Introducing The Minor Monster.  

Throughout the history of the Western literary canon, queerness and queer literature have been consistently rendered non-functional participants in what philosopher Judith Butler calls the “heterosexual matrix” (12). Queerness has been ossified as monstrous and defined only by its Otherness to the said matrix. Consequently, for queer subjects to circumnavigate these oppressive forces, they must perform in what philosopher and psychoanalyst duo Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari term “becoming” from A Thousand Plateaus [Plateaus]. This occurs through a process called “becoming minoritarian” (106), a plural term that I will explore through my term, becoming-monstrous. However, as elucidated by Butler in Gender Trouble: “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination” (7). Although queerness existing is a form of resistance, Butler maintains that queerness must continuously reinscribe difference to the heterosexual matrix. Queer subjects are exiled as monstrous subjects existing both in and outside the heterosexual matrix; through this ossification, queer subjects resist arboreal and fascistic classifications as their bodies and ontologies become rhizomatic sites of resistance.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that historical knowledge productions are organized into arboreal and hierarchical structures; instead, they maintain that knowledge should be organized into planar, rhizomatic “lines of flight” (Plateaus 3). They use the botanical term of the rhizome as a never-ending hermeneutic tool for organizing knowledge. By this, Verena Andermatt Conley argues that queerness “engage[s] in non-genealogical, ‘monstrous’ becomings” (24). Therefore, there is a becoming-monstrous that arises in queer literature; it is a form of writing that engages in what Deleuze and Guattari term “minor literature” from their earlier 1975 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [Kafka] They define “minor literature” as follows: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). This distinction by Deleuze and Guattari is imperative, as although some queer writers may be writing in their first language, queerness becomes a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka 18), by which it is a bodily speech act within the majority language of the heterosexual matrix. This essay will focus on two literary texts to explore how queer literature functions as a minority in the majority language of the heterosexual matrix. The first text is Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, and the second is Jennette Winterson’s 2019 queer rewriting, Frankisstein. Both novels are experiments in “becoming,” and as Deleuze and Guattari state, “[b]ecoming is a rhizome” (Plateaus 239); Frankenstein and Frankisstein exist in a rhizome. There is no beginning nor ending to the story of Frankenstein; it does not end with the closing of the final pages; it is repeated through literature, through rhizomatic nodules, through the optic nerve and synaptic relays: “It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks” (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus 11).

Why Minor?

In the previous volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, and Guattari reject the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of desire deriving from a lack; they argue that desire is a schizoanalytic productive, positive, interconnected machine between all beings (3). Similarly, in Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari reject the psychoanalytic scholarship of the Jewish, German-speaking, Bohemian writer Franz Kafka. Deleuze and Guattari developed their term minor literature through a schizoanalysis of Kafka and his work. They identify three characteristics of minor literature: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka 18). The first aspect refers to how Kafka, a Czech Jew, wrote in the minority language of Prague-German compared to the dominant, territorialized High German. However, the simple existence of a minor language in itself does not constitute a minor literature and becoming-minoritarian in its own right. A minor language arises only through deterritorializing arboreal, dominant, territorialized languages. There must be a recognition of difference to dominance, as “becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium” (Plateaus 292). Kafka and his work only become minor through their alterity to the majoritarian language par excellence. Through the process of deterritorializing High German, Deleuze and Guattari argue that he “kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification […] [m]etamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (22). This is because there is no subject or subjectivity for the author of minor literature, only the becoming itself.

            To understand how becoming, specifically becoming-minoritarian, is constructed, we must first analyze the DeleuzeoGuattarian terms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari analyze the symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wasp as metaphors for understanding becoming. They maintain that the “orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp, but the wasp reterritorializes on that image” (Plateaus 10). Thus, the two homogenous entities become hybridized through a process of “becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.”. However, the two are not engaging in mimicry or imitation; they become independent extensions of one another. The wasp is, therefore, a “piece of the orchid’s reproductive system,” which results in the wasp “reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen” (Plateaus 10). Through this continuous de/reterritorialization of one another, the pair, as “heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.”. Conley analyses this example of becoming to argue that “[h]omosexual becomings function in similar ways” (28) as queerness is in a “constant becoming that goes through desire” (26). For queer writers to write on queer topics and to thus reinscribe on the language of the majority, there should be a production of the “collective assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka 18) through a recognition of the micropolitics of desire in becoming-minoritarian.

            Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-minoritarian has become a generalized term for any non-dominant group or person in a hierarchy. However, this generalization does not necessitate repression of alterity to the status quo; on the contrary, it functions under their claim that “Man is majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian” (Plateaus 291). Becoming-minoritarian is dispersed into a plurality of different becomings against this fascistic, “molar” Man; there is “becoming-animal, becoming-vegetable, becoming-music, becoming-woman” (232), and most importantly, for this essay, becoming-monstrous. Becomings explore the in-betweenness of fixed and given molar perspectives and underlying and fluid “molecular processes” (Plateaus 50). Becomings are, therefore, processes of an in-betweenness of identities, ontologies, and bodies. Thus, the heterosexual matrix assumes a molar perspective and renders any form of queerness as both minor and molecular; however, it is through a becoming-monstrous that this molar matrix is subverted.

For this essay, I will frame becoming-monstrous through what queer theorist Jack Halberstam writes, “‘[t]he monster’ always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries […] so we need monsters […] to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities” (27). However, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the goal of becoming-minoritarian is not to become the majority; it is only through a “collectiv[ised] assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka 18) that emerges through minor literature. Therefore, becoming-monstrous is not reinscribing monstrosity onto the self and identifying with the ossified speech acts thrown at the so-called queer monster. Further still, as Conley argues, “[q]ueering is not based on recognition in a dialectic” (28); the act of becoming-monstrous reaffirms an attempt to reject the coding of monstrosity onto queerness by negating the utterances of the dominant speech. Consequently, for queerness to testify or perform utterances on their own monstrosity becomes taboo in the eyes of the heterosexual matrix. Philosopher Paul B. Preciado elucidates this in his 2020 publication, Can the Monster Speak? The original text was a speech delivered to the Lacanian psychoanalytic school École de la Cause Freudienne, where Preciado attempts to describe his position as a trans man in a non-binary body before being ridiculed off stage by the audience (15). Preciado draws inspiration from Kafka’s short story, A Report to an Academy, and embraces the ape Red Peter as a metaphor for his “‘cage’ as a trans man” (18). Through this, Preciado describes how he is designated monstrous, not only for addressing the molar psychoanalysts, but as “the monster who gets up from the analyst’s couch and dares to speak, not as a patient, but as a citizen, as your monstrous equal” (19). Preciado is, therefore, embracing a form of minor monstrosity that breaches the language of the minor to confront the fascism of the heterosexual matrix. Therefore, a queer monstrosity in literature becomes a site for rejecting the fascistic arboreal heterosexual matrix.

“It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”.

For this section of the essay, I draw inspiration from James Whale’s famous film adaptation of Frankenstein and the wrongly attributed quote to Shelley, “It’s alive” (24:55-25:05) as the starting point from my analysis of Frankenstein as an alive, rhizomatic, and monstrous text. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that a “rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (Plateaus 25). Shelley’s novel has become more than a singular text, and the pages stretch beyond the spine and bookshelf and into the lives of all reader’s waking thoughts and dreams. Frankenstein embraces what Deleuze and Guattari claim in Anti-Oedipus: “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality” (135). Consequently, one might claim that “this work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle [the text] has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known” (Kafka 3).

            While many literature students naively point out that Victor Frankenstein is equally monstrous or more monstrous than his creation, they miss out on the third creature Shelley forms, the text itself. Like how Frankenstein collects bones, flesh, and the sinew of dead bodies to galvanize into the unnamed creature, so too does Shelley. Frankenstein is a patchwork and pastiche of different literary genres, at times, epistolary, Romantic, Epic, and gothic; they are all hybridized into the new science-fiction genre. Shelley’s pastiching of these genres is accentuated by Shelley’s metatextual allusions to literature, authors, myths, poets, philosophers, and scientists. The allusions include references to the classics by Ovid, Plutarch, and the Promethean Myth, to more recently dead figures like Shakespeare and Milton, and Rousseau to Shelley’s contemporaries like Goethe, Coleridge, Darwin, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. All these allusions are galvanized and hybridized together both inside and outside the rhizomatic sinews of the spine of Frankenstein. However, these allusions are only “alive” through a form of the DeleuzeoGuattarian “becoming-minor” (Kafka 27) with the novel; they all, therefore, become monstrous with the text. These extra-textual elements are aided by Shelley’s rhizomatic burrowing of non-hierarchical narratives, with the dual narrative of Victor and the creature, but also the diary entries of Captain Robert Walton. However, Frankenstein’s narrative cannot be concretely defined as rhizomatic as Walton is ultimately the master narrator in the novel, and Frankenstein’s retelling taints the creature’s narrative. Therefore, using the rhizome as a framework for analyzing Frankenstein, the subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, might be more aptly phrased as the postmodern Prometheus. The intra-and-extra-textual elements engage in what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claims: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state” (79). Shelley’s Frankenstein occupies this “nascent state” of the modern, as it has become a piece of literature that does not necessitate a fixed chronological historicity.

