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The Picture of Saint George the Martyr
The journalist Mahmoud’s digital recorder highlights the difficulty of uncovering the truth (and especially a single truth) in a complex political environment, marked by social conflict. A variety of characters come into possession of the recorder. Although Mahmoud generally uses it to record his impressions of events for journalistic purposes, he later lends it to Hadi, who gives it to the Whatsitsname so that the creature can interview his own self. Later, both Brigadier Majid and the “writer” become interested in the stories the digital recorder contains. Over the course of the novel, no character interprets these recordings in the same way. Some characters believe that the Whatsitsname is real: Mahmoud, for example, doubts that Hadi could have invented such a complicated story on his own. Others, such as Aziz the Egyptian, argue that Hadi has invented everything from scratch, asking friends to impersonate the characters. The diversity of perspectives concerning the meaning and validity of these recordings underlines the difficulty of finding out the truth in a political context fraught with lies, in which storytelling can be a form of survival. The digital recorder, then, does not necessarily record a single, factual version of reality. Rather, the recorder becomes the symbol of the multiple “realities” that co-exist in a complex social world, as each character interprets events according to their own experiences and beliefs.
The Digital Recorder Quotes in Frankenstein in Baghdad
The Frankenstein in Baghdad quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Digital Recorder. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
The Whatsitsname talked about the night he met the drunk beggars. He said he tried to avoid them, but they were aggressive and charged toward him to kill him. His horrible face was an incentive for them to attack him. They didn’t know anything about him, but they were driven by that latent hatred that can suddenly come to the surface when people meet someone who doesn’t fit in.
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Chapter 10
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The young madman thinks I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi State has failed to produce, at least since the days of King Faisal I.
Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.
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I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate—in other words, the flesh of criminals—but who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day.
‘Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a bouse with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’
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Chapter 14
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In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”
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The Digital Recorder Symbol Timeline in Frankenstein in Baghdad
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Digital Recorder appears in Frankenstein in Baghdad. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: The Journalist
Mahmoud turned on his digital recorder and began to curse his friend Hazem Abboud, who took him out partying the night...
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...might be right. Mahmoud then returned to his hotel and obsessively repeated, in his digital recorder, that being “a positive force” would allow him to survive. However, he soon realized that...
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Chapter 6: Strange Events
That evening, Mahmoud recounts the day’s events in his digital recorder. He is confused by the fact that, on the way back, Saidi mocked Brigadier Majid’s...
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In the meantime, at Aziz’s coffee shop, two men turn on a digital recorder and ask Hadi to tell them the story about the Whatsitsname. Aziz gives Hadi a...
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Chapter 8: Secrets
Mahmoud decides to record Hadi’s story on his digital recorder, so that he will not forget any of the details. He bought the Panasonic recorder...
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...believe the junk dealer’s story if he interviews the Whatsitsname. He hands Hadi his digital recorder and explains to him how to use it, noting that the batteries die out fast....
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Chapter 9: The Recordings
Mahmoud begins to record his thoughts on his digital recorder, as he has seen in American movies before. He recalls the events of these past...
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...after his conversation with the Whatsitsname, Hadi told Mahmoud he gave the creature the digital recorder. Although Mahmoud initially believed that Hadi must have sold it, Hadi later gave him the...
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When the Whatsitsname complained about his bad reputation, Hadi gave him the recorder, telling him that he should record an interview to change people’s minds. The Whatsitsname concluded...
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...the Whatsitsname was planning on interviewing his own self. When Hadi later returned him the recorder, Mahmoud was shocked to listen to the Whatsitsname speak. He found the recording disturbing. He...
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Mahmoud spent an entire day listening to the recording. Later, when Saidi saw Mahmoud’s disheveled state, he told him to move to the Dilshad...
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Chapter 10: The Whatsitsname
While in possession of the digital recorder, the Whatsitsname recorded his story. When introducing himself, he compared himself to the batteries in...
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The batteries in the digital recorder then died again, and the young madman told the Whatsitsname that they had none left....
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Chapter 11: The Investigation
In his hotel room in the Dishad Hotel, Mahmoud listens to the Whatsitsname’s recordings multiple times. He is shocked by the tranquil tone in which the man recounts such...
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...ruin” in Bataween. In order to secure the Brigadier’s trust, he hands him his digital recorder, which contains the entire story of the Whatsitsname.
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...outcome, the Brigadier asks an assistant to make a copy of the files on the recorder and chats amiably with Mahmoud. The journalist, however, no longer pays much attention to the...
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Chapter 15: A Lost Soul
...This, Aziz explained, changed Hadi forever. Mahmoud objected to Aziz’s theory by evoking the Whatsitsname’s recording, but Aziz simply said that Hadi must have asked a friend to do so.
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Although Mahmoud believed Aziz, he also thought that the stories on his recorder were too complex to have been invented by someone like Hadi. To solve these contradictions,...
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Chapter 17: The Explosion
...witnessed from his balcony over the decades. A week later, a visitor with a digital recorder came to visit him, telling him that he was “the writer.” The man wanted to...
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Chapter 18: The Writer
...Mahmoud, in an unkempt state, was selling his Rolex and his laptop, while a digital recorder hung around his neck. Mahmoud then approached the writer and offered to sell him his...
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...the two men had dinner together and the writer listened to the beginning of the recording, he agreed to buy the recorder. After paying 400 dollars, the writer concluded that Mahmoud...
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...documents matched Mahmoud’s story, the writer listened one more time to Mahmoud’s confessions on the recorder.
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In the recorder, Mahmoud narrated his story. After being interrogated—without any violence, unlike what he had expected—he was...
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...days, he later recognized the voice of the Frankenstein’s confessions—which he listened to on the recorder—when he met Abu Salim. The writer was not certain the voices were exactly the same,...
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