00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Contact Us

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content FRAMING THE TEXT: METADISCOURSE AND- THE DIALOGY OF
OTHERNESS
by
Dianne Owens Armstrong
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1992
Copyright 1992 Dianne Owens Armstrong
U M I N um ber: DP23163
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS
T he quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon the quality of the copy subm itted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not sen d a com plete m anuscript
and there a re m issing p ag es, th e se will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by the Author.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI D P23163
Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode
P roQ uest LLC.
789 E ast E isenhow er Parkw ay
P.O . Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 -1 3 4 6
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
37tSD?,H
This dissertation, w ritten by
Diarvne Owens Armstrong
under the direction of h sr. D issertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILO SOPH Y
D ean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
C hairperson
i i
DEDICATION
A dissertation, as those who have been through the
process know, is "a long and lonely road." Few of us, I
think, would cross the finish line without the
sustenance of families and friends. This dissertation,
accordingly, is dedicated to them, with love and
gratitude for all they have been and are to me. In
particular, my mother Kate has given me hope, incentive,
and unfailing moral and material support, encouraging me
to persevere. To Trish, Sydney, David, Emily, and
Malcolm, I am ever grateful. Lastly, this is for my
father James, who would have dared the dream, in
memoriam.
i i i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The recognition of advisers and supporters to whom
I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude would not be
complete without my naming those people at the
University of Southern California who have provided the
critical help and inspiration I needed. First among
them is my mentor and Chair, Professor W. Ross
Winterowd, who steered me through the dissertation and
helped me out of the mire on more than one occasion,
devoting his time freely to seeing me through. My deep
appreciation for all their invaluable contributions and
huge chunks of their time is also due my committee,
Professors Ed Finegan, Ron Gottesman, and Jim Kincaid.
Without their insightful commentary and monitoring, the
prospect of completing this work would have seemed even
more daunting. I owe its final evolution in great part
to all their efforts.
Special thanks are also in order for an exceptional
friend, Phyllis Franzek, who proved a seemingly
inexhaustible "listener." Her insights and observations
were most useful.
Finally, I am grateful to USC's library staffs for
their help in researching this work. And to Wade Harper
of the English Department, I just want to say thanks for
cheering me on.
iv
Table of Contents
Introduction .......................................
Chapter One
A Compendium of Frame Theories .. 1
Chapter Two
Some Renowned Test Cases.................78-
Chapter Three
A Composite Theory of Framing .... 200-
Chapter Four
Loving Friends, Mortal Enemies: The Worlds
within the Uncle Remus Stories .... 314-
Chapter Five r
Getting Reacquainted with the (Framed)
Text: The Pleasures of Alterity . . . 358-
Works Cited................................ 424-
1-6
-77
199
313
357
423
448
1
Introduction
The literary frame, most often associated with
"framed" or embedded multiple narratives, has an ancient
and honored history reaching back to the eighth-
century.1 Though relatively ignored in earlier critical
studies, the form has attracted considerable scholarly
attention in recent years. Although any assessment of
framing theories and their application in literature can
easily founder on their resistance to tidy
classification, most framed narrative analyses derive
from certain preeminent theorems, in particular, extra-
literary studies of framing processes in the social
sciences. This research, and scholarship in fields more
closely allied to narrative literature, such as
narratology and discourse theory, has broadened our
understanding of the variety of operations which
comprise "framing."
In the following chapters I consider the
implications of these findings for literary studies,
while proposing at the same time their inadequacy as
viable paradigms for frame narrative analysis. In
brief, these approaches reveal how readings may effect
2
interpretations which reinforce Western subject hegemony
and suppress alternate sites of meaning. I suggest
instead that literary frames and the narratives they
accompany (and by which they are accompanied) embody a
complex of motives for which current framing theories
provide no entirely satisfactory account. I therefore
offer another, "composite" approach, which I hope will
address some of the challenging issues in frame
narrative.
Chapter 1 is a brief review of frame theory, both
traditional and current.
Chapter 2 is a more detailed perusal of five works
which test the applicability of current notions of
framing activity. The chapter introduces some notorious
"test cases" frequently cited in literary studies, with
discussions of their general critical reception, and
reflections on questions raised by the readings.
Chapter 3 argues my own composite theory of
literary framing. I propose that the enjoining of
conventional framing standards for the most part amounts
to the imposition of artificial context on a framed
narration, one which distorts its indigenous
conformations. The effect is to skew the global network
of intratextual relations which hangs in delicate
balance in the textual ecosystem, warping the text's
capacity for alternative readings. Since they are also
3
theoretically modeled on innate cognitive processes,
current frame theories are fairly uniform in their
approaches to textual analyses. Constitutionally
speaking, therefore, they are predisposed to a certain
inflexibility.
The framed text’s special province is the
deployment of seemingly discrepant and eclectic
narratives, each with their own encased characters,
along the panoramic spectrum of the work construed as a
whole. This arrangement is schematic to the extent that
spatial and temporal constraints mark its textual
geography, a variety of composition which hypothetically
lends itself to hierarchical ordering. I suggest
replacing the prevalent hierarchical criteria which rank
framed narratives in a sequential relationship with an
inquiry into framed narration as a performance-oriented,
appositional or contingent form. In this model, the
affinities between narrative layers are accordingly best
seen as fugal— interactive and intercalated. As with
the non-framed work, the interpretation of any framed
text is appropriately an integral procedure. Readers
emerge from their encounter with it ideally holding a
synthetic view approximating their engagement with a
dialogical text. Formal closure is not necessarily
implied, but a tentative resolution can be extracted by
converging disparate narrative points of view. My
4
composite theory, therefore, assembles the text as
processual. The assumptions in this study are based on
post-structuralist and new historicist principles which
I believe warrant the rehabilitation of literary framing
transactions. The more engaging of these bridge my dual
interests— the frame's functions in narrative activity
and the nature of text reception. The frame narrative's
alignment with anthropological theories of social
ritualization is also noted, and its commonalities with
certain directions in film studies and context-sensitive
rhetorical theory is discussed. The vitality of frame
construction is finally seen to lie in its non-linear
recuperative or retrieving energies and its dynamic
capacity to solicit interactive and interrelated
connotation.
Chapter 4 examines a "problematic" text whose
framing apparatus has been comparatively slighted,
prevailing attitudes towards it, and some indications
for a fresh look at its contents. A corpus of Joel
Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales is probed with the
aim of demonstrating the complex issue of framing
parameters. I show the trials inherent in any attempt
to demarcate frame borders and the inadequacy of
bracketing approaches to frame in accounting for the
textual relations showcased in these texts and their
confounding of systematic axioms. The whole problem of
5
boundary permeability surfaces in any appreciation of
framing functions, for it has to do with the strength of
frame control and the capacity of any frame to preserve
its margins under the onslaught of competing textual
tensions.
Chapter 5 presents my conclusions, including
suggestions for a poststructuralist-oriented "readerly"
processing of the framed text.
6
1. A standard definition of a framed narrative is found
in Meyer Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms as: "a
preliminary narrative within which one or more of the
characters proceeds to tell a story" (173). Gerald
Prince defines a frame narrative as "A narrative in
which another narrative is embedded; a narrative
functioning as a frame for another narrative by
providing a setting for it" (Dictionary 33).
Chapter One
A Compendium of Frame Theories
In recent years narrative studies have attracted
transdisciplinary scholars of frame theory whose
seemingly exoteric pursuits are nonetheless germane.
Since these branches of learning range from an
established aesthetics to contemporary speculation in
artificial intelligence, rigid classifications of their
theoretical orientations are not only problematic but
undesirable in an interdisciplinary project of this
kind, given its deconstructive tenor. Still, so that we
may focus on some observable trends in framed literary
text analyses which are shaped by cross-disciplinary
concepts, and in order to demonstrate that this study
takes a divergent position, some guidelines must be
granted which will serve as points of departure for its
claims.
Theories of framing can be loosely grouped and
synthesized for my purposes into three major
persuasions: theories of aesthetic perception, theories
of knowledge representation advanced primarily in the
social sciences, and studies of language. On the
8
surface these groupings have little in common: their
approaches to framing differ according to their generic
alignments, as might be expected. The hypotheses with
which this study is concerned, however, are denoted by
their preference for explanations of framing as a
schematically rendered activity.
The framing philosophies in this overview can be
generally inventoried as postulates of frames as
cognitively-based "expectation-driven" constructs
(Metzing, Frame Conceptions and Text Understanding N.
page); that is, they are formed from customary
expectations but are pliable enough to adjust to
received sense impressions. The outline below
summarizes the epistemic issues in frame theory in
order, beginning with a relatively abstract definition
of framing as a cognitive function to its implementation
in text processing and reading protocols. Frames are
structures typically acknowledged in all the disciplines
I have surveyed as performing the following functions
and meeting the following objectives:
1) Frames are defined as information coded
cognitive constructs. They are thought to be
culturally saturated and based on recognizable
phenomena embedded in social beliefs and
patterns of activity. Frames enable
9
observers/readers to tie their perceptions to a
prior existing knowledge base located in both
cultural and individual logics. Frames are
"overcoded" to facilitate direct apprehension
and discrimination. Frames meet the conditions
for stereotype and "prototype," and are
therefore correlate with recognition
modalities, with the familiar, with orientation
devices, representative forms, conventions.
Frames are commensurate with positively
contoured "figures" which can be extricated
from a negative "ground." Frames are
considered organizing principles.
2) Frames are often regarded as static.
3) Frames separate or delimit ontological spheres
or modes (for example, "reality" versus
"illusion," "messages," actions, and
circumstance). Frames are believed to be
ontologically and epistemologically precedent
structures of expectation which control text
assimilation in reading protocols. Frames
impose themselves on texts as coherent and
cohesive integrated wholes, "gist," or
"superstructures" enabling paraphrase and
summary. They are closural principles which
10
differentiate text "levels," concretize and fix
narrative domains, and impose boundaries or act
as boundaries.
4) Frames are unidirectional in effect, initiating
causal "chains.”
5) In narrative/linguistic theory, framing
activity is often compared to syntactical
embedding principles in which dependent
sentence units are subordinated to a main
clause.
The prevailing theoretical traditions in framing
studies thus favor a number of concepts which can be
summarized as a privileging of: 1) the visual mode, most
prominent in "picture frame" theories and Gestalt
"figure-ground" concepts of framing, and including
evidentiary operations; 2) formulaic constructions; 3)
hierarchy and hierarchical relationships; 4) sequence
and linearity.
The following brief overview of the three fields
noted above is meant to offer the thrust of their
conjectural approaches to framing issues. Since
investigations of framing activity have customarily been
subsumed within aesthetic philosophies of perception,
which have, in turn, a lengthy and hallowed history in
11
varieties of literatures, we will begin with this
grouping.
Aesthetic Theories of Perception
A key concern for scholars analyzing the framing
phenomenon in the wake of a Kantian subjectively-focused
epistemology is expressed in the query: how exactly do
we perceive objects, situations, experience? For in
interrogating what Linda Holley calls "the cognitive
metaphor of perspective" (28) in her article on medieval
optics and Chaucer's narrative organization, we are, in
reality, talking about ways of seeing, which are
culturally constructed, after all, and vary from epoch
to epoch and place to place. One contiguous argument is
the oft-debated distinction between form and content, a
controversy which bears on some of the vexing questions
raised in recent discussions of framing apparatuses in
general. The "picture frame" type and Gestalt paradigms
of organized perception, whether directly implemented in
miscellaneous formats or simply referred to, are
recurrent models of the form/content relation in studies
of framed texts.
12
The Picture Frame Model
The frame as convergent perspective, the kind of
bracketing organizing principle represented by the
"picture frame," is the aesthetic model most often
evoked in discussions of framed narrative. David
Ullrich's definition of the framed narrative as "a
narrative which, for whatever reasons, has had its
boundaries extended to embrace either an inaugurating
text, an interjacent text, or an encompassing text which
may facilitate closure" (27), underscores the venerable
affinities between aesthetic and narrative frame
theories.
Diderot employs this visual type of frame in his
"spectacle" narratives which capture both anterior and
posterior perspectives in a calculated spatial
arrangement. The "reader" is transformed into a
"beholder" compelled to witness the "tableau" (Diderot's
word) which crystallizes as a moment when narrative
action is suspended (Caplan, Framed Narratives 16).
The tableau's relationship with its viewers is
dialogical: the beholder's empathy with the narrative
subjects allows him or her to vicariously substitute for
a missing character. The beholder's status is
essentially paradoxical, however. He or she is both "in
the tableau and out of it, framed and framing, both
13
inside and out of two irreconcilable places . . . ."
As Caplan explains, "Diderot has a metaphor (or almost
one) for the beholder's situation. It is 'monstrous,
the monster being a symbol of the uncertainties of
nature (Framed Narratives 90-91). In narrative the
monstrous is normalized as "the impossibility of
establishing the difference between figure and ground,
framed and frame" (Framed Narratives 92). In
recognizing the beholder's equivocal position, that is,
as both included in and excluded from the tableau,
Diderot anticipated the consciousness in post-modern
perception theory that the container and the contained
are not so easily distinguished. The realization
dramatically opposes the traditional Platonist aesthetic
ideal of order, proportion, and symmetry, axioms long
held integral to art (Beardsley 199).
The reliance on intrinsic ordering principles,
however, enables the conviction that framing devices or
any such salient feature allow us to sift layers of
reality, a foundational tenet in the mass of frame
scholarship.1 Karsten Harries epitomizes this
certainty. In The Broken Frame; Three Lectures, she
describes the frame's function: "Frames re-present what
they frame. Such re-presentation invites us to take a
second look. . . . They are devices that help establish
14
what Bullough called psychical distance; they call for
and serve that disinterested attitude in which Kant
sought the key to aesthetic appreciation" (67-68). For
Harries, the re-presentational and the "ontological"
functions are interrelated. When the frame itself is
dignified as an aesthetic object, it is "broken," and
art is debased to "an abstract art for art's sake" (80-
81). Indeed, Harries wants an aesthetic approach that
proscribes "ambiguity" (89) .
Gestalt Theories
The modern aesthetic theories of both Caplan and
Harries are indebted to the principles of Gestalt
psychology in which the perception of shape is linked to
the identification or "the grasping of generic
structural features" (Arnheim, Visual Thinking 29). In
Visual Thinking. Rudolf Arnheim argues indeed that
"Shapes are concepts" (27). Shape recognition, however,
depends upon several factors, among them a simply
organized perceptual pattern, its configuration
"clearly" distinguished from its surroundings (28-29).
This is the hypothesis behind the enormously influential
Gestalt notion of "figure and ground." In those
aesthetics based on a similar rationale, the cognizance
of such structures as frames is activated by first
15
discerning them as precisely differentiated from their
settings. In The Hidden Order of Art Anton Ehrenzweig
explains that this process is accomplished through the
workings of "two kinds of attention," conscious and
unconscious. What is immediately apparent to the
conscious awareness becomes significant— the positive,
protrusive "figure" on a neutralized or negative,
indistinguishable background (21).
The schematic figure/ground concept is of momentous
importance to a critical understanding of framing
performance in the literary text. We would expect that
what scholars regard as the frame’s textual prominence
resembles the gestalt "figure"; it may, for instance,
and according to one commentator, "supply a determinate
context to an otherwise undeterminate beginning"
(Ullrich 204). For many literary critics, the frame is
an egregious form which stamps its presence by other
means. John Frow, for one, believes the frame to be
materially embedded, an "enclosure of the internal
fictional space" which excludes reality, not just a
mental projection (quoted in Ullrich 127). David
Ullrich argues similarly that the frame separates two
spheres of reality, the non-aesthetic and the non-
fictive from the aesthetic and fictive (33), or "the
point where the modeling of the fictive universe and the
16
experiential universe intersect" (Ullrich 183-84). As a
result, the aesthetic object is set off as "field" (35).
The frame's constitution as a "hierarchical ordering
device" (219) is synonymous with this decisive position.
For most aesthetic-based theoreticians, the framing
concept equates with that of perimeters. When these are
not clearly discriminated as figure and ground, or where
there are no discernible peripheries, our perceptions
are unsettled.
Social Science Theories of Knowledge Representation
The next set of frame theories, those advocated
under the social sciences aegis, are concerned with the
social conditioning of knowledge representation. Though
relatively limited in number, they have had a notable
impact on our appreciation of the framing phenomenon.
The disciplines most responsible for promoting research
in frame theory are anthropology, sociology, and
artificial intelligence. The studies offered here as
requisite to this inquiry are predicated on the
hypothesis that the cognitive frame is an organized body
of information based on conventional or stereotypical
experience, and including the individual's. The
cognitive frame is believed to acclimate the observer to
17
the situational known as opposed to the unknown, and is
presumed to be adaptable to changes in circumstance.
In her 1979 article "What's in a Frame? Surface
Evidence for Underlying Expectations," Deborah Tannen
surveys the origins of various theories about frames, or
"structures of expectation" (138),2 The earliest of
these, in 193 2, is psychologist F. C. Bartlett's use of
the term "schema" to describe an "organized setting,"
the ways in which "'the past operates as an organized
mass . . . (quoted in Tannen 138-39, emphasis added).
The term "frame" itself is traced back to Gregory
Bateson's work in anthropology, specifically the essay
"A Theory of Play and Fantasy," first published in 1955
and reprinted in a 1972 collection, Steps to an Ecology
of Mind. In his preface, Mark Engel comments that the
governing principle behind the work is "that we create
the world that we perceive . . . because we select and
edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about
what sort of world we live in." For Bateson, one's
"perception-determining beliefs" are the counterpart of
"epistemological premises" (vii).
Bateson sought to construct a philosophical
apparatus which would contain the more general notion of
"frames." He arrived eventually at a premise of frame
and its associated sense of "context," which he
18
construed as psychological in origin. The analogy to
which these notions are comparable is the "physical" one
of the picture frame, and "the more abstract . . .
analogy of the mathematical set." Thus, a psychological
frame is ultimately defined as being or delimiting "a
class or set of messages (or meaningful actions)" (186),
or a construct which enables us to distinguish between
one phenomenon and another.
A problem arises in these attempts to segregate
logical categories, one of sorting the "excluded" from
the "included." The inability to do so results in the
"paradoxes of abstraction" (190) to which Bateson calls
attention. But though he appreciates the question at
hand, Bateson does not confront either its broader
implications or its resolution in his essay. He did,
however, provide general propositions for frame studies,
considered a valuable contribution by students of the
genre.3
Tannen also mentions the work of C. O. Frake in
anthropology, whose 1977 paper "Plying Frames Can Be
Dangerous: Some Reflections on Methodology in Cognitive
Anthropology," takes as its chief premise the view that
frames are "interactive," not static phenomena (143).
Frake opposes the commonly held idea in anthropological
circles that frames are "fully-formed 'cognitive
19
ideolects'" which easily lend themselves to description
or can be invoiced at will. He stresses that frames are
dynamic models for social interaction, and ends his
treatise with a metaphorical image of human beings as
"mapmakers" whose "'culture does not provide a cognitive
map, but rather a set of principles for mapmaking . . .
'" (quoted in Tannen 142).
Probably the most instrumental of frame theorists,
Erving Goffman, a sociologist, conducted most of his
research from that perspective and its psychological
underpinnings, although he concentrates on the ways in
which we as individuals perceive circumstances rather
than on "macrosociological" issues.4 Nevertheless, his
studies are pertinent, not only because they are
arguably the most comprehensive examinations of framing
activity available, but also because much of what he
writes about interpersonal communication bears on
literary frame concepts as well.
Goffman acknowledges an obligation to Bateson for
both his use of the term "frame" and his initial
understanding of the phenomenon to which Bateson calls
attention in "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," the
question of discriminating between "serious" and
"unserious" behaviors (Introduction 7). Goffman's
position, however, is not so much "philosophical" as
20
"situational1 ' (his own term) , by which he means "a
concern for what one individual can be alive to at a
particular moment. ..." The question he asks is,
"What is it that's going on here?" (Introduction 8).
Thus his more immediate interest is in the strategies
which aid individuals to interpret events, thereby
producing the semblance of social order (Introduction
10; Berger, Foreword xvii). His work extends beyond
that single challenge, however, finally addressing
itself to "the relation of appearances and performances
to 'realities'" (Berger, Foreword xiv).
For Goffman, a "frame" or "primary framework" is a
culturally-coded form of common recognition, a socially-
generated "schemata of interpretation" which assists the
individual to grasp what would otherwise be
incomprehensible. Aside from their application to
discrete episodes affecting the individual, primary
frameworks are also essential constituents of group
Culture. A group's "framework of frameworks" is its
"belief system, its 'cosmology'" (27). Theoretically
then, frameworks provide us with a precedent for
decoding or interpreting any culturally-embedded
activity.
The phenomenon he calls "keying," a fundamental
axiom in Goffman's landmark work, has to do with shifts
21
in the framed situation. "Keying" is the transformation
or "reworking" of a "strip" or piece of activity so that
participants in an event can understand the experience
which is being in some sense transformed. Keying
"intendedly leads all participants to have the same view
of what it is that is going on . . . " (84) . That is,
the individual is signalled at both the beginning and
end of a specific circumstance as to its meaning.
Goffman's notion of keying is related to Bateson's
"metacommunicative" levels of abstraction. This plane,
which includes the "metalinguistic," precedes denotative
communication and determines how a message is coded,
received, and interpreted by the parties involved.
Unless these superior levels are understood to be
operative, the import of a message is easily mistaken,
since its denotative implications appear to conflict
with the individuals' visible behaviors. Bateson based
his observations on animal conduct. In one zoo
encounter, he witnessed two young monkeys "playing" at
what appeared to be combat, but actually was not. He
concluded that this could only happen if the
participants had agreed on some metacommunicative level
that their evident ferocious activity was indeed play
("A Theory of Play and Fantasy" 179). As Goffman puts
it, keying enables us to distinguish that "what appears
22
to be something isn't quite that, being merely modeled
on it" (45). Keying is primarily indicated when an
event is detached from a "natural schema" where its
significance would be otherwise unambiguously received.
We would hardly misinterpret a wedding ceremony as
"play," for example, but we might misconstrue a game of
checkers as "fighting" unless there are overriding
metacommunicative signals to the contrary (45). Goffman
holds in common with many theorists the assumption that
any activity overtly signals when it is moving from one
plane to another. The bracketing mode is a comparable
orientation in aesthetic-based dicta.5
Artificial Intelligence Models
Artificial intelligence models, often used as the
bases for text grammars, also depend upon schematic
principles of salience. Though inherently restricted,
static models, artificial intelligence paradigms are
frequently resorted to in literary analyses of framed
texts. Several cogent reasons for their application are
generally admitted. For one, as I have noted,
artificial intelligence theories provide the
philosophical underpinnings for some current textual
studies. For another, artificial intelligence research
theoretically overlaps with that of other framing
23
research conducted under the related auspices of
discourse and literary theory. Its relevance to the
work of these disciplines is substantiated, in part, on
its definition of frame as a structure which ascertains
stereotypical Conditions. This interpretation is
integral to cognitively-based explanations of framing
activity, particularly where those operations are
perceived as modifying textual transactions and reader
comprehension. (David Ullrich also makes a case for the
writer's assimilation of such models in the composition
process).6 Tannen's article provides a competent basic
introduction to artificial intelligence theory. I will
supplement it with a few contributions of my own, but
her presentation is certainly adequate for the reader
who wishes a tidy survey.
In his preface to the 1980 anthology Frame
Conceptions and Text Understanding. Dieter Metzing
points out that frame concepts in artificial
intelligence work were first applied to "vision and
natural language processing" and later to story
comprehension (N. pag.). The "frame conceptions" of the
title are "taken as a name for a number of tentative but
productive and influential ideas on knowledge
representation, information processing, recognition and
reasoning processes" (N. pag.).
24
Metzing's first contributor is Marvin Minsky, whose
"very influential article" (1975) is one of the earliest
describing the many facets of frame theory (Preface, N.
pag.)* Minsky defines a frame formally as "a data
structure for representing a stereotyped
situation. ..." and, since it comprises a nexus of
"nodes and relations," a corpus of frames having common
elements can be brought together in frame—systems (1).
According to Tannen, Minsky classifies textual frames
into four basic categories: "surface syntactic frames
('mainly verb and noun structures'), surface semantic
frames . . . thematic frames ('scenarios'), and
narrative frames (apparently comparable to Roger Schank
and Roger Abelson's scripts)" (142).7
As Minsky pictures his apparatus, the "'top levels'
of a frame are fixed, and present things that are always
true about the supposed situation, while the lower
levels have many terminals— 'slots' that must be filled
by specific instances or data" (1). Because it is so
constructed, Tannen characterizes Minsky's design as a
relatively static one, having its inception in computer
models. Scholars in artificial intelligence and
similarly directed research in text processing follow
Minsky in assuming the procedure to be a variation on
fitting what is told or experienced to a known framework
25
(62). That is, a relationship is presumed between the
text and an existing "knowledge base" (Metzing, Preface,
N. pag.).
Language Studies
Discourse Analysis/Linguistics Theory
The broad designation "language studies" includes
two representative research fields, discourse
analysis/linguistics theory and narrative studies. Both
disciplines are important to this discussion. In the
text-oriented research of both fields, framing
paradigms, generally speaking, are in keeping with the
idea of framing as an interpretive activity based on a
collective stock of knowledge. Both areas of study,
moreover, are considerably invested in orthodox notions
of framing as a globally controlling activity attended
by the fundamental criteria for hierarchy and linear
organization that viewpoint implies. The two fields are
also attentive to the textual effects of discursive
grammars. Since rhetorical complexities supply the
motive for literary analyses, we will start with a
perusal of discourse theory.
A "discourse system" can be defined as "the
totality of expectations shared by the members of a
26
speech community" (Pickering 10). Discourse theorists,
therefore, are interested in the connections between
language properties and their reification in speech. In
this body of work, framing operations are held to be
consonant with the systematic nature of communal
experience.
Dieter Metzing's research in text theory seeks to
combine the technicalities of framing and lexical
semantics [defined by Cruse as "the semantic behaviour
of words," or "the semantic properties of a lexical
item" (Preface xiii, 1)]. He offers the following
definition of framing: "Frames . . . consist of
(ordered) sequences of semantic representations
(propositions), and both are connected to corresponding
substructures (e.g. subframes, definition-chains)"
(321). An adjunct concept is the "prototype" (Tannen
140) and its instantiation in language. In this context
Fillmore employs the term frame "'for any system of
linguistic choices . . . that can get associated with
prototypical instances of scenes' and the word scene for
'any kind of coherent segment of human beliefs, actions,
experiences or imaginings'" (quoted in Tannen 143).
Similar strategies for identifying the familiar and
separating it from the unfamiliar inform John Gumperz's
interdisciplinary communication studies (including
linguistics, artificial intelligence, and anthropology),
which take into account the force of cultural
prerogatives. Gumperz strives for a comprehensive
statement of verbal communication, lamenting that "we
are still far from a general theory which integrates
what we know about grammar, culture and interactive
conventions into a single overall framework of concepts
and analytical procedures" (Introduction 4). His
account of frame function is as follows:
In determining what is meant at any one
point in a conversation, we rely on
schemata or interpretive frames based
on our experience with similar
situations as well as on grammatical
and lexical knowledge. . . . Such
frames enable us to distinguish among
permissibly interpretive options.
Among other things they also help in
identifying overall themes, in deciding
what weight to assign to a particular
message segment and in distinguishing
key points from subsidiary or
qualifying information. (21-22)
Other prominent research in discourse analysis is
that of Teun Van Dijk and Walter Kintsch. Their oft-
cited work, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension
(1983), posits a "framework for a processing model" of
discourse (346).8 Frames are spoken of in a context of
global knowledge as "conventional schematic structures"
or "set(s) of characteristic categories" (366), or as
"knowledge structure[s] which [tie] together information
in memory" (307) . The authors note that theories of
28
"Scripts (and with them schemata and frames)" have
evolved since the seventies, "having changed from fixed,
prepared structures to context-sensitive entities that
are constructed in response to some task demand."
Currently, they write, "the script as a fixed knowledge
structure is no longer useful. instead, we must
consider how context-sensitive scripts can be generated
on demand out of some flexibly organized knowledge
system" (310). Still, Van Dijk and Kintsch argue that
text schemata, particularly of the narrative kind,
"assign some superstructure to the text" in the form of
a "general knowledge . . . or metaknowledge about likely
sequences of events and actions, about motivations and
goals, about plans and interests, on the one hand, and
procedural knowledge about discourse strategies and
discourse structures on the other" (308).9
Narrative Studies
The predilection for schematic orientations in
discourse theory and other disciplines is pandemic in
narrative studies themselves, as a capsulized survey of
foremost theorists and their work attests. Tzvetan
Todorov is a major contributor whose work is often cited
in the critical literature. Although he does not allude
to it as such in The Poetics of Prose (1977), his
29
discussion of the phenomenon he calls embedding. defined
simply as the act of inserting a second story within a
first, suggests a framing function. He likens embedded
structures to syntactic forms of subordination, and
notes that linguists also term this grammatical feature
"embedding" (70). Embedding reaches its "apogee," says
Todorov, in the "process of self-embedding, that is,
when the embedding story happens to be, at some fifth or
sixth degree, embedded by itself" (72). In this event
the narrative "lays bare" its own devices.
Claiming that embedding is "an articulation of the
most essential property of all narrative," Todorov
argues that the "embedding narrative is the narrative of
a narrative" (72). Todorov asks a fundamental question
about the embedded narrative itself: why does it need to
be contained within another narrative? He answers this
query by proposing the issue of its insufficiency; that
is, the embedded narrative necessitates an extended
context. He explains this "curious property" of
enclosed narratives in the following way:
Each narrative seems to have something
excessive, a supplement which remains
outside the closed form produced by the
development of the plot. At the same
time, and for this very reason, this
something-more, proper to the
narrative, is also something-less. The
supplement is also a lack; in order to
supply this lack created by the
30
supplement, another narrative is
necessary. (76)
This condition is likened to life and death: the
narrative act is tantamount to life; its absence is
death (74). Embedded narratives are therefore narrative
"machines" which must create new narratives both within
themselves, so that their characters can continue to
live, and peripheral to themselves, in a space where the
supplements they unavoidably create can be absorbed
(78). In this way plot symmetry, something like a
narrative "steady state" condition, is accomplished.10
The preeminence of Girard Genette in narrative
studies has likewise been frequently remarked. In a
recent review of studies in the genre, Robert L. Scott
ascribes premier status to Genette1s 1980 Narrative
Discourse. Genette thinks of stories as having binary
levels of operation. He thus demonstrates the
structuralist debt to both Aristotelian and Russian
formalist principles which explicate narrative texts in
terms of a dichotomy between chronologically ordered
naturally-occurring events (in Russian formalist terms
the "story," "fable," or fabula) and the "plot" (or
siuzhet in the Russian scheme), elsewhere defined as the
"'story-as-discoursed'" or the arrangement of those
events as told (Mosher 171). For Genette, this results
31
in the designation of narrative levels sequentially as
narrative 1, narrative 2, and so on.
Genette1s framing concepts are in keeping with this
taxonomy of narrative layers. In an example in
Narrative Discourse. Genette describes one narrative as
being "contained1 1 within the first, that is "the act of
narrating which produces the second narrative is an
event recounted in the first one." He defines the level
distinctions in the following terms: "any event a
narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately
higher than the level at which the narrative act
producing this narrative is placed" (228). Genette's
"diegetic level" refers to the recounted level in its
relationship to the diegesis. or "The (fictional) world
in which the situations and events narrated occur . . .
" (Prince, Dictionary 20).
In a subsequent "revision" of these earlier
theories, Narrative Discourse Revisited, published in
1988, Genette clarifies some of the confusion
surrounding his prior work and addresses issues in
narrative studies arising since the publication of
Narrative Discourse. However, he does not substantially
modify his existing system: the same "internal-external"
narration states detailed above are preserved.
32
The philosophical supposition which grounds
Genette's theory of "levels" in narrative discourse is
based on the distinction between "fictive" and "non-
fictive" in the reader's processing of text (Ullrich
45). I would point out that this idea has many
parallels. Its correlation, for instance, with
phenomenological aesthetics of framing is evident, as is
its affiliation with the seemingly remote sociological
theories of "keying" layers of discourse and register in
Goffman's work. The shared assumption in these views is
that planes of "reality" reveal themselves through some
normative mechanism readily implemented by the reader,
"naive" or otherwise.
In her 1981 piece, "Notes on Narrative Embedding,"
Mieke Bal construes the related phenomenon of embedding,
after Todorov, as occurring when two units of text are
subordinated to each other through an "irreversible"
transitional relationship, and when these two units can
be identified in "homogeneous narratological terms
. . . " (52, 44). These criteria except phenomena in
which no transitional juncture is implied,
juxtaposition, and all "heterogeneous units" (44).
Embedding results when a narrative object "becomes the
subject of the following level. The superior level now
has an aspect which can be indicated by the prefix
33
meta-. In other words, whenever a narrative subject
becomes the object of a superior level, the superior
level becomes a metalevel (metatext or metanarrative)"
(45). According to this logic, embedding discourse is a
"primary discourse" (54).
In her later work Narratoloav. Bal undertakes the
idea of "framing" from several perspectives. She
denotes the more generalized notion, the "frame of
reference," as "information that may with some certainty
be called communal" (82). Bal's frames of reference
conform to sociological and artificial intelligence
theories in that they refer to an acknowledged reality
or set of stereotypical characteristics which are more
or less accepted as a matter of course. More extended
references to framing follow in Bal's explication of
embedded narrative texts. Bal concurs with Todorov in
arguing that the connection between a primary narrator's
text and a text embedded within it (defined as the
"actor's text") is hierarchical in the same way that a
subordinate clause is dependent on a main clause.
Applying this axiom to her theory, Bal reasons that the
narrator's and actor's texts are not of equivalent
ranking. This hierarchical positioning, like Genette's,
is signified by "the fundamental principle of level"
(142-43). Within this purview, frame texts are
34
understood as narrative texts in which complete stories
are recounted at second or third levels of remove.
Relations between embedded and primary texts are of
several kinds.11 In one form a "loose" connection
exists between the primary and subsequent texts. In
their engagement with this type of text, readers become
so caught up in the fabula of the embedded text, the
"series of logically and chronologically related events
that are caused or experienced by actors" (5), that they
lose sight of events in the primary narrative (143).
Bal considers two other complementary relations,
between primary and embedded fabula. In the one the
embedded text acts to explain the primary story, and in
the other it resembles it. In the first the parallel is
stipulated by the actor narrating the embedded story; in
the second case exegesis is usually deferred to the
reader or is insinuated in the fabula (144).
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's 1983 Narrative Fiction is a
treatise of contemporary speculation on the subject,
ranging from the Anglo-American New Criticism through
Russian Formalism and French structuralist as well as
phenomenologist approaches. Rimmon-Kenan equates text
accessibility with lucidity, realized through "codes,
frames, Gestalten familiar to the reader" (122). The
reader's task in "making sense of a text" (12 3) obliges
35
him or her to integrate its components with each other,
a process entailing a resort to paradigms of cohesion
with which the reader is conversant, one of which is
framing. She explains: "To use a frame, it seems to me,
is to ground a hypothesis in a d&ia-vu model of
coherence (or, put differently, to form a hypothesis by
reference to such a model)" (123). The emphasis is on
"the integration of data" or information, as well as on
the closure of hermeneutic gaps in the text (124, 128).
Rimmon-Kenan argues that these "models of
coherence" are acquired either from "'reality'" or
literature: "Reality models help naturalize elements by
reference to some concept (or structure) which governs
our perception of the world" [chronology or causality
fall into this category] (124). Other reality models
are not naturally occurring but evolve from social
conditions as "generalizations or stereotypes ..."
(124); cultural codes are in this category. Literature
models, by comparison, are situated in literary
conventions.
In turning now to other narrative theorists who
work with literary framing itself, we enter areas of
study which may or may not test the supposition of a
plotted logic which reveals itself in structures of
signif ication.
36
On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and
published in 1981, is an interdisciplinary collection of
essays. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith's article
"Afterthoughts on Narrative" is seminal to this overview
of contemporary approaches. Herrnstein Smith assails
the insufficiencies in current narrative theory, which
she accuses of retaining a "naive Platonism" (209). She
protests the "two-leveled" structuralist narrative model
of story and plot, or "fabula" and "sjuzhet," alleging
that it is formulated on a flawed concept of dualism in
the language paradigm which provides its justification
(221). Such sanctioned correspondences between
"language" and "the world" are insupportable (222) .
Herrnstein Smith's criticisms are erected on the primary
objection that the hypothetical plot summary or "ideal"
storyline which narratologists extract from any given
narrative, and which they attribute to evidence of
"deep-plot structure," is made out to be
independent of any of its versions,
independent of any surface
manifestation or expression in any
material form, mode, or medium— and
thus presumably also independent of any
teller or occasion of telling and
therefore of any human purposes,
perceptions, actions, or interactions.
(212)
In short, there is no "ur" model; narratives issue
from and are constrained by "multiple interacting
37
conditions" (214, 222). Smith concludes that "an
alternative to the current narratological model would be
one in which narratives were regarded not only as
structures but also as acts. the features of which— like
the features of all other acts— are functions of the
variable sets of conditions in response to which they
are performed" (227-28).
John Barth's remarks in an address on framing also
appearing in 1981 provide a digest of framing features,
with a more detailed estimate of literary exploitations
of the device. For Barth, the stories-within-stories
phenomenon is a self-referential one, a metacommentary
on narrative's generic capacity for self-reflexivity.
It invariably suggests "stories about stories and even
stories about storytelling" (47) . Like the fantastic
literature to which Borges links framed texts, framed
stories "disturb us metaphysically" (59). Barth also
recognizes variant framing devices such as the classical
"invocations" to the muses, an example of "quasi
framing" (52). But he goes further in anatomizing a
framing order. He first distinguishes between
"incidental or casual frames and more or less systematic
frames"; these are not hard and fast divisions but are
realized more or less along a continuum (51).
38
Next Barth directs us to a category of texts,
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron.
"in. which the framed stories are dramatically complete,
but the frame-story— the pilgrimage to and from
Canterbury; the retreat of ten young Florentine ladies
and gentlemen from the plague of 1348— is vestigial,
rudimentary, incomplete, or dramaturgically static"
(51). The ties between the framing and the framed
stories are "gratuitous" in this instance, which Barth
reckons the most freguently-occurring in framing
literature (56).
Barth further distinguishes between single-frame
tales such as Chaucer's and Boccaccio's, the rarer
examples of serial primary frames, and gradations of
narrative expansion beyond the second level, some as
labyrinthine as the eighth-century epic, the
Panchatantra, which contains "stories serially framed
within serial frames within a single frame" (52). These
stages of narrative involvement, as Barth sees it, are
not indiscriminately advanced, but are introduced
through incremental progressions of escalating
intricacy. The most complicated state of narrative
perplexity having been realized, the narrative reverts
forthwith to "home base," a "simple principle of both
showmanship and dramaturgy" absent, as Barth laments, in
39
the "standard frametales" (56). The condition that
Barth calls "dramatic logic," one in which climactic
(and anticlimactic) principles figure, is evident in his
assessment that "the inner tales" effect the plot or
plots of "the outer ones" (56). The inner tales bear a
"dramaturgical relationship", therefore, to the outer
ones, conceivably prompting their various complications,
crises, and resolutions (56).
Besides the "gratuitous" framestory, with its
seemingly random connections to subsidiary narratives,
Barth traces two other kinds of relation between framed
and framing stories. The second of these is "the
associative, thematic, or exemplary (or cautionary or
prophetic) relationship" (56). It is apparent from
Barth's remarks that a pointed "message" is discernible
in this mode, usually elucidated by the embedded story,
which appears to function as a moralizing vehicle for
the framing situation to which it is analogous.
Barth's third relation is the aforementioned
"dramaturgical" one, subdivided into "low-level, middle-
level, and high-level pertinencies" (57). Again,
keeping in mind his dictum that the inner tales bear on
the outer, it is not surprising that his inferences
about these relationships rest on that basis. Barth's
"low-level dramaturgical relation . . . portends a
40
general course of action in the frame-story," which
Barth rather vaguely explains differentiates it from the
"thematic" (57). In middle-level dramaturgical
connections, the enframed stories generally precipitate
the next principal event in the frame-story. Finally,
the "high-level" dramaturgical connection is congruent
with the "'inside' story's climaxing or reversing the
action of the 'outside' story" (57).12 In order for
this transaction to unfold, there must be a contiguous
link between the interior narrative and the framing
story. In the absence of this condition, and once
beyond the second degree of narrative involution, Barth
insists that any relation between consecutive levels of
narrative and the first is virtually inconsequential.
Barth ends his discussion of framing by turning his
attention to Todorov's work in narrative, specifically
his equating of narrative embedding with syntactic
embedding. Reasoning from these studies, Barth argues
that the homology between frametale structures and
syntactical embedding rests on the subordination
principle. While he avoids labeling this relation as
"causal," he still believes that the two structures are
"isomorphic" (61). Barth concludes his remarks by
suggesting that "frametales fascinate us perhaps because
their narrative structure reflects, simply or complexly,
41
at least two formal properties not only of syntax but of
much ordinary experience and activity: namely,
regression (or digression) and return, and theme and
variation" (61). Like embedded syntactical forms,
frametales are "multiple-delayed-climax structures"
(61), then, akin to "any activity whose progression is
suspended by, yet dependent upon, digression and even
regression of an ultimately enabling sort . . . " (62).
Barth's careful attention to the technicalities of
framed literature are a fitting end to this precis of
trends in framing research. I will now discuss the
appropriateness of these treatments to my own
enterprise, beginning with the aesthetic.
A Review of Current Framing Studies and Their
Implications for a Literary Theory of Framing
Narrative theories sustained by aesthetic
philosophies, though they differ on the nature of
framing functions, have in common the opinion that
frames facilitate the visibility of surface planes, a
central premise in traditional aesthetics. However,
some critics concerned with the ideological capacity of
all art contend that framing is not the benevolent
activity aesthetic-based theoreticians regard it as
being, nor does it "defamiliarize" the "real," but
42
rather, may obscure collateral values. One of the more
noteworthy among these commentators is Roland Barthes.
Barthes, writing in Image - Music - Text, singles
out the frame for its considerable ideological
potential, surmising that any framing structure composes
a self-contained "sign” which conveys explicit signals,
i.e. "Read me as a prefacing act" or "I comprise certain
parameters of the 'text'." Diderot's tableaux function
in a like manner, according to Barthes, to present "an
ideal meaning" (74). When Barthes speaks of the "ideal"
as it is represented in Diderot's art, he means the
ideological foundations of that performance.
Jacques Derrida's work similarly involves a
consuming interest in literature's political
implications, as is well known. Consequently, his views
of framing functions depart from the traditional. Any
mention of frame "borders" alludes to the very quandary
which entangles Derrida (who takes up the dilemma in
Truth in Painting). The assertion that textual
demarcations are well-defined is at the heart of an
epistemological question advanced in Derrida's work.
Derrida's concern is the circularity of any
definition of art, particularly the Kantian framing
concept, the parergon. In Kant's aesthetic, the
parergon equivalent is ornament: it is supplemental and
43
"exterior" to the actual field or ergon (56) and implies
a "lack" in that structure. [Derrida notes that
parergon "also means the exceptional, the strange, the
extraordinary" (58).] But Derrida poses a problem: what
if the pareraon is not simply a "surplus" feature, but
instead a vital nexus to the "lack" in the ergon's
interior? Assuming there is no deficiency, the ergon has
no need of a supplemental structure. We are confronted,
then, with a paradox: "The ergon's lack is the lack of a
parergon" (60), a condition which renders the latter a
requisite rather than a supplemental principle, since it
effects the very unity of the ergon. It is no wonder
that Derrida finds that he does not know "what is
essential and what is accessory in a work," for "the
|
whole analytic of aesthetic judgment forever assumes
that one can distinguish rigorously between the
intrinsic and the extrinsic" (63). The supposition held
by many aesthetic theorists, that the aesthetic field
denotes an inert space which can be effortlessly
dissociated from its site, looms as a critical issue for
frame theory. As Wallace Martin, summarizing Derrida's
conclusions, explains:
The frame tells us to interpret
everything inside it differently from
the way we interpret what is outside
it. But to establish this distinction,
the frame must be part of the picture
yet not part of the picture. To state
44
the rule that separates picture from
wall, or reality from fiction, one must
violate the rule. . . . (187)
Derrida’s findings are at the nucleus of problems
involving aesthetic epistemologies. It seems that when
we ask what art means. we involve ourselves in
tautological explanations. His inquiry into the
ontological bases of perception questions the receiver’s
pretensions to disengage parts from wholes. Derrida’s
theory therefore opposes Gestaltist assumptions that
elements are invariably separable. In his presentation
of Gestalt theory, Anton Ehrenzweig had earlier called
attention to the improbable idea that figure and ground
are factored in our consciousness. In reality,
Ehrenzweig informs us, "There is no decisive division
between the gestalt or figure and mere background
elements. The complexity of any work of art, however
simple, far outstrips the powers of conscious attention,
which, with its pinpoint focus, can attend to only one
thing at a time" (21). Thus we can never, apparently,
see both figure and ground simultaneously. We focus
either on the "positive" configuration denoted by a
line, or, "with an effort," on the "negative" figure
incised from the ground (22).
Similarly, MichaJL GjtowiAski, in discussing Roman
Ingarden's pioneering phenomenological aesthetic theory,
45
describes the literary artwork as like an object
produced by the perceptual process within an aesthetic
milieu, a procedure Ingarden calls "concretization"
(328). But G^owiftski admonishes that this scheme was
conceived as being implemented in the equivalent of
laboratory conditions, with no extraneous interference.
Only if such a situation is assumed, he says, "are we
entitled to accept that the aesthetic attitude, which is
a condition for concretization, is neatly isolated from
the elements of different orders and actually does not
enter into relations with them, that it is not
determined by Weltenschauungen [sic], social tendencies,
beliefs, generally called the cultural situation" (332).
In contrast to aesthetic hypotheses of framing,
theories derived from the social sciences fare better
because they have several appealing pragmatic features.
Though a terminology like "frames," "scripts," or
"schema" reveals their commitment to Gestaltist
paradigms of cognition, their socially-situated
orientation and acknowledgment of cultural coding in any
socially generated activity has a particular import for
our readings, namely, the appreciation of all literature
as social productions. Frake's assertion that frames
are dynamic and not static calls attention to a pivotal
cleft in the whole of frame theory, however, one which
46
could ultimately affect the means by which we apprehend
them. If frames are dynamic structures, then they are
necessarily relative and contingent media; if thought of
as static, however (like "picture frames" or some
mechanistic artificial intelligence models), then we may
regard their configurations and their functions as
expressly manifested and understood. The distinction is
of major importance to framed narrative interpretation.
I have mentioned one of the apparent drawbacks in
social science theories, that is, the reliance on overt
signalling to denominate the shifts between activity
spheres, with its concomitant presumption that spheres
are separated domains. The question then ensues, do
these models depend on the participant's conscious
awareness of the need to adapt the existing frame to new ]
circumstances or aberrant data? If this is so, then none
of these systems weighs the likelihood that nuances in
literary discourse in particular may escape conscious
detection; hence the possibility that static models,
however formulated, may actually produce an impoverished
reading. In his discussion of the "heuristic powers of
genre conventions," for example, David Ullrich quotes
text processing theorist Eugene Charniak, who states
that to comprehend a text is "'to fit what one is told
into the framework of what one already knows'" (84). In
47
the instantiation process, that is, according to another
source, "the frame produces a description of the object
being examined by substituting observed for predicted
values" (Kuipers 153). But how can the mechanism
responsible for determining values in the first place
generate substitutions for them? This is the Derridean
dilemma: the framing structure is part of the very
process it is supposed to monitor. Paradoxically, it is
responsible for determining the confines of, and any
innovations in, an observed field when it is itself
circumscribed by that field.1 3
Then too, as I pointed out above in my discussion
of aesthetic paradigms, the main difficulty with schema
theoretics or any thought system which assumes the
availability of "realities" or our reliance on them is
that digressions from a hypothetical mean or order are
taken to be anomalous rather than authentic gestures.14
With schema theorists too, the assumption persists that
frameworks remain distinct entities despite the mode of
application. Though social framing structures indeed
alter according to the "keying" of assorted "realities"
and cannot remain uniform, Goffman, for instance,
maintains that frame structures nonetheless facilitate
the discrimination of experience. I will add that as
long as the situation fits the participant's "frame"
48
view, that assumption may hold. Inevitably, the
blurring of experiential boundaries challenges those
presumptions, as Goffman implies in his discussion of
theatre models. When the mundane and staged worlds are
confused, and the deliberately constructed illusion
which sustains spectator involvement has been broken,
spectator disorientation results (142) .
The degree to which frameworks are themselves
illusive apparatuses is another knotty guestion. The
theoretical dependence upon the organizing principles of
schematic "structures of expectation" (Tannen 171) or
culturally organized knowledge is a debatable issue, an
axiomatic one for literary study. If it is indeed the
case, as Tannen observes, that schema or frames by
definition operate to create the environment in which we
interpret texts by selecting significant details, then
literary frames function similarly, and with the
augmented powers conferred on them by cultural
convention. If schema are culture-specific as several
scholars have found (Gelley, de Beaugrande, Tannen),
then they cannot be transcultural. We should be
cognizant, then, of the culture-specific factors that
inform our readings of texts. The culturally-determined
schema's capacity for blocking alternative modalities is
in this respect a liability. To what extent schema
49
impede our appreciation of plural realities, or whether
they collapse when confronted with antithetical models—
these are seminal queries which concern any exploration
into literary frames and their operations. Disposing
ourselves to accept the schema's certain presence binds
us to a particular cultural logic which thwarts any
search for more dispassionate approaches to literary
interpretation. In so doing, we allow a prejudicial
understanding of frames to impose its character on any
text of potentially multiple dimensions, a sense which
only frustrates that promise or reinforces the anomalous
cultural ideologies in which we are invested.
Artificial intelligence theorems, which have been
the target of protracted censure, are illustrative of
the finite applications of such exacting schematic
models to literary analysis. In one psycholinguistic
study by Elizabeth Bates, the author protests that
artificial intelligence investigations are "rarely cited
in either psychological or linguistic research— there
seems to be an assumption that such data are not
relevant to the description of real systems" (32). Even
so, Bates and researchers in artificial intelligence
surely fail to appreciate that context is a dynamic
phenomenon subject to the vagaries of human behaviors
and other stimuli. And, as we cannot expect machines to
50
reflect all the complexities of human response, so we
should not suppose them to accommodate the manifold
features of text processing.
In summarizing this work, and as I have argued, I
hope it is apparent that the handicap in schematic
approaches of any kind is that they tend to quantify and
measure what is in fact unmeasurable. The premise
behind schema theory is that thought patterns are
reified in organized configurations which can be
abstracted from their contexts and recovered as whole
entities. Such abstracts are reductionist in principle
and thereby limited in their usefulness, particularly
when applied to literature.
As for the notion of the stereotypical schema
itself, Robert de Beaugrande sums up the problems
associated with it in a recent article. First, "there
is no consensus on the quantity of schemas people use,"
nor second, on their "specificity." Third, "there is no
consensus on the origin and development of schemas . . .
no schema could be expected to contain or foresee every
variation" [i.e. in experience]. de Beaugrande also
points out the unpredictable character of differential
links within a schema: "Some components could be
necessary, some could be merely typical, and some could
be purely accidental ..." (52-53). Finally, and
51
perhaps most significantly, "tests indicate that people
in a culture don't always agree about what's necessary
or typical, not even for commonplace concepts ..."
(54) .1 5
For these and other reasons, de Beaugrande
concludes that "schema theory is being re-aligned, going
from a theory of application to a theory of development.
The structure of schemas is traced back to the ways
people understand and remember their experiences" (54).
Finally, as I have noted, Deborah Tannen's key concept
of frames as "structures of expectation" crystallizes
the difficulty. The question of whether such
structuring actually occurs is not debated by those who
apply schematic criteria to narrative. Despite these
detriments, the referents of social science framing
theories in social media makes them more pertinent to
textual interpretation in my view than the laboratory
models promoted in other fields.
Research emerging from the allied fields of
discourse theory and linguistics, two disciplines often
mentioned in tandem with artificial intelligence
studies, have similar encumbrances. The impulse in
schema theoretics to normalize text is a disadvantage in
discourse theory also. First of all, taxonomies and
typologies of any kind are spurious classifications
52
grafted onto a text which assume an "authentic order."
The stress on the normative in such plans also assures
that departures from a standard are considered atypical
or substandard. This diagrammatic approach, that is, to
narrative as a conceptual structure whose functions can
be plotted, eschews the iouissance of irony, accident,
paradox, or slippage, "unconscious" breakdown in the
narrator's purpose. Variables are assumed to be
incidental, or accidentals which drop out of the design
because they diverge from stipulated categories. Or
worse, textual "inconsistencies" are counted
"weaknesses" or authorial lapse. The norming bent also
endorses a preference for closure.
In short, the emphasis on the "ordered sets" of
actions which discourse "scripts" represent means that
the deviant is deemed an occurrence which needs to be
corrected for. Van Dijk and Kintsch cite research
showing that "If the actions of a script are presented
out of order, subjects tend to reorder them" (Strategies
of Discourse Comprehension 3 09-10). This view bolsters
the hypothesis that the reader's encounter with text is
never disinterested, especially when we consider the
authors' premise that "scripts serve a dual role, both
as cognitive cuing structures and as guides for the
allocation of attentional resources during
53
comprehension" (Strategies of Discourse Comprehension
310) .
The probability that textual events may in fact be
presented "out of order," and that this phenomenon may
be a naturally-occurring one, is not credited. In
effect, in the literary text, "error-making," in the
sense of a departure from a norm, may actually be the
norm. Hence, it is apparent that a system such as the
one described by Van Dijk and Kintsch, however flexible,
cannot justify textual information for which the reader
has no coefficient. It also does not address the
problem of materials which may contradict or refute the
reader's knowledge base. What reader strategies are
activated when encountering these?
In the final analysis, theories of this kind are
deductive, a priori programs which devalue textual
multivalence and overlook textual uniqueness. In such
quasi-Aristotelian designs, the well-made text is the
ideal. (As Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, discourse
models are hypothetic "Platonic" archetypes which
conform to no empirical text.) Applications like these
have much in common with structuralist assumptions that
language is "an autonomous, self-contained system" in
which the constituting elements are separate from their
54
manifestation. But as Anatoly Liberman contends in his
Introduction to Vladimir Propp's Theory
and History of Folklore, "a literary text as a verbal
message is governed by laws of its own. . . . [It is] of
course a system: its parts are organized in such a way
that they either call to mind what is absent from the
utterance (this is their associative, paradigmatic, or
metaphoric value) or refer to other parts in the same
text (this is their syntagmatic, or metonymic value"
(xx). "What is absent from the utterance" is the value
that Van Dijk and Kintsch's system does not really
account for. What is absent from the utterance must be
first recognized as absent by the reader, and then
annotated according to the reader's global knowledge.
If readers are not able to identify textual "gaps," they
cannot probe for withheld or concealed meaning. In
other words, a text's associative values depend upon the
presence of what Liberman calls in another context "the
common part" or the "invariant" (xxix). If there is no
such key, the association cannot be made.
Of equal importance, discourse theorists believe,
as I have previously remarked, that local and global
meanings are unambiguously interpreted. Van Dijk and
Kintsch's thesis, however, is "that understanding is not
purely passive analysis, but a constructive process.
55
Thus, the important role of top-down processing in
understanding also involves partial planning of
(expectations about) structures and meanings of
sentences and whole texts" (Strategies of Discourse
Comprehension 17). In Van Dijk and Kintsch's theorem,
hierarchical models mandate the collapse of stereotypic
presumptions at higher levels of generalization, which
means that new frames must be created to accommodate any
resulting irregularities because specific "incidentals"
cannot be integrated at reduced comprehension levels.
The "top-down" formula, however, disregards the
possibility that framing activity could conceivably
occur in submerged states of perception. Still, many
scholars are convinced that schematic paradigms of the
type found in artificial intelligence and discourse
analysis theorems offer more up-to-date and refined
framing theories and applications than those proposed in
other disciplines. Aside from the critical question of
the imposition of "hierarchy" and "top-down processing"
which these scholars argue is integral to text
processing, I suggest that the interpreter's enactment
of "constraints" may inhibit meaning alternatives.
Moreover, since their model posits that a textbase is
always instituted at local and linear levels, it does
56
not provide for the presence of variables at higher
planes in fictive discourse.
John Gumperz's description of an "interpretive
frame" as "a set of expectations which rests on previous
experience" (102) may characterize our approach to
framed narratives; it may explain our motives for
desiring a text to fulfill expectancies, and reading it
accordingly. Yet Gumperz's definition problematizes the
issue. If the frame is an "organizing principle . . .
[which] does not determine meaning but simply constrains
interpretations by channelling inferences so as to
foreground or make relevant certain aspects of
background knowledge and to underplay others" (131), how
are we to read a text against those expectations and
emerge with a fuller reading? More to the point, if a
frame does indeed sway interpretation, how can it not
circumscribe meaning?
Gumperz inadvertently calls attention to this
quandary in his discussion of interethnic communication.
Misunderstandings are common in situations in which
cultural differences are a weighted factor, namely
because speakers are unable to "negotiate a common frame
in terms of which to decide on what is being focused on
and where the [conversation] is going at any one time"
(185). The problems of "shared" background knowledge
57
and other "contextualization conventions" (204, 130)
with which he concerns himself are directly linked to
the total concept of operational frames which Gumperz
espouses. It seems to me that were we not predisposed
by these frames, we could enter into a relatively
disinterested communication, freed from a preconditioned
awareness, as it were.
Text processing, then, is not a simple matter, nor
does it easily lend itself to the imposition of
formulaic analysis and templates of cognitive
equivalence. Like most of the theories we have
examined, conjectures about discourse have their
collective basis in a belief that generic narrative is
fashioned by a well-defined, Aristotelian plotting.
This reductionist view is refuted by the presence in all
but the simplest narratives (and even some of these) of
energies that resist assimilation to fixed patterns.
The dynamics of any text involve numerous vortices and
trajectories, Some of which are mutable or subliminal in
their effect on reader consciousness. These operations
occur through the interaction of a text's various
"elements," whether in the customary groupings of plot,
character, setting, and so on as we, the community of
scholars, critics, readers, assign them, or in more
complex relations among, say, the semantic systems and
58
the lexical. Through the mediation of these intricate
activities, readers forge networks of interrelated
meaning unique to each individual's production. That
is, as a text is "constructed" by its author, and by our
apprehension in a plenitude of possible readings, so its
latent capacity to engender any number of
interpretations is theoretically infinite. Further, the
"schemata" rationale may explain why framing functions
are consistently overlooked in textual analysis. If the
reader assumes such a form exists, that is, as the
familiar preliminary "story" which introduces the "real"
one, then the frame is relegated to introductory status
and consequently devalued.
The frame's power to solicit conventions, thereby
overriding our discriminating faculties, often succeeds
in begging our most trenchant questions. Hence the
frequently remarked observation that an opening frame
narrative dramatizes conventional situations (as against
the "unconventional" scenes in the interior narratives)
is a likely but partial account of the inceptive
narrative's singular offices. By probing further the
relations between inaugural and sequential texts, we
often find that the very "stereotypic" circumstances
depicted are suffused with the catalytic force necessary
to disturb our presuppositions. If the opening frame
59
narrative actually obscures its content by exploiting
the reader's anticipation of a protocol, we profit by
encountering it under that apprehension. In sum,
discourse models are conceivably appropriate for
expository prose and certain kinds of truth or face-
value narratives with palpable signalling apparatuses.
However, given the capacity of their textual devices to
resist classification, literary narratives for the most
part do not conform to highly articulated discourse
models. Not every literary text is deliberately self-
referential or self-reflexive, but the propensity for
ironization which pervades the genre cannot be
overlooked.
As this cursory survey reveals, narratologists are
also largely situated by a formalist positivism. They
hold in common with scholarship in other fields a
predisposition to believe that "knowledge itself
coincides with an identification of form, and that such
form can be recognized and reconstructed by way of a
generative narrative 'grammar' ..." (Brodsky,
Introduction 4). Genre studies which consider narrative
"a primarily representational medium" diverge from these
formalist analyses with their proclivity for recasting
form into "referential meaning" (Brodsky, Introduction
5, 9) .
Commentary on Genette's work brings up several of
these timely issues. Alexander Gelley cites Paul de
Man's objections to "the ultraformalism of some recent
French critics," including Genette:
One of the most striking
characteristics of literary semiology
as it is practiced today, in France and
elsewhere, is the use of grammatical
(especially syntactical) structures
conjointly with rhetorical structures,
without apparent awareness of a
possible discrepancy between them. In
their literary analyses, Barthes,
Genette, Todorov, Greimas, and their
disciples all simplify and regress from
Jakobson in letting grammar and
rhetoric function in perfect
continuity, and in passing from
grammatical to rhetorical structures
without difficulty or interruption.
(as quoted, note 33, 487)
Donald Polkinghorne concurs, with several
additional assessments of structuralist positions:
The attempt by structural analysis to
dissect stories in order to reduce them
to formulas remains alien, if not
incomprehensible, to most readers of
fiction. The structural theory that
individual stories are generated by an
underlying set of static, atemporal
deep structures has shared the same set
of problems that have assailed many
deductive theories. For the
structuralists, problems arose when
they changed from describing the
structures that identify what all
stories have in common to accounts of
how and why stories are different.
Moreover, structural theories have
tended to overlook the surface
ambiguities of stories and to assign
only one structural description to
61
stories that have more than one
meaning.16 (93)
Perhaps because it is targeted to a literary
audience, Barth's explication of motives in framing
offers some hitherto unavailable insights. It also
reveals some vulnerabilities. Clearly, the embedding
process itself, with its compatible dramatic properties,
holds a certain fascination for Barth. However, his
concentration on these attributes deflects his attention
from the subtleties, and the latent dramatic
capabilities as well, in the "outer" or frametale
itself. In presupposing that the "primary" frame has no
dramatic merit of its own, being simply an orientational
device, Barth is inclined to dismiss it as deficient in
comparison to the mesmerizing pyrotechnics of the
"analogues" which succeed it (57).
His promotion of the incremental complexity
supposedly indispensable to heightened stages of
narrative development also nullifies the primary frame's
import as an elaborate composition in its own right.
With that proposal as a given, it is reasonable to
assume that Barth's "dramaturgical logic" can be
reversed; that is, that the outer tale can be understood
to compel the reader's reception of the inner narratives
by strategies to which we are possibly oblivious. In
dismissing the performance value of the primary frame in
62
favor of the dazzling artifices of (presumably more
complex) secondary narratives, Barth remarks that "no
sensible magician will likely open his performance with
his cleverest trick" (56) . Yet the primary frame may be
the trick!
To speak of the "logic" of frames, then, is to
validate their relative importance in a casuistry which
we initiate, a casuistry which ultimately confers a
magisterial authority on framing phenomena, effectively
granting them roles as "policing" agencies in the
narratives in which they appear. Or, to shift
metaphors, to talk of hierarchies of any kind is to
speak in an ecclesiastical language wherein literary
devices become symbolic of ascendant "offices" charged
with accountability and invested with jurisdictional
powers.
On the other hand, the critical bias which accounts
for the frame narrative as an inert aggregate inevitably
leads the commentator to assign it a conditional
meaning, activated only by tensions and events in the
inset narratives which it theoretically "contains."
This diminished view induces in turn the prevalent
belief that the frame itself is ancillary, a
supplemental artifact bearing a rhetorical resemblance
to the platitude. Approaches of this kind impair our
63
awareness of the frame's potential to enact or qualify
meaning beyond what are termed its immediate textual
borders. Because of the accent on the salient, or that
which is marked as notable in or by the text, the
pragmatic reader may disregard or underrate more subtle
phenomena. The risk is a formulaic reading which
represses the text's rhetorical, symbolic, and semantic
potency. By the same token, the authority given to
hierarchy screens out relationships which may be more
likely inferred as complementary; it obscures other
feasible patterns in a text. It also rank orders
narratives in value terms as "primary," "secondary," and
so on.
Most framing theory thus privileges a sequence of
embedded narrative structures, a trend which, as we see
in John Barth's theories, identifies profundity with
sequential order. This partiality for incremental
elaboration unduly sanctions interior narratives,
granting them an eminence which causes them to be
received as more replete or as narratives in which the
core meaning resides. Because of their distance in both
time and space (including textual time and space) from
the containing narrative, embedded narratives may
conversely be rationalized as epistemologically
subordinate or dependent on the "main" narrative for
64
significance. Or, a framing narrative may be discarded
as embryonic or fragmentary discourse, an atrophied
narrative by comparison. Subordination is also
considered an irreversible condition by some scholars.
