Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone!
Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book.
The weirdest thing in Frankenstein? In chapter 3 of volume II the monster takes refuge in a hovel – like a ‘kennel’ – at the back of a neat little cottage. In the cottage live the nice old man and his children, Felix and Agatha, and Safie – the Arabian girl Felix loves, who is receiving language instruction from Felix. The monster learns language by listening in.
Now, this is the stuff of comedy. A gentle hulking monster is living behind your tiny cottage, in a kennel that for some reason none of you ever go into, and is observing everything you do, listening in while you read Volney’s Ruins of Empire (of all things!), and thereby acquiring human speech – and no one notices. Shelley doesn’t play this for laughs, but there is just no way to picture a monster under the bench, while the lovebirds are reading Volney, that isn’t funny. The monster’s reading list is great:
One night, during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood, where I collected my own food, and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau, 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 had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.
To repeat, you live in a tiny cottage, behind which there’s a kennel containing a giant monster you don’t know about. And the monster sits in that kennel all day reading … Plutarch?
Well, that’s gothic literature for you. It’s unintentionally hilarious. I’m not the first one to notice. But I think it’s interesting the way in which Shelley hereby invents a horror-comedy sub-genre. The monster-in-plain-sight-people-don’t-notice-even-though-he-sings-show-tunes. Or something similarly culturally specific. And then they notice him, and run in terror.
My daughters both love A Monster In Paris
If you think about it, the Monster with the humorously specific cultural-artistic fixation or enthusiasm is kind of a standard trope. Mostly in animated comedies. And Shelley got there first.
{ 45 comments }
bill benzon 05.20.13 at 12:08 pm
Just took a quick run through TVTropes and didn’t find your trope (e.g. here http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurMonstersAreWeird). But you’ve got three examples. Maybe you should add it.
What about Remy, to chef-rat in Ratatouille? Or the operatic whale in Willie the Whale?
Random Lurker 05.20.13 at 1:07 pm
“The monster-in-plain-sight-people-don’t-notice-even-though-he-sings-show-tunes”
Isn’t this a consequence of the “Let’s see the story from the point of view of the monster, who is somehow superior to normal people but still would like to mix with commoners but is disliked by them” concept – wich is very Romantic and perfectly exemplified by Frankenstein, but also by most superheroes, Howard the duck (the movie, I didn’t read the comic), Harry Potter, Edward Scissorhands and a ton of others?
Isn’t this concept clearly Nietzschean in some way, and by extension also Hayekian? (and Randian too: see “Stranger in a Strange Land”)
Isn’t the fact that this evident aristocratic fantasy is probably one of the most commercial tropes ever a paradox that is perfectly simmetrical to the “monster-in-plain-sight-people-don’t-notice-even-though-he-sings-show-tunes” thing (both being predicated on the implicit idea that the weird guys are really the supposedly “normal” ones)?
Isn’t all this based to some sort of teenager insecurity (that really goes on also after the teenage since I still like this stuff and I’m 37)?
Isn’t the rethorical question a great stylistic device for stupid comments?
Adam Roberts 05.20.13 at 1:16 pm
This is only ridiculous (I agree: it is heartily ridiculous) if you read it on the level of manifest content of the text. I agree that SF fans are particularly prone to read texts this way, but there are other ways of reading too. Take the monster, as Chris Baldick does, as ‘Revolution’ (stitched together from myriad ordinary bodies, bearing upon itself the marks of its violent history, potentially benign but turned to Terror and Horror by societial incomprehension and over-reaction) — that is, take the novel as a specifically post-1789, or post-1793 fable — and it becomes much less absurd. The thing about Revolution is how enormous and obvious and inevitable it is, looming up at us; and yet people somehow contrive to continue living as if the ancien regime will never end. Poverty and injustice as so unmissable in the world, kind, literate people condemned to live in a hovel in the middle of nowhere! The Revolution is right there; you’d think people couldn’t miss it. But they do miss it, right up until it starts pulling their heads off.
fred 05.20.13 at 1:46 pm
Brings to mind Peter Boyle in “Young Frankenstein” singing “Putin’ on the Ritz”.
“Bet he’s got a great big swine schtecker.”
Anderson 05.20.13 at 2:17 pm
“the Arabian girl Felix loves”
Never caught this before, but that sounds like Percy Shelley with his incarnate dreamgirl out of “Alastor.” Maybe.
John Holbo 05.20.13 at 2:22 pm
Yes, “Young Frankenstein”. Also Dr. Frank N. Furter.
I agree, Adam, that it’s not ridiculous at the level of allegory and/or symbol (as you like it). But the visual absurdity – the physical comedy – of their housing arrangements, is just so obtrusive. That’s why it’s actually become a physical comedy tradition, more or less. That’s my point.
