Week 39 marked an important milestone in the humanities crash course: we only have one quarter of the year left to go. I expect to diverge often from Gioia’s syllabus in this last part, since I’ve already read many of his recommendations. That divergence started this week.
Not that his suggestions weren’t worthy: you can’t beat Emily Dickinson, The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, Bartleby, the Scrivener, Moby-Dick, Walden, Huckleberry Finn, and Song of Myself. The issue is I’d already read all of these except the works by Poe.
So I kept Poe, jettisoned the rest, and went in a different direction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This novel fit Gioia’s page constraint and paired well with Poe. It’s also an undisputed classic that’s spawned many offspring. And speaking of those, for the first time in the course, I watched a cinematic adaptation of the week’s literary work.
That proved a mistake — but more on that below.
Readings
I’ll make a few brief comments about the Poe, and then devote the rest of this post to Frankenstein. As mentioned above, I read The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher. I’d heard of both (mostly through their numerous offspring, including a Lou Reed album) but hadn’t read them. Both proved suitably moody and creepy.
The Raven is a short narrative poem centered on the titular bird as a proxy for a dead lover. Even though I’m not a fan of verse, I enjoyed this poem. The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story that leans into the dual meaning of “house” in English as both a building and a venerable family. In Usher, both are vividly (morbidly?) decrepit: this story would set the tone for future haunted houses. (The Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World is clearly inspired by this work.)
On to Frankenstein, a “media property” whose offspring are (unfortunately) much better known than their source: a 1819 novel by Mary Shelley (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who we read a few weeks ago.) Shelley wrote it as a challenge among friends to see who could produce the best ghost story. She was only 19, but the result is surprisingly mature and deep.
Because the offspring are more popular than the novel, I’ll lay out its plot in some detail. (Spoiler alert!) The narrative unfolds as several nested stories. The first level starts when an expedition to the arctic finds a desolate man pursuing another man across the ice. He’s brought on board, where he tells his tale to the ship’s captain.
The lost man is Victor Frankenstein, member of a well-to-do Swiss family. After immersing himself in old alchemy texts, Frankenstein becomes obsessed with creating life. He builds a creature by scavenging parts from cadavers and animals and brings it to life in his apartment — only to immediately regret it. He flees in horror. When he returns, the creature is gone.
Frankenstein tries putting the creature out of his mind. Then, he receives a distressing letter: his younger brother has been murdered. On his way back home, he sees the creature and immediately suspects him. But townspeople blame a beloved household servant instead; she’s found guilty and hanged.
Frankenstein’s conscience is killing him: his creature is now responsible for the death of two people close to him. But he can’t tell anybody, since they wouldn’t believe him. He goes on a hike, and runs into the creature, who demands an audience with him. The creature wants to tell Frankenstein about his brief, unusual life so far. (Yes, the creature speaks — and is incredibly articulate. I do mean incredibly: his eloquence is one of the work’s flaws.)
Thus starts a third story-within-the-story. After leaving the apartment, the creature learns about the world. He’s mistreated by people, who are repulsed by his deformities and huge frame. Eventually, he hides in a cabin close to a small family: a blind old man, his daughter, son, and the son’s foreign girlfriend. The creature observes them as they go about their daily lives.
Therein starts a fourth level story-within-a-story: the creature tells Frankenstein about the family’s adventures. I won’t get into that sub-sub-plot here, but the important bit is that the creature learns to speak and read. He desires human connection — even as he starts to realize human society isn’t entirely fair. He decides to befriend the family, starting with the old man, since he can’t see him.
Alas, the children walk in as the old man is talking with the creature. Horrified, they run him off. He returns the next day to the now-deserted cabin. Rejected by humanity, he decides to hate mankind. He burns the cabin and tracks down Frankenstein, whose journal he took from the apartment. There’s something he wants from his creator: a female creature to be his companion.
