Gayatri Spivak: The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work

This week, we're reading Gayatri Spivak's "Frankenstein and a Critique of Imperialism." Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist, and self-described "practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist". She is best known for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which she expounds upon in the link below.

Of course, you're not required to watch the entire 1.5-hour clip. It may be fruitful, however, to get a sense of what the subaltern is. We'll be talking about it at greater length during our week on Post-Colonial Theory, but I'm interested in how the trajectory of the subaltern discussed in the clip might inform Spivak thinks and writes about Frankenstein.




Subaltern is a term that commonly refers to persons who are socially, politically, and geographically outside of/subjugated by the hegemonic power structure. Do any of Shelley's figures exist outside of the novel's power structures? Which structures do they navigate and which do they evade? How do these processes or maneuvers inform their identity formation?

Does the formulation regarding the cacophonous (rather than "harmonious") operation of the three-part Kantian subject that Spivak presents in her article support, negate or complicate our understanding of the Creature as a possible subaltern?

I hope I'm doing this right.

I am going to preface my post with the warning that I love Immanuel Kant. Proceed with caution.

When rereading Kant's "Critique of the Power of Judgment" and thinking of it in reference to Frankenstein I could not help but dwell on Kant's concepts of beauty, genius, and the sublime, and how those apply to Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. Kant states that "Beautiful art is the art of genius"(445). But what constitutes beauty to Kant? Kant relates the idea that something which is beautiful can be pleasing without a concept or sense of contention. If basing our further discussion on this idea, that something which is to be considered beautiful would please without fault, then the creation cannot be considered beautiful. Behind the creation, there was indeed a concept, Dr. Frankenstein's need to push the limits, and see if by going beyond normal human abilities, he could create a being. That being said, there is arguably nothing of Kantian beauty in the creature. However, Kant also states, as quoted above, that beautiful art is the art of genius. Can the monster then be considered "beautiful art" if Frankenstein's work is considered to be the art of genius, with Frankenstein functioning as the genius in question? Kant outlines the qualities a genius should possess in his Critique noting that "originality must be the primary characteristic," and that the creation of genius must be some sort of model (446). However, and this is a big however, Kant also states that the author of genius does not know how the ideas have come to him, and cannot communicate to others how to produce such genius, ultimately, that it is a "particular spirit given to a person at birth."

Of course, as in anything Kantian, this is all extremely contestable, but it is worth pointing out that if the spirit of genius, to Kant, must be given to a person at birth, then Frankenstein cannot be considered a genius, even if he possesses many of the attributes due to the fact that Frankenstein believes in the process of acquiring knowledge, and that everything he understood about the human body, and the creature he created, was learned, not bestowed upon him.

All this being said, I turn to another of Kant's ideas, possibly one that Frankenstein and his creature may be able to encompass, that of the sublime. Everything about the dynamic between creature and creator can then be deemed sublime, in that they are, ultimately, "objects on which the imagination fruitlessly expends its entire capacity for comprehension"(436) and still cannot seem to comprehend.

Pardon my rant. These ideas are undoubtedly open to interpretation, as is everything with Kant. Actually, I’m almost positive that if I read this again I will come up with a whole new outlook as the “Critique of the Power of Judgment" is endlessly thought provoking. As of right now, however, these are my thoughts.

Monsters and Poets

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness—

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen very far.*

--Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” in Ariel

O voice once heard

Delightfully, Increase and multiply,

Now death to hear! for what can I increase

or multiply, but curses on my head?**

--John Milton, Paradise LostBook X, 729-732

I love how Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar reinterpret Frankenstein through the lens of Victor as a (shocked!) Eve who is overwhelmed by his own desperation as he attempts to alternately to ignore, flee or fight against his newly revealed nature as the second sex; as the fallen, doomed as he is to this particular “horror story of Maternity.” (226)

What is also interesting about reading Victor as Eve through the lens of Paradise Lostis that there is more to it than a simple overlay of character. Moving beyond the parallels between Victor and Eve, we can consider the “elaborate, gothic psychodrama of her family history” (227) including Mary Shelley’s habit of reading on her mother’s grave (where she also met her lover, thus combining books, death and sex in a otherworldly, ideological lust). Then Gilbert and Gubar take it a step farther to pose the idea that the creature was not born of science, but of books. I am especially interested in this idea—that the “ instruments of life” could in fact be read as, literally, literary works. (238) How can we play with this concept? Has the creature (and Mary) been parented by books, or can we take this out to a notion of the creature himself parenting the novel? Maybe that’s far fetched, but if we consider the assemblage of disparate narrative parts (Walton, Victor, the creature) can we revisit the creation of literary life? Does one person/creature’s story usurp the other, even as one builds upon the other in the formation of a story larger than any one character? The Spivak article speaks to this idea somewhat in its notion of imperialism, of taking something new—something foreign—and attempting (expecting?) it to conform to a specific notion of the whole, being British society and culture, I presume. Perhaps we should add empire and country to the descending layers of story already present.

