Come fare per correggere un testo con errori:

1. Leggere il testo dall’inizio alla fine due volte;
2. Controllare che tutte le frasi abbiano soggetto, predicato e complemento;
3. Attenersi alle regole di grammatica inglese;
4. Non accettare frasi lunghe con troppe subordinate;
5. Trasformare il più possibile le frasi dallo stile verbale a quello nominale;
6. Riscrivere ogni frase per costruire un nuovo testo con lo stesso significato.

FRANKISSSTEIN

The object of the present text is to provide my personal interpretation of FranKissStein, a postmodernist novel written by Jeanette Winterson in 2019.

It is not meant to give definitive answers, but I am going to make some possible conjectures about the novel, supported by textual references and analysis.

To start with the title, it reminds the novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley in 1816-1818. Therefore, since the title Frankissstein is a revisiting of “Frankenstein”, the reader may understand the novel belongs to the genre of science fiction, where there is the creation of something new. In addition, since the title is made up of the words “Fran”, “kiss and “Stein”, it makes the reader think about the idea of a love story between two people.

Moving now to the covers, there are a front and a back one. According to the front cover, the reader notices that the wallpaper is blue, which could remind of a mysterious sensation or something unknowable with red and fuchsia writings. The color red may refer to blood, the life’s essence, and fuchsia is the symbol of inspiration and sensuality. Moreover, in the front cover a white line may be Frankenstein’s scar covered by three red XXX which may be stitches to cicatrize and the expression “a love story” is written in small to make the reader understand the love story is not the novel’s main topic. Turing the book, the reader has to focus his attention on the back cover, which is also blue with red and fuchsia writings, as the front one. An important aspect of the back cover is the quotation “I AM WHAT I AM, BUT WHAT I AM IS NOT ONE THING, NOT ONE GENDER. I LIVE WITH DOUBLENESS”. It makes clear that identity is one of the novel’s theme, which is not one and unique, but people live with multiples identities which change according to the people they meet and through a web of discourses as Robin said in David Lodge’s Nice Work.

Therefore, according to the title and to the covers, the intelligent reader understands the novel is a revisiting of Frankenstein. Consequently, it means that there are past influences and that the novel is a science fiction about the creation of something new. Moreover, the reader realizes that another novel’s topic is the love story between two people, but it is difficult to understand if the two people are a man and a girl or two men or two girls only by reading the title and looking at the covers and that the novel is based on doubleness and duality.

Opening the book, the reader is in front of an introductory quotation which is “We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again” from Eagles’ song, “Take It Easy”, the rock band from Los Angeles born in Seventeens. The quotation’s meaning may be that life is in people’s mind and during it they could have success or not, but anyway life starts when you are born and ends when it decides to end. Therefore, it is impossible to live an eternal life. From the quotation the reader could understand that the novel may be about some attempts to extend life in order to make people live an eternal life. 

Moving now to structure, the novel is organized into two plots: the first one is about J. Winterson’s remake of Mary Shelley’s circumstances in writing her novel Frankenstein and in the second one J. Winterson gives voice to Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor who deals with Artificial Intelligence. 

There is a parallelism between the two parts which interact in a silent dialogue since they are mixed in the whole novel, but every section is introduced by subtitles to distinguish them. Frankissstein constantly shifts between past and present: the part of Mary Shelly is set in Lake Geneva (at Villa Diodati) in 1816 and 1818. Therefore, it represents past while the part of Ry Shelley is set in Great Britain at Brexit Time and across the Atlantic in Phoenix and Arizona in the 21st century and therefore it represents the present.

