The N-Spot: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus

In her provocative anti-war tract Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf again and again invokes a horrific wartime newspaper photograph, manipulating (to good purpose, mind you) the delicate sensibilities of her readership. However, as she reminds us, the figure responsible for the pictured atrocities—this shadowy, gargantuan figure we might call ‘Tyrant’ or ‘Dictator’—cannot be wholly disavowed by members of ‘respectable society.’ The ‘Tyrant’ is not entirely other to those capable of ‘identifying’ him, as such. Indeed, for Woolf the photograph itself “suggests a connection…that the public and private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other…It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure.” The division of parts, the distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed, the good and the bad cop, dissolves under pressure; such lucid myths cannot hold.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus seems to me to provocatively prefigure this sentiment. For, despite your—or my—expectations, Shelley’s Frankenstein is no drive-in monster movie. Dismiss visions of rectangular greenish skulls, inconvenient steel bolts, and incomprehensible low-throated grunts. There is a dash of suspense here; a spine-shiver or three there; but the tale is horrifying more pointedly in the way that campfire stories chill the childlike sense of wonder we persistently retain. In fact, the story evidently originated in a scene rather like that, around the eerie glow of the campfire, though I suppose most of us cannot boast winning three-legged races or battles for the top bunk against Percy Shelley or Lord Byron.

The body count is relatively high for such a highbrow novel, but the chief terror of this novel is its indictment of an ambitious, seemingly charmed intellectual who presumes to play god. Frankenstein (Victor, the creator; the monster has no name) believes he has discovered an antidote to the usual cycles of life—birth and death—or at least unearthed paths that obviate the conventional route humans trek along. When the creature that emerges from his unethical (or at least blasphemous, if you go in for that sort of thing—and I don’t) experimentation turns out to be visually repulsive, Frankenstein abandons him to the cruelties of the human world and subsequently expects his own life to resume its usual motions. Indeed, it is this conflict that tends to be left unmentioned when people speak of Frankenstein—or at the least, it was a tension in the novel that I was more or less unprepared for (particularly seeing as I consider myself a fairly well-informed ‘literary’ type).

In lieu of anything interesting, some recent book reviews...

Desperate to get through the next month. Lawdy lawdy. Nothing to say, but plenty of books read, and here are a few reviews, x-posted from my goodreads. Included: Plath's The Bell Jar, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.

The N-Spot: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

I’ll confess up front that I don’t often have the opportunity to read contemporary fiction; or in any case, I’m always a few years behind. Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, for example, was the only book I read in 2009 that was actually published in 2009 (and I should say that I finished the novel about an hour after midnight on New Year’s Eve—or Day, rather, at that point—as I sipped the dregs of my celebratory champagne). The novel was the latest on my kick of trying to work through everything she’s written, a little mission that began nearly two years ago, when I decided to include her novels The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride in my senior honors thesis on fairytale revisions by recent women (some might say ‘feminist’) writers. I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale for about the eleventh time that summer, and quickly devoured the two aforementioned novels for academic appropriation, and then moved on to Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake, Bluebeard’s Egg (short stories), some poetry (Selected Poems and Morning in the Burned House), and, most recently, Alias Grace, which I had the wonderful opportunity to teach in an honors seminar I was TA-ing for. When The Year of the Flood was released in September, I was at the exact point in the semester where I began to be overwhelmed by everything; if nothing else, my first semester in graduate school stripped me of my pleasure reading time. The book sat on my shelf for nearly three months, a shiny, brand-spankin’-new hardcover copy (and you should know by now that I almost never buy books new—it’s just not in the grad student budget, despite the fact that I have to purchase about a million per semester now)—and more importantly, signed by Atwood, who had stopped in Harvard Square to give a reading on her book tour. She sang, she danced, she enticed me by reading bits and pieces from the novel…but still I had to wait.

And then winter break. My reading list is hemorrhaging books—everything that’s been shoved to the side over the past four months, but I made certain to crack into Atwood’s before the opportunity escaped me. I posted thoughts on the novel as I worked through it, which you can find on my goodreads.com review of it, but here are some more overarching musings about the novel.

