Abstract
Frame’s short stories are full of the failure of experts, but where these figures of authority are shown to be wrong or are rendered conspicuously absent, the terms and laws of their symbolic systems persist. The experts may suffer capitulation, but other characters are quick to re-capitulate their authority in ways that suggest almost everything said in a Frame story comes with quotation marks. Capitulation may describe an agreement or contract by which to consider again Frame’s relationship to authority (her own, and that of others), it may draw attention to the problem of expertise and critical evaluation (as discussed by Michael Clune in his A Defence of Judgment) in her work, but it might also offer a way of reading Frame’s engagement with the short story form itself. As I hope to show, Frame’s short stories constantly draw attention to the problem of expertise, which is to say, to the ways in which the settler societies she so often depicts repeat a conservative and colonial social context contracted to a particular kind of authority.
To read the ways in which short story scholars have, from Poe to the present, sought to define the form is to become literate in the contexts, terms, and concerns of a critical doxa in which certain strains of Frame scholarship are evocatively audible. 1 Scholars of the short story emphasize the form’s lyricism, its proximity to poetry, and, in its attention to “the moment”, its brevity. The “moment” is often a “moment of truth”, an epiphany of sorts, an “awakening”, all of which are presented as “fragments” laden with the subjective experience of “inner change” (Marler, 1973: 429). Such moments, to follow Mary Rohrberger, reveal a reality “beyond the ordinary world of appearances” (1976: 81). The story, Rohrberger continues, seeks to “question the world of appearances and to point to a reality beyond the facts of the extensional world” (1976: 81).
This certainly sounds like something a Frame scholar would say of Frame’s work; indeed, it sounds like that “seemingly insatiable desire for a beyond” that Simone Drichel (among others) finds in Frame’s fiction and its criticism (2009: 183). Short story scholars, indebted to the work of Frank O’Connor, also emphasize the form’s tendency to express what O’Connor calls “an intense awareness of human loneliness” (2004: 19). Like the speaker who inhabits it, the form reads as “remote from the community — romantic, individualistic, and intransigent” (O’Connor, 2004: 21).
The form is not only thematically preoccupied with ideas about difference, but formally challenges the norms and expectations set by the novel. And so it is that we have come to repeat certain ideas about the short story: that it is wary of plot, that it prefers image over narrative, juxtaposition over exposition, is defined by “incompleteness” (Pratt, 1994: 99), and is “recalcitrant” too (Wright, 2012: 143), which is to say, the short story is unparaphrasable. As Austin Wright has argued, in its concentrated language, the densities of its patterned, motific repetitions, and in its sense of the unsaid, the story form requires us to return to it, to gather its images together, to repeat it for sense; such actions define the event of reading a short story as an act of what I am going to refer to as recapitulation, an event that, as the term capitulate suggests, involves an encounter with authority (an author’s, but also the authority of a social system) expressed by the terms and conditions, the articles of agreement or surrender, of the story’s own making. 2
More commonly, however, the story has been imagined as the vehicle for the exceptional — the romantic, perhaps modernist — outsider whose imaginative access to some beyond is indexed to their lyricism. And yet, this vision of autonomy — whether that of the story form itself or the lonely individual voiced within it — is a mystification. 3 As scholars like Douglas Tallack and Mary Louise Pratt have shown, the short story is always also a social form; it is never an “essence”, but evidence of “human institutions, historical through and through” (Pratt, 1994: 92). This may just be a way of saying that for every moment of lyrical insight, we must also attend to the informing doxa of the culture — its laws and traditions, its boundary-setting and boundary-breaking paradigms, its expertise, all of which may or may not be repeated.
For a writer like Frame, so invested in the ways in which individuals — the “lonely voices” (O’Connor) of her fiction — repeat, sometimes perversely but often with pleasure, the social systems and symbolic structures of their cultures, the short story is the form best suited to an enquiry in recapitulation. And indeed, as I will illustrate, Frame’s short fiction is full of restatement and repetition, echoes and quotations, the patterns of the social and colonial fabric, however threadbare or insidious, gathered and brought together by her narrators and characters.