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Illustration of Frankenstein and his monster, taken from an abridged version of Mary Shelley’s novel, appearing in The Birmingham Post-Herald, January 16, 1910, via Wikimedia
Frankenstein is reluctant, but eventually promises to build a female. He soon regrets this promise and procrastinates. He agrees to marry his beloved cousin Elizabeth, but first travels to the British Isles to start his “project” — only to immediately realize it’d be a terrible mistake. He destroys the half-completed female. Incensed, the creature swears to see Frankenstein again on his wedding night.
Naively, Frankenstein interprets this as a threat to himself. (Again, another weak spot in the story.) Meanwhile, the creature kills Frankenstein’s best friend and frames him for the murder. Frankenstein returns home and marries Elizabeth, but the creature strangles her on their wedding night. And thus we return to the first level of the story: Frankenstein is pursuing the creature to avenge his friends and family members. But he’s at the end of the line and dies. The creature takes the body, promising to burn it and himself.
As you can see, this is a more complicated and heady story than the “making a monster in a lab” cliché most of us associate with Frankenstein. (At least I did, until I read this thought-provoking and entertaining novel.)
Audiovisual
Music: Gioia recommended music by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Frankly, I didn’t do my homework here either: these are two of my favorite artists in any genre and I’m already familiar with their work.
Arts: Grandma Moses. This is the kind of work I’ve seen called “naive art,” although that does it a disservice. These are charming paintings and the artist is an inspiration to late bloomers: she started at 78!
Cinema: I stupidly chose to watch James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), an adaptation of a play adapted from Shelley’s novel. The film stars Boris Karloff as the creature — and he is by far the best thing about it.
I’ll be blunt: this is the worst adaptation of any work I’ve experienced in any medium. (And for the record, I’ve played the 1982 Pac Man board game.) Excepting Karloff, the acting in the movie is atrocious. And where the novel goes deep on agency, ethics, and regret, the movie goes strictly for scares and melodrama. Which is to say, Shelley is this monster’s most unfairly and thoroughly gored victim.
Yes, I know we must mind context when analyzing works. This movie is 94 years old; people had different expectations then. (The film starts with an unintentionally hilarious prologue that warns the audience about the upcoming horrors.) And this film set the template for the “mad scientist and his deformed assistant” trope. And it’s been marked for preservation as historically important by the Library of Congress. And Universal just opened an expensive new theme park featuring this property.
Sure, sure, sure — FRANKENSTEIN is important and influential and beloved by many. I found it unwatchable after reading the novel. This adaptation’s only saving grace is that at 70 minutes, it’s mercifully short. What a turkey.
Reflections
Ok, enough on this awful movie. The novel is worth your attention. As I suggested above, it’s not perfect. I didn’t buy the creature’s learning pace nor its abilities to track the protagonist on foot across Europe. The dialog in general is somewhat flat. And although many consider this the first sci fi novel, Shelley unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) glosses over the science behind the creature’s animation.
This matters because the novel is obviously written in response to Enlightenment-era advances. To her audience, scientific progress must’ve seemed unstoppable. The novel asks: where should we stop? Are unchecked powers desirable? What responsibilities do we take on when employing such powers? What moral quandaries might ensue?
These issues come up often in sci fi. Here’s Spider Man’s uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And of course, Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Frankenstein said it first and arguably best:
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Knowing where to draw the line — which stones to leave unturned — is a perennially relevant topic, but especially now that AI is being used in ways we might charitably describe as “undisciplined.” Not to say the technology isn’t useful, but to preemptively cut jobs or publish AI-generated content at scale seems foolhardy. Would that more people learn from Shelley’s Frankenstein (but not, alas, from its more famous descendent — blecch!)
Notes on Note-taking
My main sense-making experiment this week didn’t involve either Frankenstein or Poe. Given the respite from Gioia’s demanding syllabus, I finished two books I’d slow-burned for a while: Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite and G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. I tried a different approach to learning with AI on the latter.
