Out of Frame

Abstract

No, no, I am but shadow of myself:

You are deceived, my substance is not here;

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity:

I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.

(Shakespeare 2.3.52–58)

Framing occurs but there is no frame.

(Derrida, qtd. in MacLachlan and Reid 6)

Never before in the history of representation have there been so many available ways for art to represent and to “frame” lives. At the same time, the explosion of biographical information that social media have enabled has demonstrated dramatically the illusionist basis of the enterprise of biographical containment. The very idea of “auto|biography” has in recent years broken out of its own conventional frames to enlist genres and modes of representation that have more commonly operated in other arenas or have played supporting roles, rather than taking center stage themselves, as they do in many of the biographical works considered in this collection of essays. Whether their focus is on cartoons, photographs, installations, graphic memoirs, films, games, or narrative texts, these essays rigorously explore and unravel the notion of “framing” as it applies to presenting and displaying lives.

“Framing” can be understood as an act of enclosing by organizing material into some kind of order (Macquarie Dictionary). This act requires establishing boundaries whose nature and position inescapably reflect specific artistic, personal, or political purposes or world views. While these boundaries may provide a sense of containment, they are always provisional, and their very existence highlights the fact that much lies beyond them. Further, frames are endlessly open to revision by successive audiences, whose interpretations apply further layers of framing. As Derrida has said: “No totalization of the border is even possible. Frames are always framed” (qtd. in MacLachlan and Reid 112).

Although the essays here consider widely diverse products of the biographical imagination, they have in common a deep interest in the biographer’s chosen strategies for fulfilling auto|biography’s primary role: unearthing, selecting, shaping, and displaying words, images, and objects to create an impression of a life. Artifacts, photographs, documents, and mementos all play important roles as keepers of memory. But how can their latent significance be released? The contributors to this special issue, through their analyses of the interplay between memory and its many kinds of visual triggers and props, have foregrounded the key role that visual culture can play—through photographs, films, cartoons, sketches, and sculptures—in the processes of recalling and reassembling the components of a “life,” in the multiple modes of auto|biography with which they engage.

What components of a life are significant? What is the rationale for selection? What does the selection reveal about the subject of the work, and what does it reveal about its author—or about the historical context? In this digital era characterized by a seemingly limitless proliferation of data about lives, does attempting containment make sense? What are the implications for framing? The future of information is clearly heading away from the “collecting” model toward navigation via pathways and links. Does the same apply to biography? Or is there a special imperative in the case of biography to “capture” and close off a life, textually or visually, as life itself is closed off by death? The Australian Dictionary of Biography is one major biographical project, with a long history, where such questions have recently had to be confronted in the dictionary’s transition from print-only to online production.

Throughout his life as a writer, the literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin was preoccupied with recording and keeping details of his daily life. He filled extensive diaries and notebooks with his thoughts, ideas, and recollections as if in an effort to preserve whatever records he could, however slight. In fact, he was explicitly committed to valuing the “scraps” that others would discard, as he says in his famous celebration of the Paris street cleaner: “Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects … He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure” (Benjamin 251).

Benjamin was an avid collector.¹ His extensive archives of writings, photographs, catalogs, and objects constitute a miscellany that is at once a detailed record of and a metaphor for a life. He was conscious, however, that these things, once set aside, were merely lifeless clues, requiring an act of deciphering, ordering, and reanimation at another time, and that through this act they would never “recover” their original meaning but gain a new kind of life: “For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments of torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding” (27).

From the point of view of the biographer, one way of viewing lives is to consider them in terms of collections or archives. The aim of the serious collector is to build the collection toward comprehensiveness or representativeness. However, even though Benjamin had this kind of drive as a collector, his writings repeatedly reveal that his impulse to collect was complicated by his knowledge that the collected items—the “fragments”—have no intrinsic significance: “the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (251).

As the works considered in this collection demonstrate, there are many ways to consider a life, including approaches that place little value on retrievable things as “exhibits” and seek instead to delve into the less tangible and less expressible aspects of lives, such as psychological trauma, illness, and pain—and also intense joy—which may lie hidden among the miscellaneous collection of things. The tools and methods the writers use are quite different from those favored by the traditional archival approach. Their aim is not to achieve a “comprehensive” or “definitive” account of a life. In fact, the term “definitive,” which was popularly applied to scholarly biographies in the past, has in recent decades become virtually unusable.² Repeatedly in these essays, the works under scrutiny clearly trigger and provoke potential interpretations, but specify none. Far from offering comprehensiveness, they resist categorization. They reject and forbid closure. They elude framing.

The contributors to this special issue explore the highly individual and dynamic process of engagement by auto|biographers with their “collections” of material and with the idea of auto|biography itself. They do so in provocative and groundbreaking ways, adopting their own highly individual viewing positions and fields of vision as they focus on works that themselves challenge, extend, or dismantle conventions of selecting and framing.

