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The Frame Function
An Insideâ"Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame
By Jan Cronin Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2011 Jan Cronin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-182-6
CHAPTER 1
The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide
THE ADAPTABLE MAN
THIS IS NOT AN INTRODUCTORY GUIDE to the novels of Janet Frame. It does not present "Janet Frame" in easy-to-swallow capsules. Frame's novels, notoriously, aren't readily consumable, and to insist on making them so is surely to misrepresent their nature. Frame's novels are instead addictively – at times deliciously – indigestible; and that characteristic lies at the heart of this study. This is a guide for those who have acquired or are in the process of acquiring (albeit under duress) a taste for the novels of Janet Frame. It is a guide for readers who are intrigued and stimulated by her work (as I myself have been for over a decade now), rather than for those who maintain that Frame's novels should come with a health warning, or at most be partaken of in consultation with a licensed professional. This guide is concerned with the nature of Frame's work: what her texts are, how they work, how Frame works as a writer, and the impact these fundamentals have on the process of interpreting and engaging with Frame's work. At the root of these issues lies the operation of what I am terming an authorial presence within Frame's novels, and the resulting dynamic between prescriptiveness and elusiveness in her work (i.e. the way the work seems to "lay down rules for its usage", while the "whole" continues to elude us). This is a guide to the operation of that authorial presence: how it impacts on interpretation, and how it facilitates our exploration and understanding of both the nature of Frame's texts and ultimately her compositional processes.
What do I mean by authorial presence? Let's begin with an extreme example. Consider the following scenario from Janet Frame's 1965 novel The Adaptable Man. The scene is the morning breakfast table. The village dentist, Russell Maude, and his wife, Greta, are suffering the presence of Russell's convalescent clergyman brother, Aisley. Their son, Alwyn, is a good deal less tolerant. The reader is told that when Aisley 'set out for Little Burgelstatham he was careful to pack his book of Anglo-Saxon poetry' (AM, p. 23). At the breakfast table, then, Aisley sits reading from his volume aloud:
'The ashes of the oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak to tell me how high or how large it was; it tells me not what flocks sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too, [...] who will undertake to sift those dusts again, to pronounce, This is the patrician, this is the noble flower —' (AM, p. 52)
Alwyn responds with:
— Beautiful prose [...]. But it shelters behind couldst, wouldst, hath; it's easy these days, when you know the trick, to think a fancy trite thought and make it sound meaningful by adding a few wouldsts dosts haths thous and thees. (AM, p. 52)
At first glance, a conspiratorial relationship between author and reader is in the offing. The reader, who knows that Aisley is reading a translation of an Anglo-Saxon piece, is in a position to smugly note Alwyn's mistake as he misinterprets a translation of a genuine antique for a contemporary piece of cod-philosophy. However, the joke is at the expense of this reader. If we look more closely at Aisley's quotation, we notice that the extract he has recited is not a translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but is in fact from one of Donne's seventeenth-century sermons. Frame, though, has chopped the Donne extract at 'This is the patrician, this is the noble flower', with the result that the cadence echoes the metre of Anglo-Saxon verse. Such mischief is just for starters.
Aisley turned the pages again. 'Maeg is bw me syklum sogied ... calde grfrungen waeron fet mine forste gebunden caldum climmum.'
'Whither has gone the horse, whither has gone the man? Whither has gone the river of treasure? Whither has gone the place of feasting? How that time has passed away, has grown dark under the shadow of night as if it had never been!' (AM, pp. 52–53)
These two pieces are clearly posited on the page as extracts from original and translation. However, any readers who know their Anglo-Saxon poetry will spot that the initial Anglo-Saxon quotation is from 'The Seafarer' (and translates as 'I can utter a true song about my self, [...] Afflicted with cold, my feet were fettered by frost, by chill bonds'), while the English translation, 'Whither has gone the horse', which immediately follows the Anglo-Saxon extract in the text, is a partial translation of an entirely different poem from the Exeter Book entitled 'The Wanderer'. There is no question of Frame simply having made a mistake with her Anglo-Saxon translations. Later in her text, she repeats some of the same 'Wanderer' translation and this time furnishes the correct (albeit partial) Anglo-Saxon original: 'Hwaer cwom mearg. Hwaer cwom mago? Hu seo prag gewat genap u der nihthelm, swa heo no waere!' (AM, p. 77).
