Everybody, I hope, I has heard of Frankenstein: the darkly
horrifying literary masterpiece of a 19-year old Mary Shelley. What some people
may not know is the conditions surrounding the conception of this legendary
novel. In this morning’s talk How
Frankenstein Shaped Our Thinking, the ‘Prof of Goth’ Nick Groom let us in
on the secret. There in the gothic darkness of the Barn, we were invited to
think ‘I am not here’, but instead exactly two centuries in the past, on the
shores of Lake Geneva, among the likes of John Polidori, Lord Byron, and Percy
and Mary Shelley whose quest for ghost stories birthed a new breed of literary
monsters. From Polidori would come The
Vampyre while from Mary would come Frankenstein.
This was a story I had heard before, spoken by another eccentrically
brilliant raconteur, Dr Karen Morton, during my study of the Gothic at Plymouth
University. However, Groom’s story didn’t end there as he was interested in the
concepts of humanity that Shelley had imbued her creation with. He remarked on
the ‘weird science’ of the 19th century, from parlour tricks with
electricity to the not-so-legal history of anatomical studies which put the
knowledge of the time into perspective. The ‘being’, as he called the novel’s
monster, was a hybrid, a mish-mash of reanimated human and animal parts, yet this
unnatural conception stood out as the primary factor denying it the status of ‘human’.
With our modern scientific understanding, however, we know our own bodies to be
just as hybridised: corrected with lenses, machines, and medicine, and supported
by internal and external bacterial ecosystems. This creature was just like us
after all, and, as Groom remarked, could most likely pass a Turing test. In the
end, the only thing separating us and Frankenstein’s monster was our vanity
(while, after the talk, the only thing separating me and Groom’s edition of the
book was my wallet).
And from one university flashback to another, I soon found
myself back in The Barn for a talk on owls by my former lecturer, Dr Miriam
Darlington. While I had known her, her fascination had been with otters, but whilst
writing a book on them, she had had a close encounter with a short-eared owl.
This inspired her with the idea for her next book which, like a terrier (as she
described herself), she couldn’t let go of. Apparently, this also prompted
people to begin sending her owl merchandise (particularly Harry Potter) which
she admitted to having to clear out on several occasions! No doubt this merch
was cuddly and cute, yet the aim of her book was to ‘decutify’ the owl and to
remind her readers of just how important these birds were. Through her research,
Darlington had immersed herself in all things ‘owl’, from dissecting owl
pellets (a strange activity of which she learned she was not alone) to travelling
to a town in Serbia famed for its 800-strong population of long-eared owls, to
meeting her fair share of vaguely ‘reptilian’ owl chicks (as he described them)
which only a mother [owl] could love. One anecdote from her Serbian trip stuck
in my mind when she remarked on her guide’s description of the local blue tits.
When there were no longer any owls left to put rings on, he said they ringed
the blue tits which were ‘vampiric’ and vicious in comparison to the owls. Yet
in her examination of the owls’ pellets, there were the blue tits’ rings!
On my final return to The Barn today, I was invited to ‘get
lost’, not out of rudeness but in a maze, as Henry Eliot’s talk The Art of Getting Lost was all about
mazes and labyrinths. Surprisingly, there are several differences between the
two, the first being that labyrinths have a centre and no multiple-choice
paths, meaning you can’t get lost, unlike in a maze. The second is that the
pattern of the labyrinth was one of the earliest recorded patterns scratched
into cave walls some 5000 years ago, while mazes are only a mere 600 years old.
Eliot went on to explain how mazes became the vogue for stately homes as ‘a
sign of conspicuous consumption’ from Versailles to Hampton Court before
turning to a more bizarre story which unfolded at Glastonbury in 1972. A fellow
named Greg Bright asked Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis if he could make a
maze on site; a year later, upon its completion, he was commissioned by Lord
Bath to construct what became the longest maze in Britain: the Longleat Hedge
Maze. Bright’s ambition even stretched to the theoretical ‘life-or-death’
novelty of a 9ft tall Antarctic maze, but then, in 1979, the ‘King of Mazes’ simply
vanished. And if this wasn’t strange enough, Eliot soon started in on the
psychological effects of a maze/labyrinth, and how by the time you reach its end/centre,
you are a changed person; the centre is ‘a place of death and rebirth’. Then,
in a similar vein of rebirth, he told us how he had managed to track down the
elusive hermit that Greg Bright had become, persisting in his endeavours until
he was finally allowed to meet him. As proof, we were shown – after much
protest that we had run over time – a rather trippy video of Eliot’s meeting.
Trippy in that the camera was often on an angle and the footage was backed by discordant
music from Bright’s own former band. And in it Bright was seen to still be
obsessing over mazes to the point that, far from having them on the brain, his mind must surely be a maze. After the talk, I made my
physical escape from Eliot’s labyrinth, but the ideas his words had raised mean
I am probably still wandering the labyrinth of my own mind even now.
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