Keith Oatley's Changing Our Minds

In “Changing Our Minds,” Keith Oatley makes a truly fascinating claim. He asserts, “My colleagues and I also believe that readers of Chekhov’s story were taken out of their usual ways of being so that they could connect with something larger than themselves, beyond themselves…All art aspires to help us transcend ourselves.” With this simple statement, Oatley subtly shifts the boundaries of humanity. His point, that any form of art allows us to become something other than what we were born to be, is both awe-inspiring and numbingly terrifying. It is breathtaking because, with a few choice words, Oatley weaves a tapestry of astonishing images: all-seeing eyes, endless galaxies, an artist’s hand being steered by God’s… The possibilities are infinite,

From the moment the “dull yellow eye of the creature open(ed)”(55), Shelley’s readers are invariably seized by a consuming terror of the unspeakable atrocity. This fear, some might say, is almost a trepidatious premonition— a reasonable fear of the sleeping monster that dwells in all humans. As true as that may be, it is certainly plausible that the real reason behind the dread the monster conjures is the fact that Frankenstein’s abomination transcends the common realm of human emotion and imagination. As Frankenstein himself observed, “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature”(55). This statement, precipitated by the first encounter with his live monster, is a product of Victor’s being taken, as Oatley would say, beyond himself. When Victor beheld the horror whose creation he was solely responsible for, both the oeuvre and the emotions it inspired in his stricken breast transcended the realms of possibility and humanity. Even now, years after Mary Shelley penned the story of Victor’s agonizing alarm, her readers understand his panic because the idea of such a dreadful event transcends time and place to that place beyond conscience where humans’ secret agonies