However, having taken the image of sex intersecting with death which creates the “Monstrous Eve,” we have an ideal platform to consider the sublime. Kant writes that something, “may, to be sure, appear in its form to be contrapurposive for our power of judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination, but is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that.” (NACT 431) Additionally, consider the term “ negative pleasure” in this passage: “Since the mind is not merely attracted to the object but is also always reciprocally repelled by it, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to become negative pleasure. “ (431)

Where beauty (to me) seems entangled in notions of both the “agreeable” and the “good,” (417) the sublime appeals not to taste but to feeling and addresses issues of “power” and “dominion” over nature (438), which are central issues in Frankenstein. What is interesting to consider if we view the novel in light of Kant, is can the story be sublime and not at all in the realm of beautiful, while the novel, as a work of art, is beautiful? If we call Mary Shelley “genius” by Kant’s terms, and her art is inspired and, thus, beautiful, does that pull itself into Percy Bysse Shelley’s commentary on poetry and his definition of genius: “The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.” (605)

Finally, I like Sydney’s notion of, if not genius, the role of the poet, which seems to fit aptly into Mary Shelley’s life as a writer and addresses the idea of creating new legends and new stories, which, despite all the ways Frankenstein can be tied back to Milton, Dante, and Shelley’s own life, feels liberating and less an explanation of the art of our history, but a challenge to create the art of the future: “Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature as the heroes, demigods, Cyclopes, chimeras, furies and the like.” (257)

See everyone in class.

*I looked up “The Moon and the Yew Tree” in Arielbecause it was referenced in the Gilbert and Gubar excerpt. (230) I thought the poem spoke so well to Shelley and her complicated relationship with her mother that I share a longer excerpt here just for fun. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with my response. Or maybe it does. Either way.

**Same with the Milton. Just messing around with my books.

Sidney, Shelley (and Virgil)?

Sidney echoes Virgil (“happy is who is able to know the causes of things”) in claiming that some individuals’ thirst for knowledge is propelled by an understanding of “themselves to be demigods if they knew the causes of things” (260). This statement along with the rest of Sidney’s elucidation of his understanding of teaching, learning and practice is very relevant to the text of Frankenstein and Sidney’s “The Defense of Poesy”. Sidney posits that the end of learning is “to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying [of] his own divine essence” (260). Victor’s knowledge inverts this ideal; he creates a dungeon of a body for the imprisonment and eventual discontent of an incipient mind. Personally, Victor’s knowledge and its monstrous product cause him mortal terror, mental and emotional anguish and very real corporeal danger. What message might be extrapolated from Frankenstein concerning Sidney (and Virgil’s) understanding of knowledge, learning and the whole idea of “divine essence? How do Sidney’s conclusions affirm or contradict the variety of ways Frankenstein treats the body/soul binary?

9/29: The Creature's Beauty and Frankenstein's Indulgences

How can we apply Kant’s ideas of beauty, the “monstrous” (435), and the “fearful” (438) to Frankenstein’s creature who was consistently deemed repulsive by nearly everyone who encountered him? We know that the creature harbored some truly sensitive and thoughtful insights and might have even been a peaceful beast was he not judged solely on his appearance. Does the creature not fit Kant’s definition: “An object is monstrous if by its magnitude it annihilates the end which its concept constitutes.” (435) The creature – whose power, size and unbearable appearance – does end up doing much more damage than good, but this may have only been because of the aesthetic judgments of the characters surrounding him.

I find Gilbert and Gubar’s illumination of Victor’s childhood to be particularly interesting (231). It would seem that indulgence also plays a major role in the tale of Frankenstein. The most interesting thing about this is not whether Victor was playing God or not, but that he was able to indulge in the many whims that caught his interest. We generally view parents who expose their children to intellectual enrichment to be noble, but what is the flip side to that coin? Where is the parent’s accountability in making sure that indulgences are responsible ones? How much blame does the reader place on Victor’s “deific” father?

See you all at the library tomorrow!

History and the Monster

Rather than spend the bulk of my post searching for a question, I am going to pose the question first and then attempt to work through a possible answer or understanding.

Question: Why does the creature attempt to learn?

