Friday, April 15, 2011

Frankenstein and Life

We saw Frankenstein by the British National Theater in a film version at SIFF last week. I’m afraid it’s leaking into my writing. That’s not inappropriate, but I don’t want to let it color the work too much. The play and the book are about the creation of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the responsibility of altering life. (I really need to read the original Shelley.) These are themes I’ve been thinking and writing about for a while now, from my dissertation to my article on species to teaching Aristotle’s On the Soul. It’s exciting to teach that text now because it provokes us to discuss the relation between life and non-life which seems especially pressing in relation to current biological and technological innovation. (And that’s very trendy even to passive students.)

I couldn’t help but imagine that the Creature spoke for, say, a child who’d been created by artificial insemination by, say, two men from the genes of different men or women. How would the child feel about the nature of this conception? Would she feel “unnatural”? Brought about into a situation that necessarily marked her as different? Of course, the Creature succeeds insofar as it speaks for all children: Why parents have you brought me into the world only to allow me to suffer it? Why am I not like everyone else? Why have you brought me to life if only to die? At the end of the play, the Creature asks Victor who’s near death what death is? And will he die too? Even Victor, the genius, doesn’t know.