In "Approaching Abjection" (1980), Kristeva identifies the figure of the corpse, "seen without God and outside of science", as "the utmost of abjection" (232). Unlike, for instance, a mere signifier like a "flat encephalograph" (232), which maintains a disembodied and uncontaminated distance away from death, the corpse eliminates that distance, placing death in unbearable proximity to the subject. There can be no barriers of artifice: "as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live" (231; Kristeva's emphasis). The corpse is nothing less than "death infecting life" (232)—not death that is suggested or signified, but embodied and incarnate. The figure of the corpse is foregrounded in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) not only in the Creature but also its mutilated victims. Yet it is not merely the motif of corpses that supplies terror and abjection to the narrative, but also the close and troubled relationship between the figure of the corpse, and the corpus of the text. I argue that in their modes of representation, both Kristeva and Shelley incarnate rather than merely signify the crisis of abjection in their texts. By performing the condition of corporeality in both subject and style, Shelley echoes Kristeva's attempt to uncover the dynamics of the subject-object-abject relationship, while revealing the visceral and primitive materiality that is exposed by the incarnation of chaos.
In Frankenstein, Victor engenders a being by dissecting and mutilating the corpses of the dead; for him, dismemberment and amalgamation become part of the same chilling process. Although the parts he selects for his Creature are chosen for their beauty, the combination of those parts is rendered monstrous:
Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (318)
The Creature is represented as a collection of body parts, a composite of corporeal details. It lacks an existential centre; it is a fused disjunction that is 'shrivelled' and empty of life—the Creature seems, at least at first glance, to indicate what Kristeva regards as "death infecting life" (232). Yet it is not merely the Creature that is unbalanced; Victor is also marked by instability and alienation when he reflects on the horrors of his creation. As the shuddering Victor describes, "My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation" (315). Victor experiences the "sight-clouding dizziness" (Kristeva 230) that results from nausea-inducing abjection.
As Kristeva argues, the crisis of abjection involves uncertain frontiers and ambiguous margins, drawing the subject to the limits of its own conceptual boundaries (236). When faced with the abject, the subject may find himself occupying a position indistinct with the object—this disorientating state is reflected particularly by Victor, who expresses his abjection to the most horrifying moments of the narrative by registering them upon his own body. As Bette London (1993) notices, Victor "decomposes himself" (261) when delivering the account of the Creature's composition. While anticipating his inventory of the Creature's parts, he divides and de-animates his own body, expressing his body as an object made up of component fragments. For instance, Victor disturbingly describes, "my eyeballs were starting from their sockets" (315). This metaphorical decomposition is also echoed when Victor sees Henry Clerval's mangled corpse: [Victor's] human frame could no longer support the agonizing suffering that [he] endured, and [he] was carried out of the room in strong convulsions" (447). Victor's collapsed body is "stretched on a wretched bed, surrounded by [...] all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon" (448), paralleling "the lifeless form of Henry Clerval" (447). Victor illustrates his abjection corporeally as a "hideous phantasm of a man" (263), thus registering the abjection of the object upon the subject through the alarming image of the cadaverous body.
The haunting sight of Elizabeth's "lifeless and inanimate" body (467) also triggers corporeal responses from Victor: "my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins, and tingling in the extremities of my limbs" (467). This response is intensified as the figure of Elizabeth's corpse returns to him. Similar to Kristeva's description of the abject, Elizabeth's corpse "beckons […] and ends up engulfing [Victor]" (Kristeva 232), and "everywhere [he] turns [he] see[s] the same figure—her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier" (Shelley 467). Furthermore, the abject "disturbs identity, system, order", and "does not respect borders [and] positions" (Kristeva 232). In continuously confronting the abject, Victor becomes faced with a reality that if fully acknowledged, threatens to 'annihilate' him (Kristeva 230); the subject becomes threatened with destruction, as the structural order of subjects and objects are no longer sustained. This distressing disintegration is foreshadowed in Victor's nightmare after the creation of the Creature:
I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets. . . . Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror. (319)
The confrontation with the abject, even in the dream, signals a moment of bewilderment, horror, and radical disorientation. It threatens to obliterate meaning by flinging the individual into a state of baffling and terrifying ambiguity. All order is lost and borders are blurred when Elizabeth transforms into Victor's mother's corpse. There is a conflation between the mother and lover and the want to possess the latter may also be translated to an Oedipian yearning for the former. The grave-worms that crawl upon the mother's shrouded corpse are hence significant because they can be interpreted as phallic symbols representing Victor's possessive instinct. His horror is therefore a result of this disorienting conflation of lover and mother; he becomes petrified by the "the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother"
(233) that Kristeva refers to. Even after Victor wakes, he enters into another nightmare when he finds himself facing "the miserable monster" (319) in the flesh. In this successions of confrontations with the abject, whether in his dream-state or in reality, Victor psyche fractures as he is pushed towards "the edge of nonexistence and hallucination" (Kristeva 230). He seemingly experiences the "weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant" (Kristeva 230).