What we have here is the crafty assertion of an authorial presence within the text. For someone like me – a closet deconstructionist – this authorial presence was both intriguing and deeply troubling when I confronted it in a 2009 essay on The Adaptable Man and riddle and enigma. This guide grows out of that particular confrontation; and the relevant analysis is revisited and redeployed in the course of this introductory chapter. My sense, during that earlier engagement, was that my long-cherished ideals of textual autonomy were being corroded by this authorial presence, which seemed all too closely related to the empirical author. I could not avoid the fact that behind this mischief was a flesh and blood writer manipulating both text and reader for kicks: the refrain of the novel is, after all, 'who wants fun?'. Rather than simplifying the interpretative process, this empirical presence complicated proceedings, as its parameters were notably tricky to distil. Any reader familiar enough with Old English to have noted the mix-up of translations will have noticed that the spelling in the above Anglo-Saxon quotations (which is common to all 1965 editions of the novel) is corrupt beyond the limitations imposed by typesetting, and that 'maþþumgyfa' is incorrectly rendered as 'river of treasure' instead of 'giver of treasure' (the correct translation is furnished later in the text on p. 263 of the original edition). Is this merely sloppy copy-editing or is the corruption of the spelling a deliberate extension of the mischief with the translations and originals? How do we decide where the operation of this authorial presence begins and ends?
A simple exercise (charted in my earlier essay) demonstrated that the reader could not rely on the empirical author to set such parameters. When I consulted a final manuscript for The Adaptable Man, I found that, on the first page, Frame had written a note which reads: 'Spelling wrong in O.E. quotations'. Are we to interpret this as "the Anglo-Saxon spellings are deliberately incorrect" or as "The Anglo-Saxon spellings are a residual error"? The most recent edition of the novel (Vintage, 2007) goes with the latter interpretation, based on the 1993 Vintage edition. This seems a safe bet, given that if one looks at the main Anglo-Saxon passage in the manuscript, one finds that Frame has taken a pen (post-publication) and corrected three of the errors. However, she leaves further errors in that passage uncorrected and, in a particularly strange omission, does not amend 'river' to 'giver'. This last error, deliberate or otherwise, survives in both the recent Vintage editions. In an interesting twist, the 1965 New Zealand and English editions maintain the errors that are in the uncorrected manuscript but indicate an ellipsis, so that the break between 'sogied' and 'calde' in the 'Seafarer' extract, which is unacknowledged in Frame's manuscript (and in the 1965 American edition), is apparent in the published copy. This means that prior to the novel's publication someone checked the quotations and registered the ellipsis but either deliberately or carelessly did not revise the spellings. Why take the trouble to indicate an ellipsis in that section but not at other points in the Anglo-Saxon material and furnished translations in the text? We know that Frame was consulted regarding corrections to the 1993 Vintage edition of The Adaptable Man, but the correspondence appears to have gone astray. Hence, I concluded (admittedly to my relief) that the reader could not rely on the empirical author to clarify the text in relation to the above quandary. Yet, at the same time, I remained conscious that the wilful authorial presence within the text was such that it wouldn't allow the reader to disregard it when engaging with the work; and this bind intrigued me.
I began to think about the nature of this authorial presence and its impact on the process of interpreting a Frame novel. Janet Frame is well known as a playful writer, but it seemed to me that the havoc wreaked with originals and translations in that scene from The Adaptable Man went beyond properties of playfulness and manipulativeness and gestured towards something altogether more prescriptive. I use the term 'prescriptive' here, as at the start of this chapter, with reference to its OEED connotations of 'laying down rules of usage': in this case, curbing the reader's free rein, controlling the terms of the text, even, possibly, to the exclusion of the reader. For instance, the reader who is in the know regarding the Anglo-Saxon material finds that recognition of this authorial presence inevitably dictates the direction of his/her engagement with the scene: Frame's subversion of the originals and translations clearly stages some point about the perils of distinguishing translations from originals and identifying the relationship between them. But the reader who remains blissfully impervious to these authorial shenanigans doesn't even know s/he has been duped. It's a private authorial joke.
Outside of my 2009 article, the authorial mischief with originals and translations in The Adaptable Man has gone undetected in Frame studies. However, in thinking about the implications of that mischief, I was reminded very much of what Patrick Evans, in a short literary obituary of Frame in 2004, termed the 'Frame effect'. Evans defined this effect as 'the sense that her writing conceals A Secret, some private fact or facts, even some kind of scandal, which, if known, would make her oeuvre suddenly complete'. Although this assertion cannot help but resonate with Evans's earlier interest in trawling through Frame's life and work for some biographical 'aboriginal "secret"', it also entails a highly astute observation. Evans continues that this 'effect' 'came out of her control of [...] how the writing was to be read, something more ruthless and efficient than I have found in any other writer and involving a fundamental contract with the reader which was always basically adversarial'. He went on:
How this worked I began to realise 20 years ago when I [learned that] [...] [e]ach night [...] Cawley [Frame's London psychiatrist and champion] was obliged to play a game of her devising, in which she would give him a baffling sentence to unscramble – presumably something like [...] cryptic crossword clues [...] – which Cawley was expected to have 'solved' for her each subsequent morning. [...]
