“This nothing’s more than matter”: Joan of Arc, Ophelia (and those who transgress)

Five women portray different fragments of Ophelia

GENTLEMAN:

… says she hears
There’s tricks i’ the world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they yawn at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. (Hamlet 4.5.4)

The word “nothing” appears thirty-one times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The etymology of “nothing” is from nan or “not one” and “thing.” Shakespeare teased out the irony of the word endlessly in his plays: “this nothing’s more than matter.” Ophelia, for instance, verbally spars with Hamlet in a bawdy exchange just before the dumb play:

HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord
HAMLET: That’s fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. (3.2.110)

Shakespeare’s Norton Oxford Edition explains that “rustic doings” or “country” is a well-known pun on the word “cunt” and the wordplay continues in the following lines when the word “nothing” suggests a woman’s genitals which is often linked to the shape of “0” or zero (a ubiquitous Shakespearean trope), or “No Thing:” the “thing” here representing male genitals and to have “No Thing” (3.2.109) as Hamlet rejoins, is to have a vagina.  The female body is, from antiquity, linked to madness.

But why does this matter?

“Matter,” from Middle English, or matere from Anglo-French and Latin materia is “matter” as a physical substance, as well as mater, or mother; matter is also “something to be proved in law” or “the indeterminate subject of reality … [and] the formless substratum of all things which exists only potentially and upon which form acts to produce realities” (Merriam 1).

So this “nothing” is more than some thing; more than physical substance; more than material being; more than what we know, see, and hear and is the uncontainable and unpredictable action (and their potential meanings) witnessed by Laertes, and the court, upon seeing his sister Ophelia in the midst of her mad-songs. Ophelia is saying more that what appears to be just no sense. Ophelia is in the open court.  She is public. She will not be silenced as a no thing but instead engages in a counter discourse among the powers of the court and weaves the crimes, tricks, and transgressions that the sovereign(s) have committed: but you have to listen closely.

What are the implications if the (mater) as feminine, instead of being denoted as vulnerable and ineffectual, is to be coded as powerful in a mode of counter conduct; not solely as a resistance to her subjugation but asserting the self within and putting pressure inside the field of multiple forces and varying agents which include the pater? Ophelia’s immobilized self contained in the misogynistic court is now mobile, and unwieldy:  “… it [madness] is also the most rigorously necessary form of the qui pro quo in the dramatic economy, for it needs no external element to reach a true resolution.  It has merely to carry its illusion to the point of truth” (Foucault, “Madness” 34).

“Indeed would make one think there might be thought.” (Hamlet 4.5)

Elaine Showalter explains that during the late nineteenth century Dr. Charles Bucknill, president of the Medico-Psychological Association, remarked “Ophelia is the very type of class of cases by no means uncommon. Every mental physician of moderately extensive experience must have seen many Ophelias. It is a copy from nature, after the fashion of Pre-Raphaelite School” (86). Ophelia’s body is reduced to object for cultural, social and economic reproduction or to what Lacan calls “the object Ophelia” enabling sovereign control and further patriarchal, totalitarian agendas (Showalter, “Representing” 77).

OPHELIA:

[sings] By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do’t, if they come to‘t;
By Cock, they are to blame,
Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed’ (4.5.58)

Ophelia uses, for example, “By Gis” instead of Christ, and “By Cock instead of God; her linguist hybridism turns words into seemingly incoherent sequences while they do the work to replicate the chaos and hypocrisy within her castle’s and society’s stone walls – a proto-feminist move that turns Ophelia’s hysteria into counter conduct. She is not adhering to patriarchal syntactic language structures – she is creating her own lexicon. She speaks of betrayal – on all counts. Ophelia also breaks the contract with the King as his “pretty lady” (4.5.40) by answering him with the reclamation of her body: “Nay, pray you, mark” (4.5.28).

Nancy Fraser identifies, in her epistemological description, of how the space that Ophelia is addressing is gendered: “the republicans drew on classical traditions that cast femininity and publicity as oxymoron; the depth of such traditions can be gauged in the etymological connection between ‘public’ and ‘pubic,’ a graphic trace of the fact that in the ancient world possession of a penis was a requirement for speaking in public (a similar link is preserved, incidentally in the etymological connection between ‘testimony’ and ‘testicle,’ as well as ‘dissemination’)” (114). A new reading could examine the apparatus of court conduct and identify Ophelia’s “madness” as a counter conduct, an autonomy and power to speak that which cannot be spoken, do that which cannot be done.  Ophelia, then, as a sovereign body and bare life, is able to act above and outside the law (see Agamben) and is unrestrained, an independent rogue state and therefore represented through the King’s sovereign-lens as mad.

c. 1485, Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I, and her depiction, depending through which lens she is viewed, is either a holy maid from God or transgressing whore from hell.  England lost the war, largely due to the might and military intelligence of Joan, and therefore Shakespeare depicts the French warrior as a witch and a hysterical “fallen woman” who is deservedly burned at the stake:  “Strumpet, the words condemn thy brat and thee” (5.6.84).

