Testimony and trope in Frankenstein.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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That at the "bottom" of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing--this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away--this and nothing else is testimony. The Gorgon and he who has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are a single impossibility of seeing.

--Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1)

IT IS NO SURPRISE THAT MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN Prometheus (1818/1831) has received attention as a work of fictional autobiography. Shelley was married to a poet in whom we continue to have prurient as well as intellectual interest and in whose prose the novel opens; she was the daughter of two enormously influential theorists and fiction writers, well known for their ideas about and practices of parenting. Moreover, Frankenstein is composed of three first-person autobiographical accounts and is framed by a preface and an introduction that recall the notorious ghost story contest that was the story's initial occasion. For these reasons, and others still, Shelley's novel has been read both as a legible autobiography of a woman author (daughter and wife), and as an allegory of autobiography in which Shelley's monster is understood as "a figure for autobiography as such." But to read the monster as "a figure for autobiography" is already to suggest that Shelley's monster is the figure of autobiography: prosopopoeia, the "fiction of an apostrophe." (2) Indeed, prosopopoeia and apostrophe condition and name the central events in Frankenstein--the discovery of the origin of life, the pursuit of the ends of man (and earth), and the creation of a monster witness to the ends it suspends. As a story of the crisis of the human, and as an account of inhuman survival, Shelley's novel raises key questions not--or not only--about autobiography and its figures, about the assumption of a self in and as writing, but rather about testimony and its figures. Along these lines, the novel initiates a rethinking of romantic rhetoric attuned to the tensions and intersections not only of autobiography and fiction, but also of testimony and poetry. The novel shows how lyric figures effect human life as a life beyond life; it shows that the rhetoric of romanticism is a rhetoric of survival. (3)

"the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away"

When he was seventeen years old, Victor Frankenstein's parents arranged for him to leave their "domestic circle" in Switzerland for Ingolstadt, Germany, so he might "enter the world and take [his] station among other human beings" (28). (4) His mother's death causes him to delay his departure by many months, but once at the university, Victor spends two years studying chemistry under the direction of M. Waldman and M. Krempe, and finally "becom[es] as well acquainted with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt" (33). Surpassing his professors, and on the verge of causing them (and all of us) to "lose face" (as Waldman later will exclaim "D--n the fellow! ... I assure you he has outstript us all ... if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all be out of countenance" [49]), Victor decides it is time that he return to the family fold. However, an unquenched interest in the origin of life keeps him from returning to his native home, keeps him at work on a project that leaves us "out of countenance."

Years later, reflecting on his university days, Victor explains to Walton that he had "determine[d] thenceforth to apply [him]self more particularly" to the inquiry into the origins of life by studying physiology--that is, by visiting charnel houses and digging up graves. As if testing Wordsworth's dictum that "origin and tendency are inseparably co-relative," Victor sets out from the assumed relation of origin and end. (5) He wants to know where life--not just human life, but life in general--originates, and thus undertakes to examine fresh corpses, determined to overcome the "cowardice or carelessness" (33) that has kept other researchers from unfolding the "mysteries" of life. (6) Victor promises to surpass human limits and "tastes" in order to arrive at an understanding of the origin of human life. This commitment to pass beyond the human is also the mark of the human in Shelley's novel. The human witnesses the human only in surpassing it; however, to surpass the human is monstrous--unbearable and obscene.

Indeed, Victor explains that it is his great enthusiasm for the project that makes such grim work possible: "Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome, and almost intolerable" (33). Enthusiasm--or inspiration, enthusiasmos--allows Victor to bear the unbearable. Animating and self-dividing, it lets him live with death and among the dead without being paralyzed by horror. (7) Yet Victor also admits that he is able to enter into the world of the dead, not only because an "almost supernatural enthusiasm" blinds him to the awfulness of his labor, but because his father's tutelage already will have immunized him against "supernatural horrors." As he explains:

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education nay father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a church-yard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. (33-34)

