Of Books and Bicycles

One of the things I like most about Frankenstein is its complicated structure — the way there are narratives nestled in other narratives and every part of it is either a letter or a story told by one character to another. We start off with Robert Walton writing a letter to his sister Margaret Saville. Then Walton meets Frankenstein, who tells him his story, which Walton records in his letters to his sister. Then Frankenstein tells Walton the story of how he re-encounters the creature after losing touch with him for several years (I try not to call him the monster, although it’s the word that comes most easily to mind — “monster” reflects Frankenstein’s loathing of him, but “creature” is a little less hateful and recognizes that he had the potential for goodness). During this meeting, the creature recounts his life up to that point in a long narrative that Frankenstein reports to Walton word-for-word — a little implausibly — and that Walton records word-for-word in his letters to his sister — also implausibly.

After the creature’s narrative, Frankenstein returns as storyteller, and then the novel closes with Walton again, so the structure of listeners/readers and writers/speakers goes like this: Margaret, Walton, Frankenstein, Creature, Frankenstein, Walton, Margaret. Or Walton to Margaret; Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Creature to Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Frankenstein to Walton to Margaret; Walton to Margaret. It’s interesting that Margaret is the receiver of all these stories but we never find out much about her and she never speaks herself.

In addition to all this, there are letters embedded in the narratives, so we hear other voices as well, most importantly the voices of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s love interesting, and Frankenstein’s father, who both write to Frankenstein expressing their worry about his secretiveness.

And, making this already very textual novel even more so, there are literary allusions and quotations all over the place, including lines from Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Paradise Lost. Shelley finds ways to show off all the learning I wrote about the other day. This is a very inclusive novel, really, bringing in as much literature and as many voices and as much complexity as it possibly can.

All of this only emphasizes the loneliness of the creature; I just finished reading the creature’s narrative, and, in spite of the fact that he’s a murderer and that he sets out to make Frankenstein miserable, he’s really quite sympathetic. The story of how he lives in a hovel adjoining a small family’s home, how he watches them and learns from them and begins to care for them, how he shows the goodness of his heart by secretly chopping firewood for them, and how he is cruelly rejected by them when they first lay eyes on him is heartbreaking. Shelley makes clear that if only someone, even one person, had shown kindness to the creature, he would not have become the wretch that he is.

The creature’s narrative is nestled in the middle of this novel, passed on from character to character and finally to the reader, to me, but he himself is kept out of this web of communication. Every person who lays eyes on him is revolted, reacting with uncontrollable horror. The only people who will listen to the creature are a blind man who cannot perceive his horrifying body and Frankenstein who is threatened by the creature’s potential for violence and who therefore feels compelled to listen. It seems like the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that I, too, would react with horror if I saw the creature, in spite of my sympathetic feelings after reading his story. There’s something saving, then, in the ability to write to people from a distance, to write without the body being present, for it’s only this way that the creature’s message gets heard.

If only he could use words all by themselves with no traces of the physical, he could make people understand him, but the creature never actively enters this world of writing, or storytelling from a distance; his story gets passed along because Frankenstein chooses to recount it to Walton and Walton chooses to tell the story to his sister. Although his story is at the center of the novel, literally and metaphorically, he ultimately has no control over it and, left powerless to make people understand him, he lashes out in violence in response. The power that Frankenstein wields when he creates life is impressive, but the power that a writer wields is even more so; being left out of web of communication created by writing is another of the creature’s undeserved punishments.

I’ve been enjoying re-reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; this is at least the sixth time I’ve read it, as I was assigned the book once in college, was assigned it at least three times in grad school, and taught the book once a few years ago, which would make this the sixth time around. I’m not in the least bored by it, though. There is so much richness in the book, and I’m continually amazed that Mary Shelley was only 18 when she began writing it. She was 20 when it was published in 1818. The introduction to my edition discusses critical reaction to her youth, including the argument, made by Muriel Spark, that

… perhaps the wonder of it exists, not despite Mary’s youth, but because of it. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s best novel, because at that early age she was not well acquainted with her own mind.

