This chapter of my dissertation was published in
the Journal of Finnish Studies (Volume 7, Number 1, August 2003, Pages 4 - 28).
Juha K. Tapio's Frankensteinin muistikirja
Here I discuss how the monster becomes the embodiment of the new Europe as well as:
- intertextuality (Mary Shelley)
- historiographic metafiction (Gertrude Stein)
- and the breaking down of binaries between:
- — truth/fiction
- — science fiction/belles lettres
- — human/monster
- — male/female
| The beginning of my article on Frankensteinin muistikirja: |
In 1995 Finland joined the European Union. The following year, Juha K. Tapio's Frankensteinin muistikirja [Frankenstein's Notebook] reawakened the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as an allegory of the new Europe. Through intertextual references to Shelley's text and to the historical figure of Gertrude Stein, Tapio uses postmodern biography to explore ontological questions about what it means to be a postmodern subject. Tapio's simulacrum of Shelley's gothic monster embodies society's changing feelings about technology and otherness and reflects a movement away from either/or distinctions--truth/fiction, science fiction/literature, human/monster, male/female, self/other--to a more fluid, postmodern system. In the novel, a young Ernst (sic) Hemingway asks his friend Gertrud (sic) Stein to read an unusual manuscript, supposedly written by Frank M. Stein, the very same, purportedly fictional, monster that was to have died at the end of Mary Shelley's book. In Tapio's book, the monster is alive, made of flesh and blood, and quite educated and cultured. Tapio follows Frank's life, which I will show is an allegorical embodiment of Europe, from the mid 1800s through 1925. Frank tours cities including Copenhagen, Leipzig, Prague, Venice, Paris, and London and meets some of the time's most famous artists and thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Shelley, Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso. The narrative is presented through excerpts from Gertrude Stein's diary and from Frank Stein's autobiographical memoirs... To read the rest of the article, visit your local university library or contact the Journal of Finnish Studies to purchase a copy of Volume 7, Number 1 (August 2003). |
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