bring Sparky back to life for a second time. It’s a very romantic ending that leaves us with some room for hope.
We do unfortunately live in a world full of homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and sexism, but unlike Victor’s creature, we can overcome prejudices from within society while he was excluded from even engaging in a discussion. So, if we care about a better world, we should consider Prometheus’s dream and direct society toward a solid modernity rather than a liquid one. If we don’t act quickly we might find ourselves, like Victor Frankenstein, and his unfortunate creation, alone and out of time.3
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 18
