Monstrous OverflowingA Gothic Counter-Production of Modernity

Valerie de Courville-Nicol

The latin word monstrare (to show) comes from the word monstrum, I. By 'usure', Derridameaning 'a prodigious warning from the Gods', 'a supernatural implies the

object or being', 'monster', In Greek cosmology, the monster is a ~~:=~~:SOf

figure upholding the distinction between the divine and the human, meaning characteristicMuch more could be said about its purpose in later humanistic of the metaphorical

, f h Id Th 1 ' d . th process. In other

cOnstructIons O t e wor , e term terato ogy proVl es us W1 a ord aI .w s, usure v ue IS

clue, Dating from the eighteenth century, it comes from the Greek the term of the

root -atos (monster), and it designates a branch of biology that metaphoricalstudies anomalies in human beings. In Modernity, humanity and exhi~hanh ged-that wcreners

monstrosity implode. The human body as such becomes the natural invisible, that which

site of monstrosity, as well as the site of its warning. fetishises, that whichcauses us to believe

The humanist value of monstrosity conditions the possibility of that meaning is a suiClassical rationalism and its Cartesian cogito. Together they give generis reality.

rise to the incessant and productive flow of the body's figurative and

representational meanings. Norris (1991:63-4) argues that for

Nietzsche, the first relationship between 'man' (sic) and experience

is rhetorical not dialectical: '..Dialectic, which is the parent of logic,

came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths

and poetry of ancient Greece"' (Pirsig 1974:391 cited in Norris

1991:63-4). Derrida (1987; 1972) traces this process back to the

Ancient Greeks and shows how rational thought was built upon a

mythost (a figure of repetition and mimicry, or of self-presence)

effaced by the dualistic and hierarchical structures of rationality. The

impossibility of retracing this original figure (because it effaces

itself) is at the source of its useful fluidity -that which Derrida

calls its 'usure value'l. While it conditions a hierarchical and

dualistic representation of body and soul, the self-effacement of the

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Valerie de Courville-Nicol68

2. The figure through which meaning flows is, I suggest, the key to anEnlightenment's d di f od . fr . Cl . 1 .humanist subjects are un erstan ng o m ern monstrosIty: om ItS assIca , to ItS

posed as shapeless and Romantic, to its Postmodern representations.impure objects whosepossibilityof Frankenstein has spurred a wide range of scholarly

transcendence is interpretations, whether these be in the realm of feminist (Marderlmalncuml beblntupot nthDeir 1989; Mellor 1988a,b), marxist (Montag 1992; Lecercle 1988),

ea e na ure. onQuixote is an impure psychoanalytical (Collings 1992; Jackson 1986), poststructuralistobject whose desires (Power 1988; Baldick 1987), or cultural studies (Heller 1992;anhd Pedrceb Pthtions arebl .Botting 1991) frameworks. A number of these analyses ares ape ye su lInenarratives of knights hermeneutics that fail to provide an account of how their

-a doubling of the interpretations produce the meaning of the narrative, and specificallyworld of objects that monstrosity (Botting 1991). Contemporary hermeneuticproduces fear and. . f 1 l . h Id be . ed . h.monsters. mterpretatIons o popu ar Iterature s ou enVlsag WIt m a

technology of positive power which actively produces meaning and

meaningfulness.

As Smith (1992:189) has noted, in the past twenty years criticshave begun to consider Mary Shelley's narrative in its own right. Itsacademic interest had previously lain in its link to the author'shusband Percy Shelley, and in the whole range of its popularappropriations. More recently, she argues, the denunciation of thedivision between high and low culture enables us to take veryseriously a work that has captivated the popular imagination fornearly two centuries. Yet what are, in effect, the implications ofexamining the novel 'in its own right'? The 'making monstrous' ofthe critical commentary is exemplified in hermeneutics of

Frankenstein.