The theories we have been examining in general are
susceptible to the idea of frame as a literal and
material phenomenon, a tangible device with visibly
traceable functions rather than an implicitly ironized
one. As a result, these analyses take for granted a
more or less conscious process generated through reader
response to overt signals articulated by textual
structures. That framing devices may be conventionally
and culturally determined is plain. But their faculty
as value-laden and ideological vehicles has not been
duly conceded.
Finally, current framing theory's tendency toward
textual reduction means that a ludic and unstable
textual field with inexhaustible planes of meaning
dwindles to one which announces a blatant intent.
However, Herrnstein Smith's declaration that narratives
emanate from "multiple interacting conditions" means
that they unfold in a fluid medium properly understood
as an "act." That is, a text is not a static entity but
a performance. Detaching framing narratives from their
adjacent content ruptures the textural relations which
65
are woven by that performance. The assumed presence of
a dynamic principle therefore entails looking more
closely at textual semiotics and the valences of
individual texts as part of any interpretive strategy.
In this connection, Mieke Bal points out that certain
textual phenomena, such as heterogeneity, lack of
transition, and juxtaposition frustrate "homogeneous
narratological terms" ("Notes on Narrative Embedding
44"). But the very intransigent phenomena she names
should be accounted for in any tonic approach to frame
theory, since they are generally innate to textual
activity and production.
The mutual affinities among aesthetic, social
science, and language models demonstrate that they are
established on theories of perceptual techniques which
empower the viewer, using preconceived knowledge, to
isolate and classify the phenomena in undifferentiated
fields of observation. What is projected to the
consciousness, channelled through "bracketing,"
"keying," or analogous Gestaltist procedures, is what
the observer must attend. Schematically-oriented models
in these disciplines, therefore, whatever their
disposition, ultimately succeed in positioning a
dominant subject and subject matter in contrast to the
claims of non-representational art in particular to
66
dislocate such values. Whether the text is understood
as a static artifact whose aesthetic planes are
accessible to bracketing operations, or from the social
scientific viewpoint as essentially a socially situated
performative activity, its properties are considered
autonomous, high-profile attributes which function
according to hierarchical, linear criteria. Both
approaches are promulgated on a separative principle
which defines a phenomenon as egregious on the basis of
its surface dissimilarity from other, seemingly alien
forms. Both approaches may incline us to overlook
meaning in discrete phenomena in favor of the weighted
mass of information, the bulk paradigm. Both strategies
accept the ascendency of cultural values and cultural
preconceptions. Both allow a dominant subject matter to
color our interpretations at the expense of the
understated and allusive.
Derrida has uncovered the fundamental paradox in
prevailing frame theory. Expressed as a question, we
might ask, how can the framing components which are held
to differentiate ontological levels or spheres also
integrate them? In the case of literary texts, do any
individual text patterns escape the force of the
cognitive construct we call "frame," saturated as it
theoretically is with a culture-specific epistemology?
If frames are indeed precursory to the text, by
tradition the product of an idiosyncratic creative act,
can we learn to read framed works differently?
I will argue that to read a text against our
cultural conditioning is an act of politicization. In j
other words, resituating the reader's viewing dynamic
amounts to a political conversion. The key lies in a
reading strategy which dismantles culturally conditioned
power centers, appearing in the text as dominant foci of |
meaning, and liberates dispersed nuclei of energy from
their subjection to discourses of prerogative.
Decentralizing the text by transcending hierarchical and
linear criteria is the first step. Such culturally- j
mandated systems of causal connection permit the
hegemony of the validated subject by suppressing vacuums
in which alternative centers of meaning can exist.
These cruces have the capacity to impugn received social
values and challenge the stability of the inviolable
subject. They unseat dominant subjects through counter
rationales.
Certainly framed texts, because of their marked
structural design, invite a logical reading. But in
I
order to decenter the containment of their subject
matter, we must first dislodge it from the
subject/object dynamic of traditional Western thought
68
and its complement, a linear/hierarchical reading which
reinforces the subject supremacy of racist politics.
The diffused text rearranges textual power centers in
order to admit marginalized subject matter and override
representational space. The commonplace Western idea of
an objective history must be set aside, then, in order
that we may question instead the purpose in this text
before us, and inquire, who "owns" that purpose? Like
Goffman, we must ask, "what’s going on here?", but we
should avoid seeking the answers in our stock of
conventional knowledge. I am advocating, then, a change
in the balance of power. To read hierarchically, to
read as "container and contained" is to read, in effect,
imperially. If reading hierarchically and linearally
sanctions an institutionalized cultural logic, disabling
that logic will reconstruct a text which authorizes
other subject sites. Thinking of texts in optional ways
as having a multiplicity of dispersed centers and
therefore of principles, consents to a pluralism which
frustrates the primacy of voice position and ranked
social monopolies. Hierarchical readings, in essence,
are incompatible with the text pluralistically
considered. A reading unfettered by hierarchal
standards then, enfranchises an alternative
"authenticity," a countertext.
69
It is in this sense that I am working in the
deconstructionist mode. On its surface, the framed text
invites us to read it as "container and contained."
Only by reading against that relation, by departing from
a hierarchical ordering which underlies many framing
theories, can we appreciate the politics of the framed
text. More often than not, these texts challenge
entrenched social values. By processing framed texts as
they are usually read, we may be mislead by the outward
textual contours themselves into accepting their
"strategies of containment." In seeking to escape
Western-oriented text processing, however, we embrace
the text's radical gestures toward a politics of
diff&rance and more readily acquiesce to its
"subversive" operations.
In this respect, several areas of the framed text
cry out for more meticulous scholarship. Besides the
critical issue of the structuring of framed narratives,
for instance, we can more carefully scrutinize the
nature of frame narrators and their audiences.
Characters who exercise authority over the narration of
others' stories have a formidable power. More
penetrating explorations of their properties relative to
that office and to the discharge of their privilege
should render fruitful insights into the frame's
70
performance. Further, the culturally saturated controls
which inhibit the different sign systems in framed
texts, and the vistas which open to us when we divest
ourselves of traditional race, gender, or class
sympathies are but a few terrains which invite more
painstaking study.
In the search for alternative reading strategies,
we turn now to scholars associated with the "new
historicism" school for direction. Their critique of
narrative logics offers some clues to a revisionist
theory of reading framed texts. Critics of historical
narration, among others, are attracted to the cogency of
plotting, both as narrative characteristic and in terms
of the plot's potential to nullify discontinuities which
loom in explanation. Plot satisfies the readerly desire
for the seamless, the infrangible narrative. A framed
plot in particular exerts a coercive force on both
critic and reader, secured by our cultural homage to
hierarchy. Hayden White's influential commentary and
that of like-minded critics arguing from the vantage
point of the new historicism hold in common the belief
that hierarchies and irreducible categories of thought
obscure relations, molding and shaping our views so that
we are blinded to other prospects, including possible
insurgent functions such as the potential displacements
71
of signifiers and the subsequent overthrow of the
conventions inherent in their ties to particular
meanings. Certainly, according to White, the narrative
"plot" is more than artless event.
Because I am persuaded that White's position is
fundamentally sound, I hope to demonstrate the frame's
instability as a control mechanism. Given what X
propose is its tendency to dissolve into its
surroundings, might the frame work, for instance, as
palimpsest rather than as the bracketing form it is
often taken to be? As palimpsest we have a text
continuously being reconstituted out of its own
elements, somewhat like the proverbial phoenix, a
semiotic field of colliding energies. With that idea in
mind, let us reassess some celebrated frame-texts, being
attentive to the kinds of queries suggested by such an
approach and availing ourselves of the opportunities for
textual reconstruction elided by the present species of
explications.
1. Though Angela Moger's work straddles narrative
studies and discourse theory, it has an aesthetic logic.
In her view,
The frame not only makes strange, it
estranges; that is, it separates the
beholder from the object under
scrutiny. To put it another way, it
brings about a gap or interval between
the phenomenon and the apprehension of
the phenomenon. . . . Where the framed
story is concerned, the message suffers
alienation from its own delivery. A
wedge is driven between the narration
and the narrated. (Working Out (of)
Frame(d) Works 13)
Discourse theorists are also attracted to the idea
of an aesthetic model which will account for framing
activity. John Frow's 1986 work is informed by a
Marxist approach to discourse analysis, while also
taking into consideration a Derridean appreciation of
the equivocations of frame devices. His definition of
framing encompasses the belief that
the ordered systems of signification
governing the particular instance of a
text establish for it a specific mode
of aesthetic closure. This closure is
marked by the particular distribution
of the 'real1 and the 'symbolic' within
which the text operates at any one
time, and it defines its appropriate
degrees of fictionality and figurality
and the kinds of use to which it can be
put. I use the term frame to designate
this limit, at once material and
immaterial, literal and figurative,
between adjacent and dissimilar
ontological realms. The frame can be
anything that acts as a sign of
qualitative difference, a sign of the
boundary between a marked and an
unmarked space. If this definition
seems tautological it is because . . .
we know that the aesthetic space is not
an anthropological constant but is
constituted by a cultural recognition
.... (220)
73
David Ullrich's summary of applicable discourse
theory is also helpful here. In Ullrich's view, the
frame is a "metacommunicative, instructional guide"
which proscribes information, thereby averting possible
misunderstanding in communication (38). Since "frames
occur at the point where discourses shift," he envisions
frame-narrative as easing such textual ruptures (39).
In contrast to more traditional theorists such as Roman
Jakobson who conceive of frames as forms of linguistic
marking, or as "simple literary device[s]" (Ullrich
179), Ullrich, after Liisa Lautamatti, argues conversely
that framing is "a continuous process of
contextualization operating throughout a discourse"
(180).
Ullrich mentions that Steven C. Young's 1974
monograph, The Frame Structure in Tudor and Stuart
Drama. is the "earliest" theory of the literary frame of
which he is apprised (145). Young's guiding premise is
that dramatic frames have "structural properties"
(Preface iii) which enable them to be isolated from the
works in which they appear, and permit their description
as whole compositions whose relations to the entire play
can be profitably analyzed. Young holds that framing
mechanisms preserve planes of narration, often
substituting for extra-dramatic address and other
dramatic genres, though he advises that the frame must
not be broached in terms of its function, but rather
with regard to its situational context in the work (5).
The shifts in discourse modes to which Young alludes
involve conversion from monologue to dialogue or the
reverse. Ullrich denotes this shift as also
characterizing literary frames, in accordance with their
articulation of "reality" and "illusion." In the
twentieth century the dramatic frame becomes a visible
"mediating device" recalling the audience to its
spectating role and the "illusion it confronts ..."
(Young 183).
Other scholars argue for a more global explanation
of the textual frame, enlarging the parameters of the
framing structure to incorporate the extratextual. A
frame of this type is "metastructural." Lennard Davis
is representative of these positions. His definition of
frame, articulated as a conceptual "prestructure" which
infers the social, historical, and literary contexts
surrounding a given text (12), is influenced by the work
of Michel Foucault.
2. "Structures of expectation," a phrase coined by R. N.
Ross in 197 5, derives from the theory that
74
based on one's experience of the world
in a given culture (or combination of
cultures), one organizes knowledge
about the world and uses this knowledge
to predict interpretations and
relationships regarding new
information, events, and experiences.
(Tannen 138-39)
3. According to David Ullrich, frame theorists regard
Bateson's essay as "seminal" to frame analysis (41).
The term "frame" is habitually used by scholars in all
fields.
4. His critics charge that Goffman's approach is
circumscribed in that it fails to account for the
influence of tensions and variables beyond the framed
situation itself (Bennett Berger, Foreword xv). It is
felt that Goffman ignores the likelihood that the
availability of resources in interpersonal relations may
be inhibited by broader social constraints— "social
stratification," for example (Berger, Foreword xvi).
5. Some discourse research is influenced by the
sociological theories I have sketched here. Richard
Bauman's notion of frame (1977) follows Bateson (1972;
1955) and Goffman (1974). He describes it as a "defined
interpretive context providing guidelines for
discriminating between orders of message" (9-10). He
suggests that in dealing with framing phenomena we need
to ask ourselves the following questions: "What kind of
interpretive frame is being established, what does it
represent? How does the frame become constitutive of a
certain domain?" (11).
To the somewhat abstracted models we have been
surveying, Bauman adds an emphasis on the cultural
referents of framing and a stress on performance
elements. That is, a performance "event" is generated
from the interaction of multiple factors. Among them
are the "ground rules of performance," including the
cultural, ethical, and "social-interactional organizing
principles" that regulate performance conduct. Also
central to the organization of performance events are
"the participants, performer(s), and audience" (29).
Bauman concludes that
All framing . . . including
performance, is accomplished through
the employment of culturally
conventionalized metacommunication. In
75
empirical terms, this means that each
speech community will make use of a
structured set of distinctive
communicative means from among its
resources in culturally
conventionalized and culture-specific
ways to key the performance frame, such
that all communication that takes place
within that frame is to be understood
as performance within that community.
(16)
John Frow's definition of frame as norm embodies a
similar view: "The authority of the frame corresponds to
that of the generic conventions it establishes. It
works as a metacommunication specifying how to use the
text, what one can expect to happen at different stages,
and what to do if these expectations are not confirmed
(for example, how to switch frame)" (221).
6. See Ullrich's discussion of artificial intelligence
frame theory and its bearing on literary texts, 78-89.
Ullrich also mentions the pertinence of artificial
intelligence studies to the heuristic functions of genre
conventions (84).
7. Schank and Abelson's term "script," a causally linked
"knowledge structure" with a "predictability" factor
(Tannen 14 0-41), is another designation for frame.
8. In an earlier article, published in 1978, Van Dijk
and Kintsch describe their model, which details the
mental operations underlying text comprehension
processes. The model designates three classes of
operations:
First, the meaning elements of a text
become organized into a coherent whole,
a process that results in multiple
processing of some elements and, hence,
in differential retention. A second
set of operations condenses the full
meaning of the text into its gist.
These processes are complemented by a
third set of operations that generate
new texts from the memorial
consequences of the comprehension
processes. ("Toward a Model of Text
Comprehension" 3 63)
76
9. Van Dijk and Kintsch elaborate:
Many discourse types seem to exhibit a
conventional, and hence culturally
variable, schematic structure, an
overall form that organizes the
macropropositions (the global content
of the text). Thus, stories are
usually assigned a narrative schema,
consisting of a hierarchical structure
of conventional categories, such as
Setting, Complication, and Resolution
. . . . Such schemata we will call the
superstructure of the text, because the
term schema is too general and too
vague for our purpose. A
superstructure provides the overall
syntax for the global meaning, the
macrostructure, of the text. Language
users manipulate superstructures in a
strategic way. They will try to
activate a relevant superstructure from
semantic memory as soon as the context
or the type of text suggests a first
cue. From then on, the schema may be
used as a powerful top-down processing
device for the assignment of relevant
superstructure categories (global
functions) to each macroproposition— or
sequences of macropropositions— and
will at the same time provide some
general constraints upon the possible
local and global meanings of the
textbase. (Strategies of Discourse
Comprehension 16)
10. Apparent, for example, in Todorov's theory of the
text's return to "equilibrium" from a state of
"disequilibrium."
11. Bal substitutes the term "mirror" text for the
"mise-en-abyme" used by other narratologists to describe
the embedded narrative. She feels that the latter
expression implies a state of infinite regress
inconsistent with its exposition in language
(Introduction to the Theory of Narrative 146).
12. Barth's dramaturgical relations, it seems to me,
simulate the hierarchical levels of activity and top-
down articulation in artificial intelligence and
77
discourse models such as Minsky's and Van Dijk's, in
which "superstructures" and "macropropositions" antecede
the "local" meanings at the textbase.
13. The impasse is abstracted by Chris Sinha, who
writes, quoting Rumelhart, "'On the one hand, schemata
are the structure of the mind. On the other hand,
schemata must be sufficiently malleable to fit around
most everything . . . '" (151).
14. Daniel Cottom inscribes this issue in more
provocative terminology: "Cognitive psychologists may
speak of incongruity as the basis of humor, Gestalt
psychologists of figure-ground relationships, and others
of the effects of surprise, disparagement, or some other
trigger to psychophysical release. The problem is that
all such theories finally describe the deciding context
in terms of cultural norms or conventions that repress
the reality of political differences" (16). Deviancy is
seen as "simply a matter of form," the grounds for
Cottom's critique of Goffman (17).
15. de Beaugrande does not specify the kinds of data to
which he refers. Obviously, some textual features are
in common usage and would be recognized by most readers.
Among these, Britton and Black mention "titles,
abstracts, summaries, outlines, table[s] of contents,
and headings" (241).
16. To the structuralist approach Polkinghorne opposes
that of Paul Ricoeur, who regards narrative as "the
retrieval or repetition from the past of a part of human
experience. . . . Its form is related to the human
activity of recollection, not to an innate grammar"
(94) .
78
Chapter Two
Some Renowned Test Cases
The case studies in this chapter draw on five
novels with broad commonalities, not the least of which
is a framing construction, though they span the
nineteenth century and represent an eclectic subject
matter. The novels introduced here, Frankenstein
(1818), Wutherino Heights (1847), The Old Curiosity Shop
(1848), The Turn of the Screw (1880), and Heart of
Darkness (1898) are, moreover, consummate examples of
works with baffling features which have intrigued
critics and often divided scholarly opinion.1 My
selection of these works for analysis is accordingly not
a random decision, but one founded on pressing reasons.
Each of these novels is encased in a perplexing framing
apparatus. Though much discussed, these works present
singularly important examples of a complex framing
enterprise whose intricacies deserve closer scrutiny.
Thus these particular works represent a spectrum of
hypothetical problems in framing which can be addressed
briefly in the following points: 1) In any hierarchical
view of frames, the frame narrator's crucial role is
79
diminished when critical attention is focused on the
internal narratives; 2) Because prevailing frame theory
stresses hierarchy or progressive principles rather than
reciprocal ones: a) the fertile textual relations of
framed works are deferred in favor of a rigid
stratification; b) narratives are assigned rank order
value terms such as "primary," "secondary," etc.; c) one
narrative is privileged as carrying the burden of
content, or d) the stories are regarded as thematically
and structurally unrelated.
In the textual studies that follow, I will confine
my own commentary to the ramifications of the frame
apparatus itself, the enigmas these offer to scholars,
and some sampling of tentative resolutions. My thesis
pivots on the integral relation between a framing
narrative's content (including the relevancy and
functions of particular frame narrators), the tensions
between framing narratives and other narratives in the
textual arena, and some implications for the text's
thematics. In offering these dissident models, I
propose thereby to encourage an iconoclastic set of
expectations and strategies in the reader's encounter
with these works, that he or she might experience a
reading which skirts the tacit conventions of text
processing. In this elected corpus, I will also pay
special attention to the ways in which framed
80
narratives, conceived as hierarchically ordered and
organized, license what is privileged, and what is
obscured, slighted, or depreciated as a result.
Case Study I: "Frankenstein. or the Monster Within."
The decisive thrust of Robert Walton's narrative
and its pivotal bearing on Frankenstein as a whole may
go largely unrecognized in a superficial reading for
several reasons. Because of its embryonic appearance
and seemingly tame subject matter when compared to the
interior stories, readers could easily spurn it as
supplemental, a preliminary, introductory, or adjunctive
discourse of unremarkable import. However, Walton's
frame story actually binds events, characters, and
themes in the novel's exterior and interior narratives,
enabling the repletion of meaning. Walton's narrative
may be thought of as indexing the work's seemingly
disparate theses, the ways in which these are
implemented, and their social purport. In order to
appreciate these indispensable functions, readers need
to credit the narratives, not as segregated and counter
discourses, but as complementary and mutually impelling.
If read in the usual way that framed texts are read,
that is as serialized, atomized discourses, the naive
reader could conceivably emerge with any number of
traditional responses. But if the only apparently
81
competing narratives are understood as jointly
rehabilitating, the result is not the simple delineation
of contesting mores the novel may appear to be
espousing, but a radical realigning of social norms.
Mary Shelley's work is a classic example of the
popular novel whose Gothic trappings infer certain
hackneyed generic themes; if taken seriously, these
obscure its divergent veins of thought.2 Frankenstein
is also a classic "Chinese box" type of framed tale
whose presumably facile construction is often read as
follows:
Working from the outside in we start
with an epistolary narrative, the
letters of a Captain Walton to his
sister Mrs. Saville, who remains safely
at home in England while he seeks fame,
glory and the North Pole. His letters
announce the discovery and rescue of a
stranger— Frankenstein— who tells his
bizarre story to Walton, who then
includes it in his letters home.
Frankenstein's story contains yet
another, the confessions of the
monstrous creature he has created and
abandoned, and the Monster includes
within his own narrative the story of
the DeLaceys, the family of exiles he
tries pathetically and unsuccessfully to
adopt as his own. (Newman, "Narratives
of Seduction" 144)
Thus, on the assumption that the very structures of
framed texts demonstrate their teleological purpose and
linear progressive principles, the reader is pressed to
seek illumination from the inner narratives. Guided by
that premise, the reader of Frankenstein fastens on the
82
story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature, slighting
the import of Captain Robert Walton's own revealing
account of himself in the frame. Even when the
parallels between Victor Frankenstein, his "Faustian"
quest for knowledge and power and Walton's own are
granted, the complexity of Walton's position may be
lightly esteemed.
In his 1969 work, The Divided Self; A Perspective
on the Literature of the Victorians. Masao Miyoshi shows
himself to be fully conscious of the potential
sympathies between Frankenstein and Walton. He
acknowledges the novel's Gothic features with all its
imagery of excess, including Walton's scientific
expedition, analogous to Frankenstein's "Fausto-
Promethean adventures" (80) and commensurate with the
Monster's unquenchable curiosity. The considerable
rovings of both men, moreover, resemble "voyages of
atonement" [which Miyoshi relates to the pervasive
influence of "The Ancient Mariner" in Romantic
literature (87)].3 Like his double too, the divided
scientist, Walton is torn between his desire for human
fellowship and his solitary pursuit of knowledge. Thus
the engagement between the two men supports the Faustian
motif by showing its reflection in both.
If readers comply with the axiom of frames as
boundary markers which separate a frame narration of
83
lesser import from its exceptional internal content,
they may be tempted to set aside Walton's skimpy
narrative, and so the correspondence between his ethical
position and Frankenstein's is easily omitted. Hence,
while he concedes Walton's role as a second (but minor)
Frankenstein, Miyoshi concentrates on the more
pronounced relationship between Frankenstein and the
Monster. In ignoring the subtle clues which signal
Walton's vulnerability to the same quests which engross
both scientist and creature, however, readers miss the
opportunity to assess this character in greater
possibility. For example, Miyoshi observes that the
details of the Monster's beginnings, existence and
ensuing guilt "are too strange to be believed" (85) by
those who are privy to them. Yet Walton himself is a
bizarre figure, in truth one of Mary Shelley's "hideous
progeny" ("Author's Introduction" 2 64). His voyage to
the North Pole, "the seat of frost and desolation," is
one his sister regards as ominous (269). Like
Frankenstein's, Walton's venture is driven by "ardent
curiosity" and an appetite for arcane knowledge— the
hope to confer on all mankind an "inestimable benefit"
by discovering a passage to the pole or by probing the
magnet's enigma.4 Like Frankenstein too (and the
Monster), Walton— a would-be poet— is fascinated with
language. But significantly, the capacity for madness
84
is latent in all three— Victor Frankenstein, his
creature, and Walton. Frankenstein recognizes this
tendency in Walton when they first meet: "'Unhappy man!
Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the
intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale,
and you will dash the cup from your lips!'" (284). The
scientist certainly perceives Walton, the "narratee" as
well as the narrator in a frame situation, as a timely
figure for instruction. He tells him, "'I do not know
that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you;
yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same
course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have
rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an
apt moral from my tale . . . '" (285). Surely Walton
endangers the lives of his men in his "mad schemes"
(486) which imperil others, his insistence on pressing
to the pole despite being "surrounded by mountains of
ice which admit of no escape and threaten every moment
to crush my vessel" (485). [Indeed several of his crew
members die at this time.] Further, Walton's words
eerily echo Frankenstein's values when he tells the
scientist, "One man's life or death were but a small
price to pay" for knowledge (283).
In Frankenstein. as Miyoshi remarks, "the main
vehicle of Gothic fantasy is no longer the conventional
supernatural." It is science, instead, which "can
85
generate a totally new species of terror” (86). But the
locus of scientific abuses is not just the deranged
scientist and the Monster, the visible outcome of his
profane experiment. These characters constitute what we
may call a deflected focus, through the agency of frame,
from the actual object of Mary Shelley's apprehension—
the masculine veneration of power and the subsequent
alienation from communal ties which results,
theoretically epitomized in Robert Walton's "weak and
faulty” nature which Victor Frankenstein undertakes to
convert through indoctrination in his own frailties
(284).5
But though Walton's resemblance to Victor
Frankenstein is obvious enough, because of the frame's
separative influence, the reader may not discern that
he, the scientist, and the Monster make up a triad of
concerns in the novel. For Walton is also likened to
the Monster. Walton wants a friend, someone who can
empathize with him (273); he too is isolated, an orphan
like the Monster. Like the Monster, too, he is self-
educated and capable of virtue (as the Monster tells his
maker he is— 3 64). And when the Monster, recognizing
that Walton "[hates]” him, says, "Am I to be thought the
only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?"
(495), Walton again becomes the erstwhile recipient of
enlightenment from another's viewpoint, his "otherness"
86
reflected in the Monster's alien condition (and thereby
neutralizing the space in which "otherness" is
signed).6 He is implicated in humanity's misdeeds,
here voiced as crimes against communal values, the
failure to love, the negligence of social bonds, and the
privileging of individual gain above community benefit.
Robert Walton thus unites the characteristics of
the text's "deviant" characters in himself. He is both
a naturalized Frankenstein overreacher and the
scientist's manifestly asocial double, the Monster.7
All are marginal figures, but because Walton is a quasi-
realistic character— his voyage being plausible in an
age of scientific exploration despite its abstruse
nature— we are inclined to overlook his susceptibility
for metamorphosis into a Frankenstein or Monster. And
so he is cast in the redeeming role of enforcing the
primary values to which the culture gives lip service.
Nevertheless, therein lies the risk. As Miyoshi points
out, a Frankenstein's deeds may be too easily dismissed
as incredible and not to be taken seriously; even Walton
finds Frankenstein's story too astounding to be regarded
as fact, had he not seen the monster himself and had
Frankenstein not been a fellow scientist.
1 submit, however, that Walton's acts are a
comparable menace to community— indeed, only the peril
of mutiny by his men and the vicissitudes of nature stop
87
him from furthering his obscene purpose. But because
his deeds are enacted on a more modest scale
(circumscribed by a framing narrative and shrunken in
contrast to the sheer bulk of the enclosed tales) and
are not consummated, they are overshadowed by the
drastic case of the others. [I suspect too that
Walton's "Englishness," in company with the "rational"
and the "civilized," is for many credulous nativist
readers the unconscious converse of Victor
Frankenstein's Continental roots, associated with the
alien and irrational.] The likelihood of another
Frankenstein's experiments being foisted upon the world
is remote, the novel seems to be saying, particularly
because Walton as auditor (and by proxy, the reader)
does learn from the scientist's story. The prospect of
a future Walton's more prosaic ambitions arising to
disrupt the natural order is more conceivable, simply
because they do not seem so exaggerated or, by
comparison, sacrilegious, thanks to their confinement to
what appears to be a complimentary frame, one whose bulk
weight (and thus its force) has been apparently deflated
by the author herself.
Walton's appearance of normalcy is deceptive. In
commenting on the nested construction of Frankenstein.
for instance, Elizabeth MacAndrew notes that it "leads
from the everyday world of Walton's sister to the frozen
88
wasteland of Walton's scientific pursuit to
Frankenstein's closed worlds of benign Sentimentalism
and tormenting self-isolation, until buried in the very
center we come to the strangest world of them all, that
of the monster's account." This telescoped perspective
(which tends towards closure) results in a fused
viewpoint, so that Walton (and the monster) are realized
as "reflections" of the aberrant scientist, but only in
the sense that Walton's "mixture of horror and
compassion" (145) betrays his identification with
Frankenstein's plight.
One way in which the classic boxed framing
structure of Frankenstein draws attention to Walton
himself is this movement from the exterior of his
narrative inward to Frankenstein's, which in turn
encloses the Monster's narrative, the so-called "core"
to which MacAndrew refers. When that tale terminates,
however, then the reader is conducted back to the
periphery and Walton again (a significant textual move
that a conflated description of narrative frames does
not expose), through the conclusion of Frankenstein's
narrative, and the termination of Walton's. The
placement of narratives along the continuum is not
strictly linear, then, as both Newman and MacAndrew
argue, because both Frankenstein and the Monster surface
in Walton's beginning and ending narratives,
transgressing narrative "borders." A framing narrative
like Walton's, potentially open to digressive tangents
given his pupillary status, is also susceptible to
incursion by other texts and narrators.
The assignment of formal thematic and structural
categories to a text like Frankenstein can therefore
confine meaning to delimited semantic classifications.
For instance, Christopher Craft, citing the "almost
schematic formal management of narrative material" in
three Gothic horror novels (including Frankenstein),
mentions the characteristic "triple rhythm" of the
narrative strategies involved:
Each of these texts first invites or
admits a monster, then entertains and is
entertained by monstrosity for some
extended duration, until in its closing
pages it expels or repudiates the
monster and all the disruption that
he/she/it brings .... That threat, of
course, is contained and finally
nullified by the narrative requirement
that the monster be repudiated and the
world of normal relations restored.
This narrative rhythm, whose tripartite
cycle of admission-entertainment-
expulsion enacts sequentially an
essentially simultaneous psychological
equivocation, provides aesthetic
management of the fundamental
ambivalence that motivates these texts
and our reading of them. (107-08)
Craft's "resident demon" is patently the monster
(note 4, 130), but the "monstrosity" of the sort I am
entertaining is diffused in frame narratives by the
frame's agency. The frame narrator participates in this
90
condition, as my analysis of Frankenstein I hope makes
clear. For this reason, and because of that narrator's
liability to the same vice, he or she is targeted for
the guidance inherent to didactic aims in frame
narration design. "Monstrosity," then, is not confined
to the internal narratives, but lurks in the containing
story as well, in the disguised form of a seemingly more
benign figure, a frame narrator (Walton, in the case of
Frankenstein). To what extent, then, the "world of
normal relations" is "restored" in Craft's judgment and
the monster vanquished depends upon our identification
with these narrators, readers' own willingness to see
themselves as incriminated in the narrators'
infirmities, and to take their knowledge to heart. Thus
despite the epistolary form's metonymic drive which
militates against closure, and in the "absence of
univocal authority" (MacArthur, note 39, 232) which
characterizes epistolary discourse, the recovery of
meaning is conceivably assisted by the reader. In the
case of Frankenstein. Margaret Saville's inarticulated
voice makes the burden of interpretation even more
incumbent on the reader attempting to fill "gaps" in the
unfolding text.
In their groundbreaking 1979 work, The Madwoman in
the Attic. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose that
Shelley's model is "the male culture myth of Paradise
Lost," rewritten "so as to clarify its meaning" (220).
The authors characterize Frankenstein * s structure as
incorporating three "'concentric circles * of narration
(Walton's letters, Victor Frankenstein's recital to
Walton, and the monster's speech to Frankenstein),
within which are embedded pockets of digression
containing other miniature narratives . . . " (224-25).
Gilbert and Gubar equate the creature with feminine
self-abnegation epitomized in his "sense of
deformity . . . his namelessness, and his orphaned,
motherless isolation" (239), states they associate with
Eve and her counterpart, Sin. They link "the action in
the covert plot— the tale of the blind rejection of
women by misogynistic/Miltonic patriarchy . . . " (243),
to the monster's reprisals. The creature, rebuffed by
"a world of fathers," retaliates by murdering the
patronymic William, and then begins "a doomed search for
a maternal, female principle in the harsh society that
has created him" (243). If this is indeed a plausible
argument, then Walton, as monster manqui, also enacts
the recovery of a restorative female ethics. In this
respect, I suggest that Walton be considered an
androgynous figure representing Shelley's resolution of
conflicting norms, located in her ambivalent perspective
on male and female cultural roles. If, as Victor
Frankenstein's avatar, Walton symbolizes the breach of
92
social mores, then as monster he is also metaphorically
the social anomaly which is its end. In renouncing his
mad aspirations, then, Walton coincidentally solicits
union with the society he has abandoned.8 Victor
Frankenstein does not seek these bonds in the final
analysis. Revenge, interdicted by Christian precepts,
is his "life" (474).
If Frankenstein is the patriarchal model redidivus,
then the monster is the feminine principle ostracized
but nonetheless desired in a world whose rejuvenation
depends upon amending the masculine ethic. By analogy,
Walton's character combines within itself Shelley's
misgivings about unchecked masculine ambition, while
allowing feminine social values to rehabilitate and
ultimately replace this foreboding trait. This model
can be admitted only if Walton's frame story is
recognized as being in reciprocal relation to all the
contained narratives, not hierarchical, adjoining
Frankenstein's only. If this is a reasonable
interpretation, then Frankenstein's narratives are
decentered rather than concentric, as Gilbert and Gubar
maintain, since the latter term implies a common center
[which I assume to be the monster's narrative, according
to Gilbert and Gubar's conjectures above, because they
specify that Walton's story is a "secondary" narrative
(226)].9
93
Frankenstein is finally an example of how the
frame, considered as a referential structure with
allusions outside itself, diverts attention from itself.
In this way, frames exercise a disclaiming function
which ultimately occludes relationships in the text.
[In Frankenstein, as in some other framed texts, the
"inner" narratives redirect this focus. In so-called
"open-ended" framestories, however, where the text does
not return to the initial framing situation, as in The
Turn of the Screw, the recuperative focus must be
reconstructed by the reader.]
If beguiled by its framing activity then, assuming
that Walton's narrative constitutes an autonomous
ontological sphere, and neglecting the reversion of
focus and breach of frame boundaries dramatized by the
monster's metaleptic eruption into Walton's narrative
space, Frankenstein's readers are prone to disregard the
possibility that orthodox cultural categories are
subverted in the novel. For Frankenstein's framing
dissolves binary antinomies, i.e. "monster/human," in
the process dispersing ontological divisions as well.
The sign of "monstrosity" in Frankenstein is in fact
alienation, a solipsistic state perceptible in all three
male characters— Walton, Frankenstein, the Monster. The
extremity of the monster's condition (including his
description) is discharged in an equally potent
rhetoric, one which tests the limits of mimetic
representation. Walton, however, is still within
culturally defined categories of humanness, while the
monster defies such classification and remains a
socially peripheral figure. The resemblance between the
two is therefore obscured. In effect, the conventional
disparities between conceptualized social categories and
established patterns of social conformation must be
retranslated and realigned if we are to recognize the
affinity. To maintain the metaphysical distinction
between Walton's frame discourse, Victor Frankenstein's,
and the Monster's within is to dignify an artificial
separation between theoretically opposed social norms.
Walton's narrative, if understood as interacting and
interdependent with the interior narratives, collapses
any such allegiance to sham values.
Case Study II: "Wutherina Heights: Deconstructing the
Multifocal Perspective."
The celebrated multi-vocal narration scheme which
partitions Emily Bront&'s enigmatic Wutherina Heights
has inspired a plethora of dissenting critical
reactions. In earlier commentary on the novel
particularly, Lockwood and Nelly Dean are often
discarded as mere chroniclers, however incompetent or
confused, who register the various foci through which
95
the reader obtains a kaleidoscopic but ultimately
integral view of the work's major characters and events.
More recently, the two narrators have been acknowledged
for the sophisticated telling devices they in fact are.
Despite this homage to Brontft1s innovative narrative
techniques, however, these "secondary" characters have
been frequently relegated to the storyline fringe and
observer status, in which case the novel's ethic is
thought to be the burden of its protagonists and their
melodramatic histories. The antithesis of this view
depends upon a clearer perception of the interdependent
dynamic which informs Lockwood's and Nelly's respective
parts. The magnitude of its power to order the reader's
retrieval of meaning may not be fully realized.
In her discussion of fantasy genres, Rosemary
Jackson cites Irftne Bessifere's contention that fantasy's
position is one of "relationalitv. as a narrative
situated in a relation of opposition to dominant orders"
(176). She explains this notion as akin to Freud's
compensatory theory of art "as an activity which
sustains cultural order by making up for a society's
lacks." Gothic fiction, in this context, "tended to
buttress a dominant, bourgeois ideology, by vicarious
wish fulfillment through fantasies of incest, rape,
murder, parricide, social disorder. Like pornography,
it functioned to supply an object of desire, to imagine
96
social and sexual transgression" (175). If this is so,
then Frankenstein essentially disables that desire, in
the last resort, by undercutting it to endorse bourgeois
ideals. It could be argued that Emily Bronte's
Wutherinq Heights serves a comparable objective.10
Charlotte Bronte once said of her sister Emily:
"'An interpreter ought always to have stood between her
and the world'" (cited in Bald 77). Emily Bronte has
indeed not lacked for "interpreters" since the
publication of her only novel, Wutherinq Heights, in
1847. Earlier critics, intrigued perhaps by the novel's
dramatic texture, hyperbolic characters, and scenes of
heightened passion, converged on these discrete features
for analysis. Though they may sense the presence of an
underlying ideology, they stop short of engaging this on
any complex level for the most part.1 1 The rationale
behind Wutherinq Heights. I believe, lies in David
Cecil's view that "Emily Bronte's vision of life does
away with the ordinary antithesis between good and evil"
(302). Her early writings indeed revel in the kinds of
paradox echoed in Wutherinq Heights, and she herself
waged what one critic has described as a "constant
warfare within her spirit" between various polarities
(Bald 94). Bronte's inner struggles appear to be coded
into the Romantic preoccupation with division and social
renewal portrayed in her epic novel, and refracted
97
through its multiple narrators. Hence commentators,
seeking the novel's ethical center in vain, and failing
to find a consistent point of view, are disconcerted by
the apparent authorial remove.12 The novel's
ostensible dialectic structure, moreover, lends itself
to speculation that the moral foci are at the extremes;
that is, at the thesis or the antithesis dichotimized by
"good" and "evil," passion and moderation, or even in
the synthesis at the center symbolized by the second
generation marriage of Catherine Linton and Hareton
Earnshaw. [As F.A.C. Wilson notes, "Crossbreeding
provides [BrontS] with a more malleable stock ..."
than the "blend of love and hate" (53-54) which
characterizes Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw's
relations.] I submit, however, that the novel's ethic,
ramified in diverse characters who constitute a gamut of
meanings, fastens broadly on the capacity for love and
its obverse, the abstinence from fellowship, which
results in the undermining of the communal ethic as in
Frankenstein. I hope this will become clear when we
examine more closely the structure of Wutherinq Heights,
beginning with the challenging issue of the double
narration scheme, the framing design, which controls
reader response and viewpoint in Wutherinq Heights.
On the text surface this nested series of
narratives (and narrators), one enclosed in another,
98
departs from chronologically ordered plot structure.13
In brief, Lockwood, a gentleman diarist visiting the
Yorkshire moors, records his encounters with the local
inhabitants in the textual present. When he becomes ill
and bedridden, he elicits their history from Nelly Dean,
housekeeper to the Earnshaw family. She in turn
transmits a chronicle of the "major" characters,
Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, their progeny and their
relatives. Though Lockwood eventually leaves the
vicinity, he is apprised of the events' conclusions on
returning. The two framing narrators, Nelly Dean and
Lockwood, are two complementary poles of controlled
access to meaning guaranteed by Brontfi's deployment of
frame devices. Nelly's sententious bourgeois morality,
doing what she thinks is "proper" (259), underscores her
arbitrating role between the "heavens and hells" in
Wutherinq Heights, or in other words, between the
extremes. It may be said that Nelly performs an "epic
function" as narrator (particularly since hers is an
"historical" account of a community), though not,
strictly speaking, in the epic tradition but in the
folk. Hers is the prose of "realism" (which George
Levine characterizes as essentially antiheroic) (15).
Nelly appropriates the didactic function that
religion would otherwise assume in Wutherinq Heights
(and culturally that of male epic singers). She is the
99
medium for the Divine Word, Emily BrontS’s message of
love, in a novel in which the onerous presence of
fanatical religion hovers always on the edges, visible
in Joseph, that "wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee"
(42), or in the Reverend Jabes Branderhara and his "Pious
Discourse" (28) on sin. It is fitting that Bronte
chooses a woman to deliver her doctrine. By so doing
she may have subtly disarmed her contemporary reader's
antagonisms. Nelly is the unself-conscious "folk-
narrator" whose homely wisdom avoids the threatening
form of religious exordium delivered in the novel by
pedantic male authorities. Her gender may be discounted
as well, since women have time-honored associations with
the thematics of love. For the modern reader, by the
same token, Nelly could be considered a potentially
"offensive" figure whose secular religion of eros tests
the logic and dogma of a doctrinaire patriarchy.14 The
frame tale in general is constructed to a great extent
around such "veiled" speech registers. That is, framing
structures are natural vehicles for any socially
"silent" voice, narrators whose oppressed social status
and controversial subject matter warrant the indirect
approach. [In this regard, it is noteworthy that Nelly
speaks of her actions in terms of "hiding" and
"revealing" (211)].
100
Nelly’s position as family retainer contributes to
Bronte's ingratiating technique. Historically, the
"idle woman" has been a potential menace who must be
"deprived" of sexual power (Foucault, History of
Sexuality 99, 121). In placing Ellen in a familial
context (she is, like the dogs, a faithful servant and
household guardian), Bronte effectively desexualizes
her. Her sexual experience in the novel will always be
vicarious, her "children" only spiritual. As a key
commentator on the necessity of Eros in human relations,
it is essential that her own sexuality be disabled.
[Particularly so in her relations with the effete
Lockwood, for whom sexual issues are obviously
disturbing, and in terms of her account to him of the
Catherine/Heathcliff affair.]
Nelly Dean is not, however, simply "patriarchy's
paradigmatic housekeeper, the man's woman ..." that
some feminist critics have proclaimed (Gilbert and Gubar
291). With regard to the spatial design of Wutherinq
Heights, her embedded narrative compels audience
attention to the interior with centripetal force. In
Russian Formalist terms, she presides over the plotted
"story," or the chronological occurrence of events, and
is therefore perforce closer to origins, to temporal-
causal phenomena, Meyer Abrams' linear time-line of
Christian history (Natural Supernaturalism 152).1S By
101
her own admission she "tracks existence" (269); it is
significant that her dream of Heathcliff's death reveals
her concern with beginnings and endings, with boundaries
and "tidying up" (260). Her chronological narrative
itself is a containment of excess in the novel; it
reflects her own personhood and need to arrange and
design, to inhibit, to hold in perspective. Then too,
hers is history made socially relevant. Her own life
composes a narrative axis consisting of her youth (and
that of the major characters) at one pole, and her
"disenchanted maturity" at the other (254), or in Emily
Bronttt’s words, "the fresh root of Eternity" at the one
end, "Time's withered branch" at the other.16
Her privileged position as central intelligence
ironically links Nelly with "confession" discourse, in
the sense that she is mute until Lockwood urges her
"history" in simulated disclosure; she herself plays
confessor throughout the novel for all the major
characters. Her dual role, as both "penitent" in that
her narrative admits her own shortcomings, and the
receiver of others' revelations, allows us to see her as
both fallibly human and worldly wise, as we are meant to
do. She registers the conflict between events and
interpretation. She is, in short, in the world and of
it, but this does not blunt her efficacy as a prophet of
a new "religion." In George Levine's terms she urges
102
the "realist's advice": "social responsibility, self-
denial, compromise, the importance of work in the
community . . . " (210).
More importantly, her own "misjudgments" throw into
high relief the heroic potential of some characters
(Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, for example), showing
us by contrast the inadequacies of others (Lockwood,
Isabella). However, she ultimately sanctions both
Heathcliff and Cathy in her "children," Catherine Linton
and Heathcliff's "spiritual son" Hareton. In her
recognition of the couple as "crown of her hopes" (250),
she implicitly rejects Lockwood as "suitor," and reveals
to us, in the process, Emily Bronte's own values.
The other major framing narrator is Lockwood, that
"gentlemanly" denizen of the "busy world" (239, 205),
who tenants the bourgeois atmosphere of the Grange,
removed from the fierce energies at the sublime Heights.
As his name implies, he lacks the capacity for that
"immortal love" which Heathcliff tells Nelly makes us
"outcast[s]" (255, 253). In the novel's spatial
trajectory, his is a framing narrative on the textual
periphery. As opposed to Nelly's diachronic one,
Lockwood's narrative is synchronic and centrifugal,
though it paradoxically "contains" hers. It is notable
that hers is an oral performance before an audience in
the theoretical context of time and sound which
103
surrounds that evanescent mode. His, on the other hand,
is confided to a journal, a "quasi-interior monologue"
which Girard Genette tells us "does not in principle aim
at any public or any reader" (Narrative Discourse 218,
230) .
Tzvetan Todorov's often cited axiom, that
"narrative equals life; absence of narrative, death"
(Poetics of Prose 74), applies to both Nelly and
Lockwood. The conclusion of Nelly's narrative is
simultaneously the death of her narrating, though her
happy couple imply its continuance in the future.
Lockwood's narrative, however, "dies" forever in a
textual sense, not only by its entombment in a private
journal (although accessible to readers, of course) but
in his musings at the graves of the major characters,
wherein he wonders how "anyone could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth"
(266).17 Lockwood is himself a man who refuses to have
his "tranquillity" disturbed (205), who considers
Heathcliff's passionate declaration of love to his long-
lost Cathy "a piece of superstition" (33), and who holds
questions concerning the next world to be "heterodox"
(138). As Nelly presides over the life of love in
Wutherinq Heights. Lockwood presides over the death of
desire.
104
Peter Brooks' plot model, outlined in Reading for
the Plot. is useful in enabling us to see how Lockwood
functions at this basic level. In Brooks's scheme,
desire initiates narrative. Clearly Lockwood's "desire"
seduces Nelly's story but not his own, which is mainly
confined to a description of his reactions to situations
and events in which he finds himself; his narrative
scrupulously avoids deliberate self-revelation. His
pose, then, in narrative as in life, is from all
appearances a passive one, restricted to the vicarious
participation in others' lives and emotions which are
nevertheless incongruous with his own. He is a
listener, as opposed to a teller, a reactor rather than
an actor. In Brooks' dynamic, his is lack of desire
(60), or even "repressed" desire (12 6). In evading the
twofold duties of "transmission" and evaluation which
Brooks says are incumbent on the narrator of a frame
tale (28) , he becomes the endlessly recurring impulse,
the "form of the repeated," which denies and therefore
never masters its past (123). Lockwood resists change
(and therefore spiritual transformation) as Heathcliff
does not.
As a possible alternate to Heathcliff as "hero" and
potential savior of a dying community, Lockwood is
brought into the story in the events of its present, at
the terminus of the nucleus tale of Heathcliff and
105
Cathy, and when all the major characters of the first
generation are dead, with the exception of Heathcliff
and Nelly. This tendency to be beforehand or behind
dogs him throughout. He arrives in a community whose
viability is stalemated. We know about as little of
Lockwood's origins or past as Heathcliff's. (Like
Heathcliff too, and old Master Earnshaw, patriarchal
"types," he seems to have only one name). His "human
fixture" (35), Nelly, at first sees him as a possible
husband for the widowed Catherine Linton, but
significantly, the housekeeper's story does not "amuse"
him (13 0).1 8
Far from saving the community from contention and
ultimate dissolution, Lockwood would contribute to its
collapse. Like most of the novel's eligible males,
Lockwood theoretically offers the stagnant community the
prospect of procreative renewal [in line with what
Gilbert and Gubar refer to as "Bronte's visionary sexual
politics" (255)], but his is an austere carnality, to
the point of inversion.19 [He is hardly, as Melvin
Watson declares, a "relative nonentity" who represents
"normal humanity" (92)].
As I have indicated, Lockwood's stance towards life
and love is inherently adversarial. Throughout his
appearances in the novel, he displays this trait.20
Lockwood is the man "quite cured of seeking pleasure in
106
society, be it country or town” (32). In his rejection
of and consequent removal from human community, he
chooses spiritual sterility and death, becoming a
solitary in consequence. Lockwood is ironically
accurate when he remarks early in the novel, "My dear
mother used to say I should never have a comfortable
home" (15); he is the living and material counterpart of
Cathy's wandering specter.21 Lockwood's domain, into
which he escapes from the Heights, is "free air . . .
clear and still, and cold as impalpable ice." He is
indeed, "benumbed to . . . [the] very heart" (35). In
this "malignant" condition, he finally "throws away" the
chance to marry Catherine Heathcliff (243).22 Nelly,
instinctively sensing Lockwood's emotional sterility,
gently chides him towards the end of her narrative: "You
see, Mr. Lockwood, it was easy enough to win Mrs.
Heathcliff's heart; but now, I'm glad you did not try"
(250).
Lockwood is the ever indeterminate present, he on
whom change is wasted, caught forever in flux (Time
"stagnates" for him at the Heights (32)).23 He cannot
live, like the people he encounters, "in earnest, more
in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous
external things." Though he tells Nelly, "I could fancy
a love for life here almost possible" (58), he retreats
from that life at last to become death-in-life. His
107
"reputation of deliberate heartlessness" is truly earned
(15). In Lockwood there is no evolution; his narrative
is analogous in that it excludes any teleological
principle validated by the novel's events. I have noted
his reaction to the past, both personal and epic, his
failure to undertake present opportunities, and his
aborted future. No wonder Heathcliff, whom he takes to
be a "misanthropist" like himself (13), tells him he is
"unhappy in your conjectures, sir . . . " (21).
Finally, what larger implications are here for us
in this study of Wutherinq Heights? I have commented
earlier on Emily Bronte's theme. She espouses a new
faith for the old— Nelly's New Testament Gospel of Love
for Joseph's failed Old Testament one of damnation and
sin (though masculine critics in particular may be
uncomfortable with the novel's "domestic" scenario and
"Gothic" paraphernalia, its thematic insistence on love,
its "excess" of emotion and lovesick males). In Nelly
and Lockwood, the novel's principal narrators, the
course of this radical theology is most clearly
manifest. To some extent, the novel's construction,
then, is not dialectical but asymmetrical, the negative
energy of Lockwood's introverted reflections only
serving to emphasize the appeal and force of Nelly's
homely testimony. Nelly's is the communal voice in an
oral idiom, and Lockwood, whose refusal of love blights
108
community, is its object of instruction. On this note,
Peter Brooks writes, "The attraction of nineteenth-
century writers to situations of oral communication may
be explained above all by their deep wish to believe in
the cognitive value of narrative, its capacity to make a
difference through the transmission of experience" ("The
Tale vs. the Novel" 309). Wutherinq Heights1 double
narration is not, then, just a "convention" we must
accept (Woodring 165). Nor does Lockwood simply
abdicate his narrative authority to another storyteller
whose experience is more compelling. Lockwood's resort
to another discourse mode— the diary— as I have said, is
fragmented or marginalized narrative at best, amounting
to a series of incidents lacking formal closure, whereas
Nelly has been participant in the events she relates
from their beginning to end. His is no well-plotted
narrative in the Aristotelian sense (unless we consider
his recording of Nelly's narrative his own); his use of
the journal mode with its writing to the immediate
precludes that possibility. For this reason, it is not
necessary that we see Lockwood's text as does Peter
Garrett, as assimilating into "a double narrative
[which] can be construed as two phases merging into a
single, continuous history, organized by a precise
chronology" (Introduction 19), or as one half of two
reports "whose obvious biases and limitations require us
109
to redouble their accounts with alternative
interpretations ..." (Introduction 18-19).
Beth Newman's study, "'The Situation of the Looker-
On': Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wutherinq Heights."
presents an analogous reading. Driven by his interest
in Catherine Heathcliff, "[Lockwood] now seeks to look
again, as it were, through Nelly's eyes— that is, by
hearing and appropriating Nelly's story. Lockwood's
scopic drive is thus what links the frame of Wutherinq
Heights to the narrative it introduces." Listening
thereby becomes "a metaphor for looking" (1033). The
novel thus considered as "a network of gazes," offers "a
context in which to understand how narration, seeing,
and knowing are connected in the evolution and
permutations of the techniques that we now call point of
view ..." (1036). Newman concludes that "the power
of the gazes that enable both Nelly's and Lockwood's
storytelling is itself contested. Brontfi punishes
Lockwood's fetishizing gaze with frustrated desire and
thwarts the project of Nelly's narrative, which is to
make Lockwood marry Catherine" (1039). Yet, as I have
pointed out, Lockwood's "desire" is pseudo-desire,
easily checked, as Nelly implicitly understands when she
rejects him as Catherine's suitor. Nor does the novel's
plot "undermine" the power of Nelly's specular control
and its ties to narration, but rather validates her own
110
fondest wishes. In short, Newman's "fictive gaze that
structures novelistic narration" (103 6) is yet another
variant on the bracketing frame.
Of whatever value critiques such as these offer—
and they do give new life to interpretation— they
nonetheless diminish the pressure of a particular
discourse modality in directing the reader's
understanding by diverting our attention from the
vehicle itself. Discourse in Wutherinq Heights, as in
any other work, is embedded in the novel's
infrastructure. It therefore has a potency beyond the
mere act of "storytelling," the reproduction of a
rhetorical milieu, or the dynamic of "psychosexual"
("Situation of the Looker On" 103 8) voyeurism that
Newman suggests. Bronte's dual narrators, sometimes
casually dismissed as mere "secondary" characters
essentially on the circumference of the major action
unfolding in the interior stories of Heathcliff and
Catherine Earnshaw, or as hopelessly unenlightened, in
truth, and despite their failings, bear the burden of
Emily Bronte's unprecedented metaphysic of love.
Lockwood's frame narrative is a self-revelatory critique
on the kinds of destructive social impulses which the
novel ultimately refuses. In Nelly's chronicle,
conversely, despite its homely and imprudent character,
Brontfi's social ideals are valorized. The crux of the
I l l
novel’s ethic, therefore, is not coded through the
stories of its ’ ’ major" characters, but in the discourse
of its "minor" actors.
Again, readers seeking definitive meanings in the
interior love stories may take little notice of the
relatively innocuous presence of the characters who
communicate those accounts. As household "fixture" and
member of the servant class, Nelly Dean may materialize
to the naive as an appendage whose main function is
transmitting an electrifying chronicle of love affairs.
Lockwood, easily dismissed as the effete, inept witness
to the titillating events at the Heights, pales beside
Heathcliff's virility.24 Yet, in order to fully
appreciate the novel’s textual dynamic, it must be seen
as an interdialogic transaction negotiated between and
among the framing narratives and those they enclose.
The superimposition of Lockwood's synchronic text on
Nelly's diachronic one departs from the concept of
narrative syntax or logic intrinsic to most frame
models, resembling a "montage" rather than any
algorithm.
Lockwood's and Nell's frame narratives also
ostensibly bend the oblivious reader to the exceptional
import of the stories they tell, a feint all too often
heeded. It is only by weighing frame characters against
the aggregate that we see how each supplements the
112
other. We cannot sever the domains of Heathcliff and
Cathy, their stories or their loves, from the worlds
inhabited by Lockwood and Nelly. We arrive at a fuller
reading of Wutherinq Heights not by privileging or
prioritizing its narratives and narrators but by
synthesizing their implications. As I have argued, the
novel achieves resolution only in Nelly's account, but
we need the contrast of Lockwood's to realize this.
Case Study III: "The Old Curiosity Shop: The Case of the
Absentee Narrator."
Critical consensus regards The Old Curiosity Shop
as a failed framed narrative. It is thought that
Dickens renounced his original plans for a framed text
in which a single narrator, Master Humphrey, would
impart the trials of "Little Nell" and her reprobate
grandfather. Though Dickens did publicly concede the
withdrawal of his primary narrator from the text, thus
ostensibly converting frame into omniscient narration,
he has, notwithstanding, accomplished the unity
attributed to framing modes by other (perhaps
consciously experimental, perhaps serendipitous) means.
If we allow the idea that framing contrivances need not
be strictly limited to the discursive, but may perform
in musical terms like a "signature character," then the
stamp of that character is imprinted on and patterned
113
throughout the work as a correspondence among its
various parts, lending it a cohesion which substitutes
for the literal indexical quality of frame narrative
discourse.
In other words, if frame narratives are thematic
analogues, as I believe they are, then Dickens gains
their parallel effects without conventional frame
formatting. He does so by scattering non-verbal frame
like phenomena throughout the text, in this case the
iconic and imagistic replication of Master Humphrey's
character properties, achieving in the process the kind
of contextualization that we customarily associate with
the use of a framing apparatus. Readers yielding to the
notion that a formal frame is wanting, however, will
miss the ubiquitous appearance of Master Humphrey in his
various disguises. The layering of this iconic
representation in the novel is conceivably a kind of
symbolic system Robert M. Browne calls "metaphoric,"
which arises from repetition, either of identical images
or of images with corresponding physical properties
(14). Thus, in Dickens's novel, framing occurs as a
form of tropological displacement. A reconsideration of
Dickens's strategy in this light as a successful, albeit
unorthodox kind of framing art rather than an indecorous
departure from framing conventions then obliges us to
reexamine framing protocols.25
114
This interpretation challenges the notion of voice
authenticity in narrative, and the assumption that
because a voice is detached from its source of
transmission (as in the case of The Old Curiosity Shop),
then the originating point of view has also virtually
disappeared. But Master Humphrey's "voice" is only
displaced through ventriloquizing— other characters
"speaking" for him. The recurrence of one figure in
different guises also raises an interesting issue
relating to form. Dickens appears to be moving here
towards the kind of pronounced experimentation with
synchronicity and spatial form found in modernist texts.
In their use of spatial techniques, writers like Joyce
and Woolf attempt to escape the tyranny of omniscient
narration by departing from sequential time (and the
linear logic that implies). In that regard, it seems to
me, Dickens's novel could be said to anticipate such
trials with narrative point of view, for which he may
not be sufficiently credited, the more flagrant early
ventures such as Conrad's receiving the mass of critical
attention.26
Seldom is a frame narrator's disappearance from the
narrative he or she relates so marked as Master
Humphrey's from Dickens' novel, first serialized in
1840-41. In this largely experimental work, an elderly
cripple, Master Humphrey, describes his encounters with
115
a lost child, Little Nell, ward of her wastrel
grandfather, the proprietor of a curio shop. When
Master Humphrey seemingly fades from the story,
omniscient narration replaces his first person
perspective, a gesture resulting in charges that The Old
Curiosity Shop is somehow a failed or clumsily
constructed work. In his "Preface to the First Cheap
Edition: 1848," Dickens himself describes his narrator's
"demise" as a deliberate gesture, since he had in mind
the "separate publication" of the novel from its
inception (42). So, the plan to incorporate Humphrey as
The Old Curiosity Shop's narrator went the way of the
"abandoned design" of the author's "desultory" weekly,
Master Humphrey's Clock. in which the novel's first
installments appeared (41).
In his Introduction to the Penguin edition, Malcolm
Andrews mentions that Master Humphrey's "presence as
narrator becomes hampering" (14) to the burgeoning
novel, and so he formally removes himself at the
conclusion of Chapter 3, reappearing as the
grandfather's long-lost "younger brother" at the novel's
end and in a projected Appendix as Humphrey himself.
I suggest, however, that Master Humphrey's absence
from his own narrative, one in which he is, after all, a
participant, can be thought of instead as a disguised
presence. Whatever Dickens' plans for the work (and I
116
see no reason not to take him at his word), his frame
narrator's presence is not wholly erased from the text
as would at first appear, but configured throughout in
thematic framing, mediated via the iconistic agency of
surrogate characters who discharge his offices.27
In a musical sense, Humphrey is a signature
character. That is, the thematic values promoted in the
frame narrative itself are expanded through the
iconization of Humphrey's characteristics or, we might
say, the characterization of performance. When he takes
his formal departure at the end of Chapter 3, Humphrey
insinuates that his is a "deferred" narration. He tells
us, "And now that I have carried this history so far in
my own character and introduced these personages to the
reader, I shall for the convenience of the narrative
detach myself from its further course, and leave those
who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak
and act for themselves" (72). The clues to Humphrey's
performance are in the phrase "in mv own character." for
he assumes another role, as we know, that of the lost
younger brother, the "single gentleman," in the
narrative, and true to his word, though not "prominent
and necessary," other parts as well. By inviting an
alternative view, that is, that the character of Master
Humphrey is not simply a miscarried, tacked on narrating
contrivance but rather resembles a masked actor capable
117
of assuming assorted roles and impersonating others, we
appreciate the subterfuges operating in Dickens' theatre
of illusion.28
The assumed inchoate or rejected frame in The Old
Curiosity Shop is literally restored through character
agency, or in the consecutive doubling of Master
Humphrey's frame character. Readers accustomed to the
"frame" as a concrete entity and disconcerted by its
proclaimed absence, are insensible to this framelike
function of surrogate characters. I propose, however,
in keeping with my theory of framing as an interactional
accomplishment, that the novel's framing is so
constructed that it is part of what it also calls
attention to. Hence the compounded characterization is
a cohesive, not a bracketing, function. Through its
instrumentality, Dickens achieves the framelike
contextualizing scholars esteem. Unless this concept is
acknowledged, that is, that the novel is continuously
reframed through the recontextualization of the Master
Humphrey figure, the work is indeed an example of
unfinished or maladroit construction.
The invoked presence of Master Humphrey is
absolutely necessary to the novel's thematic unity.29
Master Humphrey is a crucial composite figure who
registers the novel's formal thematic and structurally
patterned contradictions, including the paradoxes
118
presented by other characters. Humphrey and the figures
who simulate his blended qualities ultimately succeed in
reconciling what Peter Garrett calls "the elementary
process of juxtaposition, the mere contiguity of
heterogeneous elements" which he maintains underlies all
of Dickens' fiction (25). For example, like his older
brother, Nell's grandfather, Humphrey is elderly, and
like the dwarf Quilp he is malformed, a cripple by his
own description.30 But unlike either of those
personalities and rather like Nell herself, he is a
force for moral "good"; he has "never been made a
misanthrope by this cause [his handicap]" (Appendix
675) .
Master Humphrey's "sleight-of-hand" capability, a
conscious inscription of character or not on Dickens'
part, is an unmistakable facet of Humphrey's role, and
manifests itself in the novel as a metaphorical
differential of incongruity. In the Introduction to
Master Humphrey's Clock (appended in this edition of The
Old Curiosity Shop], Master Humphrey, addressing the
reading audience, offers some personal background. In
detailing his early life in "the venerable suburb of
London" (Appendix 673) where he resides, he describes
his reception in the neighborhood as "the centre of a
popular ferment" (Appendix 674), himself as the object
of "various rumours circulated to my prejudice." He is
119
variously seen, perhaps because of his "mis-shapen"
appearance, as "a spy, an infidel, a conjuror, a
kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a
monster .... X was the object of suspicion and
distrust: aye, of downright hatred too" (Appendix 674-
75). From the outset, then, others identify Master
Humphrey as a protean figure.
This image of him is emphasized in Dickens1
anticipatory conclusion to The Old Curiosity Shop, when
Master Humphrey "confide[s]" to his assembled friends
(and to the reader) that he has "repressed" a secret "in
connexion with this little history . . . something I had
deemed it during the progress of the story, necessary to
its interest to disguise . . . ." But "consciousness of
having done some violence to [his nature] in my
narrative" (Appendix 679) finally extorts his admission
that the opening adventure of The Old Curiosity Shop in
which he is a key party was "fictitious" (Appendix 680).
However, he professes that he has not been entirely
removed from the show: "The younger brother, the single
gentleman, the nameless actor in this little drama,
stands before you now" (Appendix 680). The character of
Master Humphrey has then been continued in the text,
albeit submerged in masquerade, as its "nameless
actor. "31
120
The Old Curiosity Shop's inaugural narrative, in
effect, unfolds under false pretenses, a projection of
the frame narrator as poseur. And so it sets in motion
an economy of artifice and imposture that characterizes
the work's narrative temper. The sign of deformity, and
"monstrosity" in particular, is one index of that
deviancy. Master Humphrey, of course, has so
characterized himself. What can be loosely termed the
"grotesque" motif in the novel is a related phenomenon.
The two principles have a common basis in culturally
defined systems of order and chaos rooted in natural
contingencies. Aristotelian thought provides a handy
synopsis of naturalized genres of order/disorder, as
elucidated by one commentator, S. H. Butcher. He
writes. Chance, or accident, "the negation of Art and
Intelligence, and of Nature as an organising force," is
associated with the unpredictability of the material:
Its essence is disorder, absence of
design, want of regularity. Its sphere
is that wide domain of human life which
baffles foresight, defies reason,
abounds in surprises: and also those
regions of Nature where we meet with
abortive efforts, mistakes, strange and
monstrous growths, which are 1 the
failures of the principle of design.'