Almost everywhere one looks in Frame’s oeuvre readers may find such acts of recapitulation. More than ideas or themes, however, what one finds are the repeated qualities of the short story form as I have outlined it above: an emphasis on brief scenes or fragments that bespeak a wariness of plot, language that is imagistic, motivic, and which, through the focalizing voice of a “lonely” and sensitive character, promises some unparaphrasable moment of inner insight, something by which a reader might learn to scrutinize the world of appearances for the sake of some lyrical beyond. Given that Frame’s preparation for writing novels consisted in her writing of short fiction, we should not be surprised to find in her first novel Owls Do Cry 1961/1985) a short story: A neighbour looked over the fence and saw Toby. – They’re away for the weekend, she said, glad to possess information and glad to part with it – what a great day, isn’t it? She smiled at him. – You’re Toby Withers, aren’t you? I thought you looked like Toby Withers. The family’s gone to the Crudge’s, Albert’s her fiancé you know. Fancy getting married. It’ll be a change from working in the woollen mill all week and every week till she’s tired out. – Will it? Toby said. – Yes, you know how pale they get, being inside all day. – And getting married, Toby said, she will live outside then? The neighbour looked surprised — How funny of you to say that. She’ll live in a house. – Oh, said Toby. – And now, said the neighbour, I must fly. Give my regards to your mother, and now I really must fly. – My husband’s away in the swamp, shooting for ducks, she said. And Toby said, But I came for Fay to take her with me, for her to be my wife and myself to be her husband. I thought we should go down on the beach in the lupins, but sit for a while first and watch the sea coming in and the dark blue waves curled over like the beak of a bird spitting lace, yes I came for Fay, I was going to pull her hair off and float it on the sea like weed and take my rifle shining and new with oil and shoot my little paradise duck and pick the drab tired feathers from her body /and bandage with love the scar upon her neck /her neck that I will twist for her to die /the scar that leather has made, the leather strap of the mill /girl day after day, oh yes, I came for my wife. – Are you all right, Toby? The neighbour asked. Toby frowned at her. – I thought you were gone, he said, to the swamp, to be shot. The neighbour looked alarmed and hurried away inside to tell someone about queer Toby Withers but there was no one to tell and say just imagine to; which is the worst of living, having no one around at the time to tell. (Frame, 1961/1985: 55–56)
As we listen in on Toby’s lyrical moment of interiority (the italics make this rather unmissable), we are, perhaps, inclined to imagine this brief and poetic epiphany as evidence that Frame’s fiction is interested in moments of transcendence, moments where narrators, characters, and, by a textual act of authority, readers too, get to go beyond cultural consensus and into forbidden social territories. 4 It is tempting, I think, to find in such a passage the repetition of those qualities of the short story form so often repeated by the form’s experts. But the repetition of that critical, formal doxa must be read in association with the passage’s recapitulation of the social and cultural doxa, which is to say that this passage does not take us beyond the event of the story or the world it records, but back to the social symbolic. Thus, this short moment is knitted together by the repetition of words, phrases (clichés), and images (“A great day”, “fancy getting married”, “How funny”, “I must fly”, “Give my regards”, “queer Toby Withers”, “just imagine”, “the worst of living”) gathered from the culture Toby and the neighbour share. This brief, short story-like exchange does not lift us up and out of the culture, but takes us deeper into its conventions, into the unforbidden terms and conditions the social authority (as well as Frame herself) invites us to recapitulate.
As I will argue, Frame’s interests in her short stories lie not with some beyond but rather with what that mystification encourages, a mourning of authority through the repetition of its fallen relics — those downstream versions of authority that we find washing up in the social doxa, and which, as we will see, Frame associates with expertise. In Frame’s stories expertise unforbids; it permits redescription in ways that are, as Michael Clune and Michael Polanyi have described them, flexible and inclusive such that a once-potent authority, aligned with the power of sacred prohibition, might be repeated in popular and profane forms. Rather than celebrating what might be transformative about the “human institution” (Pratt) of expertise (the realm of the social, of tradition, and the structure of the paradigm) Frame’s stories commonly depict Pākehā or settler societies defined by their confused rituals of repetition. These societies may have forgotten their referents, but they remember their desire to repeat. 5 The stories are thus defined by the formal experience of recapitulation. In this way they evoke — without need for explanation or interpretation — a conservative and colonial social context contracted to a particular kind of authority. This is not, however, a forbidding authority but, as suggested, the unforbidding agency of expertise from which the textual tissue of her stories — echoes, copies, and quotations, forms of recapitulation — recur with the cadence of ritual. By Frame’s own authority such repetitions are those that we, readers and Frame scholars, are contracted to repeat.