While clarifying the conditions of my own analysis, a reading ofsome interpretations of the narrative served to highlight thehumanist relationship between the flow of interpretation andmonstrosity? The process through which some academics haveencased the Frankenstein narrative is co-extensive with the onethrough which it has become a popular myth. It is a production ofmeaning inscribed in an economy of identities, whose normalisingeffects of power are transparent, and whose logic is one ofdissemination. Details of both the novel's and the author's life arere-contextualised and used in appropriations that produce themeaning of the text. The narrative's excluded, alienated and

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oppressed creature's search for and construction of its identity (origins) is doubled bycritical commentators' search for and construction of the identities (origins) of the text.Having proclaimed the loss of the unitary Cartesian subject, postmodernism'shermeneutic subject is nevertheless a humanist figure -a text whose identity is usefully

fragmented.

As Nietzsche, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida have shown, to uncover a text'spossible implicit or even illicit meanings, or to engage in textual and structural socio-psychology is a dangerous, not to mention monstrous task. Seeking to make the textand/or the monster signify is, as Botting has powerfully argued, a 'making monstrous'.The contribution I seek to make beyond Botting's compelling analysis is two-fold. I wishto show how opposition in the form of a politics of identity serves to further ensconce thereach and depth of positive power, and more specifically I wish to show how theconditions at the heart of modern monstrosity's useful and productive metaphorical flowcan be counter-produced through an understanding of the ways in which resistance isrecuperated in a positive economy of power. Within this process of objectification, textand monster collapse into one and fall prey to further mythologisations- in other words,to further figurative displacements of meaning with their specific effects of power.

Frankenstein' s monster no longer seems to be a myth among myths: it has become a mythabout myths. Exceeding, redoubling even, the dual role of myth -of describing an objectand imposing a metalanguage -the monster becomes a figure of myth. [...] Purified,deformed, reproduced and transformed, the myth of Frankenstein's monster, a fragmentedassemblage of many myths, becomes the embodiment of the deformities of humanism' s mostprecious subject, its self(Botting 1991:203).

In lieu of offering my own rendition of what Mary Shelley's narrative means, I willfocus on how this production literalises the terms and effects of a new and positivetechnology of power. It is a strategy that does not lie in the critical unveiling of thenovel's hidden meanings, structures, and intentions, but rather in remarking that whichis made literal by it (spectacularly so). By this I do not mean that I have a privilegedaccess to the narrative's inner truths -those things which are commonly understood ornaturalised as its 'literal meanings'. I am following Nietzsche's, Barthes' and Derrida'sleads in understanding lileral meaning as productive of the 'real'. Frankenstein is acultural production that disseminates new meanings and practices that 'become lileral'(common or given).

My interpretative practice is bound up in looking for the discursive and non-discursive effects of Gothic writings, and of the Frankenstein novel in particular. Thenarrative attests to and produces emerging practices and meanings that are part of a newmodality of power, where the monstrosity of language is useful and productive. In this

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70 Valerie de Courville-Nicol

3. Kristeva (1980)argues that theliterature of horror isthe literature of theabject, and thatliterature as such isthe privileged signifierof the abject.

sense, I wish to read the narrative in terms of what Foucault (1975:40) has called 'a history of the present.' I do not wish to rethink theliterature of the abject,3 but rather think along with it in impure

ways.

In England, Gothicism was to constitute a rejection of the coldrationalism of Classicism and the Augustan Age. Its fascination withnature, desire, the mysterious, and the grotesque would be played outin its production of violence, horror, and fear (which would take onits new form as psychological anxiety). Gothicism is concerned withmuch of what Modernity would, as of the nineteenth century, seek tothink through and look to for its claims about truth. Frankenstein orThe Modem Prometheus constitutes a Romantic valuation of thesupernatural beliefs and practices associated with medieval Europe,and a devaluation of the scientific ideals of rational civilisations.Victor Frankenstein' s monster is passionate, sexual, violent,

horrifying, uncontrollable, childish, criminal, insane, pitiful,alienated, oppressed, and socially corrupt. He is the impure andabject product of the rational in the Romantic sense of the term.

Romanticism questions human beings' ability to seize theveritable nature of things, and the possibility of self-masterygrounded in rational knowledge. Its proponents reject or in the leastquestion the basic premise of Classical rationalism -the idea thatrational individuals can shape a language that represents thought ina pure and transparent manner .Because Romantic thinkers doubtedthe fact that one could know rationally, they argued that one shouldrather rely on the senses. They sought to destabilise, if not demystifythe existence of a unitary subject, and presented in its place a subjectthat is divided and pursued. As I will be arguing however, it is thisparticular division that will become rationalised and thus

recuperated by positive power.