“Isn’t this a consequence of the “Let’s see the story from the point of view of the monster, who is somehow superior to normal people but still would like to mix with commoners but is disliked by them†concept – wich is very Romantic and perfectly exemplified by Frankenstein, but also by most superheroes, Howard the duck (the movie, I didn’t read the comic), Harry Potter, Edward Scissorhands and a ton of others?”
Yes. It gets the job done quick in some decisive way. In film, in particular, you need to be sure the monster is a Good Guy, and the fact that he likes to watch cartoons like a little kid, or sing show tunes or whatever, warrants that inference.
“Isn’t this concept clearly Nietzschean in some way”
Undoubtedly.
Remy the Rat is a good example. Never seen any singing whale, but it’s hard to believe it operates on a different principle than a jazz blowing gator.
ajay 05.20.13 at 3:09 pm
How much better the book would have been if he’d been stuck in the kennel with Moll Flanders, Gargantua and the Satyricon instead.
Take the monster, as Chris Baldick does, as ‘Revolution’ (stitched together from myriad ordinary bodies, bearing upon itself the marks of its violent history, potentially benign but turned to Terror and Horror by societial incomprehension and over-reaction) — that is, take the novel as a specifically post-1789, or post-1793 fable — and it becomes much less absurd.
Which also answers the question of why this is a science fiction novel that is explicitly set in the past. ( Walton’s letters are dated to the year 17–.) I just assumed it was for narrative reasons: you couldn’t have it set in the present day because then most of the action would have happened during the Napoleonic Wars, which might have interfered with things.
And there is a lot to laugh at in Frankenstein, you’re right. Victor creates the monster; he is seized with a realisation of the horror he has perpetrated and flees the room; eventually he summons the courage to return and finds the monster has escaped, so he … goes to bed. As you do.
Harold 05.20.13 at 4:18 pm
Um, isn’t the Monster in Paris loosely based on Victor Hugo?
yabonn 05.20.13 at 4:49 pm
Adam Roberts at 3 :
potentially benign but turned to Terror and Horror by societal incomprehension and over-reaction
That’s one thing to extract from the book. But I think Shelley herself was on the other side of the barricades : the monster was doomed from the start, not because of society, not even because of the sacrilege, but because of its ugliness. The monster is not revolution, it’s poor people – they are ugly to warn us that they are also mean, and they don’t feel the cold as we do anyway.
bill benzon 05.20.13 at 5:09 pm
And then there’s the song-and-dance frog from Chuck Jones’s “One Froggy Evening”:
Neville Morley 05.20.13 at 6:02 pm
Slightly puzzled that you seem to imply it’s really weird that he’s reading Plutarch – but Paradise Lost and Goethe are perfectly normal?
Lee A. Arnold 05.20.13 at 6:49 pm
Kind of a romantic intellectual allegory of scientific hubris, incidentally kicking off sci fi. Perhaps inspired by the Jewish folklore of the golem. But I think that in those days, somebody showing up to sleep in the barn may not have been all that unusual, a vestige of the enclosures of the commons, and in fact the housedwellers might tend to ignore him as having some sort of lost squatter’s right, until push came to shove, he listened in too much. So Shelley might have seen this as a conceivable part of the allegory, you might say.
SusanC 05.20.13 at 7:09 pm
I wonder if the humor (e.g. in the alligator cartoon) is due to a switch between different models for the monster:
– The monster as animal
– The monster as discriminated-against ethnic minority
– The monster as psychopath (not in the alligator cartoon, but see later)
The cultural accomplishment precludes the monster being an animal, and so puts us into the monster as ethnic minority (e.g. the jazz playing alligator as allegory for an African-American jazz musician who is excluded from working as a classical musician due to racial discrimination) … until the story pulls the rug out from under our suspension of disbelief by reminding us that he’s an *alligator*.
In a different version of this trope – the monster as psychopath – the monster’s cultural accomplishment does not serve as evidence against his monstrousness, but rather confirms it. For example, in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter reveals his monstrousness by continuing to treat as an cultured/aesthetic experience things most people would consider horrifying: “I ate his liver with aduki beans and a nice Chianti” (which is a funny line, in a way).
Harold 05.20.13 at 7:13 pm
Plutarch was a top 18th c. favorite, especially of French revolutionaries. I suppose many people have notice this before, but the monster seems a bit like a take on the 18th “natural man,” with Victor Frankenstein as sort of neglectful god.
Mary Shelley’s father’s novel, “Caleb Williams” is a kind of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) horror story that has lost none of its power to shock. According to a recent biography of Shelley I just read, Godwin, also turned out to be a rather cold and “unnatural” parent, who put Shelley’s rank and fortune above his daughter’s happiness.