The English respond to this powerful but disarmingly down-to-earth peasant girl by calling her a witch and a whore.  Much of their language concerning Joan is filled with bawdy double meanings, beginning with their play on the word pucelle, meaning “maid” or “virgin” in French, but sounding like”puzzel,” English slang for “whore.” From the first time he meets her in battle, Talbot assumes that Joan’s powers can come only from witchcraft, rather than from a heavenly or merely human source.  Joan’s circumstances invite this kind of denigration.  She is an unmarried woman who has turned soldier and assumed the garments of a man.  In the early modern period, to dress like a man was often read as a violation of woman’s assigned place in the gender hierarchy and … such women were easily assumed to be sexually transgressive, as well as vulnerable to the temptations of the devil. (293).

Shakespeare effectively changes Joan of Arc from a powerful French female warrior into a frightened and ineffectual practitioner of witchcraft who is hunted by fiends: an effective portrayal to stage a spectacle to bolster English pride with military propaganda. Nice job.

An authentic portrait of Jeanne d’Arc does not exist today – nothing.

If  Shakespeare’s “nothing” is to be read, at best, only as a silenced and contained object, Ophelia, Joan of Arc, and all those who activated modes of counter conduct, remain at most in the state of feminized hysteria and epitomize, as the result of a sovereign’s authority (and its literary agents), “nothing,” zero, and remain as tragic icons to be burned or drowned: “this structure is one of neither drama nor knowledge; it is the point where history is immobilized in the tragic category which both establishes and impugns it” (Foucault “Madness” xii).

Let’s instead listen (and read) closely to what is, and is not being said beyond the silent static images because “this nothing is indeed more than matter.”

Tango and the Archive: Fronteras Americanas ( American Borders )

On March 12, 2008, at the Robert Gill Theatre in Toronto, I spoke with Guillermo Verdecchia about his play Fronteras Americanas (American Borders) and its relationship to memory, theatre, and the archive.  To follow is an excerpt from the interview and from his play.

The end of the US-Mexico fence in California

GV: The play started as a letter. I went back to Argentina many years ago as I was traveling. I was figuring out what this experience … a stranger in a place that in some ways was very familiar of this notion of a return home, this notion of trying to make sense … of where I lived, imagined, or some interior way I always felt that I wasn’t fully here and part of my imaginary and part of my memory was situated elsewhere. I have a memory that was passed from generation, from my family collective and culture that doesn’t sit well with the collective or social memories that are found here, in Canada or North America. This experience of being dislocated and yet knowing that returning to Argentina was the solution … it was the experience of returning and feeling, “Oh my god.” So in returning there was this working through it. That is where the play comes through, on one level. On another, it is comes from what it means to be an American, to be on this continent. What are the modes of being on this continent? Who gets to speak? Who represents who? (“Interview”)

Fronteras Americanas is a one-person show about a man divided by cultural borders that manifest in the live theatre of cultural memory through timelines, multimedia, and physical and emotional journeys home. In the play, Verdecchia is the “straight guy” against the anti-hero, Wideload, a constructed hyperbolic array of stereotypes designed to deflate defamatory archetypes through shrewd and witty commentary on culture and sentimental departures (Karenda 10). Verdecchia sees his character(s) as a border-line, as a conflation of space in the pop and political culture, not so much as a binary but as a negotiation, a working-with and through in order to reveal the violence, as well as the amnesia that is bracketed in racist representations. As “a direct descendent of Tupac Amaru, Pancho Villa, Dona Flor, Pedro Navaja, Sor Juana and Speedy Gonzalez, Wideload is the reveal that Verdecchia is after in his work ” (Verdecchia “Fronteras” 23). Wideload is a manifestation of the popular archive or “the store,” a space that “sustains power” as it disseminates through mass culture the representations of Latino American culture, specifically male identity.  Borders, geography, and body are articulated in the process of theatre by Verdecchia’s transgressing and foraging from multiple archives.

