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HISTORY COMES TO LIFE
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JessicaRiskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016)
RobertMitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
BenjaminMorgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2017
Extract
“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” So recalled Victor Frankenstein, reflecting on the creative act. By its end, however, Frankenstein has less to do with the scientist's creativity and more to do with his monster's. This is why Mary Shelley inverts this Promethean moment in the book's final scene, as the monster stands over the lifeless body of his creator. Frankenstein's last words mark the inversion: his “instruments of life,” he laments, had given rise to “an instrument of mischief,” a creature animated by a desire for human fulfillment. To live may mean behaving instrumentally, but some instruments get the better of you. Frankenstein learns this lesson the hard way; but does his monster? He echoes his creator's words—“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief”—and promises his own end, when he will “collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame.” One's frame is mere matter, but such an act is proof of the life that animates it. On the cusp of death, then, the monster lives. Frankenstein reminds us that the question “What is life?” can only be answered by experiment, from the medical horrors that gave the monster life to the fatal act with which he plans to abandon it. At life's end, as at its beginning, creator and creation combine; we become our instruments, or they surpass us.
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References
1 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 2 vols. (London, 1823), 1: 97, 2: 265, 2: 277, 1: 98.
2 For more on these debates in the nineteenth century see Strick, James E., Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar. A new overview (still forthcoming) is Lehoux, Daryn, Creatures Born of Mud and Slime: The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation (Baltimore, 2017)Google Scholar.
3 See Truitt, E. R., Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For an overview of the period and its wonders see Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.
5 See Voskuhl, Adelheid, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Foucault, Michael, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973), 127–8Google Scholar.
7 For an overview of these collecting practices see Findlen, Paula, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar.
8 See, for example, Radin, Joanna, Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roosth, Sophia, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 The most straightforward statement of this research program is Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (London, 2013)Google Scholar.
10 Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 1/146 (1984), 53–92, esp. 61–2Google Scholar. See also Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991).
11 One exception to this binary is a recent analysis of Schrödinger's impact across both the sciences and the humanities. See Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Harrison, Robert Pogue, Hendrickson, Michael R., and Laughlin, Robert B., What Is Life? The Intellectual Pertinence of Erwin Schrodinger (Stanford, 2011)Google Scholar.
12 Schrödinger, Erwin, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (New York, 1945), 68Google Scholar.
13 Canguilhem, Georges, Knowledge of Life, ed. Marrati, Paola and Meyers, Todd, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York, 2008), 22Google Scholar.
14 Shelley, Frankenstein, 1: 98.