Frankenstein is a spectacular commentary that doubles theobjectifying necessities of scientific language -its production ofidentity through difference. While it is concerned with the irrational(sentiment, dread, death, resistance, etc.), it is nevertheless arationalist and humanist production of monstrosity. The novelprovides a culturally useful understanding of human beings byrationalising that which Classical rationalism could not account for

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and master. It is a production that relies on the figurative and 4. I am using this tenD

formless pole of the Cartesian dualism, the space of difference where ~:1e~ t~~~trocessmonstrous identities are visibly inscribed. Victor Frankenstein's resis~ce iscreature is literally a fragmented assemblage of dead body parts, yet recuperated within a

he has a voice a past and a psychology .This calculated and positive economy of, , power.transparent production of identity is accomplished through therationalisation of the 'irrational', or the unpredictable, theunexplainable and the unthinkable.

Frankenstein is a case study of internal monstrosity. Theelement that would come to characterise the Gothic genre is, beforeall else, that monstrosity is discovered to be interior to theprotagonist. It is projected onto a monstrous other who is his double-an objectified and abject being. I am considering the appearanceof Gothic novels as a testimonial to the properly modern andsingular form of subjugation that commits the individual, as object,to their own government, and as the object of their own scientificpursuits. These novels are calculated productions of a sensorialobject -the homo sentimentalis -through which effects ofsubjugation are achieved. It is through the rationalisation of thisdomain of the senses (fear, desire, pity, passion, sexuality, violence)-what one might call an economy of sensations -that the sentientindividual aspires to self-government.

Inscribed in the Romantic movement's rejection of Classicism,Gothic novels constitute a resistance to rationalism and its Cartesiancogito, while it is this very defiance that enables power to increaseits range and depth. Romanticism's devaluation of Classicism, or itsantithetical moment if one prefers, is the term of its positivation4into a new thesis, within which domination becomes more pervasive.Romanticism's rejection of Classical rationalism brought on avaluation of the sensory. This opposition became rationalised withinModernity's newly founded quest for critical knowledge of theinvisible marks of internal structures and their origins -in otherwords, all that overflows from Classical representations: theunthinkable, the unpredictable, and the unexplainable.

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The Gothic commentary: from affective effects to their cognisable objects

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould Me man? Did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?

Milton, Paradise Lost (1667 X. 743-5 cited by Shelley 1992)

Foucault (1975) argued that the rationalisation of the irrational is part of a newmodality of power. He qualifies this power as 'positive' because it produces theconditions (scientific discourse) and the effects (the human person as object ofknowledge) necessary for humanism's private and invisible exercise of power. Thestrategic link between power and knowledge that develops from the Renaissanceonwards seems to have anchored itself towards the end of the eighteenth century, asattested by the emergence of the sciences of man, where the human being is posed asboth the subject and the object of the same knowledge. It is not haphazard thatFrankenstein has come to be known as the novel instigating the science fiction genre. Itis a fictive and tellingly accurate portrayal and production of the conditions of possibilityof the scientific birth of man as object of knowledge. Frankenstein's transparent effectsof truth are dependent on a calculated economy of sensations. It produces the internalaffective effects necessary for the construction of alienated and oppressed identities ascognisable objects. The increase in the production of humanistic forms of knowledgegoes together with an increase in the production of monstrous subjectivity.

Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? [...]Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was(Shelley 1992: 113-4).

In earlier sentimental/educational Gothic, such as in The Mysteries of Udolpho, therational production of irrational sensations is a condition of their rationalisation. Inorder to produce their object (both novel and readership), authors such as Radcliffe(1931) and Reeves must use the very sensational and supernatural tools they ultimatelycondemn in submitting the excesses of imagination and fancy to rational explanation.This is perhaps why reception of these novels was always ambivalent, effecting bothpraise and outrage in a society where concerns for the effects of readership in anincreasingly literate population were being voiced. As Botting ( 1996: 170) argues, earlyGothic restores properly conventional boundaries, yet also leaves an ambivalence andduplicity that cannot be contained. Later Gothic novels -sometimes called philosophicGothic (Heller,1992: 328) -such as Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde (Stevenson 1966), and Dracula (Stoker 1993) are inquiries into the affectiveobject itself, and as such they are dependent on its prior production. In these novels the

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irrational is given a scientific status and is no longer the effect of an overactive

imagination.