(180-81)
"The failure of the principle of design" surfaces
throughout The Old Curiosity Shop in variant naturalized
patterns. In one, it is linked, as I have noted, with
121
physical abnormality, even as a token impurity. If
monsters constitute nature's power gone awry, in
cripples it is that power curbed. Both exhibit the
radius of mutation. As Michel Foucault explains the
phenomenon of "monstrosity," "against the background of
the continuum, the monster provides an account, as
though in caricature, of the genesis of
differences ..." (The Order of Things 157), and, I
might add, as the carnivalistic inversion of convention,
or in Jos* Monledn1s evaluation, "as a physical or
psychological distortion of the bourgeois norm" (78).
The grotesque body in this carnivalistic sense is always
in the process of evolution. The grotesque dissolves
natural categories.32
The curiosity shop itself, "one of those
receptacles for old and curious things which seem to
crouch in odd corners of this town," full of "distorted
figures," the "spoils" of old churches, tombs, and
deserted houses, is a microcosm of the textual world
(47). The curios, like the frame narrator, are
associated in this passage with loss, desecration and
ravage. It is significant that the "heaps of fantastic
things" which surround Nell in the shop are "foreign to
her nature . . . the sympathies of her sex and age."
And so she exists for Master Humphrey in "a kind of
allegory" (56), the counter text of transcendent
122
allegory which is the obverse of the grotesque, and at
variance, needless to say, with the frame narrator's
self, at least on the strengths of its outlines.
This prospect is revealed in the following passage,
in which Master Humphrey, having encountered the child
on one of his night rambles, returns her to her
grandfather's curiosity shop. Later he paces the floor
at home, where "everything was quiet, warm, and
cheering, and in happy contrast to the gloom and
darkness I had quitted" (55). His reflections on the
child's situation take the same antagonistic form as
their separate abodes: "'It would be a curious
speculation,' said I . . . 'to imagine her in her future
life, holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild
grotesque companions, the only pure, fresh, youthful
object in the throng' .... I checked myself here, for
the theme was carrying me along with it at a great pace,
and I already saw before me a region on which I was
little disposed to enter" (56). But though he tries to
"court forgetfulness" in sleep, Master Humphrey finds
none:
But all that night, waking or in my
sleep, the same thoughts recurred and
the same images retained possession of
my brain. I had ever before me the old
dark murky rooms— the gaunt suits of
mail with their ghostly silent air— the
faces all awry, grinning from wood and
stone— the dust and rust, and worm that
lives in wood— and alone in the midst of
123
all this lumber and decay, and ugly age,
the beautiful child in her gentle
slumber, smiling through her light and
sunny dreams. (56)
The novel's phantasmagoria, a "region" of
curiosities, also incorporates the "real" in the elderly
persona of Master Humphrey, whose age and physical
irregularities mime those of the shop curios. The
grotesque is hence seemingly incompatible with the
harmonious aspects of youth and beauty symbolized in
Nell.33 This antithetic scheme is reified in various
characters, most of whom represent a clearcut good or
evil. In Humphrey, however, and in several characters
who stand in for him, the grotesque and the principle of
moral good embodied in Nell are successfully united.
[Mrs. Jarley and her caravan of "happily contrasted
colours" (263) is another.] Dick Swiveller is one more
such mediator; he wants to "promote . . . social
harmony" (68). To Dick, for whom "mutual violence" mars
human relations, opposition is repugnant; all should be
"bliss and concord" in human nature (62). Quilp,
conversely, refuses accord; he does not "combine" he
tells his business partner, Sampson Brass (567). In
body, and in his resistance to social equations, Quilp
is a primary symbol of perversion, both of nature's
"principle of design" and that beneficence which mankind
is capable of collected in the social impulse.34 The
124
"blight" theme which so often emerges in Dickens*
landscapes, the obverse of a nostalgia for Edenic
perfection, is incarnate in Daniel Quilp.
If the novel's governing principle is paradox, then
one of its more obvious manifestations is metamorphosis,
a defining attribute of fairy tale, to be sure, but not
lending itself here to the proverbial happy ending.
Characters can assume other shapes, in which case, like
Mrs. Jarley's waxwork figures and like Master Humphrey's
framing apparatus itself, the line between the real and
the imaginary blurs.35 This truth comes home to Nell
when her beloved grandfather enters her room at night to
rob her. The man "she had seen that night . . . seemed
like another creature in his shape, a monstrous
distortion of his image, a something to recoil from, and
be the more afraid of, because it bore a likeness to
him, and kept close about her, as he did" (303). The
blend of the imaginary and the real, however, need not
take such evolutionary forms. "Monstrosity," in its
capacity as metaphor for deceptive appearances, accents
this theme. For example, the "two monstrous shadows"
which terrify Nell at one point turn out to be children
on stilts (192). Like most oppositions in the novel,
imagination and reality can be reconciled, and a
symmetry, an artistic ideal of "truth" attained. The
possibility is symbolized in the gathering of friends
125
who come to hear Master Humphrey's stories (including
Humphrey's closest companion, and another handicapped
individual, a nameless "deaf gentleman" (Appendix 677).
As he describes them:
We are alchemists who would extract the
essence of perpetual youth from dust and
ashes, tempt coy Truth in many light and
airy forms from the bottom of her well,
and discover one crumb of comfort or one
grain of good in the commonest and least
regarded matter that passes through our
crucible. Spirits of past times,
creatures of imagination, and people of
to-day, are alike the objects of our
seeking, and, unlike the objects of
search with most philosophers, we can
ensure their coming at our command.
(Appendix 678)
As Nell's grandfather to his curios, Master
Humphrey has had a lifelong attachment (described
oxymoronically) to "the inanimate objects that people my
chamber" (Appendix 676). Chief among these, and the
article which perhaps most clearly connotes artistic
harmony and the fusion of heterogeneities in the
artistic ideal, besides Master Humphrey himself, is his
clock, "a quaint old thing . . . curiously and richly
carved," to which he "incline[s] as if it were alive,
and could understand and give me back the love X bear
it.” Associated with his "earliest recollections," the
clock has presided over both his youth and old age, and
is therefore the fitting repository for the narratives
which "beguile time from the heart of time itself"
126
(Appendix 678) . The clock may in fact symbolize Master
Humphrey's obsession with the past, its wrongs
retrospectively redressed through narrative.36 The
timepiece typifies Master Humphrey's other traits
besides. Like himself, a "friend and adviser, the
depository of their cares and sorrows" to his neighbors"
(Appendix 674), it is a "patient, true, untiring
friend." Its capacity too for "comfort and consolation"
(Appendix 676) mirrors that of other "cheering"
resources in the novel, furnaces and fires as hearth
substitutes, for instance. Stefanie Meier, citing
Arthur Brown, finds that clocks are also associated with
paternal figures in Dickens' work (43).
Finally, the clock also denotes the regularity
principle, the play of uniformity or "design" competing
with the text's gestures toward distortion. It keeps
"exact time" (Appendix 677), even announcing the
commencement and end of Humphrey's gatherings "at stated
periods" (Appendix 678). [Significantly, Quilp's clock,
a mutilated one with its minute hand torn off, has
stopped (88).] Erratic and unforeseen behaviors, the
sign of the paradoxical which appears to ultimately
defeat the narrator's ends, are not factored in Master
Humphrey's temperament, nor are they accounted for in
the system of orderly signification that on one level
the narrative aspires to implement. Thus paradox
127
reveals itself as an ironic trope which stymies the
impetus towards representation.37
Yet Master Humphrey is more than a compound of the
antagonisms informing The Old Curiosity Shop. At the
very least, he is a solicitous parenting figure whose
early disappearance from Nell's life foreshadows the
conspicuous vacancy of such characters throughout the
narrative, or, for such as there are, their failure to
satisfactorily replace the absentee parent. But just as
other nurturant figures, however inadequate, succeed
Master Humphrey's, in his most characteristic role, that
of narrator, he is followed by other, pseudo-narrators.
[Humphrey is the prototype, so to speak, of assorted
guises.] More importantly, however, in his pivotal
function as both nurturant figure and narrator,
Humphrey's persona is reproduced by surrogates whose
frailties and disabilities are a distinctive endowment.
One of these icons is Dick Swiveller, an amalgam of
eccentricity with "harmony," who evolves from seeming
fecklessness and culpability to an "imposter-hero" in
Steven Marcus's words (167), by rescuing Sophronia
Wackles, the "Marchioness," from the dungeon in which
she is imprisoned and giving her new life. [Like
Humphrey, he is a parent surrogate; like Nell and
several other characters, he is also an orphan.] Malcolm
Andrews concludes, indeed, that "Dick's presence in the
128
novel, once he is established as Brass's clerk, in some
measure compensates for the departed Master Humphrey"
(Introduction 24) in quasi-narration. Dick also seeks
to uncover mysteries as Humphrey does; this aptitude is
a prominent feature of his role in the affairs at the
Brass house, and clearly in his probing of the
camouflage behind Sophronia's servitude.
Other clusters of signification center around the
novel's minor compassionate figures who are in some
manner impaired. Several of these fill the nurturant
role vacated by Humphrey, whose characterization in that
regard has shifted from caretaker to detective in the
narrative's course. [Earlier in the novel he observes
that the situation of Nell and her grandfather are "an
impenetrable mystery" (55).] The club-footed elder Mr.
Garland of the family who befriends Kit Nubbles is one
such individual (165). The blackened foundry worker,
their "uncouth protector" (421), who rescues Nell and
her grandfather in the industrial waste of the Black
Country is another. This orphaned workman, whose bleak
childhood amidst poverty and deprivation has not
hardened his soul against his fellows, offers the pair
shelter from the elements at his fire. The character
calls Master Humphrey to mind, moreover, in several
respects. As Humphrey's clock is to him, the fire is
"friend" to the workman; it "has been alive as long as I
129
have" (418). And, like Humphrey's clock, the fire
performs a narrative function: It is "like a book to
me," he says, "the only book I ever learned to read; and
many an old story it tells me." The fire is also a
paradigm for harmony. To the worker it resembles music,
"for I should know its voice among a thousand, and there
are other voices in its roar" (418). [Music fills the
Same purpose for Dick Swiveller and Mrs. Jarley.]
Finally, in the original manuscript, Dickens had
envisioned this man as crippled (Note 3, 706). Indeed,
the character alludes to his condition when he tells
Nell, "You may guess from looking at me what kind of
child I was, but for all the difference between us I was
a child, and when I saw you in the street to-night, you
put me in mind of myself as I was after he [his father]
died, and made me wish to bring you to the old fire"
(420).
The kindly schoolmaster, who leans on a "stout
stick" as he walks (429), is yet another Humphrey stand-
in. One of the sheltering houses to which he conducts
Nell contains some "broken figures," whose description
resembles Master Humphrey's. Humphrey, speaking to the
reader of Master Humphrey's Clock "from his Clock-side
in the Chimney-corner" (Appendix 673), approximates the
"broken figures supporting the burden of the chimney-
piece" in the schoolmaster's abandoned house, which,
130
"though mutilated, were still distinguishable for what
they had been— far different from the dust without— and
showed sadly by the empty hearth, like creatures who had
outlived their kind, and mourned their own too slow
decay" (480) .
The sexton is another who reflects certain aspects
of Humphrey in merging seeming contradictions. He
nurtures both grave and garden, or grave as garden
(490), tending both death and life, as it were. He is
elderly and walks with a crutch. But though linked with
the passage of time and its rituals, he is impervious to
it, denying its "truths," as he believes himself
invulnerable to age. He has no pity for others'
infirmities too, and feels no bond with other
handicapped, as revealed in his impatience with a deaf
colleague (499).
The most salient of Master Humphrey's proxies,
however, is the figure heralded at the opening of
Chapter 33, the "historian" who "takes the friendly
reader by the hand," and who is significantly compared
to "Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo and his
familiar" (319). Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo is
the protagonist of Alain Ren£ Le Sage's The Devil on Two
Sticks (Le Diable Boiteux). published in 1707. The
editor's note describes his "familiar" as "Asmod&e, the
devil on crutches of the title, who revealed everything
131
that was going on in the houses as they rode through the
air: hence the appropriateness of the image to Dickens's
function as story-teller" fold Curiosity Shop Note 1,
697). In his introduction to Master Humphrey's Clock,
Humphrey also talks of "carry[ing] my readers with me"
(Appendix 673). Michael Hollington offers some
background on Le Sage's familiar in Dickens and the
Grotesque:
The idea of the grotesque, misshapen
Master Humphrey sitting up at the top of
St. Paul's looking down at society [as
he does in another issue] may recall
Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris: but for
Dickens the essential model for this
narrative angle was the demon Asmodeus
in Lesage's Diable Boiteux fThe Devil on
Two Sticks). Asmodeus has his origin,
for Christian tradition, in the book of
Tobit, where he takes possession of
Tobias's wife, Sarah, and prevents her
from marrying any of seven husbands by
killing them; traditionally he is the
demon of marital discord, lust and
anger. But in a Spanish tradition
stemming from Quevedo' s Suefios he also
has the power to take off rooftops and
reveal the secrets within, and in
Lesage's version, which draws quite
heavily upon Spanish sources, he rewards
a Spanish nobleman named Don Cleophas,
who releases him from imprisonment
within a glass bottle, by allowing him
to travel as a companion on a
nightflight over Madrid. Taking off
rooftops, he reveals crimes, sexual
misdemeanours, secret vices and
fantasies; he is a satiric device to
criticise society by exposing its
hypocrisies. (155)
Rather than fragment Humphrey into either
"historian," Don Cleophas or his "familiar," I suggest
132
that his is the sympathetic union of all three—
historicizing narrator, humane deliverer, crippled
grotesque, whose task it is to unearth narrative
secrets.38 Asmodeus is also capable of
transfiguration, adding one more link in his connections
to Humphrey. Of importance too is the announcement on
the titlepage of an 1881 English edition of The Devil
upon Two Sticks that the main work is preceded by
"Dialogues, Serious and Comic between Two Chimneys of
Madrid." This dialogic framework, reminiscent of the
antitheses in Dickens' novel, also reflects Master
Humphrey's chimney corner narrative device.
As for its thematics, The Old Curiosity Shop would
at first appear to express the defeat and death of a
transcendent allegory of purity and goodness
unequivocally depicted in Nell. A more viable (and
realistic) homily, however, is proclaimed in the
schoolmaster's consoling appeal to Nell that "good
actions and good thoughts" can be vehicles for change.
He tells her, "'There is nothing . . . no, nothing
innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us
hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling
child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the
better thoughts of those who loved it; and play its
part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the
world . . . '" (503). Master Humphrey himself is the
133
clearest exemplar of this dialectic; that is, though
evil may arise from good, the opposite also holds— that
good unfolds from "evil" in time, or from affliction and
adversity, even from the "imperfections" and mishaps of
nature. For in body Humphrey is the evident sign of
that infelicity, but his spirit is proof that the
totality of moral good available is partially recovered
through redemptive action. In the grandfather's moral
reform and in the narrator's remorse, this theme is
clearly annunciated.
Finally, and in reflecting on the conditions for
interpretation created by perceived hierarchies in our
reading, it is clear that a perspective of this kind
obscures the textual relations reinforced by The Old
Curiosity Shop's supposedly abridged frame. The
theoretically mimetic device of character is also dimly
understood in the novel, undergoing various exchanges of
venue and baring itself as a mechanism through which the
sign system is disseminated. Despite what appears to be
a truncated framework, The Old Curiosity Shop implements
a framelike cohesion in its discursive use of
repetition, redundancy, and parallelism, all forms of
coherence, on the novel's multilevel narrative planes.
This cohering activity succeeds in evoking Master
Humphrey's presence throughout the work. He is never,
then, symbolically absent, his supposed disappearance
134
from the narrative to the contrary. Through Dickens'
deployment of repetitive cohesive devices which function
to integrate it, The Old Curiosity Shop succeeds as
framed narration.39 By protesting the relinquishing of
frame construction, we forego the rich texturizing which
occurs through Master Humphrey's auspices as he merges
into the mutable characterization which informs the
novel. Readers may also imagine that the work, lacking
a frame, is in need of an organizational principle (a
frequent charge). If acclimated to criteria for
conventionalized frame narration, they are less likely
to perceive that Dickens obtains the same effect by
other means. Again, the merger of frame characteristics
with other elements of the novel reveals the
omnipresence of framing throughout the work, despite the
seeming withdrawal of its narrator. The reader immersed
in causal chains of narrative logic will conclude
otherwise.
Case Study IV: "The Turn of the Screw as Hermeneutic
Paradigm: The Relationship of Ambiguity to Silence,
Sound, and Dissonance."
A cursory review of The Turn of the Screw1s framing
structure at first defies the consensus in frame
theories that frames are metatextual organizational
principles. For all intents and purposes, the novel's
135
opening narrative, ostensibly depicting an entertaining
taletelling session at a country house, more puzzles
than informs, since it would appear to offer a tenuous
relationship at best to the governess's tale which
succeeds it. At first glance, the initial frame could
be assimilated with little difficulty as a pedestrian
(hence insignificant) prefatory scene which launches the
governess's cryptic narrative, long considered the
novel's central statement. Nor does James's commentary
in the accompanying preface provide any guidelines for
interpreting the plot's subtle ambiguity, adding fuel to
the fire of reader curiosity, so to speak.
The history of critical fixation on the governess's
story has finally meant that readers and critics alike
have sought meaning from the text's plot and characters,
the framing narrative itself being relatively neglected.
The latter*s function in the text, however, is
fundamental to its very interpretation. The framing
narrative itself provides what I call "the paradigm of
response" in the governess's story, foreshadowed in the
novel's opening scenes featuring host Douglas and a
reading of what he claims is his governess's manuscript
to an assemblage of guests. The scenes in this
narrative illustrate a rhetorical pattern distinguished
by contrariety and inversion— words and questions are
pitted against inchoate replies or opaque silences
136
which in turn elicit a counter (and often impotent)
response. It is this paradigm which supports the major
motifs in the novel, and which is transmitted through
the frame. I suggest that the lexical usage involving
silence and sound concepts forges a nexus between the
opening framing situation and the governess's seemingly
remote past. The novel's framing apparatus models both
textual and epistemological gaps, then, but also,
surprisingly perhaps to the reader accepting his
comments at face value, discrepancies in James's
criticism.
In its refusal of information, The Turn of the
Screw at first appears to rebuke James's philosophy of
the novel as an "organic" whole, since its privileging
of secrecy and origins resists what he is later to call
the "structural centre." James's allegiance to
"representational values," or "appearances" which
contribute to the aggregate, however, has influenced my
conclusions that in The Turn of the Screw, the frame is
requisite to an understanding of the entire text. The
novel can be fully appreciated only if the framing
narrative is attached to the interior, and the two are
not viewed as anomalous or spuriously related accounts.
Lastly, a more gratifying realization of the novel's
thematics suggests venturing beyond the plot levels
alone, with their apparently sundered narratives in time
137
and place, to the discursive and rhetorical textual
planes. A fuller meaning can be recovered there by
experiencing both fictions as the sum of their
respective parts, the themes of the one anticipating and
being replicated in the other.
In his Preface to the New York Edition of The Turn
of the Screw, subtitled "An Exercise of the
Imagination," Henry James refers to his provocative
novella, a framed text depicting an old manuscript
delivered at a country-house reading, as "an excursion
into chaos . . . " (120) . The observation is probably
an accurate description of the contradictory readings
the work has received. Robert Kimbrough touches on the
problem when he remarks: "Is the tale merely
'sensational,' the plot simply forcing itself on us? Or
is the process the reverse, the tale as it unfolds
evoking responses from deep within us? Each reader must
decide for himself" (Introduction, The Turn of the Screw
ix) .
Other critics describe the tale's intrinsic
ambiguity differently. James himself seems deliberately
vague. His "heroine," the unnamed governess whose
manuscript is first read by the "Douglas" character
inscribed in the opening scenes, is portrayed as a
"young woman engaged in her labyrinth," keeping a
"record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities— by
138
which I don't of course mean her explanation of them, a
different matter ..." (Preface 120-21). To add to
the confusion, he further specifies that:
There is for such a case no eligible
absolute of the wrong; it remains
relative to fifty other elements, a
matter of appreciation, speculation,
imagination— these things moreover quite
exactly in the light of the spectator's,
the critic's, the reader's experience.
Only make the reader's general vision of
evil intense enough, I said to myself—
and that already is a charming job— and
his own experience, his own imagination,
his own sympathy (with the children) and
horror (of their false friends) will
supply him quite sufficiently with all
the particulars. Make him think the
evil, make him think it for himself, and
you are released from weak
specifications. (Preface 123)
But James's suggestion that we perceive on our own
terms again elicits a range of interpretations, summed
up in one critic's remark: "[Read] one way, it is a tale
of corrupted childhood. The other, it is a tale of
uncorrupted childhood" (Goddard 206). As readers we
construe the heroine's experiences differently— from one
another, from her, from James himself. Our perplexity
is even exacerbated because James offers us no
unconditional moral judgments. The reader must deduce
his own— and they are not likely to be absolute.
These diverse readings issue, in part, from James's
method of composing in "scenes" which are to be studied
for meaning. He thereby constructs a pictorial,
139
representative, or painterly art of organically rendered
"possibility" rather than one of "fact," one which
obviates the breakdown and distinction of substance and
form, as he writes in the Preface to The Awkward Aae
(Art of the Novel 115). "The synthetic 'whole' is [the
dramatist's] form," he urges (Preface to The Awkward
Aae. Art Of the Novel 118) . The Turn of the Screw is so
designed. As a result, the "ideal" reader is
constructed as a spectator whose engagement with the
narrative involves "seeing" rather than doing. This
process is theoretically built into the structure of the
work through the story's framing device of multiple
narrators.
James's commentary, however, leads us into the very
"labyrinth" he assigns his governess. He alludes to
this idea in the Preface when he characterizes his
novella as "an amusette [a piece of child's play] to
catch those not easily caught . . . the jaded, the
disillusioned, the fastidious" (12 0). Perhaps as a
result of such teasing invitations, his many readers,
like Douglas's assembly in the framing narrative, have
typically focused on the story's plot and characters for
clues to meaning.40 However, as we have seen, a
reading taken from the circumstances themselves, or the
characters' actions and speech alone, produces
ambivalent reactions.
140
Given this uncertain topography and apparent
disjunction at the novel's surface, where does the
reader begin the search for meaning? Again, one source
is James himself, for whom the ghost-story was a genre
offering a common ground for fused sensibilities, "the
actual and the imaginary" ("James on the Ghost Story,"
Kimbrough 96). It seems relatively safe to assume that,
as representations in The Turn of the Screw, the actual
is the "natural" world of Bly and its "real"
inhabitants, governess, housekeeper, and children, while
the imaginary is intimated in the "supernatural"
presence of the ghosts. Two seemingly opposing worlds
are mirrored here— "reality" and "appearance"— which
reveal some of the novel's possible themes in their
imagery and verbal patterns.
One set of figures and lexical usage revolves
around the amorphous concept of silence (the "ground" in
Gestaltist paradigms). Although it obviously
encompasses the supernatural, it also designates an
invisible world, human or not, which the governess
cannot penetrate. The uncle is the originating agent of
this reticence which inhibits communication.41 Perhaps
because of what amounts to a silencing, the governess
finds a substitute: she frequently fills voids in the
quiet at Bly with her own interpretations, much as
Douglas's audience does in the novel's frame. On a
141
fundamental level, reading the novel amounts in fact to
the extrapolation of sound from silence, a process
reiterated in Douglas's precursive reading of the
governess's manuscript, breaking "a long silence" (2).
Arrayed against the formidable barrier imposed by
this silent world is the governess herself. She has
"authority," or so James (mockingly?) declares (Preface
121), which she implements in her roles as governess-
teacher through the didactic use of words. But words
are also her means of ordering the world; they even
define her place in it. Accordingly, she refers to
herself as "proprietary" and as having a "mission" to
fulfill, or as being a "crusader" (15, 17, 28). Words
are a necessity because they ultimately determine the
perimeters of her relationships, her duties, and
subsequent courses of action. For example, she wrestles
with the problem presented by one ghost's appearance: "I
approached it from one side and the other while, in my
room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down in
the monstrous utterance of names" (53).
Words, then, are the tool with which the governess
probes for significance in an environment which she
discerns as confusing and treacherous. Words are, as
well, spoken to her in return. They are the phonic
pattern in the work, the Gestaltist "figure," which,
like the actual world they represent, coexists with, yet
142
is essentially the antithesis of the unvoiced. Speech
may be thought of as near, then, to James's concept of
"all our apparently ordered life"; it is form. But it
is threatened by the proximity of what he termed "some
sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its
power, and its hate" (Preface to The Princess
Casamassima. Art of the Novel 76).
By culling some of the allusions clustered around
the antipodes of silence and sound in The Turn of the
Screw, the emergence of these patterns becomes clear.
James points us in the direction we are to take in
examining those aspects which correspond to silence. In
the Preface he informs us, "my values are positively all
blanks" (12 3). We as readers supply these "blanks" or
ellipses with our own constructions. For example, the
frame audience listening to ghost stories as the novel
opens mimics our very responses as readers faced with
Douglas's mysterious reticence and references to the
tale he has in mind which "Nobody but me, till now, has
ever heard." He even has difficulty in beginning, for
the story is "beyond everything" (1). Moreover, it is
in a "locked drawer— it has not been out for years" (2).
Like the manuscript to which he refers, Douglas is
described as having "broken a thickness of ice"— he "had
his reasons for a long silence" (2). Douglas himself
has been told the governess's story, but it is the
143
unspoken he recalls: "Yes, she was in love. That came
out— she couldn't tell her story without its coming
out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us
spoke of it." Later he is asked with whom the governess
was in love. The "I" narrator of the tale responds,
"The story will tell." But Douglas counters, "The story
won11 tell— not in any literal, vulgar way" (3). [If
frame narratives are being subverted as norming devices
here, that is in the assumption that they introduce
another narrative which will enlighten us, then
Douglas's reply is a deviation signal which confounds
his audience.] Finally, when Douglas leaves the company
to retire, someone remarks on his lengthy silence; it is
followed by the contrapuntal "With this outbreak at
last" (3) .42
The paradigm of response which suffuses the
narrative is thus present in the novel's opening scenes,
in the framing narrative itself. It is characterized by
opposition— words and questions versus silence. Like
the cryptic uncle, Douglas has a "secret" about which
his audience is curious. They fill the gaps in
communication with their own inferences. The "I"
narrator, as we have seen, epitomizes this process. For
instance, when Douglas is asked "What's your title?" he
replies, "I haven't one." "Oh I have!" responds the "I"
figure (6). Hence from its inception, the characters
144
who appear in the story's "frame" mirror the governess's
posture vis-a-vis the silent world she confronts. As
James himself points out in his Preface to The Princess
Casamassima. "The teller of a story is primarily, none
the less, the listener to it, the reader of it,
too ..." (Art of the Novel 63). At any rate, the
governess herself is the best illustration of this
position in this tale of arrested dialogue, and it is
therefore in her actions that we see it amply
exemplified. One critic has described her thus: "The
governess as narrator-character has two functions:
telling and explaining" (Ginsberg 271). Some examples
of her interpretive, preceptive behavior will suffice to
show how the governess's need to "inform" colors her
approach to situation.
In the introductory words of her manuscript the
governess unwittingly describes the communication
process in which she will find herself a frustrated
participant. She says, "I remember the whole beginning
as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw
of the right throbs and the wrong" (6). Throughout her
narrative, her own initial halting speech patterns, her
curtailed conversations with others, the sentences she
eventually completes for others— all iterate the
spasmodic character of the thought with which she begins
her story. Her speech patterns in this regard model the
145
exchange between the "I" narrator and Douglas in the
opening scenes. Responding to speculation about the
former governess's death, the I-narrator remarks, "'In
her successor's place .... X should have wished to
learn if the office brought with it— '" "'Necessary
danger to life?' Douglas completed my thought" (5).
Not long after her arrival at Bly, the governess
becomes aware of "a sound or two in the fading
dusk . . . that I had fancied I heard" (8). Later, in
the incident concerning Miles's expulsion from school,
this "fancy" or imagination diffuses; it begins to
provide answers where none are indicated. For example,
when Mrs. Grose inquires if Miles is "really bad" the
governess replies, "They go into no particulars. They
simply express their regret that it should be impossible
to keep him. That can have but one meaning" (11).
This faculty which injects form and meaning into
what is essentially shapeless or absent to the sense,
whether in the episode wherein she "hears" things or as
in the above scene involving an incomprehensible
statement, is one which increasingly marks the
governess's engagement with life at Bly. She describes
her own existence prior to her arrival there, as
previously noted, as "small" and "smothered." She
compensates for this closure, it would seem, in an ever
146
expanding discourse along a continuum from inference to
completion to interrogation.
As a consequence, perhaps, of the bounds imposed
upon her in her upbringing, she feels "There [is] no
ambiguity in anything" (29). She brings this quality of
her perception to a variety of situations, but it seems
most obvious in her confrontations with other human
beings. Thus, when she sees Miss Jessel's apparition
she is confident Flora does also. She subsequently
anticipates confirmation in the child's reactions, but
no such sign is forthcoming: "I held my breath while I
waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or alarm, would tell
me. I waited, but nothing came" (30). The governess's
confidence in "telling" reflects the "I" narrator's
naive belief that "the story will tell" Douglas's
secret. Words, the "monstrous" naming capable of
"plumbing depths" (46, 34), may be used as instruments
of violation, of "trespassing." In this context, speech
becomes linked with "possession," a condition replicated
by the frame situation's allusions to the manuscript's
custody and to control of meaning.
In sum, the concept of silence may be linked in The
Turn of the Screw with other motifs. It may "disguise"
or hide a truth which speech has the potential to
transgress because it threatens discovery. Language in
147
this mode is related to shock.43 Silence may also be
relative to that which the governess terms "the hidden
obscure" (80) , the paradigm brought out so forcibly in
the story's frame. Thus letters are never mailed, or
reveal "nothing" (86).
When we cannot understand others through words, we
are impelled to "read" a syntax of meaning through their
behavior, for good or ill. So it is that the end of
human communication is reached in The Turn of the Screw.
We have our first glimpse of this apocalyptic state when
the governess recounts the time before she first sees
Quint's ghost as one which has the "charm of stillness—
I
that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The j
!
change was actually like the spring of a beast" (15). |
I
Curiously, however, in this same scene a transformation
occurs in the governess herself.44 When Miles turns
from her, unable to face his interlocutress and her
dreaded "naming," she becomes the "beast": "that
movement made me, with a single bound and an
irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him" (87). So
it is that when all communication has failed, the evil
i
she first senses in the quiet of an earlier, "innocent" j
i
time reveals itself in her. She becomes speechless and
animal. The essence of one's being, then, is at the
nucleus of silence. But even the governess sees "the
wildness of my veritable leap" as "a great betrayal"
148
(88). Her act reveals the universal tendency in human
beings to reduce to that which would make them less so.
If, then, we can place in any perspective the
puzzling nature of James's fascinating work, we may be
rewarded with a moral of sorts, and that is, that our
view of realities, seen and unseen, is inevitably bound
by our individual bias. Insofar as that is adequate, we
function. When we are confronted by cosmic and ethical
contraries, however, we must reassess our systems of
thought. At best we are unable, within our limitations,
to resolve or transcend these contradictions, or only
perhaps at great cost, the invasion of others. It is
enough for the sensitive conscience to encounter them at
the outer boundaries of consummate awareness. Thanks to
James's ''weak specifications," and to the frame's parody
of that situation, we as readers, like Douglas, his
audience, and like the governess, are tempted to furnish
"all the particulars" of that experience.
Superficially then, the frame resembles a joke, but
one which recalls us to the rubric of violation
thematicized in the novel by miming the invasion of a
territorial, sacrosanct silence. Besides constituting
the work's central theme, this incursion motif is also
its organizing principle. The frame narrative
replicates the extracting of confessions which is
covertly condemned in the plot's resolution. It makes
149
the crucial point that people, their secrets, are
forcibly "revealed" in all their frailty through the
unmasking act of articulation. And, though the text
appears to be open-ended and to resist closure, the
frame retrieves the closural principle (or should we say
it is submerged in the frame?). Readers searching out
the novel's "secret" end by delving in the wrong place.
We are misled because the frame deceptively signals a
significance beyond itself, and we are tricked into
imagining that the novel can be explicated from the
false "clues" in the governess's story.
James's definition of the novel as a "picture,"
neither "moral" nor "immoral" ("The Art of Fiction"
410), guides our reception of his novella.45 At the
same time, he recognizes implicitly that we may fail to
grasp it in its organic wholeness. In "The Art of
Fiction" he warns us of the danger of fragmenting a work
of art into its parts:
A novel is a living thing, all one and
continuous, like any other organism, and
in proportion as it lives will it be
found, I think, that in each of the
parts there is something of each of the
other parts. The critic who over the
close texture of a finished work shall
pretend to trace a geography of items
will mark some frontiers as artificial,
I fear, as any that have been known to
history. (400)
The frame of The Turn of the Screw, surely
pronounced in "the geography of items" as topos. is at
150
risk of being underestimated, however, just because its
analogue in James's impressionistic poetics is the
picture frame, which we must blink in order to rivet our
attention on the work itself. In his accounting of
James's aesthetic, F. O. Matthiessen, writing on The
Ambassadors. raises that probability:
What Strether sees is the entire
content, and James thus perfected a
device both for framing and for
interpreting experience. All art must
give the effect of putting a frame
around its subject, in the sense that it
must select a significant design, and by
concentrating upon it, thus empower us
to share in the essence without being
distracted by irrelevant details.
(James, The Ambassadors 428)
The predicament indirectly advanced by both James
and Matthiessen reverts inevitably to the Derridean
paradox— the frame as parenthesis, as both contouring
the work of art and yet intrinsic to it. The Turn of
the Screw poses an instance of the problem. If we
accept James's criteria, then the framing scene with
Douglas and his gathering of friends at the country
house is an integral part of the story which must be
seen in relationship to the governess's narrative if we
are to "judge the whole piece by the pattern" in James's
words ("The Art of Fiction" 398). But since James's
criticism does not really articulate the Derridean
questioning of all forms of framing, his comments are no
sure guide to a felicitous interpretive stance.
151
Matthiessen's commentary, while more definitive, only
confuses the basic issue. If the frame disengages
viewers from the "irrelevant" by converging attention on
its contents, to what degree, then, do we neglect the
framing substance itself? In the absence of James's
concrete specifications as to the frame's function, and
without belaboring the point, a judicial view dictates
that it not be abrogated, nor by the same token should
undue regard for framing devices in themselves divert
our absorption in the tensions of the aggregate.
With the view of art disclosed in his Preface to
The Golden Bowl, James comes closer to what I believe to
be the necessary multiform approach to his work. He
writes,
We have but to think a moment of such a
matter as the play of representational
values, those that make it a part, and
an important part, of our taking offered
things in that we should take them as
aspects and visibilities— take them to
the utmost as appearances, images,
figures, objects, so many important, so
many contributive items of the furniture
of the world— in order to feel
immediately the effect of such a
condition at every turn of our adventure
and every point of the representative
surface. (346)
As he notes in the Preface to The Tragic Muse, his
art avoids the "structural centre” (Art of the Novel
85), striving instead for the dynamics of drama. Thus
"The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to
152
me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I
have in general given so much space to making the
theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved
strangely unequal.” By "masking the fault," he
"conffers] on the false quantity the brave appearance of
the true" (Art of the Novel 86), that is, the text's
organicity. In The Turn of the Screw's grammar, the
frame is the foreshortened "stage" of which James
speaks.46 If, as many researchers argue, the frame is
a "model of coherence" (Rimmon-Kenan 128), then The Turn
of the Screw's frame appears to be modelling a protocol
for something else— the hermeneutic gap, aoorias in
story, text, and in James' epistemology. The key,
therefore, to a larger appreciation of the work's
complex interrelations is a joining of frame and
interior narrative, not their separation into two
unconnected accounts. On the discursive and rhetorical
planes, not on the level of plot and action alone, the
novel's thematic whole is manifest. By conflating what
appear to be its autonomous narrative spheres, frame and
embedded story, we can more readily understand how the
novel ultimately achieves its skillful fusion of values.
Case Study V: "Heart of Darkness and the Imperial
Mandate."
153
Like The Turn of the Screw. Heart of Darkness plays
off the hermeneutic tradition and the "bait," the
knowledge of life allegedly concealed in Marlow's
relation of the novel's enigmatic events. Again, many
readers have been riveted by the theatrical story of
Kurtz which Marlow tells to the Nellie's crew, assuming
that this tale of one man's descent into ignominy is the
novel's moral. The existential answers that elude us
can be found in Kurtz's story, or so the reader feels,
despite Marlow's disclaimers that "truth" cannot be
imparted through his tale. Once more we readers are
deluded however, both by Marlow's denial that he aspires
to confer knowledge on his audience, and, conversely,
his allusions to the gravity of Kurtz's experience. The
reader's respect for the systematic relations between
frame and embedded story is again required in order to
apprehend the full impact of Marlow's "message." As in
The Turn of the Screw, the lexicon in Heart of Darkness
provides clues to the novel's propositional content. It
is shaped by an "outside/inside" metaphor which
references the ideological oppositions implicated in
Marlow's commentary encompassing the tale of Kurtz. By
Marlow's standards, "external checks" are equated with
moral restraint. Moral turpitude lies in the hidden
unknown, the interior— of the jungle, of the human
heart. Marlow's rhetoric, then, his protests to the
154
contrary, arguably defines and interprets the nature of
experience, not only that of Kurtz and Marlow's
nineteenth-century audience, but perhaps even ours.
Like my readings of all the framed texts considered
here, this interpretation tests the biases of canonical
framing philosophies. A theory of "progressive"
readings would inevitably point readers to the embedded
Kurtz story for meaning, but that tale only begs the
question. To read it as Marlow's (and by extension,
Conrad's) last word on moral issues is to deprive
oneself of the novel's principal drift, of which Kurtz's
tale is simply illustrative. In sum, Marlow's discourse
and delivery unite hypothetically dissimilar narrative
worlds, those of the good ship Nellie, the menacing one
that awaits its crew, and the "heart of darkness" that
swallows up Kurtz, with an admonition fitting to all.
Marlow's critical narratorial role as interpreter of
Kurtz's experience and the import of his narratorial
position, one which combines both first and third person
functions, are accordingly more involved than is
generally understood.
In common with the other works discussed in this
chapter, Conrad's novella has received overwhelming
critical attention. Until fairly recently, however,
that notice has converged on the significance of the
tale of Kurtz and his moral collapse that Marlow relates
155
to the crew of the Nellie. The dynamic shuttling
between modes of "seeing," "listening," and "knowing" in
The Turn of the Screw materializes in Conrad's work
also, according to Northrop Frye, who writes: "In Conrad
. . . the dislocations in the narrative— working
backwards and forwards, as he put it— are designed to
make us shift our attention from listening to the story
to looking at the central situation. His phrase 'above
all to make you see' contains a visual metaphor with
much of its original meaning left in it" (267). In a
similar fashion to James's novel, Heart of Darkness
promises inscrutable mysteries, "hints for nightmares"
(14), "subtle horrors" (59), "unspeakable secrets" (63),
"monstrous passions" (67), "the fascination of the
abomination" (6), a technique F. R. Leavis disparages:
"Conrad must here stand convicted of borrowing the arts
of the magazine-writer (who has borrowed his, shall we
say, from Kipling and Poe) in order to impose on his
readers and on himself, for thrilled response, a
'significance' that is merely an emotional insistence on
the presence of what he can't produce . . . " (219).
The "vague and unrealizable" significance which
Leavis decries is, after all, squarely within the
hermeneutic tradition demonstrably exercised in James's
work. Readers are enticed to ponder the mysteries of
Conrad's novella in its inceptive sequences. An "I"
156
narrator opens the text, describing a ship setting on
board the Nellie. anchored in the Thames estuary and
awaiting an outgoing tide. Within this scenic
presentation, Marlow, a seasoned crewman, narrates the
story of his adventures in the Congo, his encounter with
one Kurtz, representative of a European investment firm,
and Kurtz's decline into madness and depravity. When
Marlow's narrative ends, the storyline returns to the
first narrator's authority. Marlow's idol-like "ascetic
aspect" (3) confers on him a spiritual aura; to the I-
narrator he is "a Buddha preaching in European clothes"
(6), some kind of homiletic message. Marlow eventually
contracts to "no more to us than a voice" (28) in the
darkness that descends on the tale teller and his
audience, as Kurtz himself "presented himself as a
voice" (48) to Marlow. But both characters are "voices"
enunciating out of the "immense jabber" of Marlow's
narrative sounds, "silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or
simply mean, without any kind of sense" (49).
If Marlow's story is to signify then, we must hear
it. Meaning of a sort [and for a limited audience] is
transmitted through listening, the mode Marlow's
oracular frame presentation mimics. This may not at
first appear to be so. Marlow implies that the "truth,"
the "meaning" of existence is "impossible to
157
convey . . . his listeners, "you fellows," can see
"more than I could then. You see me, whom you know
. . . ". Ironically, of course, at the moment he says
this, the nameless "I" narrator informs us that Marlow
is all but invisible in the "pitch dark" (28) . It is
this [male] narrator (again as in The Turn of the Screw
perhaps an idealized recipient), who listens, the others
as he thinks having fallen asleep, "on the watch for the
sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to
the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that
seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy
night-air of the river" (28). Are there indeed
interpretive "clues" in Marlow's narrative, and if so,
how are they articulated if the work is as loosely
conceived as Leavis imputes? The frame is no doubt
instrumental in controlling this process. I propose
however, that the novel can be appreciated on several
levels by tracing the symbiotic relation between frame
and embedded story, rather than each considered singly.
In Reading for the Plot Peter Brooks characterizes
Heart of Darkness as "an unreadable report," "a tale of
inconclusive solutions to crimes of problematic status"
(238). A significant aspect of Brooks's quarrel with
the novel is the "notable uncertainties" (239) exposed
by the absence of closure on several narrative planes in
its frame structure. Brooks sees no seamless relation
158
here, only lacunae, as he expresses it: "the problematic
relations of Marlow's narrative plot to his story, and
of his plot and story to Kurtz's story, which in turn
entertains doubtful relations with Kurtz's narrative
plot and its narrating." Marlow's story, in short,
appropriates Kurtz's in a series of "retellings,"
Brooks' point being that Kurtz's story has "other plots"
(239). In Brooks' reading, Marlow's narrative imposes
an ordering principle on the confusion that passes for
actuality, "as ready-made plot to story . . . a relation
of cover-up, concealment, lie." This "necessity for
plot, for signifying system, even in the absence of its
correspondence to reality" governs the text as Brooks
understands it, though he recognizes "Marlow's capacity
to see both the admirable and the absurd in such
attempted applications of order . . . " (24 0).
Though I agree in essence that Marlow [and by
implication Conrad] is committed to a requisite social
order as the keystone of the civilizing impulse, I do
not think Brooks sufficiently examines the textual hints
that lead Marlow to settle on that exigency. One of the
earlier indicators of this idea is the framing I-
narrator's widely cited observation that "The yarns of
seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of
which lies within the shell of a cracked nut." An
episode's meaning for Marlow, however, "was not inside
159
like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which
brought it out only as a glow brings
out a haze . . . " (5). Brooks uses this passage to
argue that Heart of Darkness departs from traditional
framing as "nested" boxes or "bracketed core structures"
(256), for neither Marlow's own containing story nor its
embedded narratives are coherent or clearly "demarcated"
from their frames (257). Brooks concludes, in fact,
that an "outside" meaning "must reside in the relation
between the tale's telling and its listening, in its
reception, its transaction, in the interlocutionary
relation. The truth value of Marlow's narrative must be
in what his listeners can do with it" (Reading for the
Plot 257-58).
I believe that is indeed the case, yet Brooks
gathers that Marlow's tale, with its sliding symbolist
language, will not dispense graspable meaning.47 It
fails even to meet "the standards of intelligibility
sought by the first narrator" (Reading for the Plot
259), i.e. to provide "the sentence," "the word" from
which he can extract meaning. If, as Brooks believes,
framed narration dramatizes the narrating incentive,
then Heart of Darkness verifies the motive for
retelling, the repetition which compensates for
inadequacies in the original telling— "Kurtz's failure
to narrate his own story satisfactorily, Marlow's lying
160
version of Kurtz's story to the Intended . . . ."
Finally, meaning becomes "the implicit dialogue itself,
the 'set' of the teller's message toward his listener as
much as toward the matter of his tale" I Reading for the
Plot 259) .
If regard for Marlow's story indeed lies in our
sensitivity to its delivery, then we should return for a
more detailed look at his listeners before inquiring
into his account. In his essay "A Further Note on the
Function of the Frame in Heart of Darkness." Seymour
Gross makes a case for the I-narrator who, alone among
the four men in Marlow's audience, seems the most open
to "moral progress" (150). Gross says of him that he
"stands in the same relationship to Marlow as Marlow
stood to Kurtz in the actual experience. He is
precisely 'the audience the author is trying to
convince,' for he is a man, as becomes increasingly
apparent, who is capable of 'facing the darkness' and of
accepting its black message" (149). For this character,
Marlow's tale "seems to hold out . . . the promise of
some moral revelation, which is exactly what Kurtz had
come to represent for Marlow at an analogous point in
his experience" (150) . It is this narrator, Gross
argues, who attends "the benign immensity of unstained
light" (Heart of Darkness 4) which marks the day's end,
but who discovers at the cessation of Marlow's tale "the
161
heart of an immense darkness" (Heart of Darkness 79) .
This privileged narrator only, says Gross, "like Marlow,
will be set apart from all those who do not know the
truth" (151).
Peter Lindenbaum's essay "Hulks with One and Two
Anchors: The Frame, Geographical Detail, and Ritual
Process in Heart of Darkness" essentially corroborates
Gross's thesis, asserting that a more convincing
relationship exists between the tale and the conditions
of its telling than has been previously credited.
Noting that the Nellie's outbound maneuvers are hindered
by tidal fluctuations, he points out that Marlow's
narration is told in the interval wait for the tide's
turning. The relevance of this circumstance is that it
posits shifts in the I-narrator's position, revolving in
direction as the ship does, from a panorama of the
English landmass to a vista east and outward from
England. This rotation in the narrator's alignment,
says Lindenbaum, suggests "a possible change in moral
vision as well" (704).
Lindenbaum supposes that Marlow attacks his
auditors "for being too culture-bound. They remain
completely within the realm of their own society and
their past experience .... And Marlow's metaphor for
that state is a 'hulk with two anchors,' that is,
solidly anchored from both ends." Had the ship been so
162
secured, "there would have been no change in her
position with the turn of the tide and thus no
suggestion of a possible change in point of view in
Marlow’s audience" (705). Eventually the Nellie's crew
will be "leaving the known, their past culture and
society, looking off into a new direction" (706). They
are figures, then, in transition, in ritual passage from
one phase of life to another. Appropriately, Marlow's
is a cautionary tale: "One of Marlow's major aims in
telling his tale is to convince his auditors that there
is not much, finally, to separate them as supposedly
civilized Westerners from the savages on the dark
continent" (707). Marlow has gained this wisdom
"without having to go over the edge of madness and death
himself" (707). The story then, is a conversion
narrative with an initiatory purpose [the I-narrator
remarks that the audience is "fated" to hear Marlow
(7)].48 As Lindenbaum states, Marlow is trying to make
his audience "full beneficiaries of experience that they
do not have to undergo directly on their own. They are,
ideally, to find themselves changed— altered as one is
in a rite of passage— in much the same way Marlow has
been altered by his Congo experience" (708).
Finally, Lindenbaum believes that Marlow's
narrative is far from being an indeterminate experience
for his audience. He observes, "the narrator has seen
163
fit to retell Marlow's tale [which] suggests some
recognition, on his part at least, that the tale has
significance and was perhaps not so inconclusive after
all" (709). So it is that "Marlow may have one convert
in a chastened narrator who has partaken of enough of
Marlow's teaching to acknowledge the heart of darkness
within himself and all supposedly civilized men" (709).
Lindenbaum concludes: "Conrad's act of placing Marlow's
auditors on England's margin in the Thames sea reach and
of providing them with characteristics of neophytes or
initiands in a rite of passage designed to alter their
status and view of themselves suggests that this is the
question he wishes us to be asking of them" (709-10).
Marlow himself tells his audience, "Droll thing life is-
-that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a
futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some
knowledge of yourself . . . " (71). This rite of
initiation by telling then, I suggest, is the antonym of
Kurtz's "unspeakable rites" (51) and "devilish
initiation" (49) .
To reduce the novel's thematics to an excursus on
social Darwinism, however, compromises its rich texture.
Against a mindless gradualism, the brute reality beyond
the reach of language, Conrad proposes the teleological,
morally sanctioned "Idea." In Marlow's conservative
rhetoric, the "idea" divests itself as a certain
164
ideological thrust. For all the paranoia about language
the novel records, the Idea is consecrated as a form of
worship— "something you can set up, and bow down before,
and offer a sacrifice to . . . " (7), Marlow declares.
As George Levine tells us, in Conrad "the fittest and
the morally best are contradictions" (280). Conradian
"survival," as a letter reveals, depends on protecting
his thought "intact against the terrible reality outside
of thought." The Idea, "an alien element in the
diffusely material universe, is the force that makes
solidarity possible . . . "; it must prevail, must be
defended from "hopeless engagement with a mindless
reality" (Levine 283). The logic of cultural
imperialism which some read as synopsizing the novel is
only the medium, I sense, for a larger concern,
expressed through the oppositions of "inside" and
"outside" embodied in the I-narrator's metaphor for
meaning in Marlow's narrative. What Ian Watt calls
"colonisation and atavistic regression," related to "the
dominant symbolic polarity of light and darkness" in his
exegesis of the novel in Conrad in the Nineteenth
Century (216) are pronounced themes. But we must
explore the discourse system itself, I think, for the
propositional content of Conrad's narrative.
As in The Turn of the Screw, the novel's lexical
surface provides some cuing. In its semiotic
165
trajectory, the "inside/outside" metaphor can be traced
in a series of contraries reified in Marlow's language.
The "world of straightforward facts" (14), of preserved
appearances, out of which Marlow is jolted by his
experiences, is cognate with the import of the external
as "restraint" (43) and external "checks" (22), a world
fortified by the "something restraining" (42) in human
nature, forbearance and "primitive honor" (42),49 It
is at the same time the world in which Marlow's
complacent audience is falsely "moored . . . with two
good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher
round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent
appetites, and temperature normal— you hear— normal from
year's end to year's end" (48). Marlow insists his
listeners can't understand:
How could you?— with solid pavement
under your feet . . . stepping
delicately between the butcher and the
policeman, in the holy terror of scandal
and gallows and lunatic asylums— how can
you imagine what particular region of
the first ages a man's untrammelled feet
may take him into by the way of
solitude— utter solitude without a
policeman— by the way of silence— utter
silence, where no warning voice of a
kind neighbour can be heard whispering
of public opinion? (50)
The I-narrator appears at first to be under no
illusions about this state of affairs. He knows the
seamen of the past, characters in a "gigantic tale,"
were "the great knights-errant of the sea," "messengers
166
of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from
the sacred fire" (4). The seaman of today is a
different breed, however. His mind is "of the stay-at-
home order"; he finds "nothing mysterious" in life.
Thus "a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore
suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole
continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth
knowing" (5). The seamen's environment, then, is the
one Marlow assails, the one circumscribed by the
"policeman."
The external also corresponds to Marlow's doctrine
of "efficiency" (6), in keeping with Conrad's own
denunciation of the "criminality of inefficiency and
pure selfishness" as he writes his publisher, William
Blackwood ("Extracts," Kimbrough 129). The "devotion to
efficiency" is "what saves us" (6) says Marlow. This
creed can be variously defined. Materially speaking, it
is a Carlylean type of rewarding work, as Marlow
describes it, "your power of devotion to an obscure,
back-breaking business" (50). On the other hand, it is
the avoidance of spiritual "contamination" (50). In the
novel's light-dark equation, the external is "the
illuminating . . . exalted light," even in Kurtz's "gift
of expression" (48), his "magnificent eloquence thrown
to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of
crystal" (72), when Kurtz is only an "echo" to his
167
apostle (72). The external is the "glow" that draws
meaning from the "haze" of events for Marlow; it is the
"misty halo" (5) of that glow, the same "halo" around
the Intended's head (76), the "unextinguishable light of
belief and love" (76), the "great and saving illusion"
(77) .
The external as a pattern of restraint is also
telling qualified, as Marlow carefully does, by hedging,
by a constant search for the exact words which would
convey his own experience of "truth." His language, as
"public" discourse, is contoured by constraints, by a
"policing" as it were, by the "something" that restrains
inordinate human desire for the community's benefit. So
it is finally, that the lie Marlow tells Kurtz's
Intended amounts in truth to a "trifle" (79).
The seamen's world oscillates, though, as Marlow
warns, between the "policeman" and the "butcher." The
diametric parallels that between waking and dream
sounded even in language, the "common everyday words—
the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every waking day
of life" which have "behind them, to my mind, the
terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of
phrases spoken in nightmares" (67). Marlow can only
guess what internal "checks" prevent some from
degeneracy, couched in terms of the inexplicable
interior, the "silent wilderness" surrounding the
168
central station with its "amazing reality of its
concealed life" (26) . This is the world of the "dumb
thing" that "couldn't talk and was deaf as well ..."
(27), "the heart of an impenetrable darkness" (48) in
which Kurtz dwells, "the triumphant darkness" from which
Marlow can defend neither Kurtz's Intended nor himself
(77), the blank "place of darkness" on the map (8) which
fascinates Marlow as a boy, in which evil and
imperialism have their common ancestry. It is the
"profound darkness," the "hidden evil" and "lurking
death" in the crux of the "sunlit land" (33) , "the
stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention" (34). It is the "butcher," lack
of restraint, of "limits," Kurtz's "ruthless power"
(71), Conrad's "criminal inefficiency." Marlow links
the spell of the wilderness, "heavy and mute" (67), to
"forgotten and brutal instincts," "the memory of
gratified and monstrous passions" which beguile his
"unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations" (67). It is unpoliced silence, or the
breakout of the natives' "amazing words that resemble no
sounds of human language" (68) .50
The internal is to the external as "inside" to
"outside" meaning, as abyss to representation. It is
paradoxically, even the "unbounded" power of words in
Kurtz's report to the International Society for the
169
Suppression of Savage Customs which strikes Marlow as
"ominous" (51) . In this document Kurtz recounts that
whites seem to "savages" as "supernatural beings— we
approach them with the might as of a deity" (51). But
Kurtz's entreaty, that "By the simple exercise of our
will we can exert a power for good practically
unbounded," is rescinded by his scrawled note at the
bottom of the manuscript, "Exterminate all the brutes!"
(51). One kind of "meaning" in Heart of Darkness then,
realized in the interior story of Kurtz and the decline
into barbarism he represents, has to do with the
"unexpressed" and its corollary, the "unbounded." Other
indices to interpretation are discovered in the
"envelope." Both involve paradox, in the same way that
Kurtz's last words, "the horror," are for Marlow both
"the appalling face of a glimpsed truth" and "a moral
victory." "Better his cry," Marlow realizes, than
anything he himself can say (72) . For "the region of
subtle horrors" is "lightless" (59); in a word, it is
"victorious corruption" (63). Even Marlow's imaginary
Roman conquerors whose experiences mirror Kurtz's are
finally and unforeseenly overcome by the "savagery"
which "closed in" around them (6). Conquerors, it
seems, need only "brute force— nothing to boast of, when
you have it, since your strength is just an accident
arising from the weakness of others" (6). Genuine
170
strength is the mastery of self which deters one from
passing limits, the frontiers of pollution.
In the end, the deployment of language in Heart of
Darkness is proscribed by Marlow's "choice of
nightmares" (63) defining experience. If we relegate
"exterior" discourse to the public domain, that
"shackled form of a conquered monster" (36) to which we
are accustomed, then it follows that the "interior"
lexicon has to do with the hypothetically inaccessible,
the individual, the private and intimate, the "monstrous
and free" (36). These spheres connote two different
kinds of "truth" value imparted through Marlow's
narrative. One has to do with the public sector and the
control of cultural signs, with the "speakable," with
the illusion of truth and moral purpose, with untested
virtue, the perils of "inherited experience" (41) as
"lie." The other communicates the "unspeakable" truth
of private and personal discourse, linked ultimately to
the "human weakness" (56) tapped by wilderness
conditions.
Both discourses are gendered here: Marlow's male
audience in the frame, as upholders of empire, is the
exclusive recipient (in the narrative) of the one. The
women, represented by the Intended, are destined for
another kind of truth, however, as illusion. The two
species of truth sever their worlds. Marlow remarks
171
that women are "out of touch with truth .... They
live in a world of their own, and there had never been
anything like it, and never can be . . . . Some
confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with
ever since the day of creation would start up and knock
the whole thing over" (12). Later, he accepts that
women "should be out of it. We must help them to stay
in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets
worse" (49). Western women, as a class, resemble the
picture Kurtz had painted at the Central Station of a
blindfolded woman carrying a torch (symbolizing cultural
ideals?). Marlow equates the privilege of talking to
Kurtz with verified conviction. When he fears he will
not get to do so at one point on his journey, he is
desolated, "as if I had been robbed of a belief or had
missed my destiny in life . . . " (48). By the same
token, and in an ironic sense, he cheats the Intended of
his knowledge, substituting her own sentimental "large
capacity for belief" (76) for reality as he has
encountered it.51 In terms of the novel's lexicon, the
words "large capacity" are associated with delusion and
the unreal as we perceive them in the novel, with the
absence of constraints which hold objectivity in check.
In the final analysis, the "real" truth, with a
capital "t," is a value only men in western culture can
face and live with. [Not so the "savage" women at the
172
novel's core, equated with the "fecund and mysterious
life" of the wilderness (62).]52 Western women can
only dwell with the truth by living with a lie; they
must be, in fact, shielded from the "truth." [There is
even a faint suggestion that they are not vulnerable to
the same appetites, preferring "love" instead.] The male
community on the Nellie is not by accident a select
group.
The doctrine of "efficiency," then, transcends a
simplistic work ethic. The "light" is not civilization
in the sense of a cultural force brought to the
benighted by the supposedly enlightened. "Civilization"
is a matter of degree— an internal and external state—
that is the message of Marlow's "enveloping" meaning,
corroborated by the tale's "heart." By "civilization,"
Marlow argues, in sum, moral compunction and "right
motives" (70), deterrents to "criminality,"
"demoralization," and "wanton smash-up" (17-18).
Civilization embodies "justice" (75) in all the ways it
can manifest itself— through the individual, through
nationhood. Suitably, this ethic issues from the frame
narration, a "message" endlessly retold. Finding one's
"own reality" in Marlow's words, "what no other man can
ever know," is in the final conclusion a journey
individuals must take for themselves, as the inset
narratives of Marlow's and Kurtz's own experiences
173
attest. In others we "only see the mere show, and never
can tell what it really means" (29).
Marlow's narration condenses, therefore, to the
thought that the absolute nature of reality, in person
or experience, is unknowable. Though there appear to be
separate narratives in Heart of Darkness which
illustrate that theme and two autonomous discourses
which signify it, they finally merge. All we are
capable of discovering is ourselves, susceptible, like
Kurtz, to both exaltation and "incredible degradation"
(67). As a man who has journeyed to the precipice edge,
Marlow may very well be an Ancient Mariner type of
compulsive narrator, obsessed with his "speech that
cannot be silenced" (37). In the last analysis,
however, we cannot yield to a "surface-truth" (37) of
the saving kind, which distracts us from the real; the
"real" itself must be tested. The power of Marlow's
narrative lies in its potential to evoke "mental
changes" and its compelling persuasion that we should do
just that— brave the "real." On the level of their
actual participation, Marlow's story is indeed vicarious
living for his auditors, but it seems he also asks them
to seek the reality within, the ennobling gesture of
self-discovery. Though, as I have said, this plea is
essentially directed to men, female readers can
undeniably find merit in it. To bring this discussion
174
to an end, I will comment that Heart of Darkness is
primarily an anti-evolutionary work. Marlow lays
Kurtz's memory in "the dust-bin of progress" (51), for
progress itself is delusionary. Since most of us are
neither "fools" nor "exalted" (50) , we walk the thin
line between "butcher" and "policeman." If the "truth"
is a glimpse of darkness, than hope for spiritual
salvation is its promise of light. As the narrative
layers of the novel bear out, the relationship is
complementary.
The construction of Conrad's novel, then,
challenges several framing theory canards. Traditional
readings tend to center on Kurtz's story and the decline
into atavism of which "civilized" man is capable. A
unidirectional "progressive" reading of this sort steers
us to the teleological "heart" of the novel, discovered
in Kurtz's history. In the interim, we forget the
Nellie1s crew, or come to regard them as minor witnesses
to Marlow's story, about to undergo comparable trials in
alien climes, but armed with Marlow's message. Reading
paradigms which observe this course hinder reader
recognition of the intricate convolutions unfolding in
the spaces between the narratives which integrate two
overtly unrelated worlds. The illusory environment
inhabited by the Nellie's crew is no more segregated
from Kurtz's than the frame situation is removed from
175
the Congo jungle. The novel returns to the frame
situation for a purpose, and that is to reify the nexus
between the two and to emphasize that material
boundaries are feeble suppositions. The real outposts
must be mental, ethical, spiritual. Only Marlow's
speeches can bring this point home to his self-satisfied
and culturally conditioned audience, the message that
society's beliefs confer no impunity from defilement.
Hence the novel's thrust is actually resident in
Marlow's enveloping commentary surrounding the interior
tale of Kurtz, as the I-narrator implies. Through
Marlow's agency, the text's discourse system transverses
both the frame situation and the interior stories,
effectively blending their significance as foregrounded
in his speeches.
Marlow's narratorial role is more complicated than
is generally realized. As a single framing narrator he
combines several functions. In controlling the
aesthetic distance between his own commentary and
Kurtz's story, he limits the reader's access to the
textual interior in much the same ways attributed to
traditional first person narrators. However, his
narrative is a retrospective one, and because he knows
the outcomes of the tales he tells he is endowed with
third person omniscient privilege. Marlow's
characterization also connotes the relationship of
176
teller to audience and its facility to reverse itself in
framed texts of this type, further underscoring the
frame device's dazzling multifaceted potency. That is,
Marlow is taleteller to the Nellie's crew but Kurtz's
audience (Marlow is to the crew as Kurtz to him) .
Marlow's narrative activity, however, goes beyond
Kurtz's mere transmission. He assumes responsibility
for the moral import of events; he counsels the seamen
as Kurtz is unable to do for Marlow, who must draw his
own conclusions.53 The meaning of Kurtz's experiences
would otherwise die with Kurtz. Let me repeat that the
novel's transmission is the key to its significance.
Marlow is the medium of that transmission, yoking
together through his discourse the intratextual and
extratextual domains, the textual world and its readers,
and fashioning in the process an interdependent text.
As frame narrator, Marlow also distances the
Nellie’s crew (and readers) from the action. In
mediating the novel's events, he channels response,
enabling both frame and extratextual audiences to
participate vicariously in the occurrences he relates.
In this capacity, he serves as barrier for the crew and
for the Intended against direct encounters with
disturbing revelations (eventually, the text implies,
the male crew will engage Kurtz's world but not the
Intended— not women). Framing is revealed in this
177
instance as a political tool, since our curiosity,
desires and inclinations (modeled in the seamen) are
covertly monitored through the frame's distancing and
the restricted approach insured by the use of a frame
narrator.
Conclusions
Some general conclusions with regard to the various
framing practices surveyed in Chapter 1 suggest
themselves from the analyses of these five case studies.
The framing dynamics in these works imply several
weaknesses in existing theories. First of all, to
imagine that frames are bracketing devices fixes their
borders as static, when, as all my test cases show,
margins of any kind are only conjecturally extant.
Secondly, all the texts discussed here overturn notions
of hierarchy, though not necessarily of succession and
sequence, two dissimilar concepts. The texts also make
it evident that any assumption of serial progression, of
"embedding," must accommodate the supratextual and
reflexive transposing activity which appears to evolve
as much from the reading process as from the textual
surface itself. Boundary issues are thus foregrounded
in this textual "play." If, as I suspect, discourse
perimeters pattern social conventions, then the frame
substantiates those. At the same time, the texts I
178
discuss allow an intrusion of "otherness" into the
conversation by providing for shifting venues, opening
vacancies in the text which, according to predominant
theory, the frame theoretically fortifies itself
against. In other words, frame texts do not lend
themselves to diagrammatic study, nor can they be yoked
to schematic interpretation, being multidimensional
constructs. Our understanding of frame functions may be
enhanced, then, by appraising them as dialogic economies
which conceivably invite the participation and emergence
of multiple voices, an ultimately radical politics which
discourages the hegemony of a sovereign discourse.
179
1. Unless otherwise noted, all citations refer to the
novels under discussion.