There, in a nutshell, is Frame the Writer. As readers, each of us is caught up in the same contract she had with Cawley, under her control whenever we read her and required to perform – to solve. Each successive work she wrote was increasingly like a chess master class, apparently seamless to read on a first go, quite baffling at times, and not at all helpful.
In support of his assertions, Evans goes on to list instances of authorial playfulness: nothing quite on the scale of Frame's Adaptable Man exploits, but it's notable that Evans ends up in a similar position to my dilemma regarding authorial mischief in that text. He admits he was 'reduced to writing to every single family named Bone in the Oamaru phonebook to ask if they had a relative called Nora Bone' to correspond with the figure in Frame's autobiography. Evans's rationale was: 'what kind of parent would – [...] how could she be called Nora Bone, isn't this one of Frame's tricks, doesn't it tie in with all the bone imagery in the first volume?'. Having gone to school with a girl named Annette Curtin, I am not necessarily convinced by Evans's argument; however, it does illustrate the reader's predicament regarding the parameters of an intrusive authorial presence. The recognition of an authorial presence within Frame's text primes us to read a certain way (to follow what Richard Rorty would term 'the old occultist urge to crack codes'); yet, even if we end up in thrall to that presence, a complete picture still eludes us and remains at a remove. We're simply not sure where this presence begins and ends and what weight it has in the interpretative exchange.
Evans's conclusion on this score is twofold. In keeping with my sense of a private authorial joke, he comments that 'with all [Frame's] stunts there is no signposting, no grandstanding: just the sense of a mandarin Jamesian author standing above us watching our helpless struggles as she pares her nails'. However, it is the other half of his conclusion that simultaneously gestures towards but also diverges most emphatically from the terrain of this guide. Evans articulates 'That fix, where her reader is completely caught up between "fact" and "fiction", neither able to solve the puzzle nor able to put it down'. For Evans this dilemma (and this is the point where Evans's account parts company with my own) relates primarily to the dissolution of 'the boundary between Life and Art in such a way that we learn, through learning how to read her, a sense of the inseparability the two domains must increasingly have had in her mind'. This 'fix', for Evans, is accounted for by the model of the Jamesian author he outlines above; he tells us that such a position is 'exactly where Frame want[s] us'. My suspicion is that the extreme example of authorial presence we find in the Anglo-Saxon material, which tallies with a de-biographised version of Evans's account of Frame, presents but one aspect of the operation of a prescriptive authorial presence within Frame's work. My sense is that, in addition to such an active agency, a prescriptive presence in Frame's work is also a particular manifestation, indeed an inevitable product, of a certain writerly MO (as in modus operandi or trademark way of operating), and that this MO derives from compositional processes, of which the relationship between life and art forms only a part. Authorial prescriptiveness and the corresponding 'fix', whereby the reader is 'neither able to solve the puzzle nor able to put it down', are, I suspect, ultimately more multifaceted with regard to the nature of Frame's texts and her relationship with her reader than has previously been thought.
We get an initial sense of what I am talking about if we consider the range of authorial prescriptiveness at work in The Adaptable Man, and how it impacts on the process of interpreting and engaging with that work. As I mentioned above, recognition of the authorial shenanigans with the Anglo-Saxon material induces attentiveness to issues of originals and translations in the novel. The most immediate counterpart of Aisley's reading scene, in terms of authorial presence and the impact on interpretation, is the preface to the incest scene between Greta and Alwyn, where the particularity of the incident is suspended in relation to its potential translations and equivalencies: 'A garden shed was a conventional place for it to happen. Yet it was not the shed featured in so many stories' (AM, p. 123). The mischievous authorial presence of the Anglo-Saxon antics busies herself protesting the originality of the incestuous incident, and bemoaning the absence of – but also warding off – familiar explicatory terms of representation: 'Oh the circumstances were different. Were they like those of myths and fables there might have been some understanding' (AM, p. 124). Elaborating on 'the formal ruinous patterns of the everlasting mythical family', the narrator insists: 'It did not happen that way; it was not that way at all' (AM, pp. 124–5). Of course, even the charge of mistranslation and its attendant assertion of originality are couched in, and compromised by, their borrowed terms. That final denial echoes the frustrated refrain of T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.' The focus of the incest scene reflects the authorial moves made in the Anglo-Saxon interlude; both episodes seem playful stagings of issues of originality and representation/mediation, which resonate with Greta's statement: 'I wish life were not merely a series of echoes!' (AM, p. 49).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Frame Function by Jan Cronin. Copyright © 2011 Jan Cronin. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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