Frankenstein is a dystopic commentary about a disenchanted world whererationality itself (i.e. science, positivism, technology) is synonymous with monstrosity.Victor Frankenstein and his creature embody the Romantic understanding of Classicalrationality as monstrous. If the irrational is rationalised in Frankenstein, it is not inbeing explained away, but rather in that it acquires the status of the 'real' .Its monster isneither the product of a fanciful and overactive imagination, nor of a plausiblesocial/psychological corruption, but the spectacularly literalised abject figure of arational world. Monstrosity is effected through the attempt to double (represent) thehuman through the suturing of objectified and fragmented human subjects.

Quitting his home in the countryside of Geneva, Victor Frankenstein strives tofurther his studies in the city of Ingolstadt. Alienated from nature, and isolated from hisfamily and friends, he becomes consumed with one seemingly rational purpose -thestudy of death.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed dampsof the grave, or tortured the lifeless animal to animate the lifeless clay? [...] The summermonths passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a mostbeautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield amore luxuriant vintage: but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature (Shelley 1992:56)

Victor's discovery of the generation of life gives way to horror, and its monstrousoffspring is rejected. 'His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, whilea grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand wasstretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down the stairs (Shelley1992: 58).' Later the monster will plead the indulgence of his creator, the author and thereason of his abandonment. The excluded, oppressed and alienated being disputes hisunjust condemnation. And the means through which he seeks to legitimise his plea findsits echo in a humanist and utilitarian discourse. Calling forth the creator's sympathies,and posing as human goodness and love, this discourse will provide the opening of thenarrative space where the quality of the monster-object's will can be measured. Thusbegins the monster's narrative, a detailed assessment of the miserable circumstances ofhis generation, to the sad circumstances of his fall from grace.

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thyjustice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature;I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for nomisdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was

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benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.[...] Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who imploresthy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowedwith love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? (Shelley 1992: 90-1 )

Abjection is clearly linked to the impossible search for the transcendental in ahumanist world. To paraphrase the words of Luk.ics (1963: 46), in breaking the world of(transcendental) objects, the subject has reduced himself to the state of fragments; the(humanist) subjectivity pretends to fashion it all and this is precisely why it succeedsonly in reflecting (monstrous) fragments. In the following mirror scene, the linkbetween representation and internal monstrosity (its objectified double) is effected, andits affected object is a sentient being.

I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers -their grace, beauty, and delicatecomplexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first Istarted back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and whenI became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with thebitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know thefatal effects of this miserable deformity (Shelley 1992: 101 )

The creature swears to Victor that if he complies and grants him a companion of theopposite sex (a 'platonic' double) he will never again make himself known to humanbeings. While the monster is convinced that were he to have a companion similar indefect, he could again become good, Victor suspects that the monster might yearn forthe company of humans. The creature's abjection seems to elevate Victor Frankensteinto the position of Creator and Omnipotent Judge.

How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You willreturn, and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evilpassions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task ofdestruction (Shelley 1992: 126).

The expulsion of monstrosity in the attempt to transcend it would end up producingonly serialised doubles. Frankenstein finally aborts the project of creating a companionfor the monster, reasoning that 'she might become ten thousand times more malignantthan her mate', that 'they might even hate each other', that 'she also might turn withdisgust from him to the superior beauty of man', or worse, that 'a race of devils wouldbe propagated upon the earth' (Shelly 1992: 140). Victor's humanist attempt to masterthe irrational ends up constituting the pathos of a self-destructive idealism. Monstrosityresults from the impure relationship between his ideals/intentions and a pure signifier.The myth of the humanist/rationalist well-intentioned transcendent self is undone in hisstruggle to produce a pure and perfect being, while in effect he produces the impure andthe abject, and the lost dream of order, identity, and purity. The monster Classical

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rationalism produces, in conjunction with humanism, is the ideal (monstrous and abject)humanist self, embodied in the pathos of Romantic disillusionment and of Gothic

monstrosity.