American Borders

In Archive Fever, Derrida reveals the assumed veracity of the constructed catalogue or “that there could be no archiving without titles (hence without names and without the archontic principles of legitimization, without laws, without criteria of classification and of hierarchization, without order and without order, in the double sense of the word)” (40). The notion that there could be no archiving without titles delineates the process of classification, and the subsequent power in how material is made and not made accessible, and who decides.  The archive, in its very structure of bordering off culture through authorization and classification, stratifies the object, subject, and culture. Verdecchia is clear that the archive creates and orders privilege:

GV: I could go to the library and get things out or I could go to the Research Library and look stuff up … that’s fantastic; however, it is not the be all or the end all of knowledge, or of understanding, or the ways of knowing. The problem of course is that we have, or the West or generally in the world, we’ve validated a certain kind of knowing … we validate … the archive over embodied … knowing, not transmitted through writing: “That’s not really a document! But if you had a letter, if you had a letter that would be really good.” And of course that raises a lot of historical questions because up until a certain point in our history most people couldn’t write, so those documents that were extrapolated from a culture … are only the elite strata of a culture … because those were the 10% or less of the people who could actually write things down.” (“Interview”)

What is culturally privileged as archival ironically doesn’t necessarily represent what was or is. Matthew Reason argues that theatre provides a challenge or a resistance to the authoritative “permanency” of the archive:  “stage detritus presents an ‘archive’ able to create and recreate the multiple appearance of the performance. In the accumulation of these traces it is as if an immediate archive of the production is established: here is the shaky and incomplete evidence of what happened” (88). Where then does the archive of theatre exist if it is “shaky and incomplete”? Diane Taylor suggests “the West has forgotten about the many parts of the world that elude its explanatory grasp. Yet, it remembers the need to cement the centrality of its position as the West by creating and freezing the non-West as always other, ‘foreign,’ and unknowable. Domination by culture, by ‘definition,’ by claims to originality and authenticity has functioned in tandem with military and economic supremacy” (Taylor 12). The “freezing,” then, is a project of the institutionalized archive to maintain “the object” for supremacy that ultimately serves the economic and capitalist payoff in the form of Cultural Property Certification and the issuing of the federal tax receipt to the donor, who once again represents a small, yet powerful, elite. It is in the theatre, then, where there is a melting of the “freezing” of objectified culture, the live and living performances of its various formations in all its shaky detritus.

GV: That is one of the things that attracted me about the theatre was that it left no traces. There was something about that [aspect] that really appealed to me. I love the temporality … the flaring up like a light and then it’s gone. It’s very anti-archival, but you know, I wish I could make something to point to. Like, ‘I made that bridge!’  Instead, I make the thing that happened for a few hours, for a few weeks.” (“Interview”)

As both a scholar and a playwright, Verdecchia utilizes the archive, as well as performance to put pressure on the cultural, and institutionalized “keeping” of information. By couching his performances with multimedia, he is able to access other sites of memory, other public archives that have become naturalized into the contemporary Western lexicon of representation.

GV: Part of my process is that I have to know everything before I can write … I’ve got to assimilate to get to the beginning of what I want to get to. The timeline is an idiosyncratic history … I’ve chosen preposterous markers that appeal to me … part of the timeline is … the dialogue between history and art … I come back and forth between certain historic events and its construction of history and how it is meaningful to me.
SM: There is also a safety with the timeline, right?  A collective comfort?
GV: I do want to unsettle it [the comfort] … there are markers that should be known … or that there were cities being built in 5,000 BCE.   Like Das Kapital … it’s not a marker that we would stick into a cultural timeline … it’s kinda rude to mention Marx or capitalism but I stick it in … right next to Confederation … and it’s the utter absurdity of history. (“Interview”)

The absurdity of history through its agents, as Verdecchia states, are the keepers of the archives who categorize by way of massive reduction the “key” moments in time. Reason’s argument about the impossibility to capture “live” theatre in the archives echoes the inability to capture the “live theatre” in everydayness. Archives at best act as a filter through which most of what is passes (84-5). The filter managed by institutional mandates, then, has the “sustained power” to decide what cultural memory is and what is forgotten.

Gloria Anzaldúa, in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” insists “that borders are experienced primarily as psychological conflict, and those who wish to negotiate them experience a kind of dual identity” (63). The borders, she remarks, are not translatable in the natural world: the skin of the earth is seamless. / The sea cannot be fenced, / el mar does not stop at borders” (“The Homeland, Aztlan” 3).