I don’t particularly like this argument; it sounds condescending to me, as though Shelley wrote a work of genius in spite of herself. But it does seem that, genius though she was, Shelley was lucky in the way she stumbled upon an idea that would resonate so powerfully for so long, in ways she surely had no conscious idea of. Could she have known how acutely aware of the dangers of science and technology people would become in future years? Sometimes authors are particularly in tune with the spirit of their time, or even of future times, and it’s mysterious what allows them that insight.

My introduction is good, though, at showing all the literary and philosophical influences on Shelley, and all the ideas about science and the nature of life and death that were floating around the group Shelley was living with when she got the idea for the novel, a group that includes not only Percy Shelley, but Lord Byron and John Polidori as well. This is how Byron describes the mood of the time:

I was half mad … between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unalterable and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.

Wouldn’t you love to have been able to observe this group and listen in on all their talk?

The story of how Shelley got the inspiration to write the novel is famous; during a stretch of rainy weather, Byron proposed that everyone tell a ghost story and Mary Shelley was unable to think of one until one night she had a vision:

I saw — with shut eyes but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

Soon she realized that this vision could be the basis of the ghost story she had been seeking, and the rest is history.

I’m struck at everything she had absorbed while she was still in her teens. According to my introduction, in the years leading up to the writing of the novel, Shelley had been reading Byron, Samuel Richardson’s novels including Clarissa (whose influence we see in the epistolary structure of Frankenstein), the French writer Madame de Genlis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, books on chemistry by Humphrey Davy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (both of these at least twice), Rousseau’s Confessions, Emile, and Nouvelle Heloise (the latter two twice), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, her father William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland, or The Transformation, and various Gothic novels including those by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Maturin, and William Beckford.

And those are only the book the editor mentioned; there may have been plenty more. That’s quite a list, isn’t it? In this case the recipe for a masterpiece seems to have called for genius, avid reading, the right group of friends, and a little luck.

I have now finished Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, and have mixed but mostly positive feelings about it. As I expected, it doesn’t live up to her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, and, as I didn’t expect, it has some odd moments and some tedious ones, but overall it’s an enjoyable, interesting novel.

The novel tells the story of five young people who fall in and out of love with each other. There’s Katherine Hilbery and her fiancé William Rodney, first of all; Katherine is the granddaughter of a famous poet and she and her mother are working (not very successfully) on his biography. They spend their days surrounded by his papers and their memories; in spite of her family history, however, Katherine is not terribly literary and prefers to work on mathematics problems in secret. William is a rather surprising choice for Katherine — while she’s fairly free-thinking and open-minded, he’s conventional to a fault, particularly so in his views about proper womanly behavior. His ideal woman is not likely to spend her free time working at math.

And then there are Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham, both of whom come from decidedly less comfortable circumstances than the other characters. Mary lives on her own and spends her days working for women’s suffrage; Katherine envies her independence, although Mary worries where it is taking her — she doesn’t want to end up like the eccentrics she works with, so devoted to a cause that they can’t see beyond it and begin to lose their common sense. Mary and Ralph are good friends; Ralph lives with his family and works as a lawyer, although he dreams of owning a cottage in the country where he can work on his writing.

These four meet early on in the novel and later are joined by a fifth, Cassandra, Katherine’s cousin, who steps in to make this already-complicated love quadrangle even more complicated. I won’t tell you all the twists and turns of who falls in love with whom; I’ll just say that much of the novel involves these young people agonizing over what it means to be in love, whether love is even possible for them, what kind of marriage they want, and when and if they should confess their feelings to each other.

The novel is fairly traditional in its structure — it’s about romance after all — and yet it doesn’t quite feel like a Victorian novel; there’s so much focus on introspection and shifting states of consciousness that it seemed to me clearly a 20C work (published in 1919). In fact, it reminded me a little of D.H. Lawrence’s work (although it’s been a while since I’ve read him) and also of Elizabeth Bowen’s in the way that the characters didn’t act like any people I know and didn’t talk like them either; they do things like suddenly appearing at each other’s houses, making strange pronouncements, and then just as suddenly leaving. But a novelist doesn’t have to create characters who are like people I know, after all, and Woolf seems to have another purpose in mind: capturing the ins and outs of consciousness in all its shifts and ambiguities. What is familiar to me is the back and forth movement of the characters, the way they struggle to know themselves when the “selves” they are exploring never stay the same.

