2.24.2005

Creator and creation: part 2

In a past blog I mentioned that I wanted to talk about four stories (book or film versions, or both) which I thought contained some extraordinary insights into the concept of morality. One of those stories is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, of which I'm only concerned with the original novel. I'm familiar with the classic Boris Karloff monster of course, since he's graduated from the oftentimes ephemeral world of film and taken his place in the canon of mythological entities alongside the likes of Dracula, Sherlock Homes, and Tarzan. I'm not interested in that guy, however; he's not what Mary Shelley had in mind, but rather what some early film-maker had in mind. Kenneth Branagh's modern version with Robert De Niro is more faithful to the novel. Unless a great deal of sympathy for the monster is generated, the story loses its point. The Frankenstein monster is a tragic hero turned reluctant villain, a gentle spirit trapped in a repulsive form who winds up behaving the way in which the prejudices and fears of others seem dead-set and determined for him to act. Rather (but not quite) like Shakespeare's Richard III, who explains the precise reasons for his villainy in some of the most memorable iambic pentameter ever penned:


But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.


Of course, it could be that tricky Dick is just making excuses, but I think there is a great deal more to it. Now, I have no desire to make excuses for criminal behavior. No matter what pressures a person might be under, due to the idiocy of others or the fickle hand of chance, one must still be held responsible for one's actions in a civil society. I suppose some provision ought to be made for people with certain types of mental disorders, who literally cannot help what they say or do; but generally speaking, if you willfully interfere with the rights of another person, you should fully expect to have your rights interfered with as well. With Shakespeare's Richard, we don't see the gradual transformation of what was, presumably, a sound and decent character into that of a villain. We get the straightforward, but poetically gorgeous, rationalizations of a criminal right from the start. With Frankenstein, Mary Shelley masterfully develops the monster's character, largely in the form of an extended first-person narrative, from the innocence of his first awakening all the way through to his inevitable fall.

There are actually two massive themes at work in her novel (three really, but I doubt I'll be able to touch on the third one in this blog), though these themes are related to one another. First there is a study into the possible constitution and manifestation of a criminal mentality (or at least one type in particular): a completely innocent and well-meaning individual who can have no place in society because of his horrifying physical appearance, who discovers no way to act apart from re-acting, who becomes possessed with feelings of self-loathing and dread, because he seems to engender nothing apart from loathing and dread in others. His only friend is a blind man, a man who makes value judgments without the benefit of sight. I might be disposed to consider this a rather shallow and even cliched theme, were it not for the fact that my own experiences in life recently have made it a great deal more interesting to me than it was when I first read the book; but more on that later.

The second theme, which is related to the first, is the relationship between creator and creation. This is especially important, since many religiously-minded people seem unable to grasp the crudity of a religion which effectively
makes a criminal out every person ever born, people who revel in this universal fault and upon which they seem insatiably fixated. I believe there is a lesson for religiously-minded people in Mary Shelley's novel. After-all, the good doctor regrets his creation almost instantly, because he's smart enough to know that his creation will know nothing but torment, an existential fear, anger, and disgust. He is repulsed by this thing he brought into being, calls it a "wretch", a "filthy demon", just as God is repulsed by his creatures. The doctor is also smart enough to take moral responsibility for his monster's actions, just as God does, who sacrifices himself to himself, in the most poignant display of guilt ever recorded in the annals of literature.

There is a parallel of sorts between the two stories which justifies, or tries to justify, the reason for the creator in both tales to punish his creation. In the novel, the monster strangles Frankenstein's brother William, thereby sealing the doctor's commitment to destroying the thing he has made. He knows that he has a primary part in the murder and sets about seeing justice done, of bringing to rest something which ought never to have been commenced, an abomination which is the result of his own pride and vanity. In the old Hebrew scriptures, Man (meaning the man and the woman) disobeys God by eating the forbidden fruit, a crime for which man and woman, as well as each and every one of their ancestors until the end of time, bid farewell to innocence forever. Because of one act of disobedience, humanity is forever guilty. And God will destroy his creation, just as Frankenstein wills to do, or at least the greater majority of humankind. Some few he saves, on the condition that they recognize the sacrifice made by Christ and are abundantly grateful because of it, and on the condition that they dedicate their lives to the Father who made them, the loving creator who designed them with two broken legs and holds them at fault for falling down, the merciful Lord who offers a beautiful pair of crutches to all, but gives them only to those who shamefully admit that they really deserve no better than to crawl along the ground.