Verdecchia is haunted by his cultural memory “it still speaks to me” and begs as Marcellus implores Horatio: “Thou art a Scholler, speake to it, Horatio” (Hamlet 1.1.51).  Verdecchia dares to speak to the phantom; however, he departs from Derrida’s assertion that the phantom is to have the last word” (39). The haunting that Verdecchia cannot fully articulate draws in another level of archive: the body, his DNA. Theatre becomes a space in which the archive is activated, a fluid dispersal of polyphonic (re)memory, concrete documents that are enacted on the stage through the process of body, the articulation of the archive, without sea walls, and remain unpredictable.

Desaparecidos

The anxiety that haunts Verdecchia and informs his work as an Argentinean is the cultural trauma of the “thirty thousand disappeared who were tortured and murdered, ten thousand were women, hundreds of them pregnant. They were killed as soon as they gave birth. Their children, born in captivity, were also disappeared – not killed, in this case but adopted by military families (Taylor 169).

GV: It’s part of my memory, my cultural memory. It’s a significant part of my memory where … I live it. I would have been exactly the right age to be on the receiving end or the giving end. My family was almost entirely untouched. I have friends who were disappeared. My identity and my memory and that experience of political experience … that is a significant part of my … self imagining as a Latin American and that’s a bit weird and a bit troubling … There is something about it that’s not great … that’s not right … and that is what this moment speaks to. I wanted to see. I wanted to be close to the … it’s a hoary trope … Those are horrific and stupid cliques and what do you know, I subscribe to them. It’s a big part of my imagination. It’s complicated.

The following is an excerpt from Fronteras Americanas (American Borders). Verdecchia listened to this music, a Tango, Verano Porteno, Astor Piazzolla, over and over again while writing this section of the play.  The Tango remains in the play as a stage direction. I suggest (because I’m bossy) that you play the music and read the section out loud:

Let it “flare up like a light and then it’s gone.”

[Music: Verano Porteno, Astor Piazzolla]

It is music for exile, for the preparations, the significations of departure, for the symptoms of migration. It is the languishing music of picking through your belongings and deciding what to take.

It is two a.m. music of smelling and caressing books none of which you can carry – books you leave behind with friends who say they’ll always be here when you want them when you need them – music for a bowl of apples sitting on your table, apples you have not yet eaten, apples you cannot take – you know they have apples there in that other place but not these apples, not apples like these – You eat your last native apple and stare at what your life is reduced to – all the things you can stick into a sack. It will be cold, you will need boots, you don’t own boots except these rubber ones – will they do? You pack them, you pack a letter from a friend so you will not feel too alone.

Music for final goodbyes for one last drink and a quick hug as you cram your cigarettes into your pocket and run to the bus, you run, run, your chest heaves, like the bellows of the bandoneon. You try to watch intently to emblazon in your mind these streets, these corners, those houses, the people, their smells, even the lurching bus fills you with a kind of stupid happiness and regret – Music for the things you left behind in that room: a dress, magazines, some drawings, two pairs of shoes and blouses too old to be worn any more … four perfect apples.

Music for cold nights under incomprehensible stars, for cups of coffee and cigarette smoke, for a long walk by the river where you might be alone or you might meet someone. It is music for encounters in shabby stairways, the music of lovemaking in a narrow bed, the tendernesses, the caress, the pull of strong arms and legs.

Music for men and women thin as bones.

Music for your invisibility.

Music for a letter that arrives telling you that he is very sick.

Music for your arms that ache from longing from wishing he might be standing at the top of the stairs waiting to take the bags and then lean over and kiss you and even his silly stubble scratching your cold face would be welcome and you only discover that you’re crying when you try to find your keys –

Music for a day in the fall when you buy a new coat and think perhaps you will live here for the rest of your life, perhaps it will be possible, you have changed so much, would they recognize you? would you recognize your country? would you recognize yourself?” (58-60)

 

 

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Living Languages: Contexts for Reading and Writing. Ed. Nancy       Buffington, Marvin Diogenes, and Clyde Moneyhun. New Jersey: Blair Press, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.  Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: UCP, 1996.

Reason, Matthew. “Archive or Memory?: The Detritus of Live Performance.” NTQ. 19:1 (Feb 2003).

Taylor, Diana.  The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.  London: Duke, 2003.

Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas (American Borders). Talonbooks, 1997.