2. Frankenstein1s frequent assignment to the Gothic mode
may lead commentators to trivialize its themes. In her
discussion of the novel as product in the time period
from 177 0-182 0, Terry Lovell writes: "Gothic fiction has
been marginalized by the reconstructed great tradition,
so that only a small number of gothic writers are given
honourable mention and a minor place in the literary
history books. Yet it was an important and popular
early bourgeois form . . . " (48).
3. Frankenstein can be seen, however, as a stigmatized
Cain figure, the danger for Walton being that he himself
threatens to become one. Walton misconstrues the
scientist as "this divine wanderer" (285). Likewise,
Walton, who loves Frankenstein "as a brother" (282),
believes the Monster to be a "a savage inhabitant of
some undiscovered island," whereas he discounts
Frankenstein as such because he is "European" (2 80).
4. Mary Poovey observes that Frankenstein's offenses are
metaphysical, while Walton disregards geographical
limits; she acknowledges at the same time that "for
both, indulging desire is actually a transgression
against domestic relationships" (132). Poovey states
that despite these resemblances, Walton's zeal is only
"an embryonic version of Frankenstein's murderous
egotism, for ultimately he does not allow his obsession
to destroy relationships. The crucial difference
between them resides in Walton's willingness to deny his
desire when it jeopardizes his social responsibilities
or his relational identity" (132). The bulk of Poovey's
argument is readily apparent in the text, but Walton's
stalking the magnet's secret verges on metaphysical
speculation. Finally, as I state, Nature is
instrumental in turning him back. We both agree,
however, that "Walton's letters, as the dominant chain
of all the narrations, preserve community despite
Frankenstein's destructive self-devotion, for they link
him and his correspondents (Mrs. Saville and the reader)
in a relationship that Frankenstein can neither enter
nor destroy" (13 3).
5. Walton's "community" is represented by his sister,
Margaret, with whom he carries on a continuous
correspondence. He has ventured on his journey despite
her "evil forebodings" (269), and in defiance of his
dying father's injunctions against the "sea faring life"
(270).
180
6. In more promising circumstances, the dialogic
interaction in this episode between Walton and the
Monster would be considered liberating in its exchange
of thought and feeling. However, the relation appears
to fail when the Monster must resort to exhortation to
be understood. In so doing, his discourse veers from
dialogue to hortatory, from foundations in reciprocity
to an assault on the listener's sensibility. When this
occurs, the dialogue is no longer a viable means of
communication. The situation is not helped by Walton's
initial rebuke of the creature, though he reports their
conversation with compassion. Narrative proximity also
effects the reader's understanding in this episode.
Thus far in the novel, the monster's story as well as
his physical presence (as mediated through Frankenstein)
have been sufficiently removed from Walton's purview
until this actual confrontation, in which,
significantly, narrative is not countered with narrative
so much as censure and admonishment displaces narrative.
The reader's relation to the discourse must adjust
accordingly, as we recognize that Walton himself is its
target, incarnating the promise of community as he does.
7. In remarking on the nature of mimetic desire and its
relationship to the monstrosity principle, Ren* Girard
comments that "There is no monster who does not tend to
duplicate himself or to 'marry* another monster, no
double who does not yield a monstrous aspect upon close
scrutiny .... The nature of the relationship between
monster and double, stubbornly denied by the
antagonists, is ultimately imposed on them in the course
of the shifting of differences— but it is imposed in the
form of a hallucination" (Violence and the Sacred 160).
For the reader, the crux lies in distinguishing one
"monster" from another. The creature's unnatural
origins mark him as conspicuously "monstrous" as does
Victor Frankenstein's blasphemous tampering with nature.
Robert Walton, however, is less visibly in violation of
social constraints. For one thing, the brevity of his
narrative ensures that most readers will have forgotten
his situation in tracking the thread of the succeeding
narratives. Even though we return to Walton at the
novel's close, he is by that time Victor Frankenstein's
willing student, "deracinated," so to speak, his
"monstrous" proclivities tamed by the scientist's
moralizing.
8. Beth Newman charges that "domestic tranquillity" is
"an unattainable ideal" in the novel; it is "disrupted
at the center . . . [in the DeLacey family idyll] but it
is also excluded at the margins, in the frame" in the
181
person of Margaret Saville. The latter "provides a
final image of domesticity, but it lies wholly without
the novel, outside of its many frames, beyond all its
narratives and hopelessly unconnected to any of them."
As a result of this distancing, Mrs. Saville [and the
reader] is beyond the reach of its horror, and
Frankenstein1s "monstrous narrative" is recast into a
"domesticated" one ("Narratives of Seduction" 158-59).
As Newman explicates it, "The novel's logic suggests
that Walton, by offering her a transcription of the
stories he hears, exposes her merely to a simulacrum, a
representation of a monstrous story in a different
medium" ("Narratives of Seduction" 159). While this
position intimates that the novel's domestic ideal and
its moral concerns are analogous, X am proposing that
Frankenstein1s ethical preoccupations are lodged in
Walton himself. Because he abstains, finally, from his
profane pursuits, in effect reforging communal bonds
(rather than simply domestic ones), there is hope for
Shelley's dream of community. In other words, the
sphere of Shelley's concerns is larger, X believe, than
those Newman entertains. However, I am in accord with
Newman's conviction that domestic serenity is shattered
in the novel; that is, it is sundered because the very
ideals the novel espouses have been desecrated.
9. I am thus disagreeing with George Levine's statement
on Frankenstein1s construction: "The novel's elaborate
clarity of structure, Walton's tale enfolding
Frankenstein's, which in turn enfolds the monster's,
does not reflect a firm moral ordering, but a continuing
complicating diminishment of nonverbal reality as it
recedes into the distance." Levine (like Lovell, below)
also assumes the monster's story is the theoretical
center (29) . Joyce Zonana, on the other hand, argues
that Safie's correspondence to her fianc* Felix DeLacey,
which provides proof both of Frankenstein's tale and
Walton's, are "at the very center" of the novel's
concentric narratives (170). Zonana reasons that the
letters support a feminist ideology informing the work,
concerned with Safie's yearning for "'rational
companionship' and love," or an alliance with Felix
based on shared respect (179). Zonana opposes Safie's
need for such a relationship to Walton's and
Frankenstein's "quests of domination and control over
what they themselves figure as a female Nature" (178).
It could be said, however, that both Walton and the
Monster (a biological male), also solicit such
relationships. As I have remarked, Shelley's depiction
of these urges feminizes the aggressive male embodied in
both figures. In this regard, James Kincaid has pointed
182
out that Walton recollects his sister's "'gentle and
feminine fosterage'" in his "'best years,"' with a
corresponding "'intense distaste'" for "macho brutality"
(37-38) .
10. In his analysis of Wutherinq Heights. Michael
Macovski notes that Gothic elements "are precisely what
gives the novel its framed form, since the Gothic evils
actually prompt the need for exposure to an other within
a narrative frame" (369). He also mentions several
studies which suggest that "the Gothic novel may have
redefined the frame narrative form" (note 10, 383),
although I feel the use of framing devices has always
implied the need for containment of subversive textual
energies.
11. The critical canon which deals with the novel's
thematics obviously ranges beyond the scope of this
work. Some random examples follow. Ruth Adams states
that "no conventional morality prevails" in the work,
but rather "perverse values" (Lettis and Morris 177,
180). Others read Wutherinq Heights as some variation
on sacred and profane love. Charlotte Bronte, for
example, thought it a novel of "perverted passion,"
about "spirits so lost and fallen ..." (Editor's
Preface 10). Peter Brooks makes one reference to
Wutherinq Heights in Reading for the Plot in the
framework of a general discussion on eroticism in the
nineteenth century English novel: he suggests that "any
adolescent reader of the Brontes, of Jane Evre and
Wutherinq Heights, is obscurely aware of how erotic Jane
and Catherine can be . . . " (144). Edgar Shannon's
reading comes closer to my own as "a search for a
definition of evil— a quest that results in a paradigm
of love" ("Lockwood’s Dreams and the Exegesis of
Wutherinq Heights." Lettis and Morris 215). Other
readings discuss the text in terms of a clash between
the demonic and divine, spirit and flesh, civilization
and nature, or even as "psychological drama" developed
from "a simple sociological conflict" (Q.D. Leavis, "A
Fresh Approach to Wutherinq Heights." "Contemporary
Reviews and Essays in Criticism," Bronte 314).
12. For example, Thomas Moser, in "What is the Matter
with Emily Jane? Conflicting Impulses in Wutherinq
Heights." searches for a realistic resolution, charging
that Wutherinq Heights's symmetry has been overvalued.
It is an "imperfect book" (Watt, The Victorian Novel
181), for "Emily Bronte at no time consciously accepted
her true subject; in the closing pages of Wutherinq
Heights she certainly rejects it— to the obvious
183
detriment of her art" (Watt, The Victorian Novel 182).
Bronte's "true subject," Moser believes, is "the grand
passion of Heathcliff and Cathy" (Watt, The Victorian
Novel 183). The triumph of love in Catherine Linton and
Hareton Earnshaw's relationship (which to Moser is a
"superficial stereotyped tale of feminine longings"
(Watt, The Victorian Novel 194), impairs the novel's
structure by confuting that "true subject" (Watt, The
Victorian Novel 184).
13. Wutherinq Heights does indeed dramatize
storytelling, as critics have noted; in John Matthews'
words, it is a novel in which "story becomes the only
mode of being . . . " (28). The novel may even very
well perform as Michael Macovski says it does, as a work
whose "substance . . . is in effect a succession of
addresses directed to designated listeners, a series of
witnessed narratives," the reader being the last in the
audience Sequence (365, 368). In this reading, the
novel itself is "a chain of rhetorical exposures" (368),
whose "analytic intention," according to Macovski, is
voiced by Lockwood as the process of tracking its
characters' secrets (372).
14. The absence of a ministerial presence at Gimmerton
Kirk is significant. The voice of orthodox religion is
life and spirit-killing. Joseph, one of its spokesmen
in Wutherinq Heights, opposes healthy young love, and
covers his "large Bible" with "dirty bank-notes" (249).
Similarly, Catherine Earnshaw complains in her diary of
an "awful Sunday" in which she and Heathcliff are
subjected to one of Joseph's "short homilies" lasting
for three hours (26). Their reactions are similar to
those of Lockwood in his dream of the Reverend Jabes
Branderham, wherein he objects to the minister's
discourse on 490 sins (29) .
15. Masao Miyoshi assesses the novel's temporal frame
somewhat differently, in terms of "straight
chronological time and mythical time":
Ordinary time begins with Lockwood's
first visit to Wuthering Heights and
ends with his last visit there, a period
of less than a year, November 1801 to
September 1802. Mythical time, covering
the demonic events of the Heathcliff-
Cathy generation, which extend over a
decade, is reduced, by Nelly's
narrative, to a mere evening of Lockwood
time. Then, in Chapter XXXI, over a
184
period of about a month, Lockwood time
catches up with Heathcliff-Cathy time.
At this point, all his stories up to
date, Lockwood pays a third visit to
Wuthering Heights. His fancied romance
with the young Cathy implies a contrast
between the transcendental Heathcliff-
Cathy medium and Lockwood's
foreshortened time that shrinks events
to the scale of hours and weeks. Clocks
and calendars measure out Lockwood's
life, while the great lovers soar into
the primeval timelessness of their myth
. . . . With Heathcliff's death and the
promise of the young couple's marriage,
the two time-schemes are joined. At the
end of the story, myth is swallowed up
in time. (217-18)
16. Emily Brontfi, "Death," poem dated April 10, 1845
(Ruth Blackburn 106).
Lockwood's synchronic and circular narrative and
Nelly's chronological and linear one begin and end in
different seasons, an important contrast. Lockwood's
portion opens in the late fall, early winter (November)
and ends in the fall (September), associated with
harvest and reaping, with endings, while Nelly's begins
in the summer harvest and ends, for all intents and
purposes, with the forthcoming marriage of Cathy and
Hareton on New Year's Day. In terms of time scheme,
Lockwood's narration is mostly in the evanescent
present, while Nelly's encompasses the historical past,
present, and future.
17. Harvest activity, particularly in autumn, is of
course associated with approaching death, reaping,
return. It is in this season that Lockwood returns to
contemplate the three graves at Gimmerton Kirk. His
posture in this scene even resembles that of the dead.
18. Nelly addresses him as "a stranger to the family,"
but qualifies the remark with "Yet, who knows how long
you"11 be a stranger. You're too young to be . . .
living by yourself; and I some way fancy no one could
see Catherine Linton and not love- her" (204).
19. As Eve Sedgwick notes, "the disruptive and self-
ignorant potential for violence in the Gothic hero is
replaced in the bachelor hero by physical timidity and,
often, by a high value on introspection and by (at least
partial) self-knowledge. Finally, the bachelor is
185
housebroken by the severing of his connections with a
discourse of genital sexuality" (190).
20. Our first clue to his true nature comes in his own
account of a "fascinating creature, a real goddess in my
eyes, as long as she took no notice of me," from whom,
he professes with "shame," "I . . . shrunk icily into
myself . . . at every glance retired colder and farther
. . . " (15) . What has happened here? Simply, his love
"looked a return." Even Heathcliff's dogs recognize
Lockwood's "tacit insults" (16) and attack him. Are
these the "human weaknesses" of which he is accused by
the Reverend Jabes Branderham in dream? ["Thou art the
manI" (29)].
21. Lockwood's "terror" of desire makes him "cruel": he
sadistically drains the red blood of life from Cathy's
"ice-cold hand" (30). "Let me in," her ghost cries,
"I'm come home"— but it is precisely the "child" in
himself he cannot admit, the "Other" pleading for
acceptance. In repulsing Catherine Earnshaw, he also
forswears her daughter, who he fears will turn out to be
"a second edition of the mother" if he "[surrenders] his
heart" (13 0) . For the apparition who confronts him is
both Catherines— Catherine Linton and Catherine
Earnshaw, "a girl again" as she wished to be in dying
(107). She is the past, and bears a message of failure
and loss ("I'd lost my way on the moor" (30) which he
repudiates. Catherine overruns all narrative space in
her capricious appearance (or non-appearance) in
spectral form.
22. When Lockwood has an opportunity to woo Catherine
Linton Heathcliff, he recoils from it. Unlike
Heathcliff, who leaves after his Cathy is married,
Lockwood departs the vicinity while Catherine Heathcliff
is still eligible, removing himself from commitment.
Thus I cannot agree with Miyoshi that his "comings and
goings are hardly significant" (218).
23. This "suspended" status is revealed in his sleeping
in Cathy's childhood bed after her death, but before
Heathcliff's, in the same bed. Similarly, as he
approaches the Heights at the end of the novel, Lockwood
sees "the glow of the sinking sun behind, and the . . .
glory of the rising moon in front" (24 2), which portends
the future of the "society" there; Lockwood, as usual,
is poised between the two forms so symbolized. Like his
narrative, Lockwood's life is fragmented and anomalous;
even when it intersects with possible meaning,
186
encountered in whatever form— in people, events, or
words, there is no closure, no unification in a whole.
24. James H. Kavanagh, for instance, says of Lockwood:
"[he] is a weak or even inverted analogue of Heathcliff,
an 'antitype' whose function in the text is to register
a difference from Heathcliff and to display much of what
Heathcliff is not (18). Kavanagh's view proposes
Lockwood as a caricature of Heathcliff, "a displaced and
parodic version" (25) . If Lockwood is indeed "the wry
version of stereotypes of the weak woman" that his
"tendencies towards dizziness and fainting imply . . . "
(Miles 80), then all the more likely he should
characterize the failure of the masculine energy
principle.
25. Harry Berger's discussion in "Bodies and Texts" of
Victor Turner's work offers some comparable notions of
recontextualization. Berger writes,
Turner's analyses reveal that semantic networks
generated within language are not only displaced to
other human constructions but are also reified in—
and as— * nature.' The meanings thus extended or
transferred appear as forces that originate in the
'reality' that the extension constitutes. These
examples of the transfer of meanings from verbal to
extraverbal signifiers illustrate detextualization
or iconic recoding: the meaningful ensembles of a
culture (its cosmology, values, and norms) are
reproduced in a variety of concrete media all of
which thereby become systems of signifiers that
embed the signified cultural interpretation in
natural and technical extensions of the body. In
this process elements of the interpretation are
displaced, condensed, and visualized (or auralized)
in terms of the different signifying capacities of
each medium. Iconic recoding proceeds according to
the principles of polarity and analogy, according
to what LAvi-Strauss has called the logic or
science of the concrete; the reification of
meanings in, e.g., the color, shape, activity, and
other properties of any signifying object binds the
meanings to the object in a nonarbitrary or
motivated way because it commits them to the
associational networks in which the object is
perceived. (160)
26. This idea took shape in an informal discussion with
Phyllis Franzek, who pointed out the parallel with
Joyce.
187
27. Steven Marcus, commenting on the novel's apparent
haphazard composition, notes:
The first of the many contradictions in
which O.C.S. is involved has to do with
the absence of what Forster called
'consciousness of design.' Dickens
apparently did not think of ending the
novel with the death of Nell until he
was half-way through the writing and
Forster had told him that no other
conclusion was possible .... Dickens
acknowledged that suggestion in a letter
written on the morning he finished the
last chapter .... Yet two months
later he wrote to another correspondent,
'I never had the design and purpose of a
story so distinctly marked in my mind,
from its commencement. All its
quietness arose out of a deliberate
purpose; the notion being to stamp upon
it from the first, the shadow of that
early death' .... Both of these
contentions may be correct, for one of
the astonishing things about this novel-
-which began in even greater confusion
than rPickwick Papers1, whose original
conditions miscarried; which had to be
improvised constantly from week to week;
and whose creator had to be informed of
the indicated ending— is that, again as
Forster remarks,'the main purpose seems
to be always present' .... (Note 2,
132)
Marcus himself, however, sees The Old Curiosity
Shop as "Dickens's least successful novel, a work in
which he seems to have lost much of his intellectual
control . . . " (129).
Audrey Jaffe constructs an argument along the lines
of my own but with a diverging emphasis. Of Humphrey's
"confession" to withdraw from the narrative, which
"editors tend to discount" [as they do Humphrey's
"revelation" at the novel's conclusion. See Appendix
673], Jaffe notes that "the status of the narrator—
whether he is 'in' or 'out'— is not fully settled by his
departure. The abandonment of personified in favor of
omniscient narration suggests the need to gain the kind
of distance, for the purposes of narration, that a
character in the text can never attain" (121). In The
Old Curiosity Shop, then, "the story of the self is
188
told, over and over again, as another's" (123); it
accounts for the "precarious balance" between frame and
contents (121).
28. In his essay,"Death Worship among the Victorians:
The Old Curiosity Shoo." John Kucich alludes to "the
single gentleman's" fascination with the "excessive"
violence of the Punch and Judy performance (60). The
"gentleman" is, of course, Master Humphrey disguised,
although Kucich does not mention this. The puppet show
is also a means by which the "single gentleman" tracks
Nell and her grandfather's itinerary, as Kucich
acknowledges (60). Beyond that narrative device, I also
propose that Punch, the "merry outlaw" (189), is another
sign of the disparities which haunt the novel. Humphrey
is engaged in deciphering ambiguities, not simply the
mysterious vanishing of his brother and niece, but the
riddle of his own seeming alienation from a beloved
relative. His "discovery" of the lost child in the
opening narrative sequences is in this sense a specimen
wish fulfillment, Nell representing both the family he
has lost and the child he himself was. Kucich argues
that Humphrey’s reply to Nell's asking to be directed
home, is a "jesting threat" (63). But when Humphrey
responds to the child, "And what made you ask it of me?
Suppose I should tell you wrong?" (45), his words only
reflect his own peripatetic wanderings through the night
city and the disaffection from family ties indicated by
his solitude. For he himself has been wrongly directed,
as it were; he too, is "lost."
The novel dramatizes deceptive appearances, then,
and the puppet show is a metaphor for the theatricality
of its narrative. The modes through which this idea is
registered have to do with dramatic semblance, connoted
by the swift changes in the Punch figure itself.
Offstage, it is "utterly devoid of spine, all slack and
drooping in a dark box, with his legs doubled up round
his neck, and not one of his social qualities remaining"
(The Old Curiosity Shop 191). The reversed relationship
between puppetmaster and puppet depicted in the novel,
whereby Thomas Codlin, Punch's "master" onstage, is
reduced to "painfully walking beneath the burden of that
same Punch's temple" on the road (191) is another such
image. The strong association too, with Humphrey and
acting is punctuated by his absorption in the Punch and
Judy show. Malcolm Andrews also points to the opposing
personalities of the two showmen who exhibit the "two
sides" of the traveling Punch and Judy performance "as a
further reinforcement of the 'delusion' and reality
situation" (Introduction 26) in the novel.
189
29. In his article "Domesticating the Cosmos: History
and Structure in a Folktale from India," Stuart H.
Blackburn explains the phenomenon he calls "thematic
parallelism" (539) , in which an embedded tale is . . .
thematically isomorphic with the . . . frame text"
(528). I suggest that the surrogate characters who
substitute for Master Humphrey function in an analogous
fashion. That is, they generate parallel themes because
of their resemblance to Humphrey.
30. Both Quilp and Master Humphrey fall into outri
categories, as defined by Rosemary Jackson: "'The shadow
on the edges of bourgeois culture is variously
identified, as black, mad, primitive, criminal, socially
deprived, deviant, crippled, or (when sexually
assertive) female'" (quoted in Monledn 92). Jackson
argues according to Josi Monledn that "during the
Victorian age, evil was basically assigned to very
concrete figures, such as the worker/revolutionary, the
foreigner, the madman, or the active woman. It is
clear, then, that norms in fantastic literature (as in
dominant ideology) were determined by the image of a
bourgeois man. Any society organized around other
premises had to be conceived of as abnormal and
unnatural" (92) . Geoffrey Harpham also contends that
"the grotesque provides a model for a kind of argument
that takes the exceptional or marginal, rather than the
merely conventional, as the type" (22) . In other words,
"The most mundane of figures, this metaphor of co-
presence, in, also harbors the essence of the grotesque,
the sense that things that should be kept apart are
fused together" (11) .
Lee Clark Mitchell raises another, provocative
argument in his essay "Face, Race, and Disfiguration in
Stephen Crane's The Monster." suggesting that the notion
of disfigurement and deformity in Crane's work
constitutes a rhetorical trope, prosopopoeia (emphasis
added). Prosopopoeia, related to personification,
consists of "conferring a face or a mask on whatever
happens to lack one. Something inanimate, imaginary,
inhuman, missing, or even deceased is endowed
rhetorically with a face and thereby given the power to
speak .... Just as disfiguration consists of an
oscillation between ruin and ideal, so prosopopoeia
implies that faces can be erased as well as bestowed"
(176-77). The shift to a rhetorical context thereby
converts relations from "pictorial" or imagistic to
textual connotations.
190
31. He is compared at one point to a "Harlequin" figure
(441), "a character from the Italian Commedia dell*arte,
and the old English pantomime, who was armed with a wand
or bat that allowed him to go invisible" (Editor’s note
1, 707).
32. Mary Russo's essay, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and
Theory," is based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In
the Rabelaisian spirit of "grotesque realism" analyzed
by Bakhtin,
The grotesque body is the open,
protruding, extended, secreting body,
the body of becoming, process, and
change. The grotesque body is opposed
to the classical body, which is
monumental, static, closed, and sleek,
corresponding to the aspirations of
bourgeois individualism; the grotesque
body is connected to the rest of the
world .... For Bakhtin, this body is,
as well, a model for carnival language;
a culturally productive linguistic body
in constant semiosis. (de Lauretis 219)
With her exquisitely fashioned body, Nell is
engendered as the classic feminine ideal. [For this
reason, some critics perceive Nell as an "eroticized"
figure (see Jaffe 119).] In terms of the classical
ideal, however, I contend that Nell is closer to
allegorical significance. Sally Brass's gender is
doubtful by comparison. She is "not easily melted or
moulded into shape" (599)— "griffin or monster"? (546).
She relates to the physically and morally deformed
characters in the novel in several ways. Since the law
has been her "nurse," her mind is warped; she knows
nothing of the world (348). She is also a glaring
failure as a parental figure. If Sophronia is in truth
her "love child" (with Quilp), her brutal treatment of
that character is anything but maternal.
33. Further in the novel, Dickens, expounding on the
idea of old age as "a state of childishness," scoffs at
the comparison. We should "blush for the pride that
libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to
an ugly and distorted image" (147).
34. Quilp also evinces the displaced erotic energy,
albeit a demonic one, which has been purged in Nell and
the novel's other virtuous females. Quilp's demonic
vigor is balanced by Nell's allegorical torpor, virtue
191
in excess. Both characters figure in the economy of an
entropic monsterhood, foiling containment, which
dominates the novel. This is obviously reading against
Nell as the artless and opaque icon of a bourgeois
sentimentality. George Levine also links the monster
with "the oppressed women and children of Victorian
fiction . . . ." Like numerous orphaned characters,
including Little Nell, the monster is "rejected by his
father, uncertain of who he is or where he belongs"
(3 0). Taking these interpretations, it may be no
exaggeration to consider Nell and Quilp as complementary
metaphors. Unlike Master Humphrey and those integrated
characters functioning in his place, both do not
transcend overt contrasts. Another way to look at the
difference between Humphrey, Nell, and Quilp is in terms
of a certain mechanistic quality. "De-mechanizing," in
Stefanie Meier's words, involves a deemphasis on the
physical and a corresponding shift to the moral, a
movement from the external to internal. She discusses
this phenomenon in a context of the "decrease in
mechanical attributes" which accompanies the
metamorphosis of Dick Swiveller from "a shady and
ridiculous character" to a more socially aware one (80).
Both Nell and Quilp partake of the inanimate or the
dehumanized, the one as allegory, the other as
mechanization; Master Humphrey, however, and those
characters who stand in for him, do not. By the same
token, clocks, in Meier's scheme, are on the list of
animated things. They have a "humanized form" (81),
need I say, like Master Humphrey's own?
The editor's notes to the Penguin edition of The
Old Curiosity Shop refer to the possible influence of
G.H. Wilson's The Eccentric Mirror. 4 volumes, 1807, and
Wonderful Characters. 3 volumes, 1821, on Dickens'
delineation of character (Note 4, 695). [Dickens
apparently possessed a copy of the latter work.] On the
title page of The Eccentric Mirror * s volume 1, dated
1813, Wilson writes that his work is "a faithful
Narration of EVERY INSTANCE AND SINGULARITY Manifested
in the Lives and Conduct of Characters who have rendered
themselves eminently conspicuous by their
Eccentricities, the whole exhibit an interesting and
WONDERFUL DISPLAY OF HUMAN ACTION in the Grand Theatre
of the World." In the Preface, Wilson states that The
Eccentric Mirror concerns "memoirs and descriptions of
persons remarkable for any extraordinary deviation from
the general laws of nature with respect to exterior
conformation" (I, 1, i; emphasis added). Dickens'
characterization of Quilp may have been modeled on
Wilson's account of the dwarf Nicholas Ferry, alias
Bebe, companion to the King of Poland. Bebe is
192
described as having "a malignant disposition," as being
inclined to violent passions (10), and as "an imperfect
man" (14). Various misers depicted in Wilson's work,
distinguished by their inordinate desire for wealth and
poor familial relations, may also have contributed to
Dickens' conception of Quilp. Wilson's history of one
Joseph Clark, "a very extraordinary posture-master,"
who, though "well-made," had the "extraordinary faculty
of assuming every kind of deformity and dislocation"
(13, index), bears a certain resemblance to Master
Humphrey's powers of transfiguration. The man could
apparently dislocate his body parts at will, "pass[ing]
for a cripple among persons with whom he had been in
company only a few minutes before" (13).
35. Rosemary Jackson expresses the idea I have in mind
in her discussion of the fantastic: "From the basic pull
towards entropy derive many of the thematic clusters of
the fantastic, from obsessions with death, cannibalism,
animism, to graphic depictions of changes of form.
Metamorphosis, with its stress upon instability of
natural forms, obviously plays a large part in fantastic
literature for this reason" (81).
36. Humphrey remarks to this effect, "It is enough to
say that I replaced in the clock-case the record of so
many trials— sorrowfully, it is true, but with a
softened sorrow which was almost pleasure; and felt that
in living through the past again, and communicating to
others the lesson it had helped to teach me, I had been
a happier man" (Appendix 680). In his pose as the
"mysterious lodger," Humphrey's trunks further the same
purpose as his clock, serving up "whatever was
required," like clockwork. Dick Swiveller is
accordingly "led to infer that the lodger was some great
conjuror or chemist . . . " (346).
37. Put another way, Steven Marcus observes, "In The Old
Curiosity Shoo the idyll does not celebrate recaptured
joy and companionship; it celebrates peace, rest and
tranquility. The strongest impulse with which the novel
is charged is the desire to disengage itself from
energy, the desire for inertia" (142). I am deviating
from this argument, however, in maintaining that, if
such a "desire" exists, it is accomplished through
ironization and paradox.
38. Peter Garrett suggests that Le Sage's "eighteenth-
century heroes" may have peopled Dickens' childhood
reading: "Whenever he first read it, Le Sage's satiric
fantasy clearly made a strong impression, and the power
193
of Asmodeus to fly through space and reveal the secrets
of the city became associated with the privileges of
narrative omniscience" (33) . Though unevolved, I
believe that Dickens attempts the same strategy in The
Old Curiosity Shoo.
39. This particular form of iteration in The Old
Curiosity Shop contrasts with the repetition of other
verbal elements in that its medium is characterization.
40. Though I disagree with their basic divisions of
audience types, Juliet and Rowland McMaster call
attention to "two distinct elements in Douglas'
audience. One is a group of sensation-hungry
women . . . [who] will hear Douglas' reading of the
manuscript as another ghost story .... Subtlety is
not their concern: one of them laments that the story is
not told 'in any literal vulgar way,' because 'that's
the only way I ever understand'" (192-93). The second
reader, for the McMasters, is "the original narrator of
the story, whom for convenience we may call (James)"
(193), whose province is not an entertaining ghost story
but rather "something more subtle, that demands deeper
psychological perception" (193). So "(James) the
narrator and listener, like James the author, is our
transparent medium of perception" (194). The McMasters
do not mention the presence of the "X" narrator who,
though technically genderless, appears to be as eager
for sensation and as insensitive to subtleties as the
women. Further, the fact that Douglas's story is "too
horrible" elicits a response by "several voices" that
this attribute "give[s] the thing the utmost price
. . . " (1) [emphasis added]. Again, James is
deliberately vague as to their gender; the "voices"
cannot, consequently, be read as female. Secondly, many
of the ladies depart the assembly before the actual
manuscript reading takes place. They are not, then,
among the "little final auditory more compact and select
. . . subject to a common thrill" (4). More
importantly, the reading of gender into this scene is
hazardous at best. While it is true that "ladies" are
frequently singled out in connection with banal
comments, only one male, besides Douglas, is mentioned
directly (Mrs. Griffin's husband). Can we assume from
this characterization that the audience is predominantly
female? I think not. The group is univocal in its
desire for "sheer terror" (1). Even Douglas does not
escape that grip. At one point, when he looks at the
"I" narrator, for instance, he remarks the story's
"general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain" (2).
Further, we have no way of measuring audience response
194
at the conclusion of Douglas' story, since the novel
does not return to the initial setting. For these
reasons, I suggest that the demarcation of its audience
is not so simple a matter. We may indeed, with the
McMasters, "choose to listen with the ladies, and hear a
ghost story, or with (James), and hear a psychological
novel" (194). To do so would be precisely to rend the
organicity of the art James says he is at pains to
create.
William Goetz suggests that Douglas's "chiefly"
female audience, "our counterparts within the
fiction . . . seem like those 'merely witless' readers
whom James mentions, only to dismiss them, in his
Preface to the tale." In trying to coerce answers from
the story, he says, they most confirm their "fatuity"
(72). If such a gendered reading privileges male
authority, however (Douglas as the keeper of a woman's
secrets— the governess's manuscript), then I suggest
that it parodies the novel itself. Esoteric knowledge
is withheld by males— the uncle, Quint, Miles—
intelligence the governess, like the female audience,
labors to uncover, information which bears directly on
their experience of life. [The I-narrator may be
figuratively "male" in his assumption that the story
will "tell" (3), but I do not read this narrator as
literally masculine, as does Brooke-Rose— 138.]
Douglas's female listeners can only "understand" in a
"literal vulgar way" (3), confined as they are to
vicarious living, the "delicious" "dreadfulness" (2)
available to them only in narrative. The governess's
"authority" to probe male secrecy, however, like that of
the women in Douglas's audience, is severely curtailed
by cultural mores which, in the larger sense, prohibit
women from seeking enlightenment. [Douglas's female
assembly, "our counterparts," then, does not ideally
include the male members of any audience!]
Shoshana Felman interprets the governess's search
for knowledge as "a readinq-adventure. a quest for the
definitive, literal or proper meaning of words and of
events" (153). If women "read" their lives in books,
then it seems to me we have an epistemological problem
duplicated in James's novel. Without the assurance of
meaning in their lives, women's experience becomes even
more precarious than it naturally is. In the context of
her own study, Felman explains this relationship as one
between knowing and seeing; "'Knowing* . . . is to
'seeing' as the signified is to the signifier: the
signifier is the seen, whereas the signified is the
known. The signifier, by its very nature, is ambiguous
and obscure, while the signified is certain, clear, and
unequivocal. Ambiguity is thus inherent in the very
195
essence of the act of seeing ..." (156). I think
this order could be reversed. If the sianifier by
Felman's definition, is the "conveyor of signification,"
and the signified is "that which has been meant: the
accomplished meaning which, as such, is mastered, known,
possessed" (156) , then I propose that the male
characters in the novel are signifiers and the female
the signified, for the latter feel that meaning is
unambiguously available to them when in truth it is not.
"Seeing" then, is connected with that kind of signified
knowledge. Felman is more or less in accord with this
interpretation when she notes further, "The act of
reading, the attempt to grasp and hold the signified,
goes thus hand in hand with the repression or
obliteration of a signifier ..." (166).
On the basis of the "specific understanding" that
exists between them, and because he or she receives the
manuscript upon Douglas's death, Terry Heller intimates
that the frame narrator, "a sympathetic and concerned
auditor, who will listen to the throbs of love," is
Douglas's "specific intended audience" for the tale, an
avatar for the "sympathetic implied reader" (148). This
narrator is marked by a certain morbid curiosity and
obtuseness in his responses to social cues, however, and
seems, therefore, to be Douglas's paradigmatic audience
personified, albeit in the neuter. Aside from that
observation, the tale is only superficially about "the
throbs of love." The frame narrator's receiving the
manuscript, if this is the case, is an ironic gesture,
denoting his or her situation as the kind of limited
reader James had in mind. Perhaps the "I" narrator
inherits Douglas's manuscript because, as he or she
tells us, "it was just his [Douglas's] scruples that
charmed me" (2), i.e. Douglas's reticence. Shoshana
Felman, on the same topic, writes that "the story's
origin is therefore not assigned to any one voice which
would assume responsibility for the tale, but to the
deferred action of a sort of echoing effect . . . as
though the frame itself could only multiply itself,
repeat itself . . . " (121). Heller concludes: "this
tale offers three modes of response: acceptance of the
narrator's [the governess's] account; doubt about that
account accompanied by the construction of possible
explanations of what she reports; and, finally, a
suspension between these first two modes of response"
(148). A splintered reading of this kind, however,
returns us precisely to James's hermeneutic.
41. John Carlos Rowe suggests that the uncle is master
of "the unreadable," a form of "social power (of the
aristocracy, law, censorship)" (130)— and I would add, a
196
bastion of masculine logic. According to Douglas, the
uncle invests the governess, ironically, with "supreme
authority" (5) at Bly, no doubt a gauge of his
"seduction" (6) of her. James Kincaid notes that "there
is also a subversive sense in which those in power rule
by silence, by tacit assumption, to such an extent that
they have rendered all speech impotent" (43) . He adds
that "silence can also express something like aggression
. . . ", a silence he calls "violent” (44).
42. The word "outbreak" echoes in myriad ways throughout
the story. It is linked in meaning to Miles's
"revolution," to "revelation," to Miles's need of a
"larger" life (56) . Conversely, it also relates to
imagery of "confinement," or containment, as when the
governess speaks of her "smothered" life (14).
43. In another instance, the governess likens her
"breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass."
Mrs. Grose wards off her "violence" with "an
interposing cry . . . as if to stay the blow" (71).
Similarly, Mrs. Grose tells the governess that Flora's
speeches about her are "Really shocking," perhaps
because they reveal the child's true feelings (77).
44. This episode, incidentally, takes place in a dining
room, first described as a "temple" (20). The
implications of sacrifice are, of course, a possible
reading.
45. Interestingly, as Northrop Frye, commenting on
James' style, describes it, I am reminded of James'
aesthetic orientation. Frye writes: "The long sentences
in the later novels of Henry James are containing
sentences: all the qualifications and parentheses are
fitted into a pattern, and as one point after another is
made, there emerges not a linear process of thought but
a simultaneous comprehension" (267).
46. John Carlos Rowe contends that
the prologue is the delayed effect of
narration itself, the Nachtraglichkeit
that the displacements of the narrative
constitute as an 'unreadable' background
that may be read as such only in terms
of its exclusion from the narrative
•proper.' This prologue becomes a
necessary introduction once it has been
determined as that which the Governess * s
written narrative seeks to exclude. And
197
what her narrative principally excludes
is the fact of the Uncle's potent and
active authority that governs her own
bid for mastery as the guarantee of the
Uncle's secret power. (131)
To encourage this reading however, one needs to
ignore the exchange between Douglas and his audience. I
believe we can salvage Rowe's interesting point by
entertaining the Governess as a prototype also of the
reader who seeks "mastery" of the unknowable, for
sociological reasons, as entry to class power, or more
mundanely, as a type of Faustian knowledge distinguished
by a quest for mastery of life's secrets and
ambiguities. Traditionally a masculine prerogative, the
desire for transcendent knowledge is ironized by
locating it in a woman, a member of a marginal social
class at that, who somehow emerges from the text as
hapless, no matter what the interpretation.
Shoshana Felman also comments on this topic:
The frame is therefore not an outside
contour whose role is to display an
inside content: it is a kind of
exteriority which permeates the very
heart of the story's interiority, an
internal cleft separating the story's
content from itself, distancing it from
its own referential certainty. With
respect to the story's content, the
frame thus acts both as an inclusion of
the exterior and as an exclusion of the
interior . . . it is a blurring of the
very difference between inside and
outside. (12 3)
47. Tzvetan Todorov offers a kindred reading in Genres
in Discourse: "The 'mythological' narrative (of action)
is present only to allow the deployment of a
'gnoseological' narrative (of knowledge). Acts are
insignificant here because all efforts are focused on
the search for being" (104). The novel is thus "a tale
of apprenticeship in the art of interpretation" (106).
The irony of this posture, however, is the essential
unknowability of "ultimate meaning . . . the very act of
knowing is called into question" (110), including "any
construction on the basis of words, any attempt to grasp
things through language" (111). Marlow's audience and
we readers alike "will never be able to reach the
reference of the narrative . . . its heart is quite
absent" (111). Todorov closes with the judgment that
198
"Kurtz's story symbolizes the fact of fiction,
construction on the basis of an absent center ....
What was true for things remains so, and more so, for
signs; there is only referral, circular and nonetheless
imperative, from one surface to another, from words to
words" (112).
48. William Bonney writes that this anonymous narrator
does not consent to Marlow's narration: "indeed, he
would rather have Marlow keep silent than suffer through
'one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences'" (105). It
seems to me, however, that "fated” is a freighted word,
intimating not only Marlow's compulsion to communicate,
but the onus on the listener to hear.
49. Marlow observes a "deficiency" of this "something"
in Kurtz, who "lacked restraint in the gratification of
his various lusts . . . there was something wanting in
him— some small matter which, when the pressing need
arose, could not be found under his magnificent
eloquence" (58).
50. I have twisted Peter Brooks' concept of language to
make a point. He writes of language "as a system of
police . . . as a system of difference, hence of
distinction and restraint . . . which polices
individuality. To policing is contrasted the utter
silence of utter solitude: the realm beyond
interlocution, beyond dialogue, hence beyond language"
(Reading for the Plot 2 51-52). I have another take on
the functions of language in the novel, believing it to
be staged as other sound systems.
51. Joseph Wiesenfarth observes that Marlow presents two
versions of Kurtz's last words in his narrative, and
thus "presents two versions of Kurtz. The first ["The
horror"] is a realistic version, the Kurtz of the Inner
Station; the second is a parodic version, the Kurtz that
civilization demands" (187). It is tempting to
speculate that if the last words on Kurtz's lips are his
Intended's name (she is otherwise nameless in the
narrative), then perhaps her name and the "horror" are
homologic. That she herself is a blend of the novel's
themes is evident. She is described in imagery of both
light and dark; her nameless status could also be linked
with the "unspeakable" in the lexis.
52. William Bonney does not separate the two castes of
women in his comments about them. He states that
"Marlow's attitude toward women is openly scornful of
what he considers to be their innate inability to cope
199
with adversity; yet, when the steamer is departing at
the end of the tale and Marlow blows the whistle, in the
face of the shrieking of the whistle and the crashing of
the pilgrims' rifles (what to her must have been a
disorienting 'darkness') only 'the barbarous and superb
woman did not so much as flinch,' while the men of the
tribe flee in terror, a detail which clearly undercuts
Marlow's understanding" (104). My point, precisely, is
that "barbarous" women are acclimated to the terrors of
"darkness." Marlow's "scornful attitude" is reserved
for women of his own culture, an opinion mitigated of
course, by the concomitant urge to preserve their
ignorance.
53. In that sense Marlow's framing narrative attains a
symbolic closure, as Kurtz's does not, contrary to Peter
Brooks's point that "the inner frame of Kurtz's
narrative has no . . . shapely coherence, and— perhaps
as consequence— neither Marlow's narrative nor the first
narrator's appears to 'close' in satisfactory fashion"
(note 8, Reading for the Plot 351). On the basis of
this conjecture, Brooks concludes that Heart of Darkness
falls short of criteria for "the classic framed tale."
200
Chapter Three
A Composite Theory of Framing
Introduction; The Influence of New Historicism
The synthesized theory of framing this project
entertains is inspired in part by narrative studies
attributed to several of the "new historians," notably
Fredric Jameson and Hayden White. Jameson's concerns
lie with cultural modes of production and the ideologies
associated with interpretive acts. White, whose
specialty is historical narrative, is also intrigued by
the disposition of interpretive values. I will discuss
the thrust of their work first, as it has persuaded me
in the general course of my own. A presentation of my
composite theory follows. In it I posit a cultural
materialist model of social evolution as the basis for a
theory of literary framing. This three-tiered paradigm
includes analyses of framing production and its cultural
analogues, an inquiry into the social constituent and
its reification in the literary text as narrators and
audience, and finally, a proposed thematics shaped by
modes of rhetorical discourse linked to forms of textual
production.
201
Certainly one of the most eminent, as well as
controversial of the "new" historians is Fredric
Jameson, whose 1981 work The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act has attracted much
notice. Jameson's poetics is founded in revisionist
Marxist philosophies. He argues, appropriately, that
all narratives arise from matrices in which meaning is
authorized through its production methods. Jameson's
province is the ideology of the interpretive act; his
objective, "to restructure the problematics of ideology,
of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of
history, and of cultural productions, around the all-
informing process of narrative. which I take to be . . .
the central function or instance of the human mind"
(Preface 13). Jameson justifies the election of
narrative as his prototypical genre chiefly because it
shares with history a concern with causality. Through
the imposition of plot on what would be otherwise
perceived as random and arbitrary events, narratives as
explication wring uniform meaning from the disarray of
history's "raw material."
In Jonathan Culler's synopsis of the project,
Jameson distinguishes three interpretive planes: texts
can be understood as allegorical reconciliations of
social antagonisms, as the fragmentary discourse of
202
class struggle, or as the "ideology of style, as
variously bearing traces of modes of production"
(Framing the Sign 19-2 0). For Jameson, in sharp
contrast to poststructuralists * repudiation of its
presence, meaning is a tenable end for deliberation,
particularly because it figures in the processes of the
"political unconscious." Jameson's use of this term
stems from the Marxist belief that individuals are
entangled in dialectical history, or behave as if they
are. Thus our perspective is by necessity historically
conditioned. It follows that an epoch's literature and
criticism is tempered by "master narratives," or
politically inspired allegories which reflect "a
fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our
collective fantasies about history and reality" (34).
Though it has its detractors, Jameson's scheme
theoretically heightens our awareness of the text as a
construction molded by assorted energies— historical,
discursive, cultural, among many, whose surfaces Jameson
firmly believes are traceable in the text. Though we
need not address the spectrum of these claims, Jameson's
study behooves us, as readers and performers of the
"interpretive act" ourselves, to develop a consciousness
of the text, not as the quiescent, self-revelatory
artifact it is often held to be, from which we recover a
203
transparent account, but as a dynamic organism in which
meaning emanates from a complex of matrices. In this
sense, Jameson’s proposals invite us to rethink and
rewrite notions of "framing."
Hayden White's essay "The Value of Narrativity in
the Representation of Reality" is a bellwether for
students of the historical genre. In On Narrative, an
anthology devoted to the question introduced in the
editor's Foreword: "the value of narrativity as a mode
of making sense of reality," White's revisionist
position, represented as inclining to the "anti-
narrativist," is encapsulated in the proposal that
"narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and
politically conservative social conditions" (Mitchell
viii). The relationship of narrative in general, then,
has to do with authority because "its latent or manifest
purpose [is] the desire to moralize the events of which
it treats" (14). [Indeed, White argues, "the very right
to narrate hinges upon a certain relationship to
authority per se" (18).] This "moralizing impulse" stems
from the need to attach our mores to an originating
source, the social system from which ethics spring
(14)
White's remarks on this issue inevitably lead to
his concern for the ideological parameters of
204
interpretation. In Tropic of Discourse he cites the
work of sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim, who
advises that ideologies be categorized "according to
whether they [are] 'situationally congruent* (i.e.
generally accepting of the social status quo) or
'situationally transcendent' (i.e. critical of the
status quo and oriented towards its transformation or
dissolution)" (68). Within this framework, history is
suggested as ideological practice, since historical
interpretation has its origins in varieties of
ideological commitment. Interpretative ideologies
pervade historiography by three means: "aesthetically
(in the choice of a narrative strategy),
epistemologically (in the choice of an explanatory
paradigm), and ethically (in the choice of a strategy by
which the ideological implications of a given
representation can be drawn for the comprehension of
current social problems)" (69-70).
White advances a more extensive treatment of
narrative's relationship to historical interpretation in
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation (1987). He begins with the
position that narrative is among the "panglobal facts of
culture," a solution to the quandary of how to extract
meaning from event, "of how to translate knowing into
205
telling . . . " (1). To White, the culprit in
narrativizing is plot, signifying our desire to order,
to avert dispersal and anarchy. Plot is mounted on a
selectivity principle, moreover, which means that "every
narrative, however seemingly 'full,' is constructed on
the basis of a set of events that might have been
included but were left out; this is as true of imaginary
narratives as it is of realistic ones" (10). Since the
logic of "figuration," of "tropology," organizes
narrative, so we should never be deluded that a
narrative relation is a literal one, for "a narrative
account is always a figurative account, an allegory"
(48). In this sense, historical representation uses
narrative's explanatory principle, teleology, to imbue
actions with intentionality (217). The crucial question
for historiography, White says, is the text-context
relationship. In short, White would scrutinize any
artifact by asking the following questions: "Of what is
the artifact evidence? to what does it refer? . . . what
referent does it permit us, however indirectly, to
perceive?" (209) .
White's convictions have substantial import for
frame theory. His misgivings about the nature of
historical studies enjoin us to reconsider narrative in
light of the indispensable questions he addresses: how
206
narrative performs, how it dispenses meaning, and how it
impresses that meaning upon the reader. That narrative
is inherently epistemic and arises from the same impulse
which we associate with the judicial should come as no
surprise, considering the domination of emplotment
devices in the genre and the license to repress which
that power bestows. With White, we need to observe more
closely the equation between text and context in
narrative, and the frame's singular status with respect
to that ratio.
Several of White's insights merit our close
attention in view of the fictional narrative's parallels
with the historical account, and its vulnerability on
similar grounds to interpretive schemes. I would
suggest that White's three interpretive venues are
narrative sites as well, revealing themselves, in the
case of frame stories, by the very utilization of a
frame structure. That is, layered or "framed" narrative
is at once an aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical
device which putatively controls reader reception by
modeling causality.
A Composite Theory
Jameson and White raise two key points with which I
would like to initiate my own discussion of framing.
207
The first of these has to do with the impact of cultural
interpretative practices on framing concepts and some
alternative modalities for reflection; the other, which
I will take up later, is the value in narrative
considered as tropological form rather than the
discredited genre that White holds up as a travesty of
the historical real. I suggest several rhetorical
models which enable the reevaluation of framing activity
as a positive endeavor, and repudiate the traditional
opposition between the "fictive" and the "authentic"
which equates narrative rhetoric with fraudulent
discourse.
The three-tiered model of framing narratives which
I contemplate as paradigmatic for the genre as a whole
is not unlike the homology between nature and culture
expressed in the term bricolage, the "totemic" logic of
"primitive" man in which "nature" and "culture" are
perceived as mirrors of each other (Hawkes 51). My
model is thus integrated, yet one in which a nucleated
thematics is decentered and narrative planes are
understood as interrelated and interdependent,
performing in a dynamic which can best be described as
synergetic. In this model, the suspension of
traditional ethical contraries rather than their
collapse is the desired goal, for their maintenance
208
conserves the heterogeneity to which X believe framed
texts finally aspire. The result is a mosaic-like text
rather than a linear one. The model X propose, adapted
from Marvin Harris's Marxist cultural materialism
philosophy and modified accordingly, is "global" in the
same sense Harris argues that his paradigm reflects a
"universal pattern" in sociocultural systems" (51).
That is, I would hope it could be serviceable in the
interpretation of any framed narrative.
The connections between the formal properties of
the framed narrative and their rhetorical counterpart
are analogous to the reciprocal relationship between the
material or phenomenal order and the ideational. Hence
the narrative can be thought of in materialist terms as
having an infrastructure, a mode of production so to
speak, conceived as environmental or ecologically
constituted. The infrastructure hypothetically reflects
the formal properties of text at the structural or
technological level, its "grammar" or "syntax." My
theory of the text considered on the infrastructural
plane, and from the vantage point of the phenomenal
order, is concerned with cultural logics, their impact
on textual modes of production, and the interpretive
practices they foster. This section includes a
discussion of some optional perspectives of framing
209
activity, namely both ritual and filmic methodologies as
examples of cultural parallels for the non-discursive
ways meaning can be registered in framed texts. Ritual
strategies reorganize socially-generated oppositions;
they are both actual and allegorical reconciliations of
the social antagonisms to which Jameson calls attention
in his distinction of interpretive textual planes.
Framing values appraised in terms of film activity point
to several analogues. The initial framing narrative is
realized much like the mise-en-scene, while the framed
text as a whole is most effectually rendered as montage.
But we should also take into account framing's faculty
for deception, its flagging of signs which imply an
express reader response and indicate a certain textual
direction, but which in actuality camouflage the
presence of alternative choices. The displaced effects
of the filmic technique known as trucage are another
coordinate for the mediation of this sense on the
phenomenal level in framed texts.
The social component embraced by the concept of a
phenomenal order translates into the text's characters,
their behaviors, and their milieu. The social group so
understood includes a study of character as agency. The
phenomenal order, including both the infrastructure and
the social constituent, is the foundation of the
210
community's ideational order, the immaterial system of
concepts, ideals, ethics, and tenets or ideologies which
arises from the community's experience of the phenomenal
order, and is reflected in the work's discourse
modalities. Having outlined the fundamental plan, we
will begin by examining the dimensions of the phenomenal
order, starting with the influence of cultural logics on
textual production.
Framing and the Phenomenal Order: The Infrastructure
Cultural Logics
On the syntactical plane, a basic issue entails a
conception of framing as a mediator of desire for telos,
or the degree to which frames obey the teleologically-
driven cultural logic to which White calls attention.
Recent studies in contrastive or comparative rhetoric
are illuminating in this respect. An impressive body of
evidence supports the hypothesis of distinct cultural
differences in written language. The idea that
languages orient our perception of reality has its
source in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.2 Structuralists
suggest a reverse relationship; that is, that language
is a cognitive construct arising from consciousness.
211
Robert Kaplan's pioneering work in contrastive analysis
follows in the Sapir-Whorf tradition, since he too is
concerned with the ways in which language controls
perception. Kaplan's investigations into the bases for
English logic lead him to conclude that a text is to a
great extent the product of culturally defined heuristic
practices.
Although Kaplan's findings have been challenged as
"ethnocentric," as mythologizing, or as oversimplified,
recent studies for the most part confirm his theories.3
If a language's internal logic, its cultural "bias,"
does indeed order phenomenological reality as Kaplan
suggests, then rhetorical structuring is clearly
culture-specific. Consequently, English speakers are
conditioned by formulaic writing and rhetorical
conventions to expect the announcement of the discourse
theme at the commencement of a written piece.
Frame as Initiatory Phenomenon
Kaplan's discussion of "topic" recognition in
English bears on my purpose here. In "On the Notion of
Topic in Written Discourse," Kaplan explains the nature
of the "topic." A discourse bloc, defined as "a given
set of discourse units" (1), customarily has "a stated
or implied topic," either definite or generic
212
(inferred). A topic element is generally in first
position, that is, as subject, which Kaplan notes
typifies "straightforward" exposition (5). A topic has
several other distinguishing properties. It has
dominance: "it extends its domain over a string of
syntactic elements following it, usually to the right in
English" (7) .4 Topic also has "a logical function. The
relative truth value of comments on any given topic can
only be determined by reference to the topic itself"
(8). Thirdly, topic is cohesive, having "a relational
function, in the sense that [it] serves as a bridge
between knowledge in the mind of the author/writer, a
presupposition about knowledge in the mind of the
audience/reader, and what is about to be
said/written/read." A single topic, moreover, can
control clusters of "contextuated" discourse (9). At
the generic or macro-level, English expository writing
is predominantly deductive, hierarchical and linear.
Thus in expository discourse, a topic statement is
typically subdivided into its various points in
succeeding sentences which illustrate or exemplify them,
the so-called "topic/comment" structure. A principal
idea is thus expanded in a network of related thought,
the whole constituting the grounds for a case.
213
Nominally speaking, the rhetorical analogy of the
framed text is the classic argument, defined by Bordwell
and Thompson in their discussion of argument types in
film as follows: "One standard description . . .
suggests that it begins with an introduction of the
situation, goes on to a discussion of the relevant
facts, then presents proofs that a given solution fits
those facts, and ends with an epilogue that summarizes
what has come before" (57). The canonical view of
framing as an overt "deictic sign" suggests this classic
argument f ormat.5
The argument analogy, moreover, illustrates the
somewhat artificial construction of any initializing
discourse which must compress the multi-dimensional
nature of experience into proportionate representation.
On this topic, Alexander Welsh calls attention to the
problematic status of narrative beginnings and endings
and their denaturalized condition: "Beginnings and
endings of narrative have much in common since both are
arbitrary disjunctions in a sequence of events that is
presumed continuous, extending before and after the
events that are narrated" (10). In argument, this
problem takes the form of providing the reader with a
reason for raising an issue in the first place, or the
necessity for an inceptive stimulus. As Edward Said
214
tells us in Beginnings: Intention and Method, "the
designation of a beginning generally involves also the
designation of a consequent intention .... The
beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional
production of meaning" (5). Beginnings, in short,
"authorize" (17),6 Broadly speaking, the expository
topic is a type of "frame" which regulates textual
"production" in the Jameson sense of a matrix which
authorizes meaning.
And just as the expositional topic controls how
English speakers read an unfolding argument, the
narrative frame, as the equivalent of expository topic
or thesis, functions as a parodic rhetorical/grammatical
instrument. In literary studies, two general categories
of framing as ordering principle have been proposed. In
the one classification the frame is best described as
being in a segmental/part relationship to a textual
section, an immediate event or situational context. In
the other codification the frame is characterized as an
organizational principle for the whole text, event, or
situation. In both instances, the frame is thought to
serve as the vehicle for a metaknowledge shared by the
text/event recipient and the text or event producers.
Under these circumstances, the frame presents itself as
a jointly possessed field of knowledge which the
215
receiver will draw on to make sense of a text or event,
and which that text or event will subsequently maximize
as it unfolds. The receiver must then accommodate new
information to the generalized data in the frame
apparatus, effecting a modification of frame detail.
That narrative and expository writing share common
rhetorical features is not often realized; many
commentaries make an artificial distinction between the
two genres.
It might be helpful to think of frames as
archetypal formations which resemble many such
initiatory phenomena [in this regard frames are indeed
"conventionally marked" forms (Herrnstein Smith,
"Afterthoughts on Narrative" 228)]. Considered strictly
as mimetic structures, it can be said that frames exert
a compelling force because of their culturally ascendent
position in textual space and time. Like an inaugural
topic which comprises any conventional beginning, a
frame has the norming force and advantage of what
Menakhim Perry calls "the primacy effect." related to
readers' first impressions and the subsequent tendency
"to persist in the direction wherein they embarked on
any activity" (53) . Perry, accordingly, conceives frame
as a topicalized form, a prototypical metadiscourse, as
it were, with propositional content.7 This preeminent
216
position gives it a singular metaphysical status which
has its origins in our cultural privileging of
beginnings, related to listener/reader orientation.
Victor Brombert's article "Opening Signals in
Narrative" explores more fully the ideological
ramifications of narrative beginnings. Brombert argues
that the initial encounter between reader and text
determines "the production of meaning" (494). The first
word, in fact, acquires a "privileged status" by
"remain[ing] longest with the reader along the textual
trajectory . . . " (495). Brombert speaks of the
"initial textual moment" as "a breaking-in . . . or a
violation which works both ways: a violation not only of
the textual space, but of the reader's habits and
comforts." Thus "Every threshold means resistance" but
thresholds "also signify passage and initiation" (495).8
Further, what Brombert calls the "matricial value" of
narrative commencements has much to do with their
rhetorical significance, with the fusion of temporality
and narrativity which they effect. Narrative openings
address the "traditional" questions, "who? where? when?"
(496)— to which I would add "how? "what?" and "why?"
Opening signals, as Brombert concludes, suggest ways in
which the text should ultimately be read so as to obtain
217
the answers— they are, in the words of Victor Hugo,
1,1 inexorable revealers ' " (501).
If the frame, as signature text, announces the
"topic," it follows from this view that embedded stories
are the "comment" reflecting the concerns of the frame
and not the other way around; that is, that the frame is
an accessory device, a tangential (and extraneous) gloss
on the interior story. The claim that framed tales are
stories about stories predicates an irreversible,
sequential process in which the frame or containing
narrative annotates an embedded, contained, or interior
(hence primary) narrative.9 In my model, however,
narrative volume is not a determinant condition of its
semantic or ideological force. The relationship between
framed narratives is ideally construed as reciprocal.
meaning that both the containing and the contained
narratives are reflexive. Hence any alleged serial
progression in the narrative’s rhetorical/discursive
logic is subject to reversal. As a result, despite the
culturally inscribed preference for assigning
ontological status to opening narratives, their thematic
primacy is subsequently displaced in the transactional
tissue of effects. Framed stories are indeed about
embedded stories, but the reverse is also true if we
relinquish norms which establish and subsequently
218
reinforce an irreversible hierarchical, coercive
ordering. From this perspective, the normative value of
"metadiscourse" as a defining term is nullified since
paradoxically, the above statement renders the embedded
stories at some point also "metadiscourses," but in
quite a different way than frames.
Ironically then, though framing is recognized as an
affective distancing mechanism, when considered in its
topicalizing capacity it rhetorically encodes textual
coherence, at least in the contiguous field, thereby
effectively counteracting writing's trend towards
decontextualization.10 Despite the frame's initial
strategic location, however, the extent to which a
framed narrative is "predictable" depends upon several
factors, among them the formal components of the
particular framing protocol involved, the frame's
proximal control and its vulnerability to subversion.
To further explore the parallels between framing
activity and initiatory phenomena, I broach two
surrogate productions for framing, ritual process and
film technique. The ritual paradigm has two parts. The
first of these, Victor Turner's social drama, has some
compatible features with the flexible system this study
seeks to construct. Turner's hypothesis is particularly
appropriate to a description of the sociocultural
219
factors which precipitate ritualization. It has some
limitations, however, seen in its tendency to a
formality which ultimately excludes the appreciation of
aleatory phenomena. The other paradigm, masking rites,
approximates the architecture of the textual movement I
have in mind.
Framing as Ritual
In the social order, the initiating phenomena
frames represent has to do with Thomas Kuhn's well-known
theory of paradigm shift. In Kuhn's opinion, paradigm
changes first materialize as crises wherein community
members begin to doubt the old models. A climate of
testing then evolves in which "different points of view,
cultural experiences, and philosophic convictions are
now expressed and often play a decisive role in the
discovery of a new paradigm." In this process, "rival
paradigms" are tried until the "victor" is determined
(Prigogine and Stengers 3 06). In framed narratives, the
gauging of outworn paradigms is ritualized. The framing
narrative situation addresses the condition which
threatens the old order.11 The embedded narratives
which follow are frequently showcases for or illustrate
new paradigms which present to the community as the
unorthodox; they dramatize conditions or prevailing
220
customs in the framing situation which need redress.
The interaction between the two kinds of narratives
frequently results in a resolution of the problem and
the adaptation of a new paradigm— for values, beliefs,
behaviors. Where no resolution is implied, frame
literature nevertheless licenses the divulgence and
potential rectification of social ills.
A framing narrative's initial position is thus
ethically and politically charged. In this guise,
inaugural frame narratives as symbolic acts are a form
of praxis which imitates ritual drama, itself a type of
paradigm shift. The framed text itself can be thought
of as related to the archetypal quest, a pervasive
literary motif. As journey, the framed drama resembles
Auerbach's description of narrative in general as "a
progress through the indeterminate and the contingent
. . . " (10). According to Victor Turner, rituals also
"mediate between the formed and the indeterminate" (154)
in conveying information about the culture's most
revered values (155). Turner cites Arnold Van Gennep's
contention that, as rites-of-passage, rituals usually
"'accompany transitions from one situation to another
and from one cosmic or social world to another'" (156).
In short, ritual "transforms" (157). Ritual is also, by
Turner's definition, an experiential matrix from which
221
other "genres of cultural performance, including most of
those we tend to think of as 'aesthetic,'" are derived
(157) .
Turner's notion of the social drama (Kenneth
Burke's "dramas of living," Turner 145), a phenomenon
duplicated in ritual, is "a well-nigh universal
processual form" (148), one of his "cultural root
paradigms" (150). Turner follows Hayden White's idea of
the contextualized event in his proposal for a social
drama. In this model, the sociocultural event is mapped
as a finite historical field whose threads of
"significant occurrence" can be traced both backward and
forward in time. The recovery of meaning involves both
retrospection, or recalling the temporal process, and
reflexivity, or the negotiation of the "fit" between
past and present. The latter exercise implicates the
social group, and concerns "the ways in which a group
tries to scrutinize, portray, understand, and then act
on itself." As Turner recommends, the social drama is
"our native way of manifesting ourselves to ourselves
and of declaring where power and meaning lie and how
they are distributed" (154). In its "full formal
development," then, the social drama is "a process of
converting particular values and ends, distributed over
a range of actors, into a system (which is always
222
temporary and provisional) of shared or consensual
meaning" (152). Turner's model, with its emphasis on
"rituals of reconciliation" (151) , applies specifically
to "groups of persons who share values and interests and
who have a real or alleged common history" (145). The
social drama, is, moreover, an "agonistic" model
designed to contain the threat of dissidence and to
reintegrate disturbed social groups.
Turner describes the four phases of the social
drama as follows: "The social drama first manifests
itself as the breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule
of morality, law, custom, or etiquette, in some public
arena. This breach is seen as the expression of a
deeper division of interests and loyalties than appears
on the surface." The second, or crisis phase, is
distinguished as "a momentous juncture or turning point
in the relations between components of a social field—
at which seeming peace becomes overt conflict and covert
antagonisms become visible . . . " (14 6) . In the third,
or redress phase, and "in order to limit the contagious
spread of breach, certain adjustive and redressive
mechanisms, informal and formal, are brought into
operation by leading members of the disturbed group"
(147). The enactment of formal ritual may be an aspect
of this phase. The concluding phase "consists either in
223
the reintegration of the disturbed social group— though
the scope and range of its relational field will have
altered, the number of its parts will be different, and
their size and influence will have changed— or the
social recognition of irreparable breach between the
contesting parties, sometimes leading to their spatial
separation" (147, emphasis added). Van Gennep's
linguistics model of ritual is a related mode. It
"postulates a unidirectional move from the 'indicative'
mood [the "quotidian social structure"] of cultural
process through culture's 'subjunctive' mood
[antistructure] back to the 'indicative' mood, though
this recovered mood has now been tempered, even
transformed, by immersion in subjunctivity ..."