And I do believe (speaking in the context of the story) that the sacrifice of Christ is compelled more by guilt than by mercy, or love. God knows that the fall of Man is his fault. He has created Man with a plethora of fundamental weaknesses which render him unable to redeem himself. Sure, he gives Man a choice, but he already knows what choice Man will make. Man is helpless. Guilt leads God to his sacrifice, but only by gratefully acknowledging the magnanimous nature and degree of this sacrifice can man be redeemed. The story is interesting and does have some virtues, in that it defines the responsibilities of a creator in regard to his creation, but those virtues are overshadowed due to the natural feelings of fealty and loyalty on the part of the child for the parent, feelings which have effectively removed culpability from God and placed it firmly onto the shoulders of humanity.

Gratitude is fine, but not at the expense of reason and decency. The most powerful force in theology and apologetics at the present time seems to be Calvinist in nature, and
Calvinism has completely removed any and all traces of culpability and responsibility from God. How any entity which is refered to as a father figure can somehow manage to be spared even the tiniest shred of responsibility for the actions and destinies of his children escapes me altogether. If you are elected for salvation, it is entirely because of God's intercession on your behalf; if you are damned for eternity, it's your fault, absolutely and utterly. The Calvinists have presented a nightmarish universe for your enlightenment and edification. No matter how gallantly you struggle to obtain some sense of autonomous self-worth and independence, you will either be saved or damned, purely at the whim of God, and you will not even be granted the option of extinction. Doctor Frankenstein is not nearly so malign a father as to will an unfathomably painful and interminable existence for his creation. No fictional character of any kind ever descended to such moral bankruptcy.

In Shelley's novel, there is some wonderful dialogue between the creature and his creator; there is a fine line drawn between love and contempt, between fealty and rebellion, between guilt and blame; but I don't suppose very much is resolved in the end. At one point, the monster asks his creator, "How dare you sport thus with life?" Good question, that. He goes on, after his maker tries to kill him:

"Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it....Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend..." (Emphasis mine.)

When the monster tells his story, a great deal of his narrative draws parallels between himself and the Biblical creation story. So it's not too terribly surprising to discover that the creature has but one request of his maker: a mate. A companion, just as hideous as he is (for any more than that and she would not tolerate him), with whom he might be allowed to spend the rest of his unnaturally allotted days: another parallel, but skewed of course, between himself and Adam. The interesting thing is that Eve was created as a gift from God, seen by the latter as necessary for Adam's complete well-being and happiness (never mind how absurd it is to think that an omniscient God would not have the concept of gender clearly worked out already); in the novel, the doctor (at first) reluctantly agrees to the monster's request, one one hand to prevent any further killings, and also, perhaps, because despite his revulsion at the idea of placating his murderous creation, his rational mind tells him that he owes this one debt to him? The creator owes the creation, and is obliged to do his bidding, because he knows he has wrongfully given him existence in a world to which he can never accustom himself, through no fault of his own; but eventually Frankenstein realizes that he cannot go through with his promise. His creature takes revenge again, this time on his maker's new bride, and once again the doctor seeks to end what should never have begun, but ultimately fails. God creates Man for an idyllic life of innocence and communion with him, but he is smart enough to know that Man will not be able to function for long in this simplistic utopia, by virtue (and it is a virtue) of Man's nature as a curious, venturing, seeking, probing, disobedient, valuing, enterprising, proud, and ambitious being.


***********

To return to something I mentioned above: my life's experiences quite recently have made the story of Frankenstein a bit more poignant. There is a great deal of tension between myself and certain people I work with, due to the fact that my sometimes deplorable and pathetic lack of social skills has made it difficult for my true and benevolent character to show itself. I wish absolutely no one any harm whatsoever. I have never harmed anyone, never hit anyone: except my older brother, at which point he hit me back, harder. I despise people who can harm others without remorse. Apparently there was some talk around the workplace that I am mean to my children. One impertinent and obnoxious person actually brought this to my attention, as if it might be something I was proud of. I quickly set her straight, and was not immoderately indignant and hurt. Maybe the bald head has something to do with it? Or the squint that I have sometimes because I refuse to wear my glasses at work and can't stand the idea of contact lenses? Or because I work mostly with women and am horribly shy around them, out of profound reverence and regard, if only they knew it?

