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Note: the following article on Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” is a modified excerpt (pp. 74-76) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the main Home for Fiction website and the relevant page there.

In Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal”, the sociocultural as much as existential aspects of immortality play a central part, as the title emphasizes.

In the story, one of the students of Cornelius Agrippa gets his inexperienced hands on his master’s elixir of eternal life. It is interesting to note that Agrippa is one of the masters whom Victor Frankenstein studies during his attempt to create his monster. Winzy, the young apprentice, unwisely unleashes a curse of similar proportionsWinze means curse (OED, “winze, n.2”), a very relevant name for the main character of this story. upon himself.

He witnesses his young wife becoming old while he remains the same, with the abnormal situation having terrible repercussions, as he assumes the role of the caregiver, while she becomes jealous and grumpy.

Much like in Frankenstein, the kind of immortality offered in “The Mortal Immortal” is a fake one. The source of anguish for Winzy (and of course the reader) arises from the unsolvable conflict between past and future, between life and death.

“The Mortal Immortal”: on Archetypal Fears

The archetypal fear of the human experience, that life is finite, cannot be solved by the possibility of its infinite extension, as Winzy suffers greatly seeing his loved one withering away. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

The story essentially calls the reader to ponder what would happen if all humans lived forever. Would that form of immortality be anyhow more acceptable? The answer must be “no”.

Winzy, although as he himself explicitly says is nowhere near being a Wandering Jew, still feels exhausted by living for three centuries. Besides mourning those he loved, who are long gone, what Winzy lacks is a sense of purpose.

The Comfort of “Half Immortality”

Much like other immortals in literature or films, Winzy misses a teleology of life. In the linear, finite temporality scheme that he is placed, death appears hopelessly absent. Telling is also Winzy’s self-comforting idea that he drank only half of the elixir, and so perhaps he is, as he claims, only “half immortal” (Shelley 2010, 917). Still, as he promptly admits, the notion that infinity can be divided is a problematic one.

The kind of immortality presented in such a text only refers to bodily preservation, excluding aspects of the human existence such as consciousness, self-awareness, and transcendental experience. Winzy himself explicitly claims that his master approached the matter from an entirely fallacious perspective:

He was a wise philosopher, but had no acquaintance with any spirits but those clad in flesh and blood. His science was simply human; and human science, I soon persuaded myself, could never conquer nature’s laws so far as to imprison the soul for ever within its carnal habitation … I was a lucky fellow to have quaffed health and joyous spirits, and perhaps long life, at my master’s hands; but my good fortune ended there: longevity was far different from immortality.

Shelley 2010, 915

The hapless apprentice realizes that full, metaphysically complete immortality does not depend solely on infinite time. As the human existence is located within time, once it loses its temporal foundation, it becomes degenerate.

Placing “The Mortal Immortal” in an Infinite Temporal Linearity

The reason is that temporal linearity without the end that is death is incompatible with the human experience, based on cause and consequence. As Kochhar-Lindgren argues, Winzy feels aimless and alone because by lacking the ability to die he has lost his “compass for the human passage from nothing to nothing … a contoured horizon to existence … enabling a certain type of evaluation” (2005, 74; my emphasis).

The connection between moral stability and a destabilized linear time is also a central argument in Umberto Eco’s essay “The Myth of Superman”. According to Eco, in the time span of one story, the mythical superhero accomplishes a given task and, at the end of the story, there is a clear closure; a new comic book brings with it an entirely new story, totally disconnected from the past events.

The crucial conclusion is that if the new story presented a sort of narrative evolution from the previous one, it would essentially mean that Superman “would have taken a step toward death” (Eco 1984, 114). However, the inevitable result is a situation in which the story presents a reality consisting solely of an “ever-continuing present”, and this absence of past or future as reference points fails to communicate a sense of moral stability and continuity (Eco 1984, 116).

The Problematic Ethics of the Eternal Now

The situation Umberto Eco describes is applicable to Winzy as much as Lionel Verney, with the issue of subjectivity and the eternal now arising once again. The key issue underlined here is the problematic status of linearity, of cause-and-consequence systems within an eternal present framework.

Eco mentions that “existentialism and phenomenology have shifted the problem of time into the sphere of the structures of subjectivity”, describing time as an integral constituent of human – and subjective – ideas such as planning, actions, and expectations (1984, 112).

In addition, much like in The Last Man, where the synthesized eternal now appears as such more strongly from an external perspective, Eco argues that the adventures of Superman are made credible only if the reader acknowledges the destabilized temporality of the stories (1984, 116). In other words, the lack of cause-and-effect on a larger scale, and the “ever-continuing present” cease to appear as such upon entering into the system, that is, the world of the text in question.

Naturally, this leads to a problematic question: Would we act any differently were we ourselves in Winzy’s place? Would we have been able to see the repercussions from within the system? By consequence, can we recognize the hazy borders of the (multiple) systems we currently occupy?

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray. TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.
OED Online. “winze, n.2”. Oxford University Press. Web.
Shelley, Mary. “The Mortal Immortal”. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Second Edition: Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism. Ed. Joseph Black et al. Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2010.