Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

In the book, Frankenstein warns, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town the world that he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow” (275). Something here will rub most contemporary intellectuals wrong. However, I also think that, in the character of Victor Frankenstein, Shelley presents some reasonable questions about what it is that really motivates our quest for knowledge: is it really only a reverence for truth or is it also a desire for something more grandiose?—perhaps even for immortality. Frankenstein dreams that “A new creation would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent creatures would owe their existence to me in a manner no father could claim…” (273).  What I found most fascinating about the book were those first few chapters which chronicle Frankenstein’s transition from a cynic, then a champion of then-contemporary science, its surface-level dullness notwithstanding. His conversion is interesting to watch—especially in a pivotal moment when a professor assures him that “…these philosophers whose hands appear only made to dabble in the dirt and their eyes to pore over the microscope … have indeed performed miracles” (268, emphasis mine). I appreciate the suggestion here that what motivates the scientist is in some ways what motivates the poet and priest also—a childlike affinity for things that seem “magic.”  

        I’m no expert in Freud, but I imagine he would have had some fun making sense of the story of a creature that is created, then rejected, then that dedicates his life to destroying his “father” (maybe the monster got his hands on some Sophocles at some point). I would say that the relationship between creator and creature is the compelling force of the book, right down to the final scene when a weeping monster laments “That is also my victim…in his murder my crimes are consummated” (426). The monster’s desire that Frankenstein might build him a mate, his intentions to attack his creator on his wedding night—these seem like ripe details for psychoanalytical discussion. Perhaps what’s most fascinating is that the symptoms of what Freud describes as a male-exclusive complex are so ably depicted in the imagination of a young woman well before Freud’s time. Shelley is, like her book’s eponymous scientist, almost unsettling skilled at imbuing life.

(Note: I read an 1816/1817 version unedited by Shelley’s husband. My apologies if I am ignorant of plot developments in later editions. I intend to read those too).

Karen Desai: The Inheritance of Loss.

The Inheritance of Loss explores issues of cultural displacement in a Darjeeling community suddenly overrun with Nepalese revolutionaries. In it, Desai toys with her readers’ sympathies. This is a plus for me. I enjoy books without clear villains because this seems more like how real life is—issues are complex, and even people who seem to be on the wrong side of the debate usually don’t mean to be hurtful. So perhaps the greatest triumph of The Inheritance of Loss is the fact that the reader is made to feel conflicted about the revolutionaries in a way that helps us identify with our young protagonist, Sai, and her bumpy romance Ghorkaland fighter Gyan.

        To be clear, there is a distinctive antagonistic force in the book. As Edward Said states in Culture and Imperialism, “…imperialism lingers, as we shall see, where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in a specific political ideological, economic, and social practices” (9). The remnants of British Imperialism seem to lurk like ghosts around every corner of the book’s setting. This haunting presence is perhaps never better illustrated than when Sai absentmindedly picks up The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette, a book so unapologetically bigoted that she is overcome with a desire to find the author’s decedents and “stab the life out of them” (218).  This is a significant moment because it also illustrates Sai grappling with the questions of privilege and innocence that have already come to so entangle the reader by this point in the book. Children shouldn’t pay for their parents’ crimes, Sai reminds herself, “But should the child, therefore, also enjoy the father’s illicit gain?”

There is a sense of right and wrong in the book, but it is depicted in terms of a generations-long battle that is greater than any single individual. Although it is not quite, as the judge’s father thinks, that “by the time a case of a stolen cow arrived at court, centuries of arguments had occurred between warring families, so many convolutions…that there was no right or wrong anymore” (65), Desai does concede the daunting enormity of straightening things out. For example, as readers, we sympathize with Lola and Noni when the rebels invade their home, and Desai affirms this sympathy, but also indicates that the characters are caught up in something so much larger. “…Lola and Noni were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others, over many generations” (266). 