In Frame’s stories such repetitions take us back, down, and into culture, not beyond it. Though Toby’s “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi, 1966) of his society’s inherent violence towards women — that they should be imagined like game, to be hunted and shot — may seem like an epiphany, it is also, and primarily, a recapitulation of the values inherent and unforbidden in the neighbour’s doxa, her commonplace idiom: “I really must fly”. Toby is no lyrical exception: there is as much poetic truth in the speech of the neighbour as anything Toby says or thinks. What, for example, is a “woollen mill” (surely they are made of sturdier stuff) if not another accidental commonplace, an unforbidden error of the vernacular, and one that helps us imagine the continuities that exist between an institution, a kind of gendered work, and the larger social fabric that binds women with its every repetition. Frame repeats this image in much of her work, not least in a late story like “Insulation” (1983). The story, as the narrator puts it, is set in “God’s country” a “Garden of Eden” (199), where people live by the laws of recapitulation — to gather, to bring together, to repeat: On TV when they demonstrated knitting-machines the knitter (it was always a she, with the he demonstrating) simply moved her hands to and fro as if casting a magic spell and the machine did the rest. To and fro, to and fro, a faire-isle sweater knitted in five hours, and fair-isle was coming back, people said. […] [W]hen she walked by her friends’ houses she could see them sitting in the light moving their hands magically to and fro, making faire-isle and bulky knit, intently reading the pattern. (200)
As any reader familiar with Frame’s writing will know, even the most casual bits of doxa (“the pattern”) are always loaded with the beliefs and ideas a culture unforbids itself to value and repeat. When Toby’s neighbour asks him if he is “all right” we know the empty phrase is in fact full of concerns about difference, about those who are not “all right” at all. The neighbour, as much the other as Toby, is there to police the relation of knowledge with experience, which is to say, she is there to maintain the expertise that weighs on Toby’s shoulders (that he is epileptic), and which runs through his thoughts like conscience. An expert medical opinion on Toby is as powerful as its depleted, much repeated, version: that “queer Toby Withers” is a “shingle short” (1985: 54). We hear the tired metaphor (itself a cliché) as a distant echo — a recapitulation — of an expert diagnosis. As Mark Williams notes, even the most “innocuous” examples of phatic communion are imbued with an authority they conserve and perpetuate though their origins may be irretrievable (2011: 68). There is very little in Frame’s short fiction that is not in fact a repetition; everything seems to come with invisible quotation marks, but then this is to be expected of a writer who relied on the short story form to pursue her fascination with the ways in which authority and knowledge — expressed as expertise — are so often recapitulated.
It is perhaps not difficult to imagine why a writer like Frame, raised in a colonial culture, might have been sensitive to ideas about repetition and recapitulation. Frame must have read colonialism itself as a vast, authorial act of repetition, a culture reproducing itself on the cultures of others. As Patricia Neville rightly points out, Frame was a “transnational” writer, and was mindful of the ways in which something like the creation of the British Commonwealth could reduce difference to a series of echoes, or what Jan Cronin sees in Frame’s fiction as her recurring interest in copies, in “enactments (as in actings-out or stagings) of material relating to originals and mediation” (2011: 13). Indeed, Frame’s fiction echoes with repetitions, and her attention to what I am calling recapitulation is well noted: Claire Bazin, for example, highlights Frame’s use of the “refrain” (2018: 88), and notes what, after Philippe Lejeune, she calls the “stereographic effect” of Frame’s stories — the way her texts “echo each other” (2018: 85). Neville makes a similar point when she describes Frame as “[a] self-consciously intertextual author, [who] weaves the work of other literary creators into her own through reference, quotation, pastiche and echo” (2019: 19). Valérie Baisnée’s observation that “Frame is haunted by doxa, by the fear of repeating something already said and already thought” (2009: 93) adds yet another echo to the literary-critical doxa. Yet, I would like to suggest that it is less a “fear” of doxa than an observer’s fascination with it that is apparent in Frame’s work. As Baisnée notes, drawing on Barthes, one “cannot speak without picking up what is lying about in language”; both Barthes and Frame “hunt down clichés in their writing, and their obsession leads them to find them everywhere” (2000: 93). Frame, it seems, is always aware that “the word in language is half someone else’s”, such that every speaker is one who “collocates” (Dvorak, 2011: 143). In a sense that wish, expressed in The Adaptable Man, that “life [was] not merely a set of echoes” (Frame, 1965: 49) could run as an epigraph to all of Frame’s short fiction.
As I am suggesting, Frame’s thoughts about authority and repetition, alongside her interest in the formal qualities of her short fiction, conduce to a reading of the term recapitulation. As a verb, capitulate describes an act of writing: the drawing up of terms, as in a contract (the legal document of an authority, a treaty, or terms of surrender). 6 In a sense the word bonds an idea about the prosecution of authority, with the act of being a writer. But the reader is bound by this contract too: to capitulate is to comply with the specific points of a text, points given emphasis by their repetition, in fact by the way in which their motivic recurrence defines the form of a document like a short story.
