Blog #7: "Shut In and Shut Out": "The Cold" and the "Eternal Silence" in Frankenstein - Vickie GG

"Shut In and Shut Out": "The Cold" and the "Eternal Silence" in Frankenstein

*Note: Originally, I planned to go through Chapters 11-17 of Frankenstein and show all the passages that prove that the type of danger Lewis outlines in On Stories is present in Frankenstein. And that would be a cool paper idea. But such close reading is what I've been doing this whole time as I interact with all the readings (because it's what I've been trained to do) - systematically and logically trying to parse stuff out. That's the very thing all the philosophers we're reading say won't help me understand the mystical experience and get the true or full benefits of myth, and they seem to be right so far.

So, instead, I'll lay the philosophical groundwork from Lewis and then describe my feelings, my experience, upon first reading these chapters. (I think it is the closest to a story-incited ecstatic or mystical experience I've had.)

***********************************************************************************
Of all our readings so far, On Stories was probably my favorite, or at least the text where I was fully persuaded by almost every argument the author made. I think Lewis's strongest argument was that a truly great Story relies not on increased "degrees of danger" but on using "different kinds of danger" to "strike different chords from the imagination" (7).  

Lewis's discussions of a scene in the book King Solomon's Mines and an inverse scene in H.G. Wells's First Men in the Moon really resonated with me and reminded me of what I find most profound in my favorite novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: the extent to which the Being created by Dr. Frankenstein is both "shut in" and "shut out" from the world - "cold" and alone in an "eternal silence."

Scene in King Solomon's Mines - "being shut in" (9)
"At the end of Haggard's book...the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surround by the mummified kings of that land" (5). Lewis notes that this scene is powerful because, even though it lacks "sheer excitement" (5), it imparts to the reader "a sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death) - the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead" (6). 

Scene in H.G. Well's First Men in the Moon - "being shut out" (9) 
"Bedford finds himself shut out on the surface of the Moon just as the long lunar day is coming to a close - and with the day go the air and all heat" (9). Lewis interprets that "that airless outer darkness is important not for what it can do to Bedford but for what it does to us: to trouble us with Pascal's old fear of those eternal silences which have gnawed at so much religious faith and shattered so many humanistic hopes" (10). 

***********************************************************************************
Upon the first reading of Chapters 11-17 in Frankenstein (the Creation's own account of his birth and development), I: 

-Was sobbing through most of it 
-Felt physically cold 
-Felt afraid 
-Felt a deep aloneness / despondency
-Felt intense anger toward Dr. Frankenstein and other humans who rejected Dr. F's creation
-Felt that all this - cold, fear, aloneness, anger - was both horrid and beautiful at the same time 

Main thoughts: No one has ever been as alone (shut out and shut in) as Dr. F's creation. This is honestly the worst / saddest thing I've ever read, and thus it is the best thing I've ever read. 

***********************************************************************************

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#10 - Outside Reading 4 - Beyond Fake News

  I read a book about misinformation entitled, “Beyond Fake News” by Justin McBrayer. It dove into various topics about misinformation from its growth and spread to its effects and pervasive nature. In one of the chapters, McBrayer wrote about how news sources have incentives that rank higher on their list than sharing what is true. Their incentives for money which is gained only through selling peoples’ attention to advertisers is one such incentive. In order to hold peoples’ attention, they do any number of things. One thing that is common is to take a relatively unimportant piece of news and weave a very compelling narrative around it. People are easily sucked into stories, while plain information is not as enticing. This allows news sources to weave partially true tales that are enjoyable for readers and cause them to engage with them. Oftentimes engagement with narratives causes more important news to be less popular, and thus put forward less. Interesting how humans’ connecti...
Read more

Blog #13 Dr. Weston’s Philosophy of Life

In Lewis’ Out of A Silent Planet a certain physicist, Dr. Weston kidnaps Ransom and takes him aboard his spaceship headed towards Malacandra. Once Ransom awakes from his slumber and realizes that he is in a spaceship he begins to question the estranged physicist. With little resistance Weston begins to explain his philosophy of life. Ransom responded, “ you hold all the cards, and I must make the best of it. I consider your philosophy of life to be raving lunacy. I suppose all that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are justifiable in doing anything–absolutely anything–here and now, on the off chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.” Weston responded, “ Yes–anything whatsoever”. Weston resembles one of the great evils of mankind. That being the telos of evolution or in other words survival of the fittest. That is the basic idea the it is a means to an end and not ...
Read more

Blog #6: The "Little Abortive Secondary World" of Narnia: So Much Sexism! - Vickie GG

For the most part, I would argue that, in terms of mythopoeia, Lewis is a "successful sub-creator. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside." (Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," 60).  However, there is one thing that keeps booting me out of the world of Narnia, such that I'm "then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside": rampant sexism. I always seek and am granted re-entry back into Narnia after sexist moments in the texts, but it is a little frustrating to be so frequently ejected from the Secondary World. The question is: are these frequent ejections really Lewis's "fault" as writer / World creator, or is the shortcoming actually my own? In other words, is it fair to hold authors of past times to the social standards of our modern ti...
Read more