… , Interview with Sorouja Moll. Personal interview. Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto. 12 March 2008.

Mad Meg: Bruegel and the Discourse of Wooden Spoons

"Dulle Griet (Mad Meg)," c. 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

My mother’s wooden spoon hangs
on a nail.
A thin leather string twists
against the unpainted kitchen wall
below her crucifix.
Like any other wood spoon, it hangs
upside down, dries
new stains,
and smells like everything.

Black electrical tape mends its centre
from when she had to defend
herself; she lets me taste from it;
she says: “it gives me a good grip now, see?”  
Her face smiles, stable 
as pressed cotton.

Into her garden
bare feet across wet grass
she bends, sits
cross legged in fresh turned soil.
A mound of earth between her legs
cool in the rhubarb’s shadow
june leaves as big as her body, she rips
licks
testing rumours of poison.

She adores her elemental fire
her mountain ghosts.
She digs.

She digs

Nails full of planet
(looks over her shoulder) she
buries
wooden spoons into the ground
upright standing
transplanted
rows
the root will take, right?

“It was a tree once”:
a laurel wood like match sticks
good for setting fires, good
for wooden spoons
to make cakes, meals, children behave, behind the bamboo fences.
Ironwood alder chestnut walnut
ash poplar koa
she likes the way “cocobolo”
makes her lips

lignum vitae, carved
into something else:
an implement
a shallow bowl at a handle’s end
but it’s still a tree

(her knees circles of dirt)
in between tomatoes peas cucumbers

dig
dig digdig

A ceremony of spoons, her
quiet declarations, her rites
of necessary things and
Mad Meg’s inclination to run the bulwarked streets headlong to answer the measureless mouth …

She pats the earth: “there
there,” as the neighbours wonder

how far she will go?

The ‘Ruin of Detroit’ in Frankenstein’s Monster; or, The Post Industrial Prometheus.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?  Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?  (John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Ruins of Detroit

Victor Frankenstein’s creation, the Monster, is a symbol of abandonment.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley imagined the Monster in a dream while visiting Lord George Gordon Byron’s cabin in June 1816:

I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion … His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken … and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon in the cradle.” (Shelley, Introduction, 11)

The novel was first published in 1818, a science fiction, Victorian horror, or perhaps a prognostication of the industrial revolution as revealed in the allusion to the monstrosity generated from “some powerful engine” and then its maker “would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken.”  Shelley’s “Monster,” allegorically, is really then only a stone’s throw, I would argue, from Detroit’s abandoned spaces photographed by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.  The images capture the romantic and gothic imaginings of “a Monster” that similarly is caught in the  man-made urban wasteland that was once “the cradle” of the US Auto Industry:  “the desert mountains, the dreary glaciers are my refuge.  I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge.  These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-being.  If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction” (Shelley 126-7).

My entry begins, like the rest, with questions:  What compelled me to cast the subtle, yet seemingly unlikely parallel between Shelley’s Monster and the Motor City, and more intuitively, why do I conjure, within my own internal alchemy, a sympathy for the ruins of Detroit?  What is the physic affect of “the abandoned” that draws people to public spaces in ruin? Is it some unresolved remnant of unarticulated abandonment that the monster in novel and the exiled land somehow do articulate? What is it saying? Perhaps, as in the many themes that run through Shelley’s novel, as she references Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Goethe, there is a desire to stumble through the debris of capitalism to answer the question that has plagued philosophers for centuries: “what is justice?” or perhaps it is the counter discourse that “the ruined” unwittingly extols, a stubborn vitalism, in its very proximity to that which made it outcast?:  the potential revolutionary strength of the abject is not to be underestimated.

The handwritten first draft of Mary Shelley's, Frankenstein, has gone on display in Britain for the first time.

As William Godwin, Shelley’s father, asks in Political Justice, and Shelley implicitly weaves throughout her text: “After his fall, why did he still cherish the spirit of opposition … he bore his torment with fortitude because he disdained to be subdued by despotic power” (1: 323-25).  Godwin and Shelley’s intertextual use of the figure Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost places the Monster in a revolutionary, anti-hero opposition against the tyranny of God; it is here that I symbolically locate the decay of Detroit.  The fall of the Great American Motor City stands as a type of Pandæmonium, or High Capital of Hell, a rebelliousness and disdain for imperial inequity found in heaven and in Detroit’s unabated capitalism.