Indeed, as Vanessa Guignery has shown, Frame’s early stories repeatedly capitulate what we might call the problem of story form: “The Lagoon” inaugurates this compulsion with lines like “Is there a story [?]” (1951: 10), and “The lagoon never had a proper story” (8), that attest to Frame’s self-aware investigation of storytelling itself; the problem is recapitulated in “Jan Godfrey” whose narrator begins her story “I am wanting to write a story today. I am writing more than anything to write a story. I am sitting on my bed with my typewriter, typing words that are not a story” (94). “Story”, for Frame, names a concern not with content or theme but, as repetition suggests, with form. As the narrator in “My Last Story” puts it, writing a story while emptying it at the same time: “I don’t like writing stories. I don’t like putting he said she said he did she did and telling about people” (128). Guignery is not alone in this reading. For Christine Lorre, Frame’s stories are events of recapitulation built on “tropes” (2007). Lorre notes how the two girls in “My Cousins Who Could Eat Cooked Turnips” bond with each other by their shared repetition of socially-sanctioned ideas and language. More specifically, in their mimicry of adult behaviours and manners they echo the trope-like roles of their authority figures. In effect, they weave between them, as play, in fact as “unforbidden pleasure” (Phillips, 2015), the social symbolic in which their identities have already been written. The girls’ much-quoted refrain “really is that so just fancy”, said “over and over again” (Frame, 1983: 9), expresses, thus, a signature of sorts upon a kind of contract (a recapitulation). Lorre turns to Roland Barthes in order to argue, as so many Frame scholars do, that when characters repeat such phrases they do so to “appropriate” examples of cliché and euphemism, such that these seemingly empty words become “free to transport new meaning” (2007: 258). Versions of this kind of reading echo throughout Frame scholarship, and no one would deny the power of language in Frame’s work, but if the implication is that such transports are bound for what Lydia Wevers has called some “better […] beyond” (2003: 184), it might be worth considering that one person’s “new meaning” may, for another, be the already written, which is to say, a repetition. It is this latter consideration that holds Frame’s attention in her stories. As Barthes makes clear, “no matter what meaning is conveyed” it is “the transport itself” that “counts” (Lorre, 2007: 258). There is nothing inherently progressive about a trope or a metaphor, nor for that matter, about repetition or recapitulation, which is why meaning is always bracketed in Frame’s stories, or at least, made subordinate to the how of a story’s formal elements. Lydia Wevers makes the profound observation that “[w]hat is marvellous about [Frame’s] fiction is that it doesn’t let you rest, not that it offers up the promise of something better and beyond” (2003: 184). Cronin makes a similar point: to think about “how a Frame text works” is to recognize that text’s “tendency […] to stage serial versions of [its material], without necessarily delving into [it]” (2011: 13).
Frame’s stories are concerned with many things, but all stem from this examination of how stories transport us, and how they inform the way we move, or are moved, inside the repetitive structures of authority. Lorre cites the final passage from “My Cousins” as proof to her claim that the story’s children are transported to a new world of meaning. This beyond is signalled by the children’s “appropriation” of one of the story’s many repetitions (or tropes) (2007: 258). The girls, Mavis and Nancy, have become “very good friends. … We drank tea out of little china cups, and we said really is that so just fancy, and we swung, all day we swung as high as the dunny roses” (1983: 10). Frame is conspicuously (and typically) repetitive with her language here, and as Lorre rightly notes the content recapitulates phrases established as significant earlier in the story. Lorre suggests that these repetitions resemble a “liberating effect, conveying a feeling of the protagonists’ having grown up and gained self-confidence” — a reading that nicely picks up on the upward swing of ascent (2007: 261). But such a reading might imply a returning descent too, not least in that image of the “dunny roses”. A “dunny” (not to mention the kitsch roses) is not really a portal to some “better […] beyond” (Wevers, 2003: 184) but something that leads us back and down and inwards, always inwards in Frame, to earth’s “human institutions” (Pratt, 1994: 92), to the desublimating business of bottoms, and into the reticulating systems of subterranean plumbing. Systems recur in Frame’s stories; at the intersection of social networks and infrastructure lie her concerns about the ways in which power and authority are reproduced and maintained — certainly — but the stories also reveal concerns about the dilution and depletion of authority by its repetition. Frame returns time and again to images of binding social structures — “woollen mills”, hospitals, museums, and other institutions, not to mention the power lines of “The Linesman”, but it is perhaps in “The Reservoir” that this sense of recapitulation is best associated with the dilution of authority.
