[NOTES ON MY INTRODUCTION:]
Both Samuel Coleridge’s early Romantic poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley’s late Romantic novel Frankenstein grapple with violent murders that then culprit can retell only by omitting them from their accounts.
This intersection is not perhaps surprising: Shelley explicitly refers to and subtlety borrows from Coleridge’s Rime throughout her novel. [She mimics his frame narrative structure, purloins the imagery of a ship stranded by ice, and pursues the theme of the value of the life of every living thing.]
In Frankenstein, Shelley’s conversation with Coleridge’s Rime implies that . . . . ?
[Shelley aims to write book about the injustice of juridical system. Coleridge aims to create a story about forgiveness and salvation.]
[added after I wrote the conclusion]WHAT IS MY THESIS STATEMENT? [It’s something about how Coleridge’s Romantic understanding of the involuntary suggests powerlessness, while for Shelley it signifies the capacity to autonomously act. (Autonomic reflex and autonomy/reflexion!)]
[MY INTRODUCTION:]
Samuel Coleridge’s early Romantic poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley’s late Romantic novel Frankenstein narrate violent murders that the culprit can retell only by omitting them from their account. In the Rime, the Mariner describes the action that kills the Albatross, but strategically elides any description of the murder itself. In Frankenstein, when the monster strangles Victor Frankenstein’s young brother, William, his elliptical narration of this action leaves out any references to the sustained and deliberate decision to take William’s life. Hearkening to the Romantic experience of the sublime, both of these lacunae give expression to the characters’ encounter with a terrible and unnamable immensity that escapes verbal representation. [This intersection is not perhaps surprising: Shelley explicitly refers to Coleridge’s Rime and subtlety borrows his frame narrative structure, the imagery of a ship stranded by ice, and the theme of the value of the life of every living thing.] However, Shelley’s imitation of Coleridge’s portrayal of involuntary homicide does not transport Coleridge’s motif whole and unchanged. While Coleridge’s Romantic understanding of the involuntary suggests a sublime experience of absolute powerlessness, Shelley’s representation of this experience signifies the discovery of the individual’s capacity for autonomous action.
[MY ANALYSIS OF RIME AND FRANKENSTEIN:]
In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Mariner’s narration of his murder of the Albatross suggests that his actions were beyond his control. At the end of Book I, the Wedding-Guest observes the Mariner’s agitation, and asks:
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus! —
Why look’st thou so?” — With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.” (I.59?-62?)
While the Mariner’s active grammatical construction (“I shot”) ascribes responsibility for this action to himself, the stanza’s disjointedness [dash] suggests the inexplicability of the Mariner’s murder for himself. In context, the Mariner’s action is unmotivated. Not only has the Albatross not acted in a way that would incur the Mariner’s wrath; in the Mariner’s own story, the [“bird of good omen”] led him and the ship’s crew out of dangerous Artic waters. He offers no explanation for his actions — only the sudden, unsettling dash [break] that marks the pause between the Wedding-Guest’s question (“why look’st thou so?”) and his confession (“with my cross-bow / I shot the ALBATROSS”). Unmotivated, ineffable, a lacuna in his account, the Mariner’s crime happens spontaneously, out from nowhere, within this silent break and without a legible conscious decision on his part. This spontaneity suggests that, despite his absorption of responsibility, despite vehiculating the arrow from its bow, the Mariner’s action is involuntary. “I shot,” the Mariner confesses, but in fact the “I” that performs this violence is only a passive surface that the tension of the crossbow interrupts with its release. (It/”I” snaps into place only after the arrow is let go.) It is as though, in this moment of homicide, the Mariner suffers a psychic break and finds himself outside himself, ecstatically transported by powers greater than his own, and observes himself acting out a crime that he does not comprehend.
[false start]
[false start]
[false start]
In Frankenstein, the monster also builds the story of his murder of William around a lacuna that suggests his action’s spontaneous reflexivity. [Something about William’s insults?] Discovering that William belongs to the Frankenstein family, the monster declares that “you shall be my first victim,” and then describes the act of strangulation that takes William’s life: “I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet” (102). Similar to the Mariner’s homicide, the monster’s description indicates that he involuntarily murdered William despite his declared intention to victimize him. While his declaration evidences the willfulness of his act, his failure to narrate that murder raises question about his will in the heat of the moment. In his description, the comma serves a function similar to the dash in the Mariner’s story: it introduces a silence between the monster’s violent action (“I grasped his throat to silence him”) and that action’s apparent consequences (“in a moment he lay dead at my feet”). In other words, the comma — etymologically derived from the Greek κοπ-, the root of κόπτειν, “to strike” or “to cut” — suppresses any incriminating admission that the monster deliberately kept his hands around William’s throat until William died from the strangulation. This disconnect between the monster’s action and that action’s consequences suggests that he did not will Frankenstein’s brother’s death. (Indeed, his stated aim is “to silence” the boy who is insulting him, not to kill him.) Instead, in the narrative, William’s death just happens. [It happens to the monster as much as to William.] Similar to the Albatross’s death, William’s murder occurs involuntary [instantaneously, automatically?], without deliberation; it appears, at least in the way that the monster tells the story, out of thin air. Unlike the Mariner’s ineffable action suggested by the dash, however, Shelley’s use of the comma implies that the grip that takes William’s life happens as a reflex in the monster, overpowering his motor control; the monster, perhaps, squeezes and squeezes, not to victimize William, but as a visceral reaction to William’s epithets, which tighten him up and consequently lock down [huh?] his grasp on William’s neck.
