The Indescribable Frankenstein: A Short History of the Spectacular Failure of Words
By Jason Resnikoff
THE PARIS REVIEW
Arts &
Culture
March 5, 2013
Mrs.
Chesser taught me that there is never any reason to use the word indescribable.
Invoking the indescribability of something does no work except to tell
everyone, quite explicitly, that you are incapable of describing. Indescribable
is not a quality something can possess, only a failure that can overwhelm a
writer. Even now, years later, I can practically hear Mrs. Chesser, her voice
languid with existential weariness, pleading with all of us in third-period
English: “For the love of God, ask ourselves why a thing is
indescribable and then write that down. Never be so lazy as to just dash off,
‘It was indescribable.’ It’s a waste of everyone’s time.” I remember her making
profound eye contact with me just as the words “waste of everyone’s time”
escaped her lips. Chastened, and most likely the prime offender, I made a note
to myself, much of it capitalized, and have since made all-out war on the
indescribable in my life.
But
the indescribable has a history, and a distinguished one at that. In her novel Frankenstein,
Mary Shelley uses the word “describe,” or some version of it, twenty-one times.
Of those twenty-one, fourteen are coupled with a negation. Which means that
approximately 66 percent of the time Mary Shelley uses the word “describe,” it
is to describe how she, in fact, cannot describe something. “I cannot describe
to you my sensations,” or, “How can I describe my emotions at this
catastrophe,” or, “I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt,” or, “a hell
of intense tortures such as no language can describe.” But these romantic,
brain-feverish testimonies to descriptive incompetence are often immediately
paired with very precise descriptions, as in, “Over him hung a form which I
cannot find words to describe—gigantic stature, yet uncouth and distorted in
its proportions,” or when the explorer Robert Walton writes his sister, “I
cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It
is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation,
half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart.” What
is that indescribable sensation? Well, trembling, half-pleasurable,
half-fearful, which is actually quite descriptive.
It
seems little short of madness that any novelist, especially one of the
greatest, should ever claim that something is indescribable when a novel itself
is essentially nothing but a very long description. Why would anyone undertake
to write one of these lengthy descriptions and then fill it with apologies for
why she cannot describe? Shelley is by no means the sole writer to invoke
wordlessness as a descriptor. Many of the greatest writers of the nineteenth
century claimed they were incapable of describing: Charlotte Brontë uses indescribable
three times in Jane Eyre. In Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, indescribable
appears four times. This is from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “It would be
impossible to describe the expression of hate and baffled malignity, of anger
and hellish rage, which came over the Count’s face.” And this is from Uncle
Tom’s Cabin: “that look indescribable, hopeless, unmistakable, that says to
thee that thy beloved is no longer thine.” H. G. Wells uses indescribable once
in The Invisible Man, twice in The War of the Worlds, and three
times in The Time Machine. But my favorite of all is Herman Melville’s
solitary entreaty to the indescribable in all of Moby Dick: “What had
been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild
vagueness of painfulness concerning him ... And yet I also felt a strange awe
of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly
awe; I do not know what it was.” Ever subtle, Melville has Ismael fail to
describe his feelings, not in the presence of Captain Ahab, but after listening
to a description of him provided by Peleg and Bildad. Why did so many
great writers find it necessary to preface their descriptions with disclaimers
about the impossibility of description? What does the indescribable do in a
novel? More importantly, why do we find the indescribable in some of the
English language’s greatest novels? If literary lights like Brontë and Melville
can admit to descriptive incompetence, may we not as well?
According
to our friend the Oxford English Dictionary, indescribable was
still a very new word in English when in 1818 Shelley anonymously published Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (so new, in fact, that the word indescribable
does not appear in her novel). Indescribable as a word, and
indescribability as a concept, has its origins in the late eighteenth century,
and is first attributed to, of all people, Thomas Jefferson, who used it in his
1784 Notes on the State of Virginia (the same book in which he also
coined the word belittle.) In “Query V,” subsection “Cascades,”
sub-subsection, “Natural Bridge,” Jefferson describes in painstaking detail
“the most sublime of Nature’s works,” and offers, with ultra-fine precision, a
description of the characteristics of a natural bridge found in his home state.
