Angles (Nov 2022)
Underground Manchester as urban palimpsest in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019)
Abstract
In her 2019 novel Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson repatriates Mary Shelley’s myth to Britain, and more precisely to Manchester, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. The visionary in this case is an AI-specialist called Victor Stein, who is striving to push back the limits of the human condition in a secret underground laboratory. Subterranean Manchester presents itself as an urban palimpsest in which different historical strata coexist, and whose meaning is defined by a process of cultural accretion involving history, local culture and literature. Winterson contributes a fictional layer by interweaving the urban text that is underground Manchester and her rewriting of Shelley’s myth. Building on Jens Martin Gurr’s suggestion that the notion of the urban palimpsest may be extended to post-industrial cities, the first section seeks to analyse how Winterson represent urban complexity – i.e. the coexistence of layers of urban memory – by mobilizing textual strategies centred on the figure of Victor Stein. The paper then demonstrates how the structure of the novel performs urban complexity, encouraging readers to engage in time travel and hypertextual reading. Finally, the last section shows how the challenge which lies in representing urban complexity is also an opportunity, as the time travel allowed by underground Manchester enables Winterson, like Mary Shelley before her, to contemplate the possibilities opened up by science, probing not just the future of the city, but that of humanity. The constant shifts between the nineteenth century and the present time reflect Winterson’s conviction that Shelley’s novel is a prophecy announcing the advent of the posthuman. Drawing on the collection of essays which Winterson recently published under the title 12 Bytes. How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021), the essay examines how the novel’s reflection on the human and its boundaries invites us to question the contemporary polis and its monstrous Others.