Victor's abjection may thus be argued to be, in a sense, self-perpetuated, as his exploitation of corpses conjures the horrors that will doom him. By disturbing "with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame" (315), his creation of the Creature involves his dabbling in the filth of human cadavers, within the darkness of secretive vaults and channels. The imagery employed has distinctly phallic overtones, as Paul Sherwin (1981) remarks, and it is in the combination of filth and phallus that the corporeality of Victor's work manifests the maternal presence, assembled from "phantasmal body parts and buried wishes" (Sherwin 885). The portrayal of polluting objects recalls Kristeva's analysis of defilement and the threats that defilement poses to the identity of the self. Victor crosses the "archaic boundaries of the self's clean and proper body" (Kristeva 262) when his meddling fingers enter the realm of the forbidden. He situates himself "at the border" of his "condition as a living being" when confronted with the corpses that are "compelling, raw, insolent" (Kristeva 231). Also mirroring the acts of Victor's profane fingers is the Creature, who leaves behind his finger marks on the necks of his victims, providing the dark evidence of strangulation. After the murder of William, Victor discovers that "the print of the murderer's finger" (334) was on the boy's neck. Both Victor and the Creature leave their imprints on the figure of the corpse, imparting an element of their self to what Kristeva describes as "that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything" (231). If abjection is a kind of "narcissistic crisis" (Kristeva 240), it may be possible to interpret their acts of 'fingering' as inscriptions of the subject upon "something rejected from which one does not part" (Kristeva 232). In other words, Victor's and the Creature's act of defilement is a symbol of the closely intertwined relationship between the subject and the figure of the corpse. The self is thus under threat as the demarcation between subject and abject is undercut.
The figure of the corpse can be seen to reveal the tensions that result from the threat of dissolution which plagues the boundaries between the subject and object, and Frankenstein foregrounds the agony of this struggle particularly in the depiction of Victor. Yet the novel also affirms the significance of embodiment not just in content, but in style. As Kristeva describes in another context, "[t]he writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language—style and content" (242). Shelley's fascination with the abject parallels Victor's machinations with corpses; his attempts at reanimating the dead mirror her obsession with the act of representing the abject. In her introduction to the Standard Novels edition, Shelley begins as if she is grudgingly fulfilling a duty in writing the text that should have been dispatched to the grave (Sherwin 892). This is seen when she admits: "I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print" (259). However, her imagination and passion is later revealed when she describes the birth of her novel. Shelley evokes the disquieting excitement that her early self experienced, shifting to the present tense when describing the horrifying moment when the Creature "sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes" (263-264). As she recounts the appalling image of the "hideous phantom", she nevertheless experiences a "thrill of fear", a thrill that echoes the sensation of sublime transcendence induced by her impression that "the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond" (264). In what Kristeva calls "a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly" (238), Shelley functions as dreamer, creator, and writer, incarnating her disparate images in a text imbued "with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie" (268). After all, invention, as Shelley reflects, "does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos" (262). Unlike the chaotic corporeal mass that Victor is faced with, Shelley's chaos lies in her authorial consciousness, and it is her imagination that "give[s] form to dark, shapeless substances" (262), and serves to make sense out of nonsense, order out of chaos. According to Kristeva, writing literature that confronts abjection "implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see one self in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacements of verbal play" (242, emphasis added), Shelley presents her dream vision as an embodied text of the imagination, verbalising and materialising the intense images of the abject that haunt her consciousness.
