Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

Derrida’s conflation of difference/deference makes the important
observation about the gap between the sign and nature. The indeterminacy
of the relationship is as problematic as the indeterminacy of whether
one, when speaking French, is saying différance or différence. As I type
this, my word processor makes a command decision: both words were
auto-corrected to the English word “difference.” Likewise, the distinction
between the psychological and the physical, or what I call the “internal”
and the “external,” is lost in the “gap” between sign and signified when
modern audiences read a text such as Frankenstein. Part of the problem is
that the physical nature of the monster is nebulous in the original novel:
he is never adequately (to our modern obsessions with the visual, anyway)
described. In our modern idiom, we demand physicality, and we invent it
when it is not there, usurping the referent just as MS Word attempted to
usurp my command of language. Due to the gap between the internal and
the external of the novel, the hole that supplants the wholeness that we
expect has forced us to reinterpret Shelley’s work to reflect our obsession
with the visual, cum the physical.
The lack of a clear description of Shelley’s monster becomes a major
problem for us, and our filmic adaptations of the novel are a reaction to
this lack. The body therefore is the most significant contributing factor
in a discussion of cultural usage of this missing referent of the novel, and
filmmakers appropriate the creature’s body as a place of cultural discourse
because of both its emptiness and its resultant horror.
Allen | 97