Although neo-Bronte, neo-Austen, and neo-Stoker novels are relatively high-profile publishing phenomena, a number of writers have also been revisiting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, ranging from Dean Koontz and Elizabeth Hand to Peter Ackroyd and Laurie Sheck. In its approach to Frankenstein, Sheck's A Monster's Notes is about as far away from a novel like Jane Eyre's Daughter as one could possibly imagine: not a prequel, sequel, or conventional rewriting ("what really happened"), A Monster's Notes offers a nonlinear, virtually plotless meditation on Frankenstein as a literary work--its form, themes, images, even individual words. Understandably, it has inspired some mimetic commentary. (As reviewer Ron Charles rightly points out, "[t]he jacket flap tries to dress up the book in the clothing of a coherent story, but the title offers complete truth in advertising: This is indeed a monstrous collection of notes.") The Monster is the narrator, an almost all-seeing eye who appears to Mary when she is a young girl, reading books to her as she sits by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's grave. But he also watches Claire Clairmont and Henri Clerval as they read, write, and translate. And relays Mary Wollstonecraft's apparently posthumous letters to William Godwin. And, in our present, moves unnoticed through both depersonalized urban landscapes and depopulated monasteries, searching Google as he goes. "Time meant nothing to me," the Monster tells us. "Past, present, future, all wrapped up as one" (413). As narrative time and space appear to fold in on themselves--along with the very distinction between fictional and real characters--the Monster's relation to Frankenstein and its author becomes increasingly opaque.
As other readers have pointed out, the novel most obviously invokes Frankenstein in its use of the fragment. Like the Monster, the novel is sutured together entirely out of scraps, detached from their original textual "bodies." Some of the chapters are essentially commonplace books, such as those quoting chunks of traveler's narratives; others are cobbled together out of the Monster's Google searches. The letters that make up most of the novel are frequently scarred with strike-outs, or simply unfinished. This fragmentation extends to books within the novel, like the Dream of the Red Chamber, or the mangled works that the Monster reads to Mary. Frankenstein itself most frequently appears as decontextualized phrases, or even single words--the Monster sees the editing process, the interplay between Mary and Percy's verbal and stylistic choices, but not the story in its entirety. For that matter, the Monster normally perceives the people in his own story as incomplete fragments, usually hands. That "story" also remains stubbornly fragmented: there is no conclusive end to any of the narrative threads (and, since Mary Wollstonecraft is apparently speaking from beyond the grave, it's not clear what an "end" might be), and the novel, like Bleak House, stops on an open-ended dash.
To counterpoint this endless cracking and shattering, Sheck "stitches" the narrative together with echoes--frequently repeated quotations, allusions, images. For example, the Monster's observation about "[p]ast, present, future," which I quoted above, also appears courtesy of Claire Clairmont (in multiple contexts) and Albert Einstein. Again, in the Monster's first set of notes, he muses on the adjective "fragile," a word which then recurs in Claire's, Mary's, and the leprous Friend's prose. References to ice, to hands (the novel's dominant image), to wounds, to eyes, to the colors red and white, to glass--all these and many others seep through what we might expect to be the boundaries separating each narrative voice. Each speaker, as the Monster somewhat hazily and partially perceives them, turns out to be some fractured aspect of every other speaker. Yet if only from the sheer length of the novel--just over five hundred pages--these textual stitches keep pulling apart; the reader can do her best to compose the fragments into a unified whole, but the narrative resists such comfortable reassembly. There's as much decomposition here as composition.
Part of the decomposition effect derives from the novel's dismantling of the epistolary form. Claire Clairmont continues writing letters to Fanny Imlay even after Fanny commits suicide, while Clerval writes letters to his unnamed friend that he never intends to mail. In turn, Clerval receives his friend's increasingly fractured letters all at one go, without ever learning if his leprosy has finally killed him. Mary writes to Claire, but receives no response. Mary Wollstonecraft, as I've said, "writes" to William, even though she appears to be dead. The only consistent reader of these letters, other than their own writers, is the Monster. Unlike, say, Pamela, where Pamela's letters eventually cohere into an instructive narrative, the asymmetrical correspondence in this novel is almost entirely one-sided, sent out into the ether--or not sent out at all--without any hope of response. And yet, each writer feels impelled to make the initial gesture. Apostrophizing Cao Xueqin, Clerval admits that "[n]o matter how much I translate I can never come close to you or know you"; even so, he goes on, "there are so many things that draw me close even as I feel this unbridgeable gap" (233). This tension between the desire to know and the consciousness that such knowledge will never be possible also exists, it seems to me, in the novel's epistolary structure: each character writes (in friendship, anger, self-exculpation, and so on) to another, extending a hand (to borrow the novel's favorite image) in friendship or rage, but there is never a moment of reciprocal recognition. Only the Monster, reading this interrupted circuit of communication--much as he spies on the De Lacey family in Frankenstein--can identify the missed connections, but even so, his reading primarily consolidates his emotional exile. Certainly, as the New Yorker would have it, "in the last pages, a being without identity cowers in a squalid room, hunting the Internet for a trace of its creator."
Interestingly enough, there's one text the Monster refuses to reread: Frankenstein's notes, frequently referenced but never quoted. This novel virtually eliminates Victor Frankenstein from the equation, reducing him to his hands (the hands that Victor himself curses in the original novel): "Yet I'd glimpsed your hands before you fled, knew mine looked like yours. I couldn't know then how you'd made me out of pieces of dead things, discarded things--only sensed I was something embodied whose one clear task was to continue to exist" (10). Although the Monster returns to this moment of origin more than once, it eventually becomes unclear if this origin is actually the origin, if Mary Shelley's more lurid fantasies of fabricating him don't actually bring him into existence. Instead of the unread laboratory notes, we have Mary Shelley's notes, which are themselves frequently written over by Percy Shelley; in that sense, Frankenstein-the-novel has the same "stitches" as the Monster, composed as it is not only by multiple hands (literally--the Monster keeps seeing their hands writing and rewriting), but also out of the Monster's own fragmentary notes, dropped on the ground during the Monster's meetings with the child Mary, and Mary's perhaps unconscious allusions to her mother's writings. By the end, it's difficult to draw the line between original and copy, corpse and newborn, author and translator. Like the novel's sense of time, all of these things double back upon themselves, change places. "Who's the reader?" the Monster asks on the novel's penultimate page. "Who's the listener?" (519)
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