The act of nonchalance is something I've perfected after forty years, but it's merely one of my self-defense mechanisms. I was once terribly hurt for allowing myself to be deluded by the innocent flirting of a woman, and resolved never again to allow that to happen. I think what I project, at least to people I do not know well, which is most of the women at work with whom I do not directly interact, is a callous and unfriendly lack of interest, an aloofness which is not some kind of sexy mystique but simply an annoyance. I offend some people, I think, by the very act of not wanting to offend them. I've been told many times that I look too stern and serious; I've been told that I am intimidating, that sometimes I scare people. I am sometimes quick to anger (and what makes me angry is almost always my own clumsy and disorganized self), and I bark; but my bark is far, far worse than my bite, which is non-existent. There is no bite.
I'm harmless.

I'm actually quite a gentle person, with an enormous love and respect for the value of human life and liberty. So imagine how it strikes me to find that some people think of me as mean and bitter, a father who frightens his children? It's offensive. It hurts me and it makes me angry. The same way it makes me angry to think of
Percy Shelley's children being taken away from him (the great and famous poet, husband of Mary Shelley), for no other reason than that he was an atheist. It's disgusting to think that less than three centuries ago people were so steeped in superstition that they could regard a man as incapable of being a decent father simply because he lacked belief in some ancient tribal deity. I've wondered if some of the prejudices directed towards me are the result of the fact that I am an atheist. I don't go about announcing it, but I don't hold it as some filthy secret either. I'm proud of it. I regard it as an indication of sanity. The United States is on the verge of another religious revival, I believe, due to the fear of terrorism, the deliberate razing of the wall between church and state by our current President, the deliberate polarization of Us and Them, Us being the fortunate Christian Americans with our God-given freedom (now there's an oxymoron), and Them being the evil and degenerate Terrorist demons, who just happen to be primarily Islamic.

With the power of the Internet as a tool for dissemination, and with the seemingly inexhaustible capacity of Americans to jump on one media-driven cause after another (war on drugs to war on terror, easy jump), I don't think it's too far-fetched to worry about what might be in store for the rest of this century. I say worry because I feel that our civil rights will be threatened if enough people here become convinced that we are involved in a
Holy War. A great many of God's people aren't as concerned about preserving the concept of rights as we godless folk are, because they are sincerely convinced that Jesus will come trampling through the clouds any day now to whisk all the good lambs off to Heaven and sweep the nasty little goats into a great big hole in the ground, kicking and screaming, gnashing their teeth (not the Christian Reconstructionists, however, who believe that Christ's return will be far in the future. They had to postpone Judgment Day, since they are smart enough to know that it would take quite a good deal of time for them to establish the loony theocracy they envision).

At any rate, this all ties in to my feelings of increasing alienation, and to the story of Frankenstein, and to the old Hebrew scriptures, in some way or another. I realize my take on the novel is in some aspects similar to others and in other aspects very dissimilar. The third theme I mentioned earlier will have to be delved into in another blog, since it seems like the one which receives the most attention, probably because it's the most obvious: that of man playing God and suffering the consequences, or the dangers of reckless scientific, or technological, experimentation.

2.05.2005

Emperor, partially dressed

Quite a while back, maybe two years ago, I made some negative comments about John Ashbery at the Poetry Free-For-All. I called him "a sham", regardless of what Harold Bloom might say about him to the contrary. A few months after that I wrote a sort of apologetic post about Ashbery, which was both quite literally an apology for those comments as well as an attempt at a literary (insert laughter here) apologetic for his work, though in no sense did I lose the strong reservations I had, and still have, in regard to his esthetic approach to the craft of poem-making. I still think Ashbery's main body of work is, in an obvious sense, to literature what water is to scotch tape. If communication is the main purpose of any type of literature, and I suppose it ought to be, then Ashbery's poems don't function well in a literary sense, and, in some cases, do not function at all.