PatrickinIowa 05.20.13 at 8:29 pm
@2: Yes.
Katherine 05.20.13 at 9:10 pm
“I ate his liver with aduki beans and a nice Chianti†(which is a funny line, in a way).
It’s fava beans, aka broad beans, which sounds much less fancy and cultured. Mind you, the reference to Chianti as a by-word for sophistication has aged a bit too.
bill benzon 05.20.13 at 10:14 pm
“… an African-American jazz musician who is excluded from working as a classical musician due to racial discrimination…”
FWIW, that whale is singing about how “all mama’s chillen’ got shortn’in bread” in a very whitified version of pseudoblack dialect.
John Holbo 05.20.13 at 11:12 pm
“Slightly puzzled that you seem to imply it’s really weird that he’s reading Plutarch – but Paradise Lost and Goethe are perfectly normal?”
Plutarch does seem slightly funnier somehow.
Shatterface 05.20.13 at 11:31 pm
Plutarch was a top 18th c. favorite, especially of French revolutionaries. I suppose many people have notice this before, but the monster seems a bit like a take on the 18th “natural man,†with Victor Frankenstein as sort of neglectful god.
I always read Frankenstein that way too: the Creature isn’t the Monster, Victor Frankenstein is. He creates life and then turns away from it in horror and denies it a mate. The idea that the Creature – a tragic, sensitive, literate figure in the book is at moral fault is a product of the numerous adaptations.
Politically, Victor is the revolutionary leader who romanticises the common man then reacts against it when he sees his own privilege challenged.
John Holbo 05.21.13 at 12:52 am
“One Froggy Evening” is the exception that proves the rule. Michigan J. Frog – like Pennywise the Clown – is an evil, cthonic entity that wears a grotesque mask to fool and mock and terrify its victims.
John Holbo 05.21.13 at 12:57 am
“e.g. the jazz playing alligator as allegory for an African-American jazz musician who is excluded from working as a classical musician due to racial discrimination”
Sorry, are you suggesting that this is what’s going on in “The Princess and the Frog”?
Ken 05.21.13 at 2:17 am
I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau
Yes. Yes, of course you did. Not in any way bloodstained.
Has anyone ever examined Frankenstein under the assumption that the creature is an unreliable narrator?
Lee A. Arnold 05.21.13 at 3:16 am
I mistakenly entered this upon the other monsters but it belongs here:
“The Golem†(1920). Some may have not seen Paul Wegener’s silent film of the medieval Jewish folktale starring the pre-Frankensteinian monster. In the final act (containing 2 “chapters”), the golem is enlisted by a jealous lover to vanquish his rival. A double plot. Go to about 1 hour 2 minutes — 1:02:00, or near there…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTEN9JL1A_g
I have not read original golem stories, and I don’t know whether the filmmakers consciously adopted Shelley to their task. Perhaps James Whale saw it. I like some of the oldstyle eye-acting, particularly the jealous incitement to murder outside the door. That actor is worth watching twice. The set designs are pretty great.
Neville Morley 05.21.13 at 6:27 am
@ JH #18: re Plutarch. Harold at 14 states what I was getting at: Plutarch was enormously popular in C18, as he had been since the middle ages, and indeed continued to be until well into C19 (just see how many quotes he gets in early editions of Bartletts’s); *the* classical writer for educational purposes, offering numerous exempla for praiseworthy and dubious conduct. It’s only from a modern perspective that Plutarch seems manifestly inferior and peculiar. Insofar as this section of Frankenstein offers a Bildungsroman, as the creature is inducted into the humanist tradition, it’s actually Milton that seems a little out of place, though obviously the themes of Paradise Lost are highly relevant to the development of the story.
It would be very interesting to know which of the Lives he read…
Neville Morley 05.21.13 at 6:32 am
@ Katherine #16: yes, but the reference to fava beans evokes the Pythagorean doctrine that one should not eat them because of the possibility that a human soul might have transmigrated therein, i.e. this is (potentially) double cannibalism. Honestly; I can provide bibliographical references if required. Whether this is deliberate on the part of the author I have no idea.
Niall McAuley 05.21.13 at 8:55 am
In the novel, Hannibal ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone, not a nice Chianti. Sophistication intact.
Phil 05.21.13 at 9:16 am
Neville – not sure about Milton being out of place. I think from Mary Shelley’s perspective Plutarch, Milton and Goethe equal the Ancients, the classicists and the moderns: a rounded education.
Incidentally (#4) the body part in question is referred to as a Schwannstücke – “tailpiece”.
