It’s been a while since I shared something from my academic vault of uselessness… Well, alright; knowledge and thought are never useless; academia (the way it’s run nowadays) might be. But I digress. The following post on death in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 148-149) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press.
For most people – certainly for most artists – to be forgotten when they die is not something they would wish. They would like to be remembered for a long time. Sometimes, when they fantasize about success, they might even dream of an undefined future, long after their demise, with their name still associated with artistic or other achievements.
Not me. I want to be forgotten when I die. I want my art, in particular, everything that I’ve made – from novels to songs to drawing – to disappear as if it had never existed.
This might sound counterintuitive, odd, and to some readers even hypocritical. I don’t blame you. As I said, to be forgotten when you die is not something you hear often from the mouth of people who create. Yet my motivations, as always, are entirely selfish. The deeper reasons might even be useful to you.
This is the graveyard of a small village on Lemnos, Greece, where my grandparents are buried – and, parenthetically, where some of the action in The Storytelling Cat takes place. I remember them, but after I and a couple other people die, there will be nobody left to remember them. It will be as if they never existed. I want the same, I want to be forgotten when I die, especially my art(more…)
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.
In Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal”, an unwise apprentice drinks the elixir of eternal life, with disastrous consequences(more…)