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

     Curiously, it is not the visiting Londoners who act as antagonists in The God of Small Things, but rather the Indians who wish to be more like them. Chakko tells his niece and nephew that they are “a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footsteps had been swept away” (51). With this in mind, it isn't surprising that it is Baby Kochamma's reverence for western culture that brings about the most trouble in the novel. The novel is similar to The Inheritance of Loss in this regard. Both novels feature children of some privilege at their center. Because of their youth, we do not begrudge them their privilege; instead, we identify with their dismay as they grow in awareness of the cruelties and injustices of the world around them.
     I think what is most distinctive about the book is the playfulness of its prose. At its best it helps readers identify with the child protagonists. A reader may begin to feel “childlike” after hearing a concessions-stand operator referred to as “the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” again and again. Rahel imagines her scheduled afternoon nap as a “Gnap,” meant, I suppose, to sound like the word “Gnat,” indicating to us the somewhat irritating qualities of this daily chore from a child’s perspective. Sometimes, the narration is even interrupted by snippets from a song or rhyme (often in juxtaposition to a dark moment in the story). These non sequiturs are reminiscent of the wandering attentions of children, and specifically of Estha, who begins the novel so innocent and full of life that he is kicked out of the movie theater for so often erupting into song.
     The book is distinctive also for its structure. In the interview that follows the book, Roy states that writing the book inside-out was meant to make each moment “more poignant because it is viewed through the complex lens of the past and the present” (329). The first three-quarters of the book include numerous references to the fact that Sophie will die and a handful of scenes that take place after her death. By repeatedly mentioning that Sophie will die, and that this will change everything and ruin everyone, Roy creates a near-Victorian level of suspense. I’m not sure if the anticlimactic nature of Sophie Mol’s death (falling off a boat, unnoticed) is an intentional poke in the eye on Roy’s behalf, or a real failure to deliver what she promised.
     The novel makes better use of its structure in its final two chapters, which return to a theme first explored in the final sentences of chapter one. Readers are asked to consider “the Love Law,” regarding “who should be loved. And how. And how much” (311). Here Roy depicts a midnight tryst between Velutha and Ammu. An effective place for a nonlinear work to stop, I think, in that this is the “central” event in the story chronologically, it is so much anticipated by the reader, and, unlike the quiet death of Sophie Mol, the reader’s patience is thoroughly rewarded here with a scene that is mesmerizing, both as a standalone example of beautifully crafted prose, and in light of the whole story—we know the violent, terrible aftermath to which this quiet, intimate moment will lead, and there’s a deeply chilling effect to ending with such tragic irony.

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins imagines a world where children are made to hunt each other for sport, all in the name of creating compelling reality television and keeping the proletariat down. Ostensibly, this is a book about the wrongness of offering up violence as entertainment. But isn’t that the appeal of this novel too? Specifically, I have a problem with the way Collins depicts some of the “tributes” as deserving of death; there are tributes from the rich districts who are depicted as pampered and egotistical. In characterizing them like this, Collins apparently means for us to join in the “fun” of the games, to root for protagonist Katniss as she kills her uppity competitors. The only way the inhumanity of the games could have really gotten across was if Katniss was made to kill sympathetic figures—she never does. 

I think Collins would say no, what compels the plot is the romance between Peeta and Katniss, our two heroes who are made to fight all those snotty rich kids to the death. The conflict, the book’s defenders might argue, is between the “Tributes” and the “Gamemakers”—not merely among all the tributes fighting each other. I could buy this if the romance were a more compelling element of the book, if Collins seemed even half as interested in it as she does the bloodbath. Katniss’s ambivalence about anything besides hunting and muscle drains the life out of the romantic elements of the book.

Speaking of which, why exactly is Katniss the narrator? First person narration is really only effective, I feel, if the narrator has a distinctive or engaging voice. Because she is a figure mostly defined by her athleticism and physical prowess, Katniss’s voice seems pretty generic and forgettable. Third-person-omniscient is needed here. As the novel is structured now, the narration is question-begging. I am wanting at every moment to know how the audience is reacting to seeing Katniss on television (especially because she constantly tantalizes us with what's out of the frame, saying things to the effect of “Gee, I’ll bet they’re sure going nuts watching me right now”). She’s supposedly creating a quite a stir in the Capital, and if that tension is supposed to be the crux of the conflict, why are the readers locked out of what’s going on among the big-wigs? Collins keeps her villains trapped in the shadows. Depicting the bad guys like this might be easier for the author, but it reduces any complex approach towards morality that the book might have aspired to.

The Hunger Games is strongly reminiscent of two famous stories—Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, and Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” (the latter I suspect Collins read in high school, but then, while writing The Hunger Games, she half-forgot who she was stealing from). The two works combined are shorter than The Hunger Games, but a quick reading of either makes clear everything Collins missed. Bradbury and Connell give their villains time to talk, to explain themselves in a way that makes them all the more believable and terrifying—all the more recognizable among figures we see in real life. They develop their protagonists too. Fahrenheit and “Dangerous Game” are stories of conversion, of minds made to be more self-critical. Collins, by contrast, simply asks us to reject what is obviously grotesque from page one. Katniss ends the book simply as a more vivid version of who she was in the beginning. The reader is given a warm hug for identifying with her all along. 