Monstrosity, as warrants its semantic origins, has had and arguably still has thefunction of 'warning'. In Gothic literature this warning takes on the form of asurveillance and of an internalised gaze accessory to modern modes of subjugation. Canwe not in Gothic writings speak of a fear that is positive and transparent, useful andproductive? No longer horror matching horror , the visible incarnation of the economy ofpower, but the invisibility of this horror in the transparent relationship between sign andsignifier. No longer a spectacle that horrifyingly simulates the power of the King, butthe internalisation of this visibly violent and irrational cleavage between subject andsovereign, manif~st in the double of literature and in its economy of sensations. Free togovern himself, the subject would do so confronted with the horror and in the light ofhis own abjection. No longer the body-object, whose value lies in being shown, but theindividual-object whose monstrosity is interior.

The positivity of resistance: the politics of monstrosity

Foucault (1972) wrote that the public performances in which asylum detainees wereheld to participate functioned as warnings. Up until the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, the insane remain monsters -beings or things that acquire value when shownpublicly. He later wrote (1975) that the implementation of the eighteenth century penalreforms would cause a shift in the locus of monstrosity -this being the shift fromaberrant body to tortured soul, from public to private. It is the individual as object ratherthan the body as object that becomes the locale of this new power to punish.

The relationship first established between monstrosity and the body in the Classicalepisteme, and further established between monstrosity and the soul in the Romanticepisteme, is effaced in the creation of a new term, signifier, or metaphor: the text-as-monster-as-lost-creation. In the casuistic case of conscience the insane, criminals, orheretics are deemed to be alienated from their true (rational) human nature. In thepsychological case study the insane or the criminal are deemed to be alienated from theirtrue (healthy) human nature. Similarly, in the textual case study the observer or criticalcommentator is said to know more, 'objectively' speaking, about the observed than theobserved about himself. All narrative identities are by definition alienated from a truththat would be inclusive of their specificity. While the casuistic case of conscienceconstitutes a shaping of the formless matter of the body, and while the psychologicalcase study constitutes a shaping of the formless matter of the soul, the criticalcommentary's formless matter is the text. This is the figure (the homonculus) on which

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5. It would beinteresting to explorethe ways in whichtextual case studies

aresupplantingpsychological casestudies. One couldargue that the

nonnalising gazethrough whichidentities werebeginning to beproduced as objects ofknowledge in the lateeighteenth century isnow self-perpetuatingdue in part to thedisseminating gaze ofhenneneutic textual

analyses.

hermeneutic interpretations rely. Indeed a strong case could be madethat text and monster have collapsed into one, giving way to amonstrous (useful and productive ) flow of signification.

Foucault ( 1966: 163-170) argues that in the taxonomicclassifications of the emerging sciences of life during theseventeenth and mainly eighteenth centuries we see the emergingconfiguration of identity. The fossil is a figure of identity, continuity,and resemblance, while the monster is a necessary caricatural figureof difference and deviation. As Foucault (1972;1975;1976) has alsoshown, during the nineteenth century, the objectified/monstrousdouble on which are projected the 'irrational' activities of humanbeings (i.e. sadomasochists, perverts, etc.) point to the normalisinggaze and other essentialising practices characteristic ofcontemporary processes of mastery and domination. One of thethings that is specific to this new modality of power is that it isinvolved in a dialectical relation to itself. Knowledge of oppositionand resistance enable power to become more deeply entrenched.Critical hermeneutic commentaries are inscribed in this contextbecause they take part in the metaphorisation of a positive

monstrosity.

The text-as-monster-as-lost-creation is an important postmodernmetaphor. Within it, text is understood as a formless, fragmented,and lost body. The kinds of truth claims that are bred from thismetaphor, and the kinds of effects of power that thrive on it, are

inscribed in a process of monstration.5

How are we to explain monstrosity's mythical propensity? Howdoes monstrosity come to pass from the body to the soul, and fromthe soul to the text? The similarities between positive and mythicalpower are striking. Incidentally, Barthes (1957) goes so far as toargue that French society (i.e. Western societies) is a privilegedlocale of mythical signification. He holds that all memory of thefabrication of things is lost in the myth -the myth evacuates thereal. It does not negate -it speaks, and it is in speaking incessantly,hemorrhagically, that it is able to denote the resistance with whichwe oppose it, naturalise history, and make things appear to signify ofthemselves, in a happy clarity. In fact, maintains Barthes, thefundamental character of the mythical concept is that of being

