Mont Blanc

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”

45° Partly cloudy. Sunrise 7:00, sunset 6:10pm. Current time, 11:53pm in Belfast.

Last week was reading week, a week for students to catch up on course preparation, so I took advantage of the time and made a short visit to Chamonix. Moving around Europe is easy, fast, and relatively inexpensive. I’ve never seen the Alps, so I decided I would see Mont Blanc, the mountain I think about every time I teach Frankenstein. It’s a proverbial looming image in my mind and the literal highest mountain in the Alps at 4,809 meters (15,771 feet). “The summit was conquered in 1786 by Michel-Gabriel Paccard, a doctor from Chamonix, together with Jacques Balmat, his porter” (Britannica). 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley travelled from Geneva to Chamonix in the summer of 1816. This trip inspired her novel and she published Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus at age nineteen on the 1st of January, 1818.

I’ve always been astonished that she completed the enduring and influential novel so young, I mean, she wrote one of the first science fiction novels—but when you consider her parents, especially her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her work in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (January 1792), I can understand how Mary the younger was educated and encouraged to write.

The details surrounding how she came to write the story are intriguing, and her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and their family was complex, but those are for another time. Her novel takes on science, religion, ethical responsibility, and othering. It’s brilliant and tragic.

The landscape of Frankenstein is Geneva, Switzerland and the surrounding French Alps. The mountains are refuge for the creation of Frankenstein, as opposed to the city where he has to hide to avoid persecution. Victor Frankenstein also finds the mountains a shelter for his own grief, and a place to retreat when he needs to withdraw from the city for contemplation.

Shelley’s descriptions of Mont Blanc have captivated my imagination since I first read the novel in a British Literature class as an undergrad. From chapter nine, when Victor Frankenstein is describing his trip through the valley:

“The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise. Still, as I ascended higher, the valley assumed a more magnificent and astonishing character. Ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains, the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there peeping forth from among the trees formed a scene of singular beauty. But it was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings.

I passed the bridge of Pélissier, where the ravine, which the river forms, opened before me, and I began to ascend the mountain that overhangs it. Soon after, I entered the valley of Chamounix. This valley is more wonderful and sublime, but not so beautiful and picturesque as that of Servox, through which I had just passed. The high and snowy mountains were its immediate boundaries, but I saw no more ruined castles and fertile fields. Immense glaciers approached the road; I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and marked the smoke of its passage. Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and its tremendous dôme overlooked the valley.”

The place is stunning. The walls of the mountains rise so high and steep from the valley floor that my brain couldn’t quite make sense of it. At night, as I walked down the road to my hostel, I noticed a few bright stars that didn’t seem quite right, then I realized they were snow cats grooming pistes on the mountain. They were on some high slope, so high— that they appeared to be in the sky. 

The elevation of Chamonix is 3, 396 feet, about 66 feet higher than Boone, North Carolina. But Mont Blanc is at 15,771 (or so). That means the mountain in front of my eyes rose 12, 375 feet above me; that is 2.3 miles high. You cannot imagine what it looks like. It was soul-stirring. I walked around all day and night just staring at the mountain walls. In the daytime, paragliders twirled off the tops and circled over the valley like those helicopter seed pods that fall off a maple. At night, I had to focus to see the black outline of the mountain against the sky. I had to look up to find the dark ridge line, always higher than expected. It is massive and fierce, severe, and oh, what word will work here? Not gorgeous or beautiful. They aren’t enough. I suppose Mary Shelley already wrote it; sublime, supreme, magnificent, tremendous. In French it is nicknamed, "toit de I’Europe," roof of Europe. 

It is sad to think about how much the glaciers have retreated in the two-hundred years since Mary Shelley laid eyes on them. I could see them, still, ice blue, craggy seracs, high between the peaks. At the bottom of the Vallee Blanche, where skiers can ride down the glacier, the end gets shorter and shorter by hundreds of feet each year. Here is an interesting project to capture the shrinking Mer de Glace in photography. 

In class this week, we talked about how art attempts to preserve place. The making of these time lapse videos of the glacier, the novel Mary Shelley grounds

at the base of Mont Blanc, and the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley all attempt to arrest energy, interrupt entropy, and preserve the place. William Rueckert said poems are green plants, storers of sun. Here is another take;

Maybe poems are glaciers, with their capacity to carve a mountain pass, or to stack up a thousand snowfalls in bright blue ice, like time itself is suspended, and white winters saved somehow.