Spivak writes that "the narrative of the monster...is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human." It is worth noting that all of the cottage's characters have been separated from their histories. The family is living in a sort of exile away from their former upper class lifestyle; Safie, as Spivak reiterates, is removed from her "residence in Turkey;" and the monster has drifted from both his creator and place of creation.

I recognize "Caliban/Ariel distinction" to which Spivak refers, and it is important to observe that in this case the "Caliban" feels an intense longing for the same acceptance the cottagers extend to Safie--Spivak's Ariel. Like the monster, Safie "was left alone, unacquainted with the language of the country, and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world" (85), but the Ariel has a distinct advantage because she shares a common history with the cottagers--both from past encounters, and a broader shared 'human' history.

The monster is self-aware; because he found the notes that document his creation, he realizes that his genesis is of a different sort--Paradise Lost is not his tale. So his knowledge serves to build a sort of cultural bridge: a link that can allow him to successfully engage with the cottagers. The monster's countenance alone would betray any attempts at humanity, so he can only hope to entice the humans with his knowledge of their culture. He does not have Safie's half-Christian heritage--without knowledge, there is nothing in him, no common thread of history, that the cottagers will find redeeming.

Returning to Spivak's original quote, I would argue that the monster does not learn in order "to be" human, rather he learns so that humans might possibly attempt to empathize. Perhaps the humans would see the similarities the monster observed between his own creation and Milton's tale of human origin. But when empathy fails and the monster is shunned, all that remains is the recognition that his history is irreconcilably different.

Spivak notes that "the simple suggestion that the monster is human inside but monstrous outside" does not begin to resolve the "tangential unresolved moment in Frankenstein." Though no single resolution exists, a more plausible assertion is that the monster is monstrous inside but human on the outside. His parts are human, though grossly out of proportion, but his origin and history--attributes that reaffirm human bonds in the story--are decidedly monstrous. Even if a reader believes the monster is human, the monster sees himself as something different: the lack of a shared history keeps him outside of humanity.

Perhaps this is why the monster, as Spivak articulates, is allowed to step out of the story's frame. His narrative is too foreign for the human reader or writer to close: he fits into the unknown beyond Walton's trips to the borders of human knowledge.

-Rob

9/29 Response

Gilbert and Gubar look to Shelley’s biography, specifically her relationship or rather lack of relationship with her parents claiming that “books appear to have functioned as her surrogate parents, pages and words standing in for flesh and blood” (Gilbert and Gubar 228). Victor’s monster matures as a being by learning language and then by reading books later explaining to Victor that he read from Paradise Lost and “other volumes” (Shelley 87). The monster in essence matures with the aid of literature. Victor too reads many books; his father appears within the text mostly to chastise him for reading disproved. If Gilbert and Gubar are correct in their assessment, how do the results of Victor and the Monster, reared by books, explain Shelley’s childhood, or at least her perception of parenthood?

Kant explains there are two forms of beauty: free beauty and adherent beauty. Free beauty requires detachment from preconceived definitions that are “not grounded on any kind of perfection, any internal purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold is related” (Kant 426). Victor serves as the narrator to the story, relating his adventure to the sea captain. How does his diction when describing the creation of the monster and the monster himself suggest how he assessed the beauty of the monster? Is he presupposing that his monster should be something it is not, that he has a “concept of its perfection” (Kant 426) before levying judgment?

9/29 Response: Nitpicky questions re: Monstrous Eve

Gilbert and Gubar point out that Walton, Frankenstein, and the monster “are obsessed with problem-solving” (227). She goes on to say that “all three, like Shelley herself, appear to be trying to understand their presence in a fallen world, and trying at the same time to define the nature of the lost paradise that must have existed before the fall. But unlike Adam, all three characters seem to have fallen not merely from Eden but from the earth, fallen directly into hell, like Sin, Satan, and – by implication – Eve. Thus their questionings are in some sense female…” (229).

I must admit that I’m much more familiar with the creation myth as it appears in Genesis than I am with Milton’s telling of it in Paradise Lost, so it’s very possible I’m missing something. That being said, this seems inaccurate to me. I don’t understand how Walton, Victor, and the creature’s supposed descent into hell makes them like Eve. Eve was never cast into hell – she was cast out of Eden and into the world, as was Adam. I do see connections to the Adam/Eve/Satan/God relationships all over this novel, but I fail to see how the obsessions of the aforementioned characters are female in nature in this particular context.

There are moments later in the essay where I have an easier time buying some of their arguments, but here it seems like a stretch. Again, I admit that I’m not as familiar with Milton’s version of the myth as I am with the way it is rendered in Genesis.

