God in, God as ...Art

And God created the artist . . . or was it the other way around?

Ever since the dawn of civilisation, artists have been in competition with the gods, argues Peter Conrad in this exclusive extract
One night during a dank, stormy summer in 1816, Mary Shelley retired to bed in a house near a Swiss lake. She had a job to do while she slept.


Byron, whom she and her husband were visiting, had challenged them to think up stories, the scarier the better. Feeling miserably inadequate, she lay awake contemplating the "dull Nothing" inside her head.

By morning, to her surprise, she was in possession of a story. She had no idea where it had come from, but it concerned the enigma of origins: its hero was an artist who created his own artwork by reactivating dead flesh scavenged from gibbets and graveyards.
When she thought about it, she realised that it was a parody or a desecration of the primary story our culture tells us about creation. Frankenstein, who constructed a monster by stitching together bits of corpses, dared "to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world".
Mary Shelley accused her scientist of blasphemy, but her own feat was equally audacious. Frankenstein makes a man, and in doing so mimics God's fabrication of Adam, who was pressed together, according to Genesis, from red dust; the novelist, conjuring a character out of the nocturnal air rather than pressing earth into shape or suturing cadavers, had created Frankenstein. Does the artist mock God, or are gods merely surrogates for artists?

The God invoked in the introduction to Frankenstein created a world that is indeed a "stupendous mechanism". Such a deity must be male, since his talents are those of a structural engineer (or, in the case of Frankenstein, a biologist, a surgeon and an electrician).
But Mary Shelley knew about another model of gestation, which is the perilous prerogative of women. Her mother had died 12 days after giving birth to Mary. Mary herself bore her first child in 1815, two more at the beginning and end of 1817, and a fourth in 1819; only one survived into adulthood.

Artists often think of their creations as brain-children, plucked from the air. But perhaps a work of art is closer to actual offspring. Mary Shelley made the connection between creativity and reproduction in her farewell wish for the novel, when she referred to it as her "hideous progeny". It was her baby, and it was also - as she acknowledged with an indulgent smile - a monster.

Mary Shelley's puzzled reflections on the source of her novel place art midway between biology and theology. We can trace stories to their source, following neural routes or trails of association that usually lead back to childhood.

But where did the child come from? Who made the world, and what was it made from? Here the biological inquiry falters, and psychological deduction must give way to the guesswork of religion. Or perhaps this is the point at which the investigation should be called off.
The very idea that art purports to be a creative activity can offend a man of faith. In 1880, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins defined creation as "the making out of nothing", which was accomplished by God "in no time with a word".

Hopkins denied that human beings shared this capacity; we can only play with matter that already exists. We know how to use grain to make bread or clay to make bricks, but cannot create the seed or the soil. "Man," Hopkins emphasised, "cannot create a single speck, God creates all that is not himself".

But is it really nonsensical to praise a man of genius for creating a painting, a poem or a tune, just because he did not invent the canvas and the colours, the words or the notes? Art is a magical activity, and anyone who creates the likeness of a man seems to be exercising the power that created man in the first place.

Paul Gauguin's neighbours in Tahiti in the 1890s, unembarrassed by Christian scruples, venerated him for doing so. Once a native, knowing him to be a painter, hailed him as "Man who makes human beings!"

As a woman, Mary Shelley was preoccupied with the messy organic business of engendering. Frankenstein refers to his improvised laboratory as "my workshop of filthy creation". The reference to filth tugs the lofty thinker down to ground and embeds him in the flesh.
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