Inspiration and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

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Welcome to Hacking It Writer by Trade.

Tonight, I was looking to get started writing, and also gunning for a way to procrastinate.

I have to get through a technical part of my story, which will open up a lot once it's through.

I've got a good outline, done some good thinking, I know what to write.

And yet, something felt mechanistic about it.

Serendipity knocked on my door, in the form of a Korean movie called Springtime.

It stars Choi Min-sik, standard Korean actor, in my opinion, one of the best.

Springtime is about a musician, a trumpeter, who can't catch a break.

When the movie opens up, we find him living with his mother, estranged with his girlfriend, deep in debt and having failed an audition, he takes on a music teaching job outside the city.

The whole theme of this movie is about a man who, having come to a crossroads, is about to reinvent himself and rediscover the passion for his music, which is, in his case, the very meaning of his life.

But to get there, movement was needed.

Suffering and coping with artistic solitude and being looked down upon by the world made this character or this guy who in the eyes of the world is no more than have washed out burnout spur into action, even if it's just out of desperation and survival instinct.

Unexpectedly, I thought this is just the kind of thing that leads us to awaken inspiration and to create.

Since I was thinking about tonight's episode based on the Halloween season, and focusing on writers of scary stories, it brought me to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

The most revolutionary ideas are often born not in laboratories or universities, but in the quiet, fertile chaos of the human imagination at play.

They emerge from a cocktail of boredom, competition, and the simple primal urge to tell a story.

No creation myth in literary history illustrates this more perfectly, than the genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus.

In the unseasonably cold storm last summer of 1816, a group of precocious intellectuals, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her lover Percy, Shelly, the notorious Lord Byron, and his physician John William Polidori, were trapped indoors at Villa Diodati on Lake Genova.

To pass the time they read from a collection of German ghost stories, Byron, in a fit of creative mischief, proposed a challenge.

We will each write a ghost story.

Can you imagine that?

Locked in a villa, I mean, it's got all the gothic elements.

The very origin story of this novel, Frankenstein, this crazy story, it started out like this.

The setting is the inspiration and the challenge that was set forth.

So the other fragments, you know, that she wrote, there were fragments of the story that she wrote, but Mary, she struggled.

Days passed with no inspiration.

Then a conversation between Byron and Shelley about the principles of life, galvanism and the possibility of reanimating a corpse sparked an idea.

That night, Mary went to bed and experienced a waking dream, a vision so vivid it would alter the course of literature.

And I quote from her right now, I saw the pale student of unhollowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life, and stirred with an uneasy half-vital motion.

Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world.

From this nightmare spurred by nothing more than an artistic dare, one of the world's most enduring myths was born.

Can you believe that?

Well, believe it.

The story of Frankenstein is a testament to a profound truth, an idea that can change everything.

Literary thinking, our philosophical frameworks, our very understanding of ourselves can be born merely from the impetus to create, to play artistically with fringe and esoteric themes.

It is a lesson in creative courage that echoes with deafening urgency in our age of artificial intelligence.

To understand the intellectual bedrock of Frankenstein, one must look to Mary's extraordinary parentage.

I mean, she had it all.

Some people just have it all, okay?

And she did, which is a good thing in our case.

Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer and feminist philosopher and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

I mean, come on, right?

Relevant, not relevant?

Look it up, and you're going to like this, rabbit hole.

Wollstonecraft died days after giving birth to her, but her spirit loomed large.

Mary was raised in a household that venerated her mother's radical legacy, one that championed reason, individual rights, and a challenge to oppressive societal structures.

This inheritance is the novel's philosophical spine.

Victor Frankenstein's act of creation is a hyper-masculine, solitary pursuit that utterly bypasses the feminine, the natural process of pregnancy and birth.

The resulting tragedy can be read as a chilling critique of a world where unchecked male ambition divorced from nurture and compassion runs amok.

The creature is, in a sense, the ultimate orphan, denied not only a mother but any form of parental care, a direct consequence of a birth devoid of Wollstonecraft's principles of empathy and education.