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appropriated. The usure value of meaning, coupled with the use 6. The ong.oing debateI f . f th d .. d fti between Ricoeur and

va ue 0 resIstance, are some 0 e con ltions an e ects necessary Derrida in the sixties

to the private and invisible exercise of power. and seventies had to

do with the nature ofNietzsche, Derrida and Foucault have also thought out this the metaphorical

mythologisation process. For all three, this operation is not an process. Whereas.. al Rath . h d 1 .. th h b . 1 .Ricoeurargued that

Intention one. er It as to 0, at east In part, Wl t e UI t-In

taphonce a me orpower structures of western language -that which Derrida ( 1972) becomes codified it

calls 'white mythology', or, as Nietzsche (1991) put it, with the becomesadeadcompeting metaphors that struggle for dominance within the ;;~:ao~(au:~:~imperialist tendencies of Western language.6 In addition, with the very di~tinctionFoucault's genealogy of positive power, we see that the way power (and its understandingoperates in the New Regime has less to do with humanist intentions ~y p~osophers and

...lingwsts) between thethan with the compulsion to rationahse resIstance through varIous literal and the

positive discursive and non-discursive practices. In the Classical figurative is part andepisteme the power effects of public spectacles are unpredictable. p~l o~ the .

..obliteration OfltsThus towards the end of the eIghteenth century we see the rISe of a original figure.

regime of disciplines within which individuals come to governthemselves, from the interior .

Poststructuralism has enabled us to recognise that the rhetoricalnature of meaning is effaced in the production of humanistknowledge: positivism must both produce and efface its subjective ormetaphysical premises. In light of this, Ricoeur's hermeneuticproject becomes one of mastering 'feeling'. He (1975) argues thatpositivism is responsible for the opposition between descriptive(factual) and emotional language. The emotional is relegated to thedomain of the subject (the inner world) and would have no ties toobjective reality (the exterior world). In 'The Metaphorical Processas Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling', he seeks to establish a linkbetween a semantic theory of metaphor and a psychological theory ofimagination and emotion:

Imagination and feeling have always been closely linked in classicaltheories of metaphor. We cannot forget that rhetoric has always beendefined as a strategy of discourse aiming at persuading and pleasing.And we know the central role played by pleasure in the aesthetics ofKant. A theory of metaphor, therefore, is not complete if it does notgive an account of the place and role of feeling in the metaphoricalprocess (1979: 153).

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Poststructuralism institutes a rejection of the structuralist(romantic)7 understanding of meaning as autonomous. Rather,subjectivity itself is fashioned by complex apparatuses of power. Thisunderstanding has brought about the rationalisation of a domain of

lost identities (inner structure, intentionality, consciousness,referentiality) -what one might call an economy of lost orfragmented identities -through which further effects of subjugation

are achieved.

7. Romantic thinkersconsider thatmetaphors can createreality. Hawkes(1972) argues that themodem IKJint of viewis an extension of theromantic one.

ContemIKJrary literarycritics have generallycontinued to developthe vision establishedby Romanticism(Ricoeur 1975; 1979).

While I have argued that all that overflows (the unthinkable, theunpredictable, and the unexplainable) from Classical representationsof language (where meaning is considered to be a mirror of the real)was to become rationalised within Romanticism's economy ofsensations, I am suggesting that all that overflows (inner structure,consciousness, intentionality, referentiality, etc.) from Romanticrepresentations of language (where meaning is considered to becreative of the real) is being rationalised within postmodernism'seconomy of lost identities. Loss, lack, or effacement becomes theeffaced rhetorical term of value upholding a production ofknowledge whose effects of power are rendered transparent.

