{"id":133788,"date":"2019-02-20T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133788"},"modified":"2019-02-20T10:19:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T15:19:34","slug":"weird-time-in-frankenstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/20\/weird-time-in-frankenstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird Time in Frankenstein<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Elisa Gabbert\u2019s column Mess with a Classic<\/a>, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In her short nonfiction book Ongoingness<\/em>\u2014a single long, fragmentary essay\u2014Sarah Manguso writes a meditative exegesis on her own diary, a document nearing a million words that she has added to daily, obsessively, for twenty-five years. This practice felt like a necessity, a hedge against potential failures of memory, and a way to process the onslaught of time: \u201cI couldn\u2019t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.\u201d It started when she was a teenager. She went to an art opening with a dear friend, drank wine from a plastic cup, looked at paintings\u2014\u201cIt was all too much,\u201d the moment was \u201ctoo full.\u201d She wouldn\u2019t have time to \u201crecover\u201d from the beauty of the day, she realized, since tomorrow would offer only more\u00a0experience: \u201cThere should be extra days, buffer days, between the real days.\u201d (I\u2019ve often thought there should be a little buffer between months: a monthend.)<\/p>\n

When Manguso became a mother, this anxious relationship to time changed:<\/p>\n

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time.<\/p>\n

I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby\u2019s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Manguso stopped worrying so much about \u201clost memories\u201d\u2014being pregnant makes you forgetful, and when you have a small baby, most days feel the same. But aging also changes us; we\u2019ve moved farther to the right on the timeline of our lives (that\u2019s how I picture it, like a side-scrolling video game), a line whose end point is death. At some point you can assume there\u2019s more time behind than ahead. Manguso mentions reading an essay by a ninety-year-old writer, the last thing he ever published, that issued a \u201cterrible warning.\u201d She paraphrases the warning and does not name the writer, so I googled a few vague words and was surprised to find the essay right away: \u201cNearing 90<\/a>,\u201d by William Maxwell. \u201cI am not\u2014I think I am not\u2014afraid of dying,\u201d Maxwell writes;<\/p>\n

When I was 17 I worked on a farm in southern Wisconsin \u2026 The farm had come down in that family through several generations, to a woman who was so alive that everything and everybody seemed to revolve around her personality. She lived well into her 90\u2019s and then one day told her oldest daughter that she didn\u2019t want to live anymore, that she was tired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This remark, he writes, \u201creconciled me to my own inevitable extinction.\u201d He has few regrets, and many happy memories, but if he wanders too deep into nostalgic reveries, they can keep him up all night. This is the warning Manguso refers to: the past can act as a kind of trap. Maxwell adds, \u201cI have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living\u201d\u2014a thought I find beautiful and comforting. With so little to look forward to\u2014he died at ninety-one\u2014Maxwell took solace in looking back. Manguso, for her part, is finally able to take solace in forgetting: as time piles up, she loses access to specific moments, but begins to accept that life is ongoing, not discrete but continuous. It\u2019s more and more and more until it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n

Because I had just read Ongoingness<\/em>, when I started reading Frankenstein\u00a0<\/em>I was thinking about time.<\/em> (Well, I am always thinking about time.) Time is weird in Frankenstein<\/em>, in part because of the nested narratives. First there\u2019s the epistolary framing narrative, the letters that Captain Walton writes to his sister on his voyage toward the North Pole. He and his crew rescue a man at sea, a man who turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. Victor then takes over the narrative, basically telling his life story, starting from birth (to the captain, but also to us). We get to the monster part in chapter 5. After many months of self-seclusion, subsumed in his studies of \u201cnatural philosophy,\u201d chemistry, and other dark arts, \u201con a dreary night in November\u201d Frankenstein brings his gruesome humanoid to life. His fascination with this project instantly dissolves: \u201cThe beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.\u201d He runs from his creation to his bedroom and, unbelievably, tries to go to sleep, and, unbelievably, succeeds, only to be woken by the monster peeking in through his bed curtains, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Again Victor runs away, this time out into the courtyard. By morning, the monster is gone. Then something like two years go by with no monster in sight; he\u2019s on Frankenstein\u2019s mind, but he\u2019s not in the story.<\/p>\n

We meet the monster again in chapter 10. Frankenstein\u2019s young brother has been murdered, and their beloved servant girl executed for the crime. Victor is sure, though, that his creation is to blame. The doctor has been been wandering around gazing at the Alps\u2014the \u201cglorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature,\u201d these \u201csublime and magnificent scenes\u201d providing modest consolation to his suffering. And suddenly there is the monster, \u201cthe wretch.\u201d Victor goes off: \u201cDo you dare approach me? \u2026 Begone, vile insect!\u201d The \u201cdaemon\u201d responds quite calmly, and in high formal register: \u201cI expected this reception \u2026 all men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then another embedded narrative begins; the \u201cabhorred devil\u201d takes Frankenstein back to his \u201chut upon the mountain\u201d and tells his own tale. We learn, in the monster\u2019s words, what he\u2019s been doing all this time\u2014taking shelter in a hovel behind a cottage, and observing the family inside through cracks in the walls. From this poor, compassionate family\u2014the father is blind\u2014he learns something of humanity, and language; he learns even more from a \u201cleathern portmanteau\u201d he finds that contains some books, among them Paradise Lost<\/em> and \u201cSorrows of Werter<\/em>\u201d! (Never mind how he learns to read; we don\u2019t even know why he\u2019s alive.) Like Napoleon and half of Europe in the late eighteenth century, Frankenstein\u2019s monster gets a touch of Werther Fever: \u201cI thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sunk deep.\u201d Werther\u2019s suicide causes him to weep, \u201cwithout precisely understanding it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of this nonlinear storytelling, we\u2019re left to puzzle out just what Victor was up to during his monster\u2019s intellectual coming of age. It\u2019s tricky in part because the emotional texture of their experiences was different. The monster\u2019s years feel richer, thus longer, to the reader; they held more joy. But from inside the experience, Victor\u2019s years full of fear and regret would surely have felt longer than the monster\u2019s happy ones; pain elongates time. On the other (other) hand, these were the first two years of the monster\u2019s existence; time is elongated in childhood in part because each day accounts for such a large proportion of one\u2019s lifetime so far. (There\u2019s also a theory<\/a> that because children\u2019s hearts beat faster, \u201ctheir body clocks \u2018cover\u2019 more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults.\u201d Would this apply to Frankenstein\u2019s monster? Maybe, if his love for the cottagers quickened his pulse.) Can there be true simultaneity in fiction? In what sense do narratives that unspool at different times \u201chappen\u201d at the same time? Some of Shakespeare\u2019s plays seem to operate on two contradictory time scales, a phenomenon critics have dubbed \u201cdouble time.\u201d But then, there\u2019s no true simultaneity in the real world, either. Here\u2019s Wikipedia\u2019s enchanting ur-voice on the relativity of simultaneity: \u201cAccording to Einstein\u2019s special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute<\/em> sense that two distinct events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space.\u201d (At one point, the monster quotes from Percy Shelley\u2019s poem \u201cMutability,\u201d which makes no sense at all, since the narrative takes place before the poem was written.)<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s chronology is further complicated by the fact that Mary Shelley wrote the first version before her husband Percy\u2019s death by drowning in 1822, but the version we commonly read now is a revision first published in 1831. Mary\u2019s mother, the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died ten days after her daughter was born. When the author of Frankenstein<\/em> was sixteen, she met Percy Shelley, who was already married, but they ran away together anyway, which earned her the same bad sexual reputation that her mother had had. In her biographical introduction to a critical edition of the novel, Johanna M. Smith writes that Mary (Shelley) \u201cnever entirely escaped the social effects of her early indiscretion,\u201d \u201ceven though she married Percy in 1816, within a month of his wife Harriet\u2019s suicide\u201d\u2014as if this latter move were the epitome of discretion. Mary and Percy weren\u2019t destined for happiness\u2014three of their four children died very young, and in 1822 she had a miscarriage. Then, on July 8, Percy died in a shipwreck. Famously, when his body washed up onshore, his face unrecognizable, he had a book of poems by Keats in his breast pocket. His clothes must have been very close fitting.<\/p>\n

In the final paragraph of her introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley claims to have changed very little:<\/p>\n

I will add but one word as to the alterations I have made. They are principally those of style. I have changed no portion of the story, nor introduced any new ideas or circumstances. I have mended the language where it was so bald as to interfere with the interest of the narrative; and these changes occur almost exclusively in the beginning of the first volume. Throughout they are entirely confined to such parts as are mere adjuncts to the story, leaving the core and substance of it untouched.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have not read the original 1818 version, but according to Anne K. Mellor\u2019s biography of Mary Shelley<\/a>, the two are quite different, because Shelley\u2019s worldview had changed. Her layers of grief\u2014their dear friend Lord Byron died two years after Percy from what was likely septic fever\u2014combined with her \u201cfinancially straightened circumstances and her guilt-ridden and unshakeable despair\u201d to convince her \u201cthat human events are decided not by personal choice or free will but by material forces beyond our control.\u201d Shelley\u2019s \u201cnew vision of nature\u2019s relationship to humanity is registered in the novel itself,\u201d Mellor writes. The characters become pawns of fate; they can\u2019t quite be blamed for destroying their own lives: \u201cIn 1818 Victor Frankenstein possessed free will or the capacity for meaningful moral choice \u2026 In 1831 such choice is denied to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wondered whether Shelley\u2019s misfortunes in the 1820s were also responsible for the novel\u2019s obsession with loneliness. Everyone in the story, in particular the three men who take control of the narrative in turn\u2014if the monster can be called a man\u2014longs desperately for companionship. Walton writes, in his second letter posted from Archangel, a Russian port on the White Sea: \u201cI have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend, Margaret \u2026 You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.\u201d He does not expect to find one on the ocean, but he does, in Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein left his lifelong friends behind to attend university; it may be his isolation that leads him astray. The monster\u2019s loneliness is especially keen. He calls the poor cottagers, who are ignorant of his existence, his friends: \u201cWhen they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joys. I saw few human beings besides them, and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of my friends.\u201d When he works up the courage to approach them, they cower in fear and chase him off. The monster realizes he is doomed to solitude, people will never accept him; so he demands that his creator provide a companion for him, a girl-fiend, like Adam asking God for Eve. At first, moved, Victor agrees, but then decides in good conscience he can\u2019t and reneges. The monster gets revenge by killing all of Victor\u2019s friends, so the doctor, too, must suffer alone.<\/p>\n

Could Shelley have woven these themes into her revision, to force her characters to suffer alone as she suffered? It doesn\u2019t appear so. The word friend<\/em> appears 134 times in the 1831 version, and 131 times in the original. So mourning and loss were always part of the horror in her horror story. It had come to her, as she describes in the introduction she wrote in October 1831, like a transmission, and kept her awake: \u201cWhen I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reveries.\u201d I think of her lying there (\u201cthe dark parquet<\/em>, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through\u201d) like William Maxwell in a parallel insomnia, lost in his past. In the morning, she transcribes \u201cthe grim terrors\u201d of her \u201cwaking dream.\u201d She envisions it as \u201ca short tale,\u201d but Percy pushes her to \u201cdevelop the idea at greater length.\u201d It becomes the story of her life. Frankenstein<\/em>, her \u201chideous progeny,\u201d was \u201cthe offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.\u201d It\u2019s as though she had a premonition of her bleak future.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I started reading \u2018Frankenstein,\u2019 I was thinking about time. (Well, I am always thinking about time.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46550],"tags":[204,49551,2363,19530],"class_list":["post-133788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mess-with-a-classic","tag-frankenstein","tag-ongoingness","tag-sarah-manguso","tag-william-maxwell"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWeird Time in Frankenstein by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 20, 2019 \u2013 When I started reading \u2018Frankenstein,\u2019 I was thinking about time. 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