Tonight's program, What is Monster, What is Human?
Address these two questions central to Mary Shelley's novel.
I'm going to tackle the first, what is monster and
leave the rest of you humanists and scientists to figure out what is human.
I have only ten minutes so I'm gonna get straight to the point and
state my argument.
Mary Shelley, living in a moment when aesthetics crossed paths
with science, portrays a new kind of monstrosity in Frankenstein,
one that is conceived in vitalist terms as an excess of vital power.
Romantic monstrosity, as I've called it, can be found elsewhere in contemporary
literature, from the Byronic vampire to Keats' Lamia.
But Frankenstein is the era's classic text for understanding monstrosity.
And the creature who comes to life in it ruptures the very fabric of that text
with his own frightening vitality to emerge as the paramount
monster not only of the period but of the past 200 hundred years, and
our own post modern and possibly post human age.
The question that motivates my argument is this, why is it that Victor Frankenstein,
having spent countless hours in his lab with his creature, arranging his parts,
sewing them together, sees his creation as a monster only when it comes to life?
Only when the dull yellow eye of the creature opens does Victor run away,
rejecting him categorically and irreversibly.
Now the most important theoretical orientation for
monstrosity at the intersection of natural philosophy and
esthetics is Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.
In his critique of aesthetic judgment,
Kant examines the effect of magnitude in producing an idea of sublimity.
And we all know that the creature is larger than life.
He is super human in strength and agility.
He's able to scale mountain precipices and glaciers, and
he moves faster than human legs can run.
He is also 8 feet tall, which is taller than tallest human of Mary Shelley's era,
the so called Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, whose skeleton
now stands in John Hunter's Museum of Anatomical Monstrosities in London.
Kant argues that for
an aesthetic judgment of sublime to be pure, it cannot be connected to purpose.
He says we must point to the sublime not in products of art, for
example buildings, columns where both the form and
the magnitude are determined by a human purpose.
Nor in natural things whose very concept carries with it the determinate purpose.
For example, animals with a known determination in nature, but
rather in crude nature.
And even in it, only in so far as it carries with it no charm nor
any emotion aroused by actual danger.
That is merely insofar as crude nature contains magnitude.
The effect of sublimity is increased with magnitude, according to Kant.
And it is equally diminished by purposiveness,
which is essential to a judgement of the beautiful.
Crude nature, as in the kind of arctic expanses that Robert Walton seized
from his ship or the lofty and profound mountain ravines, where Victor argues with
his creature can be sublime in producing an idea of unbounded power.
But that idea must always be contained by, or
subjected to an intuition of the mind's own power to apprehend it.
But magnitude can veer out of sublimity and
into monstrosity when it becomes attached to purpose.
Kant argues that monstrosity results when there is a purpose, whether natural or
human but when that purpose is defeated,
exploded from within by the power of its own magnitude.
An object, he says, is monstrous if by its magnitude
it nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept.
Kant's third critique connects the critique of aesthetic judgement to
the critique of teleological judgement through the concept of purposiveness.
And organic, unifying principle that relies on a vitalist understanding of
the natural world as self-generating and self-forming, self-shaping epigenetic.
Kant credits the German Physiologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,
whose treatise on the Bildungstrieb, the formative drive,
was vastly influential in conceptualizing life as power.
The ability of matter in an organized body, he says,
to take an organization Blumenbach calls a formative impulse.
And Kant adds that it is distinguished from the merely formative force that all
matter has.
But it stands under the higher guidance and direction,
as it were, of the formative force.
So the formative force or power
mechanically carries out the self-shaping processes began by the formative impulse,
but it is the greater power, and by implication the greater danger.
It is self-propagating and it can be detached from the originating impulse.
Should it get out of hand, it can know no bounds and will not be restrained by any
purpose towards which that formative impulse might have urged it.
So while formative impulses always teleological,
the formative force responsible for executing it
has the potential to defeat it and when it does, the result is monstrous.
Okay, a debate within the scientific public culture of Shelley's day
is an acknowledged source on the novel.
And its participants were Shelly, her husband's physician
William Lawrence and Vitalist John Abernethy who was Hunter's student.
Abernethy began by endorsing the vitalism of his teacher John Hunter.
And Hunter was Blumenbach's contemporary and an influence on the latter.
So in many ways, it was John Hunter, okay?
Who captured poor Charles Byrne's skeleton and put it in his museum,
who was the prime mover of romantic era vitalism, as well as the concept,
the theory of monstrosity as excess vital power.
In his study of organic monsters, Hunter theorized what he called the principle of
monstrosity as a force of vitality run amuck.
It is not clear that Hunter realized the paradigm shift he was setting in motion.
He starts out from a classical definition of monstrosity as deformity
which would be disproportioned, deficient, supernumerary of ill-assembled parts.
He says, nature being pretty constant in the kind and
number of the different parts peculiar to each species of animal,
as also in the situation, formation and construction of such parts.
We call everything that deviates from that uniformity a monster,
whether in crystallization, vegetation, or animalization.
So monstrosity is understood as a deviation from uniformity but
one can see that Hunter is already thinking about deviation in terms that
are less static than dynamic, less anatomical than developmental biological.
The devious principle of monstrosity must be sought not in the animal, but
within animalization, a term originating in the 18th century
which represents the animal in the process of becoming.
So again, purposiveness.
There must be some principle, Hunter says, for
those deviations from the regular course of nature, and
he calls this principle the great principle of monstrosity.
Lawrence, meanwhile, argued that a higher power responsible for
vitality might exist, but it cannot be discovered,
it could not have been discovered through the practice of legitimate science.
A vital principle such as the one Hunter believed existed and
that he believed also drived monstrosity.
He says quote, could never have been brought to life by the labors of
the anatomist and the physiologist.
An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered
amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room.
But this is precisely where,
precisely the filth in which Frankenstein discovers the principle of life.
Victor speaks of the lab in which his creature comes to life as the workshop
of filthy creation.
And this kind of filth characterizes his creature in his essence.
He says, when I looked on him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and
talked, my heart sickened.
His filthiness is his flesh come to life.
And, more specifically, from Victor's point of view,
flesh disoriented from purpose.
Victor complains of the filthy demon to whom I had given life and
admits it was indeed a filthy process in which I was engaged.
Like the modern Prometheus Shelley calls him, Frankenstein has grasped the spark of
life from the exalted regions of supernatural study and
set it loose in the blood and filth of the dissecting room.
And in doing so he has detached it from its purpose in nature.
So finally and this is where I conclude.
In Shelly's novel, Victor has set loose a kind of self propagating power that
horrifies him with its results.
Before the creature comes to life,
he comes to contemplates with delight the prospect
of a new species propagating itself from the spark of being he has bestowed.
But once the filthy mass begins to move,
the idea of its self propagation becomes odious.
The vectors of that self-propagation extend temporally as the creature extends
his own life through time.
And Victor lives in daily fear lest he should perpetuate some new wickedness
which given Victor's view of the creature, is a kind of self-perpetuation.
Those vectors extend spatially and the possibility that the creature will
produce more of himself, others like himself.
Victor dreads the idea that a race of devils will be propagated on the Earth,
which might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and
full of terror.
So the object upon which Victor has bestowed so much time explodes with life
into a self-propagating fleshly filthy mess.
He is the prototypical romantic monster.