“The Reservoir” begins by staging a “serial version” of itself (Cronin, 2011: 13); the story’s second paragraph is a short story nestled inside the story proper — a voyage out and a safe return: The Reservoir was at the end of the world; beyond it, you fell; beyond it were paddocks of thorns, strange cattle, strange farms, legendary people we would never know or recognise even if they walked among us on a Friday night downtown when we went to follow the boys and listen to the Salvation Army Band and buy a milk shake in the milk bar and then return home to find that everything was all right and safe, that our Mother had not run away and caught the night train to the North Island, that our Father had not shot himself with worrying over the bills, but had in fact been downtown himself and had bought the usual Friday night treat, a bag of liquorice allsorts and a bag of chocolate roughs, from Woolworths. (Frame, 1983: 127)
The repeated, recollected, story of the reservoir — and what is a story if not a structure designed to be repeated? — is mixed in with the small-town rituals of Friday nights. The “forbidden reservoir” at “the end of the world”, “beyond” which there is the fall, along with that diluted reference to “salvation” (127), all evoke Biblical authority such that the reservoir might be read as its earthly institution. But in this passage that authority is only somehow and very loosely remembered in the details of the town’s repetitions. As the passage suggests, there is no “beyond” but for a return to the world of profane conventions, if not also, in the image of a chocolate biscuit, profane confections.
As we know on finishing the story, the narrator has been to the reservoir but nonetheless repeats the social consensus that “[t]he Reservoir was at the end of the world; beyond it you fell” (127). The retelling of the events on which the story is based makes a pleasure of their recapitulation but also conserves (as might a reservoir) the doxa, even though the narrator knows it is false: the reservoir is nothing to be afraid of. As we read the story we repeat its narrative time and space; we remain within the contract of recapitulation, which is repeated in the narrator’s description of forms of “paralysis” (131). As the narrator insists, “there is nothing to do, there is nothing to do” (131). Once again repetition is the point. As Frame’s story form expresses it, the future — as promised by an act of narrative telling — is a repetition, just as all stories are; what seems like movement through narrative time and space is also recursion. We note too, perhaps, the tropes of Framean lyricism so often associated (though too easily) with the imaginative rupture of restrictive social patterns: that long, woolly, run-on sentence, the parataxis, the occurrence of unexplained references — all of which serve the sense we have of overhearing the untreated, unfiltered thoughts and impressions of a mind. Yet these are not original thoughts. We must also note the elements of quotation found here: where, for example, does the information about “legendary people” come from, or that phrase about a “mother” running away, catching the “night train to the North Island” if not from adult anecdote? Always in Frame’s stories we find such information, diluted forms of knowledge and expertise, once authoritative and forbidding, trickling down through the social network to child-like tributaries.
But as always with such passages in Frame, recapitulation is not simply a theme but a formal concern too: thus, the word “treat”, first mentioned in relation to the “chocolate roughs” and “liquorice allsorts” the father buys himself from Woolworths, is repeated again, a paragraph or so later in the story, where we are told that the water in the reservoir is “treated” (1983: 128). The social fabric of the town, that might once have been held together by authority and forbidding — loosely remembered in the false forbiddenness of the reservoir — is now held together by the all-too-human institutions of expertise. That single, wending, sentence that began with a reservoir, and all the knowledge and expertise such a structure represents or contains, leads to Woolworths, that reservoir of consumables. One’s perhaps sinful consumption cannot be separated from knowledge, but we are a long way from Eden. It is worth keeping in mind though that the effect of this repetition is to advertise Frame’s own exercise of authority. And so it is, then, that the word “treat” further repeats where the story mentions “infantile paralysis” (131), the treatment for which involves confinement (“paralysis”) in an “iron lung” (134). Such repetitions, as I am suggesting, help gather together elements of the story, and by doing so, illustrate how reliant short stories are on aspects of form; but this quality of repetition serves also to make a point about recapitulation: the story’s society is one in which medical treatment — that which derives from the realms of authority and expertise — rhymes and repeats in other images of regulation: the treatment of the town’s water supply, and the self-treatment of pleasure apparent in the father’s ritual consumption of the ironically named “allsorts”. These repetitions signal the contract that no voice in the story contests — of self-regulation, standardization, and control. Frame’s attention to recapitulation, one might say, is not simply about a reservoir’s power to conserve, treat, and reticulate, but about a broader and conservative culture of repetition. In such a culture the “beyond” is a story told to children, a weak remembrance of the power of a lost authority, and with this the lost power to forbid.