Familiar as it is, this back and forth could get a bit tedious at times, especially towards the end — in fact, the book starts off more traditionally than it ends, I think — and I wished now and then that the characters would just make up their minds. I was flummoxed by one bizarre moment when in the midst of a heated discussion between Katherine and William all the sudden Cassandra appears from behind the curtains, having apparently been hiding there, although Woolf doesn’t prepare us for this and never offers any explanation. It was just a clumsy way of advancing the plot, I suppose. But the plot seems less important than character development, and a device like this one serves to put the characters in an interesting new situation.

In spite of some flaws, though, I enjoyed the way Woolf captures the fleeting moods and emotions of her characters, and particularly the way she portrays the dynamics among men and women in a time when women were close to gaining the vote. It’s painful to watch William casually dismiss women’s intelligence as unnecessary, but even Ralph, a much more sympathetic character, can be dismissive at times, and Katherine remains uncertain about whether she believes in women’s right to vote or not. Mary is the most modern character among them in this respect, but she is also the character who suffers the most, a fact that speaks, perhaps, to the difficulty of taking the political stand that she does.

I plan to read the chapter on this novel from Julia Briggs’s book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life; I’ll let you know if I find new insights on the novel there.

I finished Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this afternoon, and what a fun book it is! I read it because I plan to teach it later this semester … yes, I did put something on my syllabus without having read it first … probably not the best idea, but it’s in our anthology, it’s short, and I’d heard such good things about it. Luckily for me I enjoyed it a lot and think it will be fun to talk about in class.

The book seems so very Victorian to me, with lots of London fog (lots of it), weird psychological twists, a creepy kind of repressed sexuality, and a brooding, mysterious atmosphere. It tells the story, as surely most people know, of a split personality, of Dr. Jekyll who transforms into his evil other, Mr. Hyde. The story is told, though, from the perspective of Mr. Utterson, a friend of Dr. Jekyll’s and so turns out to be a mystery story; Utterson cannot understand why Jekyll has been acting so strangely, and he doesn’t know why he has made Hyde his heir, Hyde, the one who was recently spotted trampling on a poor young girl who happened to run into him on the street.

Utterson becomes worried about Jekyll and decides to track Hyde down to learn what he can about him; ominously, he discovers that Hyde sends out a very bad vibe — whenever people encounter him, they can’t help but shudder a little bit, as though they were in the presence of evil. Eventually Utterson is called upon to help save Jekyll, who has secluded himself in his chambers; he fails at this, but he does receive several packets of papers that reveal the mystery — the horror of what Jekyll has gotten himself into.

The first part of the story sets up a mood excellently well; it’s dark and creepy and claustrophobic. The last part is fascinating for psychological reasons. Jekyll, when he finally reveals the truth of himself — in writing, interestingly, at a distance, as though the truth is too shocking to tell face to face — tells a story about loving pleasure but fearing where that love might take him:

And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.

It’s not that his pleasures — whatever they were — were particularly craven; the problem was that they didn’t square with “the exacting nature of my aspirations.” He cannot accept his own complexity, his capacity to contain both seriousness and gaiety. This discomfort with his own self leads to some scientific experiments, during which he learns how to separate out his good and evil elements, and eventually Mr. Hyde is born. It’s not that Dr. Jekyll is pure good compared to Mr. Hyde’s pure evil, however; Jekyll remains a mixture, so his struggle becomes a struggle between a pure state, Mr. Hyde’s evil, and a mixed one, his own complexity. Self-loathing is at the heart of this quest:

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved day-dream, on the thought of the separation of these elements [good and evil]. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

This evil is not extraneous, though, but part of every person’s complex nature. Because he cannot accept this complexity, he is doomed to fight against himself until he can’t fight anymore. In the effort to wall himself off from his own dark side, he ends up more closely wedded to it:

… that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

The part of yourself that you loathe and deny, in other words, will come back to haunt you and will be your downfall. It’s clear this book comes out of a culture ripe for psychoanalysis; how could Freud not come along at this point?