There is a parallelism also between the characters of the two plots: the main character of the first part is Mary Shelley, the writer of Frankenstein. She wrote it in 1816 when she was at Lake Geneva (Switzerland) from 1816 to 1818 with her husband, with her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, an English politic and poet, and Polidori who was a doctor. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a visit to a castle in Geneva with her husband, where a man told them the story of a monster. In her novel the main topic is the creation of a new form of life by Victor Frankenstein: he creates a monster which may be the symbol of people’s fears about new technologies and about new world’s progression. In addition, MARY SHELLEY believes in the power of the abstract substance of life, she shows it through nature, desire, language and she believes in the power of the soul and of the mind. 

The characters of the second part are: 

• Ry Shelley who is a transgender doctor. His name comes from the last two letter of Mary and it does not define a sex gender. Indeed, Ry is a transgender who has to live all his/her life with doubleness; 
• Claire is a secretary;
• Victor Stein is a cryogenesis scientist and an artificial intelligence doctor who has to find some methods to extend people’s life (as Victor Frankenstein, he wants to create a new form of life);
• Lord Ron who is a sex robots’ seller which only uses artificial intelligence to make fun;
• Polly D., a Vanity Fair’s journalist. 

Moreover, RY SHELLEY is attracted and scared at the same time by the unknown and progress, an open-minded transgender who makes his body what his soul and his mind want it to be and who believes in the power of desire. VICTOR STEIN believes in the power of the human mind and human desires and wants to make human brain immortal.

Moving now to the narrative techniques and strategies used by Jeanette Winterson, it is clear she used a first-person narrator: in the first part J.W gives voice to Mary Shelley and in the second part to Ry Shelley, the main protagonists of her novel. She used the Postmodernist attitude of the mixture of formal and informal registers, in order to make the narration suitable to the context. It is also used a rhetorical language: there are hyperboles, metaphors, similes, alliterations, irony; litotes are used to make concepts clear, to add meaning to narration, to provide a more effective image of topics, to allow full comprehension and to create a specific atmosphere and last but not least there is a frequent use of double meaning expressions to convey the idea of doubleness. Jeanette Winterson used both telling, showing and dialogue and lots of descriptions to create visual images in the reader’s mind. In addition, body language’s exaltation expresses characters emotions, feelings and intentions, there is the use of different expressions according to the situation and words belonging to the semantic field of: sex, science, mystery, innovation. It is present the steam of consciousness (a not linear concept of time but a simultaneous one: the present you live is affected by your past memories and future expectations and you grow up accordingly to your past experiences, you are embedded in a net of discourses, the ones of your family, community, society and circles you live in), self-reflexivity, retro, the concept of relativity: every mind is a world made of personal interpretations of reality.

According to the novel’s topic, the reader may notice that, along the whole novel, both Mary Shelley and Ry Shelley ask themselves the same essential life questions such as “How are men and women different?”, “Is reality concrete or is it just a human mind interpretation?”,  “How can A.I. help the human being?”, “How is man possessor of his future?”, “Can man know all the secrets of human mind?”. In addition, the writer wants to focus the attention on people’s interpretation of consciousness as something both mysterious and significant in human mind because it shows what you tend to. 

During the whole novel, there are explained some of nowadays problems and news, such as cryogenics and new efforts to extend life, individual freedom and freedom of expression , man’s desire to create and control his own creation, the double faced nature of Artificial Intelligence, gender identity and trans humanism, dualism and doubleness, the nature of humanity, love and the presence of intertextuality.

All things considered, I think that Jeanette Winterson wants to make clear the concept that the future is not as far as people think and that the world is an ever-changing reality. In addition, people want to create new form of life, new creatures, but they are not always aware of artificial intelligence’s possibility of escaping man’s total control. In addition, nowadays most people appeal to cryogenics to extend their life: there are a lot of human being’s bodies iced waiting for science’s ability to make them live another time.

Last but not least, one of the main topic is that reality is water-soluble and it exists in people’s mind only where everything is settled (memories, suffering, pains, emotions, situations, hope...) and the presence of the rain in the whole novel reminds of the analogy between reality and water. Since reality exists only in people’s minds there is not a unique world but it constantly changes according to people’s interpretations.