Another point that bothered me: Gilbert and Gubar use the following quote, alongside others, to illustrate how the “Adamic Victor” is “curiously female:” “He is consumed by ‘a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature’” (234). Were I the author of this essay, I would not choose a quote that indicates a desire to penetrate as evidence of a character’s femaleness – especially right after suggesting that we should pay special attention to words like “dilate.”

That's all for now.

Dan Fiorelli

Kant, Frankenstein, and the Sublime

Kant writes that, "We call sublime that which is absolutely great" (pg 433 of Norton), and he gives us the definition: "That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small" (same page). In Frankenstein, Victor encounters what he considers the sublime in nature several times. What effect does this have on him? It seems like his "mind feels itself moved in the representation of the sublime in nature" (Kant pg 437), but does it have any other effects? Does it in any way make Victor himself feel small? Does this have a humbling effect on his person? Or is he merely moved by the sublime in the moment, to forget about it afterwards?

9/29 Response: Defense of Poesy

Some thoughts on Sydney:

Sidney tells us that Poetry must move one towards good moral action. He criticizes philosophy as “abstract and general” (262) and often difficult to understand as it is not concrete. History is criticized as too concrete – concerned only with what is and was and not what should be. Poetry, on the other hand, can be understood by the uneducated and those “more beastly than beasts” 263. Does this mean that Sidney would object to any piece of art that lends itself to multiple interpretations? In our time, the moral of a given story is often open to interpretation, and we often have to dig deep to find it. Perhaps, in these cases, Sidney would say that the true moral of any given story is found on the surface? I don’t think the most “beastly of beasts” are likely to dig very deep to find a story’s moral.

also...

Sidney says that the poet cannot be a liar, because he does not claim any authority and affirms nothing. Would he object to the epistolary style of writing, or any other device that might make fiction much more likely to be interpreted as fact? It is true that an author of an epistolary novel does not affirm that its contents are factual simply buy using this device. But would Sidney object to using said device simply because of the likelihood of misinterpretation? I get the feeling that clarity is key to Sidney’s definition of poesy.

I have a few nitpicky comments about Gilbert & Gubar's "Monstrous Eve" essay, but I'll put that in a different post.

Dan Fiorelli

On Theory, Literature and Interpretation: A Review

In last week’s readings, Jonathan Culler commiserated with us, admitting that literary theory is seldom, if ever, what we would presume it to be and seldom does what we’d presume it would do. Contrary to what many would expect and prefer, literary Theory is NOT the systematic account of the nature of literature and the methods of analyzing it. Comprised of the disparate fields of anthropology, art history, film studies, psychoanalysis, science, social and intellectual history and sociology, literary theory is a body of thinking and writing that challenges and reorients thinking within its own field of origin and beyond. Its main effect is to dispute common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature and experience. It is irreverently interdisciplinary. It is analytical and speculative. It critiques the notion (and possibility) of common sense, and it is reflexive. As such, theory is intimidating, a resource for constant upstagings between successive generations of theorists.

Our Norton anthology maps out this site of discord by highlighting the central tension between theorists and antitheorists and noting the latter’s insistence that we return to purer days when theory meant systematic reflection on the nature of literature and its production. The problem created by such a return is that it presupposes a static definition of literature and selectively promotes certain modes of scrutinizing it. The narrowness of that definition and the bias present in its preferred mode of analysis actually proves that there is no position free of theory and no way to exclude ourselves from its practice. Said simply, where there are analysis and interpretation, there is theory.

Like Frankenstein’s Creature, theory is a repulsively constructed corpus, built to make sense of an increasingly unknowable world. Taking on a life of its own, the monster causes us to question some of the most unnerving questions of artistic production and human existence. In its quest to be regarded as a valuable and viable being in the eyes of society, it habitually vanquishes several of the people, paradigms and ontological positions treasured and held most dear by its creator(s).



A surprising development from last week’s reading and discussion came as we moved toward defining literature. While many of us anticipated that ‘theory’ would be the more challenging concept to define and conceptualize, it soon became clear that ‘literature’ would be no less unwieldy term to manage. Culler provided us with five points that theorists have made about literature:

1. Literature as the ‘foregrounding’ of language: understanding literature as an organization of language that emphasizes its own strangeness and, in so doing, distinguishes itself from language used for other purposes.

2. Literature as the integration of language: understanding literature as language that is likely to exploit relations between form and meaning or theme and grammar, and marking an argument about how each element impacts the whole.

3. Literature as fiction: understanding literature as a linguistic event that both utilizes narrative form and leaves the work’s relation to the world open to interpretation.

4. Literature as aesthetic object: understanding literature as a marriage between form and content in a text.

5. Literature as intertextual or self-reflexive construct: understanding literature a web of interconnected, inter-referential texts that draw upon one another to create meaning.