Frankenstein might be considered a minor piece of literature for her identity as a woman in the patriarchal 19th century and for the molecular and minoritarian construction of language against the molar Man of her contemporaries. Further still, in the creature’s narrative, there is a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of traditional literature, Romantic ethics, and societal norms. The creature undergoes three forms of becomings. The first is a “becoming-intense” (Plateaus 253), whereby the creature rages against Frankenstein for his existence, as exemplified in the novel’s epigraph: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me? —” (Milton qtd in Shelley). The second is “becoming-revolutionary” (Plateaus 292), whereby the creature breaks all societal ideas of ethics through the murder of William and Elizabeth and then the attempted murder of Frankenstein himself. The final form of becoming is becoming-monstrous, whereby the creature is ossified as monstrous and can only be understood through the burrows of the rhizome.

In Frankenstein, the creature and, arguably, the novel are constructed outside the confines of heterosexual reproductions; they are queer assemblages of becoming-monstrous against the territorialized, arboreal, heterosexual matrix. Therefore, through the burrows of the Frankenstein rhizome, various queer rewrites or nodules emerge; Winterson’s Frankisstein is one of these emerging nodules. Frankisstein is simultaneously an ode to Frankenstein and a “deterritorialization of [the] language” (Kafka 18) of Frankenstein. However, Frankisstein is not simply an imitation of Frankenstein but rather a continuation of the rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari maintain, “a map and not a tracing” (Plateaus 2) of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Winterson uses Frankenstein as a cartography for reframing Shelley’s novel to the modern day.

Winterson constructs Frankisstein on many interconnected narrative lines of flight that intersect through various rhizomatic nodules between the mirror narratives of Mary Shelley and Ry Shelley. Through this rhizomatous narrative, Frankisstein undergoes a form of becoming-with-Frankenstein. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s modeling of the orchid and the wasp, where the “orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp, but the wasp reterritorializes on that image” (Plateaus 10), Frankisstein deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of Frankenstein, and through this, Frankenstein reterritorializes on this image, thus creating a hybrid monster text that is simultaneously both becoming-Frankenstein and becoming-Frankisstein. Winterson explores these textual becomings through the framing of each narrative shift through italicized philosophical statements, like “Reality is water-soluble,” “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,”and “Story: a series of connected events, real or imagined. Imagined or real. Imagined And Real” (1,55, 23). The last statement plays on the definition of a story by claiming that literature is “Imagined And Real”; the text is not entirely fictional and bleeds through the pages

This is exemplified through Winterson’s structuring of mirror characters between the two narratives. The Mary Shelley narrative begins in Lake Geneva in 1816 and details the creation of Frankenstein and her conversations with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairemont. These characters are mirrored in the 21^st century by the trans-male physician Ry Shelley, the Artificial Intelligence scientist Victor Stein, Ron Lord, Claire, and Polly. However, Victor Stein is the only character to have two mirrors; he is mirrored by Percy Bysshe Shelley and by Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley meets Victor Frankenstein in the mental health hospital Bedlam, where he declares to her, his creator, “I am the monster you created […] I am the thing that cannot die — and I cannot die because I have never lived” (214). Victor Frankenstein has broken free of the pages of Shelley’s novels. Victor Frankenstein becomes living proof that “[i]t is not a reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality” (Anti-Oedipus 135). The character of Victor Frankenstein is an example of postmodern metalepsis, where he first meets Mary Shelley in Bedlam and then later in the novel at Charles Babbage’s house before disappearing into the darkness. He is a character that befuddles the reader as “[w]e are thus left wondering whether the two Victors are the successful explorers of new life spaces or ‘necronauts’ (Ciompi 169). He is a character that represents a rhizomatic manifestation of history, continuously questioning the ontological boundaries of the human. Frankisstein is, therefore, a novel exploring the posthuman Prometheus.

The PosthumanPosthuman Prometheus: becoming-posthuman.

