Bouldbe anticipated. “That for which we are not prepared,” Derrida writes, “is
heralded by species of monsters.” But uncanny arrivants from the future are
often all but impossible to distinguish from revenants—the ghosts which
return to haunt us, the already dead that refuse to stay buried.
The classic monster returning from the past and arriving from the
future is Mary Shelley’s creature. Frankenstein (1818) begins not among
the abattoirs and charnel houses from which scientist Victor Frankenstein
scavenges body parts, nor in the filthy workshop of creation in which he
assembles them. It starts instead with the frame tale of Robert Walton’s
expedition to find a navigable polar route from St. Petersburg to the
Pacific, and thence to East Asia and the western coast of the Americas.
He dreams noble and romantic dreams of scientific adventure, of risk
and sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge. But in reality he is bound in
service to the expansion and acceleration of European power and global
commerce. And it is there, near the top of the world, just as the map
becomes a bare white Arctic expanse—a Georgian outer space—that
Frankenstein’s creature is first sighted: taken for “a savage inhabitant
of some undiscovered land,” he has “the shape of a man, but apparently
of gigantic stature.” Throughout the novel, the creature is described in
this contradictory way, as both subhuman and superhuman.
On the one hand, he is as Boris Karloff portrays him in James
W ha le’s Frankenstein (1931): “hideously deformed and loathsome... a
monster, a blot upon the earth,” “detestable,” “horrible,” “uncouth and
distorted.” Twice his flesh is compared to that of a mummy, a reminder
that Shelley grew up during the first wave of British Egyptomania that
followed Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile in
1798 and the French surrender of Egypt in 1801. Egyptomania really
kicked off with the 1803 translation of Dominique-Vivant Denon’s Tra v-
els in Upper and Lower Egypt During the Campaign of General Bonaparte
in that Country. Replete with etchings of sublime and melancholy ruins