Monstrous Significations

"The plot of Melville's Billy Budd is well known." (2258). Oops.

Anyway, despite my ignorance of the story, I found Barbara Johnson's application of Saussure to Billy Budd to be interesting. I was wondering if we might do the same thing with Frankenstein?

Perhaps Frankenstein might be read as an example of what happens when those who are "in language" are confronted with a signifier (the creature) that is out of continuity with its established signified concept. What appears to be signified is an evil monster, by virtue of its appearance. But significations can be arbitrary, and what is actually signified is an intelligent, sensitive creature (the creature as he experiences himself).

The creature's later monstrous behavior ultimately realigns the signifier-signified relationship - the creature ultimately cannot help but exist in continuity with his monstrous outward appearance - he has no choice but to conform to the rules of the language of signifiers he is "born" into.

Maybe that's all a little obvious, but it's the best I've got ;-)

Also, this quote from Johnson stood out to me, in light of our ongoing class discussion:

"If all plots somehow tell the story of their own marring, then perhaps it could be said that all plots are plots against authority, that authority is precisely that which creates the sense of its own destruction, that all stories necessarily recount by their very existence the subversion of the father, of the gods, of consciousness, of order, of expectations, or of meaning" (2264).

This could apply to the way we've recently considered Victor as author and the creature as text. It also calls to mind the Bloomian process of the misreading of the "parent poem," which has ties to the Oedipal situation as discussed in psychoanalysis. Paternal anxiety abounds in theory, apparently. Does the layered narrative of Frankenstein also lend itself to "the subversion of the father ... or of meaning" (2264)?

Dan