On Reading: Everything Literature - a blog

On the Two Frankensteins: Miss Shelly's "Prometheus" and Mister Saadawi's "Whatsitsname"

Intertextuality, the term coined by Julia Kristeva in her attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics (study of how signs derive their meaning from the structure of a text) is vital when studying literature. Meaning and their multiplicity (heteroglossia) whether we are reading a text or speaking is something that is never straightforward. Meaning, according to Kristeva, is not transferred directly from the writer to the reader but is instead mediated or filtered by “codes” imparted to the writer and reader of other texts. She calls it the notion of intersubjectivity.

But reading is seldom straightforward. One might read a text and see similarities with another text – the two texts might be contemporary or published centuries apart. What is common between them is what they have to say. The way they say it might differ but it is enough for a frequent reader to point out the commonalities. (I have written a a piece which talks about two novels showcasing some commonalities even though they were published centuries apart. You can find it ??)

And Plato has something to say about it.

According to Plato, Art is imitation (the Greek word for it is mimesis) and all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the “world of ideas”) is a type created by God; the concrete things we perceive in his existence are mere shadows or representations of this ideal type. What he was trying to say was if there happens to be an artist, a painter, a musician, then their work was an imitation (and they being imitators) which thus was twice removed from the truth or reality. So, in a nutshell, according to this guy, art is an imitation of life. Plato goes on to give an example of a carpenter and a chair. The idea of a ‘chair’ first came in the mind of the carpenter. He gave physical shape to his idea out of wood and created a chair. The painter imitated the chair of the carpenter in his picture of the chair. Thus, the painter’s chair is twice removed from reality. Hence, he believed that art is twice removed from reality.

While discussing Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, the acclaimed graphic novel, I stumbled upon a panel which started it all. That one image was enough to pique my curiosity. While discussing the graphic novel with my students, where we were talking about the futility of war and its cruelties along with the aftermath and its long-term impact on the people, this image (shown below) took me by surprise. It represented something I’d seen before or at least had read about. And after some thinking, it clicked! I know what I was looking for.

The image, if one forgoes the speech bubble, makes one think that the subject in focus might be going through some sort of metamorphosis where he is being turned into something new, and maybe something dangerous. The image spoke of the harrowing and excruciatingly painful process of metamorphosizing someone into becoming something else – detaching oneself from their true and original self which results in giving birth to something that one can seldom understand, including the person on whom this change is being forced.

That took me on a journey, my rabbit hole - the question was simple: Has anyone written something which combines Ms. Shelly's Prometheus while also discussing the harrowing nature of war and its impact on the people? Lo and behold, I stumbled upon Mr. Saadawi's novel, the 2014 winner of the International Prize for Arabic Literature, Frankenstein of Baghdad. But before I could start reading about the 21st Century cousin-tale, I wanted to dig deeper into the original text first. (Nerd Alert: Here's the an amazing New Yorker piece on the truth about Mary Shelly's novel ??)

What's interesting about Saadawi's novel, which is set in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq and so viscerally portrays life and times of the people living there, is the multi-layered and fragmented narrative, stitched together from different points of view as well as different timelines. It employs multi-perspective narration, focusing on various characters' viewpoints. Saadawi infuses it with metafictional elements (Metafiction is a style of prose narrative in which attention is directed to the process of fictive composition. The most obvious example of a metafictive work is a novel about a novelist writing a novel, with the protagonist sharing the name of the creator and each book having the same title)

The novel, much like Shelly's work which critiques scientific hubris, is a social commentary on the real horrors of war-torn Baghdad, where Saadawi uses fantastical elements (like the creation of the creature, Whatsitsname “????????” or ashismi in Saadawi’s original text, who is stitched together from the detritus of different victims of violence and comes to life seeking justice. You can read an excerpt from the novel which narrates the creation of the monster here) along with visceral descriptions of daily incidents is what makes the novel stand out. Here's an example from the novel's first chapter which describes an explosion taking place -

The explosion took place two minutes after Elishva, the old woman known as Umm Daniel, or Daniel's mother, boarded the bus. Everyone on the bus turned around to see what had happened. They watched in shock as a ball of smoke rose, dark and black, beyond the crowds, from the car park near Tayaran Square in the center of Baghdad. Young people raced to the scene of the explosion, and cars collided into each other or into the median. The drivers were frightened and confused: they were assaulted by the sound of car horns and of people screaming and shouting. - Frankenstein of Baghdad

Even though both these works showcase thematic differences in terms of their context and setting, they are similar in exploring themes of responsibility (the fact that actions have consequences) but on the other hand, Frankenstein in Baghdad focuses a lot on causality - the cause-and-effect relationships that drive the cycle of violence and retribution in a war-torn society. Similarly, it also showcases creation as one of its inherent themes, similar to Shelly's novel, and talks about how the creature, Whatsitsname, is a direct product of violence in Baghdad. The creature itself symbolises the consequences of war endured by the common masses and the vicious cycle of violence they unknowingly become a part of.

Identity is also an important theme in Saadawi's novel and if one looks at the creature, who is a patchwork of different body parts, each from a different person with their own identity and story, which then gives way to talking about fragmentation and identity crisis (the creature embodying different people hence its own identity is either fragmented or made up of other people's identities).

Shelly's Frankenstein, the story of a creature with no name, stems from her own experience of being pregnant with a baby she did not name. She recorded her predicament in her diary on a daily basis which also helps gain insight into what made her write the creature the way it is written. She lost her baby and dreamed of her baby being alive again.

“Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived,” she wrote in her diary. “Awake and find no baby.”

Much like her condition, Frankenstein resembles the reanimation of the one person she'd lost - her child. On the other hand, the reason to not name the creature, since she published the book anonymously, can be understood by looking at the time it was published. Women writers were seldom published and accepted in the society and this mirrors how the creature was rejected by the human world.

For Saadawi, the moniker Whatsitsname has a deep rooted meaning and connection to the Iraqi people stemming from different backgrounds (in terms of their ethnicity, sect, or race) and since the creature is an amalgamation of different peoples' body parts, it does justice to represent the many souls that had lost themselves in the civil war-torn Baghdad of 2005. And unlike Shelly's predicament of herself being the creature, the one who is never accepted by the society, Saadawi has been vocal about why he took Frankenstein as a reference to write about something so real and evident in the world that we are living in. (You can read his interview here)

Both the novels are vital to understand the world we are living in - on one hand, Shelly's Frankenstein can be seen as a cautionary tale about the responsibility of creation and its consequences with respect to the advances we are encountering in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning while on the other hand, Saadawi's novel humbles us with the brutal realities of war and makes us think about the aftermath of the event and its effect on those who fall prey to it.

As an IBDP English facilitator, I would love to teach Saadawi's novel for Paper 2 since it infuses a mix of genres (literary fiction, metafiction, magic realism) while talking about the global issues of war, conflict, human rights, identity, to name a few, as well as the global area of either culture, identity and community or politics, power and justice. Overall, the novel is an excellent text to help students gain perspectives about war, culture and identity and can also be taken for writing their English Extended Essays, if not Paper 2.

Let me know what other novels come to your mind and can be discussed with either Shelly's or Saadawi's novel.