Victor is able to endure the images of "natural decay" not only because of his almost supernatural disposition, but also because his enlightenment education allows him to see corpses not as "supernatural horrors" but as part of the food chain. To see the dead body as "food for the worm"--rather than as a den of ghosts or spirits--is, however, to be able to see what ghosts and spirits disclose, and what this project already has transformed him into: the excess of life, a life that exceeds the end of life. While Victor has an admittedly demystified sense of the grave and the corpse, it is this demystification of the supernatural that conditions the "almost supernatural" work of scientific research. If superstition (the admission and attendant fear of the supernatural) would have kept Victor from his discovery, his own supernatural powers make the discovery possible. They make it possible for him to witness the passage from death to life as the revelation of life's origin instead of being blinded in fear of ghosts and spirits. Trolling through graveyards, Victor therefore can analyze "every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of human feelings" (34). Victor's supernatural enlightenment thus allows him to support the unsupportable and see what humans cannot bear to see. (8)

Yet, Victor's discovery of the origins of life is indissociable from the suspension of the limit he discovers. His own survival of the ends of man is at once the condition and the effect of the discovery. He explains:

Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me--a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. (34)

Once among the dead, Victor looks--even if to look is not to feel as a man, even if to look is to do what a man cannot do--and gives three accounts of what he sees: "I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain" (my emphases). At first he seems to describe realistically something that can be seen, the process of degradation; he then goes on to describe a passage from death to life. This account--which is an account of "the corruption of death"--relies upon and interprets the "how" of man's degradation. Victor grasps (beholds) by way of the double genitive the invisible passage from the dead to death to life, from death as corruption to the corruption of death, and this coincides with his perception of a living face (of earth) as the issue of a dead body. The third account--in which he admits to seeing what his father taught him to see (the worm)--interprets the second account and marks a shift from a progressive discovery to interpretive repetition. Victor sees the life that succeeds death in the worm that takes the corpse as the condition of its life. In other words, the passage from death to life that Victor sees does not (yet) coincide with the resuscitation of a single being, but rather involves the incorporation of the dead into "life" as the incessant life of the earth. A worm that inhabits--indeed, inherits--eye and brain gives an image to "the corruption of death." It provides an image of the degraded corpse (the very image that allows Victor to make his discovery), and signals the return of the corpse (as food for the worm) to a fictional cycle of life. Victor interprets an inheritance as the passage from death to life--a passage that precludes any further passage, not because death is an end, but because upon this passage, life and death become indistinguishable and indissociable in the figure of the worm-infested face. When Victor discovers the origin of life, when he sees "how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain" (my emphasis), when he sees the image of "the corruption of death" and the passage of death into life, he enters into--as he witnesses--a world of neither death nor life, but of a life that endures in the absence of death. He discovers life--not as the seemingly palliative Wordsworthian intimation--but as the truth of intimation, as the endurance of living on.

Moreover, if this discovery of the origin of life is, specifically, the discovery of human life, it coincides with an analogous passage of the human into the non-human. In his genius vision, a degraded animal becomes the "inheritor" of mind and vision, and even the most exalted organs of enlightenment become food for the worm. However, when Victor, thanks to his own super-human position, witnesses the limits of man, he also discovers that the worm is man's progeny, and that this image of inheritance is also the image of mortal ruin (the infested skull). Victor phrases this inheritance as a figure of the death of man and origin of life; its image allows him to perceive "the change from life to death, and death to life" in such a way that the passage marks both a tropological substitution and a real discovery. This double face of man's suspension gives premature birth to the monster (life beyond life, human beyond human) whose actual birth coincides with Victor's "discovery" of the ends of man.

When Victor discovers the origins and ends of man--when he bears what is "insupportable" to men and witnesses in the bodies of the dead the passage from death to life--he sees a face. By seeing the earth as a face (perceiving its "blooming cheek"), Victor seems to see the redemption of death in natural life. Yet the prosopopoeia (this facing) that allows death's passage into life, also renders the earth an image of mortality: the face inhabited by worms. The facing of the earth is both an image of degradation and--inseparably--an image of enduring life. The earth--as face--remains in "bloom" even as corpses corrode; it is at once "mortalized" (faced) and its mortification is the sign of life's recovery. However, what here figures corruption (worms devouring the face) is not corruption when the face is the face of earth, but is merely a sign of life. And this means that the life of the earth becomes the image of death's corruption.