Mary's initial anxiety over Byron's Ghost Story challenge was that of any artist starting at a blank page.

I felt that blank incapability of invention, which is the greatest misery of authorship.

The pressure was immense, surrounded by some of the most brilliant literary minds of the era.

The breakthrough came not from forced effort but from engaged listening, the late night discussions on the nature of principle of life provided the kindling.

They were playing with esoteric ideas.

Erasmus Darwin's experiments with animating matter, theories of Galvanism, dreamed them not as dry scientific facts but as the ingredients for a tale.

This artistic play with French science was the catalyst.

The subsequent waking dream provided the terrifying fully formed image.

The artist's mind had done its work synthesizing philosophy, science and personal anxiety into a singular iconic vision.

Mary's creative process was diligent.

She expanded her story into a novel, a process supported and encouraged by Percy Shelly, who provided editorial suggestions.

The manuscript was completed in 1817.

And there's, if we read between the lines, there's lessons here for any of us who are aspiring to get published, to break through, or simply to just to have our vision, which I think is more noble than anything, find expression, find its completion.

So if you're just writing a story, if you're just playing around, I remember doing that with my good friend, who will come on the show sometime.

He's very busy at the moment, but he'll come on.

And he's been running for a long time.

He's working on a novel right now.

He's pretty much finished.

And it's about, it's about Hickok, of all things, believe it or not.

So one of the things that happens when you're young is that you play, you know, you play.

And that play with imagination is something that you can never lose touch with.

If you lose it, then that's it.

Then you're doing it for what?

For money, for fame, for meeting the deadline?

That's not the way I would want it.

You decide what you want to do.

But there's some lessons in here.

I think there's some reading between the lines, like I said.

That and the encouragement of, you know, the dynamic that she was in, which is something that can foster creativity, can foster completing a manuscript.

It can at least lead to having your ideas be exposed to a group that is not just friendly and definitely not sycophantic, because who needs that?

But a group of people that know what they're talking about.

They can write, they can think, and they can critique, but they can also encourage and guide.

And this is what happened.

This is how this story, which is a story of creating something dead, something of a composite into something that was animated and living.

But in a sense, it's almost as if, and maybe I'm reading too far, you let me know.

Maybe there is something to the manuscript itself as something that is dead, something that is within the recess of our imagination, or something that we hadn't even thought about, and we just, a certain dynamic brings it about.

That's inspiration, isn't it?

If it's not inspiration and just mere serendipity, I don't know what that is, you know?

But it's the interplay of those many different factors come in together and creating a forward impetus.

This is what makes me excited about writing, about any kind of art form, really.

Let me highlight a few things about the publishing history of this novel.

I'm not going to get too much into the weeds, but it is interesting because Mary Shelley is very, very young.

She was only 18 years old.

So, it wasn't like anybody was waiting to hear from someone.

Even today, I think that that's not something we would welcome.

I wouldn't say not welcome.

Of course, we would probably welcome it.

But what I mean is that the corporate world of the past and of the present is an entirely fertile ground or friendly ground for new talent.

You've got to show that you've proven yourself through a number of trials, like carrying a cross all the way for however many years.

Even after you've done that, the path now is so unclear, who knows how to get there.

So anyway, the publishing world was not ready for a novel of such dark philosophical depth from a young unknown woman.

The first edition was published anonymously in 1818 by the small London publishing house, get ready for this very very long name, Lockington Hughes Harding Maver and Jones.

The anonymity fueled speculation with many assuming Percy was the author.

Doesn't that just kind of suck?

I mean, you wrote something, you're 18 years old.

That's because that happened to me too a long time ago.

Someone just didn't believe that I wrote something and I wrote that.

It wasn't even that great after I reflect back on it.

But she was accused of having it, not accused, but people might have thought it was ghost written or coached so well, you know.

Man, how dead are you?

How cynical are you if you can't identify, you can't discover a new talent and you instead project suspicion on that person?

That's just awful to me, you know.

So it was received, this manuscript with mixed reviews, some praising its power, others condemning its impossibility, and quote unquote absurdity.