(Turner 159) .12
Turner's contextualist social drama model can be
adapted to an understanding of framed narrative with
some modifications. As he himself points out, rituals
are most effective in "relatively stable sociocultural
system[s]" (161), to which I would add that his four-
phase drama could only succeed in fairly homogenous
societies.1 3 The idea of stages or phases, after all,
does imply a linear progressive principle from which
this study diverges. Certainly, however, the prominence
of disordered social states and their tacit values is an
224
aspect of framed narrative situations which lends itself
to Turner's paradigm. We can think of the framing
narrative roughly as presenting these conditions,
expounding on them by means of the embedded narratives,
and reconciling them or not in the return to the framing
situation. Obviously such a model fits classic closed
frame narratives like some of those nineteenth-century
texts examined in Chapter 2. In this respect, framed
narrative may be thought of as a secular ritual process
through which unsettling social conditions are
adjudicated or at least scrutinized. Essentially, as
Turner notes, "All collective ceremony can be
interpreted as a cultural statement about cultural order
as against a cultural void"; ceremony is "a declaration
against indeterminacy" (159) . Framing narratives are
cultural statements or forms of "experiential knowledge"
in Turner's scheme (163). Framing narratives resemble
the "remembering" activity Turner describes. Though
they disinter the past, they do not simply revive it.
Framing sets the past, in Turner's paradigm, "in living
relationship to the present" (163).
Understood in this context, frames reflect the
representative logic of a certain narrative discourse
which proposes itself as a mimesis of invariable social
rituals. To appreciate them in this way, however, is to
225
consent to the meta-ordering principle to which a theory
of reconstructive ritual subscribes. In keeping with my
contention, then, that all frames are consciously or
unconsciously reflexive, we need to apply two more of
Turner's concepts to our revised model. If narrative is
indeed, "a reflexive activity which seeks to 'know'
(even in its ritual aspect, to have gnosis about)
antecedent events and the meaning of those events"
(163), then that activity manifests itself, not as a
closed system consisting of successive stages, but
rather as Turner himself notes, in a transcendent
operation wherein "the rules frame the ritual process,
but the ritual process transcends its frame" (156) .
Though it aptly describes the framed text's
concerns, then, Turner's root model of the social drama
as ritualized performance, as a rule-governed activity,
must be amended. In accordance with my position, after
Jameson, that outmoded syllogistic "strategies of
containment" will not serve a revisionist framing
theory, it becomes necessary to seek supplemental
paradigms which explain framing activity in addition to
Turner's theory of ritualized performance. The desired
model substitutes a theory of plav which postulates
constellations of meaning and reciprocity for the
discursive and rhetorical structural principles of
226
sequence and hierarchy to which we are accustomed, and
other deductive relational categories which obscure the
aleatory nature of textual performance. I do not wish
to wholly abandon social science approaches, since they
are fruitful sources of theory which can account for the
performative aspects of narrative. If, as Hayden White
insists, narrative is essentially coded as a moral
genre, and if, as I believe, framing narratives in
particular exercise that didactic function, then ritual
like forms of exorcism, of healing and transforming the
social body, are not immaterial.
Ritual theory also addresses the issues of boundary
which preoccupy frame scholars. As Mary Douglas notes
in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo, the notion of disorder is integral
to "ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and
punishing transgressions [which] have as their main
function to impose system on an inherently untidy
experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference
between within and without, above and below, male and
female, with and against, that a semblance of order is
created" (4). In the same light, narrative can be seen
as a form of reordering the social environment, or as
Douglas calls it, "dirt-chasing," resulting from the
fear of contagion and pollution (2). According to Van
Ill
Gennep, transitional rites "treat all marginal or ill-
defined social states as dangerous" (Douglas, Purity and
Danger 56). In this spirit, Douglas's contention that
"ritual recognizes the potency of disorder" (94) gains
credence for a theory of framing activity as ritualized
performance. An understanding of the role of form in
ritual process is essential to the position of the
framed text as the narrative equivalent of that process.
As Douglas writes, because "all social systems are built
on contradiction, in some sense at war with themselves"
(14 0), the threat of ritual pollution "arises from the
interplay of form and surrounding formlessness.
Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked"
(104). The dangers represented by the peripheral are
minimized in several ways, one of which is the
confessional rite (13 6-37) , to which framed texts bear a
strong rhetorical resemblance.
Elsewhere in her work, Douglas likens the concept
of permeable boundaries and the threat of pollution to
the social group's affinities with the human body as an
organism. The dynamics of narrative considered as a
social body can thus be seen from one perspective as a
warring zone in which the forces of control and those on
the periphery contend. In her analysis of the symbolic
behaviors which take their meaning from the replication
228
of the social experience in material constructs, Douglas
calls attention to the social group's dread of invasion
by external forces: "the orifices are to be carefully
guarded to prevent unlawful intrusions .... The
emphasis is on valuing the boundaries, guarding the
orifices, avoiding improper mixtures" (Natural Symbols
viii-ix). If we cast narrative form in the bodily image,
then initiatory framing narratives, the inscripted,
localized structures of the type I am discussing, can
readily be imagined as figuratively guarding narrative
access. As I have indicated, this commanding position
gives the framing narrative a peculiar force, one
connected by extension to the manifestations of social
disorder. In remarking the exceptionality of
"beginnings," Juriji Lotman observes that they are
"linked to the concept of the existence of a certain
ideal initial state, its consequent spoiling and final
re-instatement" ("The Origin of Plot" 169),14
Similarly, frame narratives implicitly address
themselves to the conceivable reform of a decaying or
regressive social order.
In a formalist model, the framing narrative's
authoritative control at the text's opening is
challenged by its marginal elements, the sites of
potential social disturbance in the form of themes,
229
characters, and so on. In the model I propose, however,
meaning is negotiated between framing and embedded
narratives. That is, the model which best fits my views
of framing activity must be one which reveals the text
as a semiotic field in which the convergent or
synergistic actions of its different agencies result in
an aggregate effect greater than the individual force of
its separate parts.1 5 For this reason, a non-
adversarial model of framing is needed, one which
entertains the position that the discord which threatens
the social order is actually beneficial, a means of
cleansing an ailing community. Our notion of ritual
should accordingly reflect the idea of auspicious
transformation. Primarily, the model I have in mind
posits frame narrative as a conversion mechanism with
reference points and origins in an actualized social
process, one in which opposing beliefs and attitudes in
the ideational order are accommodated. At this point,
more conventional views of ritual as a symbolic
restoration of hierarchy, even a transformed hierarchy,
are not in order. The model I now offer is an
anthropological one in which the concept of masking as
an encounter with ambiguity and paradox is uppermost.
The idea of defamiliarization is prominent in this
scheme, and requires the dismantling of deductive
230
categories of thought in which we fit "clues'1 to
preconceptualized belief patterns.
In her article "The Mask and the Violation of
Taboo," Laura Makarius writes that a major function of
masks is to furnish protection against the dangers and
disorders which usually arise from the violation of
taboos (196). Masking rituals are thus included in the
common anthropological phenomenon Makarius calls "the
transformation of a situation into its opposite" (200).
N. Ross Crumrine indeed thinks of masking as a
phenomenon in the "general domain of symbolic
transformation" (1).
In comparing masking to framing activity, it could
be said that masking operations manage competing or
contending vortices of meaning within their textual
parameters much as framed texts do. An orchestration of
power is involved which induces a fresh dimension from
the combination of patterned activity and the symbolic
components of the physical apparatus (3). Hence rituals
provide "a context in which power, individual and
potentially ego-centred in origin, is transformed or
socialized, becoming community-oriented ..." (7). I
suggest that framing narratives perform in a similar
fashion. That is, their broad purpose is social reform,
presented via narratives involving the implied
231
reorientation of the individual into the community or
the revitalization of the community. Frames may be
thought of then as community-directed narratives whose
goals ostensibly involve the conversion of ego-centered
power, or the socialization of power. They may also be
subsumed under the rubric of signs which shore us up
against "the idea of life as a meaningless sequence
. . . the constant possibility of fragmentation,
disintegration, and dissolution which haunts and
threatens the self" (Carr, "Narrative and the Real
World" 126). Analogous in their transactions to masking
rites, which Crumrine describes as "cultural techniques
for dealing with general psychological and physiological
processes" (11), framing narratives are ritual-like
phenomena which mediate between worlds— the symbolic
worlds of the text and those of the reader's conscious
and unconscious cognition systems.
Framing narratives bear other resemblances to
ritual process. As rituals are "encoded in the past,"
that is, they are "repeat" performances (Halpin 222), so
too framing narratives often give the impression that
they are re-enacting antecedent events. Put another
way, framing activities, like rituals, are reiterative
forms, "family resemblances," if you will, which in A.
232
David Napier's view are "a major means of extending the
ontological realm of the personal" (12) .
But most importantly, the framed text as
carnival/ritual probably resembles what Don Handelman
calls a mode of "symbolic reversal," often associated
with transitions in the phenomenal order. Reversal is
frequently marked by "mockery, mimicry, and ridiculing
of one category, of one person by another, or by a
category commenting upon itself" (173).16 In this vein,
A. David Napier comments that the practice of masking
epitomizes "perceptual paradox" and therefore "offers a
prospect for reconciling the ambiguities of change"
(15). The "mask metaphor," as Napier calls it, "as a
device for dealing with categorical difference, can also
provide a model for elucidating problems in
interpretation that exist between radically different
modes of thought" (15-16). Masking conventions are
particularly appropriate as a metaphor for framing
activity because they are associated with transitional
states where normal social rules and taboos are in
suspension and subject to alteration by inversion or
opposition. In essence, mask wearers "attempt to
undermine the credibility of our empirical faculties"
(16). The mask thereby becomes "a means of
transgressing boundaries because it provides an avenue
2 3 3
for selective personification in manipulating certain
recognized paradoxes" (Napier 17). Thus they also
transcend divisions (Napier 21). Napier also points out
masking1s relativity to cognitive practices, noting that
masks function as vehicles for alterations in "substance
and in idea" (22). These parallels with structural
change imply an accompanying reconstruction of ethical
systems as well.
The ritualistic should not be confused with the
dramatic impulse, however, which is basically mimetic,
as Fredric Jameson points out in his critique of Kenneth
Burke's rhetorical dramatistic modes, with their
"categories of consciousness" ("The Symbolic Inference"
88). Theatrical spectacles are not truly matrices for
change but are instead sources of a reinforced
anthropomorphism, according to Jameson, who explains:
Drama is then not so much the archetype
of praxis as it is the very source of
the ideology of representation and, with
it, of the optical illusion of the
subject, of that vanishing point from
which spectacles— whether of culture, of
everyday* life, or of history itself—
fall into place as metaphysically
coherent meanings and organic forms.
("The Symbolic Inference" 88)
The theatrical metaphor is altogether not an
appropriate one for a description of framing activities.
The differential which is fundamental to my view of
framing performance lies in the distinction between
234
showing and telling. As David Bordwell points out in
Narration in the Fiction Film, mimetic theories,
modelled on "the act of vision," conceptualize narration
as "the presentation of a spectacle: a showing," whereas
dieqetic theories perceive narration as "consisting
either literally or analogically of verbal activity: a
telling" (3-4). As I indicated in Chapter 1 also,
theatrical presentations are basically static events;
even when they are not, they are conventionally moved by
linear progressive principles configured in a teleology
of plot ends. However, I want to underscore at this
time the primary contrast between the transformative
process of ritual I have described above and the drama,
though the two modalities appear to have much in common.
Like those of the drama, ritual behaviors are informed
by a rudimentary plotted character, but its motivating
pressure is not merely accessory. In mediating between
the natural and supernatural realms, ritual performance
essentially seeks to engage an exchange of community-
sanctioned metaphysical values whose transcendent
outcome qualifies ritual activity as being on a
different level of profundity. Ceremonial rites may
also involve the recognition of societal infirmities,
their repercussions on community, and the need for
mitigation. Despite the clear generic differences,
235
framing activity more closely resembles this undertaking
than that of the formal staged spectacle we associate
with theatrical or other visually "bracketed" aesthetic
phenomena.
Framing as Filmic Technique
If, as I am claiming, frame relations facilitate a
dynamic of semic reciprocity, in which analogous and
repetitious properties continually rebound from and
displace one another, then suppositions of framing
activity entailing formal progressive principles
preclude these transactions. As we saw in The Old
Curiosity Shop, where the frame operates rhetorically as
metaphor, framing's metaphoric capacity may be
subliminal or redirected to other agencies. This
faculty may not be detected as performative metaphor for
several reasons. The structure of a framed text, as
with any narrative, is denoted by spatial and temporal
signs which mark the contiguity of its serial
narratives. The framing narrative itself may be
distanced in both time and place from the narratives
which succeed it in the text, and so its thematic
relation to embedded texts may be occluded.
Framing hypotheses which view framing as a self
reflexive endeavor also forfeit this sense of multifocal
236
textual play. The idea that a narrative reflects on
itself but implements that activity through the
appropriation of other texts in more or less parasitic
relation to it does not equate with the notion of text
as the locus of diffuse radii of meaning, the framing or
enframed text being only one. Thus this study indicates
the need for optional paradigms of text activity.
Anthropological ideas of ritual are one analog for
describing the transference of values on the phenomenal
plane which occurs in framed texts, film theory is
another.
In their explication of the mise-en-scene1s
function in film, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
touch on what I propose are associated concepts in
framing phenomena. Mise-en-scene is a term referring to
the director's staging of events in space and time for
filming, and has to do with the deployment of effects
such as setting, lighting, costume, and the behaviors of
participants. Because the mise-en-scene focuses on
"salient gestures" or patterned effects which amount to
systems, "many motifs that recur in the course of the
plot's unfolding are visual elements of the mise-en-
scene , and such motifs can contribute significantly to
the fundamental formal principles of the film's overall
237
organization: its unity and its patterns of similarity,
difference, and development" (14 2) .
An initial framing narrative performs an
interpretive function similar to that of the mise-en-
scene in distributing visual elements or motifs through
the plot's unfolding. But besides the mise-en-scene
itself, one of its outgrowths which seems most pertinent
to an initial framing narrative is that of setting,
primarily because, as the authors explain, its elements
"can weave through the entire film to form motifs within
the narratives" (125). Part of the setting's impact
results from the manipulation through "depth cues" of
foreground/background "planes" in film space (138). In
terms of the "plane" relation to which Bordwell and
Thompson refer, we can think of a "frame" in the
conventional sense and as it is generally understood, as
a "foregrounded" plane, the focal equivalent of the
telephoto lens's zoom shot with its compressed space.
In cinematic terms, a narrative frame is also like the
iris used by D. W. Griffith, in which the film frame is
darkened except for a small circular center; the iris
then opens up to reveal an entire scene (Jinks 80).
More importantly for my understanding of framing
operations, however, mise-en-scene elements "imply story
information" (Bordwell and Thompson 142). In sum, the
238
mise-en-scene, like the frame, functions narratively.
The kinship between the two systems is evident in their
similar configuring energies. In both phenomena
patterns which constitute motifs are distributed in plot
space and time. For instance, Bordwell and Thompson
write that "across an entire film the repetitions of
certain framings may associate themselves with a
character or situation" (172). As I have noted, this
organizing pattern shapes the rhetorical framing of The
Old Curiosity Shop.
Other commentary on filming practices suggests
comparable methodologies in both cinematic and narrative
framing enterprises. In his study of "celluloid"
literature, William Jinks describes the employment of
montage by early Russian film makers, notably
Eisenstein. Montage is "a process of creative editing
whereby the images derive their meaning from
juxtaposition with other images" (73). Ralph Stephenson
and Jean Debrix, in The Cinema as Art. offer an expanded
definition of montage as a process whereby "shots
combine to form an integral whole [in] a synthesis
called montage" (129). A framed text resembles this
montage process in several ways. It juxtaposes events,
discourses, and personae, yet its gross effect is a
fusion of these independent parts. According to the
239
authors, montage both temporalizes space and spatializes
time, as I perceive an initial framing narrative
doing.1 7
Finally, Jinks speaks of another strategy which
resembles framed text construction. He mentions that
the "denotative" meaning of an image can be altered by
the film maker so that its "connotations" are instead
suggested. Jinks relates the film maker's maneuvering
of imagistic connotations to figures of speech or
nonliteral tropes. In film, any departure from
conventional methods is the equivalent of a literary
trope. For example, by juxtaposing two concrete images
in such a way as to imply that one thing is another, the
film maker creates film metaphor. As in literature,
ironies depend upon the friction of such incongruities.
Jinks's observations about the tropological effects
in film lead to one other study which I believe
indirectly bears on framing performances in literary
texts. In his essay, "Trucage and the Film," Christian
Metz considers "trick photography" or the special
effects which contribute to trucage conditions. The
term is best defined as the "various optical effects
obtained by the appropriate manipulations, the sum of
which constitutes visual, but not photographic material"
(151). These "process effects" (153) derive from the
240
film's transitional developments, and are therefore
extradiegetic, probably indicative of the film maker's
direct interference in the story's evolution.
The optical art of trucage, as it relates to the
concept of mise-en-scene, diverges from representational
"'photograph!cityits rubric, "loosely defined . . .
will obviously form, for the semiologist, a
heteroclitical group" (153). Trucage effects, then, are
"suprasegmental," as opposed to discriminatory
syntactical features such as punctuation marks and
rhetorical clauses, and in contradistinction to filmic
taxemes, or optical effects which dominate the screen
momentarily (153). At the instant of its evocation, the
process no longer correlates with the taxeme: "it is the
exponent of one or more taxemes" and refers to the
simultaneity of images (154). Metz elaborates:
In contrast to the fade-out, a taxeme
process, the processes of exponents are
fairly numerous: the iris, the wipe,
special lenses, blurred focus, backwards
motion, accelerated or slow motion, the
use of a freeze frame, dissolves,
superimposition, overexposure, split
screen (several photos at the same time,
the screen being divided into a certain
number of 'scenes,' but by juxtaposition
and without superimposition)— as many
effects as assume (and affect) one or
more photographs. (154)
In essence, Metz likens trucage effects to
duplicitous machinations which inhibit rhetorical
241
indicators, declaring themselves rather as "before and
after" "decelerations" into dream states (159).
Trucages are also discovered in "divergence" and
departures from realism, and are linked to "deceit" and
to the "metalinguistic order" (160-61).18 Given these
associations, Metz concludes, "there is always something
hidden inside [the trucage] (since it remains trucage
only to the extent to which the perception of the
spectator is taken by surprise), and at the same time,
something which flaunts itself, since it is important
that the powers of cinema be credited for this
astonishing of the senses" (159). The sliding, occult
nature of trucage stratagems leave an unsettling
impression on the spectator for these reasons,
subjecting him or her to "a series of disquieting or
'impossible' events which nevertheless unfold before him
in the guise of eventlike appearances" wherein "the
connotated" passes for the "denotated" (161) . The
psychic corollaries of the actual and the illusory are
located in the spectator's capacities for
"identification" and "distancing," but the "interfusion"
which instantiates trucage and suppresses the diegetic
sign guarantees that neither response will be consummate
(162) .l9
242
Metz's interest in the rhetorical tenor of filming
techniques furnishes a segue into a discussion of
framing's own rhetorical effects, and tangentially, the
transactions of initializing framing narratives as
revealed in the social grouping which provides both
rhetors and audiences. If the grammar of the literal
film is comparable to the syntactic exponents of
discourse, as Metz argues (165), then the customary view
of framed narratives as serial, denotative texts is the
critical equivalent of this idea. However, if we adapt
the principles of trucage to an interpretation of framed
narratives, then an initial framing narrative can be
thought of as a trucage-like configuration with a
similar deflectincf power, but performing connotatively
as a backward extradiegetic sign, meaning it is seeded
with the signs of a thematic "return" but ostensibly
gestures forward in time and space. It is in this sense
that most framing narratives are implicitly if not
explicitly retrospective in nature and intent. Framing
activity is also trucage-like in its manipulation of
reader response. Since framing narrators' strategies
are especially indicative of the text's structuring to
this end, we will turn now to an evaluation of their
performative role, the kinds of audiences they address,
and the general nature of their craft.
243
Framing and the Phenomenal Order: The Social Const:ituent
Framing Narrators
When framed works are assessed as contexts for
relayed narratives, it is evident that they involve
transference and appropriation. The "ownership" of a
narrative is therefore at issue. In brief, we need to
ask some searching questions about frame narrators. To
begin with, who has been "chosen" to tell the story, for
what pressing reason? Frame narrators in particular
appear to be obliged to transmit a narrative; a didactic
impetus is usually the motivation. We might also pay
closer attention to what Meir Sternberg has designated
"the storyteller's ordering and distributive strategy"
(45). The rhetoric of rupture which is frequently an
overt sign of framing construction would appear at first
to be transcended by the influential position of the
framing rhetor, whose prerogative is validated by time-
honored cultural conventions of storytelling
"privilege." We think of Douglas's tale "holding" his
audience in The Turn of the Screw, of the Nellie's crew
"fated" to hear Marlow's story. This narrator, in many
framed texts an omniscient one who is either the
caretaker of another's story or authorizes its
presentation, possesses extraordinary knowledge: the
244
existence of an interior narrative, and the "secrets" it
will unlock, unknown to either the implicit or the
explicit rhetorical audience. However, a closer look at
the narrators' discourse and that of their stories
reveals a symbiotic relation which is integral to the
text's thematic functions.
Roger Fowler explains two types of modal discourse
which I will argue involve framed texts and narrators.
One type, representing the communal viewpoint, is a
discourse which situates us outside the characters'
immediate consciousness. This type is often couched in
terms which imply surmise, meaning that it consists of
"speculative verbs such as 'seem' . . . and 'suppose',
and adverbs and conjunctions which emphasize
interpretation rather than factual report . . .
comparisons citing known phenomena in order to make
comprehensible a hidden inner state . . . expressions of
tentativeness or indefiniteness." This is the discourse
of "estrangement" or "external perspective" (93), so
called because "it is a discourse pose which the author
attributes to his narrator when he has some aesthetic
reason for pret.ending innocence or distance"
(Linguistics and the Novel 92). The framing narrative
often makes use of this kind of discourse. An eminent
example is The Turn of the Screw.
245
The converse modality is the "internal perspective"
(97) of personal experience, a discourse in which
"feeling states" are prominent, "words of feeling,
expressions denoting mental states, emotions, acts of
thought. They designate unobservables of consciousness
which in real life are accessible only if the subject
reports them" (Linguistics and the Novel 92). Although
this discursive mode is also found in framing
narratives, it is more often the case that it contours
the embedded or interior vignettes which detail the
particular adventures to which the frame refers.
But though it would appear to foreground
estrangement and defamiliarization techniques through
the presentation of two converse speaking modes, the
framed text's "narrative discourse stance" as a whole,
to use Fowler's terms (Linguistics and the Novel 93),
should be considered as combining both types of
discourse (and their speakers) in an intratextual
construct of meaning and allusion. The pretext that a
story has been casually acquired, its content of
incidental importance to the speaker, or that it is
directed primarily at an audience whose affair it should
be are misleading artifices. Speakers with "missions"
of this sort induce us into setting aside essential
connections between narrator and narrated. For
246
instance, though it may not superficially appear to be
plausible, the framing narrator often bears an inverted
relation to a particular character or characters in the
internal narratives whom we might call "scapegoat"
figures. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights. Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, the
Monster in Frankenstein, are all characters so
stigmatized. This figure, customarily an isolate
portrayed sympathetically or not as being antipathetic
to the community, suffers odium or undergoes victimage
as a result of the abhorrence in which he or she is
held. The scapegoat’s "alter ego" in the framing
narrative, the framing narrator, is in many instances
"reformed" by having heard the story of his or her
experience, and by extension, so is the rhetorical
audience (who, need it be said, mirrors in some ways the
community in the inset narratives undergoing trial).
The dramatized breach in community-individual relations
alerts the contemporary reader to the need for changes
in traditional beliefs and values so that community
healing may take place. Hence, the scapegoat figure in
the interior is frequently a trespassing figure, one who
scorns or tests the limits of customs which are no
longer viable.20 While the framing narrator may seem to
be beyond impunity himself, signified by his
247
authoritative position, he is in truth implicated in the
transgressions of the ostracized figure, as we have seen
in the Chapter 2 examples.
Hierarchical or linearly-organized theories of
framing thus efface certain framed text operations,
specifically those involving the frame narrator's
pivotal site. The screened perspectives which result
from their application, those involving "gaze," theories
of "desire," or other trace "bracketing," object-
oriented notions ultimately flag readers to look beyond
the framing narrator to his subject matter, passing over
the ramifications of his role in the process, and in
particular his likeness to scapegoat figures in the
sequential narratives.
Audience
The values assigned to the explicit audience in the
framed text is another potential snare for the reader.
In her essay "Framed Narrative and the Dramatized
Audience in a Tamil Buddhist Epic," Paula Richman
discusses the ways in which framed texts establish "'a
protocol for reading.'" She writes that "because they
include a dramatized audience, the portrayal of that
audience can give the reader cues about how to interpret
the story" (99). Richman's remarks essentially agree
248
with William Goetz1s interpretation of the frame as "a
narrative which instructs the reader about how to
understand the tale which follows” (99). In accordance
with these tenets, Richman concludes, "The framed
narrative . . . helps to shape and control the reader's
responses to particular ideas, either by including a
dramatized audience or portraying a response to the
story in the framing narrative" (100-01). In positing
these beliefs, Richman has fortuitously declared the
kinds of ideological prompts I feel the reader should
decline.
Thus the framing text is said by some commentators
to contain "culturally-accepted versions of morality,
wisdom, and instruction" (Ullrich, after Gittes 142); in
David Ullrich's words, "the world of the frame is,
invariably, modeled after a stereotypic society and
derived from the received moral fabric of the author's
society" (182). It follows from this viewpoint that the
reader's orientation is a natural progress from a
fictive situation contextualized as orthodox to a
"subversive" one depicting the flouting of convention.
As Ullrich, commenting on the construction of Heart of
Darkness, writes, the reader is led "out of the
normative world of the reader, through the normative
world as presented in the frame of the text, and into
249
the' extraordinary world of the actual 'story1 of the
text" (191). At the core of the interior narrative is a
daunting figure or some excess which must be contained.
It follows that the interior narrative signifies danger,
an "irreal" condition which menaces frameworld values.
Inevitably, this "juxtapositioning of alternative worlds
forces the reader/audience to judge the relative
'correctness' or 'morality' of the two opposing worlds"
(183). Framing narratives so interpreted become
filtering mechanisms for aberrant forms, a means of
imposing order on the "untidy" experience (in Mary
Douglas's lexicon), or devices for upholding moral
values and social rules threatened by dangerous
contagion. In this scheme, the enframed content is
pernicious. It is whatever "pollutes" our purity,
whatever we would not confront or recognize. Marlow's
"lie" therefore, is part of the frame's policing
function, as that dynamic is frequently assessed in
frame theory.
Taking this approach, and on the,face of it, the
framed text reads like the generic mystery.21 Critical
information about an enigma explored in the framing
situation, which suggests the problem is located outside
the context of its own milieu, is seemingly withheld.
Readers (and text audience) are redirected to the
250
internal narrative or narratives, and maneuvered into
thinking the information they require in order to solve
the puzzle is interred there, at a less conspicuous
level. (A tactic of this sort is in sympathy with the
framing narrative coded as argument stimulus in the
"problem-solution" essay, or narrative beginning as
"disturbance" in any hypostatic, tension-driven paradigm
in which bodily—resident diseases serve as metaphors for
narrative dynamics.) The implicit rhetoricized textual
audience is an "initiate" one then, and interior
narrators are often "experiential" narrators, in the
sense of having directly undergone a life-transforming
experience, as opposed to the framing narrator's
witness. (On the other hand, the framing narrator may
also be or have been a participant.) In the cooperative
relationship I envision, however, the worlds depicted in
a framed text need not be competing but rather in
supplementary relation and mutually reinforcing, forging
what Kenneth Burke might call the work's "equational
structure" (Philosophy of Literary Form 101).
I have argued against the idea of narrator
"authority" as it is typically conceived. How, then,
does the text's construction disable loci of power so as
to assemble meaning issuing from its various centers
rather than endorse a magisterial logic? If allowed to
251
do so, narrator "authority" can write over "gaps" or
silence alternative voices by reinterpreting them for
the reader. For these reasons the available rhetorical
determinants within which we have been operating only
penetrate the surface depths in frame narrative
constructs. If we are to assess frame narratives in
light of their inexhaustible potentiality for
intersecting textual play and heightened meaning, then
we need a model which takes their unique dynamics into
account without acceding to hierarchic formulae. How
can we reconceptualize this genre so as to magnify its
scope and capacities?
FRAMING AND THE IDEATIONAL ORDER
Framed Text as Tropoloaical Form
A generic rudimentary working definition of framing
narrative, one which will expand the extant parameters
accorded frame narrative properties in the current
literature, is this study's main objective. Hayden
White's contention that narrative is essentially a
tropological form is the basis for my position, which
reduces to the assumption that a framed text's tropology
is an asset and a crucial strategy for a production of
252
meaning at the rhetorical level.22 Because it is often
concerned with marginal social issues and "pariah"-Iike
phenomena, the framed text is a deliberately stratified
work. Its subject matter, particularly in the
nineteenth century when rigid social systems and their
espoused values were still largely in place, is often of
a controversial nature, and its characters conceived as
being in excluded relation to a conservative readership.
The stability of certain ethics, beliefs, or attitudes
is put in question. Framing mechanisms theoretically
working within the narrative facade of cause-and-effect
relation function obliquely as metaphorical devices
which allow the text to expound a meaning which might
otherwise discomfit the contemporary reader if presented
candidly, in a bald fashion. Some basic questions need
to be asked, therefore, at this juncture: what is a
literary frame narrative? How can we define it in terms
which avoid the kinds of disadvantage I have outlined,
the hierarchicalizing, sequencing criteria which locate
frame narratives in either the entitled or the
subordinate, enclitic position?
First, certain conditions must be met. In most
texts considered framed narratives, the "framing" part
of the text is taken to be the initial, opening,
primary, or inaugurating narrative at the text's
253
inception, which I am defining for convenience as the
parameters of the textual "story" or narrative itself.
I am excluding from my definition other phenomena which
have been elsewhere considered "framing" devices, such
as titles, prefaces and other apparatus materially
incidental to the actual account which conjecturally
justifies the presence of these effects.23 There are
times, however, when editorial letters, prefaces and
other paraphernalia which I take to be temporally
antecedent to the story per se are substantively
attached to the thematic matter of the narrative text
and are consequently indispensable to its completion on
that level. In the main, however, my definition does
take as its gauge the initial (and initiating) narrative
traditionally considered the "frame" narrative. Frame
activities are not metatextual, however, despite their
initial location. That is, they have a decentering
influence, sharing import with subsequent narratives.
To appraise framing narratives as I wish to do,
however, presents an epistemological problem,, in view of
the Derridean paradox I have so often cited. Taking
this tack leads to the seminal question, how is the
preliminary frame narrative central to this discussion
to be distinguished from other kinds of textual
openings? Appropriately, the following theoretical
254
material is patterned on the Russian formalist concept
of "defamiliarization," or the displacing of phenomena
from their usual milieu. I prefer to define an
inaugural framing narrative as a multifaceted event
context, charged with an express situation, orientation,
and motive. A framing narrative is a presentational
context of a unique order. In the sense that it alludes
to or introduces a fictive narrative or narratives, it
is allied to the rhetorical or discourse code for
expository introductory material (topicalization).
Though the frame's presence might convince readers who
perceive it as an integrative and containing figure that
it does indeed bracket meaning, however, no rhetorical
structure succeeds in entirely repressing the text's
distributive symbolic and connotative powers. The
framing narrative's immediate effects may appear on the
reader's horizon, however, as something resembling
"staging." In actuality, a framing narrative is
configured on a space—time experiential model of
socially situated or "scenic" discourse.24 Hence it
reflects rhetoric as process. not product. As a
discursive medium, it is subject to tropological
semiotic intervention, yet, as I have noted, it
superficially resembles expositorily-oriented rhetorical
discourse with the syntactic markings of that mode. As
255
an information structure, a framing narrative has
denotative values, to use Roland Barthes' nomenclature,
yet it also participates in the connotative realm of
symbolic imagery.25 A framing narrative's form is
therefore agency-like, but in more than one modality.
Arthur Patterson's remarks elucidate this faculty. He
points out "the typical use of space as a scene for
action (perhaps more typically called a 'setting' . . .
and as an agency or instrumentality" (363). One of the
frame narrative's roles is surely assisting the reader's
passage to other textual venues. In this capacity, its
space is both a "scene for action" and "an agency or
instrumentality."
As presentational context, an inaugural framing
narrative exhibits certain noteworthy characteristics.
It is customarily launched with the urge to communicate
or impart knowledge, as Young et al. , suggest rhetoric
conventionally does, "to share some experience with
others" (Rhetoric; Discovery and Change 9). Strictly
speaking, a framing narrative digresses from standard
rhetorical practice, however, for it mounts that
experience differently. The following expanded
definition accommodates its likeness to expository
rhetorical modes, while acknowledging its deviation from
standard expositional purpose:
256
An introductory frame narrative is a
presentational context in which another
narrative is relayed or •'reported" by a
mediating narrator or narrators
inscribed as fictive characters. The
relayed narrative may be the narrator's
own or someone else's, or the mediating
narrator may authorize the telling of
another's story. That is, characters
may tell a story themselves, be told a
story, or have been told a story. A
character may be both a narrator and a
narratee ["The one who is narrated to,
as inscribed in the text" (Prince,
Dictionary of Narratology 56).] A
narrator may tell a story in which he or
she has personally participated, may
have the story communicated to him or
her, or had the account by some other
means (diary, letter, and so on). A
rhetorical audience, either implicit or
explicit, is assumed. Moreover, a
framing narrative is bound by particular
spatial-temporal coordinates and indices
which may or may not separate it from
the relayed narratives on the
syntactical plane of the textual
surface, but which do not prevent its
interrelation with succeeding narratives
in the rhetorical strata. The
orientational context that distinguishes
a framing narrative— the address to a
(usually explicit) rhetorical audience
on the site, the presentations of other
narratives to this audience, the
location of the rhetorical situation in
the fictional present tense— these
features are not usually attendant in
the contained narrative, which tends to
be a retrospective story set in either a
personal or mythical past, and generally
removed from the circumstances of its
telling in the present.26
In terms of its tangible estate, frame narrational
schemes in which groups are depicted are inlaid in what
might be called a material event with temporal
257
immediacy. In frame narration involving a single
speaker communicating to an implicit rhetorical
audience, however, the setting may be devoid of physical
correlates and even its usual present tense ambience, as
the speaker may be recounting a narrative after the
fact, recollected, as it were, and in isolation or
seclusion. Frame settings therefore range along a
continuum from a finely articulated, concretized
environment to a relatively undefined one with few
indicators of time, place, and circumstance. The latter
composition or format minimalizes itself, as it were, as
an abstract rhetorical event occurring in an inexplicit
textual milieu, but this is not a hard and fast rule.
At any rate, the foregrounded event is a frame metier.
A framing situation nearly always involves a
suggested dissonance, some sense that there is an
incongruity between perceived realities. Though the
framing text itself may not appear to be, it is
narrative-like. not only in its literal presentation of
characters, their situations, and in some cases, their
accounts of themselves, but it is itself a colloquium, a
locale for the genesis of "story." But though it
resembles the commonplace literary "setting," an
embedding narrative is not merely a scenic set piece or
backdrop.27 The enframing narrative suggests instead
258
the "psychological atmosphere of a series of events"
which Joseph Grimes (after McLeod) mentions "may be
treated linguistically in a fashion parallel to spatial
and temporal setting" (55) .
Framing narrative as thematically-permeated topos.
then, has a curious geography. It is both
contextualizinq scene, a "psychic situation" (Ibsch 99),
or, after Kenneth Burke's "symbolic" language model a
"'scenic' reality" (Kimberling 14)28 with a formal
setting component and a discursive matrix from which the
construction of a macro-proposition, the subject of the
ensuing text, theoretically issues. At the same time,
the enframing narrative is contextualized in that its
situation is present in its own narrative, or in
Derridean terms, neither inside nor outside its own
mediating context. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of
chronotope. the "concrete sense of how individual
agency, historical context, and social milieu interact"
(Morson, "Bakhtin and the Present Moment" 216), is an
approximate idea. The framing narrative's rapport with
it can be discerned in its likeness as a medium for the
convergence of these elements in a particular
representation of time, place, situation, and
participants.
259
Its associations with "beginnings" then, as I have
remarked, give the initial framing narrative its
uncommon force and disposition. It plays off the
paradigm of conventional openings, and the assumptions
to which Alessandro Duranti calls attention in his
remark that "the tendency for beginnings to be more
predictable than endings appears to be characteristic
across societies" (209) . In this respect, and as "jnise-
efl-scene," the framing narrative superficially positions
the major subjects with which the entire text will be
subsequently absorbed. At the same time that it
introduces the de facto topic or topics, however, it
appears to eclipse other, more pressing concerns which
later unfold in the text, an act which echoes Kenneth
Burke's sense of "situation" as "another word for
motives" (Philosophy of Literary Form 20). The text's
true agenda, its veritable subject or subjects, is
immersed, encased in the "official" text. The veiled,
denied motives thus constitute a subterranean plot,
consciously present or not in the text's design, and
obscured by textual layering and the opening frame's
publicly declared intent. The framed text's
authoritative speakers play crucial roles in seeming to
negate the post-structuralist sense of narrative as
elliptically constructed, the discourse of unnamed (and
260
unnameable) spaces. But the frame is actually a proxy
for the legitimate presence of a plenum of "subjects"
disseminated through the text, no matter how firmly an
absolute topic appears to be ensconced in the enframing
narrative or proclaimed by framing narrators.
As for the controversial matter of frame syntax, I
suggest that framing is simultaneously both an embedding
and an embedded activity. To "bracket" or to imagine
linear sequence or hierarchy in any but the most
empirical terms risks the assignment of ranking and
therefore value to framed narratives. To sequence is
also to separate, and because I am arguing that framed
narratives are apposite, interdependent, and
interrelated, their recoverable meanings hinge on our
recognizing the text's ludic operations, the family
likenesses among framing and framed narratives, and
their common source in the textual situation annunciated
in the opening narrative. Frame tales are recursive,
mutually reflexive texts. I believe we can speak of
sequenced or contiguous narratives, of "primary" and
"secondary," and so on, only in the pragmatic
recognition that one narrative succeeds another both
temporally and spatially as inscribed in the text. An
initial frame is paradoxically within the narrative text
but antecedent to or anterior to it. Since it occupies
261
this originary site, this position of primacy, the
opening frame's ascendency appears to empower it to
prioritize, but that hegemony is illusory. Their
appearances to the contrary, all framing texts have
supplemental status; they are structurally as well as
hermeneutically and rhetorically unfinished, needing
other texts to complete them. Correspondingly,
"embedded" or inset narratives in framed texts need the
framing situation to fulfill their meaning.
A "framing" narrative is therefore in the most
elementary sense a narrative which temporally and
spatially precedes another as it unfolds in the reading
process and as it is inscribed in the material text,
while a "framed" narrative follows from it or is
embodied within its textual circumference. To speak of
"embedding" in any other fashion wrenches a text from
its prior or naturalized context; it is to
hierarchicalize and subordinate. When framed texts are
appraised by assigning them gradations of value
contingent on ranking criteria, we clearly confer
regulatory privilege on "embedding" and "embedded"
texts.29
An initial framing narrative does vary
configuratively in certain respects from inset
narratives, however. As I have said, the initial
262
framing text is distinguished by space-time indices
which discriminate it from subsequent narratives. As
shown above, it is usually set in a detached place and
time from the narratives it relays, precisely the
narrated present. Succeeding narratives are commonly
placed in the narrated past and located elsewhere.
Unlike the narratives succeeding it, however, the
inaugurating frame is coreferential with the text's
past, present, and future. It is analeptic because it
recalls the narrative past. Its habitual setting in the
textual present links it to that temporal dimension.
Lastly, it is proairetic or proleptic, in that its
referents are theoretically invoked beyond itself— it
signals beyond itself in the material text— unveiling
events in other narratives. Framed texts in general,
then, and framing narratives in particular, are achronic
or atemporal in the sense that they are both analeptic,
evoking an event prior to the present in textual "real
time," and proleptic or anticipatory, in Gerald Prince's
definition, "going forward to the future with respect to
the 'present' moment" (Dictionary 77), again, in the
context of textual events. Readers may mistake these
rhetorical markers for the claims of exclusivity, of
ethical significance, of historicity, as the text's
consummate thesis.
263
These referents are often tempered by other textual
controls, however. For one, initiating frame narratives
are commonly abbreviated texts in comparison to the
interior matter, which means that they can skew texts
towards formal asymmetry, a shape which contravenes
traditional logics for formal and thematic well-
formedness. (Symmetrical texts are those whose segments
are of equitable verbal length.) In sum, initializing
frames are more than just the narrative counterpart of
rhetorical topic markers. Their ideological potency in
our cultural logic is offset by a tropological import
which has to do with the amelioration of compelling and
onerous social issues which lend themselves to
metaphorical configuration, both as they issue from any
sociocultural matrix and because of their (often)
polemic themes. The key lies in reevaluating framed
narrative as tropological form and as ideational
production. A discussion of that prospect is therefore
now in order.
I believe a reexamination of framed narrative is
possible on both the formal and the discursive
rhetorical levels. On the formal level, I will argue
that a spatial view of frame narrative is one that
enhances our appreciation of its kinetic energies, and
on the discursive level I suggest that Kenneth Burke's
264
"performative" rhetoric and Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of
dialogical discourse afford a fruitful understanding of
the scope of framed rhetoric. Both Burke's and
Bakhtin's views of the way rhetorical discourse behaves
are in keeping with my idea of frame discourse as
cooperative in principle, as socially situated and
constructed, consanguine with Linda Flower's theory of
negotiated meaning. This theory of framed texts views
them as producing meaning through an appositional, not a
linear logic, in which narratives are believed to be
enmeshed in each other's rational apparatus. Taken all
together, the various narratives which inhabit the text
weave its complementary logics. Such an approach is not
inimical to the idea of framing as a masked enterprise,
however, or as "charade." Like most narratives and
discourse in general, both fictive and non-fictive,
framing narratives are an ideologically-driven discourse
(for Bakhtin the equivalent of point of view— Martin
150)), accompanied by the facility for artifice,
equivocation, and duplicity that posture inevitably
entails. Though they manifestly participate in the
kinds of aesthetic and moral ordering we impute to
narratives, framed texts frustrate rather than satisfy
several of what Roland Barthes has termed narrative's
"cultural codes," namely the preference for knowledge,
265
the "hermeneutic," and for order, the "proairetic" code
(S/Z 19). [An allegiance to the same coding principles
appears to underlie the rationale for schema theory.]
Unlike post-modernist "anti-narratives," however,
classical framed texts do not foreground their exception
to these cultural codes. It would be advantageous in
this respect to think of them rather as intrinsically
tropological paradigms which function within rhetorical
modes.
What is needed, then, is a post-structuralist
language theory which radicalizes discourse and disturbs
our culturally implanted tendencies to validate the
traditional ethical claims attached to speaker discourse
and standards of accountability. Framed narratives do
away with the old distinction between "transactional"
and "poetic" language, in the sense of the one as a
straightforward proclamation of intelligence and the
imparting of knowledge, and the other as the deliberate
restraint of information. A framed text employs both
modal properties of language. In effect, framed
discourse is instrumental, informative language, but its
operations are only ostensibly pragmatic. Its rhetoric
is in fact coded to engage rebuttals of the arguments
dispensed from any "authoritative" textual center.
266
A deconstructionist position, in particular, would
abolish hierarchies which conceal these relations. The
deconstructionist approach, as Jonathan Culler explains,
reverses the hierarchical opposition of
the causal scheme. The distinction
between cause and effect makes the cause
an origin, logically and temporally
prior. The effect is derived,
secondary, dependent upon the cause.
Without exploring the reasons for or the
implications of this hierarchization,
let us note that, working within the
opposition, the deconstruction upsets
the hierarchy by producing an exchange
of properties. If the effect is what
causes the cause to become a cause, then
the effect, not the cause, should be
treated as the origin. By showing that
the argument which elevates cause can be
used to favor effect, one uncovers and
undoes the rhetorical operation
responsible for the hierarchization and
one produces a significant displacement.
If either cause or effect can occupy the
position of origin, then origin is no
longer originary; it loses its
metaphysical privilege. A nonoriginary
origin is a 'concept' that cannot be
comprehended by the former system and
thus disrupts it. (On Deconstruction
88)
In a deconstructionist treatment then, framing
narratives are at once both "cause" and "effect," like
the inset narratives which succeed them. By extension,
an enframing or enframed narrative considered fugal in
nature is neither exclusionary nor inclusionary, or even
"self-reflexive," if by that we mean "dependent for its
functioning on the signs that contain it" (Bal, "De-
disciplining the Eye" 517). Framed texts can be thought
267
of rather as polyvalent. If we are to "demystify" them,
the reader must reconstruct an individualized
interpretation based on a contingent, not a linear
perspective, one in which narratives are seen as
colluding, and composing a meaning which is the
individual reader's summation of its parts, but which
can never be a "total" reading. By reading between the
renowned textbook "either-or" schematic figure-and-
ground paradigms, we "[undo] the disciplining of the
eye," as Mieke Bal would have it ("De-disciplining the
Eye" 531).30 When this model is followed, readers will
construct the text as dialocfical. and arrive at a
synthesized reading based on their perception of the
complementary relationships among its variant
narratives, but refusing to privilege any one narrative
or its content, or empower it to prejudice their
reception of others. Such a prospect is analogous to
Kenneth Burke's analysis of literary "mysticism"
embodied in the "principle of the oxymoron," whereby
"contradictory elements [combine] . . . in a single
expression" (A Rhetoric of Motives 324).
The above reading experience most nearly resembles
the dynamic in Virgil Nemoianu's theory of culture,
described in a recent review as "based on the
dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, the
268
central, dominant, systematic, homogeneous, and
progressive areas of culture (the 'principal*) and, on
the other, the marginal, recessive, unsystematic,
heterogeneous, and regressive areas (the 'secondary')."
Structurally, frame narratives mirror these domains, and
what Nemoianu refers to as "'the tensions and frictions
between public epistemology and the private disorganized
arrangements of the secondary'" (Jameson's "class
struggle" and "social antagonisms"). These arenas,
Nemoianu says, "'make up the main untold story in human
culture"' (McHale 715). An interpretation which takes
such oppositions into account will not necessarily
reduce to a conclusive or saturated meaning, but is one
which arises as a consequence of holding the various
perspectives in counterpoised balance.
For an "ideal" reader too, the constructed
"meaning" will not take its inspiration from the literal
events on the plot level, but will be to some extent
independent of them. This is more likely when so-called
"open-ended" framed narratives, such as The Turn of the
Screw, do not return to their initial situations, to the
setting depicted in the opening narrative. Though
lacking a "reintegrative" frame, such texts generate
meaning in the same way. That is, "meaning" in the non-
closural text arises from interactional concepts. those
269
engendered in the enframing narrative, and their linkage
to reflections in the interior narratives. Meaning here
has a decidedly philosophical bent, exceeding the
simplistic, often pedantic moral we ascribe to more
conventional, closed texts.31 When a text fails to
return to its opening frame situation, then, thet
intervening narrative(s) have not necessarily
discredited the initial situation, nor conversely is a
return to the framing situation inevitably an attempt at
ideologic resolution. The "broken" frame may outwardly
signal conflicting mores or perversely indicate that the
framing context is derelict in its projected "control"
of reader perception of internal narrative situations.
A theory of framed narratives as cooperative ventures,
however, abjures those interpretations which pit one
narrative against another to the sure detriment of the
vanquished text. Accordingly, a theory of spatial form
in which thematically-charged clusters of meaning, and a
rhetorical view of voice as dialogically constituted
instantiates the kind of multi-focal reading this study
urges, one which would avoid the imposition of a
hierarchical framing which reinforces western subject
dominance. If it is indeed the case, as Dominick
LaCapra argues, that one of ideology's "typical" forms
is "the attempt to see 'meaningful' order in chaos"
270
(138), then I suggest that the framed text ultimately
escapes the positioning of the hegemonic subject (and
therefore its ideology) by distributing "subjectivity."
Spatial Form 32
The mode which I believe fashions the formal
activity of a framed narrative on the rhetorical level
is a naturalistic one, the spatial-temporal. In support
of this contention, I offer Alexander Gelley’s
observation that "as Kant and others have shown, the
representation of time through language involves an
inescapable utilization of spatial concepts and terms"
(Note 14, 485).
Spatial form in narrative is metaphorical in
character (Rabkin 80), and operates on the principle of
substitution and association. The signs of spatial form
are enunciated in various manners, but all of them
suspend or retard chronological progression and suppress
linear causality, creating in their place a
metaphorically configured text, whose aggregate of
details is a pastiche (or using Linda Dittmar's term, a
"verbal montage," 191) though manifested on the surface
through metonymic contiguity.
Spatial modes work in a way like "zooming" film
techniques, employed in order to "decrease distance and
271
increase focus” (Daghistany and Johnson 57). In his
essay on "Types of Spatial Structure," David Mickelsen
says that "leitmotifs or extended webs of interrelated
images" are examples of these spatializing methods.
Like "flashbacks," and like the filmic "montage" of
which it is reminiscent, these reiterative images check
the reader's forward advance (68) .33 Although it might
be said that these are features of any narrative,
particularly the novel, in the framed text they occur in
what seem to the reader disjunctive and polarized
universes of discourse. But as Mickelsen points out,
spatial form is also characteristic of the multiplot
story (and not incidentally "interpolated tales" 74).
Now the framed text, because of its sequential
embedding, is not ordinarily thought of as one in which
concurrent actions or juxtaposed plots materialize.
However, I suggest that on the thematic level, this is
indeed what happens when events, themes, and characters,
though manifestly discontinuous or disengaged both
spatially and temporally in the textual plane, are
conceded as parallel and appositional, coincident
phenomena. Thinking of The Old Curiosity Shop in this
way, for instance, means that by failing to recover the
concept of Master Humphrey as narrator, we forfeit an
entire commentary on the novel's harmony of oppositions.
Ill
In other words, the framed text's plotting, though it
works on the surface by uncovering concatenated layers
of information theoretically representing a forward
progress, in reality functions more or less
dialectically. In the framed text, that is, though we
read synchronically, in actuality we move both into and
out, between and among, diachronic planes.
Mickelsen maintains that the kind of thematic
coherence resulting from interrelated motifs and word
play "crystallizes into two kinds of spatial form:
portraits of individuals and tableaux of societies"
(70). The framed text's raison d'etre, though it may be
and is often narrated by a single individual, has its
political genesis in social concerns. For this reason,
it is aligned thematically with Mickelsen's social
tableau. Thus its proclivities for a spatial form,
which, in Mickelsen's opinion, is most representative of
an "exploration" of states of mind and being (78) . In
this context, though a reader proceeds linearly through
the consecutive layers of a framed text, its
interpretation in the final analysis depends upon our
waiving the ostensible connections made by framing
narrators to embedded texts and viewing its narrative
planes as coexistential. The distinction in effect is
between the textual dynamic perceived as causal, linear,
273
and atomized as opposed to the cyclical, patterned, and
relational.
A Dialogical Rhetoric Model
The second ideational dimension of my rhetorical
frame model is informed by a non-adversarial discourse
which has a dialogical impulse as its incentive.
Kenneth Burke's "performance rhetoric," a concept which
perhaps reaches back to the oral roots of written
narrative, is one paradigm for this kind of discourse.
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the multivocal text is
another. The dialogical model proposed here
incorporates both philosophies in complementary
relation. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg point out
the correlation: "The traditional oral narrative
consists rhetorically of a teller, his story, and an
implied audience. The non-traditional, written
narrative consists rhetorically of the imitation, or
representation, of a teller, his story, and an implied
audience" (53). The filmic umise-en-sceneu is reworked
in Kenneth Burke's rhetoric. For Burke, rhetorical
meaning is "scenic"; that is, scene is synonymous with
"environment," "society," "particular places,
situations, or eras." These are also charged with
motive and purpose or "reason." Thus acts have "scenic
274
reference" (A Grammar of Motives 12). Seen as
"performance rhetoric" rather than as hierarchically
plotted, a frame narrative becomes quite a different
matter. As Cristopher Nash remarks in his essay
"Slaughtering the Subject: Literature's Assault on
Narrative," since "every narration visibly represses
another narration, the narration it leaves out, an
alternative construction of signs," then we should stop
"settling easily on what books seem to
'say1(constatively) [and] start looking more closely at
what books (performatively) 'do'" (211).
If we apply Burke's rationale to our frame
analysis, it follows that the opening narrative reveals
the motivating forces which will ultimately generate the
interior narratives. In that sense, and because it
introduces the framed situation, the containing
narrative is summary-like in its performance. At the
same time, it has all the features of scenic
presentation Burke delineates. Thus an opening
narrative frequently lacks the dramatic action of
interior stories, and in that sense its tempo is
retarded; it often has more rhetorical presence than
actional. But these attributes only partially explain
the nature of framing performance. For one thing, the
presence of a prefiguring motive or purpose means that
275
the reader, picking up cues from the enframing
narrative, will encounter the enframed tale as a form of
"d£j3i vu," in which the motive elements echo. The
hypostatization of such constituents thereby reinforces
the complemental relation between the two narratives.
But to digress, for a moment, to consider the
rhetorical notion of "voice" which figures in this
discussion of the dialogical dimension of framed texts.
The voice issue forces us to confront a problematic
narrative question involving norms for authenticity.
Narrative is often assumed to be a premier example of a
genre in which the primacy of "voice" is paramount.
"Violation" of this authenticity has been a traditional
concern. The Old Curiosity Shop is an example of the
perspectives which result from interpretations based on
the presence or absence of voice, and the accountability
issues which ensue. Dickens's novel challenges the
principle of voice authenticity in narrative, and the
assumption that because a voice is detached from its
source of transmission, then the originating point of
view has also been erased. The issue of voice
authenticity and its corollary in narrator authority is
thus a crucial one for framed texts. Generic narrative
is haunted by the old rhetorical criteria for self
presence and speaker ethos in referential discourse, of
276
which Gricean principles and similar referentially-based
concepts are no doubt an offshoot.
The criterion of "voice" also leads to a view of
framing narrative, not as essentially narratorial in
character but rather as rhetorically/discursively
constructed. The difference is as plotted to rhetorical
discourse. In the one formal causal principles, a
sequence of events and structure determine meaning; in
the other the dispersion of rhetorical signs and
associative patterns effect interpretation. The former
mode achieves a certain coherence by enacting meaning
through direct inference, while in the latter we might
say meaning, in Linda Flower’s terms, is "negotiated."
Michael J. Toolan's discussion of the "group" stories
told by "all or several conversationalist-participants
working together" (173) illustrates the rhetorical
nature of frame narratives. He writes,
In practice . . . a group story may
become more a series of hypotheses or
conjectures about what might have been
the case (the true resolution, the
proper evaluation) concerning some set
of events, particularly, where all the
group-tellers were detached witnesses of
those events, with limited inside
knowledge. And the more that a group's
talk becomes an unordered set of
overlapping conjectures, the more the
talk returns from narrative mode to that
of ordinary conversation or gossip.
(174)
Ill
Framed texts are, similarly, collective
constructions; that is, "meaning" is arrayed by a
contributory discourse, both the immediately present or
discourse removed in time and place, in ensemble.
Framed texts are thus rhetorically configured rather
than "plotted" according to Aristotelian precepts. In
this context, temporal effects acquire significant force
in shaping discourse "planes." The framing principle
works on a manipulation of certain time values, two of
which have to do with the inaugural narrative's position
in time. A variety of initializing frame narratives is
the first-person retrospective or "posterior" narration,
a "subsequent narrating" which succeeds the narrated
events in time (Prince, Dictionary 76). Heart of
Darkness is a narration of this kind. The binary
temporal mode is "anterior" or "predictive narrative,"
which precedes the narrated events in time (Prince,
Dictionary 6). At this point, however, the terminology
becomes a little misleading. Deciding which textual
events are precedental and which are subsequent depends
upon point of view. Most initializing frame narratives
occur chronologically subsequent to the events they
present in narration time, but are antecedent to them in
the presentational order of events in the text itself.
278
An opening frame narrative, a Janus-figured,
socially situated construction which looks both forward
and backward in time and place, thus occupies a singular
textual site. Its unique positioning enables it to
construct a certain "logic" which has to do with what
Ruqaiya Hasan has called the text's "motivational
s t r u c t u r e By this term Hasan refers, not to mere
episodic causality but to the existence of "some
[temporal and causal] logic that controls the selection
and presentation of the material in the story" (80). In
the initializing frame narrative, the "selection"
process Hasan mentions has to do with the phenomenon of
actualization. Future events refer to "time that is not
yet actualised; and a non-actualised event is a non-
event" (49). In these terms, the framing narrative is
itself an "actualised" event, while the events it refers
to are not until they are in fact narrated. We can say,
then, that a framing or initializing narrative has
control over the potential actualization of
circumstances by bringing them into the reader's focus.
Hence an enframing narrative has "authorial" status; it
can uncover voices and events much as an author does in
fabricating a certain "truth" version. Like narrative
in general, then, framed texts "legitimize," but their
autonomous, speaker-oriented, temporally and spatially
279
separated discourse planes enable a perspective which
the seamless generic narrative does not. In allowing
the intervention and interpolation of competing
discourses, the framed text most closely resembles the
symposium, though not the Platonic type wherein a
monologic discourse ultimately dominates and triumphs
over a pseudo-dialogical exchange. In the polyphonic
text, competing voices disrupt hegemony or dominance.
In the relativist discourse model I propose for
framing, discourses achieve credibility only in
relationship to other, perhaps counter, discourses, not
as separate and therefore more "authentic" rhetorics.
Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia in the novel, in
which no discourse can be assumed to have monologic (and
therefore ascendent) status, negates the need to have to
verify "authenticity." This view would perhaps explain
Ren4 Wellek and Austin Warren's definition of the frame
story as "historically, a bridge between anecdote and
novel" (221).
The question of "authenticity" in the framed text,
then, is moot. A frame (or any literary text for that
matter) is a deliberate construction for the purpose of
transmitting a certain worldview. The storytelling act
itself is governed by the conception of narrative
authority and the access to knowledge that authority
280 j
f
guarantees; that is, the transmission of any narrative j
involves the assumption, as Lyotard remarks, that Hthe j
i
I
narrator's only claim to competence for telling the 1
story is the fact that he has heard it himself. The
current narratee gains potential access to the same
authority simply by listening" (2 0). This is the
process Lyotard calls "the narrative function and the
legitimation of knowledge" (27) . Yet the conferring of I
"authority" on various speakers in a framed text should
not dupe the reader into overlooking rival claims
against that office from other textual sites and \
speakers. A framed text is a forum in which an issue is
I
thrashed out by the manipulation of multiple "voices," |
all artificial constructs. A narrative text, then, j
involves not only an orchestration, or dramatization if ‘
you will, of apparently contending "voices" in the form 1
of characters or other vocal forms, but a presentation
in Lyotard's terms of various archetypal "positions,"
speaker, listener, actor, etc. In this concept,
"listeners," both readers and rhetorical audience,
become potential narrators themselves through the
i
narrative channels of which Lyotard speaks. j
Kenneth Burke's use of the word "courtship"
explains in part the function of the communal or
i
collective rhetorical performance model which serves
281
i
j
this study's end. Its design is one which seeks to j
i
honor the nuances of disparate rhetorical positions, j
while striving at the same time for an agreement of j
purpose among them, a meaning which rehabilitates the j
j
viability of the textual "community" and averts the
transcendence of the sovereign subject. As Burke
defines rhetoric, it is "the use of language as a j
symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by
nature respond to symbols" (A Rhetoric of Motives 43). |
In A Rhetoric of Motives Burke explains the courtship
I
principle as "the use of suasive devices for the
transcending of social estrangement" (208). Rhetoric in
this sense is a socializing force (39) in conformance
with Burke's view of communication as "a generalized
form of love" (37). "Social estrangement," as W. Ross |
Winterowd points out, "results from hierarchy and
order." The alternative in Burke's thought is a "social
dialectic" which is "anti-hierarchical" ("Glossary"
151). Burke's conciliatory rhetoric eschews enmity in
favor of an Hegelian metaphor for "identification," or
what is held in common but which does not deny
distinctions, embodied in his "doctrine of
consubstantiality" (20-21), referring to shared
"substances" or properties which evolve dialectically in •
rhetorical terms of "perpetual transformation" or
282
rebirth (38). As Cary Nelson recognizes, Burke
"realized that texts convince in part by establishing
structured and hierarchized relationships between their i
i
I
key terms, thereby managing to convince us that the ;
I
relationships between these terms are both correct and |
i
inevitable" (159). Thus Burke suggests "that language
as a whole operates as a kind of terministic screen, one 1
that substantially creates the world we perceive as
natural" (159). In the final analysis, however, Nelson
continues, "rhetoric is for Burke a community of actions
based on primordial difference, not a means to recover
i
primordial sameness" (158). i
f
In fictive discourse and especially in framed j
i
texts, the quality of difference, or Derridean j
diffFrance, is hypothetically present as ironization. i
i
This is particularly apt in view of the frequently i
l
remarked framed text's shifts in discourse register fromj
one narrative plane to another. Theoretically, these j
are ideological shifts as well, each register bearing 1
i
its own idiosyncratic reference.34 Bakhgtin's concept of |
"language zones" is comparable (Martin 150). Again,
Burke's position is relevant. Of his "four master
tropes," metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, two
are pertinent to this discussion, metaphor and irony.
Burke's substitute term for metaphor is "perspective."
283 j
!
Thus "metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms ■
i
. . * h
of something else. It brings out the thisness of a \
that, or the thatness of a this" (A Grammar of Motives i
i
503). As I have argued, the framed text is
k
metaphorically structured through its use of spatial j
form, and this structuring creates the type of
perspective in which its seemingly dissident parts can
be perceived as eliciting each other's opposite
qualities in the sense that Burke intends. Burke's
definition of irony as dialectic, or "mutually related
i
or interacting perspectives" is an associated phenomenon ,
j
fA Grammar of Motives 503), but it should not produce
the relativism he believes fragments dialectic.35 By j
i
relativism he means "if you isolate any one agent in a 1
drama, or any one advocate in a dialogue, and see the
whole in terms of his position alone, you have the j
purely relativistic." Ironization, then, is necessary j
I
in order to avoid a relativistic devaluation, but it
also arises conversely 1
when one tries, by the interaction of j
terms upon one another, to produce a
development which uses all the terms.
Hence, from the standpoint of this total
form (this 'perspective of
perspectives'), none of the
participating 'sub-perspectives' can be
treated as either precisely right or
precisely wrong. They are all voices,
or personalities, or positions,
integrally affecting one another. When
the dialectic is properly formed, they j
284
are the number of characters needed to
produce the total development.
Thus binary concepts like "disease-cure" are
inherently "reversible.” By this Burke means "we should
'ironically' note the function of the disease in
'perfecting' the cure, or the function of the cure in
'perpetuating' the influences of the disease" (A Grammar
of Motives 512) .36
The holistic appreciation of any text, then, as
Burke pictures it, is attended by a requisite irony.
The framed text in particular encourages this kind of
reception. The logic of such a relation avoids a
reasoning founded on the elimination of oppositional
terms and forges a coherence which incorporates
artificial distinctions or concepts .otherwise regarded
as being in friable and anomalous relation. In a scheme
of this kind, issues related to narrator "authenticity,"
including the adjunct charge that other narratives in
framed texts are second-hand, "retold," or "reported"
rather than "immediate" (see Brooks 239, 2 61, and
Newman, "Narratives of Seduction" 14 6)" are in the main
irrelevant. In such a case, we could not maintain with
Filix Martinez-Bonati that "the mimesis of the narrator
provides the foundation for the dialogic and monologic
discourses of the characters," nor could we posit a
"logical difference" between the narrator's speech and
285 j '
I
that of the characters based on "truth" value (28-29).
I
I might also add that the literal question of
narrator "authenticity," the related phenomena of
"authority" and "reliability," even the concomitant idea .
of storytelling as "seduction" (Newman, "Narratives of j
Seduction" 151)— all of these insinuate some willful j
duplicity or hoax which alert readers must elude at all
cost in order to wrest some platonic "truth" from a text
which labors to shroud it from them. In framed
narration, authenticity is a relative value forged by
the cooperation of narrative voices in the text taken as
a whole. Some of these can be construed as
"fraudulent," as I have remarked in my discussion of the i
framed text's deceptivity. That is, narrative relations 1
i
are indeed obscured by disclaiming practices of various
i
sorts. However, these strategies inherent in framing I
i
construction allow the genre to introduce controversial !
j
ideas for the reader's consideration. Hence thinking of j
i
i
a framed text in terms of the conscious or unconscious |
I
i
attempt to communicate with a reader by exploiting the
stratagems of multiple voices causes us to reflect anew
I
on its objectives.