The prosopopoeia that allows Victor to discover the origin of life in an interrogation of the carnage of death also allows him to witness "the corruption of death"--allows him to see death, death without end. Turning death into life, turning the dead corpse into a sign of life, Victor at once discovers the origin of life and the truth of romantic rhetoric. The limit that Victor witnesses through prosopopoeia already coincides with the emergence of a life beyond life--his own and that of the monster. When Victor witnesses the ends of life, he gives birth to the monstrous excess of what never can be witnessed.

While prosopopoeia is the condition and effect--the origin and tendency--of the monster who marks their co-relation and betrays the attendant crisis of human ends, apostrophe is the condition and effect of the monster's account. (9) Apostrophe, furthermore, will make the monster "appear" and present him in and as a "figure of man." (10) But the "restoration of mortality" (de Man, Rhetoric 81) that the presentation of the monster would seem to imply--a restoration reinforced by the fact that the monster always responds when the dead or inanimate are addressed--suggests rather that apostrophe yields monstrosity, the "monstrosity" of (in)human speech.

On his eventual return home to Switzerland, occasioned by the (monster's) murder of his brother William, Victor melancholically approaches the mountain ranges that frame his "native town," weeps "like a child," and calls out: "'Dear mountains! My own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?'" (55). The call--a version of the lyric gesture of addressing the earth with the assumption that it can respond--establishes a relation of nativity and origination: Victor is the mountains' as they are his. He identifies the calm landscape as a response, but an enigmatic response that he is unable to interpret. The calm may be a true "sign" of what is to ensue or may be a false sign that would mock and deceive him. Once he takes nature as signifying, once he renders nature as welcoming, it becomes impossible to tell what is a mask or deception and what is a prognosis; it is impossible to read the symptoms once they are understood as symptoms. (11) This impossibility, the acknowledgement that the landscape may deceive, undercuts any promise, any "true" sign or "sign of truth." (12)

While this apostrophe is retrospective, Victor cites it in telling Walton his story, it is met with an apostrophe in the present of narration, an apostrophe that is "used" rather than "mentioned." (13) Victor interrupts the narrative to address Walton directly: "I fear, my friend, that I shall render myself tedious by dwelling on these preliminary circumstances; but they were days of comparative happiness, and I think of them with pleasure. My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and, more than all, thy lovely lake" (55). (14) In a dizzying series of turns, a second apostrophe to his "beloved country" quickly subsumes the first apostrophe in which Victor addresses Walton as a friend, establishing the relation that Walton desires and that Victor already admits is unbearable. By invoking the nation, Victor's question establishes that Walton, a non-native of Switzerland, is unable to understand him, but the answer to the question "who but a native can tell ...?" is--as Victor already "knows," and as the ensuing (and at this present moment, already past) events demonstrate--the monster. If the question of national sentiment seems rhetorical, one that states nationalism as an "undeniable" fact, it turns out also to be (and thus to be undermined by) a real question, the answer to which Victor will come to "speak" and to "see." (15)

The question of prognosis or mockery is not only a matter of "reading" the signs in the landscape as it first appears, but also a matter of the landscape's "response" to Victor's apostrophic questions. The rhetorical figure that dominates Victor's return to Switzerland--and his narrative of that return--is "apostrophe": Victor addresses mountains, lake, country, friend, and his dead brother (a child for whom he once cared as if for a son), assuming that they might hear and respond to his call. Victor, the "native," arrives home, but so late that he is left outside of his gated hometown. Stuck, he decides to cross "his" lake in order to visit William's grave, and is met by a fierce--and blinding--storm. Thunder "was echoed from Saleve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash" (56). Blinded by the electrical storm, Victor again calls out and calls to his dead brother: "'William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!'" (56). And as soon as he invokes the dead, Victor "perceive[s] in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees" (56). In apparent response to his apostrophe, a "figure" emerges from the shadowy...

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