More Frankenstein
Frankenstein isn’t the name of the monster, it is only the name of the creator of the monster, and the monster himself is never given a name, which contributes to the productive confusion that leads most people, even those who know better, to think of and speak of the creature as “Frankenstein.”
Dr. Frankenstein, the father (and mother) in a sense, notices the creature, shortly after creation, peering over the edge of a bed, like a toddler in his parents’ room. Dr. Frankenstein flees in terror from the sight. The creature is then left on his own. For awhile he hangs out around the house of a family he dreams of belonging to; the head of that family is a blind man; the creature one day gathers the courage to present himself to the kind, blind man; the man listens, sensitively, to the creature’s story; then the man’s children return, scream in terror, and fight the “monster” off, even as said monster cries and clings to the knees of the blind father, as would a very young child.
After that, the creature becomes angry, and violent—also like a young child.
The creature eats only fruits and berries, and never meat.
Most people report that when seeing babies they have a desire to eat them.
So babies do appear in literature maybe more than we might first notice.
And movies
Among the things commonly noted about the original Godzilla movie is that it came out in 1954 and was the first movie to acknowledge the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though it acknowledges it obliquely. Godzilla is said to have been awoken by nuclear testing, his footprints are radioactive, and the only English words in the movie are Geiger counter and oxygen destroyer. Also a woman on a commuter train says, of Godzilla, “First the acid rain, and now Godzilla.”
But Godzilla doesn’t necessarily mean to do harm; malice isn’t a fundamental aspect of his character. In a sense he has no malice at all, only rage. My favorite scene in Godzilla is the brief one in which we see Godzilla underwater, in his (or maybe her) natural setting. Underwater Godzilla is played by an obviously small toy. The toy is a much less detailed special-effects creature than aboveground Godzilla. Underwater Godzilla seahorses around on the ocean floor as extra-diegetic classical music plays; his gentle pulsing movements almost make it seem as if the underwater Godzilla has himself put the delicate music on, on an unseen underwater stereo. These “bad” special effects contribute, perfectly, to the overall effect: Godzilla is a childlike creature, innocent of his destructions. Even aboveground Godzilla walks widely, like a toddler. I read once of studies looking into the question of when it was that violent criminals became violent; the studies concluded that it wasn’t that violence suddenly appeared, it was that in some people more than others, for whatever reasons, the natural violence of youth was never extinguished.
Princess Kaguya
The baby seems younger today, her hand reaching out, grasping and ungrasping like a sea anemone. I pick up something I have read before, something especially short; I have the baby bound and burritoed in a thin blanket next to me, I position her on her side, so she can stare at the black-and-white notecards slotted between the sofa cushions, and she seems content, and I read the story again; the story, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, is based on a Japanese myth at least 1,200 years old.
The tale tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who one day comes across a glowing stalk of bamboo. Inside the stalk, he finds a tiny, tiny baby girl. He brings the girl home and he and his wife raise her as their own. The previously poor and childless couple now find gold each time they go out to cut more bamboo. The girl grows quickly into the most beautiful girl in the land, drawing the notice even of the Emperor. But the girl is moody. She has no interest in suitors. She spends a lot of time looking at the night sky. One day, a spaceship arrives; it turns out the girl is from another planet! The gold in the bamboo was a gift in thanks to her adoptive parents for keeping her safe; there had been war on her planet, but now it was time for her to return to where she truly belonged. The girl boards the spaceship and leaves, forever.
Suddenly the strange old myth seems to be just a straightforward and basically realistic tale about babies: their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you. A more “realistic” description of a baby—e.g., “born after a seventeen-hour labor . . . at 7 pounds 11 ounces . . . nursing every two hours . . . smiling at eight weeks, grasping at twelve weeks . . .”—misses most everything. Only the supernatural gets at the actual. Or so it can seem to a mother on a good day, at least to the mother of a relatively easy baby, who is lying on her side, looking at a picture of an owl.
Rumpelstiltskin
Rumpelstiltskin is a small man with the exuberance and temper of a two-year-old child. He helps the miller’s daughter spin straw into gold. He helps her in this way not once, not twice, but three times! His help saves both the miller’s daughter and the miller. In some versions of the story, this even leads to the miller’s daughter’s marriage to the king. But Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t do this for nothing; the third time he spins straw into gold, he does so in exchange for the miller’s daughter’s future as yet unconceived firstborn.
Still, Rumpelstiltskin isn’t too bad a guy. When the miller’s daughter doesn’t want to hand over her firstborn, Rumpelstiltskin offers her an out. He doesn’t have to offer her an out, but he does. That’s why he’s kind of sweet. The famous out that he offers her—if she can guess his name within three tries then she doesn’t have to give over her baby—wasn’t part of their original deal. Why does he offer her an out at all?