To recast characteristic oppositions as appositions
then, requires a percipient reader whose reception of j
the text must remain open to a logic of "possibility."
286
In this regard, the dialectical paradigm, though useful
for describing the interaction of symbolically opposing
trajectories, presents some liabilities which are best
circumvented if we would escape the entanglements of
foundational positions. The fallacy in the dialectical
paradigm is the tendency towards reductionism in either
its monolithic terms or through a terminal synthesis
which is its natural modal outcome, the conflation and
closure which condenses an inherently dense narrative
texture to one dimension. In other words, the dialectic
of textual energies and multiple perspectives should
ideally describe the interaction of oppositional and
relational patterns, to be conserved in a fluid state
for as long as the reader can manage it until such time
as he or she extracts a synthetic reading. The strategy
I am urging comes closest to Burke's perspective by
incongruity, defined as "the metaphorical extension of
perspective [which] involves casuistic stretching, since
it interprets new situations by removing words from
their 'constitutional setting'" (Attitudes toward
History 3 09). Such terms become, in Burke's
dramatology, "characters," and an essay on "attenuated
play. The essayist's terms serve to organize a set of
interrelated emphases, quite as Othello, Iago, and
Desdemona are inter-related emphases .... Emphases
287
cannot ’contradict' one another, so far as the 'total
plot' is concerned, any more than Iago's function in the
play can be said to contradict Othello's" (Attitudes
toward History 312).
"Seeing" differentially, accordingly, involves both
an awareness of dissimilarity and an acceptance of it.
For Burke a "performance rhetoric" furthers the latter
end, since it is ideally moved by the impulse he calls
"courtship." Another catalyst which galvanizes Burke's
rhetoric is identification. One of his terms for this
process is scope, which encompasses all the metaphorical
modes of creating agreement and salving rifts.37
Identification, in contrast to the "old" rhetorical
emphasis on persuasion and calculated strategy, fosters
social bonding. And, though Burke says "we need never
deny the presence of strife, enmity, and faction as a
characteristic motive of rhetorical expression" (A
Rhetoric of Motives 20), identification is still the
means by which we transcend and heal divisions (A
Rhetoric of Motives 326).
The text considered as conversation then, is an
exercise in communication. In such a case the textual
field is a site for theoretically competing speakers,
between and among whom the reader must referee. The
subject or subjects of this text are not however, the
288
various substantive formations valorized by western !
i
metaphysics, which are conceivably resident in the text j
as presiding or monopolizing topics. Nor are they
bracketed so as to appear contradictory and hence
irreconcilable, the one, the "traditional Cartesian
subject" (Lentricchia 125), occupying a peerless
position of authority and dominance by virtue of "the
humanist privilege granted to the autonomous actor— '
j
subject (with its corollary values of freedom, j
I
creativity, activity, and self-presence" (Lentricchia !
136), the other politically marginalized and
objectified. By the same token, we need to avoid j
blatant strategies which lead us to "essentialize," the j
process Frank Lentricchia calls "the product of a '
genealogical will to power" (137) and its allied motive, j
)
the "theological" impulse (13 8). Form-oriented j
bracketing theories or any principle which disengages
and heightens textual parts are commensurate with (
systems which grant the hegemonic positioning of subject *
I
in a homogeneous text.
i
Bakhtin1s theory of heteroglossia is an appropriate
response to these problems. It permits other centers of
address which usurp the supremacy of any monologic voice
and foils the report of a sole or exclusive
significance. In this regard, Bakhtin's system departs |
289
from praxis theories such as Goffman's "keying" and
other schools which suppose overt communication as the
norm. Bakhtin's approach has another, timely, aspect
which I find apropos and in keeping with the so-called
"new rhetoric," which stresses rhetoric as an agency for
social change, with emphasis on knowledge as socially
constructed. In terms of Aristotle's "categories,"
Bakhtin's system is "relative," and Aristotle determines
that "all relatives are spoken of in relation to
correlatives that reciprocate" (Complete Works I, 7,
11) .3 8
Framing then, may be thought of as an activity
which purports to sanction the dominance of socialized
criteria but actually subverts them. Dominance of form,
voice, point of view, and so on are ultimately
carnivalized by the framed text's gesture towards
disorder, in the licensing of the inexpressible. The
latter phenomenon takes the form of the inarticulated,
the censored, and the suppressed which threaten social
norms and constitute the framed text's usual subject
matter. For these reasons, Bakhtin's view of the novel
as an open interchange which culminates in
transformation for the parties involved, is
illuminating. This dialogization process justifies his
conception of the novel, "the 'carnivalized' genre,
290
which embodies the spirit of relativism and, especially,
of parody," a genre which finally "subjects all thoughts
and actions to an 'irony of origins'" (Morson, "Who
Speaks for Bakhtin?" 13). "Change" is the force behind
u* heteroglossia, * the unsystematic conflict of tongues"
(Morson, "Who Speaks for Bakhtin?" 7), the "jostling of ;
disparate languages" (Martin 149). For Bakhtin, then,
"there is no algorithm of history" (Morson, "Who Speaks
for Bakhtin?" 7). In such a system, "no frame is ever
secure," "official" meaning and master rhetorical codes
being forever dispelled by the intrusion of other, i
I
counteractive discourses. This hypothesis supports a j
view of the novel as "anti-canonic" and "potentially j
revolutionary." The dialogic relationship includes both I
I
agreement and disagreement, in which a novelistic
"orchestration of styles" eludes "monologic".
I
homogenizing tendencies (Morson, "Who Speaks for
Bakhtin?" 2, 13) ,39
Adjusting our viewing positions of the framed text
amounts to a parallax (and a paradigm) shift in accord j
I
with Bakhtin's perspective on the novel as a "hybrid" !
form of language relationships, "an artistically j
organized system for bringing different languages in j
i
contact with one another, a system having as its goal i
t
the illumination of one language by means of another" |
291
(The Dialogic Imagination 361). To regard frames as
maximally coded, organized structures requires us to
interpret them as ordering principles referring directly
to overt themes developed elsewhere in the text. Yet !
I
l
restricting them to this narrow role depreciates their
f
versatility. The frame strictly considered as 1
I
"orientational" device effaces its capacity to retrieve
meaning from other textual arenas, its interactional
properties, its ecological relation to adjacent i
r
narratives, and its performance in the work treated
holistically.
By moving out of a nominal observer/observed
relationship with the text and into sites which permit a .
multi-focal viewpoint, we cultivate a more disinterested
interpretation, since ideology and point of view are
equated for Bakhtin in a "false consciousness" (Martin
150), "the ideological becoming" which ensues from
t
"selectively assimilating the words of others" (The |
Dialogic Imagination 341). When we substitute the
concept of "speech zones," loci "for hearing a voice" j
(The Dialogic Imagination. Glossary 434) or "sphere[s]
of influence," for speaking subjects, we experience the
phenomenon of "refracted," alternative discourse, the
configuration of "the pre-textual real" (Connerty 401).
The emphasis on multiple discursive foci and their
individual semantic systems (Fowler's "semantic j
i
cluster[s]") or "symbolic reverberations" (Linguistics i
and the Novel 37, 41) thus deactivates the centrality of ;
causal relations emanating from any one (definitive) '
I
source. The Bakhtinian text is consequently
"architectonic," meaning its elements are
"simultaneously form and content" (Connerty 401).
Perceived in this way, a framed text is a metaphor !
for telling (and reception)— not one in which the "told" -
i
i
as "confessional" discourse has been incorporated by |
I
that act, nor is it an artifact (with the corresponding
want of legitimacy that status implies), but a text in
i
which each voice is warranted through its contributions ;
to its verbal network. The issue at stake is not simply
one of mimetic verisimilitude or an arid faithfulness to
1
i
an empirically vouchsafed reality, but the recognition ;
I
of an existential verity based on a fidelity to the j
J
plural nature of the text, on a multivalent dxscourse i
and its inveterate reflexivity. The verbal network I
have described is much like the spatial form I have
posited as structuring the framed text. As David
Mickelsen conceives the grounds for spatial form,
existence is a complex, multiform
totality in which any given element is
tangential to countless others.
Discarding a causal, linear organization
at least moves toward an organic
conception of life, a life in which
293 !
I
events are not so much discernible
points on a line as they are random (and
often simultaneous) occurrences in a
seamless web of experience. In short,
spatial form conveys a sense of the
scope of life rather than its
magnificence or its length. (77)
The spatial "scope” to which Mickelsen refers is
the formal equivalent of Burke's rhetorical "scope," his
"perspective by incongruity."
Thus, as Bakhtin explains the discursive context of -
the novel, "no living word relates to its object in a
singular way: between the word and its object, between
I
the word and the speaking subject, there exists an 1
elastic environment of other, alien words about the same
I
object, the same theme" (The Dialogic Imagination 276). j
i
John Frow elaborates on Bakhtin's methods: !
the great power of his conceptualization
of the transformational activity of
novelistic discourse is that it allows
the high-order textual constructs of (
plot, character, narrator, space, time 1
and so on, to be thought of as complex j
discursive effects, reality effects
produced in the intertextual operation j
of one discourse upon another. By using j
the concept of discourse genre, it i
becomes possible to analyze a text as a j
play of voices— that is, of utterances j
made from shifting positions specified j
by the registers the text invokes. !
These positions are not necessarily j
actualized as those of a personified
speaker: they are positions appropriate j
to a kind of speaker. Taken in this
discursive, nonontological sense, the
concept of voice has the advantage over
traditional concepts such as point of
view that it is not in the first
294
instance subordinate to concretizations
drawn from a represented world— that is,
the 'consciousness' or 'vision' of
characters or the narrator. There is,
therefore, no sharp division between
discourse which is assigned, directly or
indirectly, to a character, and
discourse which has its source in other
texts. The narrative process can be
theorized as a structure which knits
together heterogeneous discourses;
everything in the text is language.40
(159)
Reading a framed text, then, is an encounter with a
"narrative of emancipation," one which in Lyotard's
estimation and using his criteria, participates in
"resistance" to received "subject-systems" (guoted in
Yaeger 249) and establishes the conditions under which
an optimal discourse can flourish in all its elective
variance.41 The Bakhtinian theory of language extends
Burke's ideas of rhetorical "voice." It offers an
appropriate, dynamic view of discourse which satisfies
my theory of a framed text as constituting interactive,
energetic fields of meaning, a concept which avoids
totalization in order to foreground the symbiotic
relation between both the traditional apd its
counterforce, the rhetoric which must inevitably exert a
transforming influence on the protocol to which it is
symbolically in opposition.
My argument can be summed up in the proposition: If
the various narratives in a framed text are seen as
thematically analogous, complementary and supplementary <
rather than as predatorily jostling for positions of
power, then a containing frame narrative only seemingly
i
j marginalizes a contained narrative. I believe, j
therefore, with Hillis Miller, in a perpetually j
transposable relation, "the possibility of being two j
f
apparently opposite things, both the container and what ;
is contained" (11). Any number of examples from studies
of cultural forms and rhetoric exemplify that relation.
i
Both anthropological and film studies point up the j
I
interdependent relationship of cultural phenomena and ;
i
procedures which reveal those contingencies. In ritual, |
I
the process of transformation through masking, in which ,
|
the revealed is hidden in order that the hidden can be !
j
revealed, is yet another illustration of this process
through which conventional social meanings are
transfigured. In the film genre, camera techniques
i
elicit jumbled temporal schemes, thus forcing the ,
juxtaposition of planes and images we would normally j
I
keep visually separate. The result is a
reinterpretation of experience in which events are seen
as montage- or trucage-like rather than discrete
I
entities.
A rhetorical theory such as Kenneth Burke's, which
visualizes the text as a colloquia for the performance,
296 I
I
I
interaction and play of a panoply of speakers is another |
I
approach which emphasizes my view of framing techniques j
as interactional phenomena. Burke's theory of rhetoric !
I
as "courtship" and as an agency for identification and
i
i
reconciliation of discordant stances is one rhetorical
i
model for the behaviors of framed texts. Finally, ,
Mikhail Bakhtin's awareness of discourse ideologies,
their textual roles, and the text's censorship or
enfranchisement of them is a paradigm which I have used
to "supplement" Burke's, in an effort to avoid the
latter's commitment to hierarchical criteria elsewhere
in his explanations of rhetorical systems, and to the 1
extent it is possible, to extract a reading of framed !
I
texts which engages them as a colloquy for interrelated
discourse regimens. In the Derridean sense of a non
determination of borders, the framing text is part of |
the enframed; they have mutually dependent meanings. In |
short, I have chosen these viewpoints because they j
I
celebrate and recognize the presence of a fundamental
heterogeneity in any subject matter. The question of |
what is essential and what is accessory which
preoccupies critics in such a case is of dubious
utility. A framing narrative thus capitalizes on
Derrida's paradigmatic impasse: it is indeed framed by j
what it seems to be framing.42 The textual subjects
profiled in Chapter 4 confirm that hypothesis.
298
1. H. Verdaasdonk1s 1982 article, "Conceptions of
Literature as Frames?", offers a parallel discussion of
the ways in which the institutionally ordained character
of the knowledge we must have to interpret texts
impinges on the reading process. Since
institutionalized beliefs dictate our responses to
literature, resulting assertions are ideologically bound
and legitimized by the institution of choice, though
claiming a foundation in an objective body of
"knowledge."
2. Tom Ricento explains the currency of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis as follows:
Today the strong version of the Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis (i.e. that language
determines thought) is generally
discredited (although the grammar and
dictionary of Hopi completed by Whorf is
still referred to by linguists).
However, the weak version of the Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis (i.e., that language
influences thought, or predisposes
certain types of verbal behavior over
others) is still supported by a number
of anthropologists and linguists. It is
in this tradition that interest in
contrastive rhetoric finds its roots.
("A Model for Research in Contrastive
Rhetoric" 9)
3. Tom Ricento writes,
Some scholars have criticized Kaplan's
characterization of English expository
writing as ethnocentric (e.g., James
1980: 121), and others have posited
other equally possible types of non
linear description (e.g., Johns 1980).
* Nonetheless, a number of studies done in
Canada (McDaniel 1980), the U.S.
(Ostler, 1981; Martin, 1980; Egginton
and Ricento, 1983; Santiago 1968),
England (Houghton 1980a), Japan (Harder
198 0), and Australia (Clyne 198 0) have
found Kaplan's characterization of
English and other languages to be valid,
based on examinations of large numbers
of texts from a wide variety of
299
journals, books, and other publications.
("Culture, Language, and Thought" 11-12)
In her frequently anthologized study,
"Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Nonlineal,"
Dorothy Lee declares that languages promote different
codes for the representation of reality. Her research
into the language of the Trobriand islanders, a group
living in the Solomon Sea area, emphasizes the nonlineal
nature of that discourse and the contrasting lineal
relations which demarcate English. For English speakers
she writes, "the line is basic to all experience" (95).
See also Michael Clyne, Jimmy Hoeks, Heinz-Josef
Kreutz, "Cross-Cultural Responses to Academic Discourse
Patterns," Berlin: Mouton, [c.1983], 457-75, whose
research shows significant discrepancies between English
speakers* and German speakers' academic styles. Texts
by English speakers reveal a preference for "linear
progression, symmetry, early advance organizers, and
data integration ..." (459) . The authors' results
confirm Kaplan's.
In a later paper (1985), "A Model for Research in
Contrastive Rhetoric," Ricento reports that
"confirmatory evidence [for Kaplan's claims] outweighs
disconfirmatory evidence both quantitatively and
qualitatively" (10).
Finally, see John Barnitz's research, in which a
number of studies affirm the crucial influence of
"cultural origins" on text comprehension (101).
4. The positioning of frame as topic has several
consequences related to the hypotactic syntax properties
of English which subordinate alternative discourses so
as to make them dependent on a main construction.
5. Tzvetan Todorov also likens narrative to argument— "a
means of convincing ..." (The Poetics of Prose 77).
To add to this catalogue of resemblances, I believe that
an (enframing) narrative in an inaugural or topic
position may also conflate the initial three elements of
classical (Ciceronian) argument. According to William
Brandt, these are:
1. The exordium, the introductory
section in which the speaker got the
auditors into the proper frame of mind;
2. The narratio. which presented the
relevant information— in a legal speech,
the facts of the particular case
relevant to the issue;
300
3. The partitio. a technical section of
a speech which attempted to divide up
the facts into those which were agreed
upon and those at issue. The partitio
also made explicit the orator’s
subsequent organization. (50)
I construe the above components of argument as
establishing the "ethos" Brandt says is "always present
in the rhetorical situation" (53). At any rate, a frame
fulfills the criteria for introductions named by Brandt:
"To set himself up for an audience a writer must
establish three things .... First, he must establish
some sort of relationship with his audience. Second, he
must establish an attitude toward his subject. And
third, he must establish some sense of himself— of the
kind of person that he is, or that he chooses to be
thought" (55). Frame narratives seen as modelling
argument may also approximate the linear problem-
solution format suggested for that mode (59). Many
framing narratives mimic a "deductive" argument in
theoretically presenting a thesis-driven topic, but
their subsequent presentations of alternate topic sites
means that they are in effect structured inductively.
We associate the deductive pattern with preconceptions,
which is why Francis Bacon recommended the inductive
method based on empirical (and theoretically value-free)
inquiry.
6. The genealogy of the framing narrative has to do with
what Kenneth Burke defines as the "qualitative
importance of beginning, middle, and end," noting "the
development from what through what to what. So we place
great stress upon those qualitative points: the 'laying
of the cornerstone,' the 'watershed moment,' and the
•valedictory,' or 'funeral wreath'" (Philosophy of
Literary Form 70-71). In Physics as Metaphor Roger
Jones explains our preoccupation with beginnings from
another angle, the idea that "Space, measurement, and
number are consequences of our fear of chaos" (63).
7. Ann Matsuhasi equates conceptual frame structures
represented by propositions with "global meaning
structure" (256). Mieke Bal defines metadiscourse as
having an "embedded discourse for its object" ("Notes on
Narrative Embedding" 53). I use the term
"metadiscourse" advisedly, since it also belongs to the
lexicon and discourse of hierarchy, and my suppositions
are geared towards destabilizing hierarchical
conceptions of framing. I am retaining the term here
301
for lack of a better definition for commentary
discourse.
Chris Sinha's discussion of topic is enlightening
with regard to potential connections between framing and
topicalization. He writes:
In normal discourse, the topic is
foregrounded, and linked by 'inferential
bridges' . . . to presupposed
background. In this respect, the
representation (sign) in its metaphoric-
endostructural aspect constitutes the
topic governing the selection of
background, and the presupposed,
metonymic-exostructural context provides
the elements available for combination
through bridging inference. Thus, the
metaphoric pole of signification
corresponds (in general) to the
topicalizing, thematic,
propositionalizing moment of discursive
reasoning; while the metonymic pole of
signification corresponds (in general)
to the presuppositional, thematic moment
of discursive reasoning. (181-82)
Sinha's association of topic and metaphor is an
intriguing one. I will extend his conclusion to my own
argument by suggesting that one (figural) way of looking
at framing is to consider it a metaphor for topic.
8. William Madden's essay "Framing the Alices" makes a
similar point regarding the interdependence of the frame
poems and dream tales in the Alice in Wonderland books.
The prefatory poems effect a transition into the central
narratives, the dream tales. The accompanying
transformation for the reader obliterates "the barrier
between the 'real' and the 'unreal'" (366), as Carroll
sought to erase the mock partitions between the everyday
Victorian world and the "unreal" textual world. The
reader too, like Alice, experiences the dream state.
The frame poems thus "lead us into, through, and out of
[the] dark central vision" (371) which informs the
interior narratives. Madden suggests that the dream
narratives in the Alices break down linear time models
and are coincident with primordial space and time (372).
Framing as a perceptual threshold or liminal
experience initiates an altered consciousness or
subjective reality parallel to oneiric or day-dreaming
302
states in which dreams, memories, and fantasies are
prominent occurrences.
9. We should recall in this respect Van Dijk and
Kintsch's theory that a hierarchically presented text is
not reversible in terms of reader recognition
(Strategies of Discourse Comprehension 310). The only
caveat may be the possibility that what Van Dijk and
Kintsch refer to as "subunits" of meaning in a text
recall the frame, unless, as in some cases, the frame is
too physically removed in the text from the reader's
immediate purview or stored memory. However, if a
framing or initial text is an abbreviated or fragmentary
one in what was earlier termed a part/whole synecdochic
relation to its sequential narratives, it could be
conceivably weighed as accessory rather than essential
information.
10. For an example of framing as a distancing device,
see Sibyl Jacobson, who, commenting on Scott's novels,
writes, "the frame as we have seen is an attempt to
ensure the appearance of authorial impartiality through
distancing" (185). The "distance" factor, I reiterate,
has more to do with the frame's material state and the
reader's short term memory capacity. [It may also have
to do with the reader's susceptibility to the "boredom"
and "overstrain" factors which Iser says "form the
boundaries beyond which the reader will leave the field
of play" ("The Reading Process," Tompkins 51).]
11. The practice of enframing narrative also has visible
correspondences with Christian exegesis wherein, as
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg put it, "the letter of
the Old Law was seen as containing or foreshadowing the
spirit of the New" (12 3) in an evolutionary paradigm, "a
record of the actual in which could be read the story of
the gradual spiritual perfection of man" (125). The
Christian narrative model is not ultimately appropriate
for framed texts, however, because these are always in
some sense recursive rather than teleological. For
another thing, the major difference between the framing
and the sacred text is that the former gestures toward
countering the threatening ideological presence of its
own monologic voice. Finally, since the problems
depicted in framed texts are seldom wholly resolved, a
potential repetition of the situation is implied; there
is no final "perfection." On this note, Alexander Welsh
remarks, "by setting actions in past time novelists
assured that actions could be experienced as complete
303
. . . but, conversely, history always threatens the
establishment anew" (18).
12. Turner writes that "ritual's liminal phase . . .
approximates to the 'subjunctive mood' of sociocultural
action" in which "the cognitive schemata that give sense
and order to everyday life no longer apply but are, as
it were, suspended" (161). The framing situation is of
this order; that is, it introduces a "what if" situation
elaborated by subsequent narratives. In liminality,
moreover, "there is a play of meanings. involving the
reversal of hierarchical orderings of values and social
statuses. There is a play with words, resulting in the
generation of secret initiatory languages as well as
joyful or serious punning" (162). Turner's concept of
liminality accommodates the ludic features of framing
texts to which I have called attention.
13. Fredric Jameson's critique of ritual's irrelevancy
today is apropos here. Jameson argues that ritual or
other mechanisms for "ensuring . . . collective
coherence" are moribund because no longer applicable to
fragmented, individualistic capitalist societies ("The
Symbolic Inference" 84) .
14. Todorov's narrative "grammar," founded on
structuralist precepts, is an example of homeostatic or
tension-driven models like Lotman's. In keeping with
the concept of a counterpoised design, plots are
described in terms of static versus dynamic states, or
as passages from one "equilibrium" to another. In
Todorov's view, embedded and embedding narratives
conform to formulaic operations characterized by "the
complete trajectory [of] (equilibrium-disequilibrium-
equilibrium)" (The Poetics of Prose 118). In the
"ideal" narrative, some force or powerful energy invades
the space of an initial stable situation, resulting in a
condition of disequilibrium. Equilibrium is restored by
the activities of opposing forces (Poetics of Prose
111). Theories of this kind are obviously grounded in
rationales for closure.
Michel Foucault proposes an analogous, phenomenon in
his inquiry into digressions from historical ordering.
He writes,
Discontinuity— the fact that within the space of a
few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it
had been thinking up till then and begins to think
other things in a new way— probably begins with an
erosion from outside, from that space, which is,
304
for thought, on the other side, but in which it has
never ceased to think from the very beginning.
Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is
that of the relations between thought and culture.
(The Order of Things 50)
15. In his essay, "How Primordial is Narrative," Michael
Bell describes a similar paradigm operating in Don
Quixote. In his discussion of the novel's centering of
epistemological themes in its protagonist, he brings up
the ways in which the major motifs are projected into
surrounding narratives:
A crucial device here, of course, is the fictitious
historian, Cide Hamete, through whom the work's own
realistic 'historical' account is thrown into
question. But such a device would have no real
effect if the narrative texture did not already
create an unsettling relativism. One of the ways
in which Cervantes achieves this, and disturbs the
simple hegemony of the containing narrative as the
counter-term to Don Quixote's romance, is to
interpose between these two polar narratives a
whole series of sub-narratives which are themselves
affected by the field of force within which they
exist. And they in turn of course modify the
dominant narratives of which they are often
simultaneously a part. Cervantes uses this
multiplicity to create unsettling conflicts not
just of narrative action but of narrative premises.
(181)
16. Along these lines, Allon White notes that "carnival
gives symbolic and ritual play to impurity, to the
mixed, heterodox, messy, excessive, and unfinished
formalities of the body and social life," or what is
normally culturally "repressed" (164, 167).
17. The montage concept is similar to Klaus Riegel's
presentation of dialectical time, "in which time, like
energy, is viewed as an 'interphenomenon' produced by
the interplay of multiple ongoing events. In
dialectical time, multiple temporalities of many
sequences interact to form a unique time that
characterizes the event in its many aspects" (Gorman and
Wessman, Introduction 57). Riegel stresses that
realizing this phenomenon involves the "skill of
decentering and thereby of viewing the past (or the
future) from various perspectives ..." (63).
305
18. I am interpreting Metz's use of metalinguistic here
to mean "outside the pale of." In this sense, the
trucage effect is an autonomous one rather than
transcendent (though it could be argued that the
momentary suppression of rhetorical indicators is a
transcendent result). As far as frame operations go, I
imagine such effects to be transitional, apprehended, if
at all, at the moment in which they instantiate
themselves in a reading. On the other hand, the
plausibility of their shaping comprehensive meaning
throughout the breadth of the text and the duration of a
reading cannot be dismissed.
19. The optical illusions Metz describes are not unlike
those Umberto Eco attributes to the mirror play of
"catoptric theaters," related as follows:
Suitably arranged plane mirrors produce, on a
mirror surface, the image of several superimposed,
juxtaposed, and amalgamated objects, so that the
observer, unaware of the catoptric play, gets the
impression of prodigious apparitions (Semiotics and
the Philosophy of Language 221) .
20. Kenneth Burke argues that the scapegoat, a "vessel
of vicarious atonement," in principle exhibits a
"concentration of power, hence may possess the
ambiguities of power" (A Grammar of Motives 4 07). He
describes the events which evolve from these conflicts
in theological terms: "the process of pollution-
purification-redemption is the drama of the self in
quest" (Foss, Foss, Trapp 182) .
21. Toolan observes that detective fiction as a genre is
established on the group story principle. That is, "the
testimony of a range of individuals connected in some
way to a crime" must be processed by both reader and
detective as
a radically diffused and potentially defective
group story. The diffusion lies in the fact that
there is— typically— no Aristotelian unity of time
or place as far as the characters' contributions
(within the story) are concerned. And— an extreme
form of intra-group dissent— defectiveness and
contradiction are probabilities since one or more
of the group may construct their contributions so
as to conceal their own guilt. (174)
306
22. The theory of narrative as tropologically endowed is
fairly widespread. As a random sample, Jonathan Culler
cites Kenneth Burke’s view of the genre as "the
tropological 'temporalizing of essence,’" and Paul
DeMan's opinion of narrative "as the expansion or
literalization of tropological structures" ("Fabula and
Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative" 29).
23. Roland Barthes provides an interesting footnote on
this subject. In speaking of the narrative "situation,"
that is, "the set of protocols according to which the
narrative is consumed," he writes:
In so-called 'archaic' societies, the
narrative situation is heavily coded
. . . . Generally, however, our society
takes the greatest pains to conjure away
the coding of the narrative situation:
there is no counting the number of
narrational devices which seek to
naturalize the subsequent narrative by
feigning to make it the outcome of some
natural circumstance and thus, as it
were, 'disinaugurating' it: epistolary
novels, supposedly rediscovered
manuscripts, author who met the
narrator, films which begin the story
before the credits. The reluctance to
declare its codes characterizes
bourgeois society and the mass culture
issuing from it: both demand signs which
do not look like signs. (Imaae-Music-
Text 116-17)
In a sense classical framing narratives assent to
this "disinauguration," this insistence on dissembling
signs. The frame of this type may seek to naturalize a
subsequent narrative by presenting it as the outcome of
some spontaneous circumstance (from which it often
dissociates itself), particularly when the subject
matter of the succeeding narrative is polemic. This
faculty for mitigating the impact of the interior
material, an outgrowth of the frame's supposed
distancing capacity, is dismayingly illustrated in the
history of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," a post World
War I German film. The first director, Fritz Lang, was
replaced by Robert Wiene, who changed the format of the
original script by putting the story in a frame.
According to the author of From Caligari to Hitler: A
Psychological History of the German Film, the framing
307
story "perverted, if not reversed, [the authors']
original intentions," which were to show the oppression
of authority. Kracauer goes on to explain:
While the original story exposed the
madness inherent in authority, Wiene's
Caligari glorified authority and
convicted its antagonist of madness. A
revolutionary film was thus turned into
a conformist one— following the much-
used pattern of declaring some normal
but troublesome individual insane and
sending him to a lunatic asylum ....
In its changed form Caligari was no
longer a product expressing, at best,
sentiments characteristic of the
intelligentsia, but a film supposed
equally to be in harmony with what the
less educated felt and liked. (66-67)
24. Linda Flower's discussion of the use of such
narrative frameworks in egocentric writer-based prose
illuminates the process by which narrative frames may
displace expositional ones in immature writing. By
extension of this paradigm, I suggest that it is not too
far afield to infer that the literary "frame" has the
features of an autobiographical event in a temporal-
spatial context.
One writer does in fact suggest this bond. In her
article "Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes,"
Ruth Glancy notes: "The presence of a linking narrative
surrounding the tales permitted a special
interrelationship between the story and its teller, and
for Dickens the importance of this relationship lay in
the possibilities it provided for autobiographical
storytelling, the relating of tales derived from the
memory of the teller" (54-55). For Dickens, the
framework device intensifies the singular correspondence
between teller and tale.
25. See Barthes' discussion of the rhetorical makeup of
imagery in Image-Music-Text (37). Barthes allocates
ideology to "the common domain of the signifieds of
connotation ..." (49). Barthes' referents here echo
Jinks' remarks on the film maker's manipulation of the
denotations of an image to suggest its connotations, a
strategy which resembles the nonliteral trope.
308
26. In reviewing the implications of time motilities,
William Stephenson remarks on the metaphysical
significance of present time, the "now": "from
Kierkegaard to Nietzsche it was emergence from
embeddedness— of turning potentiality into actuality and
self-realization" (21). To appreciate an initial
framing narrative's placement in present time is to
realize its stake in these modes of both being and
becoming. In his discussion of systems theory and its
relationship to life, Ilya Prigogine provides a related
perspective in the idea that "initial conditions, as
summarized in a state of the system, are associated with
Being; in contrast, the laws involving temporal changes
are associated with Becoming" (310). Similarly, the
opening frame's announcement of its own existence is a
form of being. while its designation of another
narrative which tells us how the frame situation or the
situation in the inset narratives developed encompasses
its becoming mode, the evolving narrative in its
entirety. The framing narrative is not in a state of
static being, however, but a matrix from which future
events radiate. The Bakhtinian sense of the novel's
temporal focal point, "the 'inconclusive present'
leading into the immediate future" as opposed to an
"absolute" past (Morson, "Bakhtin and the Present
Moment" 219) properly describes the framing text's
"presentness." The reader may sustain a comparable
transition from a state of ignorance to one of knowledge
through the reading dynamic.
27. Joseph Grimes subordinates setting under "non-events
in discourse" (51). An enframing narrative also
resembles other narrative features Grimes discusses
under the rubric of "non-events." For instance, it
serves as explanatory background. which Grimes defines
as "the secondary information that is used to clarify a
narrative" (56). Framing activity is also similar to
the idea of "collateral information," which Grimes
explains links "non-events to events." Collateral
information is therefore related to "projected time,"
which "has the effect of anticipating content, when,
with reference to projected time, a number of
alternative possibilities are spelled out in advance
. . . . In this respect collateral information is not
very different from foreshadowing" (65).
28. For Burke, the symbol is "the verbal parallel to a
pattern of experience" (Counter-Statement 152).
309
29. For instance, the term "mise-en-abyme" is commonly
used for embedded narratives. This term implies a
hierarchical relationship of embedded narrative to the
whole text, however, the inset narrative being described
as a "miniature replica," "a textual part reduplicating,
reflecting, or mirroring (one or more than one aspect
of) the textual whole" (Prince, Dictionary 53).
30. Bal's enterprise is described as "countering
realism's disciplining effects by opposing realistic to
textual reading and by maintaining, rather than
resolving, the tension between the two." She argues,
Reading with the preestablished assumption that the
work is a whole, that it is coherent and well-
structured, has now come under attack as a critical
strategy that stimulates strongly ideological
interpretations, erases disturbing or incoherent
details, and imposes on the text a romantic
conception of organic growth not relevant to works
outside the romantic tradition. The 'convention of
unity' is a powerful ideological weapon because of
the pressure it exerts on the reader to choose one
interpretation over another rather than to read
through the conflict of interpretations, because it
presupposes single-handed authorship and the
authority that entails . . . and because it
encourages the projection of 'masterplots' that
colonize or erase the marginal. ("De-disciplining
the Eye" 506-07)
31. Linda Dittmar defines this kind of "asymmetrical"
frame narrative as "investigatory." She explains its
rationale as follows: "the investigatory frame
presupposes that knowledge is subjective and ever-
changing. Investigation cannot lead to closure, but it
can explore the relation between knowledge, identity and
values" (19 2).
32. In a context examining self-reflexiveness in
modernist texts, Patricia Waugh explains "spatial form":
With realist writing the reader has the illusion of
constructing an interpretation by referring the
words of the text to objects in the real world.
However, with texts like T.S. Eliot's The Waste
Land (1922), in order to construct a satisfactory
interpretation of the poem, the reader must follow
the complex web of cross-references and repetitions
of words and images which function independently
310
of, or in addition to, the narrative codes of
causality and sequence. The reader becomes aware
that 'meaning' is constructed primarily through
internal verbal relationships, and the poem thus
appears to achieve a verbal autonomy: a 'spatial
form1 (Metafiction 23).
33. A distinction is necessary here between types of
repetition, for which J. Hillis Miller's categories are
useful. Following DeLeuze's classification, he cites
the "Platonic" or "mimetic" forms "grounded in a solid
archetypal model which is untouched by the effects of
repetition," and which are therefore essentially copies
of the original. The other type of repetition is the
"Nietzschean," which "posits a world based on
difference. Each thing . . . is unique, intrinsically
different from every other thing .... It is a world
not of copies but of what Deleuze calls 'simulacra' or
'phantasms.' These are ungrounded doublings which arise
from differential interrelations among elements which
are all on the same plane" (6). This paradoxical kind
of repetition "with a difference" is the activity I
suspect occurs in framed texts, particularly since it is
associated with dreams, "in which one thing is
experienced as repeating something which is quite
different from it and which it strangely resembles"
(Miller 8). The second form is therefore "not the
negation or opposite of the first, but its
'counterpart,' in a strange relation whereby the second
is the subversive ghost of the first, always already
present within it as a possibility which hollows it
out." This form of repetition, Miller says, is related
to the image. which "is the meaning generated by the
echoing of two dissimilar things .... It is neither
in the first nor in the second nor in some ground which
preceded both, but in between, in the empty space which
the opaque similarity crosses" (9). An "emblem of this
relation," Miller suggests, "turns on . . . oppositions,
or rather counterparts," some of which are relevant to
our discussion of framing, namely "inside/outside,"
"waking/dream," "identity/similarity," "container/thing
contained" (9). These are not to be considered as
"polar opposites but as differences which remain
differences but can turn into one another" (10). I
suggest that the framed text demonstrates this
metaleptic reversibility, although the initiating
auspices of the framing narrative impel the commencement
of repetition. Miller also calls attention to the
novel's repetitive apparatus, its title, subtitle,
preface, and so forth (12 5). [In the case of the framed
311
text, even its structure is multiplied.] The use of
repetition assures that no motif has "a sovereign
explanatory function for the others” (12 6), and that
meaning is not "transcendent" but "immanent" in a text
(127). The result is a heterogeneous conglomeration of
"thematic and figurative threads," which, taken
together, make "a meaningful totality" (128). For
Miller, repetition, in short, is a "method of
permutation which establishes the relation among the
elements in a given chain .... In each new appearance
the components are rearranged" (12 8). Though succeeding
examples do not duplicate the first, they echo them— or
in some cases "the new exemplar repeats its model with
an ironic reversal of its elements" (133). It need
hardly be added that repetitious techniques evade a
determinate center.
Kenneth Burke argues a similar view. In Counter-
Statement he defines repetitive form as "the consistent
maintaining of a principle under new guises" (125).
34. Shifts in discourse register naturally entail shifts
in time and place, but also in narrating point of view.
Wallace Martin's "grammar of narration" (13 6) indicates
that tense and deictic use are important components in
this process: "The distance between the narrator's past-
tense summary and the character's present-tense interior
monologue" (137), both in direct discourse, are examples
of these "methods of representing consciousness" (14 0)
and point of view manipulation. Discourse registers
also include such speech characteristics as regional and
class inflections and so on. Martin mentions, however,
that "categorical distinctions, such as that between
first- and third-person narrators, are often less
important than the distance between types of discourse,
since the latter can obliterate the borderlines created
by grammar." For this reason "Bakhtin insists that
linguistics alone cannot identify such borders" (150).
Some critics maintain that the shift in registers,
however, marks the dissimilar ontological "realms" of
the text or that rhetorical shifts "heighten" certain
passages (see Ullrich 112, 172, 181, 203, and Waugh,
Metafiction 90). Interpreted in this way, register
shifts become substitutes for the bracketing frame
concept.
35. Cary Nelson mentions that irony is Burke's
"universally transformative trope, closest to the pure
principle of the dialectic itself." Burke’s argument
puts the "representational nature of language . . . at
312
risk," with the result that language is conceived as "a
self-referential system" (161).
36. According to Cary Nelson, in Burke's "differential
system" (164) no "metalanguages . . . transcend the
linguistic situation" (166).
37. Foss, Foss, and Trapp point out that "although
rhetoric includes, in Burke's view, spoken and written
discourse, it also includes less traditional forms of
discourse such as sales promotion, courtship, social
etiquette, education, hysteria, and witchcraft. It
includes as well works of art such as literature and
painting. Art is 'a means of communication' that is
'designed to elicit a "response" of some sort'; it is
symbolic action— action that symbolizes something" (160-
61). The authors note that "Burke's definition of
rhetoric also includes nonverbal elements or nonsymbolic
conditions that 'can themselves be viewed as a kind of
symbolism having persuasive effects'" (161).
38. At first glance, Burke's "relativism" appears to be
in conflict with Bakhtin's. Burke's Hegelian drive
towards consensus would seem to obviate relative terms
in favor of a monolithic patterning, while Bakhtin's
theory of competing discourses theoretically maintains
relative or mutually exclusive positions. Conversely,
Bakhtinian relativism could be viewed as a refusal of
consensus and therefore a weaker equation in terms of
constructing political equalities in the text. But
though they disagree on relative values, I believe both
Burke and Bakhtin arrive at the same end. Both advocate
a hearing for the opposition; both would avoid
partiality; both solicit an empathy for the repressed
which has its expression in balanced and engaged
dialogue; both esteem the contribution such an exchange
makes to understanding.
39. In John Frow's interpretation, Bakhtin's dialogic
discourse is "discourse which is oriented toward and in
some way influenced by an alien discourse" (163). Thus,
one could define monologic modes of discourse in
terms of the suppression of alternative ways of
speaking and the reproduction of official norms,
and dialogic modes in terms of the pluralization of
the text and the transformation of official norms.
Further, it is those registers specified as
appropriate by the genre— in this case particularly
the morally superior discourse of the omniscient
313
narrator— which tend to embody official values,
whereas those registers drawn from other realms,
and particularly those which transgress stylistic
decorum, tend to subvert the authority of the
dominant discourse. (163)
40. Roger Fowler, remarking on Bakhtin's theory of the
carnivalization of literature, observes that carnival
"rejoices in extremes, negation, inversion, subversion,
antithesis. The rhetorical figures generated by the
logic of carnival are clear: they include prominently
hyperbole, litotes, negation, syntactic inversions,
paradox, contradiction" ("Polyphony in Hard Times" 79).
The authoritarian monologic text suppresses such
rhetorical figures (or they are absent from the textual
surface). In the grammar of the framed text, the
embedded, sequential narratives may be thought of as
inverted syntactically, perhaps even subversive, and
certainly antithetical. In the linguistic context of
transformative sentence operations Fowler discusses,
transformation is a process which "repositions the
agent" and directly affects "perspective" (Linguistics
and the Novel 19, 21). I have this kind of move in mind
when I argue that the framed text exhibits a kind of
syntactic inversion. I emphasize, however, that these
relations are to be interpreted as interwoven to produce
the textual fabric; they are not fractured or atomized
parts which bear no ideological relation to each other.
41. Patricia Yaeger groups Bakhtin's dialogic theory in
her taxonomy of "emancipatory" discourse strategies
because "the dialogic tendency of languages to interact
with one another is the source of textual liberation"
(255). Such texts exalt dissonance.
42. This is a paraphrase of Barzilai (12).
Chapter Four
Loving Friends, Mortal Enemies:
The Worlds within the Uncle Remus Stories
Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus canon is a
felicitous choice as demonstration text for the
composite theory outlined in the previous chapter. It
exposes the copious problems raised by framing practice:
the discrepancies produced by a reading in which
storytelling is received as entertainment in contrast
with textual vestiges suggesting a more trenchant
significance, the clash of social mores sublimated in
the text's display of surface homogeneity, the
dislocating effects which result from the confiscation
of an alien cultural art, and the specter of authorial
purpose. The American South's cultural memories of the
bygone plantation era recalled in these stories amounts
to a regional mythology. The Remus tales are an
integral part of the Southern heritage from an "ideal"
past which evokes, among other things, an image of
mutual respect and caring between the black and white
races. Even so, another reality may stand behind the
idyll. It is entirely possible that the Uncle Remus
tales themselves challenge the sacrosanct myths many
whites have unquestionably accepted.1 For a radical
incongruity occurs at the boundaries of the stories'
frames where an oral matter documented as "authentic"
encounters its written context. The resulting
discrepancies between the frames' presentations and
those of the interior stories appear to threaten the
benign vision of plantation life, indeed Harris's very
protest to the contrary that "There is nothing here but
an old negro man, a little boy, and a dull reporter."2
Uncle Remus, the black teller of the tales, is a
white man's creation. He represents what one critic has
called the "Southern myth: the old-fashioned,
unadulterated negro who is still dear to the heart of
the South," who fulfills all the requirements of the
"loyal family retainer" (Hemenway 18). Remus, a former
slave and present handyman on "Mars Johji" and "Miss
Sally's" plantation, unfolds "the mysteries of
plantation lore" night after night to the family's young
son (Harris, Introduction, Uncle Remus: His Songs and
Sayings 47).3 In the Introduction which accompanied the
initial publication in 1880 of Harris's first book,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Savinas, we already note the
ambiguous references which inform the work as a whole.
Harris assures his readers that the old negro "has
316
nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of
slavery . . . and . . . has all the prejudices of caste
. . . that were the natural results of the system"
(Introduction 4 6-47). Is Harris saying that Remus
endorses the "prejudices" of the Southern caste system
or he has been victimized by it?
The African-American animal stories which |
f
i
constitute the Remus repertoire belong to the satiric r
genre of beast fable, a variety of allegory. As such, j
they display an "outlaw" or "secret code" of animal I
I
behaviors emblematic of deceit, evasion, and "ruthless i
self-interest" (Bone 134), all survival characteristics >
of a marginal culture. Brer Rabbit, the tales' black •
I
culture hero, a clever trickster, is the "brier-patch '
representative of a people living by their wits" j
(Hemenway 9).
It was Harris's own "sentimental attachment to a
plantation memory" (Hemenway 8) which fostered his
collection of the tales endemic to black culture and
"shaped by a long line of oral artists" (Hemenway 9).
Harris's recording method varied. He wrote some
narratives down from recollection, others he obtained by
going up to groups of blacks and asking them if they
knew any "Brer Rabbit" stories. He admitted later that 1
j
there were some problems with this approach: "Curiously j
enough, I have found few negroes who will acknowledge to
a stranger that they know anything of these legends"
(Harris, Introduction, Uncle Remus: His Songs and
Savings 45).
Whatever the restraints in the field situation,
scholars are generally agreed that Harris "did not in
any significant way tamper with the stories themselves"
(Hemenway 23); that is, the oral material of the tales
is genuine folklore, not literary artifice. In fact, it
is claimed, Harris's rendering is so meticulous that
even gestures are captured in print (Brookes 50). Early
reviewers felt indeed that the book graphically
portrayed "genuine Negro life in the South" (Hemenway
14), due in no small part to "the very authenticity of
Harris's dialect" (Hemenway 17). Truly, another critic
declared, "the only part of the stories really created
by Harris is Uncle Remus himself" (Hemenway 16), their
medium. These are provisional assessments, however,
since Harris creates their context also.4
In the chronicle of their publication, as I have
noted, the narratives* bases in an historical black
culture have not been at issue. The stories themselves,
on the other hand, have generated considerable
disagreement in spite of (or perhaps because of)
Harris's claims that they reflect "a new and by no means
318
unattractive phase of negro character" ("Introduction"
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Savings 40) presented in what j
critics excoriate as a "racial utopia" (Bickley, !
I
Critical Essays xxi) in the "Edenic world of the old J
plantation" (Hemenway 19). Some of this controversy
revolves around Harris's own intent, conscious or not,
the "considerable confusion" surrounding his narrator,
Remus, and "what he means" (Hemenway 8), and finally,
the degree to which the tales derive from aboriginal
African lore, and to what extent they embody the
African-American slave experience (Bickley, Critical j
<
Essays xxi). The resolutions to these questions in sum j
or in part lie in a closer scrutiny of their |
I
constituents, namely the Harris "persona," the j
i
characters, the narratives, and their contexts. '
Many scholars have remarked on the contradictions J
i
within Harris's own personality as evidence for the
disparities informing the Remus stories. Harris has
been described as "pathologically shy and self-
j
effacing," a chronic stutterer;* He even pictures J
\
himself as "'morbidly sensitive,'" a "'cornfield |
journalist'" whose role vis-a-vis the Remus tales was j
I
that of "'mere compiler'" (quoted in Hemenway 9-10). In
a revealing letter to his daughter, however (which
Freudian critics have made much of), he concludes that
319
"all of us have two entities or personalities." When he
writes, he tells her, "the other fellow" in him "takes
charge" (Hemenway 11). Harris was significantly at ease
in black company with whom he overcame his shyness as
they swapped stories. j
Harris's sense of apartness may have had its j
i
beginnings in his somewhat unconventional childhood. He I
was born and grew up in rural Eatonton, Georgia, the
illegitimate son of an Irish day laborer who deserted
his family shortly after his son's birth. Harris was
raised by his mother, whose name he was given.
According to R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., neo-Freudian
analysis "stresses Harris's imagined rejection by his
!
father, and the profound depression and sense of I
inferiority that this and other causes produced"
i
(Introduction, Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris
xxi). As a result of this kind of assessment, there has
been much speculation regarding the degree to which
Harris himself is represented in the Remus canon. Some
commentators have contended that Uncle Remus is Harris's
alter-ego— "'dictatorial, overbearing, and quarrelsome'"
I
as Harris describes him (quoted in Brookes 49).
There is telling evidence that Remus is indeed
Harris's "double," perhaps best realized in the idea
that whites may be only "blanched" Negroes. As one of
320
Harris's characters explains, "'Study a nigger right
close, and you'll ketch a glimpse of how white folks
would look and do without their trimmin's'" (quoted in
Wolfe 538). Robert Hemenway concurs. "By donning the
black mask of Uncle Remus," he says, "Harris liberated a
part of himself" (17).
Another view of the nebulous relationship between j
the character and his creator offers the prospect that J
the benevolent plantation darky who beams "kindly" on j
1
the little white boy who rests against him is a
substitute father (55). For the illusion prevailed in
Harris's generation that "the human relationships of the
peculiar institution had been close and mutually
supporting" (Hemenway 21). Harris himself speaks of the
"'confidence and affection that had always existed
between the white and colored races in the South'"
(quoted in Hemenway 21) .
The problem goes beyond the personal, however, as
fascinating to conjecture as that is, and as crucial to i
the tales. For "by writing the white South and its
Negro talespinners into the stories, [Harris] also wrote
in its unfaced paradoxes" (531), "a monument to [its]
ambivalence" (539) declares Bernard Wolfe in "Uncle
Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit." Far from being
simply, in Harris's words "'the roaring comedy of animal
. 1
321
life'" (quoted in Wolfe 528), the oral content of the
tales is essentially subversive and anti-establishment.
It depicts a world of "unrelieved hostility” (Hemenway
2 6) in which not even the innocent survive, a world
i
where "irrational violence can be invoked at any moment" |
►
(Hemenway 28).
j According to Robert Bone, the tales represent the
i
| blacks' attempt to "define themselves" against an
i
i oppressive culture "through the art of storytelling"
(132). In this context, the tales serve three
functions: 1) they provide glimpses of the slave's
"world view"; 2) they provide a "'psychic drainage
system'" for a people's suffering (Wolfe, as quoted); 3) j
i
and they penetrate "the deepest psychic meaning" of the '
African-American experience (Hemenway 24). In a later
j
work, Nights with Uncle Remus f Remus hints at their i
import when he tells the little boy, "'Well, I tell you
dis, ef deze yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun, en giggle,
giggle, giggle, I let you know I'd a-done drapt um long
ago'" (quoted in Hemenway 25). The world of Brer
l
Rabbit, in short, is "an unmistakable projection of the
black imagination." Bone concludes that its "central
emotion is hostility towards the powerful and strong.
[The characters'] moral code is that of an oppressed
322
people; their hidden motives are such as no white man
could entertain" (133).
Harris may have been unaware that the tales were
ripe for political interpretation when he rather naively
suggests in his Introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs
and Savings that they could be "allegorical."5 ]
Nevertheless, he inadvertently put his finger on the j
issues when he recognized that "it needs no scientific !
investigation to show why he [the Negro] selects as his j
hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and !
9 I
brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the i
i
wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but j
helplessness ..." (44). ,
[
I
In depicting the rabbit as "helpless," Harris
reflects traditional Christian iconography wherein the (
t
rabbit is indeed the "essence of meekness and innocence" '
i
|
(Wolfe 534), a timid and fearful creature. The Brer i
Rabbit stories themselves, however, are probably more
faithful to the animal's proper nature, for according to
one scholar of fantasy fiction, "rabbits are in fact
cunning, resourceful, courageous, and fierce" (Swinfen
18). Thus blacks could identify with Brer Rabbit, whose
"exploits . . . overturned the neat hierarchy of the
world in which he was forced to live" (Hemenway 25).
32 3
One early review from across the seas astutely
recognized the tales for what they were. In reality,
the anonymous critic wrote, the tales "'illustrate the
habits of cunning, deceit, and dishonesty, and the
delight in them'" in which blacks were '"steeped,and
the infinite gullibility1" as well of the so-called
I "1 stronger1" race (Bickley, Critical Essays 6). Bernard i
i ;
| Wolfe's evidence supports this view. In noting the |
! . . . :
: incidence of carnage and gratuitous death m the i
I
folktales, he remarks that "all the Strong die violent j
S
deaths at the hands of the Weak" (529). He continues,
i
I
"Brer Rabbit sees all forms of etiquette as hypocritical
and absurd. Creatures meet, address each other with
unctuous politeness, inquire after each other's |
families, pass the time of day with oily cliches— and '
I
all the while they are plotting to humiliate, rob, and j
|
assassinate each other" (530).
The Rabbit embodies the mythological archetype of j
the "animal-man" (Burland 63), whose role as trickster j
f
"seems to be that of projecting the insufficiencies of
man in his universe onto a smaller creature who, in
besting his larger adversaries, permits the
satisfactions of an obvious identification to those who
recount or listen" to tales in which he is a culture
figure (Leach 1123). In Jungian psychology, the
324
trickster represents the "principle of uncertainty"
(Burland 63) or disorder. In at least one African
mythological system, he symbolizes the "philosophical
principle of accident— the way out— in a world where
fate is predetermined" (Leach 1123-24).
In human terms the trickster denotes instinctive
actions "not approved by the conscious mind" (Burland
63). Through him, we may experience what is not
permitted. His asocial being and boundary-shattering
behaviors help to resolve psychological tensions. Jung
regards the trickster as a "savior figure," for through
our identification with him and his antics, our own
repressed consciousness is released (Jung 135). In the
Remus tales, he is a character in an anti-pastoral and
"pathological" animal world (Bone 138), framed in a
human and pastoral tableau.
Harris was convinced that "these curious myth-
stories" had their origin in Africa (Introduction, Uncle
Remus 44-45). If he did indeed sense the tales'
threatening aspects, that belief would certainly relieve
any anxieties they aroused. As it turns out, over half
of the 22 0 tales in the Remus oeuvre are of African
derivation but indigenous in the slave communities of
America (Hemenway 24). In fact, Robert Hemenway notes,
"virtually every single Brer Rabbit tale written down by
325
Harris" was known in African-American folklore for at
I
least 150 years prior to 1880 (9) .
Hemenway's contention that "the prior existence of J
the rabbit as African trickster proves that the tales j
originally were not racially coded for allegorical i
i
interpretation" (25) , while feasible, presents certain
obstacles. The Remus tales may conceivably be !
i
i adaptations of African counterparts, or at least of some
of their features.6 African tricksters are many and
i
varied, however, and the tribal lore in question
involves the hare as trickster rather than a rabbit, a |
i
i
significant deviation, because the hare has different
physiological attributes. Furthermore, in some African :
tales he is depicted as a good pupil whose socialization i
is a paradigm for man's relation to tribal culture
i
(Lindfors passim). If Brer Rabbit is the African-
i
American equivalent of this figure, then he reverses j
I
both its role and purpose. I would also add that if the j
world presented in the tales is confined to the slave j
t
community itself, then the wholesale destruction they j
j
depict is not in keeping with a traditional African I
i
emphasis on community stability. Brer Rabbit profanes i
the very ethic of communal accord. It stands to reason
that the African-American slave population would hardly
■
imprint a concept of community in narrative which
326
mirrored their own, and limn it as torn asunder by
violence, nor is it plausible that they would celebrate
a focal character responsible for that destruction. In
addition, critics have cited other characters as having
parallels in white culture. Examples are Brer Fox, who
Wolfe contends is not the familiar European "Renard,"
but the white man (53 4) , and ' ’Miss Meadows and de gals" i
who Hemenway argues exemplify "the established order of
the white world" whose sexual and racial taboos Brer |
I
I
Rabbit transgresses (28-29). I
Aside from these objections, I would also add that j
I
even if the Brer Rabbit tales are indeed a faithful |
i
translation of their African complement, the blatant |
references to the oppressive New World slave system, its !
subversion as depicted in rebellious acts, and the
general devaluation of white social hierarchies are
signs of an insurgent recoding. These episodes, which
throw into high relief the hostile nature of race
relations in the plantation milieu of the American
South, can have no significance for African peoples. As
convincing as such external evidence may appear when set
against Harris's presentation of the tales, the
discrepancy between what he contends they represent and
the world they actually reveal is nowhere more visible
than within the written texts themselves.
327
The Uncle Remus stories are theoretically addressed
to a white audience (Hemenway 17). In contrast to the
black dialect which informs it, some parts of the text
are in standard English, namely in the introductory
frame, in interpolative material at the frame
"boundaries" between the initial frame setting and
embedded text, and occasionally in the endings. To
Robert Hemenway, the use of standard English in these
framing devices suggests by rhetorical contrast that
black language is "colorful but ignorant," and that
blacks are "picturesque but intellectually limited"
(22). There are other approaches to such structures,
however, which I will point out when I consider the
framing text itself, the literary text superimposed on
the tales.
The potential for ambiguity hitherto glimpsed in
the Remus canon is implicit in the very language of the
oral materials at its core, the anarchic force which
threatens to burst its textual restraints. Running
counter to the sentient, almost reactionary written mode
is an estranged subtext, a form which Jacques Lacan
correlates with unconscious materials— "visible at
certain 'symptomatic' points of ambiguity, evasion or
overemphasis" (quoted in Eagleton 178). For Robert
Bone, these disjunctions occur "the moment that we move
328
from the folktale to its narrative frame" and "enter a
fictive world entirely of the white man's making" (133).
Such dissociations or hermeneutic gaps are significant
because they disclose uncertainty in a text; they attest
to withheld information. According to some
interpretations, voids of this kind signal an unreliable
narrator whose faults primarily have to do with his
"limited knowledge, his personal involvement, and his
problematic value-scheme" (Rimmon-Kenan 100). The
younger the interpreter, moreover, the more limited his
understanding.
There are fundamentally three "interpreters" in the
Remus stories— Harris, the little boy, and Remus. Each
theoretically "controls" a different segment of the
story. The narrative "frame," the setting in which the
stories are embedded, consists of the title, the
beginning in which an omniscient narrator appears (for
our purposes, Harris, and in some cases, Remus), and the
interpolations of the child or the omniscient narrator.
The oral texts, the animal tales themselves, and
significantly the ends of stories, are attributive to
Remus and do not appear to be integrated with the
initial framing apparatus, although this is a debatable
issue, since Remus, is, of course, Harris's invention.
Each of these components, when analyzed, yield seemingly
329
separate orientations, yet we must remember the puzzling
fact that each "persona," for all intents and purposes,
is Harris's.
The stories usually begin, as previously noted, in
standard English discourse which details the setting or
locus from which the ensuing narratives depart. Thus
"Why Mr. Possum Loves Peace" opens: "'One night,' said
Uncle Remus— taking Miss Sally's little boy on his knee
and stroking the child's hair thoughtfully and
caressingly— " (59). And the very first story in the
canon, "Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,"
commences: "One evening recently, the lady whom Uncle
Remus calls 'Miss Sally' missed her little seven-year-
old. Making search for him through the house and
through the yard, she heard the sound of voices in the
old man's cabin, and, looking through the window, saw
the child sitting by Uncle Remus" (55) . The framed
beginning then, whether initiated by Harris as
omniscient author, or Remus as narrator, sets up reader
expectations for the story, and denotes the inception of
the narrative plot or event. Aside from the troubling
portrayal of a benevolent ex-slave as father figure,
significant textual inconsistencies, although
occasionally resonant, are not generally located here.
330
The import of the oral subtexts and Harris's
presentation of a gracious black/white world begin to
collide in the interpolative text at the frame junctions
between oral narrations, some of which is Harris's
description. Authorial intrusions ask the reader to
revere the "simple, serious face of the venerable old
darkey . . . " (90), "a modern Aesop," who holds within
memory "a strange past" over which he throws "the veil
of fable" (Complete Tales 178). Occasionally authorial
directive and oral material confront each other with
baffling results, as in this fragment: Once Uncle Remus
was singing "a curiously plaintive song— a senseless
affair so far as the words were concerned"; the song:
"'Han' me down my walkin' cane (Hey my Lily! go down de
road!')." The authorial voice continues: "The quick ear
of Uncle Remus, however, had detected the presence of
the little boy, and he allowed his song to run into a
recitation of nonsense .... All of this, rattled off
at a rapid rate with apparent seriousness, was
calculated to puzzle the little boy" (Complete Tales
133). What's going on here? Is "go down de road" a
possible secret message embedded in black oral
narratives and meant only for the ears of slaves, a
metaphorical "escape"? Is this why "Remus" allows his
song to run into "nonsense"? It is obviously necessary
331
here to distinguish between the original oral materials,
the language of the song, and the boy's overhearing of
it in the surrounding context which may be part of
Harris's framing device. In any event, such an episode
throws possible light on black reluctance to provide
Harris with folktales (Introduction, Uncle Remus 45).
It is also likely that Harris is unconsciously imitating i
black circumspection in the presence of whites. {
Other interposed commentary is relegated to the !
little boy, in the "anxious position of auditor" ("Mr.
Terrapin Appears upon the Scene" 80). Interestingly,
these insertions differ from the descriptive uses of the
interpolative which Harris reserves for himself as the
omniscient authorial voice. The little boy's
interruptions of the narrative serve several important
purposes. He may ask a question as a point of
clarification, or one which impels the narrative forward
because it recoups a thread which has been momentarily
dropped; or he may make an observation on the events
(usually in the form of speculation or protest).
Sometimes he probes too far, and is rebuffed by his
"venerable patron."
One such incident occurs in the Tar-Baby story.
"'Did the fox eat the rabbit?' asked the little boy
332
. . . . 1Dat's all de fur de tale goes,' replied the old
man. 'He mout, en den again he mountent. Some say Jedge
B'ar come 'long en loosed 'im— Some say he didn't
. . . (59). And in "Brother Bear and the Honey
Orchard," the boy inquires: "'Who unfastened Brother
Bear?' 'Eh-eh, honey!' exclaimed Uncle Remus. 'You
pushes yo' inquirements too fur. Dat what's in de tale
I kin tell you; dat what ain't you'll hatter figger out
fer you'se'f"' (Complete Tales 488). Again we read,
"'You don't wanter push old Brer Rabbit too close!'
i
[Uncle Remus] replied significantly. 'He mighty |
tenderfooted creetur, en de mo' w'at you push 'im, de j
furder he lef' you!'" (Complete Tales 126). At times, j
when his authority is questioned, the old man seems )
t
downright testy. In "A Plantation Witch" the little boy j
interrupts Remus: "'Papa says there ain't any witches.'"
To which Remus responds, "'Mars John ain't live long ez
I is'" (143).
The problem central to the entire Remus canon,
however, remains my concern here; that is, are Remus's
responses part of the original oral lore, or are they
part of Harris's framing text? But I have said that
Remus controls the significant sections of the tales.
Within the oral narrative itself, this includes remarks
of particular import, but the endings are of paramount
333
interest. In "How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr.
Fox," Brer Rabbit escapes being murdered when he pleads
with the fox to throw him into a brier-patch. When the
fox does so, Brer Rabbit eludes his captor, crying,
"'Bred en bawn in a brier-patch!' en wid dat he skip
out" (64). The rabbit, it seems, cannot be taken on his
home-ground. In fact, he is frequently pictured as
invincible and beyond constraints. As "Uncle Remus
Initiates the Little Boy" ends: "'and wid dat Brer
Rabbit gallop off home. En Brer Fox ain't never kotch
'im yet, en w'at's mo,' honey, he ain't gwineter'" (57).
And in "Mr. Fox Is Again Victimized," Brer Rabbit
tells "Miss Meadows and de gals": "'Ladies, Brer Fox wuz
my daddy's ridin' hoss fer thirty year; maybe mo,' but
thirty year dat I knows 'un,'sezee" (68). And from the
same tale, "'When hat come time fer Brer Rabbit fer to
be gwine, en he tellum all good-by, he strut out to de
hoss-rack same's ef he wuz de king er de patter-rollers,
en den he mount Brer Fox en ride off'" (71). What
revolutionary attitudes are invoked here— a rabbit, a
black folk hero who rides a fox, symbol of the white
establishment, and who moreover is "king" of white
plantation patrols!
Even more startling is the statement in "How Mr.
Rabbit Succeeded in Raising a Dust," which concerns a
courting contest in which one of the animals "'ud git de
pick er de gals.*" Brer Rabbit practices his etiquette
by making "'a bow ter de Buzzard en den ter de Crow;
takes a limber-toe gemmum fer ter jump Jim Crow!
(140). Needless to say, Brer Rabbit does have his "pick
er de gals,"— as Bernard Wolfe has noted, by "jumping
Jim Crow," in violation of the South's sacred
miscegenation and segregation laws (530).
What else does Rabbit tell us? When the Fox goes to
the bottom of a well in a bucket, he passes Rabbit on
his way up, singing, "'For dis de way de worril goes,
some goes up en some goes down" ("Old Mr. Rabbit, He's a
Good Fisherman" 98). Bernard Wolfe comments that this
is a "theme song" of the stories. But, who, he asks,
sings it? "The Rabbit is a creation of Uncle Remus's
people; is it then. Uncle Remus singing? But Uncle Remus
is a creation of Joel Chandler Harris . . . " (531).
Because of discrepancies like these, we cannot take at
face value Harris's comment, that "'not one [tale] nor
any part of one is an invention of mine'" (quoted in
Hemenway 17).