Analyzing identity formation enables us to recognise that theexercise of power relies on the production of the subject. However ,political identity claims tend to naturalise these identities andperpetuate the logic within which they are produced. For example,the loss of the universally posed referent of women or of theproletariat has given way to a micro-politics of identity and ofidentification. The loss of this systemic referent is not to bemourned, as its all-encompassing tendencies did violence tosituational and substantive forms of oppression. However thisfragmentation increases the range and depth of positive powerthrough the reconstructive surgery of identity politics. It could besaid that a micro-politics is a micro-positivation. The dialecticallogic of resistance and liberation on which political struggles andidentity claims rely in modern societies have served to furtherensconce positive power's hold. Resistance in the form of a politicsof identity is a kind of pr9test through which particular conditions ofinjustice are made visible and literalised by way of figurativeprojections. This dialectic is deeply entrenched and all the less

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visible in power formations that have become necessarily diffuse and subtle, while itdoes not fundamentally undermine the production of identities.

The hermeneutic critical commentary: from textual formlessness to its monstrousidentities

The quest to uncover the secret of the text's nature, to unfold once and for all its livingpresence, its principle of life, does not reveal the unequivocal or authorised voice, butdiscloses only monstrous doubles, different and distant from any unifying figure. [...] Themetaphor of monstrosity, and the monstrosity of metaphor, thus inhabits and anticipates thetexts of Frankenstein's critics (Botting 1991: 3).

Along with the abandonment of the unitary subject, we see the emergence of a typeof commentary that, while it values this loss of referent, seeks to double the identities ofthe text. The use value of this loss lies in some academics' circular and infiniteproductions of authoritative formulations of meaning that feed into the discursivecircuits of positive power. The site of the representation of monstrosity has beendisplaced from the body-object to the individual-object, and onto the text. The text hasbecome the new object of humanist productions of knowledge, where language becomesvisibly monstrous.

The emergence of hermeneutic interpretations point to the further entrenchment ofpositive power. They are calculated productions of identities through which effects ofpower are achieved. In presupposing a familiarity with contemporary critical theory, thistype of commentary is part of the 'monstrative' resistance process through which anumber of 'critical' discourses and practices become useful and productive.

The critical commentaries instigated by the hermeneutic approach could be said toconstitute the tautological embodiment of both substantive and formalist practicestowards literature -a division that betrays the inherent paradox of scientific language'sobjectifying relationship to itself. Their proponents attempt to rescue the lost identitiesof the text by doubling these with the production of its author's intentionality, and byidentifying its visible marks of truth within the text. They also locate this intentionalitywithin the expression of an autonomous, truthful and unitary vision of the world (atheoretical one) as system sui generis. As Bakhtin (1978: 144) cautioned, thepolylinguistic nature of novels refract the expression of the author's intentions, as theyare populated by others' intentions. 'La plus grande erreur consisterait a se representerle contenu comme un tout theorique connaissable, comme une pensee, comme une idee'(Bakhtin 1978: 50).8 And as Grosz argues:

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8. 'The greatest error

would consist in

representing to oneself

the content as a

knowable, theoretical

whole, as a thought, as

an idea' (my

translation).

The author's intentions, emotions, psyche, and interiority are not onlyinaccessible to readers, they are likely to be inaccessible to the authorherself. For Barthes and Foucault, as for Derrida, a text cannot be theexpression of an individual's interior, nor simply the representation ofsome social exterior, for it is as an act ofwriting, the materialmanipulation of signs, discursive structures, textual elements, an act ofinscription, with its own protocols, modes of constraint, and regulation.The author's signature, as Derrida argues, is not a full presence thatsomehow stands outside the text, while finding itself reflected insidethe text as a mark of the author's propriety , ownership over, or singularconnection with the text (1995: 13).

Hermeneutic interpretations are critiques in the sense that theyreproduce the formalist understanding of text as autonomous -thatis, the autonomy of the narrative as expressive of a particular truthor unitary vision of the wor Id. However , rather than locating truth inthe text's inherent structure/order as would the more traditionalcritique, hermeneutic interpretations locate truth in the text'sinherent ambiguity/disorder, at the junction between its surplus ofsignification and its loss of literal meaning. They are alsocommentaries succumbing to the affective and intentional fallaciescommon to impressionists in that they superimpose a foreignconceptual grid (an identity or a psyche) on the text in order todouble its signifying origins (i.e. its intentionality). Themetaphorical understanding of text as both shapeless and shapeable,autonomous yet subjugated, locates it within the realm of the psyche,while the attempt to double its lost, fragmented, or unconsciousorigins/identities enables its representations to become productive.Popular fiction is being coined as a formless textual mass: amonstrous affective object on which hermeneutic interpretations fix

identities with scientific pretence.

