Do you remember what you saw last?
Not much to hear over the rain, the ruin
as it bloomed. There was no light,
only the chill of his body. A trampled green.
A plot like a grave. My face unfurling at the seams.
Did you have a raincoat?
No eulogy. Nothing to mourn
except the way the ashes
lie. Nothing to break the fall
but myself. I had no raincoat.
Was the Sun trying his best?
You cannot be beautiful, he told me.
You can only be terrible. You were born
with this body, he said, a terrible
burning one. No mercy. Nothing.
Were you healed?
A flash of white, then silence.
Were you healed?
I had no raincoat.
Were you healed?
There was no Sun.
Were you healed?
At first, I thought I was. I was so cold
& his hands were so white & his face was blue
like mine & we were close for a startling, moment,
closer than we had ever been before--
There’s a thing about hope. Do you know this?
A thing about hope?
I think you know already. I think you are remembering.
Analytic Component:
Initially inspired by the implications of Matthew Etough’s piece “‘Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?’: Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige,” I wanted to reconsider some of the ideas Etough introduces by applying them to Klara in the Sun. Notably, Etough notes how Klara and the Sun can be considered a variant of science fiction—untimely genre fiction—and can thereby suggest an image of what a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster may look like, with society ultimately being complicit in morphing something inhuman into something truly monstrous. As a result, inspired by the differences between Frankenstein’s monster’s final vengeful monologue and Klara’s peaceful reflection in the junkyard, I wanted to write a poem contrasting their voices; I wrote the poem in a question-and-answer form, with Klara asking questions that the monster answers.
In his final monologue, the monster notes: “I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more” (Shelley 211). I wanted to compare the monster’s relationship with his creator to Klara’s relationship with the Sun, who she considers to be a kind of omniscient, God-like figure. To be a monster is to be alive, yes, but startlingly so. As he appears in the interpretations that I gained inspiration from, the monster teeters between the dead and the living, with many parallels to Klara herself. While Klara believes in the power of the Sun, the monster remains alone in the cold, unable to find peace through his acts of murder: “At first, I thought I was [healed]”; instead, it is the closeness to his creator that he longs for. I wanted to display Klara’s innocence and unwavering trust in humanity and the Sun, as contrasted with the monster’s own jaded and distrustful nature toward the beings that ultimately betrayed him: “Was the Sun trying his best?”; “You cannot be beautiful, he told me.” In doing so, I wanted to show how the monster reflects upon his own actions, ultimately feeling regret in the loss of his own innocence.
In light of this difference in attitudes, through this poem, I wanted to reimagine Frankenstein’s monster from the position of Klara: to isolate his poetic being from his physical form, and to establish his humanity within his pleas for acceptance. “There’s a thing about hope,” about humanity, about the act of trust, notes Klara, that the monster once knew. That he is “remembering.”