"Listen to my tale": Multilevel Structure, Narrative Sense Making, and the Inassimilable in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is an epistolary novel with a structure that is often likened to Russian nesting dolls.¹ The nesting doll metaphor predisposes readers to regard Frankenstein's primary narrators as doppelgangers and its extended, first-person narratives as concentric. The largest doll is the narrative of Captain Robert Walton, a friendless and ardent arctic explorer; inside of it rests the narrative of Victor Frankenstein, a Faustian striver who secludes himself to pursue the scientific research that will prove his undoing; inside of Frankenstein's doll rests the smallest doll in the set, the narrative of Frankenstein's lonely and tenacious creature. Dismayed to find awful desolation where he had hoped to find "a region of beauty and delight" (49) and bored to distraction while waiting for the ice to break so that his ship can continue its voyage, Walton appears to have much to learn from the twinned tales of broken dreams and unfulfilled desires told to him by his unexpected visitors—and the time to record them.

Russian nesting dolls, inset tales, frame narratives, Chinese boxes, stories-within-stories, narrative embedding: literary critics repeatedly adopt these terms when discussing multilevel novels.² Like all figures this group shapes our understanding of how to engage with the subject to which they are applied. For instance, to figure the multilevel novel as a series of nested containers is (oddly enough) to suggest that reading is a linear process of discovery, as if narrative sense making and interpretation were merely matters of reaching a previously obscured closural moment.³ Of course, containment figures gesture clearly toward the commonplace that meaning waits beneath the text's surface for those who hold the interpretive key. However, such figures ultimately impoverish our understanding of the role played by multilevel structure in the reader's process of meaning production because they unnecessarily imply that hermeneutic complexity and structural complexity go hand in hand. Textual recalcitrance—the tendency of a given text to resist narrative's drive toward unification and resolution—becomes in this scheme a matter of delay through numbers.⁴ One is led to assume that the more embedded narratives a text has, the more it will prolong its reader's journey through the so-called uncertainties of the middle, and, therefore, the more complex and recalcitrant it will be. Frankenstein's infamous recalcitrance, however, cannot be accounted for in these terms. Compared to radically multilevel texts like Arabian Nights or Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, the multilevel structure of Frankenstein is straightforward.⁵ While some critics appeal to Shelley's artistic inexperience to explain her first novel's strange yet familiar form, a form that seems not quite able to perform the conscriptive duties of Form itself, I would argue that a more productive approach involves taking Frankenstein's divergent sense-making cues more seriously by regarding as deliberate its resistance to interpretive closure and rejection of traditional strategies of coherence.⁶

It is from this perspective that this essay examines a form of textual recalcitrance that I term the inassimilable. I proffer the inassimilable as a contribution to the collective effort to expand our understanding of the relationship between our perception of narrative coherence and a text's engagement with historical ideologies.⁷ Most simply: the inassimilable is an element (e.g., a character, event, narrative technique) that calls attention to a text's constructedness by simultaneously activating two or more competing, yet equally plausible, sense-making frames.⁸ As a device, the inassimilable represents a textual invitation to confront the stakes of the form-giving and meaning-making simplifications inherent in the process of narrative sense making and interpretation.⁹ It plays upon the rules of signification (to use Peter Rabinowitz's terminology) in an effort to prompt a recursive reading style (as opposed to a linear one), opening the door to an unscripted reader response.¹⁰ Other examples of the inassimilable include Dr. Trescott's saving of Henry Johnson's life in Stephen Crane's "The Monster," Nicholas Bulstrode's purchase of...