Then there is Remus's "new account of the origin of
races" in "Why the Negro is Black," an "earnest recital
of a piece of unwritten history that must prove
interesting to ethnologists," Harris superciliously
335
remarks. Remus's version even makes the little boy
laugh— he thinks it one of the old man's jokes— "but the
youngster was never more mistaken. The old man was
serious" (150). And how does this story begin?
"'Niggers is niggers now, but de time wuz w'en we 'uz
all niggers tergedder'" (151). Blackface, it seems,
washes off. In effect, there is much that is ominous in
these seemingly simple tales. Is the rabbit figure more
than he appears? Those who shoot rabbits, Uncle Remus
tells the little boy, "'come ter no good een'" (Complete
Tales 240). Brer Rabbit is indeed, a "'monstus soon
beas'" (62). !
What of the future? Uncle Remus is evasive on this j
i
point. In the last story in Uncle Remus: His Songs and |
j
Savings. "The Sad Fate of Mr. Fox," he tells the boy,
I
"'Don't push me too close, honey. I don't wanter tell j
you no stories. Some say dat Brer Rabbit married old
Miss Fox, en some say not. Some tells one tale en some
tells nudder; some say dat fum dat time forrer'd de
Rabbits en de Foxes make frien's en stay so; some say
dey kep on quollin.' There was a long pause ..."
(155) .
The culminations of these tales are in themselves
open-ended questions. Far from closing their frame
structures, they leave them dangling, either by failing
to return to the frame situation presented, in the
beginning, leaving questions unanswered, or hedging by
presenting uncertain alternatives. In "Mr. Fox and the
Deceitful Frogs," for example, the fox barely escapes
being drowned. He has been lured by his own reflection
into a pond because "'Dar you'll fine yo' brudderi'"
When the little boy inquires anxiously if the fox has
drowned, Uncle Remus answers "with an air of cautious
reserve," "'He wern't zackly drowndid, honey. He did
manage fer ter scramble out, but a little mo' en de Mud
Terkle would er got 'im, en den he'd er bin made hash un
worril widout een'" (94).
These cautionary replies signal the alert reader
that all is not well in the world of Uncle Remus. We
are uneasy and uncomfortable. Like Brer Fox when he is
ridden by Brer Rabbit, we try to fling him off— but, as
Uncle Remus admonishes us concerning the fox, "'he might
ez well er rastle wid his own shadder'" (72). Uncle
Remus, Brer Rabbit— they are our shadows to whom we are
inextricably bound in history. The little boy's
questions represent our own misgivings. He may be
Harris as "child" in a loving "father's" arms, but he is
also a surrogate for the reader; his childish questions
provoke answers which evade the understanding. Perhaps
as auditor he senses the smoldering animus beneath the
337
surface of the stories told for his entertainment, or
that the atmosphere in which he finds himself is not
really "benign" at all, nor even secure. It is a world
in which everything seems reversed, including the
relationship of master and slave.7
Readers of these stories are left, then, with a
pervasive feeling of unrest. Like the boy, we dare not
i
explore further the nightmare world beneath the tales' f
i
surface. We have been "initiated" all right. The black ,
"poetic imagination," Harris tells us, suggests "a i
certain picturesque sensitiveness— a curious exaltation |
of mind and temperament not to be defined by words" |
j
(Introduction, Uncle Remus 40). Harris was mistaken. j
Ultimately, the black mentality in these stories is i
i
revealed by the oral rhetoric of a covert "subtext," j
which continually undermines the implications of the !
I
surrounding frame text in which it is contained. We may j
prefer not to confront this phenomenon directly. For to |
*
do so is to recognize ourselves indeed in the title of j
the last tale, "The Sad Fate of Mr. Fox."
The Remus tales are a veritable battleground upon
which the attested oral materials of a black culture
struggle against a literary frame whose language encodes
white values. There are really four, and possibly five
texts in the Uncle Remus canon: Harris's literary frame
and the white cultural biases in the subtext it
supports, the material of black folklore in the oral
tales at the core of the Remus stories, with their
covert subtext, and a possible fifth text, a combination
of all of these, read and received as a whole text whose
themes are overtly antithetical. As a result of these
oppositions on every level, we ingest, as readers, an
oral text which continually threatens to subvert, or
"overthrow," the concepts being promoted within its
literary frame.
The more serious problem for scholars, however, is
posed by Harris's use of the framing structure. Of
course, the integrity of the oral folk materials would
seem to be violated by the encroachment of the literary
text wherever the two converge. In Robert Georges'
words, the frame "manipulates" the oral text, or tries
to contain it.8 We really have two disparate media
here.
The scholar's recourse at first suggests several
projects. These would certainly involve separating
Harris from his various personae, as Wolfe's work
implies, but at the same time the rescue of a genuine
body of black folktales, unique perhaps in American
folklore, from their submersion in the literature of an
inhospitable culture. Such procedures would undoubtedly
339
call into question the prevailing impression noted above
that Harris has not "tampered" with the tale material.
Since these are not feasible solutions, for the reasons
given earlier, we must turn our attention to other
issues.
Our literary enterprise then becomes the larger one
of framing structures in general, their use in a
literary context, and their distortion of the texts they
surround. The frame intervenes, as it were, and as a
result the listener/reader experiences one text through
the filtering medium of another which may ultimately
succeed in reinterpreting the core material or at the
very least condition our response to it. Why, then,
does an "author" deem it necessary to use a frame? j
Though a frame structure orients us, it may also
physically distance potentially volatile materials, to
place unsettling subject matter at a remove. In
Harris's case, or in like cultural encounters, the
recorder may feel uncomfortable with his copy and seek
to make it palatable to a target audience which might
find it otherwise disquieting. In terms of more global
social ends, the subjects of frame narratives are
encapsulated in that narrative form precisely because
they are often symptomatic of attempts to breach social
interdictions.
340
The frame device, in oral or literary context,
always forces us to see the tale it encloses in
juxtaposition to it, and subsequently to recognize the
correspondence which exists between the tale and its
narrator, or conversely, the divergence. The value of
Harris's Uncle Remus stories is that they provide a rare
model of a framed narrative which the black tale tellers
did not themselves supply, and so we have one culture
literally grafted upon another. As such, the stories
offer us the exceptional opportunity to explore the
convoluted relationship between two socially opposed
cultural groups. In the sense that he contributes to
their tissue of effects, Harris is the co-author of the
Uncle Remus tales.
Beyond these suggestions, the related question
which has arisen in my study of the Harris canon
pertains to the whole notion of "framing" itself.
Though it is a commonplace, as I have argued, to refer
to frame narrative as a tale within a tale, or as the
setting for a group of tales such as the Decameron. the
idea of an identifiable schemata is troublesome. The
challenge then becomes, to what extent can we
legitimately talk about the frame as an intact entity?
When frame boundaries are blurred, as they are in the
Remus tales, does the frame structure implode upon
341
itself? If this is indeed the case, then we have the
condition I would like to call intratextualitv. At such
moments, when interpolated material overruns the nominal
frame structure, I suggest that the touted frame
i
boundary is not a distinct concept- Parts of it may
indeed be visible— initiating motifs, for instance— but
the settings and circumstances with which the narrative
began have shifted. Chaucer's "links" in the Canterbury
Tales are a famous example. These are revelatory in
their own right, as scholars have pointed out, serving |
i
much as a frame does to orient or position, or
conversely, to compromise the reader's perspective. 1
Could we legitimately consider them framing devices
i
also? Whatever our approach to this protean subject, the j
I
presence of frame mechanisms, however they are
encountered in narrative, warns us to proceed with
caution in unraveling their relationship to the texts on
which they verge. Frame "breaks" and boundary issues
are related phenomena, meant to call attention to the
fallaciousness of a gap between "reality" and
"illusion"; they challenge the chimera of the frame’s
ontological status. In terms of the cooperative
principle on which my model of textual poetics is
founded, these moves are indispensable to the whole
342
performative network of artful effects through which the
text impresses its substance on the reader.
Because of the divisive nature of their tensions,
the Uncle Remus texts present some formidable obstacles
to a concordant reading, at first appearing to defy the
prospect that a framed text can be received as one in
which exchange systems of complementary value are |
inscribed. To be sure, the oral texts are the legacies |
i
of white power; in essence they are colonized texts. A
reading which would simply co-opt them for the
subordinate position in a disproportionate colonial j
dynamic would seriously compromise the gains of a !
balanced approach. Can these stories be read, not as
"hybrid" or collaborative texts often deprecated as
sullied admixtures which besmirch a bona fide folk art, i
but as engaging studies of power relations in a select
historical milieu? After all, the white culture which
has expropriated the black art depicted here has also
made it manifest, to our advantage. By reading so as to
shift the loci of hegemonic cultural power exhibited in
the text, that is, passages which imply a certain
authorization of meaning dignified by white patronage,
to the subsumed focus, Harris's enabling the stories'
access by a white audience, we can shape the more
counterbalanced viewpoint this study advocates.
343
Harris's appropriation of the stories can be
registered as yet another triumph of an aggressor over
an "inferior" adversary who sustains loss in
consequence, the obverse of Brer Rabbit's own victory
over his victims. A reading of this sort condones a
view of the text's narratives as inimical; the reader
takes away an impression of unresolvable enmity. On the
other hand, we can also accept Harris's curiosity and
investment in these stories as a goodwill gesture, even
as indicative of a latent desire for racial bonding,
signified in an avuncular Remus and his white pupil.
One might argue that the Remus figure is the white ideal
of race relations; nevertheless, equivocal as Remus is,
Harris's (perhaps) unconscious juxtaposition of white
and black cultural values in the same textual space
speaks to an obsession, one which conceivably explains
the merger and confusion of racial personae in which a
black character impersonates a white, or is it the other
way around? (Harris has even elevated the black text—
its mass dominates textual space).
Viewed in this way, the Remus text offers the
reader a real boon. The textual medium holds in
suspension power relations suggestive of social
upheaval, which resist each other and face off, to the
reader's benefit. To borrow a metaphor from H&l&ne
344
Cixous, this "intersection of textual histories" results
t
in a process of becoming (882), but one which
figuratively extends beyond a work's dynamics to a
j
percipient reader.9 From an exemplary viewpoint, the j
knowledge that texts like the Uncle Remus canon involve !
the testimony of contending social groups should prime
*
I
readers to proceed with care. Ideally, readings of such I
texts are tempered first of all by a realization that
they are sites for warring values. As Homi K. Bhabha
writes,
The transgressive, invasive structure of
the black 'national' text, which thrives
on rhetorical strategies of hybridity,
deformation, masking, and inversion, is
developed through an extended analogy
with the guerilla warfare that became a
way of life for the maroon communities
of runaway slaves and fugitives who
lived dangerously, and insubordinately,
'on the frontiers or margins of all
American promise, profit and modes of
production.' From this liminal, minority
position where, as Foucault would say,
the relations of discourse are of the
nature of warfare, emerges the force of
the people of an Afro-American nation
.... (296)
Getting beyond this basic realization, however,
necessitates a return to my composite model. The Remus
works satisfy its requirements. At the phenomenal
level, the conditions for ritual are met. The
contemporary reader sensitive to the stories' display of
outmoded social mores will hardly fail to credit the
345
rancor which belies their diverting surface. The
ritualized end is seen in the negotiation of tensions
and ultimate displacement of extant cultural power
systems at the source of hostilities, denoted in the
symbolically opposed roles of the slave Remus and "Miss
Sally's" little boy, representative of the white
establishment. The operations of masked figures, not
only of Remus as both white author and black narrator
but of his trickster counterpart Brer Rabbit, finally
generate a rhetorical matrix from which the politically
responsive reader may extract a system of communal
values based on joint respect and commensurate with an
enlightened purpose.
The Remus canon demonstrates other framing
properties to which I have called attention. As befits
our discussion of film methodologies, the Remus works,
like most framed texts, accomplish filmic effects when
they are perceived as configured by montage patterns
with all the masquerading attributes of trucage, here
instantiated on the rhetorical plane.
At the second level of my three-tiered model, the
social, the Remus canon also conforms. One sign of the
enframing text's control is its governance of
omnipresent temporal modes. As narrator, Remus
successfully links the exalted African mythological past
346
and its sacral portent to the degraded present, while
alluding in his vatic role to the indeterminate future
(inscribed in the text as his open-ended remarks and the
animal stories themselves which deny closure by hinting
at the possibility of retribution in an allegorical
return of events).10 The boy serves as the initiate
audience generally found in framed texts.
It is finally at the rhetorical level, however,
that we discover a reading which synthesizes two
contrary views of the Remus texts. Allowing Burke’s
theory of "identification" to supersede our impressions
of a textual field riven by animosities, and by
implementing Bakhtin's multivocal model, we engage
decentered, dialogical rather than oppositional textual
domains. This means recognizing not only the values
inscribed by the dominant white discourse in the text's
standard English passages, but also the discourse of the
minority, which "sets the act of emergence in the
antagonistic in-between of image and sign, the
„ accumulative and the adjunct, presence and proxy"
(Bhabha 307).1 1 In this manner we recover an
interpretation which licenses competing cultural centers
of meaning, but which moves us beyond the antagonisms of
the historical past to a more utopian future and the
347
hope that races traditionally enemies might one day
coexist in peace, harmony, and mutual understanding.
At the same time, readers should avoid an easy
sentimentality. Doing so requires that they alone are
responsible for the conversion of opposing values which
would reconcile antithetical social perspectives on a
higher plane of understanding. Readers accomplish this,
not by minimizing the importance of one dimension or
another, but by arriving at a consciousness of the
disputing ethics which charge textual energies,
therefore transcending all social positions inscribed in
the text. The educational process which transpires from
these textual dynamics holds out the tantalizing promise
that brotherhood may yet be an achievable ideal. The
relationship between Uncle Remus and "Miss Sally's
little boy" can be looked upon as an instructive one of
mentor and pupil. Whether he realizes it or not, the
child/reader is in a fortunate position. He is
receiving an intercultural perspective disguised as
folklore. In this sense, a text so constituted models
intercultural communication.
Bracketing, hierarchical frame theories would
prevent these relations from being realized as
reciprocal or as having bilateral impact. For one
thing, the visual mode upon which theories of bracketing
348
frames depend reifies the very stereotypes to which
frame constructions call attention. The concept of a
bracketing mode, as we have seen, lends itself to the
"prototypical," and so the reader's own stereotypical
notions, based on mental "images," are reinforced by
constructing a text which indulges this disposition.
Another difficulty with bracketing strategies, as I have
remarked, is their preference for rank order and linear
arrangement. Under bracketing auspices, Remus's
sponsorship of the tales controls their reception and
interpretation. In acting as both Harris's duplicitous
double and mouthpiece, Remus conveys white uneasiness
with the tales' ominous import. He functions thus to
stave off reader anxiety. By inserting himself between
the reader's direct confrontation with the tales'
implications (represented by and filtered through the
little boy), and our avoidance of them, he obstructs the
processing of political awareness. However, refusing to
bracket allows the reader to entertain both frame
presentation and interior narrative in an integral
relation which reveals the nature of their kinship and
foundation in a common genealogy. Even if a bracketing
theory were to be adhered to, we still could not pretend
the narrative is a seamless text, nor could a theory of
this kind account for the amalgamation of commentary and
349
narrative which follows from the incursion of rhetorical
discourse in the narrative interstices.
As I said in the chapter opening, the Uncle Remus
canon is a propitious choice to illustrate my composite
model. I have purposely bypassed self-conscious, self
reflexive modern or post-modern framed texts because
they intentionally subvert conventional framing
artifice, and are bound to have a calculated rather than
the naturalized irony which emanates from the often
involuntary exchanges in the production economies of
traditional framed texts.12 The thematics of
traditional texts are clearly fertile ground for the
varieties of semantic play acclaimed by
poststructuralist poetics theory. Chapter 5 treats the
subject of a reconstructed reading ethic based on this
assumption.
350
1. An example of the transference of stereotypical
presumptions to black characters is seen in early
commentary on Harris's work. Seymour L. Gross writes
that John H. Nelson's The Negro Character in American
Literature (1926),
one of the earliest full-scale
treatments of the subject, organizes
itself critically around such various
characterological assumptions as the
Negro's 'irrepressible spirits, his
complete absorption in the present
moment, his whimsicality, his
irresponsibility, hi intense
superstition, his freedom from
resentment.' It follows for Nelson,
then, that the 'whole range of Negro
character' can be revealed in one
twenty-six-line sketch by Joel Chandler
Harris of Br'er Fox and Br'er Mud
Turtle. (Introduction, Images of the
Negro in American Literature 5-6).
In 1916, Benjamin Brawley, author of literary and
social histories of the Negro, delegated Remus and
"Uncle Tom" to the same category— "'embalmed vanishing
types'" (quoted in Gross 8). For these reasons,
commentators on black literature in the early part of
the century scorned the "genial buffoons" of white
literati like Harris (Emanuel and Gross, Introduction to
"Early Literature" 3). As Emanuel and Gross tell us,
We see a new Negro emerge in the 192 0's-
-a fully human Negro and not a
refraction of the white author's
sensibility, a character rather than a
caricature .... The Negro of
nineteenth-century literature was a
comic, essentially idealistic Negro
associated with the fiction of the
Southern plantation; few writers
conceived of a Negro who differed from
the humorous or pathetic type.
(Introduction, "The Negro Awakening" 66)
2. Joel Chandler Harris, Introduction ms., Uncle Remus
and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), Joel
Chandler Harris Collection, Emory University, Atlanta,
Folder 4, Box 12, n.pag.). His other writings reveal
Harris's tendency to evade issues of veracity. In his
351
"Introductory Note" to On the Plantation: A Story of a
Georgia Bov's Adventures during the War (New York: D.
Appleton, 1892), for example, he writes, "That which is
fiction pure and simple in these pages bears to me the
stamp of truth, and that which is true reads like a
clumsy invention. In this matter it is not for me to
prompt the reader. He must sift the fact from the
fiction and label it to suit himself" (n. pag.).
3. Unless otherwise noted, all citations refer to Uncle
Remus: His Songs and Savings.
4. The Publishers' Note to the original production
testifies to the reliability of Harris's transcriptions,
declaring that "From the beginning it was his intention
to tell these tales in written form as nearly like their
spoken versions as he possibly could, and he took great
pains to spell the language as it sounded— with all the
inflections and rhythms, word combinations, and
expressions characteristic of the dialect" (The Complete
Tales of Uncle Remus xxii). This is a doubtful claim,
nonetheless. In his biography of Harris, R. Bruce
Bickley, Jr. writes:
it is an important corrective to
Harris's disclaimer that he was only a
'compiler* of the Remus tales to note
that he often spun several—page tales
from the one-paragraph summaries sent to
him by his readers; and an unpublished
letter to the folklorist Charles Colcock
Jones written in March 1883 reveals that
Harris was even willing to pay for
outlines of stories from the Sea Islands
and coastal plantations. (Joel Chandler
Harris 39)
My own search for Harris's primary source materials
in an attempt to distinguish the oral tales from their
literary embellishments proved fruitless. .It is my
understanding that Harris may have destroyed some of his
original data. In her letter dated February 4, 1991,
Beverly D. Bishop, Emory University's reference
archivist for the Robert W. Woodruff Library which holds
the major Harris collection, informs me that "there
appears to be no original manuscript" for Uncle Remus:
His Songs and Savings. She referred me to attached
pages from William Bradley Strickland's dissertation on
Harris, Joel Chandler Harris: A Bibliographical Study
352
(University of Georgia, 197 6), in which Strickland,
states:
According to Dr. Thomas English, Curator
of the Harris collection, no manuscript
of Uncle Remus exists. The tales,
sketches, proverbs, and verse that make
up the book had all been published
earlier in The Atlanta Constitution, and
the plates for Uncle Remus were set from
a pasted-up collection of the newspaper
columns. Joel Chandler Harris's
personal copy of the book, also in the
Emory collection, bears a great many
penciled-in alterations and emendments
in Harris's hand. However, few of these
appeared in subsequent editions of the
work.
Be that as it may, my examination of archival
materials in the Harris collection raised doubts about
the "purity" of the tales' transcription. I found
abundant evidence of editing and alterations in Harris's
hand of what I assume to be transcripts of collected
materials in dialect.
Finally, in an introduction to a 1948 publication
of seven previously uncollected Uncle Remus tales,
editor Thomas H. English remarks that the tear-sheets
"bear many proof corrections and emendations in Mr.
Harris's hand, though the revision is not
thoroughgoing." English also notes that several of the
stories in manuscript had been "taken out of the Negro
dialect and retold" (Introduction, Seven Tales of Uncle
Remus, Atlanta: Emory U, 1948: 5-11; 5). The upshot of
all this, the scope of these amendments and their
ubiquitous practice in Harris's writing, lead me to the
inescapable conclusion that he was no artless "recorder"
of black folklore. Harris's "retelling" may stem from a
desire for accuracy in light of what he felt to be his
"amateur" status or other considerations. Thomas
English reveals that when "the author saw his Uncle
Remus sketches in a permanent literary presentation, he
fell into a momentary distrust of the Negro dialect
which he had employed. He therefore began laboriously
to alter Uncle Remus's idiom, adding corrections between
the lines and in the margins ..." (Introduction,
Seven Tales of Uncle Remus. Atlanta: Emory U, 194 8: 5-
11; 9-10). The equivocal wording here does not allow us
to conclude what "Uncle Remus's idiom" is, exactly.
Obviously English views the character's language as
353
either separate from the tales' or conversely, of a
piece with them. Nevertheless, though a claim cannot be
made that Harris was consciously invested in presenting
sanitized versions of the tales, the result is the same-
-a form of censorship disguised as romanticism, if we
will.
5. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. mentions that "Critics disagree
. . . about the degree of Harris's racial awareness in
the tales. Daniel G. Hoffman and Lyle Glazier believe
that Uncle Remus is in many ways a minstrel portrait of
the black slave but that Brer Rabbit's trickery, which
Harris probably did not appreciate fully, represents
allegorically the Negro's struggle for survival and his
indomitable spirit" (Joel Chandler Harris 69).
Elsewhere in his work Harris demonstrates that he
was not obtuse in his appraisal of black behaviors,
although he habitually undercuts his commentary. In an
1885 article entitled "Uncle Remus's 'HA'NT'" he writes
that "the plantation negro was a great dissembler.
'Hypocrite' would be too strong a word to apply to him;
for there was nothing malicious in his dissembling." In
a subsequent passage on this same topic, he doubts that
there is any "purpose" to black dissembling. Yet in the
same breath he also writes, "Those closest to the negro
seem to think that he was a mere ignorant, grown-up
child. They failed to give him credit for any sort of
shrewdness, or for any of the wisdom that is necessarily
a part of all human experience. The great majority of
the whites deceived themselves with the idea that the
negroes had no conception of freedom and no desire to be
free ..." (Youth's Companion. 17 December 1885, 3;
Joel Chandler Harris Collection, Emory University,
Atlanta, Folder 23, Box 13). Harris's quixotic
attitudes towards blacks undoubtedly betray a deeper
conflict. In an article published in The Saturday
Evening Post January 2, 1904, "The Nedfro as the South
Sees Him," Harris mourns the passing of the "plantation
establishment" (23), particularly "the old-time darky"
(1). At the end he acknowledges that his readers will
think he is
putting forward a plea for slavery, and
second, that I am drawing the portraits
of ideal negroes who exist only in the
imagination. Be it so, I never had any
hand or part in slavery, but I know that
in some of its aspects it was far more
beautiful and inspiring than any of the
354
relations we have between employers and
the employed in this day and time
. . . . Slavery itself is so far in the
past that it seems like a dream. As for
the old family servants, they are either
gone or fast going, and we shall never
behold their like again. (Joel Chandler
Harris Collection, Emory University,
Atlanta, Box 13, Folder 2, 23)
Like many a Southern writer from Poe to Faulkner,
Harris's nostalgia for an historical past that he was
persuaded was imbued with the spirit of congenial race
relations finally drives him to dilute the truth; his
characteristic ambivalent portrayal of that world is the
residue.
6. In his article on "The African American Animal
Trickster as Hero," John W. Roberts finds that
the differences, both sociocultural and
practical, in the life-style of Africans
on the continent and those enslaved in
America led to a transformation in the
African animal trickster. First of all,
on the continent, Africans had viewed
the animal trickster's characteristic
exploits as adaptive behaviors in the
struggle to survive in a harsh natural
environment and rigid socioreligious
hierarchy. In America, it was the
artificially created conditions of
material shortages imposed by the slave
masters that threatened their lives.
Second, Africans on the continent had
infused the animal trickster's behavior
with moral and even cosmic significance
through the frequent association of
tricksters with the gods. However, in
America, their enslavers' efforts to
control them by suppressing African
religious expression had a profound
influence on how they were to
conceptualize and justify behaviors
adapted from the animal trickster.
(108)
The animal trickster-tale, as Roberts explains, was
"a model of heroic action" (109) for slaves seeking
compensating behaviors which would equip them to cope
355
with their debased condition. The animal trickster's
world was shaped to represent "a thinly disguised
version of [the slaves'] own" (110). Slaves "embodied
their view of the trickster primarily in tales of Br'er
Rabbit and other animals who, in the wild, would have
been considered prey for those animals most often acting
as dupes" (109). In reversing these natural relations,
the tales championed traits such as "cleverness, guile,
and wit as the most advantageous behavioral options for
dealing with the slave masters in certain generic
situations" (110). Unless this "worldview" is taken
into account, Roberts concludes, the slaves'
appreciation of the trickster's exploits
appears problematic, indeed. For
example, collecting animal trickster
tales in the late nineteenth century, A.
H. M. Christensen noted of her informant
that 'he regards the rabbit stories with
much respect, evidently considering them
types of human experience, his own in
particular .... He praises the Rabbit
when successful in spite of his
treachery' . . . Christensen was
repulsed by the enthusiasm and delight
expressed by her informant for what she
viewed as the immoral antics of the wily
trickster and warned her readers that
'we of the New South cannot wish our
children to pose long over these pages
. . . . ' (112)
7. In the later work, Uncle Remus and his Friends, cited
earlier, the boy begins to question the significance of
the "helpless" rabbit's conquests of the stronger
animals. Remus defends his portrayals on grounds that
the smaller the animal the more it needs "sense" to
survive: "You hear folks say dat Brer Rabbit is full er
tricks. It's des de name dey give it. What folks call
tricks is creetur sense. Ef ole Brer Lion had much
sense ez Brer Rabbit, what de name er goodness would de
balance er de creeturs do? Dey wouldn't be none un um
lef' by dis time" (136).
8. Robert A. Georges, then Chair of UCLA's Folklore
Department, made this suggestion in a conversation on 15
April 1986, Los Angeles.
356
9. As Teresa McKenna notes, "Being a crossroads does not
imply a denial of difference, but rather an articulation
of difference. It is living without borders, but also
living as an intersection of all the border spaces which
define: race, class, gender" (3 5).
10. I have pointed out that in more traditional frame
texts the frame form controls narrative exposition. To
what extent narrative endings succeed in "subverting" it
varies with a text. Open-ended texts call the frame
situation into question in some way, whereas "closed"
texts may appear to validate frame values. A cursory
review of the oral materials in the Uncle Remus tales
infers them as conflicted with their frame. They remain
a disease in residence, as it were. Not surprisingly,
the texts are frequently open-ended.
11. As Homi K. Bhabha explains,
The analytic of cultural difference
intervenes to transform the scenario of
articulation— not simply to disturb the
rationale of discrimination. It changes
the position of enunciation and the
relations of address within it; not only
what is said but from where it is said;
not simply the logic of articulation but
the topos of enunciation. The aim of
cultural difference is to re-articulate
the sum of knowledge from the
perspective of the signifying
singularity of the 'other' that resists
totalization - the repetition that will
not return as the same, the minus-in
origin that results in political and
discursive strategies where adding-to
does not add-up but serves to disturb
the calculation of power and knowledge,
producing other spaces of subaltern
signification. The identity of cultural
difference cannot, therefore, exist
autonomously in relation to an object or
a practice 'in-itself', for the
identification of the subject of
cultural discourse is dialogical or
transferential in the style of
psychoanalysis. It is constituted
through the locus of the Other which
suggests both that the object of
identification is ambivalent, and, more
357
significantly, that the agency of
identification is never pure or holistic
but always constituted in a process of
substitution, displacement or
projection. (312-13)
In "hybrid sites of meaning," therefore, the
presence of minority discourse is signed by "'the minus
in the origin' - through which all forms of cultural
meaning are open to translation because their
enunciation resists totalization" (314).
12. William L . Andrews offers a parallel assessment of
framing mechanisms in the work of Charles Chesnutt,
particularly those pieces singled out as belonging to
the plantation lore genre. However, our analyses
diverge on a significant concern. Andrews writes that
Chesnutt's work "remains distinctive because of his
expansion and occasional transcendence of the historical
assumptions and traditional social purposes of
plantation-dialect fiction" (41). Chesnutt was an
"insider," an African-American writing about his own. I
do not believe that Harris consciously "transcended" his
work or openly acknowledged its implicit conflict in
values. As Andrews notes, whereas Chesnutt
"manipulate[s] the accepted conventions of 'plantation
fiction' of the 1880s and 1890s" (41), Harris's "most
influential creation, Uncle Remus, usually upheld the
popular nineteenth-century assumptions about the black
man's capabilities which so easily solidified into
stereotype" (50). The dissimilarities between the two
writers finally pivot on the issue broached in
Chesnutt's own appraisal of Harris. Chesnutt refused to
be "misrepresented as a follower of Joel Chandler
Harris, whom he considered a collector and skillful
adaptor of the lore of another culture, not a truly
creative figure in his own right" (Andrews 46). The
reader seeking further illumination on framing activity
in the African-American dialect story, however, will
find Andrews' work indispensable.
Chapter Five ;
Getting Reacquainted with the (Framed) Text:
l
The Pleasures of Alterity j
i
i
Schema Theory: Its Influence on Studies of Reading ;
Strategies
i
i
i
Read as hierarchical and linearly plotted entities
I
having artifact status, framed texts contain the i
machinery of thematic and poetic excess. The dictionary!
definition of '•artifact" comes from the lexicon of !
i
histology. An artifact is "any structure or changed |
appearance produced artificially or by death." A !
[
dynamic or process-generated model strives to j
*
resuscitate the text so that it can be esteemed as j
i
inscribing the semblance of life. Schematic approaches, j
being static by nature, defeat this aim: framed texts so j
conceived are artifacts. To appreciate the differences :
i
between reading the text as artifact and engaging it !
dynamically as a socially-situated event, let us review j
the recommendations of schema theorists as they apply to
t
the reading process.
In his article, "Top-down and Bottom-up:
Interpretive Strategies in Reading E. E. Cummings,"
359
Willie Van Peer draws on two current text processing
paradigms, familiar to us as artificial intelligence and
discourse theory models. He describes their
applications as follows:
The interpretative act . . . seems to be
the result of two complementary
operations: on the one hand the reader
has to use his (often implicit)
knowledge of the world in order to grasp
what the author is trying to say, while
on the other hand textual features must
be used to construct the meaning of the
text. The first operation starts with
the reader (especially with the
knowledge he already possesses) and has
the text as its object. The second
starts with textual configurations to
suggest a meaning that is judged
satisfactory by the reader. (598)
Van Peer diagrams the two processes thus (the
direction is downward in the first diagram, up in the
second):
Top-Down Bottom-Up
(Schank & Abelson) (Kintsch & Van Dijk)
Script Interpretation
Text Integration
Inference Textual Elements
The diagrams might be thought of as circular. That
is, readers start with a "script,” or presuppositions
3601
[
about the reading material, make inferences and bridging!
assumptions from it in the course of their reading, and i
finally arrive at a global interpretation through the
integration of these processes. Felman and Sarig equate
the "top-down" approach with the text's macro-structure,
noting that some researchers posit that "top-level
structures are equivalent to the major schemata used by j
authors to organize their texts" (11). Louise Wetherbee;
j
Phelps elaborates this process:
Readers comprehend texts through 1
progressive integration, projecting an
anticipatory holistic structure which i
they continually reform, clarify, enrich
and fill in to whatever degree fits j
their goals and capabilities. At the
same time they abstract and simplify j
this structure in retrospect, both as
they read through the text and later in
rereading and memory. j
*
She inadvertently qualifies this proceeding and its;
[
effectiveness, however, in calling our attention to the i
I
reader's tenuous interpretive capacity. Readers may J
indeed "feel themselves to be the performer of meanings |
intended by another," but only, it seems, "so long as i
they feel they can correlate . . . meanings globally j
with a writer's intention" (20). In other words, as I j
understand it, the whole schematic process theoretically!
breaks down when readers falter in their ability to t
match meanings with what they perceive is the writer's ;
purpose. J
361
In his article, "The Notion of Schemata and the
Educational Enterprise," Richard Anderson, after Tim
Johns, confirms this possibility. He argues that
"changing a high-level schema (for example a world view,
ideology, or theory) is not a simple matter. It very
likely involves being forced to confront difficulties in
one's current schema and coming to appreciate the power
of an alternative schema to resolve these difficulties"
(418). Anderson notes that in attempts to "preserve
cognitive consistency" (428), people tend to resist
changes in high-level schemata (429). In Anderson's
opinion, "even the assimilative use of schemata must
involve constructing interpretations, for every
situation contains at least some novel characteristics"
(421). The reader may be unable to come up with a
suitable schema to meet these demands.
Michael Townsend's findings of schema activation in
prose processing concurs with these deductions. He
writes,
The results of this study indicate that
potentially meaningful prose text can
remain relatively incomprehensible when
a context does not activate appropriate
schemata at the time of acquisition of
the material. High levels of
comprehension depend on relevant
cognitive structures or schemata being
engaged with the linguistic material as
the result of contextual cueing.
Furthermore, extending the work of
Johnson et al. (1974) with sentences,
362
these results demonstrate that
activation of inappropriate schemata to
comprehend prose passages is likely to I
be more debilitating to comprehension !
than providing no contextual information
at all. It seems likely that the
activation of inappropriate cognitive
structures prevents a person from
independently attempting to find an
interpretation# perhaps idiosyncratic#
that allows for greater instantiation.
This finding is important to the concept
of schema shifting. During the reading
process the reader must engage an
appropriate cognitive structure in order
to comprehend the material. As the
context of the material changes, so must
the cognitive structures if
comprehension is to be maintained. If a 1
person fails to shift schemata as the
context changes, then the previously
activated schema, now inappropriate
because of a change in context, is being
used in an effort, albeit unsuccessful,
to comprehend the new material. (52#
emphasis added)
Suzanne Hunter Brown also unintentionally calls
f
attention to schema qualification. She concludes# !
"Because of STM [short term memory] limitations# we must :
encode the text according to some schema# and we do not
remember— do not in fact truly apprehend— those elements(
i
of a text that are not important to the various macro- j
i
propositions of the schema" ("Discourse Analysis and the j
Short Story" 218). It may well be that those elements j
which "fall out" of a reader's monolithic schema
constitute alternative schemas, alternative texts. J
Brown describes the reader's "interpretive order" as "a j
I
matter of . . . foregrounding some relationships among \
I
363 ,
elements and subordinating others” ("Discourse Analysis
and the Short Story” 239). Thus there is an interplay
between the textual field and the receiver’s frame. The
i
emergence of some of this "new" material is signalled by
grammatical or discourse markers, but some of it may not
be, or the receiver may be oblivious to it.
Finally, in The Implied Reader. Wolfgang Iser
cautions that any gestalt which the reader fashions is
"colored by our own characteristic selection process";
it is not the text’s "true meaning" (284). In our
search for a consonant interpretation, we impose these
schematic meanings, which are assuredly not textual
givens. As Iser explains in his critique of schema j
theory in The Act of Reading, representation must be j
separated from reception. The problem with schemata is
that "when something new is perceived which is not
covered by these schemata, it can only be represented by ;
means of a correction to the schemata." Thus "While the
schema enables the world to be represented, the
correction evokes the observer's reactions to that
represented world" (91). In essence, schemata are forms
of circular reasoning, self-fulfilling prophecies. ,
The above commentary should make it evident that j
schema hypotheses, whether characterized as "top- 1
down/bottom-up" or by other variants, simply reinforce i
364
the "psychological" logic of conventional frame theory.
If framed texts are read according to these methods, the
initiating or framing narrative becomes the "top" or
macro-structure which organizes the text, and the
sequacious narratives are then relegated to micro-
structural status as the elements that must be
integrated into the larger "script." This speculation
has undoubtedly influenced professional reading studies
in literary criticism and the social science
disciplines. Though its claims are based on its
replication of innate cognitive processes, to what
extent schema theory in fact describes the actual
reading process of framed texts is the larger issue. It
is one which will have to be held in abeyance for future
consideration, however, since it is beyond the scope of
the present study.
Cognitive Reading Styles
Being advised of cognitive behaviors which
encourage dependency on a set of parameters is helpful
in avoiding the imposition of schema-activated readings.
In her article "What no bedtime story means: Narrative
skills at home and school," Shirley Brice Heath
discusses two "learning styles" which have a bearing on
this study. She explains these as "two contrasting
365
types, most frequently termed 'field independent-field
dependent' . . . or 'analytic-relational'" (55).
Scholastic achievement is correlated with analytic-field
independent practices which "mold selective attention
. . . such as 'sensitivity to parts of objects,'
'awareness of obscure, abstract, nonobvious features,'
and identification of 'abstractions based on the
features of items' ..." (55). The key is the ability
to decontextualize. The features of Heath's model are
useful to this study's proposal that the reading of
framed narratives be recontextualized. This
necessitates reeducating the reader to decline
conventional textual approaches and to follow more
innovative routes to an understanding of framing
narratives.
In their recent article on "Cognitive Style and
Written Discourse," W. Ross Winterowd and James D.
Williams elucidate the roles of cognitive styles in
reading. They observe that "Identifying a hidden
pattern . . . requires a person to consciously override
the 'obvious' perceptual representation and to re-code
the embedded pattern as a unit" (5). They acknowledge
that this is a "complex activity," requiring "the
ability to decontextualize stimuli and, equally
important, the ability to then recontextualize them
366
. . . . Those who cannot perforin these mental operations
easily depend on the context of stimuli to provide clues
for processing; those who can do not need such clues, or
at least not as many" (5). While the matter is too
complex to go into here, the obstacle for field
dependent perceivers is the difficulty they experience
in abstracting the language event from the material in
which it is embedded (7). While retrieving a frame
narrative as a "unit" would present complications for
field dependent receivers, Winterowd and Williams'
recommendation that the "obvious perceptual
representation" must be overridden in a
recontextualization procedure is entirely apropos to my
suggestion that we need new cognitive models for framing
functions, ones that depart from received protocols.
These may be informed or not by critical theory. That
is, the reader educated in certain approaches to
processing texts, for example using literary criteria,
philosophies, or methodologies, may engage the text on
different grounds than the so-called "naive" reader
does.
Winterowd has suggested two kinds of writing style
which approximate the kinds of framing modes I have
diagrammed, the "propositional and appositxonal." The
former is characterized by a "stated topic,
367
organizational rigidity, general examples, and a
backgrounded style . . . ", while the latter is denoted
by "implied topic, organizational flexibility, specific
examples, and foregrounded style ..." (Winterowd and
Williams 4). I believe classical framed texts combine
these features, exhibiting on the surface the properties
Winterowd terms "propositional," but ideally read as
"appositional." If they would achieve the coveted
field-independence necessary to prevail over field-
related parameters, then, readers need a strategy which
finally transcends sentence-level processing. They
should avail themselves of textual "cues" which enable
them to "develop contextualized mental models that
include semantic intention, audience, and topic— indeed,
the entire range of features associated with speech
acts" (Winterowd and Williams 16). Since I have said
previously that these "cues" may not be overt, readers
have to ask themselves what the writing does (Winterowd
and Williams 18). Though assuming that "the demand for
a total account is implicit in the effort of
interpretation, even when it is evaded or minimized"
(18), in J. Hillis Miller's view, reading strictly for
"a meaning based on the linear sequence of the story" is‘
"too easy" (2). It is inhibited, in any event, by the
tropological nature of the work's rhetorical texture.
368 ;
*
Miller's enterprise, "the relation of rhetorical form to!
meaning" (3), is exactly this study's concern. He asks j
the questions we have all along contemplated: "The focus j
I
of my readings is on the 'how' of meaning rather than on
its 'what,' not 'what is the meaning?' but 'how does
meaning arise from the reader's encounter with just
these words on the page?'" (3). One clue may lie in the
reader's conscious effort to obstruct systematic and
ingrained reactions. Since the expectations aroused by
!
generic form are a major hindrance to this end, let us
examine the ramifications of the problem.
i
I
t
(
[
Alternate Reading Models: The Reader's Axis
Poststructuralist Reading Strategies
i
i
The Question of Genre
i
The foundationalist position behind the idea of |
"macrostructures" and other familial categories,
including schematic Gestalts so conceived, descends from ,
the essentially elitist and theological concept of
metadiscourse. The thorny question of genre's
intangible effects on readers is encumbered in this
f
discussion of metaorienting devices. The old quarrel
between form and content, text as product and process,
369
is at the core of this issue. Carolyn Miller's
discussion of "Genre as Social Action" enables us to see j
i
these associations more clearly. Miller argues that j
genre is metainformational discourse established on the I
basis of "recurrent situations" (161). In this regard,
Burke forewarns us about the authority of "formal
patterns" to draw audience participation through the
awakening of "an attitude of collaborative expectancy in
us .... Once you grasp the trend of the form, it
invites participation regardless of the subject matter"
(A Rhetoric of Motives 58). This idea has another face, j
however. Because we are conditioned by literary
conventions, we do not expect to find a framed narrative >
in a preface or in the space before the material text.
Yet framed texts showcase the culturally organized
knowledge which in some disciplines defines the very j
concept of framing. So, we may not recognize frame j
I
narrative's parallels with a culturally encoded generic j
f
form, the topic, argument, or thesis. Moreover, to read
against cultural expectations and stereotypes takes an !
adroit reader. How many of us recoil instinctively from j
i
i
the ferocity inscribed in Wutherina Heights. for j
instance, or the monstrosity in Frankenstein? We are
relieved that these astringent forms of violence are
370
seemingly banished to the interior, negated, or
reincorporated into the "normative."
Mary Louise Pratt argues similarly:
the reader who picks up a work of
literature of a given genre already has
a predefined idea of 'what the nature of
the communication situation is.'
Although the fictional discourse in a
work of literature may in theory take
any form at all, readers have certain
expectations about what form it will
take, and they can be expected to decode
the work according to those assumptions
unless they are overtly invited or
required to do otherwise. (205)
Texts, then, are "display" texts in the sense that
they adhere to Gricean cooperative principles of
communication. John Gumperz explains Paul Grice's view
of conversation process as
a cooperative activity where the
participants, in order to infer what is
intended, must reconcile what they hear with
what they understand the immediate purpose of
the activity to be. Grice lists four
subcategories and related maxims in terms of
which the cooperative principle is
articulated in particular instances:
quantity— make your contribution as
informative as necessary; quality— be
truthful; relation— be relevant with
reference to which is being talked about;
manner--avoid obscurity and ambiguity and
obey proper form. These maxims function as
general guidelines or evaluative criteria
which when apparently violated give rise to
the implicatures or chains of reasoning by
means of which we reinterpret what is said in
such a way as to fit the situation. (94)
Deviation from this model is marked, and Pratt
classifies it as a type of "rule-breaking." She
observes, "Within literature, this kind of linguistic
subversiveness is associated especially with the so-
called 'new' or 'anti-novel,' where we find radically
decreasing conformity to the unmarked case for novels
and a concomitant radical increase in the number and
difficulty of implicatures required to make sense of the
given text" (211).
By the same token, as David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson recognize, "A form may work to disturb our
expectations . . . A form may even strike us as
unpleasant because of its imbalances or contradictions
. . . . Such disturbing artworks may display new kinds
of form to which we are not accustomed. [These works]
reward analysis partly because they reveal to us our
normal, implicit expectations about form" (27) . Thus
open-ended narratives which do not return to the opening
frame cheat our expectations; they surprise us. In
doing so, they force us to reevaluate the initializing
narrative in light of what has ensued in the text.
Experiments of this kind can be said to break generic
"rules." Bordwell and Thompson's suggestion that we
explore cinematic form in terms of "the overall
interrelation among various systems of elements ..."
has implications for textual readings as well. They
propose accordingly that "One useful way to grasp the
372
function of an element is to ask what other elements
I
demand that it be present" (36). We can bring similar
i
questions to bear on the literary text. Most j
importantly, we can become more aware of the kinds of j
responses we are being asked to make.
In our encounter with the text, Terence Hawkes
urges us to be aware that "truth" is a cultural
variable. For Hawkes our readings "'re-code,'" by which ®
t
he means "the activity of reducing or 'trimming' all
experience to make it fit the categories we have ready
for it. Genres are the literary aspect of these
categories .... [they] are essentially culture-bound,
'relative' phenomena" (104). Genres are problematic
categories for Mikhail Bakhtin also. Evelyn Cobley
details Bakhtin's ideas: I
Genre has a double orientation toward |
both a coded world and a coded text. On j
the one hand, it is prior to the >
specific literary text in that it I
contributes to our perception of ;
reality. On the other hand, the
literary text supplies the perceiving
subject with the verbal and generic
forms that reproduce and circulate
attitudes to reality. Genre is
consequently a literary order which
carries social evaluations. The concept
of 'social evaluation' is crucial to j
Bakhtin because it permits him to ;
recognize that genre 'mediates between I
form and performance' .... If genre J
is the site where social codes intersect !
with poetic texts, then generic features !
must be approached as dynamic carriers !
of ideological meaning and should not be |
reduced to static elements in a
synchronic configuration. (25-26)
Genre can indirectly reflect social realities.
Thus Bakhtin argues that "heterogeneous or dialogical
genres represent the desires of a society whose
conditions of existence are restricted by monological
official discourses" (Cobley 335). When readers shift
from "a priori concepts to the problem of the
correspondence between genre categories and socio-
historical reality" (Cobley 336), they free themselves
from the dogma surrounding generic taxonomies and resist
the implicit textual strategies to which Bakhtin is
attentive. As Cobley states, "In his opinion, every
literary text manifests a polyphonic diversity of
disparate generic features which reproduces, in more or
less displaced ways, the ideological struggles from
which the text as such had been generated in the first
place" (337).
In encountering the literary text, then,
institutionally-trained readers must withstand the
expectations raised by considering a certain "type" of
work and decode it in opposition to these invitations.
Neither form nor its conventions should predispose us to
the character of the text. We need to refuse the
referential system signalled by the text in favor of one
which intensifies its presence without overt signs. We
374
should not be satisfied with the text reduced to its
j
gist then, its aphoristic "message," a tendency to which ;
i
we are inclined by textual pressures. As Jonathan
Culler writes, after Freud, "for the force, the ethical
import of a narrative, always impels the reader . . .
i
toward a decision" (The Pursuit of Signs 181). That ■
contingency can hardly be resisted, since readers will ;
undoubtedly arrive at a consensus whether the text does
so or not. However, readers can extract as saturated,
as replete a meaning as possible, while attending to
contextual nuance. The search for alternative reading
strategies which compensate for the text's hierarchical j
and linear positioning warrants our pursuit of several 1
options, among them models grouped under the appellation
"spatial." These offer the prospect of an appositional,
metaphorically configured text rather than the kind to
which we are acclimated by generic convention. j
i
t
I
1
Framing as Spatial Form j
One of the first framing effects readers need to be 1
aware of in reading spatially is a frame's capacity to
configure natural space. In their discussion of
cinematic manipulation of space, Ralph Stephenson and
Jean Debrix comment that "the cinema substitutes film
I
space for pictorial space; and by this trick it
375
assimilates pictorial space into the unbounded space of
nature which the camera usually shows us: proof that our
concept of space in the cinema is arbitrary” (8 6-87).
In a similar way, an enframing narrative substitutes its
own concept of space boundaries for naturalized space,
or the context of the natural event. In this manner, an
enframing narrative indexes reality.
William Jenks' discussion of film rhvthm is
pertinent. Film deals with two kinds of rhythm:
internal rhvthm (within the shot itself), and external
rhythm. the actual length of time a given shot remains
on the screen. Rhythm "supports and intensifies
meaning" (75). Jenks continues, "In many ways, the
rhythm of a scene corresponds to the way in which an
observer would ordinarily perceive that scene" (76). An
! enframing narrative plays off the same naturalizing
I
i tendencies in viewers. Just as a film maker uses
I
particular settings to "evoke a specific emotional
response” in an audience, so framing narratives function
I
as Jenks says some settings do, "as visual counterparts
to states of mind or states of being" (166).
At the outset then, readers encounter the text as a
prototypical space form. The text's opening is
conventionalized for readers, who acknowledge it as they
would the generic social "situation." In this sense,
376
and because it resembles the familiar "scene" whose
spatio-temporal referents are culturally sanctioned, the
frame opening seemingly lacks the formal markers
associated with academic discourse. If the generic
likeness were perceived, readers could readily place
frame narrative as a fictive variation on that model.
Framing Narrative as Situating Device
This resemblance to the empirical known leads us to
register an initial framing narrative as a situating
device. Barbara Babcock explains the importance of
"metanarrative" apparatuses such as narrative openings
in these terms. She writes, "'Beginnings' and 'endings'
are of crucial importance in the formulation of systems
of culture; in narrative they are one of the ways in
which a narrator sets up an interpretative frame which
tells us this is play, this is performance, or more
specifically, this is such and such type of story and
should be understood and judged accordingly" (71-72).
The reader so oriented may be misled, however, into
ignoring the inevitable presence of irony in narrative
relations. A framing narrative which presents itself as
referential and informational may or may not be telling
us it is "play"; conversely, if it does present as
377
deliberately calling attention to its performance
aspects, it may mask its representational intent.
The theoretical problem with "metasystems" of any
kind reveals itself in the presumption that readers can
make the fine distinction between "presentation" and
"representation." Since all selective presentation is
ideologically freighted and governed by the play of
semantic connotation, we are suddenly recalled to the
Derridean paradox: What is "meta" or "outside," and what
is subsidiary and "inside"? In assuming that
metanarrative strategies are both perceptible and
retrievable, and by viewing framing as an explicit and
metacommunicative feature, we credit the stereotype of
frame narrative as a relatively artless genre whose most
deserving (and typical) reader is a gullible one.
Because we delegate it as a policing function, we expect
a metasystem to be beyond reflexivity and self
commentary. But as Linda Dittmar observes, "the very
fashioning which goes into the production of fiction
undermines the claim for authenticity." Narrative art
(and I would add the very concept of "metadiscourse")
tends to cloak this "fabricating process" (190).
From a political standpoint, more importantly, and
because its magisterial authority transcends or silences
voices in opposition to it, the "meta-" principle is
378
anti-democratic and potentially fascistic. It bestows
rank and constitutes relation, installing a
"metalanguage,” in Burkean terms, which surpasses "the
linguistic situation."1 It therefore conflicts with the
egalitarian dialogical model advanced by this study,
whose business is precisely the linguistic situation and
its textual effects. The powers conferred on
metadiscourse amount to a cultural privileging of
certain textual signals which tell us that a particular
subject matter has the ascendent character of the global
"message." Construed in this way, metadiscursive
content is desensitizing. It co-opts our analytical
faculties because we are drawn to what we believe are
its transcendent thematics, and because Western culture
has historically conditioned us to privilege causation,
centrality and dominance. As we value these qualities
in life, so we grant them ascendent status in the text.
As opposed to an (essentially) cabalistic language of
license, of play, metadiscourse is blunt fixity and
overdetermination. It tells us what we want to know; it
is narcissistic. The concept of a meta-ordering
principle is finally Platonic in nature, and a
Platonized discourse is an idealized one. An "ideal"
discourse, for me, is one that constitutes itself out of
acknowledged oppositions without dissolving their
379
i relationships. As I am aware, we struggle with the
I inescapable fact that any commentary, any analysis in
the spirit of inquiry is itself metadiscursive. But if
it is indeed the case, as Don Bialostosky argues in his
j article "Dialogics as an Art of Literary Criticism,"
I that every "critic becomes an author, who, in turn,
provokes a future reader to engage in dialogue" (793),
then this study is ideally received in the same temper,
as an entry into an ongoing "conversation."
| And, as I have shown, a framing narrative
I consolidates both summary and scenic attributes. Its
summary features simulate those of expository discourse,
j In its scenic capacity, it conforms to Didier Coste's
1 definition of "scene" as "a textual unit (or group of
units) whose unity is determined by the conjunction of a {
certain population of characters in a particular '
presented space" (223) . These are traditionally ;
| I
! diametric rhetorical categories as Coste points out
i
i
(222), thought to have a comparable weight in textual i
f
presence. Yet, he notes, "Metafiction is a great enemy
of the scene, as it dismantles it or disrupts it to
i
superimpose the adventure of telling over the tale of
adventure, or even uses it, like fantasy literature, for i
purposes contrary to its supposed singulative vocation,
J
380
by repeating it or making it easily repeatable, not
unique” (223).
The scenic components of the enframing narrative
have several characteristics which rebut the idea that
the text suffers the hegemony of ”metafictional" powers,
however. In his discussion of what he terms "the
extraordinary contextual significance of the first
scene," Meir Sternberg describes the allegorical stature
of initiatory scenes:
Every narrative establishes a certain
scenic time-norm of its own ....
Since every work does establish a scenic
norm and since the scenic treatment
accorded to a fictive time-section
underscores its high aesthetic
importance, the first scene in every
work naturally assumes a special
conspicuousness and significance. The
author's finding it to be the first
time-section that is 'of consequence
enough' to deserve full scenic treatment
turns it, implicitly but clearly, into a
conspicuous signpost, signifying that
this is precisely the point in time that
the author has decided, for whatever
reason, to make the reader regard as the
beginning of the action proper. That
is, the text suggests, why this
occasion' is the first to have been so
'discriminated.' (20)
Sternberg's rationale explains my own justification
of the framing narrative as the inaugural narrative.
Elsewhere, in a discussion of the texture of exposition
and modes of presentation, Sternberg refers to
"expositional elements that introduce us into the
381
fictive world, establish . . . canons of probability,
and serve as the groundwork on which the particular
narrative edifice is to be erected" (26). In my view,
because frames perform these "summary" operations
(Sternberg 3 0), they are rightfully considered
inaugural. Sternberg also mentions that the frame's
construction "serves to draw the reader's notice to the
existence of various gaps" (53). The latter result from
the meager distribution of expositional information in
the framing situation and its usual beginnings in medias
res, a variety of displacement Sternberg calls "a
deformation of the chronological sequence" (40). As a
result of these stimuli, the reader's curiosity is
excited, and so he or she is obliged to read on to
obtain the withheld information and be able to
reconstruct the narrative past at which the framing
situation hints. The framing work, in effect, spurs the
reader's desire for closure while simultaneously working
to retard it. In this respect, as Sternberg explains in
his discussion of expositional retardation as a "local
device," "the unfolding of the past blocks or is blocked
by the developments of the present and the future [in
the frame]" (177).
In drawing upon the constraints of a culturally-
specified format, and by retarding the presentation of
382
an unknown which would tax the reader1s speculative
abilities, framed openings relieve the anxiety provoked
by textual beginnings, by confrontation with "new"
situations. Because they echo the familiar and
commonplace, framing devices mitigate what would
otherwise be the reader's arduous immersion in the text
milieu. In like manner, they ease the termination of
conditions with which we have become intimately
involved. Linda Dittmar sums up these functions as
follows:
There is something comforting— even
pleasurable!— about symmetrical brackets.
Whatever disorientation readers . . . might
experience in the transition from one realm
of discourse to another, once the text
establishes a pattern, a reiterative
regularity that becomes a key to the
disjunction, periodic return to the framing
narrative is very reassuring. Such frames
function tautologically; they validate the
interpretive act by foregrounding the story
telling context at least in the beginning and
end of the text. (195)
As far as the "fragmentary" or "problematic" close
is concerned, Margaret Higonnet envisions two intrinsic
reader responses: "Readers may assume they have misread
and reread the story in order to find the signposts
leading to this conclusion. Or they may assume they
have read correctly and extrapolate a further narrative
that encompasses and gives meaning to the apparently
incomplete structure at hand" (47). To this end, Susan
Lohafer associates frame use with "preclosure," or
action resolution. "Good readers," she writes, "ignore
preclosure" ("Preclosure and Story Processing" 270-71).
She argues that "frames may determine not only what
•facts' we do or do not recognize . . . but also what
issues we think are engaged . . . ." She warns against
"interior preclosure points," which include "location at
the end of a paragraph, correlation with a shift in
physical place, correlation with the end of a debate
. . . " and correlation with the warping of textual
' shape to coincide with characters' choices ("Preclosure
and Story Processing” 273). In substance, readers need
to repel the text's pressures for closure, forcing its
ambiguities to remain open for as long as possible.
The topic of text symmetry is one which naturally
arises from Higonnet's remarks. Given its inclination
to parity, its endeavoring to instantiate an equilibrium
between the poles of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, a framed
text thematic construed as global shuttles between a
"situation" dramatized on the one hand as conventional,
and on the other, the constellation of radical elements
which impend on the stability of the doctrinal. In
terms of its syntax, the framed text presents itself as
heteroclitic, an irregularly inflected grammar.
384
As I have remarked, the risk of destabilization is
homologous with the inceptive textual site. In speaking
of a comparable situation in music, Leonard Meyer says,
"[C]onsonance 'represents the element of normalcy and
repose, [dissonance] the no less important element of
irregularity and disturbance'" (231-32). "Dissonances,
in short, are [inhibited] tendencies ....
[dissonance] is a deviant, delaying the arrival of an
expected norm, the consonance appropriate in the
particular stylistic, musical context" (232). In music
as in life, deviations are departures from an assumed
norm (254). This study accordingly proposes reading
methodologies which acknowledge the framed text's
balancing act between norm and deviation, or put in more
benign terms, between invariant and alteration. On the
fundamental, phenomenal level of consciousness, reading
strategies designed to provoke a spatial reading account
for these differentials. They can replace the tired
concept of a linearly conceived text pattern with a
fresh and dynamic view in configurational selection.2
Maintaining textual ambiguities in a fluid (not a
schematized) Gestalt is one determinant in the
extraction of a spatial reading.
Spatial Reading
As I argue, the reader must desist from closure
because ambiguity is a desirable textual agenda. In a
t
musical context, Leonard Meyer explains the causes of :
ambiguous conditions. Ambiguity arises "because the
organization of the field is itself unclear" (192).
Meyer also notes that "when the distinction between
!
figure and ground is obliterated altogether, the texture (
becomes completely ambiguous and the listener is
uncertain as to what the textural organization is" (194-
95). In that case, I suggest that the reader must
realize both figure and ground by transforming the
contours of the one into the other. This technique
alone, however, does not yield an optimum reading, for (
i
we must also be cognizant of intermediary phenomena, ,
j
borders, contours, boundaries. These are a species of
i
the "blanks" in any text, which Iser says "break up the
i
connectability of the [reader's] schemata, and thus they I
i
marshal selected norms and perspective segments into a I
fragmented, counterfactual, contrastive or telescoped i
sequence, nullifying any expectation of good
I
continuation" (The Act of Reading 186). [Iser defines
good continuation as "the consistent combination of |
I
perceptual data that results in a perceptual gestalt and 1
I
in the linking of perceptual gestalten to one another i
386
• • • " (The Act: of Reading 185).] In blanks, Iser
writes, "the formulated text has a kind of unformulated
double" (The Act of Reading 226). Iser calls this
double "negativity," which he defines as follows:
Unlike negation, negativity is not
formulated by the text/ but forms the
unwritten base; it does not negate the
formulations of the text, but— via
blanks and negations— conditions them.
It enables the written words to
transcend their literal meaning, to
assume a multiple referentiality, and so
to undergo the expansion necessary to
transplant them as a new experience into
the mind of the reader. (The Act of
Reading 226)
Regardless of its manifest construction, the text
should always be regarded as producing sites for
indeterminacy. Gaps, blanks, and other interruptions of
textual continuity testify to a paucity of redundant •
information. These principles of discursive "play"
support a theory of language as game. Because such
structures are inveterately ambiguous, they amount to a ;
plot's suppression of causality or coherence. They !
jeopardize the denotative design of the text by
refracting its rationale for cohesion and directing our
i
focus to its "accidental" phenomena. Exposition in such ;
I
|
a case is either deferred, redistributed, or simply j
I
withheld. As David Bordwell points out, as opposed to
the "classical" film which relies on a surplus of
1
communicative features, nontraditional "art^cinema"
387
deliberately creates plot gaps, and thus relaxes cause
and effect, loosening the tight causality of the
realistic fil-m. Causality in this form is displaced by
contingent or aleatory phenomena (Narration in the
Fiction Film 206). Even with the knowledge that
displacing activity is occurring in a text, however, its
signifiers are still theoretically in place because as
readers we tend to validate meaning as it is mediated by
dominant cultural values. Overriding the hegemony of
these values in our thinking is the answer to this
complex relation. We would not read as Cartesian
subjects, absorbing in reflexive and autoerotic fashion
the known from the known. We may not be able,
ultimately, to escape the conclusion that all
interpretive strategies are Gestaltist in some way.
However, resisting the lure of privileging theories of
any kind means that we eschew overt formal poetic
patterns for the "anti-text," the patterning of a
counterdiscourse. This is not simply a matter, either,
of the opaque as opposed to the transparent text.3
Texts are both. They masquerade as the one or the
other. Through the conditions of negativity, Iser
continues, "positions clearly denoted in the text may
begin to negate one another ..." (The Act of Reading
227). By contorting the text in this way, negativity
"acts as a mediator between representation and
reception: it initiates the constitutive acts necessary
to actualize the unformulated conditions which have
given rise to the deformations, and in this sense it may
be called the infrastructure of the literary text" (The
Act of Reading 228). Finally, Iser remarks, from the
reader's position. "As far as the reception of the text
is concerned, negativity is that which has not yet been
comprehended" (The Act of Reading 229).
While Iser's system encourages readers to
appreciate recessed or submerged textual activity, they
should be wary of oscillating between binary poles of
meaning which reflect the figure/ground paradigm, the
positive aspect and its chiasmatic image. That is, we
do not want to solicit an elementary one-on-one
exchange, signifier to signified, but a counter
discourse conventionally understood as seditious, here
welcomed into the reader's vista and assembly of
meaning.
In the long run, readers need to surmount their
visceral reactions to the text. We expand our textual
horizon [which Iser defines as "that which includes and
embraces everything that is visible from one point" (The
Act of Reading 97)] by engaging perspectives that are
not mere transpositions of each other but by
389
reconnoitering various paths and myriad avenues. But
because we cannot grasp the whole text at any one
moment, Iser recommends a phenomenological reading in
which "The relation between text and reader is . . .
quite different from that between object and observer:
instead of a subject-object relationship, there is a
moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which
it has to apprehend" (The Act of Reading 109).
Eventually, Iser says, readings which unfold from
multiple perspectives are synthesized in "groupings that
bring the interrelated perspectives together in an
equivalence that has the character of a configurative
meaning." This configured interpretation is not to be
confused with the schematic gestalt, however, for it is
incremental, "a product of the interaction between text
and reader, and so cannot be exclusively traced back
either to the written text or to the disposition of the
reader" (The Act of Reading 119).
A Plea for Self-conscious Reading
The advantage of a configurational reading is that
it stimulates the reader to make analogous inferences.
Leonard Meyer argues that meaning is objectified "only
under conditions of self-consciousness and when
reflection takes place." In other words, when "behavior
390 ,
is automatic and habitual there is no urge for it to
become self-conscious, though it may become so. If
meaning is to become objectified at all, it will as a
rule become so when difficulties are encountered that
make normal, automatic behavior impossible. In other
words, given a mind disposed toward objectification, j
meaning will become the focus of attention, an object of i
conscious consideration, when a tendency or habit
reaction is delayed or inhibited" (39). If narrative
i
framing does indeed "[give] the author control over how
i
the narrative is read" (Moger, "Narrative Structure in
Maupassant" 316), that axiom should only be retained as
a theoretical measure of the stamina required to
dismantle ideological assumptions and practices in a
confrontational reading. It should be held in abeyance. :
i
!
The heightened awareness I am advocating as a more j
productive reading strategy involves rising above scooic 1
readings of a text conceived as transparent. In order
to loosen the hold of the purely specular, in itself a j
I
metaorienting strategy, the reader should probe for )
i
multiple dimensions of conventional meaning. The
enormity of this plenitude exceeds the facile
i
multiplication of signified meaning, both as it is j
conspicuously visible in the text, buried in a subtext,
i
or paralleled in extratextual realities. Meaning is
391 !
I
palpably resident in spaces opened by the material text,
but it is also exterior to the limits of its ostensible
verbal network. In effect it transverses connotative j
i
systems genetically unrelated to the substance of J
visible signifiers. The recognition of various speaker
positions which occupy discursive sites must also
account for their animating motive, the vector perhaps !
i
most responsible, in all its guises, for trajectories of |
i
meaning in the text. We might think of any narrator as
the literary manifestation of the Heisenberg principle—
that is, his or her presence in a textual circumstance j
is liable to alter the conditions of our understanding. ;
I have pointed out the arcane and privileged nature of I
narrator knowledge in Chapter 3. Only the teller knows
how a tale will end, for instance.