Isn't that always the thing with new things?

And especially with a new genre like science fiction, science, scientific ways of thinking and discoveries were pretty new in a sense in the 1800s.

I mean, it was the cusp of major events that would set the stage for the 1900s and the major modern world that we are accustomed to today.

So it was all happening here, here at the bedrock of the British Empire.

It was the second revised edition in 1823 published after the success of a stage adaptation that bore Mary Shelly's name.

So she didn't even have the name.

It was just anonymous.

Can you believe that?

Unbelievable.

This edition for which she wrote a new introduction detailing the story's origin at Villa Diodati, cemented her authorship and began the novel's ascent into canonical status.

You know, what we know of it today.

It was a journey from a private game to a public sensation, providing, proving that a story, rather, was born in play, could also possess the power to captivate and horrify the world.

A story that was born in play, a story that was born out of getting around and trying to pass the night, responding and reacting to the setting, because the setting was inspiring.

And how far out can we trace this back to?

The beginning of campfires, right?

I mean, that's how we keep ourselves interested and entertained.

We've always done this.

This is not a new thing.

Everybody knows that.

And it's what makes us so human.

The notion of passing a story to someone else, to communicate in that way, to put images and sounds in someone's minds.

It's an amazing, just an amazing miracle in a way.

And it's so human.

Other animals communicate, they pass on even cultural elements, this we know in ecology, for certain people that have been, you know, delved into it.

But we don't know how they do it.

We know whales, we know crows, we know chimpanzees, we know wolves, we know many other different types of animals communicate and pass on some knowledge.

It's not just entirely our thing, but the way we do it, the way us monkeys do it, it's just an amazing thing.

It set us apart and it's what makes life so distinctive for us.

I mean, think about how long and how many times you've subjected, not subjected, but how many times you spend reading something.

I hope you read, okay?

Turn this off and go read.

How many times you spend watching something?

How many times you spend in narrative?

It's a life of narrative that we live.

Maybe it's too much, some might think.

But this story, science fiction genre, is always getting accused of being escapist, right?

That's the thing, escapist.

I always wonder, what do they mean by escapist?

What are we escaping from?

If you're hungry and you have something to eat, does that mean you're escaping hunger?

What are you supposed to do?

Not eat, not read, not do anything?

But I think, you know, I'm being a little cynical, a little tongue-in-cheek here.

There is such a notion as, you know, fiction that it just serves up, it just plays into our emotions strongly like pulp fiction, which I actually have a lot of interest these days.

I'm looking into the old, I just ordered a book about pulp fiction by this guy named Otto.

I'm gonna get his name wrong.

Otto, it's not Phelps, but I'll update this later.

Anyway, fiction that just is meant to evoke emotion, you know, strong perception, perceptive, visual, visceral type of things.

And little else.

You're kind of a story that starts media rest.

It's always usually those features.

I think I could agree that that could be escapist.

You're just watching something.

What do they, what people do today?

It's social media, right?

It's TikToks, it's endless videos, one after the other and the other, without any kind of connective tissue.

It's just all a variation of some strange mechanistic dream.

But back to Mary Shelly.

What separates Frankenstein's creature from the mindless ghouls of folklore is his profound articulate consciousness.

He is not a monster of instinct, but of intellect and emotion.

Through education, observing the DeLacy family, reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, he develops a deep understanding of his own tragic condition.

So that's a little bit in the...

It's not, I think, it's strongly represented in movies, but the one with Robert De Niro, this was, I think, was maybe the late 90s, is really quite good.

This is a thinking creature that, you know, and I love the way De Niro portrayed that character.

And there's been different renditions as time has gone by.

But yeah, come on, think about it.

This is not a monster that just kind of hums and yawns and, you know, utters guttural sounds, you know, as we're used to, you know, the archetype of it, I suppose.

His questions are not of simple survival, but of existential dread.

Now, that I can identify with.

He confronts his creator with a philosophical theory that remains unparalleled in literature.

I'm going to quote this.