Counter-producing the Cartesian cogito: overflowing

As Shaviro (1993) tellingly argues in his essay on DavidCronenberg's films, the primacy of text in postmodern Westernculture feeds off the 'residue of the Cartesian myth of an autonomousthinking substance', where 'the text is the postmodern equivalent ofthe soul. ' He views Cronenberg as a 'literalist of the body' because

his films 'display the body in its crude, primordial materiality' and'deny the postmodern myth of textual signifying autonomy' .Hence

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Monstrous Overflowing81

the obscene and grotesque spectacles of monstrosity portrayed in his films subvert the

logic whereby monstrosity would be a consequence of lack and denial, to demonstratehow, rather, 'our ideologies of "health" and "normality" are grounded in the denial orexpulsion of monstrosity.' Moreover, this obscene spectacle denies us 'the luxuries ofobjectification and control; fascination is mingled with disgust.'

Modernity's projective intentionality cannot escape the temptations of writingdifference somewhere (in a fictive past, on fictive bodies, or on a fictive space) in itsattempt to stand outside of it. Colonialism, nazism, and eurocentrism come to mind, toname but a few examples. Projection clearly also means expulsion. The positionascertained by a politics of identity, and its offshoot political correctness, is essentially ahumanist one based on intentionality and consciousness, and one that can only make itsavowals by way of its own objectification: a serialisation of identities, a dissemination ofdoubles where difference is based in presence. According to Grosz, one of the problemswith identity politics is:

that one can, through conscious avowal, acknowledge what one's position is. This seems tobe a basic assumption in much of what is presently called 'identity politics', whichcommonly functions in a publicly confessional mode, and in anti-racist calls for an authenticnative voice, a voice that can speak only for and as it is. Can one admit what one's positionis? Is a position definitively present, not only to a subject's self-representation, but for allothers to avow and accept? Does any subject or position have the stability to definitively statewhat-it-is (1995: 67)?

How then are we to escape both this propensity to write difference somewhere, andthe accessory role we play in making critical resistance productive? Barthes (1957)develops the idea of the counter-mythical, or of the artificial myth in order to deal withthe problem of the myth's greatest weapon: its recurrence. The myth can always come tosignify the resistance with which we oppose it. As an alternative, he argues that if wepose the myth's signification as the term of a second myth (an artificial one), the powerof this second myth becomes that of locating the first one in a position of visible naivety.This is similar to his idea of the Guignol, where children denounce what the clownfeigns not to notice. It is a notion I am striving to develop in terms of a counter-production of the Cartesian cogito's mythical propensity- one that is anchored in theliteralisation of its body's figurative propensity. What if one were rather to counter-produce the dialectical logic by making visible that which is made visible by it? Becausea dialectical progression of history makes resistance positive and productive, thereby

increasing power's consciousness of itself, increased subjugation, control and regulationseem to be inevitable. Counter-producing power's increasing knowledge of itself meanscounter-producing the myth of the Cartesian subject by literalising its figurative violence-its monstration of bodies. Perhaps Warhol's Frankenstein constitutes such an

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Valerie de Courville-Nicol82

endeavour. As Nestrick (1979: 312) argues, the film constitutes 'a magnification andliteralisation of the very idea of fetish (from the Latin factitius, artificial), the projectioninto an inanimate object of magical power. ,

Like social monstrosity, textual monstrosity can be counter-produced through its in-differance -an in-differance that ultimately escapes master-minded productivity,rationality, and expulsion. Because texts are figures of the deferral of meaning, wecannot definitively arrest their meaning, nor can we definitively decide their identities.While this figurative formlessness prompts the hermeneutics of critical commentators,ultimately the excess values that flow from these equally seductive and monstrousinterpretations give way to a massive overflow, enabling a literalisation (a makingvisible) of the metaphysical surplus of signification on which positive mythicalpropensity relies. Literalising the figurative is thus a making-visible of the transparentmetaphorical process from which humanist meaning flows and a making-visible of themonstrous values that overflow.

Carleton UniversityOttawa. Canada

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