The N-Spot: Review of A.S. Byatt's 'Possession'

For a year and some change, A.S. Byatt’s Possession beckoned to me from the rocky crags of my various bookshelves; first, from the ten-foot-high, cheaply-minimalist shelf of my high-ceilinged dorm room (the bookshelf my friends were convinced would crush me one day, toppling over from the sheer weight of my book collection). But no, I would say, I want to save the book for a time when I can immerse myself entirely in it; not while I’m reading five others for classes. And then this summer, the siren’s call echoed throughout my shoebox of a bedroom. This time, however, I kept putting it back on the shelf for no other reason than that when I ordered it online over a year ago, I received the unfortunate film-tie-in edition—yes, those dreaded reprints of novels that infect serious scholars of lit-ruh-chah with embarrassment, for we would never wish to seem as though we were reading a book because of its film adaptation! Instead of the arresting Burne-Jones’ painting, “The Beguiling of Merlin,” that was the original cover of the novel, I was subjected to Gwyneth Paltrow’s bland half-smirk and a strangely dizzying—not to mention unfitting—neon landscape of London.

And so Byatt just had to wait; yet, as the summer wore on and I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with my reading list thus far, I figured, what the hell? I gathered my courage, I steeled my easily-flushed cheeks, and I dove into the novel—each time convincing myself that when I closed its pages, ol’ Gwyn wouldn’t be staring back at me. The novel overcame my initial reservations, and broke the procession of good-but-not-great-novels I’ve been reading of late. You see, it was on the shining recommendation of a favorite professor, and a favorite fellow student in said professor’s course, that I picked up Possession. We were reading, I think it was, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (blech) and talking about woman-monster figures; and what comes up, but the myth of Melusina! Instantly, aforementioned professor and fellow student begin gushing over Possession, by some woman—A.S. Byatt?—with enough brilliance, evidently, for ten master novelists. Who was this Byatt woman? And why hadn’t I—a serious lover of contemporary women writers—heard of her?! Of course, I rationalized this for myself; they must be speaking of some Victorian novelist, right? Professor is a Victorianist, and student is a Medievalist who dabbles in Victoriana. So that would explain it—a Victorian woman writer, fallen into obscurity and possibly poverty because of the vicious patriarchs that dominated her era.

Oh, how wrong was I. I added Possession to my goodreads.com account, noting sourly that the novel was published in 1990. I would have been three years old; my Victorian fantasy instantly deflated. Imagine my surprise, however, that my limp fantasy was, indeed, a central conflict of the novel! (I’ll derail again here momentarily to say that once I swallowed my pride and ordered Possession, I also threw her short fiction collection Elementals into my shopping cart. That one I did manage to read in the whirlwind of last semester—and my god, it was a whirlwind in and of itself! If you are at all in doubt that short stories can be moving, powerful, life-changing, or simply beautiful, read Elementals. A longer story within, “Cold,” is quite possibly one of the most incendiary and breathtaking stories I’ve ever had the fortune of devouring. And that’s just one masterpiece among five others!

Okay, that said. I should preface this, too, by saying that there were two things working against Possession as I embarked upon the journey: 1) I had hyped it up over the year-and-change so much that it would be next to impossible for it to live up to or exceed my expectations and 2) I discovered very soon after beginning the novel that this is undoubtedly a ‘winter experience’ sort of novel. It’s intended for frigid nights and five-P.M. moonrises and reading tucked away in your favorite blanket in your favorite chair. It is by no means a summer novel, a beach read, or something to be engrossed in while you swat mosquitoes from your thigh. For this very reason, I’m looking forward to a delicious re-read over Winter break.

Possession, then, is a sort of patchwork quilt. There are two central narrative threads—the clandestine affair between Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel Lamotte, and the research-based affair-of-sorts with Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—but that is only just the beginning. For we have, too, the narratives invoked through Ash and Lamotte’s poetry; we have the sordid history and expedition of Mortimer Cropper; we have Ellen Ash—that original Hillary Clinton—and her correspondences; we have Leonora Stern and Beatrice Nest and James Blackadder (three very distinct academics, each with their own motives and passions); and interwoven myths and fairytales and legends and more. With such a hodge-podge of characters and events, each offered up in what one might term a post-modern relativist sort of way (the author’s slant is ever-ambiguous, so to speak), the reader—here, Me—may find him or herself liking bits and being bored to tears by others. At times, it felt like a salad-bar sort of novel; for example, no matter how I tried, I found Ash’s poetry—which often ended up being ten or fifteen page stretches of awful(ly) Victorian prose-poems—an insufferable chore. I tried reading aloud to grab the cadence, with no such luck. Lamotte, on the other hand, works with a lucid, precise, melodic poetic voice—and her subject matter, the fairy Melusina and the City of Is, grabbed me by the gut. Likewise, the detours into fairy tales—again, like the one we are given to ‘by’ Lamotte—are engaging and stunningly written. Byatt has a knack for fairy stories, and the several featured throughout Possession could be published on their own (in fact, I think two of them are featured in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye).