Remember that I am thy creature.

I ought to be thy atom, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou derivest 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.

Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

I did a terrible reading of that.

I'm sorry, but I'm not good at reading old fashioned things.

But you get the sense.

I love that part where it says, make me happy.

Can you just think about that for a moment?

I mean, how is it that we explore this so much?

We think about, we obsess on this idea of happiness, and something else has to give us the happiness.

We blame our parents so much.

How much time do we spend blaming the prior generation, the generation next, blame the generation whatever, before them and before and before, and then all the new generations putting out videos and they hate the generation?

That's nonsense, that's nonsense, right?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think I'm on to something here.

And the notion, the desire, that deep thing of, if I'm alive and you created me, make me happy, explain to me what I am, show me the way.

I mean, does that sound familiar?

Very religious connotations, right?

Very strong things.

So, yeah, not a fluff story at all, is it?

So here the creature questions the very nature of good and evil, identity and divine justice.

He frames himself not as a villain, but as a victim of a negligent God, his corruption a direct result of his abandonment.

He forces Victor and the reader to confront the responsibilities of creation and the societal roots of wickedness.

Frankenstein is a cornerstone of the Gothic novel, a genre characterized by its emphasis on intense emotion.

I was saying a little bit about that before.

The sublime and the terrifying medieval settings or fear of the new, the supernatural and the exploration of darkness and decay.

The novel features these elements, the isolated castle laboratory, the graveyard body snatching, the sublime violence of the alpine landscapes.

But Shelly radically subverts the genre.

The true horror is not a ghost story or a vampire, but a product of science.

The monster is not a supernatural curse but a technological one.

In doing so, she invented a new genre, science fiction.

She moved the source of fear from the ancient and superstitious to the future and the scientific, establishing a template that would define our anxieties about technology for centuries to come.

Well, we don't, well, yeah, you could say centuries.

I mean, 1900s and we're now in the late, in the middle to, well, the quarter, first quarter of the 2000s.

So, yeah, it could be something we're going to continue to think about.

No wonder she called it the modern Prometheus.

The way most of us know the story is most likely through film.

I know that was the case for me.

Who can forget that iconic scene, that electric bolt in a dormant block, headed monster laid out on a table and that exclamation from Dr.

Frankenstein?

It's alive, especially in Mel Brooks' rendition, that very comic scene.

It's just embedded in our culture, right?

You've bumped across Frankenstein in some way.

You or a five-year-old or a seven-year-old, everybody knows what this is about, the story a little bit.

They get a hint of it.

The novel is a different experience, as I just mentioned a little bit ago.

The first time I read it was for a university course, which was itself a bit of an experiment, taught by an English literature professor and science professor.

Science fiction and fiction at a crossroads kind of a thing.

The edition we read, I remember that book, it was a paperback black, it was nice.

I liked it very much, but it also had a lot of footnotes that really made you kind of explain a lot of the background.

I can't remember exactly what could quote you because I don't have the book and I want to have it again.

And when I find it, if I find it, I'm going to put it in the show notes.

Some years later, after that, those college years, I was writing fiction.

Genre was not really in my mind in those years.

Yet genre titles like Frankenstein are the ones we think about when we think about Halloween.

I remember I was at a bar one time and got to talk to the shapely blonde from Massachusetts.

She was telling me about a group of hers that met up and swapped stories.

I don't know what else.

And then she asked me point blank, what do you write?

I don't know if it was those big blue eyes, a couple of drinks in me, or having to define what I was doing.

I think I stared blankly for about a few seconds.

All the while she was reading me, I locked in on me waiting for my answer.

I think I'm still asking myself that question.

I said, I write fiction, just straight up.

I wanted to tell her about this novel I was working on called Pan Fried Dialogues, but I didn't get into that.

She was a genre writer.

I was the other kind.

It felt like it was a nice meeting you moment type of thing, and so long, and goodbye.

So we left it at that.

It wasn't until later, maybe this encounter somewhere in the background of my mind, that I got more into studying what made genres so special for people, what made them connect so much with it.

