Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education Volume 19 Issue 5 The Messy Affect(s) of Writing in the Article 9 Academcy December 2020 The Frankenpaper: One or More Essays on Writing and Frankenstein and Deleuze and . Joshua Cruz Texas Tech University, [email protected] Holly Corkill Texas Tech University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/taboo Recommended Citation Cruz, J., & Corkill, H. (2020). The Frankenpaper: One or More Essays on Writing and Frankenstein and Deleuze and . .. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 19 (5). Retrieved from https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/taboo/vol19/iss5/9 This Article is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Article in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Article has been accepted for inclusion in Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Joshua Taboo,Cruz &Fall Holly 2020 Corkill 133 The Frankenpaper One or More Essays on Writing and Frankenstein and Deleuze and . Joshua Cruz & Holly Corkill This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. —Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature We believe that this quotation situates our paper well; this paper emerges from an email sent from the second author to the first, containing the world “Fran- kenproposal.” Her use of that portmanteau, a combining of “Frankenstein” and “proposal,” provided a fruitful avenue to begin a conversation about the writing process. What are the Franken- qualities of writing, and what are the limits of the Franken- analogy? What exactly is the nature of a Franken(stein)? What is the nature of any creative endeavor? Our conversation became too much to con- tain; our thoughts meandered. They began to overlap and beget new ideas. The word “Frankenproposal” was an intersection of everything that had been said/ thought/written about Frankenstein and everything that had been said/thought/ written about (de)composition. The word “Frankenproposal” itself is a Franken- monster, a coming together of parts to form a creature that cannot be contained within a single directed conversation; it takes on a life of its own. This paper is the result of our conversational spill-over and a rhizomatic intersecting of ideas. Like Macaully’s (1990) children’s book, Black and White, these pages may con- tain a number of short independent essays: a literary analysis, an author’s writing biography, thoughts on writing theory; or it may be only one essay. Like Deleuze Joshua Cruz is an assistant professor and Holly Corkill is a Ph.D. candidate,both in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of the College of Education at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Email addresses: [email protected] & [email protected] © 2020 by Caddo Gap Press. 134 The Frankenpaper and Guattari’s (1986) castle, it has many potential entrances. We leave our readers to discover points of dis/junction among the various ideas that have spilled onto these pages (if they want to), the result of two individual multiplicities engaged in a dialogue about Frankenstein… or writing… or Shelley… or Deleuze… or some or all of these topics, or even more than these. Joshua Cruz & Holly Corkill 135 The Frankenstein Monster: Anti-Oedipus, Body without Organs, a Phenomenon of Bordering Is the Author’s Work Her Own?: “… the strange nature of Intensities, Assemblages, the animal would elude all and anti-Agency pursuit…” in Shelley’s —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Frankenstein “What is the Body Without Holly’s Writing Reflection Organs of a Book?” Bringing the Post to Post-Pro- As horror writer Stephen cess Composing King once said (appending on to a quote once written by The post-process movement William Faulkner), “…kill your in composition studies adopts darlings, kill your darlings, even the term “post-” literally: when it breaks your egocentric process no longer explains how little scribbler’s heart, kill writing works, so we move your darlings” (King, 2000, somewhere else. Post- in this p.222). The implications of this sense is “after” (Kent, 1999; metaphor are simultaneously Trimbur, 1994). This version of macabre and grossly accurate. post- does not necessarily leave Writing is an act of creation, and process entirely behind, but it the manifestation of that creation moves the concept of process is a product that beyond the cogito 136 The Frankenpaper Consider the Frankenstein When Mary Shelley added monster: it is the anti-Oedipus. an introduction to the 1831 Indeed, it has no mother to publication of Frankenstein, Oedipus about, and we cannot she called this insertion say that it was born in any “an appendage to a former kind of Freudian sexual frenzy. production” that she promised Rather, it wasn’t, and then one to limit to “such topics as have day, it was. While the common connection to [her] authorship portrayal of the Frankenstein alone” (Shelley, 2017, p. monster’s beginnings involve 291). The use of the word a body on a slab, scientific “appendage” is apt considering machinery, and harnessing the that the text to which Shelley power of lightening, Shelley’s adds this explanation to a body description of the monster’s of writing that documents the “birth” is far less detailed: the aftereffects of one man’s efforts narrator simply states that one to create life through the et scribo approach of many refer to as a body of cognitivism that had dominated writing. In the same way that, writing in the 80s; it suggests at the moment of birth, a child’s that matters of context and body exits the mother’s womb audience are paramount in and is suddenly present in a writing and that there can be no place where, only moments one series of steps that produces before there was merely the “good” writing. idea of a child, an author brings But post- as a philosophical forth a body of writing…a child enterprise implies more than a that, for better or worse, enters simple social turn, which seems the world either as a divine to be what the post-process creation or as a monster (maybe movement ultimately boils both). Though it is uncertain down to (Breuch, 2002). Breuch as to whether or not all writers notes that when applied to a experience this sensation, many discipline, post- has the potential writers perceive their work…this to decenter the human brainchild they have Joshua Cruz & Holly Corkill 137 rainy night in November, he cobbling together of a body… saw the accomplishment of his an assemblage of parts sutured toils brought about by collecting together to make a whole. In the “the instruments of life” around appending of the introduction to him. There is no description the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, of these instruments. As such, Shelley insists that she only popular media has taken the did so in an effort to satisfy her Frankenstein creation in any publishers’ concerns that the number of directions: most are body of work as it previously familiar with James Whales’ existed in the 1818 publication 1931 Frankenstein, for instance of the work was not whole; (“It’s alive!”), and there is the however, this explanation more elaborate Kenneth Branagh reinforces the idea that the novel representation of the birth of the Frankenstein is an assemblage; monster, wherein Frankenstein moreover, from a Deleuzian creates what is standpoint, we can use (e.g. Barnett, 2015; Rickert, 2013); imprisoned in the page to be provide attention to infinitely monstrous from its inception. complex minutiae (Mays, Thoughts of the work’s 2017; Lynch & Rivers, 2015); ineptitude and ignorance plague and express incredulity with the writer. “This paper can’t metanarratives of what writing is possibly be good enough… or should be. However, Breuch everyone who reads this will claims, post-process theory has hate it…please do not read my yet to do this. Similarly, Heard stuff because you’ll think badly (2008) asks what we should do of me once you see just how with the post-process movement wretched, basic, and grotesque in writing. He observes that there my writing skills are.” The writer was something called a post- finishes the writing, and, for a process movement, writing and brief moment comes the feeling composition theorists nodded their of relief at completion, but this heads in acknowledgement, and moment can be fleeting. 138 The Frankenpaper essentially an artificial womb. Shelley as a kind of case study Harnessing the power of electric to examine how authorial eels, Victor plunges probes agency is, in fact, non-existent into the body of his creature when speaking about the writing (the astute observer will not of a text. To understand any overlook the sexual implications assemblage, one must embrace of probing a body with rods or the multiplicities that exists the phallic imagery of writhing within and around it as well eels in a yonic pool of liquid). as the intensities that inform Shortly thereafter, Robert De it. Deleuze and Guattari posit Nero is expelled in a deluge of that “a book has only itself, amniotic fluid. This tells us that, in connection with other at least in film representation, we assemblages and in relation to cannot move beyond the idea of other bodies without organs” an Oedipal birth.