FRAMING TEXTS AND TEXTUAL FRAMES : A CASE STUDY OF SELECTED WORKS OF A.S. BYATT

Abstract

In appreciating a picture, viewers tend to focus on the painting itself and ignore the frames. As far as some viewers are concerned, the frames of paintings do not matter, as least not consciously. However, frames have an ambiguous nature. They exclude and include elements in the experience of a picture. For instance, frames are part of the picture insofar as they mediate between the physical environs of the painting, yet frames also recede into the canvas of that environment. Thus, different kinds of frames change the perspective of a painting. If a novel is seen as a kind of diptych in which the narrative paints a picture of the story, then frames play an essential role in narratives too. A S. Byatt's novels, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Possession: A Romance, explore art and its history, and the uses of language vis a vis visual perception through various types of frames, from gaps to genres, time shifts, marketing forces, and institutions. These frames influence and determine to a large extent the place of other frames, hence the readers' experience of the novels. In reading narratives, therefore, readers undergo a process similar to that of viewing paintings. The frames I am concerned with can be grouped under two very general categories: textual frames and frames that enclose texts. Textual frames (gaps, genres and time shifts among others), in the texts constantly determine the ways texts are to be read by readers. Although textual frames are meant to sway readers' interpretative strategies, they also create indeterminate spaces wherein the readers enter with their own frames of references. This overlapping of frames is in tum affected by larger frames that encompass the reading process, Market forces and institutions are larger frames that shape the way novels are read. Tue various manners in which book covers are illustrated are not just calculated to sell the books but they influence readers in their approach to texts. In this market forces are assisted by other frames. Institutions, academic and award-giving ones, as well as literary journals, exercise control over the value of texts: what is considered 'worth" reading and what is not. Academics are considered by the general public as literary experts as are literary reviewers, and their opinions are taken into account. Their pronouncements sometimes determine whether a text is read widely or otherwise. Awarding institutions also confer such an aura of culture over the reading of certain texts. The very fact of the award can propel a book into the limelight of the public arena. Hence the drawing of buyers' attention to Byatt winning a Booker prize for her novel, Possession, in her previous published novels, Tue Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. These different frames carry with them ideologies and value-systems. The frames seek to persuade readers to accept such world-views as foregrounded in the texts by the frames. However, because frames have a doubleness, a space is also created that allows readers to resist the texts.