Inorganic Intentions: Organizing Form from Frankenstein to de Man

Abstract

AbstractWhile Romantic organicism has long been an object of interest, this article argues that it is through the figure of the inorganic that Romantic writing grapples most revealingly with its ambivalence toward human intentionality. I first focus on William Lawrence's 1816 lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons and two contemporary texts – Coleridge's unpublished Theory of Life, and Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein – which respond to Lawrence's materialist thesis. Whereas the organic is predicated on the coordinated functioning (organization) of internally differentiated elements (organs), the inorganic is radically undifferentiated, its sheer sameness representing the primitive mass from which the organic springs and into which it threatens always to fall. The paradox of the inorganic is that it occupies both organicism's before and its after: the mechanical, the organic's familiar opposite term, lies at the pole of over – rather than underorganization. Shelley's tale reveals the precarious position of the human within the organic; nature's most highly organized product, the human is by that very fact the agent of its becoming‐inorganic. I conclude by showing that this same concern for the inorganic potential of human intention underlies de Man's influential critique of organicism. De Man's attempt to reclaim the category of intention from its New Critical assailants does not reject the organic metaphor but reconfigures it to incorporate rather the “structural intentionality” of the esthetic object.