There are two books I’ve finished recently that I haven’t yet written about. I don’t put books away in their places on the shelves until I’ve written my final post on them, and these two have been lingering around next to my reading chair for too long.

The first is Mavis Gallant’s collection Paris Stories (I wrote about the first half of the book here). I felt the same about the second half of the book as I did about the first: some stories bored me and others were magical. Most of them I liked; there were just a couple that left me cold — I think, in these cases, the action went by too quickly, and I didn’t have enough time to come to care anything about the characters. Where the stories succeed, they give you the full sweep of a life, but they also linger enough along the way to give you time to get imaginatively and emotionally caught up in the characters’ lives.

One of my favorite stories from the second half is “Grippes and Poche,” a story about the author Grippes who regularly gets called in by the government official Poche to answer questions about his income and taxes. The story follows their meetings as they take place over the course of many years; Grippes is fascinated by Poche and gleans what information he can in the short time they have together. But Poche remains mysterious and distant. Grippes is so intrigued by Poche he turns him into a character in his novels, and it turns out that Grippes depends on Poche for his creative inspiration; when Poche no longer sends for him to inquire into his finances, he feels at a loss.

The story is interesting because of the surprising nature of this relationship — even though they seldom met and hardly knew each other, Grippes depends on the polite but still antagonistic relationship to feed his creative work. I admired the way Gallant could tell so much about Grippes solely through this one seemingly-unimportant relationship.

In another story, “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” the narrator writes a letter to the titular character, a young woman who has lived in her house but is unlikely now to come back, and the letter is unlikely to reach its destination. The narrator reminisces about Mlle. Dias de Corta and their life together, and as she does so, reveals much about herself, much that she probably did not intend to reveal.

There’s lots to enjoy in this book; although I thought it was uneven, the stories that worked worked very well.

The other book I’ve recently finished is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’m not going to write anything like a regular review, partly because I feel like most people already know what this book is about if they haven’t read it already, but also because I don’t feel I have much to say about it. It’s a book that left me with strong feelings but largely bereft of words.

I will say, though, that it’s a near-perfect book for what it is — what it sets out to do it accomplishes, and it does so brilliantly. It’s a harrowing book, very difficult to take, but a beautiful one too, with gorgeous writing. It’s such a simple story — father and son walking south in a post-apocalyptic world — and not much happens in it, or, rather, the same thing happens over and over again, and yet I found it so compelling, so involving, that it was very hard to put down. I wanted to keep reading for contradictory reasons — because I was caught up in the world of the story and because I wanted to get out of that world as soon as possible. That’s how great books about horrible subjects make me feel I suppose — in awe of them and wanting to get some distance on them very fast.

As you will probably have guessed based on my post from a few days ago, I enjoyed Nicholson Baker’s novel Room Temperature. It’s his second novel, and it follows a similar format as his first, The Mezzanine: both take place during a small chunk of time — in the first novel the time it takes to ride up an escalator, and, in the second, the twenty minutes it takes for the narrator to feed his infant daughter — and they both range outwards and back in time to fill in details of the narrator’s surroundings and his life.

Both have narrators who, much like Baker himself (as evidenced in his essays at least), are extremely observant of and curious about the world around them, especially when it comes to the objects that surround them and fill their lives — the things that most of us take for granted. The Mezzanine’s narrator was obsessed with many things, but I remember, in particular, long passages on shoe laces and on drinking straws, and in Room Temperature, the narrator reminisces at length about glass peanut butter jars and the sound they make when first opened. The narrator is a former music student and aspiring composer and he once dreamed of writing a symphony that began with exactly that peanut butter jar sound.

