Listening to Frankenstein

ABSTRACT

Frankenstein is a novel about the ethics of choosing to hear another’s call. In light of Frankenstein’s attention to the ear, how might we listen to this novel? Our listening remains perpetually incomplete, I argue, because we occupy the novel's outermost frame. We encounter retrospective accounts of how Frankenstein’s narrators have listened to those who address them. Walton and Frankenstein demonstrate that they have listened to their interlocutors by writing how they have done so; they record Frankenstein’s and the creature’s narratives, respectively, alongside descriptions of each narrator’s voice and the inarticulate noises that he makes. Taking my cue from Peter Szendy's perspectives on writing how we listen to music, I describe how Frankenstein's narrators record their auditory experiences of speech. As we immerse ourselves in the novel's records of listening, we recognize, as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, that “listening is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety,” a claim that underscores both the urgency of listening and its infinite nature. Reading Frankenstein ultimately teaches us to listen without end. The novel prompts us to relinquish mastery in favor of a charged, spacious proximity to other lives as they present themselves to us.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening
• voice
• ethics
• Frankenstein

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mary Shelley. 1831. “Introduction.” In Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley: v-xii. In Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter, New York: Norton: 171.

2. Felman elaborates on this position as follows: “As distinct from the traditional male-centered conception of ‘Shelley and His Circle,’ [Barbara] Johnson’s contrapuntal circle – ‘Mary’s circle’ – is inclusive of the feminine, but unsure where the center is. This circle is defined in Johnson’s Introduction by three predominating features, three concepts which distinguish it from Percy Shelley’s circle: (1) Johnson’s circle – Mary’s circle – is distinguished (Johnson says) by its emphasis on listening as the origin of narrative desire, and as the driving force of its (female) storytelling” (133). Felman observes further that “[t]o listen is to get precisely out of one’s own self, to break outside of one’s self-centeredness, to pay attention to the other, to put the other at the center.” 2014. In “Afterword: Barbara Johnson’s Last Book.” In Barbara Johnson. 2014. A Life with Mary Shelley. With a forward by Cathy Caruth, introduction by Mary Wilson Carpenter, and essays by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 133.

3. Mary Shelley. 1818. Frankenstein. J. Paul Hunter, ed. New York: Norton: 67. Hereafter cited in the text.

4. Comitini observes that “[i]n the end, Margaret Saville, Walton’s absent reader, receives the narratives and discourses enclosed within Frankenstein. The absent reader is us; we participate in an aesthetic experience that enables us to see and feel what is beyond our particular experiences” (2006. “The Limits of Discourse and the Ideology of Form in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Keats-Shelley Journal 55: 180). O’Dea notes that “our position during the reading sequence approximates that of Walton’s sister, Margaret Saville, in reading her brother’s letters; we experience the narratives as a set of texts arranged not according to the chronology of actions they represent, nor the order in which the narratives were originally related, but instead as they were received and came to have situational meaning to the perceiver (in this case, Walton)” (August 2003. “Framing the Frame: Embedded Narratives, Enabling Texts, and Frankenstein. Romanticism on the Net 31).

5. Jean-Luc Nancy. 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham: 5. Hereafter cited in the text.

6. Lawrence Lipking. 1996. “Frankenstein: The True Story, Or Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques.” In Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). J. Paul Hunter. ed. New York: Norton: 313.

7. Nussbaum goes on to observe that “[i]nsofar as great literature has moved and engaged the minds and hearts of its readers, it has established already its claim to be taken seriously when we work through the alternative conceptions. These alternatives could be described and investigated by the ethical theorist; sometimes they are. But this too often results in criticism that simply mines the work for a set of propositional claims – rather than what I am calling form, an investigation of that which is expressed and ‘claimed’ by the shape of the sentences themselves, by the forms of the traditional genres, by narrativity, themselves. It seems unlikely that this richer ethical task can be carried out by someone who is not in the habit of attending to these things” (191–2). In 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

8. Garrett Stewart captures the novel’s preoccupation with transmission in the following terms: “Shelley’s revisionary access falls … on discourse in circulation: its overwrought paths of access between narrators and narratees.” In 1996. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 114.

9. Jonathan Sterne. 2012. “Sonic Imaginations.” In Ed. Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge: 7.

10. See especially Denise Gigante. 2000. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein.’ ELH 67:2: 565–587 and Scott J. Juengel. 2000. “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 33:3: 353–376.