To this point I have been interested in showing something of what I see as Frame’s preoccupation with the ways in which authority (undoubtably a key concern in all her work) is reproduced and repeated in the worlds of her stories. Her short fiction is characterized by recapitulation — a form-defining contract that emphasizes the how of authority itself: how it is reproduced; how it might affect an author’s conception of her own acts of written reproduction; how such a contract might hail readers in the process of their reproduction of a narrative. Key to all of this, however, is expertise, a word that, in Clune’s investigation of it, carries with it a complex of concerns: if Stephen Turner’s description of expertise as “a condition of genuine public discourse” (Clune, 2021: 76) reminds us of its connection to the social, we do well to remember that the social is neither neutral nor “objective”. What, for example, happens to expertise in cultures characterized by populism, anti-intellectualism, or, as in the case of Frame’s Aotearoa New Zealand, the values and qualities of a colonial culture characterized by a surveillance-based egalitarianism (Pearson, 1974). Indeed, as Clune wonders throughout his book, what happens to expertise and ideas about authority if all opinions are treated as equal? (2021: 76). As Clune (2021) further notes, though “expertise can […] function as a mask for special interests, a means of rationalizing prejudice, and a way of concealing the groundlessness of expert claims” (77), as Jerry Z. Muller (again, quoted by Clune) puts it, expertise also “regularly arouses […] [a] suspicion of authority” (28). Indeed, it is this latter “suspicion” that has given rise to much of the scholarship directed at Frame’s work, if not also to Frame herself as someone subjected to the authority of expertise.
In “expertise” we have a word by which to consider the processes of repetition and recapitulation involved in the creation, testing, and communication of knowledge and power; indeed, it is a word by which to read authority. And yet, in Frame the word carries at least one further consideration: it connotes a distinction between an irretrievable authority — a spiritualized authority, as I have already intimated in my reading of “The Reservoir” — and an all-too-human realm of expertise in which that lost authority, at best, may be traced only vaguely. Expertise, I suggest, names a fear in Frame’s stories, not simply because of how it might be invoked to serve power, but for the way in which it has become too permissive. As noted, Frame’s stories are full of echoes, quotations, “serial versions” (Cronin, 2011: 13), copies, clichés, and doxa — the very noise of culture repeating itself — all of which, like the poorly understood relics of some now confused ritual, point in their depleted way to an origin they barely resemble or remember. All those echoes are evidence of the unforbidding facility of expertise, which, to follow Clune’s reading of Northrop Frye and Thomas Kuhn, is best imagined as the “consensus of [a] critical community” (2021: 17). To put this another way, expertise requires the paradigmatic work of recapitulation: the active, ongoing process of repetition and summary — of testing — in which a culture, working through thesis and antithesis, may unforbid the formerly forbidden. As Clune argues, drawing on the work of Michael Polanyi, “[e]xpert judgement does not take the form of an individual subject’s reaction to an object. It represents a space in which the boundaries between the subject and object are reorganized to enable perceptions, discoveries, and actions otherwise impossible” (2021: 71). Though expertise may well work in the service of authority, of cultural dominance one might say, it must also be recognized as a structure that, rather than conserving or blocking, may unforbid. And it is to this latter possibility that Frame’s stories compulsively return. The concern in her stories is not simply with the forbidden — with what a culture represses or refuses to say — but with the unforbidden, with what is all-too-possible, and perhaps too easy, to say. Much against what Clune and Polanyi see as valuable, transformative, perhaps even progressive about expertise, Frame’s stories record the poverty of copies, versions, and redescriptions expertise creates, and which her characters seem compelled to repeat as forms of pleasure, as tropes and patterns. In Frame the forbidding power of authority no longer exists; in its place there is the human institution, an authority built on expertise that might make anything possible, anything permissible.
When one starts thinking about what expertise unforbids, not just in that enlightenment sense of explaining the spiritual as the secular, but also in the way that forbidden knowledge may become mutable as it is processed through cultural ecosystems, passing into conventions and tropes, metaphors and phrases, one begins to consider the grounds of the formal problem of recapitulation Frame’s stories pose. I think it is certainly the case that Frame’s texts address what Claire Bazin calls “a conformist authoritarian society” (2018: 89) but, as the formal qualities of her texts appear to suggest, the interpretation of such a society is secondary to the formal qualities of authority, the “how” of power and its contractual recapitulations, that echo in the form-defining repetitions of her stories. To this end, I would like to suggest that Frame’s stories are studies in what Adam Phillips describes as the “unforbidden pleasure” (2015: 48) of obedience. As is apparent in her fascinated recording of moments of repetition, the question of obedience is everywhere in Frame’s stories. It runs, one might say, in an image redolent of interpellation, like “the creek which flowed day and night” in the heads of the children in “The Reservoir” (1983: 128). In a world of human expertise, a world of popular culture for example, full of “all those other things the authorities encourage us to enjoy” and with which we “treat” ourselves, “[e]verything forbidden can be redescribed [repeated] as ultimately desirable. Everything sacred can be rendered secular” (Phillips, 2015: 133, 125).