But there is an undeniable art to his poems, which are frequently lyrical and often beautiful, at least in a concrete sense, in that the words themselves have a pleasing sound and feel to them. Without that I suppose he wouldn't have achieved much. I remember reading that Auden, who picked Ashbery's first book for a literary prize of some distinction*, later claimed to have comprehended virtually nothing in the poems. Not surprising, because at first glance, and even after a few run-throughs, the poems seem highly competent, and they certainly appear to be fine works. It's only after repeated readings that one begins to get that creeping feeling of having been suckered.

After that initial feeling, some readers either give up or keep reading him anyway, out of some sort of nagging jealousy maybe, wondering what in the hell everyone else is discovering in those ornate fakes. Why the hell is this man famous? Why the hell is this man championed by one of the most powerful critics in academia? What the fuck?

I can't speak for others, but for me there was a third phase. I had reached a point at which I was convinced that Ashbery was a sham, that his poems were nonsense served up as an elite type of modern poetry, not blatant nonsense, like some of the work of a fellow "New York School" poet Kenneth Koch, but a tricky and deceptive nonsense. I believed that he represented everything that was rotten esthetically (and more broadly philosophically) in modern art and literature. He was the enemy of Reason. He was the Great Satan, the Naked Emperor who purposefully destroyed lines of communication, purposefully frustrated the passing down of ideas and ideals, and who was wrongly glorified because of it. He was the Laureate of Doubt and Uncertainty. The perfect and fitting literary icon for a thoroughly fucked-up age.

Then I made some public comments about Ashbery (though this was that very minor-leaguey, arm-chair-quarterbacky, back-seat-drivery, Internety public we're talking about. Yes, this one here.)

After that I went back to Ashbery's poems to make sure I couldn't get anything out of them, at which time, of course, I began to get something out of them. You see, that's the trick with Ashbery. You have to go into his poems with both barrells, ready to shoot them down for their incomprehensibility. It's exactly through a kind of "
negative capability" that the poems begin to reveal themselves, and you have to realize that two years ago I would have shot myself for typing the first part of this sentence. I won't claim, though, that the poems necessarily succeed, at least not in the way that a Frost poem, or a Tennyson poem, succeeds, though a handful do come close; rather, they work, they have a kind of utility to them, in at least two ways: first, they force the reader to pay attention, and they are on extremely intimate terms with that reader, each and every one of them, in a way that not even Billy Collins can manage; and they also create images, sometimes in a vivid and traditional sense, but more often in a kind of surrealistic, psychadelic sense, in that they cause a definite mental disintegration which is on one hand extremely frustrating and on the other hand a valid and powerful imitation of certain actual day-to-day conscious states and dream-states.

One Ashbery line leads inexorably into the next, and he often uses
enjambment, not to create an enlightening or informative surprise, but to cause still more bewilderment. It's almost as if he allows the poem to veer out of control, or into a variety of tangents, in the very same way our thoughts sometimes seem to run. Not that this is a desireable thing, mind you. I am sure that certain highly intelligent and disciplined minds experience this kind of thing only very rarely, or not at all; but in my case, I go through it all too often. Sometimes, five minutes in the life of my poor little brain is probably very similar to an Ashbery poem.

Nonetheless, I do believe that the highest function of art should be to portray things as they can be, or ought to be, and not necessarily what they are. The latter's just journalism, really, though certainly there's a place for graphic realism in art, as well as for
Romanticism. I am also sure that quite often the two things mix well together. In that respect, where does Ashbery stand? As a poetic voice for various and sundry, conscious and unconscious, mental states, he's second to none; but what else can we get out of him? He seems to have virtually no political ideas to convey, and if he has, they have thus far sailed right on over this reader's melon. Philosophy in general? I wonder if Ashbery might be some type of Idealist, since his descriptions of the external world and physical objects are often ostensibly unconnected with one another, or with anything in particular; but I have no right to an opinion in that matter, really. It's just an observation, probably worth nothing.

I don't know. What does he represent? Who does he represent? Maybe everyone, maybe no one. He's not a downer, like so many modern poets. He doesn't whine, complain, campaign, or pontificate; he isn't a mouthpiece for anyone, he's never corny or angry or defiant or sentimental, he's famous, but he's never vain. What the fuck?

I might come back to this at a later date. Or, at a different time when dreams come after, in which case, for the time being at least held or disembodied, all is manipulated and remembered, although inclined, as in the cranial beam of deadlights, to a place which is where we travel and where we are.


*too lazy to look it up