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

I suggest that in this landscape the voyeurism of urban paleontologists carve their paths, some for nostalgia, yes, but more to bear witness to the resilience that is imbued in what has been left behind, that which stills stands in opposition to the illusion and ideology of American progress – or maybe simply to cast its tenacious shadow of stark irony.  The gothic quiet of the Michigan Central Station is a mammoth concrete structure, a patterned grid of broken panes, a thousand eyes that parody the once exacting infrastructure of modernity, commuter energy, punctuality, the proof of labour capital, steady wages, the privilege of leisure, shiny steel, now a forfeited structure that is impervious to its own delinquency as it haunts the arched doors and windows smashed open by discontented rocks.

When I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I become fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.  Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity.” (Shelley 139)

Here, as in Milton’s portrayal of Eve in the Garden, not only is the monster’s outcast-self made known, but the alienation was also felt by Shelley who was abandoned by her mother, proto feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died ten days after giving birth to her.  The Monster embodies Shelley’s innate understanding of loss, mourning, and that which haunt us.  In the biology classroom at George W. Ferris School in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, a half dissected body stands among its own anatomical debris, organs strewn, large intestine exposed, left breast discarded, skin torn away, and the left hemisphere of the brain (central to speech control) is scattered among broken drywall and emptied drawers.

“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (Shelley 126).  There are now small gardens springing up among the ruins.  Abandoned lives living in the communities are banding together to grow food and themselves even upon contaminated ground.  Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to take the material responsibility for his creation was exercised similarly by the American Auto Industry – instead, both transform their “creations” into a daemon.  Although the allegory to associate the complicated social ramifications lived by the citizens of Detroit to a fictionalized Monster is far too simplistic, the novel does offer a literary vantage point upon which to speculate the massive incarnations that occur when responsibility is not taken for that which is created,  a contemporary hubris, and its abandoned consequences.  Detroit is a Post Industrial Prometheus; the anti-hero who stole fire from the gods to feed the people and for his treason is chained to the land upon which the ravenous vultures feed.

Instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you.  I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?  You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me. (Shelley 169)

Shelley’s monster listens to the domestic lives of the cottagers from a secret hovel outside the house.  Volney’s The Ruins, or, Mediations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) is being read and a dream vision is recounted that includes the French Revolution,  as well as an overview of world history and religions (25).  Along with Volney’s accusations against domestic tyranny and imperialist aggression, listening to Volney’s writings reminds the Monster of “his earliest experience … and the description of the first human as “an orphan, abandoned by the unknown power which had produced him” and his subsequent ruin by an empire.

Detroit is, in a sense, a neo-gothic rupture, a dissonance against the once held propriety of the offices of Highland Park Police Station:  photographs of those who have passed through the system, awaiting justice, patient faces in piles of discarded bureaucracy. The vomit of incarceration, institutionalization, penal punishment, and civil discipline.

The dentist cabinet in the Broderick Tower: torn ceilings, equipment plugged in impotently, and the specter of procedure, an opened mouth wet with panic and spit, methods of extraction excavation surgery: an anesthetized patient.  A metaphor.

Detroit is, however, not a project of nostalgia but is a mourning play, a continuum of reconciliation, crack houses, squatters, crime, community gardens, growing vegetables, fear, flowers, broken homes, fires, laughter, foreclosures, spontaneous art, shootings, front porch gossip, weather, music, silence:  all negotiating within a spatial parameter of neglect.  A social negation into which we stand on our toes to peer into.  A bare life in a state of exception that is struggling.  It is not tragic.  Nor is it a myth. It is what we have made it to be and that which its inter-communities are trying to rebuild … against all odds.  It lives.

East Side Public Library’s shelves are laden with novels poetry history biographies maps geography philosophy science and only the light from a noonday sun browses these hard dusty covers until the night closes them.

The Spanish interior of the United Artist Theater in Detroit was built in 1928 and closed in 1974, a gothic cavern with unreachable ceilings in which light spills in as an audience would. The Romantic does not live here. Nor does nostalgia unless we permit it to invade as a ruse to cover the irresponsibility of just plain ignorant urban planning and racism and classism.  Ruins do breathe, if I am permitted to personify that which I do not understand, and inject it with a vitalism that is as organic as any tree.

“Who was I? What was I? Whence I came” What is my destination? (Shelley 153)

These questions remain with Shelley’s unnamed monster, and are pronounced in her novel as a cautionary tale to her “Dear Readers”:  to comprehend that we must know how “Monsters” come to be,  to admonish our arrogance when we create them, and to take responsibility for their living.