But ultimately, love or hate ‘em, you have to appreciate Byatt’s depth of investment into the various threads of the novel. She clearly had a grasp on Victorian poetry and the contemporaneous interest in evolutionary principles (remember that Darwin’s Origin of Species was 1859), and the strangely conflicting obsession with supernatural haunting (which Byatt also ties in in a very well-researched and historical manner)—all this to generate a convincing poetic style and voice for Ash. Without a doubt, she knows her fables and myths to such an extent that they seem almost to infect the novel. You begin to recognize the motifs of the overt myths in the shadowy undercurrents of the entire novel, in places you simply hadn’t noticed them before. Take, for example, the Melusina myth; at first you think, okay, okay, I get it. A woman-monster is feared for her power; likewise, Christabel Lamotte’s poetic voice is silenced because she’s employing poetry—a male-dominated world—as an outlet for her particular identity (feminine, sexual, and authoritative). Lamotte writes a poem about Melusina—all right, I get it. Then out of nowhere, you realize that Maud Bailey, over a century later, is not only doing that same sort of ‘frightening’ female self-authorship, but has become a forbidden spectacle for Roland, and suddenly, you can trace the images and the hints all the way back to the beginning of the novel. I realize this sleuthing sounds geeky, but think about who’s writing this for a moment. I am an unabashed book nerd/slut/obsessive.

Likewise, the theme of the ‘academic mystery’ probably appealed to me because it felt like gazing into a crystal ball; everything’s still a little murky, but ‘signs point to yes’ that the novel was reflecting (at least in some distorted way) my future back at me. It won’t be for everyone, I know. It’s thrilling for me to watch at Roland and Maud seek out hidden letters and discover secret hair-locks behind doll collections, and so forth, all in the name of scholarship!—because that’s kind of/sort of what I want to do for the rest of my life. But that, and Byatt’s ever-present and self-conscious erudition are potentially grating for the reader with little patience for vulgar displays of the Ivory Tower. The primary setting is academe, the novel is peopled with scholars—the only escape you’ll find from that is within the magic-and-mystery-laced flashes into Lamotte and Ash’s ‘lifetime.’ And then, if you’re not big on Victoriana or Celtic myth and superstition, you’ll be trapped once again. I guess what I mean to say is that I’m a bit shocked to hear so many people gush over the novel (and not just the two from that class I mentioned), because it seems the kind of book directed at a very, very particular audience—and the kind of book that can easily break a reader’s last nerve.

I suppose the ‘affair of sorts’ I mentioned between Roland and Maud, too, drew my interest in. Evoked in contrast to the almost burning passion of Christabel Lamotte and R.H. Ash, Maud and Roland’s attraction to one another was all the more fascinating—because, through them, Byatt captures the truly icy quality that seems so peculiar to modern romance. Their intellectual barricades against one another, and their desire sublimated through a chaste yearning for solitude and quiet seem somehow to reflect a more pervasive question in the so-termed post-modern era: are we too self-aware for romantic love? When Roland wonders whether he can verify any of his thoughts or feelings—because he has taken up the pomo flag for the idea of an incoherent Self—I think about my own alliance with post-modernism and my inextricable connection to the Age of the Internet. I’m blogging a review of a book that was tactile, that had a texture in my hands—in the process of writing this, I still feel the keys beneath my fingers, but the words are no longer anything but creations on a detached screen. I don’t mean to get wildly philosophical, because these are old and frequently cliché questions, but nonetheless, Byatt captures one of the greatest predicaments of the modern age—what does it mean to assert an identity in an age where identity is almost wholly unstable? And how can we justify thinking or feeling anything if we can’t subscribe to some sort of stable order of understanding? Interesting that the book even preceded the sort of spiral into the internet, because it seems the questions have become more pertinent in the last decade than when the book was originally published. There’s a nostalgia in Roland and Maud’s mutual attraction for, I guess we would say, a ‘simpler’ age—a time in which they could put faith into their emotions and their ‘love.’ Likewise, the book’s evocation of fables and superstitions and Wuthering Heights-esque moorlands and cliffs gives the nostalgia that seeps through a more definable quality.

