The Limits of Looking: Conceptualising the Frame in Ann Quin’s Berg and Christine Brooke-Rose’s O

Hilary White

doi:10.4000/angles.4398

Abstract

This article will consider the motif of the frame — conceived of as a device which isolates and presents that which falls within its bounds — in two experimental British post-war novels (Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out and Ann Quin’s Berg, both published in 1964) as a means of drawing parallels between experimental literature and conceptual art in Britain during the 1960s. I argue that Brooke-Rose and Quin develop a heightened interest in visuality in the 60s, which, in the early works examined here manifests as a thematization of vision, and in later works provokes more overt visual experiments with typography and illustration. These novelistic experiments with visual technique take place within a wider context of increasing interdisciplinarity within art forms over the course of the 60s and 70s, which a cross-investigation of visual arts and literary experimentation helps to reveal. Quin’s Berg and Brooke-Rose’s Out form a complementary pair in terms of thinking through issues of presentation and representation. Berg — with its egocentric protagonist and the window frame through which he views the outside world — calls up associations with single-point perspective, the development of this perspectival technique in the history of painting (especially the fact that the technique was historically reserved for ‘important’ figures like kings). Out’s fractured, multi-perspectival narrative, on the other hand, resonates with cubist art and contemporary developments in cinematic editing (the techniques of the French New Wave), presenting a ‘natural’ frame formed by the overlapping branches of trees, underlining the text’s interest in visual patterning and complexity. Using Phillip King’s Window Piece (1961) as my main example from the visual arts, I discuss the reconceptualization of the frame by the experimental writers and artists of the period, looking forward slightly to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the frame in The Truth in Painting (1978), which signals a loss of faith in intellectual and disciplinary mastery. Derrida’s writing ‘around’ Art — with connotations of both enclosure and obliqueness — and his purposefully perforated frame which does not seem designed to contain anything, are akin to Quin’s and Brooke-Rose’s novels, whose frame motifs — rather than containing the images they are presenting — serve to problematise the idea of strict boundaries, borders, and in a more abstract sense, of remaining within presupposed categories of definition in general. As such, the novels end up enacting a sort of theory of their own, a theory of limits with bearing on both aesthetic and social contexts within their narratives.

Highlights

The Limits of Looking: Conceptualising the Frame in Ann Quin’s Berg and Christine BrookeRose’s Out “Thinking the frame teaches us that everything is framed, visibly or not, even thinking itself — all the more thinking the frame.” (Jean-Claude Lebensztejn 1994: 118)
Berg’s concern about being seen is explicable within the narrative — he has arrived undercover, intending to kill his father. This response of Berg’s suddenly switches the power relations: even though it is unclear who exactly is looking at Berg, and irrespective of what they might intend by that looking, the situation of being looked at is enough to place Berg in a position of weakness
Johnson’s experiments with typography, cut-outs and the book format, and engagement with cinema and painting by other contemporary authors like Anna Kavan and Eva Figes — and those of the simultaneously burgeoning field of conceptual art, functioning as it does in both the visual and discursive realms. This interdisciplinary focus on the frame is a useful method of approaching works in this period because it hinges on an interrogation of how the works approach issues of representation, containment and even normativity — of conventions both artistic and socio-political — carrying the potential to reframe these authors’ works as theoretical interventions in their own right

Summary

Introduction

The window is one detail — along with the partition — that is recurrently referred to in the narrative of Berg, seeming to focalise the narrative at the points it appears. It does this most obviously because the amount that can be seen through it is limited, unlike the boundless arena in which Berg’s thoughts play out. The text consistently undermines Berg’s authority, by showing Berg’s reading of events to be false He certainly imagines himself in a position of centrality, of significance, most obviously of importance — a sort of central figure in a panopticon arrangement, a figure of whom Foucault writes: “He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, minute, can escape” (1991: 217). Berg assigns himself this central position, notably the position of the important viewer in the system of single-point perspective; the long-running associations between centrality, individuality, vision and power are clear. This response of Berg’s suddenly switches the power relations: even though it is unclear who exactly is looking at Berg, and irrespective of what they might intend by that looking, the situation of being looked at is enough to place Berg in a position of weakness.

13 The final chapter of Berg consists solely of the following paragraph:

Conclusion