As I’ve documented before, my usual approach is to read the book and then write a brief summary in Obsidian. Then, I’ll feed the summary to an LLM (either through ChatGPT or various Obsidian plugins) for feedback. The ensuing back-and-forth helps me clarify points I might’ve gotten wrong and reinforces my understanding. Then, I use the Text Generator plugin to get a brief LLM-generated summary of the work in the note itself.
This works well with classics, such as the books I’ve studied this year. Most are in the public domain, so we can assume they — along with ample commentary about them — are already in the LLMs’ training corpus. But this approach isn’t as viable with works that are unlikely to be in the training corpus: my sense is the chatbots rely on web searches of supporting materials (such as book summaries) for newer works.
But I’ve also had unreliable results when asking for granular summaries of older works. I documented the poor experience I had with ChatGPT when reading Boethius earlier this year: it soon became clear the system had been trained on a different version of the book than the one I was reading, leading to a series of confusing and potentially misleading interactions.
The ideal would be to upload the whole book to the LLM as the starting point for the interaction. Alas, some books are too long and might exceed the system’s context window. But in a podcast last week, I heard someone mention that Gemini 2.5 Pro’s context window was large enough to support this very use case.
I tried it by uploading a PDF of The Everlasting Man and was pleased with the results. I asked not just for an overall summary, but also for detailed outlines of each chapter. I won’t subject you to the whole thing here (it’s long!) but here’s the overall summary and first chapter as a sample:
G.K. Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man,” published in 1925, stands as a monumental work of Christian apologetics and a direct response to H.G. Wells’s “The Outline of History.” Chesterton’s central thesis is that both humanity and Christianity are unique, revolutionary phenomena that cannot be explained by a simple, linear model of evolution. He argues that to view man as just another animal, or Christ as just another historical figure, is to ignore the profound and exceptional nature of both. The book is divided into two parts: “On the Creature Called Man” and “On the Man Called Christ.”
In the first part, Chesterton asserts that even when viewed from a purely naturalistic standpoint, humanity is a radical departure from the rest of the animal kingdom. He highlights unique human traits such as the creation of art, the capacity for laughter and shame, and the development of complex religious and philosophical systems. These, he argues, are not mere differences in degree, but in kind, setting humanity apart as a creature of a fundamentally different order.
The second part of the book applies a similar line of reasoning to the person of Jesus Christ. Chesterton argues that even when stripped of divine claims and viewed solely as a historical figure, Christ is an anomaly. His teachings were not simply a product of his time but were radical and paradoxical, transcending the cultural and historical context in which he lived. Chesterton contends that the enduring and transformative power of Christianity is evidence of its divine origin. He concludes that just as man is the one creature who is fundamentally different from all others, Christ is the one man who is fundamentally different from all others.
Outline and Chapter Summaries
Part I: On the Creature Called Man
- Chapter 1: The Man in the Cave
- This chapter introduces the central theme of the book: the uniqueness of humanity. Chesterton uses the example of prehistoric cave paintings to illustrate that from the earliest evidence we have of man, he is already an artist and a creator, something no other animal has ever been.
- Main Points:
- Man is fundamentally different from all other animals, not in degree but in kind.
- The ability to create art is a uniquely human trait and a sign of this fundamental difference.
- The popular, modern conception of the “caveman” as a brutish, savage creature is a myth not supported by the evidence.
- Illustrative Passage: “Art is the signature of man.”
Reviewing this outline was useful after I’d read the book. But this approach will be most useful to me before I starting reading: this is a great way to understand the key things to look for. (Note that The Everlasting Man is in the public domain. I’d be wary of uploading copyrighted works to cloud-based models.)
Up Next
Alright, on to the last fourth of course. I said I’d start diverging from Gioia’s syllabus, but not now. This week, he recommends Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’ve already read The Brothers Karamazov and the Tolstoy, so I’ll focus on Nietzsche instead.
Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!