I’m getting off track, and this has become college-paper length. As I said, there are bits of the novel that felt like chores—Ash’s poetry, Cropper’s narrative—not to mention the fact that I was two-hundred pages into the novel before it became a ‘can’t-put-down’ kind of read. At first I was disappointed with the conclusion’s tidy precision, but as I think more about it now, I realize it actually wasn’t as neat as I originally thought. It was no Austenian dash to knot up the frayed ends, that’s for damn sure. No, as I think about it, the tidiness of wrapping up the plot points seems almost to play into the construction of the Victorian novel, where that sort of reassurance was expected, indeed almost required, of the novel; Byatt’s wrapping-up is a sort of defiance of ‘factual’ ambiguity, again bringing up the nostalgia for the past that we’ve spoken of already. But the ideas of the novel remain in limbo—again, questions of the unstable identity arise, as do fears about the state of modern romance; perhaps most importantly (and one of the more obvious inquiries of the novel), what is the meaning of possession? How does one possess another person, or an idea, a text—or even oneself? Byatt gives us no assurance on that point, and of course (I won’t spoil here), the very last three pages throw us for a bend as to even our understanding of those aforementioned and ‘resolved’ plot points. A hundred new questions materialize, and poof! Thar’ goes the last page; we’re left to ask ourselves about the possibilities involved in…well, again, I won’t spoil here. Needless to say, if you had the patience for this review, you’ll likely have a much more tolerant patience for Possession. It’s a dense read; it’s metafictional to an almost tiresome degree; Byatt teases, but never satisfies—but it’s well worth your parched tongue by the end.

The N-Spot: Review of Jeanette Winterson, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit"

Background: Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) is a recent discovery, thanks to my incredible—now former—thesis advisor, who suggested I check out her novel The Passion. Ever anxious to please, and interested after hearing shining things from another friend who had read it, I grabbed a brand spanking new copy of the novel from Barnes & Noble as a Christmas present for myself. Now, if you know what a compulsive used-book buyer I am (I binged on half.com the other day, in fact!), my buying a brand new book is fairly momentous. And momentous was the result: The Passion wowed me in every possible sense; the prose was like glittering velvet, the characters fleshy and whole, the plot and elements of magical realism were glittering and engrossing. It concerns an androgynous young trickster woman who becomes involved with a soldier from Napoleon’s army—the plot details themselves aren’t all that showy, but Winterson’s verve makes all the difference. I can’t say anything but that it was one of my favorite novels of the year thus far.

That said, I went into Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with similarly high expectations. Keep in mind that this is a sort of fictionalized memoir about her rather unique growing pains; Winterson was on the path to become a Pentecostal missionary, raised by a truly cracked out evangelical mother, when she began to experiment and come to terms with her sexuality—which, as it turns out, leaned more towards women than towards men (or perhaps preferably, in her mother’s mind, to chastity through Christ). The ‘novel,’ in turn, follows these awkward experiences, beginning with Jeanette’s childhood in a hyper-religious community and following her up through her excommunication, so to speak, from said community (along with some interesting uses of exorcism). Winterson weaves in elements of myth, fairytales, and legends; Perceval of Arthuriana makes a few cameos, as do interesting accounts of another knight’s quest for perfection, and a young girl’s enslavement to a father-wizard. With these and biblical references so abundant, Winterson’s own history becomes inextricable from the sort of quest narratives we’re all familiar with, even if we aren’t particularly knowledgeable about evangelism or lesbian experience.

Ultimately, Oranges didn’t quite live up to my expectations, having read The Passion, but not because it wasn’t a good novel—because, I think, it was so pervasively quirky and frequently hilarious. It was, simply, different from her other novel, which was seductive and magical and foreboding and powerful—but not all that humorous or naïve. These are almost inevitable when dealing with the sort of experiences Winterson narrates here, and she certainly makes them work. Perhaps I’ve overdosed on the lesbian comint out memoir—I took a course last semester that dealt a lot with this, and read things like Ann Bannon’s I Am a Woman and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle; in effect, I felt like I’d gone through some of this before, though the religious aspect of Winterson’s text certainly raised the stakes. I suppose my one legitimate complaint was that there were times where I felt the novel could have elaborated further—I was often lost in a sea of names; Mrs. This and Mrs. That—who are they again? And why the hell do I care about them, if you give me nothing to go on? Though The Passion was also quite short, the characters were fewer, and each felt whole to me. Here, I understood the positions of the primary characters, but the supporting cast felt unfortunately like tracework at times. In any case, I hear this novel is pretty much Winterson 101, if you’re interested. I have my complaints, but they’re mere surface—the novel itself is quite good, often laugh-out-loud funny, and Winterson is such a skilled writer that a handful of passages from the novel make the entirety worth it. I’ll leave you with one of these:

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn’t rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can’t settle…