--Sorry I didn't have this up Monday evening guys!
Speaking From Beyond Signifiers
The sign is a prison; a relationship of entrapment that ultimately captures the signified within the grasp of the signifier for the purpose of subjugation. No matter how arbitrary the “signifier” may be, the act of attaching it to a “signified” is a system of closure; once these two are linked and become—in Sassure’s words—“whole” the signified becomes no more than a “part” that is separate but ultimately doomed by its other half. However, this relationship is dependent on a “fixed visual image” (Sassure 850). The lack of an image produces nothing more than “writing” from which the “real” is always escaping behind an endless link of supplementary signifiers (Derrida 1692). In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature does not seek out the blind man in order to come across as human, and he does not cover Frankenstein’s eyes to empower a human voice—the creature’s actions are part of his effort to elude the imprisoning gaze that will serve as his ball and chain; he wants to elude the signifiers that will name him as nothing more than part of a sign.
When Frankenstein encounters his creation for the first time since the night of the being’s animation, he is overcome with rage and reacts by calling the creature a series of names: “Devil!” for example, as well as “vile insect,” “abhorred monster,” and “fiend,” but it is devil that by the end of the scene is repeated more often than the others (Shelley 67). Devil is specific enough to have a certain connotation: the antithesis of the creator, the deceptive perpetrator of the fall of Man. Frankenstein says “relieve me from the sight of your detested form” (Shelley 67), and the creature obeys, but not by leaving—instead he covers Victor’s eyes. Outside of Victor’s gaze he is neither human nor devil, the creature is restored to that nameless and indefinable ambiguity out of which he was born. Frankenstein’s narration ceases to define the creature with a litany of monstrous terms, and settles for the time being on a somewhat contradictory pairing of words: “odious companion” (Shelley 67). Odious, on the one hand, conjures negative connotations, though they are not nearly as specific as those assigned to “devil,” but “companion” is even vaguer: it involves a certain relation or camaraderie. The creature comes to occupy this ambivalent and unbridgeable gap between “odious” and “companion.” By impeding Victor’s gaze, the creature has escaped the signifiers of the sign; he is no longer a signified, but is the “blind spot” that both his own narration and Victor’s reading can encircle but cannot grasp (Derrida 1697).
The creature comes to occupy this “blind spot” more literally when he recites his encounter with De Lacy, the old blind man who lives in the cottage where the creature resides for some time following his animation. The creature does not engage De Lacy in hopes of being regarded as human; human is an inadequate signifier in light of the creature’s self-awareness of his own very inhuman appearance, but he does wish to be deemed “kind friend” (Shelley 90). It is during the conversation with De Lacy that the creature articulates the binding power of the sign. “A fatal prejudice clouds their eyes” the creature says of the cottagers, “they behold only a detestable monster” (Shelley 90). The creature is distancing himself from humans—the ‘their’ at once refers to the cottagers and all humans in general—and the “prejudice” is a human inclination to trust the sign: so that when “they” see the creature, they recognize him as an embodiment of the concept (signified) marked by the signifier: “monster,” thus trapping the creature within the oppressive nature of the sign. Because the blind man cannot see, the creature is able to refer to himself as a “detestable monster” and evade the process of signification. Blindness has rendered De Lacy’s experience to that of a reading—he hears language in the same way others read a text: without any relation to what is “beyond and behind” the language (Derrida 1692). When the scene devolves into chaos, the blind man exclaims “Great God!...Who are you?” (Shelley 91). There is a hint of betrayal in his exclamation, as if he actually knew who the creature was before this moment. The betrayal is the failure of his signifiers—the realization that the creature inhabited a zone outside of the “chain of differential references” (countryman, friendless, human, criminal) he had previously used in an attempt to accurately capture the creature’s essence (Derrida 1692, Shelley 90-91). As for the blind man’s “Great God!” this can be read as a desperate plea to a simpler reality: one in which god’s forms stand as ideals, and a creature cannot escape definition. The fellow cottagers’ reactions demonstrate the pervasiveness of the sign. They act swiftly to physically restrain the creature because of the same “prejudice” that the creature described to De Lacy.
In addition to eluding the gaze and capture of signifiers, the creature successfully eludes physical capture throughout the book. The creature is somewhat of an enigma in that he is never present long enough to be anything more than a phantom of sorts, except in that situation in which he is defining himself to Frankenstein. Like reality itself, the creature has “always already escaped…never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida 1692). His escape from the cottagers leaves them relating an unbelievable story: “The life of my father is in the greatest danger” De Lacy’s son Felix says to the cottage’s owner, “owing to the dreadful circumstance that I have related” (Shelley 93). The story, and the insufficient language used in its telling, cannot leave an adequate impression of the creature, and in all cases—whether Felix is relating the tale of his experience, or those cases when Frankenstein is describing the creature’s existence—the listeners are skeptical or do not react very strongly to the implausible details. The creature is allowed to escape both physically and metaphorically through these cracks in the characters’ “writing” of the tale.
The trapping nature of sight and vision resurfaces in the final scene of Frankenstein. When Walton observes the creature standing over Frankenstein’s body, he is only able to address the creation of “appalling hideousness” as one addresses another thoughtful and intelligent being by closing his eyes—albeit “involuntarily” (Shelley 153). Saved from the “prejudice” of sight, Walton is able to ask the creature to stay. Walton begins to feel “a mixture of curiosity and compassion” for the creature, but only because he “dared not again raise [his] looks upon [the creature’s] face” (Shelley 153)—to look again at the creature would cause Walton to fall back on the prejudice and the conventions of the sign that do not allow for a monster or devil to be reasonable or sympathetic. The creature leaves by saying “I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold” (Shelley 155). Spivak notes that the creature in this manner has escaped the frame of the text, we do not get Walton’s final remarks to perform closure (Spivak 268). At the same time the creature escapes the text’s signification. Just as Walton does not close the narrative by stating what exactly his eyes “beheld” in this final moment, and he thus does not complete the sign: as readers, we are only left with his ambivalences. The creature, though he may be off to perform his own death, remains outside of the endless chain of signifiers that the text has produced in a failed attempt at capturing his “real” being.
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