In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ of the ever deeper penetration to the core of the dream: it is not that we first penetrate from the manifest dream-content to the first-level secret, the latent dream-thought, and then, in a step further, even deeper, to the dream’s unconscious core, the unconscious wish. The “deeper” wish is located in the very gap between the latent dream-thought and manifest dream-content.¹⁴

      A perfect example of this logic in literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A standard Marxist critical point about the novel is that it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference: history is eternalized as a family drama, larger socio-historical trends (from the “monstrosity” of revolutionary terror to the impact of scientific and technological revolutions) are reflected/staged in a distorted manner as Victor Frankenstein’s troubles with his father, fiancée, and monstrous progeny . . . While all this is true, a simple mental experiment demonstrates the limitations of this approach: imagine the same story (of Dr Frankenstein and his monster) told as a story of the scientist and his experiment, without the accompanying family melodrama (the monster as the ambiguous obstacle to the sexual consummation of marriage: “I’ll be there on your wedding night,” and so on)—what we would end up with is an impoverished story, deprived of the dimension which accounts for its extraordinary libidinal impact. So, to put it in Freudian terms: it is true that the explicit narrative is like a dream-text which refers in an encoded way to its true referent, its “dream-thought” (the larger socio-historical dimension), reflecting it in a distorted way; however, it is through this very distortion and displacement that the text’s “unconscious wish” (the sexualized fantasy) inscribes itself.

      The Romantic notion of monstrosity is to be understood against the background of the distinction, elaborated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, between Imagination and Fancy: Imagination is a creative power which generates organic and harmonious bodies, while Fancy stands for a mechanical assemblage of parts which do not fit each other, so that the product is a monstrous combination lacking any harmonious unity. In Frankenstein, the story of a monster, this topic of monstrosity is not limited to the narrative content; it somehow spills over and pervades other levels. There are three levels of monstrosity/fancy.

      1. First, most obviously, the monster reanimated by Victor is mechanically composed of parts, not a harmonious organism.

      2. Then, as the novel’s social background, social unrest and revolution as a monstrous decomposition of society: with the advent of modernity, traditional harmonious society is replaced by an industrialized society in which people interact mechanically as individuals, following their egotistic interests, no longer feeling that they belong to a wider Whole, and occasionally exploding in violent rebellions. Modern societies oscillate between oppression and anarchy: the only unity that can take place in them is the artificial unity imposed by brutal power.

      3. Finally, there is the novel itself, a monstrous, clumsy, inconsistent composite of different parts, narrative modes, and genres.

      To these three, one should add a fourth level of monstrosity, that of the interpretations provoked by the novel: what does the monster mean, what does it stand for? It can mean the monstrosity of social revolution, of sons rebelling against fathers, of modern industrial production, of asexual reproduction, of scientific knowledge. We thus get a multitude of meanings which do not form a harmonious whole, but just coexist side by side. The interpretation of monstrosity thus ends up in monstrosity (fancy) of interpretations.

      How are to find our way in this monstrosity? It is easy to show that the true focus of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the “monstrosity” of the French Revolution, its degeneration into terror and dictatorship. Mary and Percy Shelley were ardent students of the literature and polemics regarding the French Revolution. Victor creates his monster in the same city, Ingolstadt, that a conservative historian of the Revolution, Barruel—Mary read his book repeatedly—cites as the source of the French Revolution (it was in Ingolstadt that the secret society of Illuminati planned the Revolution). The monstrosity of the French Revolution was described by Edmund Burke precisely in the terms of a state killed and revived as a monster:

      out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist.¹⁵

      Furthermore, Frankenstein is dedicated to Mary’s father, William Godwin, known for his utopian ideas about the regeneration of the human race. Godwin entertained millennial expectations in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), where he exulted in nothing less than the coming of a new human race. This race, to emerge once over-population had been scientifically brought under control, was to be produced by social engineering, not sexual intercourse. In the novel, Victor says:

      A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

      The symbolic association between Godwin and monsters was forged in 1796—1802, when the conservative reaction against him reached its peak. During those years, demons and the grotesque were frequently used to deflate Godwin’s theories about the utopian regeneration of humanity. Conservatives depicted Godwin and his writings as a nascent monster that had to be stamped out, lest England were to go the way of revolutionary France. Horace Walpole called Godwin “one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history.” In 1800, The AntiJacobin Review, which championed the attack upon William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, denounced the couple’s disciples as “the spawn of the monster.”

      Frankenstein does not directly approach its true focus; instead, it tells the story as a depoliticized family drama or a family myth. The characters of the novel re-enact earlier political polemics on the level of personal psychology. In the 1790s, writers such as Edmund Burke had warned of a collective, parricidal monster—the revolutionary regime in France; in the aftermath of the revolution, Mary Shelley scales this symbolism down to domestic size. Her novel re-enacts the monster trope, but it does so from the perspective of isolated and subjective narrators who are locked in parricidal struggles of their own. In this way, the novel can maintain its true topic at a distance, invisible. As we have noted, this is also the standard Marxist critical point about Frankenstein: it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference.

      But why must Frankenstein obfuscate its true historical referent? Because its relationship to this true focus/topic (the French Revolution) is deeply ambiguous and contradictory, and the form of the family myth makes it possible to neutralize this contradiction, to evoke all these incompatible attitudes as parts of the same story. Not only is Frankenstein a myth in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. One should also follow Lévi-Strauss when he claims that Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth is another version of the Oedipus myth, to be treated in the same way as the original myth: further variations of a myth try to displace and resolve in another way the contradiction which the original myth tried to resolve. In the case of Frankenstein, one should therefore treat as part of the same myth, as its further variation, the cinematic versions (of which there are more than fifty), and the manner they transform the original story. Here are the main moments:

      1. Frankenstein (the best-known, James Whale’s classic from 1931, with Boris Karloff as the monster): its main feature is that it leaves out the subjectivization of the monster (the monster is never allowed to tell the story in the first person, it remains a monstrous Other).

      2. In Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Frankenstein creates СКАЧАТЬ