On Context and Monstrosity

Claire Colebrook sets forth as the “necessary problem of context” the suggestion that “a text cannot be contained within some context of safe, historical, and guaranteed astute reading” (702).  The article points to potential disruptions and disconnects between readers and textual “meaning” stemming from temporal displacement (specifically the foreign-ness to today’s students of some canonical texts’ language), spatial or cultural distance (as in the case of “highly local” references in music lyrics), and other examples of what she calls “contextual decay” (702). Colebrook even considers the question of what kinds of meaning can inhere in a text that not only has moved beyond its original context but has been removed from all of remotely familiar or imaginable backdrops. Imagining a scenario in which abstract, future beings encounter human text archives in “radically inhuman contexts” brought on by the decline of literacy or the “disappearance of all reading animals,” Colebrook stresses the necessity of considering texts beyond their immediate, or even relatable, contexts (703).

In unpacking the theoretical and historical context of the concept context, Colebrook turns to the study of language itself, pointing out that accounting for the origin of language permits a more grounded “empirico-transcendental approach” to understanding its structure:

Language […] emerges because man is an animal whose species requires him to enter into social relations; languages differ but have the same underlying imperative of allowing man to emerge as a being whose relation to his environs requires some organizing structure. Man knows himself only as he appears to himself through these structures. The fact that there are structures […] is transcendental; but the specific form these structures take is empirical, and we know the transcendental (or life) only as it appears in its specific form. (713)

In other words, we understand the structure of language as a mediator between “man” and “his environs” only in and through the specific iteration of this structure that is available to us and through which we understand ourselves--and our own position within the context of that structure. Reading these lines with an eye toward a dialogue between this article and Shelley’s Frankenstein prompted me to revisit the scene in which the Creature relates the story of his time in the forest—the “original era of [his] being” and his attempts to account for himself within the social structure (Shelley 79).

The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, announces an intertextual link to the story of the invention of writing, which is to say, the coming into being of the material text as a body separate from the body that engenders it (as distinct from speech). With this in mind, I brought Colebrook’s perspective on the “empirico-transcendental approach” to language and context to bear on the Creature’s tale of his beginnings (713). He tells of gradually mastering his senses, finding food and shelter, and educating himself by way of eavesdropping, all while remaining outside the social order—“shut out from intercourse” and struggling to make sense of himself: “But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses [. . .] I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?” (97). Absent the benefit of known relationships by which to triangulate his position within the structure, he cannot read himself.

An attempt to locate his own position within the larger social sphere fails as well, as the Creature learns details of “the strange system of human society” and finds that its ordered structure holds no place for him: “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood. [. . .] And what was I? I was not even of the same nature as man. [. . .] When I looked around, I saw and heard none like me. Was I then a monster?” (96). Especially in light of the allusion to Prometheus and the possibility of the Creature as an analogue of the written text (and accordingly cobbled together from borrowed parts), I can’t help but read this moment partly in terms of the struggle to fix meaning that is not entirely contingent upon context.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Ed. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.