Harold 05.21.13 at 1:03 pm
I think Plutarch’s lives was first translated (from the Greek into Latin) in the fifteenth century. Leonardo Bruni began c. 1405
http://books.google.com/books?id=X2W1I-nP_z0C&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=Plutarch's+lives+translated+in+Renaissance&source=bl&ots=QnTdNuWEcY&sig=L1hm73110scVdf9ilT4rK5CP88Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UWybUfunN62w4AP9g4CYCg&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Plutarch's%20lives%20translated%20in%20Renaissance&f=false
First complete (of manuscripts extant) edition in Greek appeared 1517. Plutarch was an ancient who shaped the modern (not medieval) European sensibility, beginning in the Renaissance.
Katherine 05.21.13 at 1:29 pm
Neville @25 – eurgh, I’ll never look at my deep fried broad beans the same again!
Phil 05.21.13 at 1:32 pm
Oops – that should have been Schwanzstücke, not Schwann ditto. The Internet is so unreliable.
Shelley 05.21.13 at 2:44 pm
I love to picture the expression on the monster’s face as he sat back in the darkness and learned language by “listening in”….
Was there a Helen Keller “water” moment?
Neville Morley 05.21.13 at 5:21 pm
@ Harold # 28: yes, poor phrasing on my part; you’re right to stress that Plutarch becomes widely read in Italy in C15 (there’s a detailed book by Marianne Pade on the subject) rather than earlier.
clew 05.21.13 at 6:35 pm
Tarzan/Lord Greystoke learns to read (and possibly to speak?) by looking at books.
LizardBreath 05.21.13 at 8:37 pm
He learns to read English, and is later taught to speak not English, but French, on the basis of his reading knowledge of English. (I.e., he’s taught that the way to pronounce the word he can read as “APPLE” is “pomme”. A seriously great moment of wackiness. And then a year or so later he’s accentless and sophisticated.)
garymar 05.22.13 at 4:57 am
And the albino priest in Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” learned to read his native French by being locked up in a room filled with magazines.
A great airplane read, but that was a serious WTF moment.
Niall McAuley 05.22.13 at 8:01 am
Hey! Don’t make fun of renowned author Dan Brown!
ajay 05.22.13 at 8:42 am
I vaguely remember hearing about a woman in rural Russia who had taught herself English with the aid of an English-Russian dictionary, a King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and who as a result spoke fluent seventeenth century English. Too good to check.
garymar 05.22.13 at 8:56 am
Ha ha!
In â€Tarzan’s New York Adventure†(1942), Tarzan is taken to a stylish New York nightclub. He sniffs the air and remarks, “Smell like Swahili Swamp.â€
A Swahili Swamp, mind you. Imagine a linguistic map with a small area on it marked “Swahili Swampâ€: a dreadful place, filled with ferocious fricatives, poisonous plosives, dripping with nasal stops.
dilbert dogbert 05.22.13 at 3:26 pm
Frankenstein and Andrew Sullivan in close proximity.
Interesting, not for Andrew’s sexual orientation, but for some reading I have done about “5th Columns” and cheer leading for Iraq. Some self applied mud can not be let dry then brushed off.
Gene O'Grady 05.22.13 at 11:35 pm
Plutarch may seem inferior from a modern perspective, but in a more up-to-date (shouldn’t call it post-modern, I guess) viewpoint he is taken a great deal more seriously, partly as evidence for his own culture which is treated with more respect than in 19th century classical studies and partly because he has been considered on his own merits as a historian rather than a rag doll for Quellenforschung. As witness the scholarly work of Professor Pelling.
I have to confess to having taken a graduate seminar in Plutarch with a beloved teacher more than forty years ago.
jake the snake 05.23.13 at 2:30 pm
@ 22: Does anyone not read first person narrative as anything but an unreliable narrator? Except, maybe, Bascule in Banks’ “Feersum Endjinn.”
@23: Whale very consciously “borrowed” from The Golem.
Compare the famous flower petal scene in Frankenstein with the scene in
The Golem in which the golem throws a young woman into a river.
Keith Edwards 05.23.13 at 3:16 pm
Re: Sorrows of Werter in the monster’s satchel — it was the 18C equivalent of Fifty Shades of Gray or Twilight. You couldn’t swing a leathern portmanteau in the woods without hitting a copy.
floopmeister 05.24.13 at 4:52 am
I love to picture the expression on the monster’s face as he sat back in the darkness and learned language by “listening inâ€â€¦.
Wow, so that ridiculous scene in The 13th Warrior ( 14.35-17:20) has a respectable literary antecedent?
floopmeister 05.24.13 at 4:52 am
Damn – lost the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDiqbXpmVk
from 14:35-17:20
Salient 05.24.13 at 6:42 am
a leathern portmanteau in the woods
What is saddleback. As in, riding your horse saddleback through the forest?
I’ll take neologisms for $300
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