Come on, Suzanne, give us a challenge!      

(NOTE: Okay, fine, I’ve only read the first book. Maybe, maybe, maybe the next two will address all these concerns. I am interested, too, in seeing if the movie, freed from Katniss’s narrow narration, can fill in some of the blanks in order to create something enjoyable). 

Jeffery Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

       The title of The Marriage Plot comes from a research paper written by Eugenides’s main character, Madeleine Hanna, a lit major at Brown University in the eighties. Madeleine’s essay asserts that “The Marriage Plot” is a lost form in contemporary literature. Madeleine considers matrimony—and the drama that surrounds a protagonist’s choice among suitors—to be the compelling force of classic romances. Since society no longer reveres “the institution” of marriage in the way it once did, she speculates as to whether a contemporary novel could generate anything like the same gravity with the stakes having changed—that is, with everything meaning so much less than it used to.

     Eugenides’s novel asks the same question. The Marriage Plot mimics a Victorian structure insofar as the book’s tension arises over questions of whom Madeleine will fall in love with—maybe even marry. Generally, the book seems to be a re-affirmation of this traditional form, a reassurance that contemporary literature can still be about marriage—even in an age when the stigma of divorce is lessened.

     Adding to the complexity of Madeleine’s questions about the weight of marriage is the book’s setting. Eugenides depicts the young adults of the early eighties as a generation glad to have avoided the “whiplash” that followed the rocketing sixties, but still meaning to push envelopes of their own. Madeleine, near graduation, studies Jacque Derrida and semiotics. She meets students who insist that books have nothing to do with real life, that all of language should merely be considered a self-referential vacuum.

     Just as Madeleine struggles with questions about the reality of love, her two potential lovers—Leonard, a biology student, and Mitchell, a religious studies major—wrestle enigmas of their own. Leonard tries to make sense of his manic depression, Mitchell yearns to understand God. The novel’s three themes (love, faith and mental health) taken together suggest that Eugenides has something to say in general about the validity of a mind’s internal experiences. I suspect that the book is an acknowledgement of the way things can weigh heavily on one’s soul, even if those things (and even if the soul itself) can be found to be deconstructable.

     Take that, Derrida.  

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

           Conventional wisdom among Christians today is that international evangelism need not necessarily bring about cultural conflict, so long as missionaries arrive abroad with spiritual, not political, objectives. However, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart intends to remind us that the two motives—conquering and converting—were originally mixed. The missionaries here don’t arrive in Africa meaning to imprison and kill, but the tension they bring about makes instability seem inevitable.

            What I like best about the novel is how so much time is given to the world of the Ibo village in the first three quarters of the book. If, say, the novel had begun with the arrival of the missionaries, or if they became just gradually more present, the reader wouldn’t be able to recognize the greatly disruptive quality of the white intruders in quite the same way.

             Developing the setting so thoroughly was a smart move on Achebe’s behalf for a few other reasons: spending so much time in a world so foreign to me is enjoyable in that I am able to learn so much, but it also makes the moments where I identify with the characters seem that much more vivid. I’m thinking specifically of the way a son wishes to be the opposite of his father, so much so that grandfather and grandson seem sometimes like the closer match. Okonkwo and Nwoye each mean to live a life that cancels the wrongdoings of their fathers, and in trying to erase the shame, each creates mistakes of his own. This is a universal experience.

            My family’s background being what it is (my grandparents were missionaries—all of them), I am naturally fascinated with moments when Achebe is “gentle” in his depictions of the intruders. Nwoye’s conversion is an especially interesting moment in that Achebe makes it seem like a natural move. For a moment we are in Nwoye’s mind as, “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the questions of the twins crying in the bush and of Ikemefuna who was killed” (147). And, indeed, the practices of the tribe may seem troubling for the readers also. But then the missionaries are no less cruel. By the end of the novel, their court-ordered executions and imprisonments appear to the reader as merely another type of needless brutality. There is nothing so cruel in the Ibo culture that it isn’t matched in some way by the practices of the missionaries.

            Still, it is interesting how Mr. Brown is offered up as a sort of peaceful alternative to the much more aggressive Mr. Smith. Brown preaches against “an excess of zeal” (178) and has thoughtful conversations with the tribesman in which he appeals to their existing religious structures, (“‘In my religion, Chukwo is a loving Father, and need not be feared by those who do His will’” [181].). I don’t doubt whose side Achebe is on, but I feel there is a model in this peaceful dialogue that he might embrace as an alternative to the brutality that has come to characterize interactions between the two cultures.