Testimony and Trope in "Frankenstein"

Abstract

That at bottom of human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing--this is Gorgon, whose vision transforms human being into non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses human, apostrophe from which human cannot turn away--this and nothing else is testimony. The Gorgon and he who has seen her and Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are single impossibility of seeing. --Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and Archive (1) IT IS NO SURPRISE THAT MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN Prometheus (1818/1831) has received attention as work of fictional autobiography. Shelley was married to poet in whom we continue to have prurient as well as intellectual interest and in whose prose novel opens; she was daughter of two enormously influential theorists and 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 preface and an introduction that recall notorious ghost story contest that was story's initial occasion. For these reasons, and others still, Shelley's novel has been read both as legible of woman author (daughter and wife), and as an allegory of in which Shelley's monster is understood as a figure for as such. But to read monster as a figure for autobiography is already to suggest that Shelley's monster is figure of autobiography: prosopopoeia, fiction of an apostrophe. (2) Indeed, prosopopoeia and apostrophe condition and name central events in Frankenstein--the discovery of of life, pursuit of ends of man (and earth), and creation of monster witness to ends it suspends. As story of crisis of human, and as an account of inhuman survival, Shelley's novel raises key questions not--or not only--about and its figures, about assumption of self in and as writing, but rather about testimony and its figures. Along these lines, novel initiates rethinking of romantic rhetoric attuned to tensions and intersections not only of and fiction, but also of testimony and poetry. The novel shows how lyric figures effect human life as life beyond life; it shows that rhetoric of romanticism is rhetoric of survival. (3) the apostrophe from which human 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 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 university, Victor spends two years studying chemistry under direction of M. Waldman and M. Krempe, and finally becom[es] as well acquainted with theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on lessons of any of professors at Ingolstadt (33). Surpassing his professors, and on verge of causing them (and all of us) to lose face (as Waldman later will exclaim D--n fellow! ... I assure you he has outstript us all ... if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all be of countenance [49]), Victor decides it is time that he return to family fold. However, an unquenched interest in of life keeps him from returning to his native home, keeps him at work on 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 inquiry into 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 from assumed relation of and end. …