The Game of Literally or Figuratively

Barbara Johnson speaks of a literal reader and an ironic reader, and the opposition between them. Is her literal and ironic reader similar to Paul de Man’s discussion of literal and figural meanings?

Both Victor and the Monster encounter this opposition, literally, in the text; Victor reads the old science books and the Monster reads Paradise Lost, which both take to be literally rather than figuratively. How then does the inclusion of this conflict within the text relate to the idea of texts as an allegory of reading?

De Man explains “it is not so that there are simply two meanings, one literal and the other figural, and that we have to decide which one of these meanings is the right one in this particular situation” (1371). That is also to say, that the relationship is not simply oppositional. Is Foucault supporting this idea when he suggests that writing is transformed into “an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of signifier… writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind” (1477)?

Would it be accurate to follow this up as to say that the monster simply doesn’t understand the rules of the game of reading Paradise Lost when he allows his interpretation in a literal way to shape his world view? And what about Victor, who has the same sort of reading, pursues the concepts he reads in his science books—creating the monster—only to have the realization of how incorrectly he read those books?