Counter to Coleridge’s evocation of the ineffable at the heart of the Mariner’s involuntary crime, Shelley’s attention to the monster’s reflexes provides an occasion for the monster not to baulk incredulously at his act but to reflexively comprehend his own creative power. Immediately after William’s life is taken, despite the fact that the monster’s narration does not directly ascribe responsibility to himself for the violence, he declares: “I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph: clapping hands, I exclaimed, ‘I, too, can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him’” (102). While the emptiness of the dash in Coleridge’s Rime marks the space of the Mariner’s inability to comprehend his own actions, the monster’s “exultation” and “hellish triumph” suggests that that space — signified in Frankenstein by the comma — gives the monster an object through which he can become conscious of his existential purpose. Since the monster’s excitement follows the act of strangulation, William’s murder is not the calculated [premeditated] expression of the monster’s desire to injure Victor Frankenstein through violence against his family. Instead, in the sequential structure of the narrative, Shelley’s text demonstrates that the monster discovers this desire through a violence that happens to him. For the monster, this initial act of violence may have been beyond his control, as it was for the Mariner. However, unlike the Mariner’s experience, the monster happens upon his capacity to control his situation in this ecstatic experience of that powerlessness. Enciphered in the lacuna of the comma is not a figure for the monster’s absolute passivity but for his capacity to grieve, “torment” and “destroy,” his creator, which did not exist in the monster’s self-consciousness prior to that involuntary murder.
Rather than remaining ineffable, the monster’s action provides him a surface that reflects him to himself.
[NOTES ON CONCLUSION: What does this difference between Coleridge’s and Shelley’s texts suggest about Romanticism as a movement?
Since Shelley’s novel is about the injustice of juridical punishment, the application of this “involuntary” category makes sense. In comparison, Coleridge’s poem does nothing with this idea. If anything, the spontaneity of the Albatross’s murder renders the rest of the poem insane, since the Mariner is punished in unbelievable ways for a crime that he did not commit in the strictest sense.
What is the difference between a dash and a comma, between an interruption and a cut?]
[A QUICK REVISION OF MY CLAIMS (BASED ON ABOVE ANALYSIS):]
Para. 1 — In the Rime, Coleridge’s strategically placed dash suggests that the Mariner’s murder of the Albatross is beyond his control.
Para. 2 — When the monster narrates his murder of William, Shelley introduces a comma (rather than a dash) that signifies not only the monster’s loss of control over his actions but the power of autonomic reflexes over him.
Para. 3 — While Coleridge’s dash signifies the Mariner’s radical passivity in the moment of homicide, the apparent passivity at the heart of Shelley’s comma paradoxically calls attention to the monster’s discovery of his power.
[MY CONCLUSION:]
These two different punctuation marks figure forth two different forms of the Romantic experience of the sublime. Coleridge’s dash in the Rime points toward an experience closer to Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [ . . . ] recollected in tranquility.” [While Coleridge’s dash calls attention to the immemorial — something unconscious and extraneous to recollection — the Mariner’s absolute susceptivity to its violence evokes a [leisurely] state in which the experience comes upon him, rolling over and consuming him to the point of paralysis [catatonia?]. In this paralysis, the Mariner finds himself in the throes of an experience whose immensity outstrips and obliterates him, that is, he cannot find himself.]] In contrast, Shelley’s comma refers to an experience that finds creative power not in passivity but in a power to “strike” and to “cut,” to overwhelm and reconstitute, a hostile, recalcitrant world, rather than remain its victim. Shelley’s evocation of this resistant power implicitly critiques the principles of spontaneity and the sublime foregrounded in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. For the monster, the comma signifies an affirmation of his subjectivity, not its repression in a tremendous experience of the sublime. Beyond his control, the reflex that causes his hands to strangle William to death and reveals to himself his capacity to take revenge against his tormentor calls attention to a sublime strength in him, pulsing in his blood and contracting in his muscles, driving his actions. In this way, perhaps, Shelley’s comma symbolizes the revolutionary coup that refuses to accept marginalization and repression, and instead confronts those coercive practices with a sublime demonstration of control.
Language & Literature III 