In the current popular discourse, notions like posthumanism, transhumanism, and machine learning have been inevitably co-opted by the cis-white heteronormativity of Silicon Valley. Billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all invest heavily in techno-futurist ventures that promise brighter tomorrows; however, these ventures only serve to reaffirm the “Man [as] majoritarian par excellence” (Plateaus 291). Winterson warns against this “Man”-controlled techno-futurism in Frankisstein and describes in an interview for Literary Hub that “machine learning, based on data, is not just biased, it is misogynist, racist, sexist — and worst of all we imagine, we are taught to imagine, that machines are “objective.”. The result of this “Man”-controlled techno-futurism further codifies alterity and queerness as antithetical to the progression of scientific advancement and the heterosexual matrix. Queer people are, therefore, ossified as monstrous luddites opposed to these so-called techno-utopias.

Despite this, the origins of posthumanist theory can be traced back to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and the publication of Donna J. Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto. Through this, Haraway broke down the binary assumptions of nature-woman and technology-man, in which posthumanism (although a term not used by Haraway) signifies a rupturing of gender binaries into numerous lines of flight (7). Posthumanism attempts to disrupt the philosophical movement of humanism and the notion of human exceptionalism through the usage of the prefix “post,” which invokes a plethora of lines of flight that highlight “thinking with and against humanism” (Zallou 312). Humanism assumes a fixed molar gender identity and vehemently refuses any notion of fluxed, molecular gender identities existing. In Frankisstein, the character Ry Shelley occupies the posthumanist perspective on gender identities; he describes himself as “[n]ot one gender. I live with doubleness” (89). Ry’s body signifies a site of ontological difference to the heterosexual matrix, through which he enters into a form of becoming-minoritarian. His body, ontology, and speech acts embody a form of minor literature and language whereby he enters or has always existed in a state of becoming-monster. The notion of becoming-monster hybridizes the humanist concept of monster (queerness) and non-monsters (heteronormativity), where queer subjects resist such binaries. This is exemplified by Halberstam’s claim that “ ‘[t]he monster’ always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries” (79). Becoming-monstrous is not an attempt to move beyond monstrosity as a site of difference but a celebration of one’s resistance to heteronormativity.

What is becoming-monstrous?

This paper has thus far analyzed Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of minor literature and becoming to explore how queer monstrosity is represented in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein. Through this, I have coined the neologism becoming-monstrous as a hermeneutic for exploring the rhizomatic oeuvre of Frankenstein. By explicitly analyzing how queerness has been ossified as monstrous identities within Butler’s heterosexual matrix and heteronormative discourse. Through the DeleuzoGuattarian term of becoming-minoritarian and how queer subjects navigate the oppressive forces of the fascistic, arboreal, and molar heterosexual matrix in a continuous process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization called becoming-monstrous. However, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, “rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle” (Plateaus 25); therefore, there are innumerable rhizomatic pathways to burrow and follow that are all “alive” with their own nascent energy”. Although this essay has analyzed how becoming-monstrous functions in Frankenstein and Frankisstein, there are various other fungal roots to follow, like, Addie Tsai’s 2022 Unwieldy Creatures, Polenth Blake’s 2018 Werecockroach, and Julian K, Jarboe’s short story, I Am A Beautiful Bug!. By engaging in becoming-monstrous, queer literature becomes a rhizomatic force that transcends boundaries and celebrates the beauty of difference.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990, Routledge, 1999.

Ciompi, Fausto. “«The Future of Humans in a PosthumanPosthuman World»: Frankisstein by Jenette Winterson.” Between, vol. XII, no. 24, 2022, pp.165–182. <www.betweenjournal.it>.

Conley, Verena Andermatt. “Thirty-six Thousand Forms of Love: The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari.” Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh UP, 2009. 24–37.

Deleuze, Giles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. U of Minnesota P, 1986.

—. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1977. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Bloomsbury, 2013.

—. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, performances by Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, and Boris Karloff, produced by Carl Maemmle Jr. Universal Picture, 1931.

Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995.

Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester UP, 1984.

MacCormack, Patricia. “Unnatural Alliances.” Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh UP, 2009, pp. 134–139.

Preciado, Paul B. Can the Monster Speak? Translated by Frank Wynne, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020.

Salah, Trish. “Transgender and Transgenre Writing.” The Cambridge Guide to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, edited by Joshua Miller, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 174–195.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. 1969. Oxford UP, 2001.

Winterson, Jeanette. Frankisstein: A Love Story. Vintage, 2019.

 Winterson, Jeanette. Interview by Mark O’Connell, “Jeanette Winterson and Mark O’Connell on the Future of Humanity in a Tech-Dominated World,” Literary Hub, 1 Oct 2019. <https://lithub.com/jeanette-winterson-and-mark-oconnell-on-the-future-of-humanity-in-a-tech-dominated-world/&gt;.