If books about shoe laces and peanut butter jars sound boring, they are not at all. Instead of boring you, Baker inspires you to look more closely at the world you live in. There’s so much to see and learn, the books imply, so much we don’t even notice that’s right in front of our eyes. In fact, in Room Temperature Baker plays with the idea that we can reconstruct much of our own history and the history of the world if only we looked closely enough at the present. He makes this argument directly in at least two places in the novel:

I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one’s whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest — every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness — could be at least glancingly covered …

This passage sums up his aesthetic in both novels — to narrow down his focus and in the narrowing to see how his vision actually expands to include a whole life. But the passages continues:

… but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit … certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with “I was born in January 5, 1957,” and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation.

You will not obtain an objective view following Baker’s method, but you wouldn’t obtain an objective view no matter what method you used anyway; any way you choose to look at the world or your life is going to shape the way you see it.

In a later passage Baker takes up this narrowing idea again, not to describe a life but to describe the world. Thinking about the miniscule currents of air moving through the room in which he’s rocking his daughter, he wonders:

If, using some as yet undeveloped high-resolution technique of flow visualization, I filmed the motion of a cubic yard of air … and if I studied that film for four hours a day, during Bug’s [the daughter’s] two naps — just looked at it, leaned into the idea of it with my entire self — at various speeds, and took the videotape from one international congress on turbulence to another, and made men of science look at it so that I could read in their polite expressions some of the particular complexities it offered their more geometrically manipulative minds, would I begin to feel that I could deduce from its veils of infinitesimal insurgence and reversion the objects in the room around which the air had flowed before it entered this domain of record? Would I deduce the shapes of the half-inflated plastic globe and the cheese grater on the rug, the superball in the fireplace, my dusty collection of mechanical coin-sorts on one of the bookshelves — and infer that a man breathing steadily through his nose in a rocking chair rocking at roughly one cycle every two seconds had held a baby also breathing through her nose on the verge of sleep?

And he goes on from there, wondering just how far he could take the information he’d gather from watching air flow through one cubic yard for twenty minutes. I thought that was rather wonderful — everything is connected to everything else, whether it’s through air or through memory, and one object or patch of air or memory will take us to another and another and another until eventually we’ve covered everything.

This book is intellectually interesting and it’s charming too. The narrator tells stories about Patty, his wife, as well as his daughter; he describes not only the air and the peanut butter jars in such great detail, but also his relationship with his family. The feeling that comes from all this is an infectious joy. This is a book about contentment; it’s curious and searching and about happiness and wonder. You can feel it in the long sentences and paragraphs Baker uses; it’s as though he’s trying to squeeze as much experience and as much life into his book as possible, and the sentences threaten to break apart with the energy and effort it takes. But they don’t — instead those Proustian sentences take you every which way, and you are happy to follow wherever they lead.

That said, I do think The Mezzanine is the better book of the two. Room Temperature takes a while to build up the kind of energy I’m describing; it has a beautiful but rather slow beginning, as though Baker needed some time to generate momentum. It does get that momentum, but overall, it’s a quieter book than The Mezzanine. The Mezzanine had so much of the energy I’ve described that it could hardly contain itself and burst out into those footnotes I wrote about a year or so ago. Still, Room Temperature is a beautiful book, and I’m determined to read more Nicholson Baker novels.

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road right now, and — people read this sort of thing for fun?? I mean, I’m glad I’m reading it, it’s great and all, but I’m more than a little freaked out. I saw the post-apocalyptic movie I am Legend not too long ago, and I’m still recovering from that. I’ll admit I scoot back to bed in a hurry at night, thinking about those horrible zombie monster things. At least that movie didn’t give me nightmares; now we’ll see if this book does.

After this, I’m reading something full of sweetness and light.

From Room Temperature:

But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings — for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family — the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had — as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. And such hybrids — of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too — might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms — and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.

The longer sentence, indeed. And the longer paragraph, the exuberance, the digressions, the obsession with the comma, the fact that he can write a novel about a man spending twenty minutes with his infant daughter …