Maybe naming a newborn baby isn’t all that different from guessing the name of Rumpelstiltskin: any name is possible, but only one name proves to be right. It almost seems as if what Rumpelstiltskin is trying to do is to get the miller’s daughter to remember that she is his mother. Rumpelstiltskin’s name, in all the versions, in all the languages, translates into something like, “dear little goblin who makes noise with a stilt.” He is the firstborn, he is the original source of gold; he’s ambivalent about having a sibling.
How the puma affects others, one
A friend has two children with a woman to whom he is no longer married and he is now with a woman who has no children, and who probably wants to have children, though none of this has been openly discussed with me, I am surmising. The two children of the friend are now teenagers, and they themselves have a half sibling already, from their mother’s side, their mother who is known to be appealing but unreliable, able to land, say, in Chicago, before beginning to make phone calls to arrange for babysitting for her children in New York. My friend pays the half sibling’s college expenses. One gets the sense that he fears raising children again with someone who may reveal themselves to be not necessarily internally outfitted in a way suitable for the care of children, but again all of this is surmising, and my friend never mentions thoughts about maybe, or maybe not, having another baby, and knowing him as I do, it is reasonable to guess that he has also maybe not mentioned these thoughts to himself.
One evening, this friend arrives at our home, to meet the puma, when she is fresh, less than two weeks old. He arrives wearing a forty-pound vest. The vest, he says, is recommended as a way to build strength and endurance. It’s just a thing he’s trying out. He just now walked the ten blocks from his home to our home, not too far. But with the vest. His teenage children and his girlfriend are with him too. They are often with him. He is very close to all of them. They say nothing about the vest. He apologizes for being a little late. He had been in a class for potential foster parents, he explains. We have never heard anything about this fostering interest before; it is new. “You always dream of just the normal kid, with no issues, who’s been orphaned by a car crash,” he said explaining his hesitation, but interest, in taking on foster children. “But apparently it’s much more difficult than that.”
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br /> How the puma affects others, two
We live at the intersection of Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Very few babies make their home in this area, while a relatively high number of men without homes make their homes here. Between the front door of our building and the butcher shop at the corner there lives a very slim Hispanic man who sometimes sweeps the sidewalk, and who sometimes helps the catering company next door move their boxes, and who sometimes just stands around. Once I saw him directing buses out of the nearby bus parking lot. He is sometimes well, and smoking a cigarette and making conversation with the catering and food cart and garment guys on the block, and he is at other times not well, and half-asleep on the sidewalk. When I first moved to the neighborhood, one afternoon when I walked by him, and he was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of the butcher shop, he spat on me and shouted, “Ugly!” After he spat on me a second time, I took to crossing the street to avoid him, especially when I was pregnant, and generally more cautious than usual.
But in those first couple months at home with the puma, the environment around me blurred, like in those photos taken with the f-stop set just so, and one day I didn’t notice this man who lives on our block, and so I didn’t cross the street to avoid him, I instead walked right by him, and I heard someone shouting at me—it was him shouting at me—“God bless you! What a beautiful baby boy. Take care of that boy.” This has consistently been his response to our passing ever since. Even though the puma now occasionally wears a dress. Now, when we walk by, he and the little girl invariably exchange a high five. But not really invariably. When he is smoking, he suggests that she not come too near.
Notes on some twentieth-century writers
Flannery O’Connor: No children.
Eudora Welty: No children. One children’s book.
Hilary Mantel, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Jane Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Pym: No children.
Helen Gurley Brown, author of Having It All: no children.
Katherine Anne Porter: No children, many husbands.
Alice Munro: Three children. Two husbands. First story collection at age thirty-seven.
Toni Morrison: Two children. First novel at age thirty-nine.
Penelope Fitzgerald: Three children. First novel age sixty. Then eight more novels.
John Updike: Many children. Many books. First book age twenty-five.
Saul Bellow: Many children. Many wives. Many books. First at age twenty-nine.
Doris Lessing: Left two of her three children to be raised by her father. Later semiadopted a teenage girl, a peer of one of her sons. Said, and had to repeatedly handle questions about having said, that there was “nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” Many books.
Muriel Spark: One child, born in Southern Rhodesia during her marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark, who suffered from manic depression. She moved to London alone, leaving behind her husband. Her young son, also left behind, ended up in the care of some fruit sellers down the road, before he eventually moved to Scotland to live with his maternal grandparents. The child was later disinherited by his mother, who was annoyed, it is said, that he went around complaining that his mother wouldn’t admit that she was Jewish. Among other things. Many books.