11. See especially Emmanuel Levinas. 1998. Otherwise than Being. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press and Judith Butler. 2003. Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Hereafter cited in the text. Adriana Cavarero, whose work I discuss later in the essay, inflects Levinas’s and Butler’s ideas in terms of vocal sound. Drawing on Levinas’s work, Adam Potkay captures the relationship between listening, responsiveness, and responsibility in the following terms: “Ethics begins in listening. Often, it begins in listening to a voice from above, as in Exodus 19–20, in which Yahweh, from the sky, speaks the moral law to Moses and Moses, from the mountain, speaks it to the Israelites. In Levinas, it begins in making oneself available, through discourse, to the replies and questions of the Other, who figures as above … In what sense can such listening be called ethical? A certain protoethical stance, or a formal condition for ethics, may be implied in the phenomenology of hearing itself, which involves responsiveness (a step toward responsibility) and vulnerability (a sense of which underscores our obligation to care for others)” (In 2012. Wordsworth’s Ethics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 13).

12. See especially Diana Reese. 2006. “A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights.” Representations Fall 2006: 48–72.

13. Britton elaborates on her position as follows: “… sympathy in Frankenstein ultimately depends on auditory, not just visual, experience, and second, it is manifested most reliably not in the imaginative space between two individuals but rather in the textual space of the novelistic page. Frankenstein parses sympathy’s elements and repeatedly makes the simultaneous alignment of physiological resemblance, visual experience, and auditory engagement impossible. At these moments, Frankenstein reformulates sympathy as a narrative phenomenon that implicates engaged listening and textual production” (2009. “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 48: 3). Michael Macovski writes about the novel’s orientation to sympathy in the following terms: “Here, ‘exciting sympathy’ in an other becomes a metaphor for ‘existing,’ for fabricating a correspondent link with a preestablished collectivity. By instilling human sentiment within a member of this community, the monster can situate himself within it. Hence, evincing communal ‘sympathy’ from another (whether from Victor or some fellow being) becomes the primary impetus behind the monster’s narration, for in seeking such affect, he is actually striving to orient the self – to place it within the social world.” In 1994. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press: 106.

14. Other references to narrative and its variations include the following: “I have related my little history” (16); “Before I continue my narrative … ” (19); “this narration” (21); “my narration concerning my studies”; “the story I had to tell” (49). “as the sun is already far declined, I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you” (83); “such was the history” (85), “giving an account” (85), “these wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings” (90).

15. Butler observes further that “the question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the Other: ‘who are you?’ The question assumes that there is an Other before us, one who we do not know, whom we cannot fully apprehend” (24).

16. Kelly Oliver. 2015. “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48:4: 474.

17. Peter Szendy. 2009. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press: 5.

18. Roland Barthes. 1972. “The Grain of the Voice” (1972). In trans. Richard Howard, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. New York: Hill and Wang: 170.

19. Mladen Dolar. 2006. “The Linguistics of the Voice.” In A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Reprinted in Ed. Jonathan Sterne. 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge: 539–554.

20. Adriana Cavarero. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press: 210. Cavarero also locates the voice in its environment: “The voice is not only sound; it is always the voice of someone as it vibrates in symphony with the natural and artificial sounds of the world in which he or she lives” (148). A substantial portion of For More Than One Voice concerns the female voice, beginning with the mute dialogue between the mother and her newborn infant: “Existence hangs on a push of the lungs, which is at the same time an invocation of the other. The voice is always for the ear; it is always relational … The voice first of all signifies itself, nothing other than the relationality of the vocalic” (169).

21. Stephanie Bishop. 2013. “The Read Voice.” Text 17:1. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april13/bishop.htm.

22. Newman observes further that “Frankenstein raises the issue of the human voice in order to complicate it, and to call our attention to the differences between reading a story and hearing one spoken aloud. It insists on a difference between the voice of Frankenstein and that of the Monster, which ‘though harsh had nothing terrible in it’ (132)” (145). In 1986. “Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein.” ELH 53:1: 145.

23. Shelley describes her reading life at length in her private journals: Mary Shelley. 1814–44. The Journals of Mary Shelley. Eds. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

24. Adriana Cavarero. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. New York: Routledge: xii.

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Giffen Mare Maupin

Giffen Mare Maupin earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University and currently serves as an assistant professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She writes criticism, lyric essays, and poetry, and teaches courses on poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on British Romanticism. She has written on topics that include lyric address in William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charlotte Smith, and representations of listening in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Her writing and teaching alike are propelled by questions about intimacy and by a curiosity about the relationship between critical and creative work. Her essay “On Tending, Movement, and Making” is forthcoming in the Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons special issue on Romanticism, Teaching, and Wellbeing.