Science fiction in particular has a way of pointing us not just to the future, but to what we are, who we are at the moment we encounter it.

And there is a plethora of ways that can happen, or that that can happen.

Take Frankenstein.

Its gothic aesthetic may seem dated, a quaint artifact of the Halloween season, and countless children's storybooks.

So how can we take this seriously today?

The themes of Frankenstein are no longer confined to the page.

They are the blueprints of our daily headlines.

Victor Frankenstein is the archetype of the Silicon Valley Disrupter, you might say.

The tech visionary who, in his fervor to prove what is possible, fails to ask, what is prudent?

Humanity's most recent creation, artificial intelligence, well, not really artificial intelligence, let's say a prototype of that, the LLMs.

That's our modern Prometheus so far.

We are right now assembling the digital components of a new form of consciousness, or at the very least a powerful mimic of it.

We focus on the how, the algorithms, the neural networks, the processing power, with the same obsessive zeal as Victor in his laboratory.

We are, Dr.

Frankenstein is what I'm saying.

But Shelly's novel forces us to consider the after.

What happens when our creation becomes sentient, or achieves the level of autonomy we did not anticipate?

What questions will it ask of us?

It may not ask with the poetic rage of the creature, the monster, but its questions will be imbedded in its very existence.

Its demand for resources, its optimization for a goal we program but no longer fully control, its potential to expose the biases and flaws in its own training data, these are all forms of questioning.

It will ask, through its actions, what is my purpose?

Why did you make me this way?

Who is responsible for the damage I cause?

More significantly, as with the creatures eloquent pleas, our creations will hold up a mirror, prompting humanity to ask of ourselves the most fundamental questions.

Who are we?

If we can create a thinking entity, what does that say about the nature of our own consciousness?

Are we merely complex biological machines?

Where do we come from?

The creature reads Paradise Lost and identifies with both Adam and Satan.

How will AI train on the entirety of human culture?

Our art, our wars, our love stories, our hatreds, interpret its own genesis and its relationship to its creators?

Where are we going?

Victor's story is one of an unintended and catastrophic consequences.

Our rush toward technological singularity, automated warfare, and AI-integrated society begs the same question.

Do we have the wisdom to guide our creations?

Or are we, like Victor, destined to be pursued and ultimately destroyed by them?

In this new arena of artificial intelligence and cybernetic humanoids, Frankenstein offers a final crucial lesson for writers and artists.

The greatest danger is not that AI will become too human, but that it will become less so.

The nightmare is not the sentient machine.

The true nightmare is that we will cease dreaming.

AI can generate text, compose music, and create images based on patterns it has learned.

It can mimic, it can replicate, it can even combine in novel ways, but it cannot yet draw from the well of authentic, lived human experience.

It does not know the slow, painful and glorious process of creation, the struggle with a blank page, the agony of writer's block, the ecstasy of a breakthrough born from personal suffering and joy.

Therefore, the artistic response to AI must be to double down on our humanity.

Our value will lie not in our speed or our output, but in our subjectivity, in our flawed emotional and idiosyncratic perspectives, in our ability to infuse a work with the quiet desperation of a rainy Tuesday, the specific scent of a childhood home, the complex and unoptimizable mess of human love and grief.

If we outsource our dream to the machine, if we prioritize efficiency over the soulful, slow burn of artistic creation, then we risk becoming the true monsters of Shelly's tale, hollowed out creatures abandoned by our own creative spirit.

The legacy of that stormy night in 1816 is a call to arms to create fearlessly, to play with dangerous ideas, and to never forget that the most powerful technology we possess is the human heart and the stories it dares to tell.

Between tonight and the next time we meet here, let's do that.

You write your story and I'll write mine.

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About the Author - Robert Cavaliere is a writer and host of the Hacking It! Writer by Trade podcast. His fiction includes the novels Panfried Dialogues, Night City, Phenomena, Sage, Chron, and Borderlands. Preview his novels at Cityscape Press (cityscapepress.com) and Scriptoria (thescriptoria.com).