Rebecca West: Had one child with H. G. Wells, to whom she was not married. Tried to convince the child that she was his aunt and not his mother (arguably for his own good). In 1955, the child wrote a roman à clef, Heritage, about the son of two world-famous parents; the mother does not come off well. For twenty-nine years, West successfully blocked publication. In 1984, when the novel was finally released, the child, aged sixty-nine, wrote an introduction to the book that further condemned his mother. The same year, the child published a laudatory biography of his mostly absent father.
Shirley Jackson: Four children.
J. G. Ballard: Widowed with three young children. Drank every day, was very productive, and called all of his children, in his autobiography of the same name, “miracles of life.” In describing seeing his children newly born, he wrote, “Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had traveled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young.” Ballard also wrote with fondness about his time as a child in the internment camps of Shanghai.
Other people’s babies
Are often noted to not be of interest.
Other people’s babies, two
Every hour, about 14,500 babies are born.
Other people’s babies, three
When Lucille Ball was pregnant, her character on television was also pregnant, though the word pregnant, like a swear word, could not, at the time, be said on television; Lucy was, instead, expecting. She carried bags, and stood behind chairs and sofas, so as to protect viewers from a full visual sense of what was expected. Lucille’s husband on the show, Ricky Ricardo, was played by her actual husband, Desi Arnaz. In real life, Lucille Ball turned down show-business offers until someone was willing to also employ Desi Arnaz, who, probably because he was Cuban, was mostly denied employment. This dynamic is reversed in I Love Lucy. Ricky Ricardo is a successful bandleader at a nightclub, and a regular plot point is Lucy’s desperate attempts to be part of his show. The episode of I Love Lucy in which Little Ricky is born was watched by forty-four million Americans, in three out of every four homes that had a television, and was titled, simply, Lucy Goes to the Hospital.
Other people’s babies, four
For the first photos of the twins of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, People paid fourteen million dollars.
Reversals
Murasaki Shikibu, of The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shonagon, of The Pillow Book, knew one another. They weren’t fond of one another. Shikibu was reserved and retiring, and more well-placed politically; Shonagon was witty and conversationally brilliant, and had a less stable position at court. Tutored by their fathers, both women knew Chinese, which was then the language of power and of politics (and of serious literature), and it was a language that women were not taught; women were supposed to speak and write only in Japanese; both women wrote their masterworks in Japanese, the insignificant language of women and gossip.
After The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji, the third most noted and enduring book from the Heian period is The Tosa Nikki. It is a sort of travelogue, written in Japanese, by a male author writing under a female pseudonym, and its opening line is, “I hear that diaries are things that men make but let’s see what a woman can do.”
Mother writers
Both Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon had, it seems, babies. I don’t know to what extent ladies at Heian court raised their babies. From the books it is difficult to tell. But at least, it would appear, somewhat. Even empresses nursed. Shikibu in her diaries describes the patheticness of her empress’s baby not quite latching on. Shonagon complains in The Pillow Book of overly possessive wet nurses. Shonagon’s empress, a different empress than Shikibu’s, is sent away from court to have her baby, and though it was normal to be sent away, she was sent somewhere conspicuously low in status, she’s in political decline, and the passage in which Shonagon describes this pregnant exile is one of the most willfully cheerful passages in the whole book; that empress dies shortly after giving birth.
Today there are many writers who are mothers, sometimes writing specifically about motherhood, and in a genre that we recognize as literature. Or, at least, there are some mother writers, in this sense, if not many. There is Elena Ferrante, and Sarah Manguso. But among the mother writers of today probably two of the most celebrated are men: Karl Ove Knausgaard and,
in his way, Louis C. K.
When the baby came home
I set her down in her crib, and she didn’t cry. Why, I wondered, is she not distressed? It’s as if she assumes that we will, of course, love and care for her. It seemed so strange for her to assume that. I respected her fearlessness.
When the empress moved
The passage in The Pillow Book titled “When the Empress Moved” tells of all the amusing and comic things that happen when the empress Teishi and her court (including Shonagon) are moved out of the main palace to another residence, one where the gate is not wide enough for the carriage to pass, where the master of the house doesn’t know the words for things, and where the court ladies are not given their proper privacy. In this passage, Shonagon does not mention that the empress Teishi is pregnant and ill, that another woman from another family was also recently named empress, that the move to a house far beneath her station was a political one, part of an attempt to shift power to a different family, and she also does not mention that the empress Teishi will soon die in childbirth, an event that has most likely already happened when the passage was written but which isn’t encompassed in the passage. Instead the writing is crowded over with laughter and “charm,” and scholars tell us that the passage has a special density of what in Japanese aesthetics is known as okashii—the amusing and the strange—and this high incidence of okashii (as opposed to aware, roughly translated to us as the pathos of things passing) often increases in The Pillow Book at moments when we might expect the opposite, at moments of distress and loss. (This is part of what makes me associate the book with what I think of as the “small” as opposed to the “minor.”)
Little Labors Page 3
