Courtesy: Dougal Waters/Getty Images
The Beacon Team
“Read in Order to Live…and Question…” (Gustave Flaubert in a misreading)
Mary Shelley’s novel, ‘Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus‘, written in 1816 began as a tale told around a fire one summer evening in Geneva where Lord Byron the poet Percy Shelley, a doctor friend John Polidori exchanged ghost stories. The story that 18-year old Mary Godwin (later Shelley) narrated was to be published as a novel becoming the first sci-fi fiction, popularized by Hollywood: But also falsified into a binary tale of good and evil, of an ambitious young scientist and his hideous ‘creation’ he rejects with horror. And that version has endured. But Shelley had created a more layered tale that can be read, unlike the celluloid or dramatic versions, as two, perhaps more intertwining tragedies—of man’s overweening ambition to play God and the abandonment of what we can now, with post-colonial hindsight call the ‘Other’.
The first tragedy underlines a parable of gross ambition, the systemic destruction of Nature fueled by untrammeled ambition overreaching for ‘progress.’ The second tragedy speaks to us even more eloquently as a parable of modernity’s aversion to Difference, to its fealty to and push for sameness, homogeneity that in turn leads to a range of hostile reactions to fellow creatures deemed hideous, leastways not like ‘Us’. The ‘creature’ is demonised, it has become the ‘Other’ because it does not fit our conception of ‘good’ ‘beautiful’, normal. The gay, the transgender, the dalit, the dark-skinned the obese, the old are the Other, dispensable, to be shown the door denied citizenship rights (or as was done to senior COVID-19 patients in Italy or Indian pilgrims in QUM Iran tested positive left to die) because they are not like us. They have been stripped of their humanity because they are different.
In Mary Shelley’s exquisite prose the creature’s humanity, his desire for love and to love is palpable and unrequited.
Read or download here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42324/42324-h/42324-h.htm
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180611-why-frankenstein-is-the-story-that-defined-our-fears
Bartleby, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” copies documents for an attorney on Wall Street.Very early in the story he starts to refuse to do more than copy; he refuses to collate, to compare with the immortal words that will define his existence throughout the story and his own life: “I would prefer not to”
“I would prefer not to.” ”You will not?” “I prefer not to.”
This phrase forms resistance to capitalist ideological hegemonies by which everyone is reduced to an automaton. Early in the story the attorney sees this mysteriously worded refusal as that: “Nothing so aggravates a person so as a passive resistance.” A ‘political’ reading of this fable of “Wall Street” would suggest this to be the case by Bartleby’s refusal to obey; soon his refusal extends even to copying, to never admitting his preferences. His quaint “I would prefer not to” contains within it a decisive ambiguity; no list of refusals at the core of that passive resistance for the firm to work on and attack. And then his refusals extend to his life; he refuses to move, stasis defines his being.
In this sense “I would prefer not to” moves beyond the political into the psychological; Bartleby will not eat, co-mingle, leave office, or the building (is it a one-man sit-down/gherao?) Is he a renunciate striving paradoxically for an ascetic purity through inaction and revolt? The “formula” to use Giles Deleuze’s memorable phrase for “I would prefer not to” drives everyone, co-workers, the attorney into aggressive rage; madness permeates the office. But equally the formula repeated throughout the story decimates language itself. “I would prefer not to” is neither affirmation nor negation. Renunciation is total; no negotiations; resistance/revolt works itself out in a comprehensive disengagement by the small and pallid man.
Yet as Deleuze reminds us, Bartleby is a comic story in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Read or download here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231-images.html
Rabi Babu’s Introduction says it all:
“It costs me nothing to feel that I am; it is no burden to me. And yet if the mental, physical, chemical, and other innumerable facts concerning all branches of knowledge which have united in myself could be broken up, they would prove endless. It is some untold mystery of unity in me, that has the simplicity of the infinite and reduces the immense mass of multitude to a single point.
This One in me knows the universe of the many. But, in whatever it knows, it knows the One in different aspects. It knows this room only because this room is One to it, in spite of the seeming contradiction of the endless facts contained in the single fact of the room. Its knowledge of a tree is the knowledge of a unity, which appears in the aspect of a tree.
This One in me is creative. Its creations are a pastime, through which it gives expression[vi] to an ideal of unity in its endless show of variety. Such are its pictures, poems, music, in which it finds joy only because they reveal the perfect forms of an inherent unity.
This One in me not only seeks unity in knowledge for its understanding and creates images of unity for its delight; it also seeks union in love for its fulfilment. It seeks itself in others. This is a fact, which would be absurd had there been no great medium of truth to give it reality. In love we find a joy which is ultimate because it is the ultimate truth. Therefore it is said in the Upanishads that the advaitam is anantam,—”the One is Infinite”; that the advaitam is anandam,—”the One is Love.”
To give perfect expression to the One, the Infinite, through the harmony of the many; to the One, the Love, through the sacrifice of self, is the object alike of our individual life and our society”.
Read or download here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23136/23136-h/23136-h.htm
Notes: --Shelley and Melville and Tagore texts download links courtesy Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org Many thanks to the trustees of Project Gutenberg for this outstanding public service.
Leave a Reply