Someone responds with, "but that's........that's the book. that's what the book is about"
Unlike most of my "Crap from Facebook" blog posts, I actually commented when I saw this one. My initial response was...
He murdered a five-year old child and framed the babysitter for it because the kid happened to be related to his creator.
It was before I went to bed this morning. I was tired. It seemed like a suitable response at the time. No one replied to me, so don't worry about me having gotten into an argument on this one. But I thought about it again and it bugs me. Mostly, it bugs me that I can't get away from Frankenstein. I find myself impelled to think about this book more than almost any other book, and it's a pretty bad book!
I mentioned it in another Crap from Facebook entry, back in May of last year, but I'll always associate this book with poor Hank Galmish, who picked it for variety as part of the curriculum in a college class about novels. I watched it dawn on him that he'd messed up, that he'd forgotten just how bad of a read Frankenstein actually is. And he just wanted to escape. He was bored out of his mind reading the book himself and possibly even felt like he owed the class an apology for picking it as one of the books we'd all read that quarter.
If I remember correctly, the post last year dealt with the idea that Frankenstein was "the first science fiction story." What I didn't talk about then was the idea that "it's a tragedy." On the one hand, this could be less annoying because it's true. Frankenstein definitely uses tragic elements. It's fair to classify the story as a tragedy. On the other hand, at least the "it was the first science fiction story" is mostly unique to Frankenstein, and not a tired excuse trotted out for lots of other shitty "classics."
Without regurgitating everything I can remember about the plot of Frankenstein, I'll note that it involves a lot of stupid decisions by both Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Some of those are morally wicked things too (like the bit I mentioned in the Facebook comment), but mostly, they're just foolish approaches to situations that could have been mitigated with even a jot of forethought. The book is about bad people doing bad things and having bad things happen to them for it. Some innocent victims get caught in the crossfire, but they're not the focus of the story anyway.
The whole structure of the narrative, in the first place, is superfluous and annoying. The plot is tedious. The prose is bland. The characters have essentially no development and behave strangely. Reading this book for any reason, even in the most cursory and clinical sort of way for literary analysis, is a dull experience. However, the genre classification in this case is correct: Frankenstein is a tragedy. Well spotted indeed. The parallels to tragic tales already well-known in the literary canon at the time are evident. The book tells a tragic story and Mary Shelley wrote it that way on purpose. So good job: you figured it out. It's a tragedy.
You wanna know what else is a tragedy? That anyone ever had to read the damn thing. By the way, I'm not mad at Mary Shelley. She was 20 when she wrote the book. If some crap I'd written at 20 were touted as a great classic, it would be crappy too. No one is a great writer at 20. Developing those skills takes time, practice, and experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment