corrected and augmented
The question of narrative truth is here given a sudden new twist. As
readers over the course of nearly three volumes containing Victor's
narrative, we have come to assume that it is a straight-forward account,
unmediated by another voice. Now we are forced to recognize that what we
have read in this simple understanding has been twice edited, first by
Victor, and then by Walton acting at Victor's behest. What Walton first
wrote has in its second draft not only been "corrected,"
but "augmented," added to, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that
mistakes could still survive in the text, or that they could have been
accidentally or -- much more worrisome -- deliberately introduced in the
process of editing, or that further areas for augmentation might still exist
that, if properly elaborated, might materially change the focus
of our perspective. In other words, Mary Shelley, having just enjambed
two
distinct narrative voices and their respective audiences, now further
destabilizes her text as an embodiment of a fixed, immutably true account
of its personalities and events. Our knowledge is indeterminate and
relative, wholly dependent on those voices that filter it.
