The Blip Report for Thursday, April 11th 2024
Frankenstein - part 2 - Shelley and Poe
Part 2 - Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe
Most of us think of Mary Shelley as the devoted wife of her late husband, Percy Shelley, who patiently and methodically collected, organized and published all of Percy’s writings for posterity. And so, she should be remembered for that. But we also think of her as the author of that frightening and eerie masterpiece – ‘Frankenstein’.
But before we look into that story itself, we should first read her later-added introduction to the story – something that could lead us into the mind of this genius, and also could prepare us for a journey into her story.
Mary begins her preface by discussing her childhood memories – growing up on the ‘blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay’ in Scotland, and how, in seeking to pass the time in such a place, she would scribble down her stories, her ‘castles in the air’ –
“the indulging in waking dreams – the following up trains of thoughts, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents”.
[Perhaps, Mary and I share a common, though distant, childhood linkage - while she grew up near the dreary shores of the Tay river in Scotland, I grew up in the wilds of Tay Township in Ontario]
And she reminisces of how this became her ‘eyry of freedom’ – her elevated and secluded dwelling, like the nest of a bird on the side of a cliff –
“the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy”.
But then, like us too perhaps when we have to grow up, she says that her life got busier, and that ‘reality stood in place of fiction’.
She now jumps ahead to the summer of 1816, when she and Percy were visiting Switzerland, and reading ‘some volumes of ghost stories’, and each one of their small group of friends and neighbors, were challenged to write their own ghost story. And so she tried to rediscover her former childhood pastime of creating a story, but each day it was always in vain –
“I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations”.
She began to speculate that ‘every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase’. And I thought how wonderfully she describes our penchant for coming up with witty one-liners, that she likens to Sancho Panza – that more earthly side-kick of the romantic Don Quixote. But then, she goes on to say something so profound, about her search for somewhere to begin:
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it”.
For those, like me, who don’t know the story of ‘Columbus and his egg’, here is how it was told by Girolamo Benzoni, in his book ‘History of the New World’ (1565):
“Columbus being at a party with many noble Spaniards, where, as was customary, the subject of conversation was the Indies: one of them undertook to say: ‘Mr. Christopher, even if you had not found the Indies, we should not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same that you did, here in our own country of Spain, as it is full of great men clever in cosmography and literature’.
Columbus said nothing in answer to these words, but having desired an egg to be brought to him, he placed it on the table saying: ‘Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all’. They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility.”
Columbus Breaking the Egg, by William Hogarth
Again, as Mary says ‘Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of molding and fashioning ideas suggested to it’!!!
And now, she tells how one day, various ideas were being discussed and one of these ideas was the nature of ‘the principle of life’ – ‘whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated’. That night she couldn’t sleep, but that:
“my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie”.
That was to be the rough pale glimpse of her frightful story – ‘of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’.
And in the morning, she began to make her dream into a story and she began writing - ‘It was on a dreary night of November’.
And this small first sentence reminded me of the beginning lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem the ‘Raven’ - ‘Once upon a midnight dreary … in the bleak December’.
While the months had changed, the beginning for this recalling of an idea, was just so similar, and I became convinced that it could not be mistaken as simply fortunate or accidental.
Then Mary tells us how Percy encouraged her to develop her story –
“and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.”
And Percy would write a preface for the initial publication of her story in 1818.
And Mary ends her preface by bidding her progeny to go forth - because it bears her loving remembrance of her husband:
“I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.”
… aahhh … never more!!!
Perhaps, Poe had read Mary’s preface (of 1831), and that nudged him into thinking of an idea for a poem, the ‘Raven’ (in 1845) … perhaps …