If indeed, as Peter J. Rabinowitz argues, "the
stressed features in a text serve as a basic structure
{
on which to build an interpretation" (53), then as j
readers we should strive to detect the unstressed in j
order to exhume the surrogate texts for a fuller i
I
reading. When we focus on stressed textual components,
we are caught up once again in the figure/ground bind.
Collapsing visual centers is what decentering the text
is about. Visible parallels in the text, be they
i
thematic, spatial, plot, or whatever, have their !
392
converse, their alternate relations. We must look for
those too, not only to become more subtle readers, but
in order to discover the reach of textual options. In
that way, we excavate the "ground.” The territory
between them, the sumptuous banquet of perspectives
offered by a textual cornucopia, should also be mined.
We can do this by looking at various clues to
alternative constructions. Armine Kotin Mortimer
establishes the following categories for recognizing
clues to "second-story constructions," or embedded
stories: "rhetorical, symbolic, syntactic or mechanical,
codal or subcodal . . . ." Mortimer defines "subcodal"
cues as "elements of the first story that cannot be
organized by any of its codes and so remain deviant, or
'ungrammatical'" ("Second stories" 295).
In our search for uncharacteristic paradigms of
narration, the category of the "ungrammatical" leads me
to Jurij Lotman's article "The Discrete Text and the
Iconic Text: Remarks on the Structure of Narrative."
Lotman's comments bear striking affinities to the
nondiscursive modes of narration discussed in Chapter 3.
Lotman argues that "a semiotic system without signs" is
possible. He determines that meaning can be imparted
without utilizing "the words of natural language," and
cites "painting, music, and cinema" as examples of media
393
which conduct meaning through asemantic "iconic signs"
(333) . In these forms, "there are, essentially, no
signs [as in the "discrete verbal message]: the message
is communicated by the text in its entirety." This is
brought about by "an internal transformation and
subsequent combination in time. One figure is
transformed into another. Each of them constitutes a
certain synchronieslly organized segment" (3 35). In
this kind of "non-discrete [type] of semiosis," "there
is a tendency to their synthesis and mutual influence"
(337). A text's layers of connotation, then, are
created by the relations among its grammatical,
rhetorical and iconic strata and their distributed
subject centers, but also by synthesizing its different
constructions— the syntactical and temporal modes with
the thematic and spatial.
David Mickelsen points out a problem, however, with
the synchronic textual moment in his article on "Types
of Spatial Structure." He observes, "The functional
moment is 'now,' not 'then,' and this gain in immediacy
is necessarily accompanied by a loss in coherence: the
narrator and the reader are too immersed in particulars
to grasp their organization and direction" (75). By
annotating the text as he or she goes, however, the
reader will eventually register its global patterns,
noting in the process the details which are generally
overlooked. As Jeffrey R. Smitten points out in his '
summary of Joseph Frank's work on spatial form, in the
absence of causal-temporal connectives, it is up to the
reader to work out the text's "internal . . . syntax"
(Introduction 18) by "paying extraordinary attention to
the synchronic relationship among . . . seemingly
disconnected word groups" (Introduction 19). In the
case of a challenging frame construction which displaces
i
causal-temporal sequence through flashbacks and other ■
distortions of temporal succession, readers should avail I
themselves of the strategy Frank calls "reflexive i
reference" (Smitten, Introduction 20). In other words,
when departures from "the conventional causal/temporal
syntax of the novel" prove disruptive, then "the reader
must work out a new one by considering the novel as a
whole in a moment of time. That is, the reader must map
out in his mind the system of internal references and
relationships to understand the meaning of any single
i
event, because that event is no longer part of a ;
conventional causal/temporal sequence" (Smitten, j
Introduction 20).
Unlike precursory, deductively-oriented schematic
i
readings which superimpose themselves on text as
unassimilated demonstrations, reading processes stemming !
395
from engagements with spatial form are inductive and are
resolved by synthesis. The process in the one begins
with the assumption that readers maintain an intact
cognitive "Gestalt" which incorporates textual phenomena
at the onset of a reading, in many cases discarding
those properties for which there is no correlate, while
in the other situation the reader*s construction process
is imperceptible. He or she assembles a comprehensive
impression in piecemeal fashion and inductively, from
textual fragments. Text shape is a factor in that
global comprehension.
If the narrative frame's textual proportions are
curtailed so that its mass is insignificant compared to
that of the embedded story, then it will be eventually
removed in both time and space from the reader's
recollection. The frame's surface phenomenal apparatus
mimics the cognitive, diachronic linear process of
reading. Recession into the narrative interior is like
recession into the nested frame story; in both cases the
reader is fed information only in sporadic or episodic
intervals. The frame's control of the text's "causal"
order in the sequential rendering is thus at issue. Its
prefatory status at the text's opening is also
frequently offset in some texts by its grounding in a
different temporal framework from that of the interior
narratives. The reader becomes immersed in the time
i
! frame of the inset story and forgets the framing
situation.
In the long run, however, these considerations
should not be figured into the reader's collocation of
meaning. It is certainly possible to read framed texts
I
and distinguish a "nesting" from a "nested" narrative
without assigning them a hierarchical value or restoring
; the causal privilege that move implies. Nor need the
text's contending energies dwindle into seeming
desultoriness. The reader must be careful, of course,
that the increase of aesthetic distance in frame
narration does not decrease emotional involvement.
Though the partiality for linear-causal schemes may
j enable a serial, distal text to supercede the thematic
i
i foci and argument of the originating or framing
narrative in the reader's understanding, nevertheless,
and in order to actualize the vital nexus of stories in
the framed text, we need to read against its linear
construction, wherein an initializing narrative
seemingly presents a topic subsequently enlarged upon by
a serial narrative(s) unfolded in an advancing temporal-
| spatial medium.
! The reader’s task is best described by David
Mickelsen in his summary of spatial form: "It focuses
i 397
i
i »
closely on a single individual or an aspect of society i
and does so by dwelling statically on the present. The
J »
j nonchronological juxtaposition of elements is not
ultimately resolved, perhaps because no absolute
conclusion is possible. Instead, the reader is j
i I
j confronted with an open-ended array of thematically ;
j interrelated factors he must weld into a picture— into a
j ‘spatial form'" (78). As Mickelsen admonishes,
! spatiality is visible in works “which are only j
i i
j superficially temporal and linear” (67). j
In our encounters with narrative transmissions, we
are going to have to look past conventional grammatical
I
j and diacritical markers as explanations for framing. j
Embedded stories are not the thematic equivalent of [
i
J sequential, “inserted” texts demarcating a separate
i
\
i narrative level or segmental text. Discourse models of
this kind erase the interactive relations between marked j
passages. We might borrow the method of choice from i
; H&l&ne Cixous, who describes a writing free from bias in 1
i |
“The Laugh of the Medusa": j
To admit that writing is precisely
working (in) the in-between, inspecting '
the process of the same and of the other I
; without which nothing can live, undoing
the work of death— to admit this is
first to want the two, as well as both,
the ensemble of the one and the other,
; not fixed in sequences of struggle and i
j expulsion or some other form of death I
! but infinitely dynamized by an incessant
process of exchange from one subject to
another. A process of different
subjects knowing one another and
beginning one another anew only from the
living boundaries of the other: a
multiple and inexhaustible course with
millions of encounters and
transformations of the same into the
other and into the in-between, from
which woman takes her forms (and man, in
his turn . . . ). (883)
Reading strategies which place readers in a
relatively bias-free relation with the text are those
which bid them to explore its ideological nuclei. These
are often revealed in the discourse of socio—cultural
subject matters.
Poststructuralist Praxis:
Reading for Gender. Race. Class, and Other Culturally
Defined and Culturally Significant Categories
Though draconian measures are not required, the
reader should be watchful for signs which indicate the
presence of discursive power centers. In his discussion
of gender issues, Louis Montrose, after Joan Wallach
Scott, names four strategies for uncovering evidence of
gendered power relations in historical analysis. I
consider these adaptable for readings designed to expose
analogous justifying tactics which shelter other
politically charged relations. Montrose proposes
*four interrelated elements: first,
culturally available symbols that evoke
multiple (and often contradictory)
representations'; 'second, normative
399
concepts that set forth interpretations
of the meanings of the symbols, that
attempt to limit and contain their
metaphoric possibilities' . . . ; third,
the realizations of those various
alternative or contestatory
possibilities that are marginalized or
suppressed by the normative or dominant,
and which must be recovered by
subsequent critical-historical analysis;
and fourth, the employment of such
historically specific (though not
necessarily stable or consistent)
cultural representations in the making
of gendered subjective identities. (1)
Succinctly recapitulated, the reader should be
vigilant for forms of normative cultural representation,
the probability of their embodiment in alternative
examples available either in the text or independent of
it, and the containment of these, either by substituting
the historically specific for the general or through
extolling the dominant as norm. In short, readers need
to defer the willful "suspension of disbelief"
traditionally exercised in readings of narrative— and
which the text coerces us to do— and disengage
themselves from orientations which prejudice them to
embrace one viewpoint over another. Readers must remain
impervious to textual decoys of this kind, to the extent
that they can sustain an impartial perspective, reading
in the space between the word and sign, between word and
action— the inarticulate text denied by cultural
shibboleths.4
From Bakhtin's standpoint and that of other
proponents of language as a political tool, language is
never neutral. So we as readers should confront it with
a sensibility of its underpinnings in assorted
ideological positions, particularly as they materialize
in the discourse of social class. In this vein, social
constructionist pedagogy parallels the reading approach
advocated here, for it engages the political production
of subject and has as its objective the student's own
empowerment through "voice." The recognition that
language encodes socio-cultural institutions and also
reflects a context in which these are reified should
orient us to its socializing force. It might be helpful
in this regard to view the text, as Chantanee Indrasuta,
after Halliday, discusses it, "as a sociosemiotic event
'through which the meanings that constitute the social
system are exchanged'" (23). In the new cultural
literacy, metaphor is envisioned as an inestimable
rhetorical resource, transacting the incalculable
possibility of language, not its regulation. In other
words, a contracted estimate of semiotic energies
supports an interpretation based solely on the contrasts
produced by diacritical stress. A broader view suggests
that meaning has its germination in sociocultural
practices and the institutions which both image them and
401
are responsible for their continuation. As Linda Flower
suggests, meaning and purpose are both socially bounded
(shaped by others) and socially embedded ("The
Construction of Negotiated Meaning in Writing"). In
such a case, poststructuralist-oriented readers will
deconstruct the text so as to extrapolate socially
constructed and socially situated meaning.
In constituting the text as a metaphorical
phenomenon, I am not sustaining the traditional
polarization of that mode and the more conventional
forms of argumentation based on logic; conceivably,
metaphor is as capable of logically constructing a text
as the other. The kind of "logic" we are seeking here
is associative, not expositional, not deductive. While
reading strategies which ignore the connotations of
political power are admittedly less incumbent upon
readers, and ultimately equip them with a less wieldy
interpretive apparatus, the ideological pressures which
constrain our readings finally devitalize them.
Just as Derrida protests the assumed dichotomy between
margin and center, so I would prevail upon readers to
imagine the text, not in terms of "lack" and its
supplement, but rather in the sense that the two
concepts considered both autonomously and collectively
make up whatever meaning is available. Trapped in
received systems of discourse, we cannot help but be
imprisoned by their ideological strictures. In H61*ne
Cixous's words, "Let us defetishize" (890). When we
read for alternate "[histories] of life," we acknowledge
what Cixous calls an "Other love" which reaches beyond
"conscious computation," surpassing "Opposition,
hierarchizing exchange, the struggle for mastery
. . . ." Cixous asks, "Does this seem difficult? It's
not impossible, and this is what nourishes life— a love
that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that
provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a
love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies"
(893) .
In his article on rereading narratives with a
poststructuralist awareness, Marcel Cornis-Pope suggests
the following procedures which I would like to put
forward as a tentative practicum. Cornis-Pope says that
these are designed to "disrupt . . . the linear
progression of early reading. During first reading I
ask students to pause periodically and make a note of
some of the following:
-details of plot or character that are
emphasized, or that they have singled out as
significant;
403
-narrative sequences, their role in
foreshadowing and building thematic coherence;
-words, clusters of images that stick in their
memory;
-their immediate response to these textual
prompts; specific insights into character and
narration they afford;
-•gaps,' contradictions, unresolved questions
in the story's plot, characterization or
overall structure;
—what seems to carry forward the flow of
reading, or, on the contrary, obstruct it;
-expectations upon opening this book and how
these are fulfilled/thwarted by the story;
-their overall reaction to the story, aspects
they found challenging or hard to accept.
(254)
Cornis-Pope continues, "Most of these questions
tune students to narrative details and language 'clues,'
in an attempt to move them from a naturalized, holistic
reading, to one that would pay more attention to the
source of our successful syntheses, as well as to the
difficulties we may have in accounting for particular
details and narrative inconsistencies" (254). An
"analytic, self-exploratory second reading" then
404
j follows, designed to complement the "annotated" first
reading. Cornis-Pope explains that in this reading he
asks "students to analyze their response to the story's
presentational process, to ponder some of the
| exclusions, distortions, misreadings they have
j perpetrated during first reading." Cornis-Pope
describes the "second-reading questionnaire" as follows:
1 -How did the story's general purport and
, orientation change after second reading?
-What aspects of the story have you
| 'misremembered,' adapted to suit your first
reading?
-What possibilities of the text have you
ignored (not accounted for) during earlier
reading?
-What 'mysteries' or 'gaps' in the narrative
have you tried to settle and how successfully?
j
| What aspects in the story still escape your
i understanding?
-Have your generic or thematic expectations
about the story changed?
i
-As you begin to sort out the textual
'evidence' in support of an interpretation of
the story, which details do you find useful,
; 405
and which seem irrelevant or 'hostile* to your
particular reading? (256)
As Cornis-Pope explains the nature of the second
| reading, "By reorienting interpretation through these
i
| questions, second reading can be made more !
i 1
j confrontational and (self)exploratory" (256). While
Cornis-Pope's "confrontational" and "exploratory" model
adequately describes the kind of encounter I envision
for readers of framed texts, it also has several
; drawbacks with respect to this study's intent,
i
| summarized in my belief that it enacts an atypical
I
engagement between reader and text. It is plainly
I designed for institutional settings in which the student
i
is furnished with both directive and time to reread a
(preferably) short work. Pragmatically speaking, both
these factors are incompatible with the autonomous '
i
; generic readings which compose one facet of this study. I
i j
Nevertheless, Cornis-Pope's question series is adaptable
I
to the requirements of an individual reading.
Robert Hodge suggests another method which might
work in place of a more systematized approach. He
i
| writes,
j One way of situating . . . a text in its !
own framework of meaning is to attend ■
! closely to the language used at key I
points in the narrative, openings and j
closings and other transition-points,
since these are precisely the points '
406
where the meaning of the narrative is
itself at risk for the narrator and the
culture. This is where homologies are
at their most dense and most functional,
linking microstructures (words, phrases,
clauses, episodes) with major
macrostructural elements. (180)
The reader must fight the impulse to construct the
cohesive design the text invites. One way of thwarting
that tendency in reading is to pay close attention to
the disruptive or disjunctive transitional passages to
which Hodge calls attention. Readers should visualize a
negative plate, a reverse imaging inscripted in the text
as it were. They should entertain the unremitting
possibility of transformation in the cognitive template
they are constructing, invest themselves in the logic of
transpositional phenomena, and expect thematic
oppositions to present themselves at every textual
level. A confrontive reading of this sort shatters the
contrived "boundaries" imposed by the text— at sentence
and paragraph conjunctions, discourse shifts, and other
demonstrative flagging paraphernalia. Michael McCanles
expresses the relation we should be conscious of: "Since
a text is formed through a rejection of other possible
countertexts, to know what a text says necessarily
requires knowing what the text implicitly or explicitly
j rejects" (31). Our readings should be most aware, then,
of the implicit presence in the affirmatively inscribed
407
text of countertexts. In terms of the figure/ground
scheme, we need to acknowledge the "ground," the
multiple dimensions and vortices of textual space
occluded by foregrounded subject matter.5 This
recognition brings us to a precis of the reading theory
delineated in my composite model.
Composite Theory Reading
Our problem, essentially, is to discover a reading
[ strategy which toggles between figure and ground,
evading the field-dependent reading demanded of us by
I
i
i the imposition of hierarchal and linear cultural logics,
and seeking instead the fieId-independent reading which
I
would assist us in distinguishing between the
i
j
i "propositional" and the "appositional" text. The framed •
' ;
text invites both kinds of reading, as I have said. We I
i !
j can inhibit a more dynamic reading by valorizing it as a |
I form of the proposition, the culturally familiar Western ;
\ i
I
| argument, or we can engage it on more fecund grounds, as '
a text generated by the tensions exerted by competing j
j centers of meaning and thematic controls. I believe
i i
| that my composite theory allows this deeper meaning to |
I :
j emerge. On a general cautionary note, if they would !
|
I abstain from partiality, readers should invariably watch
for the attendance of culturally-sanctioned .
408
epistemologies. They can do that by questioning whether
the stereotypical is being presented here, by asking
what the text is ’ 'doing," and by interrogating the
prerogatives seemingly being conferred. This task does
not assume an institutionally-trained reader. It helps, ;
of course, to be acquainted with the kind of self- ■
i
questioning on which this process presumes (in which
case, Cornis-Pope's body of questions answers the ■
purpose). When readers exhibit a healthy skepticism by
doubting their own entrenched values, however, they
generate a nonconformist reading; they realign not only
the text but the formulas and cliches in which they are
invested. However, this procedure is not an absolute
!
given. Textual configurations themselves, I believe,
disturb the tranquillity of our preconceptions, however
dormant. All informed readers need to do is heed these
I
signals, these provocations (and usually, on a "gut"
level, they suspect incongruities). In terms of my
paradigm then, the reader factors the text on three
levels. j
!
The first of these is the basic infrastructure, the ^
i
level on which text elements are organized and produced, i
I
Our ritual orientation indicates that we should seek
i
evidence that the text is attempting to redefine social '
opinion, adjust received values, or address inequities. !
409
The framed text, a literary version of Kuhn's paradigm
shift, is a forum in which the untried, the avant-garde,
and other potential challenges to the social order are
pitted against the need for social reform. Considered
in this way, the framed text is literature as an
experiment in consciousness-raising. In its capacity as
a politically-charged text, it puts innovation on trial
in the service of society, but it functions also as a
redress mechanism, an alternative forum designed to
compensate for the absence of suitable public mechanisms
for amending social ills. Turner's breach, redress,
reintegration or its refusal paradigm is an appropriate
one to recollect.6 The enframing narrative itself is
the usual locus for these issues, for it commonly
foregrounds a particular concern or concerns which will
be dealt with by sequential narratives (and narrators).
Readers will examine the framing narrator(s)' discourse
in particular for cues to the text's import.
The framed literary text's expositional features,
its congruence with expositional purpose, and its
playing off expository conventions should not deceive
the reader. Though exposition and narrative have broad
commonalities, as I have remarked, and the current
debates suggest there are no artificial distinctions
between them, they do not finally work by the same
410
rules. The expositional text, as pragmatic discourse,
is theoretically bound by certain agreed-upon
conventions, one of which is to communicate information
in a lucid manner. Fabrication may indeed be immanent
in this text, but it is not received as self-conscious,
being obfuscated by topic-cue foregrounding. In the
narrative text, thematic meaning is often only
insinuated; readers must infer it. Although they may do
so with a certain amount of confidence, given the thrust
I
i
| of the story, I reiterate that logical relations are
: suppressed by narrative's syntactical controls, by
i
| chronology, and by its dependence on event and situation
to express connotation. The complexities of meaning in
narrative are best described, therefore, as latent or
subliminal. The translucent narrative is of course more
keen on declaring its intent than are the rather
i sophisticated works under discussion here.
Nevertheless, a narrative manifesto is seldom blatantly
i
| exposed. The framed text in particular is deft, as I
! have shown, at masking purpose. For this reason,
precisely, and despite its machinations, readers should
forego manifest affirmations of text logic.
‘ Secondly, we should be alert to the "masked" nature
j of narrators/actors, who tell us in so many ways that
| they are in collusion with the text's covert design,
411
that they are not what they appear. Readers sensing the
didactic impulse behind their discourse should also
redirect their attention to the themes being
mythologized, the possibility of contradiction by a
counterdiscourse, and the transposition of thematic
values circulating in that exchange. In other words, we
should pay close attention to the critical functions of
framing narrators. Exchanges between frame narrators
and their audiences and the nature of that audience, its
makeup and orientation, are also fraught with import.
We have to carefully note nuances in their-speech and
dialogue, in the textual syntax itself or in the
lexicon, symptomatic of irony. On a perceptual level,
these effects are linked in my model with trucage
movement, and the reader/spectator's feeling that an
illusory change has taken place in the transaction of
values being registered at the moment of apprehension.
As I visualize it, the concept of trucage is intrinsic
to the fictive arts and to their techniques of
deliberate mystification. Readers need to recognize
also that the discourse of framing narrators may be
overlooked because these figures are frequently thought
of as merely introducing the main subject. This is
particularly so in the case of the truncated enframing
i narrative. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind
412 |
that framed texts qualify as multiple viewpoint
narrations in the fullest sense.
Thirdly, on the rhetorical/discourse plane, we must
be "all ears," observant for indications of
heterogeneity as it is vocalized, noting the text's
shaping by multiple voices, both those which appear
"monologic" in the Bakhtinian sense and those which
frustrate the control of textual space by the potency of
contradiction. Any voice has its foil; this antithesis
may be intratextual or extratextual, but a
counterdiscourse is always theoretically available to !
i
us. Reading dialogically mandates that we consider a !
text as perpetually revolving on a continuum among poles J
of discourses, counterdiscourses, and mediating i
discourses.7 !
Don Bialostosky's article offers some key j
propositions for recovering meanings which elude
validating, transcendent phenomena. In his proposal of
a dialogics which articulate people's ideas and do not f
i
separate the "thesis" from its speaker, he argues that |
"Dialogic reading should strive . . . not for an I
i
impossible coincidence of the reader's and the other's j
i
languages but for revealing and answerable t
i
representations of the one in the other" (790). In such |
a process, the reader encounters dialogue which |
I 413
articulates partial or biased views as opposed to a
I
i
"truth"-value rhetoric which transcends them. As
Bialostosky points out, "such a standard of truth would
reduce the sense of radical otherness to an as yet
| unsolved problem and would direct further discussion to
j locating the higher principle that would synthesize the
j
I difference one had stumbled on" (794) . The dialogical
discourse of otherness, therefore, would be one which,
I
i in Bialostosky’s words, "define[s] its identity" (791)
i through terms other than those of the oppositional
J discourse. Simply put, how does one textual "language"
j illuminate or engage for us the discursive positions of
! others?
i
When readers process a text at the sentence level,
i they "parse" a linear presentation order. They are
conditioned to do so by pedagogical reading practice.
i
1 The implementation of this methodology also means they
j ingest a culturally-biased rank order. On the sentence
| level, this system is reified in the logic of a
I
culturally-preferred subject, verb, object, complement
order, but on the global level it exhibits itself as a
positioning of the empirically-validated cultural
subject, in an ideology of the commonplace. Thus the
typical reader of framed stories records them literally
as "nested." In the process he or she also registers a
414
subject matter in emphatic degree, "dominant” over
"subordinate.” But these graduated topics are not the
profusion of "equally privileged participants" which
present themselves to our awareness when we entertain
the "dialogically intersecting consciousnesses," the
"voice ideas" or "idea images" of the Bakhtinian-
conceived dialogic work (Bakhtin, Problems of
Dostoevsky1s Poetics 91-92).
The Greco-Western linear, hierarchical logic under
scrutiny, X would like to emphasize, is only one of many
omnipresent "logics." That is, we are accustomed to
think of Western logic as the logic, the reasoning. Yet
language operations embody a planetary spectrum, an
infinite variety of "Other" logics, as in the material
universe. For example, women are often considered to be
"alogical," to think dissociatively, judged by masculine
cultural standards of rationality. But when we speak of
"logic," we need to ponder its heterogeneity. For
instance, who could begin to appreciate the terrestrial
logic of nature in all its infinite variety? The
postmodern reader avoids leaning on an institutionally-
generated linear logic and its concomitant discourses of
hierarchy, abandons his or her allegiance to the
established values it has memorialized, and which we are
conditioned to unquestionably adopt, and remains open to
415
the surfeit of metaphysical "logics" and epistemologies,
alternate ways of thinking, which occupy a text. In
this manner, voices otherwise muted are summoned forth
and translated into the reader's new rhetoric.
Conceptualizing the framed text as dialogical also
means that we must pay attention to the web of relations
between embedded or serial texts and enframing ones.
What are their parallel aspects, circumstances, values,
characterizations, themes, dispositions? What accepted
mores are at stake? How and why are they challenged by
counter demonstrative phenomena? Noting the relevant
cuing of these issues means that we communicate with an
intertextual work or an intratextual one. As it is
conventionally understood, an intertextual reading
unites the reader's cultural or empirical knowledge and
the text material. In terms of the Derridean
differential between Gcriture/writing, however,
intertextuality is also a site for the interaction of
ideas within a text, activated by the clash of its
languages. Brenda Marshall explains: "Derrida's point
is that there is no such thing as a sovereign subject of
Gcrlture; rather there is a system of relations between
the psyche, society, the world, and so forth. This
system of interrelationships is intertextuality: the
multiple writings— cultural, literary, historical,
416
psychological— that come together at any 'moment* in a
particular text" (122).
As I am advocating it, an intratextual reading is
Derridean intertexuality♦ By "intratextual," X mean
that readers must register the discrete text's own
exclusive counteractive themes and events, its
counterargument within the specifications of its
material environment. Bakhtin describes the dialogic
dimension X envision, based on the interchange of word
and idea, as follows:
The idea— as it was seen by Dostoevsky
the artist— is not a subjective
individual-psychological formation with
'permanent resident rights' in a
person's head; no, the idea is inter
individual and inter-subjective— the
realm of its existence is not individual
consciousness but dialogic communion
between consciousnesses. The idea is a
live event, played out at the point of
dialogic meeting between two or several
consciousnesses. In this sense the idea
is similar to the word, with which it is
dialogically united. Like the word, the
idea wants to be heard, understood, and
'answered' by other voices from other
positions. Like the word, the idea is
by nature dialogic, and monologue is
merely the conventional compositional
form of its expression, a form that
emerged out of the ideological
monologism of modern times ....
(Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 88)
The counter text or texts of which I speak, then,
are oblique "shadow" texts which may be occluded by
j either the textual preponderance of foregrounded
417
material, resulting in spatial ellipses, or by the
reader's inclination to construct a pronounced textual
"argument." These "invisible" texts, the visible text's
doubles, are our focus. It helps to think of the work
in terms of its community, its "languages" and voices,
as one. The constituting (and constituted) powers of
language, in other words, extend beyond the lexical.
The reader's consensus of meaning derives from the
amplitude of language. Such a document delivers a
manifold perspective, one which enhances our
understanding of the text as a living event. By
entering into the dialogical exchange of the text's many
voices in direct and indirect speech, we recover a
stronger reading.
Finally, we will construe the text formally as
montage. its parts as complementary. A work's symbolic
texture is created by metaphorically interactive fields
of play, the dialogue of values on every level— lexical,
syntactic, semantic. The task of repositioning
ourselves as readers involves putting ourselves in a
mental space where we can ask, "What vested interests
control the speaker's position, and what ends are being
shaped by the discourse?" The enterprise is summed up in
Barbara Page's remarks about the necessity of
"differing" in the academic community. She says,
418
By differing . . . we escape
enthrallment in a story, which, however
beautiful, prevents other speaking, a
state that certainly would leave us
poorer and perhaps also trapped in error
or delusion. I would suggest, then,
that we should redefine our notion of
the academic community as that place in
which we entertain our differences, and
guard it well against conditions that
make speaking and listening impossible.
Before inferring a text element as ' ’fixed,*’
therefore, we should ponder its extension of meaning
into semantic hemispheres of inestimable depth. The
resonance of values which issues from this activity
endows readers with reserves of meaning from which to
distill their own version of the text. Otherwise, we
are at the mercy of a "monologic," ideologically-driven
discourse.
In the interests of a Burkean "identification," all
framed texts understood as dialogic in nature are
metaleptic. The concept of a "marginal" or "accessory"
text is incompatible with such a philosophy since all
textual discourses are considered of equivalent merit;
we "invite" them to form part of the text's "identity"
and to participate in its composition. A Burkean move
acknowledges "contending" discourses as instinctively
seeking sacramental communion with each other. We
readers embrace all the text's resident discourses
therefore as representing the discourses which construct
419
or "identify” the text as we understand it, taken
holistically. As I have said, the postmodern reader
resists closure, however, refrains from confirming the
"subject," until he or she feels compelled to finalize
an interpretation which would satisfy the need for
replete meaning.
In sum, the final goal of this study suggests that
the "ideal" reader is a "listening" one, open-to diverse
views which challenge his or her own ideologically-
invested positions. A reader of this kind is
"democratic" in the universalist rather than a narrowly
defined political sense. Readers are optimally not
members, either, of the community of listeners in the
text, the implicit or explicit rhetorical audience. In
the last analysis, and in order to escape being swayed
by the text, the ideal readers of framed narratives can
be neither. What we seek, in the long run, is the
reader-cum-archaeoloqist. whose concept of discourse is
an excavating and tunneling one which positions him or
her squarely within and beneath the textual surfaces as
"eavesdropper" or "spy"— a "mole" as it were, even in
the political connotation of that word.
The framed text's mappings and ostensible
boundaries, its separations of territories, are only
hypothetically stabilized projections and topographies.
420
They are in essence permeable by the reader willing to
forego the seduction of the familiar, willing to
transcend the localized, willing to entertain the nature
of a global textual economy which does not announce
itself as such, willing in short to be transformed.
421
1. See Chapter 3 for source of this quote.
i
2. By way of further comment, Jerome Beaty, in i
synopsizing Victor Brombert's article "Opening Signals |
in Narrative" (Mitchell), mentions that in Brombert's j
judgment "all self-referential structures [like spatial 1
concepts] subvert the linearity of the text and thus
create 'narrative space'." (557) i
3. In this regard, a framing narrative is not analogous !
to the picture frame because it has content; it is not
hollow.
4. As Wolfgang Iser explains the process:
Thus the text offers various lines of
orientation which are in opposition to
one another— or at least fail to
coincide— and this is already the basis
of conflict. The conflict itself arises
when the reader tries to project one
perspective onto another and finds
himself confronted with inconsistencies;
the solution to the conflict lies in
some idea of reconciliation which is not
formulated by the text. It is not
formulated because the reader must work
it out for himself if he is to make the
experience his own— or if a solution is
formulated, this may be purely in order
to hinder the reader from building up a
concept. (The Act of Reading 47-48)
5. Kenneth Pike's summary of the affiliations I am
contemplating here is marked by a concern with
hierarchal strata, but is nonetheless useful in its
orientation. He writes,
The relation between grammatical and ,
referential hierarchies is often a
source of difficulty in many kinds of ■
texts. Grammatical structure is linear:
one item stated after another in
sequence. But the data to be presented
is n-dimensional. in network relations,
with spatial directions up or down,
right or left, and front or back, and
time relation sometimes sequential and
sometimes simultaneous . . . words must
come in linear grammatical order; but
much of our perception is n-dimensional.
(Taomemics. Discourse, and Verbal Art
18)
6. Turner's social drama model superficially resembles
Todorov's tension-driven equilibrium narrative paradigm.
However, it allows for the sociocultural focus with
which this study is concerned. This focus includes the
assumption of a rhetorical immanence in social forms.
7. Patricia Bizzell's comments on the rhetorical nature
of Kuhn's paradigm shift, mentioned in Chapter 3 as a
metaphor for social change, are pertinent. Blzzell
writes that "Change in the discourse begins when change
in the material world impinges more frequently or
urgently than before" (50). The tensions between
"normative" and "suppressed" discourses are strained at
this juncture. Bizzell explains,
There is an established political order-
-the normal discourse—-but always at the
same time, alternative orders— the
revolutionary discourse— subversive to
varying degrees of the established
order. In society, subversive orders
continue to speak in spite of the
established order's attempts to suppress
them. Indeed, the act of suppression
becomes creative of subversive orders as
these are granted recognition by the
very act of suppression, and as they
define themselves in response to this
suppression. (51)
In an analogous vein, Joy Ritchie writes of the
nature of Bakhtinian discourse:
In their biography Mikhail Bakhtin.
Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist
remind us that implicit in Bakhtin's
descriptions of the polyphony of
dialogic processes is a fundamental
sense of 'simultaneity,' of 'both/and'
instead of 'either/or.' Inevitably, as
Peter Elbow points out in Embracing
Contraries. we represent normative,
unifying, and ordering forces. But
simultaneously, in whatever situations
we teach, we must represent the
contending, creative, generative forces
which allow us and our students to
stretch beyond the limits of traditional
thought. (172)
424
Works Cited
I. Primary Texts
Bronte, Charlotte (Currer Bell). Editor's Preface to
the 1850 Edition of Wutherinq Heights. Emily Bronte
9-12.
Bronte, Emily. Wutherinq Heights. Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. William Sale. New York: W. W. Norton,
1972 .
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1971.
Joseph Conrad. "Extracts from Correspondence,
December 13, 1898-February 12, 1899." Kimbrough 128-
34.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Ed. Angus
Easson. 1972. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Appendix: 673-80.
. "Preface to the First Cheap Edition: 1848."
Easson 41-42.
Harris, Joel Chandler. The Complete Tales of Uncle
Remus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1955.
. Publishers' Note. Harris, The Complete Tales of
Uncle Remus. xxii.
. Introduction. Uncle Remus: His Songs and Savings.
Ed. Robert Hemenway. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
39-47.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. New York Edition.
Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W.W. Norton, 1966.
. The New York Preface. Kimbrough 117-23.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein. Three
Gothic Novels. Ed. Peter Fairclough. 1968. New
York: Penguin Books, 1982. 269-505.
"Author's Introduction." Fairclough 259-65.
. "Preface." Fairclough 2 67-68.
425
II. Secondary Sources
Abrams, Meyer H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 5th ed.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1988.
. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton,
1973.
Adams, Ruth. "Wuthering Heights: the Land East of
Eden.” Lettis and Morris 177-81.
j Anderson, Richard C. "The Notion of Schemata and the
! Educational Enterprise: General Discussion of the
! Conference." Schooling and the Acquisition of
Knowledge. Eds. Richard C. Anderson, Rand J. Spiro,
and William E. Montague. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
1 Erlbaum, 1977. 415-31.
j
Andrews, Malcolm. Introduction. The Old Curiosity
Shoo. Dickens 11-31.
! Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W.
[ Chesnutt. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State
I UP, 1980.
I
Anonymous. Spectator. 2 April 1881, 445-46, cols. 1-2.
Bickley, ed., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris
6-9.
i
i Aristotle. The Complete Works. Vol. 1 of 2 vols. Ed.
! Jonathan Barnes. Princeton/Bollingen Series LXXI.2
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
! Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The
; Violence of Representation: Literature and the
history of violence. London and New York: Routledge,
I 1989.
i
Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1969.
i Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask.
1968. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.
Babcock, Barbara. "The Story in the Story:
Metanarration in Folk Narrative." Bauman 61-79.
Bakhtin, Mihail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essavs.i
Ed. Michael Holquist. Transs. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. 1981. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.
i
-— . Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans.
Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature.
Vol. 8. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Bal, Mieke. "De-disciplining the Eye." Critical
Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 506-31.
*--* Narratoloqy: Introduction to the Theory of
Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.
. "Notes on Narrative Embedding." Poetics Today 2.2|
(1981): 41-59.
Bald, Marjory A. Women Writers of the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1923.
Barnitz, John G. "Toward Understanding the Effects of
Cross-Cultural Schemata and Discourse Structure on
Second Language Reading Comprehension." Journal of
Reading Behavior 18.2 (1986): 95-116.
Barth, John. "Tales Within Tales Within Tales."
Antaeus 43 (1981): 45-63.
Barthes, Roland. Image - Music - Text. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977.
. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. 1974.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. j
Barzilai, Shuli. "Lemmata/Lemmala: Frames for Derrida's j
Parerga." Rev. of Pareroon. by Jacques Derrida. j
Diacritics 20.1 (1990): 2-15. j
Bates, Elizabeth. Language and Context: The Acquisition :
of Pragmatics. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, Inc., !
1976.
Bateson, Gregory. "A Theory of Play and Fantasy."
1955. Rpt. in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1972. 177-93.
Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance: with
Supplementary Essavs bv: Barbara A. Babcock. Gary H.
Gossen. Roger D. Abrahams. Joel F. Sherzer.
Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers, 1977.
427
Beardsley, Monroe C. "Order and Disorder in Art."
Kuntz 191-218.
Beaty, Jerome. "Commentary: On Narrative and
Narratives." New Literary History 11.3 (1980): 551-
59.
Bell, Michael. "How Primordial is Narrative?" Nash,
Narrative in Culture 172-97.
Berger, Bennett M. Foreword. Goffman xi-xviii.
Berger, Harry, Jr. "Bodies and Texts." Representations
17: The Cultural Display of the Body (1987): 144-66.
Bhabha, Homi K. "DissemiNation: time, narrative, and
the margins of the modern nation." Nation and
Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London and New York:
ROutledge, 1990. 291-322.
Bialostosky, Don H. "Dialogics as an Art of Discourse
in Literary Criticism." PMLA 101.5 (1986): 788-97.
Bickley, R. Bruce, Jr., ed. Introduction. Critical
Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1981. xi-xxiii.
• Joel Chandler Harris. 1978. Athens and London: U
of Georgia P, 1987.
Bizzell, Patricia. "Foundationalism and Anti-
Foundationalism in Composition Studies." PRE/TEXT
7.1-2 (1986): 37-56.
Blackburn, Ruth, ed. The Brontfi Sisters: Selected
Source Materials for College Research Papers.
Boston: Heath and Co., 1964.
Blackburn, Stuart H. "Domesticating the Cosmos: History
and Structure in a Folktale from India." The Journal
of Asian Studies. 55.3 (1986): 527-43.
Bobrow, Daniel G., and Allan Collins, eds.
Representation and Understanding: Studies in
Cognitive Science. New York: Academic Press, Inc.,
1975.
Bone, Robert. "The Oral Tradition." Bickley, ed.,
Critical Essavs on Joel Chandler Harris 130-45.
428
Bonney, William W. "Joseph Conrad and the Discontinuous
Point of View." The Journal of Narrative Technique
2.2 (1972): 99-115.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd edition.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An
Introduction. 2nd edition. New York: Alfred Knopf,
1986.
Brandt, William J. The Rhetoric of Argumentation.
Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.
Britton, Bruce K., and John B. Black, eds.
Understanding Expository Text: A Theoretical and
Practical Handbook for Analyzing Explanatory Text.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985.
Brodsky, Claudia J. The Imposition of Form: Studies in
Narrative Representation and Knowledge. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1987.
Brombert, Victor. "Opening Signals in Narrative." New
Literary History 11.3 (1980): 489-502.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Brookes, Stella Brewer. Joel Chandler Harris—
Folklorist. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1950.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1984.
. "The Tale vs. the Novel." Whv the Novel Matters:
A Postmodern Perplex. Eds. Mark Spilka and Caroline
McCracken-Flesher, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 1990. 303-10.
Brown, Suzanne Hunter. "Appendix A: Reframing Stories."
Lohafer and Clarey 311-27.
. "Discourse Analysis and the Short Story." Lohafer
and Clarey 217-48.
429
Browne, Robert M. "The Typology of Literary Signs."
College English 33.1 (1971): 1-17.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. 3rd edition.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984.
. Counter-Statement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of
California P, 1968.
. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U
of California P, 1969.
. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in
Symbolic Action. 3rd edition. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: U of California P, 1973.
. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1969.
Burland, Cottie A., ed. Mvths of Life and Death.
London: Crown Publishers, 1974.
Butcher, Samuel Henry. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and
Fine Art: with a Critical Text and Translation of The
Poetics, 4th ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1951.
Caplan, Jay. "The Esthetics of Sacrifice." L 'Esprit
Criateur 24.1 (1984): 99-107.
-— . Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the
Beholder. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
Carr, David. "Narrative and the Real World: An Argument
for Continuity." History and Theory: Studies in the
Philosophy of History 25.2 (1986): 117-31.
Carter, Ronald, and Paul Simpson, eds. Language.
Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in
Discourse Stylistics. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Cecil, David. "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights."
"Contemporary Reviews and Essays in Criticism."
Emily Bronte 298-305.
Cixous, H&l&ne. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs 1.4
(1976): 875-93.
Cobley, Evelyn. "Mikhail Bakhtin's Place in Genre
Theory." Genre 21.3 (1988): 321-38.
430
Connerty, J. P. "History's Many Cunning Passages: Paul
Ricoeur's Time and Narrative." Poetics Today:
Narratoloav Revisited I 11.2 (1990): 381-403.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel. "Poststructuralist Narratology and<
Critical Writing: A Figure in the Carpet Textshop."
The Journal of Narrative Technique 20.2 (1990): 245-
65.
i
Coste, Didier. Narrative as Communication. Theory and '
History of Literature. Vol. 64. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
Cottom, Daniel. Text and Culture: The Politics of
Interpretation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Craft, Christopher. "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips':
Gender and inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula."
Representations 8 (1984): 107-33.
Crumrine, N. Ross. "Masks, Participants, and
Audience." Crumrine and Halpin 1-11.
Crumrine, N. Ross, and Marjorie Halpin, eds. The Power
of Symbols: Masks and Masquerade in the Americas.
Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1983.
Cruse, D. A. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1986.
. Preface. Lexical Semantics, xiii-xiv. !
I
Culler, Jonathan. "Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis ;
of Narrative." Poetics Today 1:3 (1980): 27-37.
. Framing the Sion: Criticism and Its Institutions.
Norman and London: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. ;
. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after j
Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
i
. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics. Literature. !
Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
i
Daghistany, Ann, and J. J. Johnson. "Romantic Irony, j
Spatial Form, and Joyce's Ulysses." Smitten and
Daghistany 48-60.
«
Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the
English Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. !
431
de Beaugrande, Robert. "Schemas for Literary
Communication." Hal&sz 49-99.
de Lauretis, Teresa, ed. Feminist Studies: Critical
Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatolocrv. Trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1976.
The Truth in Painting. Transs. Geoff Bennington
and Ian McLeod. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P,
1987.
Dittmar, Linda. "Fashioning and Re-fashioning: Framing
Narratives in the Novel and Film." Mosaic 16.1-2
(1983): 189-203.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in
Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
—— . Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo. New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, 1966.
Duranti, Alessandro. "Sociocultural Dimensions of
Discourse." Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Vol. 1.
Ed. T. Van Dijk. New York: Academic Press, 1984.
193-231.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in
the Semiotics of Texts. 1979. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1984.
. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. 1984.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1967.
432 '
|
Emanuel, James A., and Theodore L. Gross, eds. Dark
Svrnohonv: Negro Literature in America. New York: The
Free Press, 1968.
. Introduction. "Early Literature.” Emanuel and
Gross 2-11.
. Introduction. "The Negro Awakening."
Emanuel and Gross 62-68.
Engel, Mark. Preface. Bateson vii-viii.
Felman, Shoshana. "Turning the Screw of
Interpretation." Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977):
94-207.
Felman, Shoshana, and Gissi Sarig. "Intercultural
Rhetorical Differences in Meaning Construction."
Communication and cognition International Congress,
Ghent, Dec. 1987. 1-69.
Flower, Linda. Address. "The Construction of
Negotiated Meaning in Writing." Spring Rhetoric
Conference. University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, 23 Feb. 1991.
. "Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for
Problems in Writing." College English 41 (1979): 19-
44.
Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp.
"Kenneth Burke." Contemporary Perspectives on
Rhetoric. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press,
1985. 153-88. |
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I. .
Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. !
. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human j
Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Fowler, Roger. Linguistics and the Novel. London: j
Metheun, 1977. I
. "Polyphony in Hard Times." Carter and Simpson •
77-93. 1
t
Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1986.
433
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essavs.
1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.
Garrett, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel;
Studies in Dialoqical Form. New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 1980.
Gelley, Alexander. "Metonymy, Schematism, and the Space
of Literature." New Literary History 11.3 (1980):
469-87.
Genette, Girard. Narrative Discourse: An Essav in
Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1980.
. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E.
Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in
the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Centurv Literary Imagination. New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 1979.
Girard, Reni. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick
Gregory. 1977. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1989.
Gittes, Katharine Slater. The Frame Narrative: History
and Theory. Diss. U California, San Diego, 1983.
Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990. 8319117.
Glancy, Ruth F. "Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale
Themes." Nineteenth-Centurv Fiction 35.1 (1980): 53-
72.
G^owiftski, MichaJ. "On Concretization." Odmark 325-49.
Goddard, Harold C. "A Pre-Freudian Reading."
Kimbrough, ed., The Turn of the Screw 181-209.
Goetz, William R. "The 'Frame' of The Turn of the
Screw: Framing the Reader In." Studies in Short
Fiction 18.1 (1981): 71-74.
434
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essav on the
Organization of Experience. By Goffman. 1974.
Boston: Northeastern UP, 1986.
. Introduction. Frame Analysis: An Essav on the
Organization of Experience. By Goffman. 1974.
Boston: Northeastern UP, 1986. 1-20.
Gorman, Bernard S., and Alden E. Wessman, eds. The
Personal Experience of Time. New York and London:
Plenum P, 1977.
Grimes, Joseph E. The Thread of Discourse. 1975.
Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984.
Gross, Seymour L. "A Further Note on the Function of
the Frame in Heart of Darkness.” Harkness 148-51.
. Introduction. Gross and Hardy 1-26.
Gross, Seymour L., and John Edward Hardy, eds. Images
of the Negro in American Literature. Chicago and
London: U of Chicago P, 1966.
Gumperz, John J. Discourse Strategies. Studies in
Interactional Sociolinguistics 1. 1982. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1988.
HalAsz, L&szld, ed. Literary Discourse: Aspects of
Cognitive and Social Psychological Approaches.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1987.
Halpin, Marjorie. "The Mask of Tradition." Crumrine
and Halpin 219-2 6.
Handelman, Don. "Reflexivity in Festival and Other
Cultural Events." Essavs in the Sociology of
Perception. Ed. Mary Douglas. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1982. 162-90.
Harkness, Bruce, ed. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the
Critics. 1960. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1965.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesgue: Strategies of
Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1982.
Harries, Karsten. The Broken Frame: Three Lectures.
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic U of America P, 1989.
435
Harris, Marvin. Cultural Materialism; The Struggle for
a Science of Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. Linguistics. Language, and Verbal Art. i
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley ;
and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1977.
/
Heath, Shirley Brice. HWhat no bedtime story means:
Narrative skills at home and school." Language in
Society 11 (1982): 49-76.
Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of
the Tale of Terror. Urbana and Chicago: U of !
Illinois P, 1987.
Hemenway, Robert, ed. Introduction. Harris, Uncle i
Remus: His Songs and Savings 7-31. <
Hernadi, Paul, ed. The Rhetoric of Interpretation and
the Interpretation of Rhetoric. Durham and London:
Duke UP, 1989.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. "Afterthoughts on
Narrative." Mitchell, On Narrative 209-32.
Higonnet, Margaret R. "Narrative Fractures and
Fragments." Annual of the Modern Language
Association Division on Children's Literature and The ,
Children's Literature Association. Vol. 15. New
Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987. 37-54.
Hodge, Robert. Literature as Discourse: Textual ;
Strategies in English and History. Baltimore: Johns !
Hopkins UP, 1990. i
Holley, Linda Tarte. "Medieval Optics and the Framed
Narrative in Chaucer's Troilus and Crisevde." The
Chaucer Review 21.1 (1986): 26-44.
Hollington, Michael. Dickens and the Grotesque. London
and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984.
Indrasuta, Chantanee. "Contrastive Rhetoric and the
Relationship Among Culture, Language and Thought."
Unpublished paper, U of Illinois, 1986. 1-33.
436
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of
Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1978.
. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunvan to Beckett. 1974.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.
. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological
Approach." Tompkins 50-69.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of
Subversion. London and New York: Methuen, 1981.
Jacobson, Sibyl. "The Narrative Framing of History: A
Discussion of Old Mortality." The Journal of
Narrative Technique 1.3 (1971): 179-92.
Jaffe, Audrey. "'Never be Safe but in Hiding':
Omniscience and Curiosity in The Old Curiosity Shop."
Novel 19.2 (1986): 118-34.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1964.
. "The Art of Fiction." Zabel 387-414.
. The Art of the Novel. Boston: Northeastern UP,
1984.
. Preface to The Awkward Age. The Art of the Novel.
98-118.
. Preface to The Golden Bowl. The Art of the Novel.
327-48.
. Preface to The Princess Casamassima. The Art of
the Novel. 59-78.
. Preface to The Tragic Muse. The Art of the Novel.
79-97.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative
as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1981.
. "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and
Ideological Analysis." White and Brose 68-91.
437
Jinks, William. The Celluloid Literature: Film in -the
Humanities. 2nd edition. 1971. Beverly Hills:
Glencoe Press, 1974.
Jones, Roger S. Physics as Metaphor. 1982.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Four Archetypes:
Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster. 1959. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1969.
Kaplan, Robert B. "Contrastive Rhetoric and Second
Language Learning: Notes Toward a Theory of
Contrastive Rhetoric." Purves 275-3 04.
. "On the Notion of Topic in'Written Discourse."
([Los Angeles]: [U of Southern California Fac.].
N.P.: n.p.), 1978. 1-14.
Kavanagh, James H. Emilv Brontft. Rereading Literature
Series. Ed. Terry Eagleton. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1985.
Kimbrough, Robert. Preface. The Turn of the Screw.
James ix-x.
Kimberling, C. Ronald. Kenneth Burked Dramatism and
Popular Arts. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1982.
Kincaid, James R. "'Words Cannot Express':
Frankenstein's Tripping on the Tongue." Novel 24.1
(1990): 26-47.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caliaari to Hitler: A
Psychological History of the German Film. 1947.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Kucich, John. "Death Worship among the Victorians: The
Old Curiosity Shop." PMLA 95.1 (1980): 58-72.
Kuipers, Benjamin J. "A Frame for Frames: Representing
Knowledge for Recognition." Bobrow and Collins 151-
84.
Kuntz, Paul G., ed. The Concept of Order. Seattle and
London: U of Washington P, 1968.
438
LaCapra, Dominick. "Culture and Ideology: From Geertz
to Marx." Hernadi, ed. The Rhetoric of
Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric
125-42.
Leach, Maura, ed. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary
of Folklore. Mythology, and Legend. New York: Funk & ;
Wagnalls, 1972.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: A Study of the
English Novel. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954.
Leavis, Q. D. "A Fresh Approach to Wutherinq Heights."
"Contemporary Reviews and Essays in Criticism."
Emily Bronte 306-21.
Lee, Dorothy. "Codifications of Reality: Lineal and
Nonlineal." Conformity and Conflict: Readings in
Cultural Anthropology. Eds. James P. Spradley and
David W. McCurdy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. 81-
95.
Lentricchia, Frank. "Reading History with Kenneth
Burke." White and Brose 119-49.
Le Sage, Alain RenA. Asmodeus. or The Devil upon Two
Sticks. London: J. C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881.
. Asmodeus. or The Devil on Two Sticks. n.p.: The
Bibliophilist Society, 1932.
Lettis, Richard, and William E. Morris, eds. A
Wutherinq Heights Handbook. New York: Odyssey Press,
1961. ' ;
Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English
Fiction from Frankenstein to Ladv Chatterlev.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Liberman, Anatoly, ed. Introduction. Theory and
History of Folklore. By Vladimir Propp. Theory and
History of Literature. Vol. 5. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1984. ix-lxxxi. 1
Lindenbaum, Peter. "Hulks with One and Two Anchors: The <
Frame, Geographical Detail, and Ritual Process in I
Heart of Darkness." Modern Fiction Studies 30.4
(1984): 703-10.
439
Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Forms of Folklore in Africa.
Austin: U of Texas P, 1977.
Lohafer, Susan. "Preclosure and Story Processing."
Lohafer and Clarey 249-75.
Lohafer, Susan, and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Storv
Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State UP, 1989.
Lotman, Jurij. "The Discrete Text and the Iconic Text:
Remarks on the Structure of Narrative." New Literary
History 6.2 (1975): 333-38.
. "The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology."
Poetics Today 1: 1-2 (1979): 161-84.
Lovell, Terry. Consuming Fiction. London and New York:
New Left Books, 1987.
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. The Post-Modern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Transs. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi. 1984. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1988.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction.
New York: Columbia UP, 1979.
Macovski, Michael S. "Wuthering Heights and the
Rhetoric of Interpretation." ELH 34.2 (1987): 363-
84.
Madden, William A. "Framing the Alices.” PMLA 101.3
(1986): 362-73.
Makarius, Laura. "The Mask and the Violation of Taboo."
Crumrine and Halpin 195-203.
Marcus, Steven. Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey. New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction
and Theory. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca
and London: Cornell UP, 1986.
440
Martinez-Bonati, Filix. Fictive Discourse and the
Structures of Literature; A Phenomenological
Approach. Trans. Philip W. Silver (with the author's
collaboration). Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1981.
Matsuhashi, Ann, ed. Writing in Real Time: Modelling
Production Processes. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing
Corp., 1987.
Matthews, John. "Framing in Wuthering Heights." Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 27.1 (1985): 25-
61.
Matthiessen, F. O. "The Ambassadors." James 427-38.
McCanles, Michael. "The Dialectical Structure of
Discourse." Poetics Today 3.4 (1982): 21-37.
McHale, Brian. Rev. of A Theory of the Secondary:
Literature. Progress, and Reaction, by Virgil
Nemoianu. Poetics Today 11.3 (1990): 715-16.
McKenna, Teresa. "Intersections of Race, Class and
Gender: The Feminist Pedagogical Challenge." Pacific
Coast Philology 25.1-2 (1990): 31-38.
McMaster, Juliet and Rowland. The Novel from Sterne to
James: Essavs on the Relation of Literature to Life.
Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981.
Meier, Stefanie. Animation and Mechanization in the
Novels of Charles Dickens. Swiss ^Studies in English,
111. Zurich: Francke Verlag Bern, 1982.
Metz, Christian. nTrucage and the Film." Trans.
Frangoise Meltzer. The Language of Images. Ed. W.
J. T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago
P, 1980. 151-69.
Metzing, Dieter, ed. Frame Conceptions and Text
Understanding. Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1980.
Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956.
Mickelsen, David. "Types of Spatial Structure in
Narrative." Smitten and Daghistany 63-78.
441
Miles, Peter. Wutherinq Heights: An Introduction to the
Variety of Criticism. The Critics Debate Series.
Ed. Michael Scott. London: MacMillan Education Ltd.,
1990.
Miller, Carolyn R. "Genre as Social Action." The
Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2 (1984): 151-67.
Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven
English Novels. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. 1
Minsky, Marvin. "A Framework for Representing
Knowledge." Metzing 1-25.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. "Face, Race, and Disfiguration in
Stephen Crane's The Monster." Critical Inquiry 17.1
(1990): 174-92.
i
Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. On Narrative. Chicago and
London: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the
Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York UP,
1969.
Moger, Angela Schrode. "Narrative Structure in
Maupassant: Frames of Desire." PMLA 100.3 (1985):
315-27.
. Working Out (ofl Framefd) Works: A Study of the
Structural Frame in Stories bv Maupassant. Balzac.
Barbev. and Conrad. Diss. Yale U, 1980. Ann Arbor:
UMI, 1980. 8025217.
Monle6n, Jos* B. A Specter is Haunting Europe:*A
Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
Montrose, Louis. "The Work of Gender in the Discourse '
of Discovery." Representations 33 (1991): 1-41.
i
Morson, Gary Saul. "Bakhtin and the Present Moment."
The American Scholar (1991): 201-22.
. "Who Speaks for Bakhtin?" Bakhtin: Essays and
Dialogues on His Work. Ed. Gary Saul Morson.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. 1-19.
Mortimer, Armine Kotin. "Second Stories." Lohafer and
Clarey 276-98.
442
Moser, Thomas. "What is the Matter with Emily Jane?
Conflicting Impulses in Wutherinq Heights." Watt,
The Victorian Novel 181-99.
Mosher, Harold L. "A New Synthesis of Narratology."
Rev. of Storv and Discourse: Narrative Structure in
Fiction and Film by Seymour Chatman. Poetics Today
1.3 (1980): 171-86.
Napier, A. David. Masks. Transformation, and Paradox.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Nash, Cristopher. "Slaughtering the Subject:
Literature's Assault on Narrative." Nash 199-218.
, ed. Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling
in the Sciences. Philosophy, and Literature. London
and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Nelson, Cary. "Writing as the Accomplice of Language:
Kenneth Burke and Poststructuralism." The Legacy of
Kenneth Burke. Eds. Herbert W. Simons and Trevor
Melia. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. 156-73.
Newman, Beth. "Narratives of Seduction and the
Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of
Frankenstein." ELH 53.1 (1986): 141-63.
. "'The Situation of the Looker-On': Gender,
Narration, and Gaze in Wutherinq Heights." PMLA
105.5 (1990): 1029-41.
Odmark, John, ed. Language. Literature & Meaning I:
Problems of Literary Theory. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins B.V., 1979.
Page, Barbara. "Confessions of a Tenured Liberal."
Convocation Address. Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,
New York. September 1991.
Patterson, Arthur H. "Spatial Representation and the
Environment" Some Applied and Not Very Applied
Implications." Spatial Representation and Behavior
Across the Life Span: Theory and Application. Eds.
Lynn S. Liben, Arthur H. Patterson, Nora Newcombe.
New York: Academic Press, 1981. 361-72.
Perry, Menakhem. "Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a
Text Creates Its Meanings." Poetics Today 1: 1-2
(1979): 35-64.
443
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "Dialectics of Coherence:
Toward an Integrative Theory." College English 47.1
(1985): 12-29.
Pickering, Wilbur. A Framework for Discourse Analysis.
Arlington, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and
the Univ. of Texas at Arlington, 1980.
Pike, Kenneth L. Tagmemics. Discourse, and Verbal Art.
Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, U of
Michigan P, 1981.
Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative Knowing and the Human
Sciences. Albany: State U of NY P, 1988.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Ladv and the Woman Writer.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984.
Pratt, Mary Louise* Toward a Speech Act Theory of
Literary Discourse. Bloomington and London: Indiana
UP, 1977.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of
Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Toronto and
New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratologv. Lincoln and
London: U of Nebraska P, 1987.
• Narratologv: The Form and Function of Narrative.
Berlin and New York: Mouton Publishers, 1982.
Purves, Alan C., ed. Writing Across Languages and
Cultures: Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric. Written
Communication Annual 2. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications, 1988.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative
Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation.
Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1987.
Rabkin, Eric S. "Spatial Form and Plot." Smitten and
Daghistany 79-99.
Ricento, Tom. "Culture, Language, and Thought."
Unpublished paper, U of California, Los Angeles,
1984. 1-19.
. "A Model for Research in Contrastive Rhetoric."
Unpublished paper, 1985. 1-82.
444
Richman, Paula. "Framed Narrative and the Dramatized
Audience in a Tamil Buddhist Epic." Asian Folklore
Studies 44 (1985): 81-103.
Riegel, Klaus F. "Toward a Dialectical Interpretation
of Time and Change." Gorman and Wessman 59-108.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary
Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983.
Ritchie, Joy S. "Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and
Individual Identity." College Composition and
Communication 40.2 (1989): 152-74.
Roberts, John W. "The African American Animal Trickster
as Hero." Ruoff and Ward 97-114.
Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henrv
James. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P. 1984.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Jerry W. Ward, eds.
Redefining American Literary History. New York: MLA,
1990.
Russo, Mary. "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory."
de Lauretis, ed. Feminist Studies: Critical Studies.
213-29.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Stacks, Frames and Boundaries, or
Narrative as Computer Language." Poetics Today:
Narratology Revisited II 11.4 (1990): 873-99.
Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method.
1975. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of
Narrative. London: Oxford UP, 1966.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.
Shannon, Edgar F., Jr. "Lockwood's Dreams and the
Exegesis of Wuthering Heights." Lettis and Morris
202-15.
Sinha, Chris. Language and Representation: A Socio-
Naturalistic Approach to Human Development.
Washington Square, NY: New York UP, 1988.
445
Smitten, Jeffrey R. Introduction. Smitten and
Daghistany. 15-34.
Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. Spatial
Form in Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP,
1981.
Stephenson, Ralph, and Jean R. Debrix. The Cinema as
Art. 1965. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973.
Stephenson, William. "William James, Niels Bohr, and
Complementarity: IV— The Significance of Time." The
Psychological Record 38.1 (1988): 19-35.
Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal
Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1978.
Swinfen, Ann. In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the
Genre in English and American Literature Since 1945.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Tannen, Deborah. "Oral and Literate Strategies in
Spoken and Written Narratives." Language 58.1
(1982): 1-21.
. "What's in a Frame? Surface Evidence for
Underlying Expectations." New Directions in
Discourse Processing. Vol. 2 of Advances in
Discourse Processes. 2 vols. Ed. Roy O. Freedle.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1979. 137-81.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans.
Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
*. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Resoonse Criticism: From
Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 1984
Toolan, Michael J. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic
Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
Townsend, Michael A. R. "Schema Activation in Memory
for Prose." Journal of Reading Behavior 12.1 (1980):
49-53.
446
Turner, Victor. "Social Dramas and Stories about Them."
Mitchell, On Narrative 137-64.
Ullrich, David William. "Organic Haros Diversely
Fram’d": A Theory of the Frame and the Frame
Narrative. Including a Taxonomy and Its Application
to Nineteenth-Centurv British Literature. Diss. U
Wisconsin-Madison, 1986. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990.
8623705.
Van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. Strategies of
Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press,
1983.
. "Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and
Production." Psychological Review 85.5 (1978): 363-
94.
Van Peer, Willie. "Top-Down and Bottom-Up:
Interpretative Stategies in Reading E. E.
Cummings." NLH 18.3 (1987): 597-609.
Verdaasdonk, H. "Conceptions of Literature as Frames?"
Poetics II (1982): 87-104.
Watson, Melvin R. "Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and
Structure of Wuthering Heights." Victorian
Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Austin
Wright. New York: Oxford UP, 1961. 86-97.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1981.
, ed. The Victorian Novel: Modern Essavs in
Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.
Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the
Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-
conscious Fiction. London and New York: Methuen,
1984.
Wellek, Reni, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature.
3rd edition. 1975. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977.
Welsh, Alexander. "Opening and Closing Les Mis&rables.”
Nineteenth-Centurv Fiction 33.1 (1978): 8-23.
447
White, Allon. ’ ’ Hysteria and the end of carnival:
Festivity and bourgeois neurosis." Armstrong and
Tennenhouse 157-70.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form; Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
• . "Getting Out of History." Rev. of The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by
Fredric Jameson. Diacritics 12.3 (1982): 2-13.
. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,
1978.
. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of
Reality." Mitchell, On Narrative 1-23.
White, Hayden, and Margaret Brose, eds. Representing
Kenneth Burke. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1982.
Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Gothic Manners and the Classic
English Novel. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
Wilson, F.A.C. "The Primrose Wreath: The Heroes of the
Bronte Novels." Nineteenth-Centurv Fiction 29.1
(1974): 40-57.
Wilson, G. H. The Eccentric Mirror. 4 vols. 1807.
London: James Cundee, 1813.
Winterowd, W. Ross. "Kenneth Burke: An Annotated
Glossary of His Terministic Screen and a
'Statistical' Survey of His Major Concepts."
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 15.3-4 (1985): 145-77.
Winterowd, W. Ross, and James D. Williams. "Cognitive
Style and Written Discourse." Focuses 3.1 (1990): 3-
23.
Wolfe, Bernard. "Uncle Remus and the Malevolent
Rabbit," in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel:
Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American
Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973. 524-40.
Woodring, Carl R. "The Narrators of Wuthering Heights."
Lettis and Morris 164-9.
448
Yaeger, Patricia. Honev-Mad Women: Emancipatory
Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia
UP, 1988.
Young, Richard, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike.
Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Young, Steven C. The Frame Structure in Tudor and
Stuart Drama. Salzburg, Austria: Institut fur
Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat
Salzburg, Erwin A. Sttirzl, General Editor, 1974.
Zabel, Morton Dauwen, ed. The Portable Henrv James.
1956. Middlesex, Eng. and New York: Penguin Books,
1983.
Zonana, Joyce. "'They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale':
Safie's Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein." The Journal of Narrative
Technioue 21.2 (1991): 170-84.

Linked assets