Perhaps we need to read Frame’s stories as examinations of a culture’s misplaced, misunderstood mourning for a grand authority, almost forgotten, undone by what the stories seem to view as the permissiveness of human expertise and repetition. Throughout this article, and somewhat against the scholarly doxa on Frame, I have sought, along with writers like Drichel and Wevers, to question the notion that Frame’s fiction invites us to think otherwise, to imagine something beyond in her fiction, her language, and the culture she records, in ways that literary scholars describe as transgressive, progressive, or transcendent. If there is a beyond in Frame’s fiction, it is not a thing that can be retrieved. As the stories seem to suggest, its absence is felt as an authority, forbidding, and conservative. To look for it in Frame is not to look without (above, beyond) but to look within, and not for a thing but for a process (a “how” rather than a “what”), for the circuits of recapitulation in which it is so distantly, perhaps crookedly, traced. As Drichel argues, a repetition without a referent is like a “signpost for a world that is never mentioned”, and where the signs point only to the profanation of human expertise, to names, to signs (2009: 181). As Drichel puts it, quoting Wevers: What Frame seems to offer is not a fully realized ideal presence, not “some-thing” “better and beyond,” but instead simply “no-thing beyond”. Instead of presence, Frame gives us absence or, rather, a disrupted presence, a gash in the fabric of worldly “there-ness” through which the beyond makes itself felt without ever settling into the ontological structures of a “some-thing”. The beyond, in other words, functions as trace in Frame’s work, an absence that is not the opposite of presence, that is not completely nothing, but instead is an enigmatically present “nothing” beyond being. (2009: 188)
Frame’s interest in her short fiction is not with this “beyond”, but rather with the ways in which, however perversely or pleasurably, the cultures she reproduces in her stories conserve, mourn, and repeat the authoritarian and forbidding power from which expertise has alienated them. For these reasons “You Are Now Entering the Human Heart”, one of the last short stories published in Frame’s lifetime, is perhaps the greatest expression of this fascination with repetition, authority, and expertise. Indeed, Frame loads those three concerns on the form of perhaps the most over-determined, most-often repeated, images in literature — the serpent. At once a sign associated with the forbidden (God’s prohibition to Adam and Eve) and the act of unforbidding, Frame’s snake serves as a warning that there is nothing, not even the serpent of Genesis, that cannot be redescribed by human expertise. The snake is “harmless”, a “common grass snake” (1983: 194), a new icon for a world in which, via the promiscuity of expertise, nothing once forbidden or feared need remain so. Thus, the story’s focal scene is one in which a museum attendant endeavours to teach a class of elementary-school children that “we must learn to love snakes” (195).
The story is about repetition. As the unnamed narrator’s observations suggest, she is a regular visitor to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia: the heart, she notes, “was a popular exhibit, and sometimes, when there were too many children about, the entrance had to be roped off” (1983: 193). Her attendance at this secular cathedral — a place associated with the authority of science and expertise — is one of her recapitulations. The narrator respects signs, longs perhaps for them to represent real authority, but like the weak expertise of the attendant, this cathedral is filled only with false signs and degraded information. The ritual impulse kept alive in repetition returns to the narrator only the barest memories of the great referent for which rituals should serve. The story thus begins with a tautology: “I looked at the notice” (193). To notice a notice is to suggest, as we have already seen, that language itself has become confused and repetitive. Frame repeats the word and idea in the passages that follow: the notice that hangs across the entry to the heart hangs “askew”, unnoticed, un-respected, unattended; moments later she wonders why the attendant and the children have not “noticed” Miss Aitcheson’s fear (194); but when the narrator looks at the “exit light”, which she describes as “hooded” (194), a term associated with the physiognomy of many snake species, we see Frame’s point: the children, the attendant and his expertise, as well as all the signage of a museum, are linked with the image of the unforbidding serpent; we even hear this in the attendant’s sibilant repetition of the teacher’s name: “Miss—Mrs —; he said. Miss Aitcheson” (194). The notice placed on the heart is also something placed on what the narrator describes as a “popular” (193) exhibit, and it is in this detail too that we might hear that aversion for the popular expressed elsewhere in Frame’s work. 7 To call something “popular” in a Frame story is to offer caution as to the ways a culture might, in the process of its pursuit of knowledge and expertise, further deplete the reality of things as they might once have existed.
