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Frankenstein
Two hundred years ago, in July 1818, a shy teenage girl named Mary Shelley (1797-1851) spent her holidays in Switzerland with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; both lodged with Lord Byron at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. Byron, an adventurer and romantic poet, had settled in Switzerland that year, fleeing the bad reputation he had racked up in London because of his scandalous affairs.
One night, to kill the boredom, Byron proposed a game in which everyone would write a scary story to share it in the usual candlelit gatherings in the middle of the heat. Three weeks later, young Shelley, who was barely 17 years old, read to them one night Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus giving birth to one of the great myths of universal literature. This work has been translated into all the languages of the planet, represented in the theater and embodied in more than forty film versions.
Frankenstein is a being created by a scientist who uses the brain of a criminal, and has transplanted it to the fragments of other corpses with which he has created a body similar to a human. By means of the electric discharge of a ray, he manages to convey the spark of life to this coarse simulation of a man who, feeling alive, rebels against his creator and sows chaos and terror in its flight to nothingness.
According to Sébastien Lapaque in Frankenstein, two hundred years old and not a wrinkle ( Frankenstein, two hundred years old and not a stroll ), more than a ghost story like Byron's request represents the confrontation of modern man with himself: "In Mary Shelley's book, Dr. Viktor Frankenstein is a strange and lonely scientist who plunges into the human body, even that of animals, into trying to locate the essence, the origin of the principle of life In seeking the mystery of the passage from life to death in the family cemeteries of his people, he manages to find the opposite way: the passage of In one passage of the book it reads: "After days and nights of unbelievable fatigue, I have managed to discover the cause of generation and life: even me, I am the only one in my life. was able to animate the inert matter. "Popular culture called Frankenstein the m who terrorizes them with his inhuman power. This artifice of man is fatally condemned to evil. This is how Mary Shelley's novel "is more moral than it appears," says Lapaque
Mary Shelley
In the 1818, Shelley simply calls it "the creature." Without a soul, without a proper name, unhappy in its superhuman strength unleashed and unchecked. Interestingly, he is also known as demon a name that in Greek mythology refers to a supernatural being. In The Banquet Plato defined a demon or demon as an intermediate being between mortals and immortals, since he was to convey human affairs to gods and divine affairs to men. In this Platonic conception, the main functions of the demon were to guide men throughout their lives and bring them to Hades at the moment of death.
Creature, monster or demon, Frankenstein is more alive than ever, as summarized by Maria Popova ( 200 Years of Frankenstein Brain Pickings, 2018), Referring to Frankenstein & # 39; s Bicentennial Project of Arizona State University, a multidisciplinary and multimedia effort to engage and make people think about the eternal themes of science, technology, ethics and creative responsibility raised in the book. The project explores Shelley's prophetic questions, focusing on the nature of consciousness, the evolution and definition of life, the ethics of genetic engineering, the future of the human body, and the Artificial intelligence. Shelley's novel is alive in the heart of the world. On the project site The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project reads as follows: "C is alive!", "Mldr is alive!". https://frankenstein.asu.edu.
For his part, MIT Press, published Frankenstein: commented for scientists, engineers and creators of all kinds ( Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds ). This is Shelley's original manuscript of 1818, published in line with the comments, annotations and essays of prominent contemporary thinkers in science, technology, philosophy, ethics, feminism and fiction speculative. In the preface it reads: "No work of literature has done more to give the human form to humans and their moral consequences than Frankenstein the Modern Prometheus" . https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/frankenstein.
The first film version of this work is captured in a short film by Searle Dawley, author of the 1910 American silent film. The most acclaimed version is undoubtedly the Frankenstein by James Whale (1931 ), with Boris Karloff, is a work of anticipation of what would happen in Europe when German society would have created Hitler and Nazism. Remember that at the end of the film, the inhabitants of the city lose their fear, join and arm with what they have on hand; Frankenstein is persecuted, stuck and burned alive by an angry mob. The moral is that in order not to annihilate you, you must unite and confront the monster.
Poster of the 1931 film with Boris Karloff
The current scientific or literary interest awaken a monster created by the imagination of a teenager there At two hundred years, we are convinced of its real existence and of the fear that our creations and inventions will escape our control and will create chaos. I am referring, to name just a few examples, to the early experiments on nuclear fusion, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb and which, starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sparked an arms race in the hands of psychopaths. Iranians or North Koreans threaten not only to erase entire nations of the map, but also to destroy life on the planet. Another example would be the experiences of large biogenetic-based companies that demand laws, controls, and ethical standards of society, especially for those who wish to alter the genes of foods for humans and humans. animals. The monster is on the run
Another interpretation might be that societies, whether they are advanced or underdeveloped, have also created their ideological monsters far from all humanity, which have turned against their own people and sowed terror and death. examples of this are Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, as well as their emulators, I refer to Fidel Castro and his Latin American Frankensteins: Chávez, Kirchner, Correa, Lula, Evo, Ortega and Maduro. The monster lives among us
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