More on Intent

There is another important reason to ignore intent when examining a work of art.

Sometimes, an artist fails.

The artist may have an intention with a work of art, but could fail to achieve that intention. That doesn't make the work unworthy of analysis; indeed, the artist's intent could fail and BECAUSE OF THAT FAILURE, the result could be a great work of art. Regardless of the success or failure of the intent, we still have the results to examine.

And as psychoanalytic thinkers and critics have clearly suggested, human action and intent does not always operate on a conscious level.

Mary Shelley may have intended Dr. Frankenstein to be a sympathetic character. If this is the case, she failed: he is a self-pitying coward who constantly evades responsibility (despite protestations of guilt and blame, he avoids actually being held to blame for anything; furthermore, he takes blame for making the monster, not for abandoning the monster the moment of creation). Does this mean I have to think of Frankenstein as sympathetic because Shelley wanted him to be? Of course not. Does this mean I have to talk of Frankenstein as a failure? No, I don't, and even if I did, it might not change the merit of the work itself: regardless of what Shelley was trying to do, I must deal with the results on the page.

Generational Tastes and All-time Evaluation

Re-reading Frankenstein, it strikes me that many contemporary readers must see the style, language, and general writing as second-rate. The book was written with the conventions and language of Romanticism; it came before the Realism Revolution of the novel and well before the subsequent Modernist Revolution. The twentieth-century reader's tastes for what is good writing and good fiction were formed by realism and modernism; indeed, from the perspective of realism and modernism, the language of Romanticism is second-rate.

But that's the thing about tastes. The preference for the twentieth century style of writing (invented, some would say, but people like Flaubert, Twain, and James) is a preference, a taste. It doesn't necessarily mean that this is an inherently superior style of writing. A contemporary of Shelley would not have appreciated the novel written in the style of Flaubert (and indeed, if Shelley were born a hundred years later and written the same book, she may have written it entirely in the style of realism. Or not at all. But then, considering Frankenstein's impact, it's hard to really predict the history of literary tastes and moods without it).

In the 19th century, there was a critic who said that the slave narrative was the only authentic American literary genre; the implication was that the slave narrative was superior literature. This is the century that gave us Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickenson, and other titans of American literature. These are now more respected names than the authors of any slave narratives. Tastses change. A literary critic of one generation cannot possibly predict what writers will be thought well of by future generations, or what writers will be forgotten in a century, or what books will be considered masterpieces to the ages. We don't know; tastes change too quickly.

So if you read a Gothic novel, don't assess it by the standards of what makes good writing today.

Indeed, sometimes tastes change to such a degree that writers forgotten for decades or centuries suddenly come back into vogue. T.S. Eliot brought back Donne and the metaphysics; that type of poetry fit the tastes of modernism. Post-modernist thinkers look backward to literature before realism/modernism to works like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy to find earlier examples of post-modernism. Tastes evolve, styles evolve, and it is difficult to know what will last.

A sci-fi Thursday

I, Robot is a very good movie. It's lacking in character and dialogue, but why watch Sci-Fi for character and dialogue? You should watch Sci-Fi for ideas, and this movie is full of them. Among other things, futuristic robot movies often feature overtones of humanity's history of racial discrimination.

After talking it up to some of my classes, I've started re-reading Shelley's Frankenstein, and since next week a brief respite from grading will ensue, I may actually finish it sometime soon. The frame story adds an important element to the themes of this book. Robert Walton says, "I shall satiate my ardent curiosity...and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man." He asks, "What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?" He admits that he would "gladly sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise. One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought." And then...he's about to hear Frankenstein's story.

What a cutting literary figure Mary Shelley makes. Daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of Percy Shelley, sometime companion of Lord Byron--and does she surpass them all with this book?