The Creator and the Created
Victor Frankenstein and the Creative Act
“What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support…”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.”
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
It was a dreary November night, and, as Mary Shelley would write several sentences after the above epigram, rain was audibly pattering against my windowpane. This was last night, and I was scribbling in my journal for the first time in several days, exhausted from a new job, my thoughts sluggish and meandering. I started the job two weeks ago, and before that, I spent nearly a month submitting job applications for hours every night.
During that time, my writing had slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped. I’ve only just begun to pick up the pieces where I’d left them and try to make sense of my creative life again from half-composed fragments and loose ends. I’ve been looking at all of it, the half-written scraps, the broken deadlines, the fiery inspirations that have gone cold, and wondering if I can breathe life back into them. If I can suture all these disconnected and discarded fragments together and fashion something worthwhile, like Victor Frankenstein in the upper room of his student lodgings one dreary November evening, where, in a feverish mania, he assembled his creature from charnel pieces and slaughterhouse viscera.
Like Victor Frankenstein, I’ve also abandoned plenty of projects, leaving them discarded and unfinished after a phase of initially fevered inspiration. I’d have an idea and put pen to paper, feeling completely on fire for a time, as if nothing could stop me from propelling myself towards a grand and ineffable vision. But as I worked and was forced to engage with the real-world drudgery of patiently composing a piece and taking the diligent steps to actualize it, narrowing it down from the realm of imaginary possibility into the disappointing confines of reality, I would fall out of love with it.
I would get snagged by my responsibility to the project, tangled up in insecurities about whether I was truly capable of actualizing my vision at all. I’d become afraid of what I was creating and what it would suggest about me if it were a failure, and like Victor Frankenstein fled just as the piece was taking shape, just as it began to open its eyes and peer at me for guidance.
It’s not surprising that this happened most often when I was the same age Victor is in the novel, in my early-mid twenties.
Over time, these discarded and incomplete things build a debt of wasted potential that gnaws at you from the inside. My disappointment and frustration with myself began to bubble up from the deep recesses and torment me, like Frankenstein’s creature, the agony of frustrated creation returning to wreak vengeance on the negligent creator. The insecurities grew, the anxiety and frustration increased, and the overwhelming sense of failure stemming from the fear of failure itself became paralyzing.
So eventually I resolved to knuckle down, grit my teeth, and drag myself through things each and every time, kicking and screaming if necessary (it often was). The pain of running away had become so acute that I started running towards obstacles, often blind and numb with fear, throwing myself at them and forcing myself to think on my feet. It became important to just get it done, once and for all, and I did, more and more.
So this question of whether or not to continue a piece, whether I should ever put something in progress aside and try something new, is a touchy one. I’ll always be able to convince myself that I hate what I’m working on, that it's hideous and malformed, like Victor’s creature, which people uniformly flee from and despise. But the awful secret, which the creature even points out to Victor, is that the supposed hideousness of the creation is merely a reflection of the creator.
Writing is nothing less than the deepest expression of the self committed to text, in stark black and white, laid bare for the world to see. But the silver lining is that we all have something to say and we all have a self to express, because we are, in essence, all worthy of love. The great tragedy of Frankenstein is that, despite the physical monstrousness of the creation, it starts with only good intentions and merely seeks acceptance. The creature only reflects the violence and mistreatment that it receives. So if we are harsh and overly critical of ourselves, that’s what our work will feed back to us when we attempt to be creative.
As I sat with my journal last night, on a dreary November night with the patter of rain on the windowpanes, the question wasn’t so much whether or not to start something new but to start something, anything at all, but with a new attitude. The way I’ve dragged myself over finish lines and towards goals, of all kinds, though it’s been progress, still stems from the same attitude, just aimed at the problem rather than away from it.
It’s seeing the responsibility itself as a problem, as a burden to begin with, rather than an opportunity, that’s the mistake.
The novel Frankenstein, which I have been reading over the past week, since watching Guillermo del Toro’s new film, is very much a novel of the Romantic era. The key tenet of Romanticism was that human expression was sacred, that the imagination and the creative act itself were somehow divine. In their conception, creativity was never a burden to the soul, even in its slow day-to-day efforts, but a liberation.
Creation can only ever be an act of love; otherwise, it’s merely ego and destruction, and love, contrary to those things, is responsibility.