The corporealisation of the novel is also evident in the narrative structure of the text. Like a body that can be dissected into "component parts" (Kristeva 263), this epistolary novel adopts a distinctively Chinese-box narration—the Creature's tale is told by Victor, whose story is in turn rendered to Walton, who then textually records the narrative in the letters he sends to his sister. In addition, if the crisis of abjection involves the disrespect of "borders, positions, rules" (Kristeva 232), the text seems to enact or at least simulate this crisis when it ignores chronological conventions. Besides the frequent use of flashbacks, Shelley inserts an extended flashback when she disrupts Victor's narrative in order to insert the Creature's tale. As Sherwin notes, once Victor begins to describe the lengthy process of creating his Creature (310-317), his hitherto sequential narrative becomes curiously disjointed (Sherwin 895). Relying largely on repetition and juxtaposition, Victor obscures temporal relations, delivering a dense account that is as complicated in its composition as the creature is complex; the subject becomes trapped in an antagonistic tussle with its object. In fact, the entire novel is rendered incarnate as a metaphor for the Creature when Shelley proclaims in her introduction: "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper" (264). As the "hideous progeny" of Victor and Shelley respectively, both the Creature and the narrative may be interpreted as products of artistic genius and creative labour, even while they embody the crisis of abjection in their origins and their struggles.
Similar to Frankenstein, Kristeva's essay embodies the crisis of abjection that it describes, thus not only explicating its arguments, but also performing it. Megan Becker Leckrone (2005) points out that Kristeva's prose employs the first-person pronoun rather than the conventional scholarly 'we'. It is the ambiguous 'I', occasionally italicised or placed within quotation marks that "disorients the reader from the start" (Becker-Leckrone 35). Because of the 'I', the text can be read as a personal account that testifies to the intense and affective experience of abjection, and as a theoretical and conceptual analysis of abjection. In Becker-Leckrone's words, "the 'I' on Kristeva's pages belongs to both discourses" (35). Kristeva's use of language thus enacts what it seeks to explain. Similar to how the prose, through the use of 'I', fuses two radically different types of discourses, Kristeva's arguments explicates the "radical disruption of the borders that separate the subjects from its objects, the 'I' from the 'not-I'" (35). It is in the difficulty of delineating the subject from the object that an unspeakable and hardly describable sense of abjection arises. The indistinctness of this sense of abjection is accentuated in one of the opening paragraphs of Kristeva's essay:
When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing me, which I name or imagine.
What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject only has one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. (229-230, emphasis Kristeva's)
Kristeva repeatedly describes the abject in terms of what it is not; in denying that the abject is "a definable object", "an ob-ject facing me", "an ob-jest", or "my correlative", she highlights the elusiveness of the abject. Abjection is resistant to definition and radically defiant of categorisation. As Kristeva argues, the abject draws one "toward the place where meaning collapses" (230). Kristeva's descriptions thus reflect an opacity of meaning that is intensified by the rich texture of her prose, but nuanced with dependent clauses (like "When I am beset by abjection") and subtle etymologies (such as the reference to 'cadaver': cadere, to fall) (231). With its repetitive rhythms and elegant contours, her prose, like the abject, seems to be simultaneously "unapproachable and intimate" (234), repulsive and yet strangely fascinating. Clearly, Kristeva's text serves as an embodiment of the crisis of abjection, staging the very struggle and ambiguity that characterises its meaning.
Kristeva and Shelley's texts thus reflect attempts to corporealise the crisis of abjection that is present in their works. ; These efforts are expressed both in content, especially in the motif of the corpse, and in style, as a performative mode of representation. In particular, Shelley, as interpreted through Kristeva, demonstrates the ways in which the incarnation and reanimation of the textual body can constitute the creative labour of authorship. It seems that any discourse that seeks to articulate the abject, in means that do not simply inhibit or suppress it, is necessarily marked with the imprint of the abject's own force. By extension, it may be suggested that psychoanalytic thought can never flee the effects of that which it attempts to investigate. Considering the abiding ambiguity of the abject, it is heartening that both Shelley and Kristeva nevertheless aim to plumb the depths of the murky waters of abjection, potentially uncovering the sublime in the process.
Ow Yeong Wai Kit graduated from NUS as an English Literature major and Philosophy minor. He has been President of the NUS Buddhist Society and Vice-President of NUS Interfaith. His research interests include medieval and modern religious literature, contemporary British and Irish poetry, as well as topics in the philosophy of religion. Currently, he is pursuing graduate studies at University College London.
Works Cited
Becker-Leckrone, Megan. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. "Approaching Abjection." The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996. 229-263. London, Bette. "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity." PMLA 108.2 (Mar 1993):
253-267. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. London: Penguin, 1968. Sherwin, Paul. "Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe." PMLA 96.5 (Oct 1981): 883- 903.
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