To explain this more precisely, just as Bloom acknowledges in
Omens of Millennium that the very prescience of the Gnostic texts would not have allowed them to disappear entirely (and for their persistence, it must be noted, he is joyful), the prescience of
Frankenstein similarly renders it a dangerous text to be used and/or abused.
Frankenstein’s prescience resides in Mary Shelley’s brilliant dialectic of reality-based faith and scientific dreams. Simultaneously, this dialectic demands attention and theorization and it denies the possibility of polemical resolution. Thus, Shelley astonishingly narrates a meta-prognostication on the formula of science fiction as the imaginative production which can lead to reproductions inside and outside of texts even as she is installing the spark of life into the first of its species. From this critical perspective, even the most conservative efforts to ossify
Frankenstein into a technophobic cultural cliché will, like Victor’s pastoral optimism in trying to forget about the creature amidst the sublime Alpine landscape, not succeed in bringing forth the good spirits (whether God or a sacred “Nature”) they summon. Rather, every cautionary invocation of
Frankenstein cannot help but give
more life, as both Harold Bloom and that rebellious replicant Roy Baty are both fond of saying, to precisely the abhorrent productions and reproductions they desperately wish to kill.
From “Dismembering the Cautionary Cliché: Re-reading the Warnings in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”