The bridge is forty-five feet wide at the bottom, ninety feet wide at the top,
semi-elliptical in form. He even refers to the effect produced by looking
straight down into the 270-foot-deep gorge, which, he tells us, “gave me a
violent head ach [sic].” In perhaps the most inspired passage of the
entire work, he goes on to describe the emotional effects of the geological
phenomenon: “It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be
felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light,
and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the Spectator is really
indiscribable! [sic].” Jefferson is at his most poetic when describing
either the beauty of nature or the institution of slavery, and here we find one
of the only six exclamation points to appear in the book. Just like Shelley,
Jefferson claims that it is impossible to describe that which he has just
described in great detail—how he feels standing on top of the natural bridge.
He claims not only that he has he failed to account for his feelings,
but that he will always fail to do so, despite his evocation of the
image of springing to heaven, the rapture of “the Spectator’s” ascension to a
more celestial sphere, a member of the elect chosen in a Second Coming brought
about by Reason and Natural Philosophy.
Since
the moment Jefferson coined it, indescribable has referred to the
emotional state of the describer. But that emotional state itself reflects a
moment in time, a radical change in how people understood the very nature of
language, its shortcomings in particular. The late eighteenth-century invention
of the inability to describe is evidence of a larger revolutionary change in
the point of view of English speakers (and probably not them alone), a change
in their very notion of nothing less than the workings of the universe. The
development of Newton’s calculus created a wordless language capable of
describing the motions of the heavens with far greater precision than prose
ever could, which began to discredit words altogether as vehicles of truth.
George Steiner argued as much in his 1961 eulogy for the English language, The
Retreat from the Word, when he said that it is starting with these
mathematical breakthroughs that “significant areas of truth, reality, and
action recede from the sphere of verbal statement.” It is a serious problem. We
know well the Book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.” But if everything started with the word, and
that word is the fount of creation, how can anything be beyond verbal
description, the application of the word to the world?
It
would seem that on the heels of the Enlightenment and at the birth of
Romanticism both language and God came up short. But the failure—this sublime,
ecstatic, revolutionary failure that Jefferson describes with pleasure and
Shelley with horror—is the incapacity to communicate with words the inner life
of one’s own feelings. Obviously, words can describe the shape of a natural
bridge; they can describe the shape of a monster. But they cannot describe the
shape of the soul, changeable yet persistent, overwhelming but subtle. Feelings,
Shelley and Jefferson agree, render words puny and inadequate. So yes, Shelley
can tell you about feelings and their physiological manifestations, as can
Jefferson, but neither can tell you the feeling itself. At the turn of the
nineteenth century, English speakers discovered that the word, the work of
humanity, the fashioning of significance to sound, could not be conflated with
reality. The name of the soul was not the soul, despite John and his Gospel.
The discovery of the psyche coincided with the discovery of humanity’s
powerlessness to control the universe by naming it, as Adam did in the Garden
of Eden, or for people to understand their feelings by naming them. Mary
Shelley could describe neither Frankenstein nor his monster, and the failure
was magnificent.
Despite
Mrs. Chesser’s insistence, when we write indescribable it need not be an
evasion. Far from it, the word is a specific statement about the powerlessness
of language in the face of an essentially unknowable universe. Indescribable
is evidence of a revolution that took place in the world of feeling; it is a
fossil of that revolution. Perhaps we have discarded the word because we now
believe ourselves more capable of describing our emotions, whether with the
humane reasoning offered by psychology, or the less intimate explanations
provided by neuroscience. But by using it, by unearthing it and brushing off
the dust, we can look back in time and gain a pinhole vista onto a lost world
of ideas and feelings. By invoking it we acknowledge a mode of thought and a
way of seeing that might not be ours, but which still has value. When we
describe something as indescribable we avow our cosmic ignorance, and we
celebrate what makes us magnificent: our own indescribable amazement at
ourselves.
Jason Z. Resnikoff formerly investigated police misconduct for the City
of New York. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in American history at
Columbia University.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/03/05/the-indescribable-frankenstein-a-short-history-of-the-spectacular-failure-of-words/
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