Dark Matter

I hesitate to use this example, but it is what most strongly came to mind. Mary Shelley as the narrator in the version of Frankenstein we started working on this fall is, I think, an incredibly interesting use of dark matter. Initially, her presence seems to negate the idea of dark matter, being that authors do not usually appear onstage to play a role in their own fictional tale, but in this case she not only appears, she is seemingly conjuring the story. So where is the dark matter in that? Any usual production of Frankenstein does not include Mary Shelley as a character. Why would it? She is not a character in the story itself; she is its creator. But that is what makes this interesting, because her being onstage perpetuates a whole new level in the cycle of Frankenstein being a story within a story within a story. As Victor creates his monster, Mary is creating them both. She is the creator of the creator. With that coming into play, the story is no longer simply about Victor’s struggle with his creation; it is simultaneously about Mary’s struggle with her creation. However, since her struggle is only portrayed through the narration of her characters’ struggles, her own life experiences that inspire and prompt her to write the story remain unspoken; they are not literally presented in the script, but they are intertwined in the story all the same. Which brings up an interesting point that Sofer makes, “what is invisible always holds what is visible in place (7).” Everything starts to have a duel meaning. Victor and the Creature’s journey present the more overt meaning, while Mary’s meaning is masked but acts as a fuel and driving force. Her presence compels us to ask what is motivating her to tell this story. For example, Victor’s mother, Caroline, dies in childbirth. She becomes dark matter as her death and subsequent absence seems to drive Victor to his obsession with controlling life and death. Mary’s presence onstage layers the dark matter surrounding Caroline, because her own mother died in childbirth. So, is she driven in a frenzy with Victor to find the solution to losing a loved one, to harness nature’s power in order to cheat mortality? What is her relationship to Victor? To the Creature? Do they mirror her relationships with her father and her husband? Which parts of these characters represent her? Her motives are dark matter, and she, in the context of creating the story, has the power of life and death over her characters. She is an omnipotent force for her characters; she knows their fate before they do. Like the smile of the Mona Lisa, she paints the basics for us, but the story sizzles invisibly with her own story that she is not telling. Even if the audience doesn’t know much about Mary Shelley’s life, it should be clear that something unseen and unspoken is haunting the stage with her as she visibly haunts her fictional story. “Such invisible presences matter very much indeed, even if spectators, characters, and performers cannot put their hands on them (3).”

            In regards to representing the Holocaust, I agree with Adorno’s statement: “the abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting”. This particular section of the article was the most interesting to me. It is an important thing to consider: when do we represent something so as not to forget, so as not to have the past repeated, and when does that which is being represented simply turn severe suffering into a form of entertainment? This is where abstraction can become the knight in shinning armor. Adorno talks about Beckett, and in our class discussion we talked a bit about Waiting for Godot (another great example of dark matter that Sofer mentions).  Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, who never actually shows up. They don’t intellectualize the experience of waiting; they show rather than tell the relatable human experience of waiting, being stuck, feeling stagnant, hoping, holding on to the idea that something is coming that will change everything. There are numerous ways to look at Waiting for Godot, because it is abstract, because it is absurdist. It is not literal, it is not naturalistic, but it speaks to something we, as humans, can all understand. Perhaps this is the best way to justifiably represent the Holocaust without risking it becoming Hollywoodized, for lack of a better term. Take the horrific nature of the Holocaust and break it down to the skeleton of human experiences that it embodies and show those human experiences. Through abstraction, all those very real, intense human feelings and experiences can be presented and explored in a way that takes them out of the realm of the literal Holocaust while still paying homage to those that suffered without exploiting their suffering. This could be more powerful and impacting than a literal representation, because it says everything that should be said and remembered about the horrific event without commercializing the event itself.