It is by the attendant’s lesson that Frame’s fascination with unforbidding, the degradations of topical expertise, are made apparent, and again this is something to read in the repetitious and depleted language of this person the narrator refuses to call an expert; he is only ever the “attendant” and thus little more than a servant to the fashions of his moment and mode. The attendant’s language is marked by doxa and repetition, and yet he is an author too; he scripts the lines Miss Aitcheson and the children repeat. The poverty of his expertise is there to hear in his reduced vocabulary: words and phrases such as “surely”, “them”, “no harm”, “fear”, “afraid”, “not afraid” repeat all too frequently. When the narrator asks whether she might sit in on the lesson, the attendant responds, Surely. We’re having a lesson in snake handling, […] It’s something new. Get the children young and teach them that every snake they meet is not to be killed. People seem to think that every snake has to be knocked on the head. So we’re getting them young and teaching them. (1983: 194)
That “something new” is a bit of a worry when it comes to the timeless serpent, but then so too is the inaccuracy of the attendant’s language: the vague pronoun “them” may refer as equally to snakes as to children, but in the very sloppiness of reference, a new generation is linked with the permissive unforbidding associated with the Biblical serpent, which is to say, the dubious expertise of a lesser authority than God. The lesson is unambiguously coercive: the children are told what to think, feel, “see” (repeatedly), and “touch” (195). Frame’s use of motivic diction makes this clear where the repetition of “waiting, waiting” in her description of the children aligns them with the waiter “attendant” (195); even the narrator is not immune to the expert’s repetitions, as she contracts something of his language when she begins to use “surely” in her internal speech (194). Rather like the children, she recapitulates the terms in which the attendant couches his expertise. The point of the attendant’s lecture is to encourage the children to “lose their fear” of snakes: “we have to learn to love snakes” he says (195). The sentence incautiously conjoins “love” with “learn”, but, as the narrator must appreciate, the sentence is a commandment and is thus central to his “pronouncing judgement” on Miss Aitcheson (194). In this fallen world of expertise, the attendant gives voice to a distant and profane recapitulation of authority itself. The story’s “heart” too, one might note, is far from sacred; indeed, at no point in the story do we enter it — even the story’s own notice, its title, is not an accurate description of its world, but perhaps this is fitting for a world in which real authority has been lost. Within the walls of the story’s human institution, a place of culture and history, conserved and remembered — a reservoir, one might say — is a confusion unforbidden by expertise. And so it is that we might find here a woman, the children’s teacher, named “Aitcheson”: a name, in the Scots, derived from the diminutive form of Adam, Atkin. The permissiveness of modern expertise, it seems, has led to this misprision. And like that other snake-story, “You Are Now Entering the Human Heart” is also a trial, a test, in which the terrifyingly naïve jury of children, so ready to accept the authority of the witless expert, pass judgement on Miss Aitcheson, “evict[ing]” (a word close to the idea of Eirenic expulsion) her from their hearts (196).
With what then do Frame’s exercises in recapitulation leave us? One answer must involve what I have called pleasure — something shaded with obedience and unforbidding — that, by Frame’s own authorial power, we experience as we repeat her forms, structures, and lines. Formally, at least, her stories invite us to consider the ways in which authority is reproduced. But other answers vie for attention too: Frame’s stories intervene in the history of story form, and in ways that highlight our acceptance of certain recurring themes of literary critical doxa (precisely, literary expertise). I have in mind here the conventional readings of the story form that associate it with romantic individualism, the lyrical moment, and the trope of the beyond that echo the terms by which Frame’s work, if not also her person, has been subjected to the authority of expert (or “attendant”?) readers. Such readings remind us of the persistence of the mystified authority that haunts the empty, ritual-like recapitulations of her stories. This is a mystification created by the fall into expertise. Power and authority, as the stories seem to perform these, work best on us when, as is often said about the short story form, they are unparaphrasable, beyond name or topic, and operate as an unforbidding absence. It is for this reason Frame’s work is cautious about thematic readings, content, and topics. To ask of a Frame story what is this about? is to ask the wrong question. For Frame to permit an answer would be to reduce her authority over us; it would be an exercise in expertise, so she does something more powerful: instead of critiquing power, she exerts it.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.