Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

Not long ago, I reread the book Harry loved best when we were in high school: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. We often read the same novels, and the two of us had polished off Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights , all of Austen, and much of Dickens by then, but Frankenstein became Harriet’s archetypal text, a fable of the self, a scripture for the reality of Harry Burden. Although I was taken by the story as a foreboding myth about the developments of modern medicine, I did not read it again and again. Dr. Frankenstein and the book’s vapid female characters held little interest for Harry. The person she loved was the monster, and she used to quote long passages from his chapters by heart, declaiming them like an old-fashioned poet, which made me laugh, even though I was bewildered by her fanatical attachment to the Miltonic creature.

Reading the book again as an adult, however, I felt a door had been opened. I walked through it and found Harry. I found Harry in a novel that had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl on a bet. In 1816, Mary Shelley was spending the summer in Switzerland with her husband, their neighbor Lord Byron, and another person less celebrated whose name I cannot remember. The challenge was to write a ghost story for the pleasure of the others. Mary was the only one who fulfilled the bargain. In the preface, she writes that the story came to her in a “waking dream,” as one image after another possessed her. She watched as a “pale student of unhallowed arts” created a monster.

“Behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

It is impossible to forget the novel’s essential story. I knew the terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. I knew his awful isolation is transformed into vengeance, but I had forgotten, or probably had never felt before, the ferocity of his feeling — his fury, grief, and bloodlust. And then I came across these lines spoken by the monster in Chapter 15:

“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions steadily recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

I felt as if Harry’s ghost were speaking to me.

Ethan Lord

1. How did Gobliatron, hero of the Fervidlies, who inhabit a country far to the north of Nowhere, disentangle himself from the ice-cold clutches of the Bobblehead, a machine man who froze great lakes by looking at them? Bobblehead froze Gobliatron solid with a mere glance. So Gobliatron, stranded in mid-step on a field of ice, began to think hot. He thought so hot he gave himself a fever. The fever melted the ice, and the hero was free.

2. Aword eludes a picture. How do you draw whenever, but, and then , or last week ? Arrows.

3. Red roosters all over pajamas purchased in France that Edward Boyle said belonged on girls. I took a pair of scissors, cut a hole in one leg, and threw the scrap in the garbage. The slashed pajamas disappeared. This is a confession. I was eight.

4. Riddle: What is so fragile even saying its name can break it?

Silence…. F.L., paterfamilias, asked me this riddle when I was nine. I could not answer him, but after he gave up the secret, I could not stop thinking about the answer. I lay in bed and said Silence again and again to hear it break. You asked me what I was doing, and I told you, and you smiled, but the smile went crooked, and I did not know exactly what it meant.

5. Iremember the closet was my enemy. I remember there was something behind the door. I remember you put a flashlight inside the closet and that, when it burned out, you let me change the batteries.

6. Everything has a pattern or a rhythm that can be discerned through close attention, but whether those repetitions exist outside the mind is an open question. You and I did not see the same patterns.

7. “ Theory is good but it does not prevent things from happening.” You told me that one month, two days, and thirty-seven minutes before you died. It is a quote from a neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, who dressed in black, admired paintings, and wrote the first descriptive analysis of multiple sclerosis.

8. Boredom never touched you, except when waiting for suitcases at the airport.

9. Under the logical fallacy argumentum ad popular, the biggest brand is the best brand. This false reasoning is used by every cultural herd, however large or small. The herd runs to gape at the spectacle of whitening toothpaste. The herd runs to see the new hot gallery star. The herd thinks in unison. The herd is a collective voyeur, driven by received knowledge to see beauty, sophistication, cleverness in the shining thing, the empty vehicle of worth and wealth and glory. But the herd loves ugliness, too: humiliations, murders, suicides, and corpses — not actual corpses within reach, not corpses that stink, but the mediated dead, the dead and dying on screen. The familiar herd, our own herd, is mostly sanitary in its tastes. The herd reads The Gothamite to discover sanitary tastes that will not interfere with the spectacle of whitening toothpaste that brightens its collective Madison Avenue grin and will not sully its Wall Street suit. The herds, large and small, create varying identities through one or another commodity of choice, their raison d’être. Images of the living as well as the dead are sold on the open market as delectable bodies. Their reality is exclusively of the third-person pronominal variety. The bodies have no inside because the first-person singular is not allowed. Value is determined within each herd by collective perception and the number of viewers.

10. Rubik’s Cube: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations. You gave it to me because you knew its algorithms would haunt me. M.L., Maisie Lord, aka Twinkletoes, the tutus-and-Mad-Hatter’s-tea-party sibling, did not understand that this was a hexahedral universe to be mastered by movement and color, that it was a cosmology, a separate reality, a place to be. She broke my Rubik’s Cube. I cut off her ponytail. I held the ponytail over the toilet while she screamed. I flushed. The toilet did not want to digest the hair. You came, you looked, you yelled, and while you yelled, you waved your hands beside your ears. Then you brought towels, and you spoke to us about tolerance, but we were not interested in it, not interested in tolerance, that is. We were too old, you said, to be breaking Rubik’s Cubes and flushing ponytails down toilets, and you were dead tired of it — of us. I was eleven and Maisie was thirteen. And then you sat down on the bathroom floor (with the towel that had a beige stripe at one end) even though the floor was not dry. Your head flopped down onto your chest and a sound came from you — a choking sound and sniffs. I froze like Gobliatron. I could not move. Twinkletoes said to me, Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve done! But my mouth was too tight and cold to answer.

11. Debord, Guy. He invented the Game of War. It was a board game about the Napoleonic Wars. Guy Debord, Julien Sorel, Ethan Lord — all wanting to play the game, move the pieces. Tell me the rules. Men love games. You said that once to me. But you loved games, too.

12. Ethan Lord, only son of Harriet Burden and Felix Lord, product of aforementioned two persons in nuclear family arrangement, aspirant scribbler, puzzle-maker, neo-Situationist orphan, remembers his mother. I am trying to remember you, Mother, to find those brain scraps and turn them into more than a Humian bundle of impressions, as you would have said, Humian, after David Hume. Kantian and Hegelian, but not Spinozaian, perhaps Husserlian? There is Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke . You would be glad to know that I’ve looked, read a few pages of him. He is difficult. You, too, could be difficult to understand.