Regardless of the selection of material to be included, and whatever the medium or genre, the auto|biographical works that these essays focus on tell stories. Some stitch together stories from limited pieces of “evidence,” while others proceed obliquely by withholding and concealing or setting up ambiguities and ironies. Yet others present cartoons, riddles, or puzzles, and deliberately create spaces for viewers and readers to fill. But in all of the essays, the story of a life is shown to be uncontainable, unstoppable, and infinitely open to recasting and connecting in new ways with other stories, contexts, and histories. “The story never stops beginning or ending,” wrote Trinh T. Minh-ha in Woman, Native, Other. “It appears headless and bottomless because it is built on differences. Its (in)finitude subverts every notion of completeness and its frame remains a non-totalizable one” (2).

A preoccupation with how each work resists completeness, and what the personal and political implications of that process might be, is a connecting theme in these essays.³ In this exploratory activity, the authors do not share a “position;” rather, to echo Scott MacDonald’s comment in a conversation with Trinh on her filming methods: “It's exactly the opposite of ‘taking a position’: it’s seeing what different positions reveal” (qtd. in Trinh, Framer 115).

Because genre is itself a framing device, many of the works under discussion are considered in terms of their transgeneric or antigeneric representational strategies. Auto|biography draws on multiple genres. In photography and film, the “effacement” of the photographers and filmmakers, and what has been called the “invisibility of their politics of non-location,” is a powerful and continuing convention that is considered and questioned here, especially in relation to photography (113). Speaking about her film Reassemblage, Trinh has said: “in my case, the limits of the looker and of the camera are clearly exposed, not only through the repeated inclusion of a plurality of shots of the same subject from very slightly different distances or angles … but also through... incomplete, sudden and unstable camera work” (115). While written narrative uses different tools, it is no less subject than visual representation to the pressure of generic convention in relation to political invisibility when dealing with human subjects. When visual and written materials are interwoven, new possibilities for disruption emerge. Their individual conventions can, through misalignments, incongruities, or disjunctions, show each other up in strange and revealing ways.

This is certainly the case in the work that is the subject of Sidonie Smith’s interview with the feminist visual artist Joanne Leonard, which precedes the essays in “The Process” section of the journal. Leonard’s groundbreaking work is further explored by Maria Tamboukou’s essay, “Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s Intimate Photo Memoir,” which engages deeply with Leonard’s Being in Pictures, where there is a creative “entanglement” between written text and photographic images. Investigating and probing Leonard’s layered works of “narrative assemblage,” the essay carefully elucidates specific features of Leonard’s experimental autobiographical practice, such as her presentation of a highly theatrical and shifting “narrative persona” and her remarkable “visualization of vulnerability” (Tamboukou 29-36). The artist’s commitment to representing vulnerability, by using startling and sometimes shocking juxtapositions of photographic images, is part of her wider agenda of focusing on women’s experience within the framework of the genre of “intimate biography” that she developed. Leonard’s project as an artist is “to create visual ways of representing female worlds” (Tamboukou 43). By collecting and stitching together fragments of memory in a layered process of photographic montage, she attempts to “freeze in pictures what is rapidly changing and vanishing” (42). In her work, clarity of meaning is deliberately avoided to mimic mnemonic processes and avoid “the fantasy of … unity” (44).

Ricia Anne Chansky’s essay, “When Words Are Not Enough: Narrating Power and Femininity through the Visual Language of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party,” focuses on the work of another experimental feminist artist. The Dinner Party is a highly influential and controversial work of feminist auto|biographical art, which has sought, over several decades and against powerful institutional opposition, to counteract and reverse the effects of the historical effacement of women as artists. Interweaving a biography of the artist with the history of this extraordinary room-sized installation, Chansky shows how Chicago’s work extends the boundaries of biography to accommodate not only multiple and unorthodox materials, images, and methods, but also multiple artists and “voices,” coming together in a celebration of their own communal, interwoven lives, and the lives of the many women they choose to honor. More than four hundred people participated as volunteers in the creation of The Dinner Party, which is experienced as a room with three connected tables prepared with individually crafted settings for twenty-nine historically important women. The names of 999 other influential women are painted on the porcelain floor. In this complex, multilayered work from the 1970s, with its confronting, explicitly sexual imagery, Chicago “cultivates a distinctly feminist aesthetic by melding fine art, domestic craft, and feminist theory and practice” (Chansky 64). Acknowledging the potentially therapeutic dimension of visual auto|biography for its creators and its viewers, Chansky considers the power of this work in Chicago’s own development as an artist and a feminist, and its continuing inspirational impact on the lives of countless other women. Threaded through the story of the work’s genesis, production, and reception over several decades is a parallel story: the course of second-wave feminism during the same period.

Jessica Wells Cantiello’s essay takes us back in time to the world of five young women who worked as teachers of Native American children in the early 1900s. Her analysis of the words and images in their memoirs focuses on the dissonance between the photographs and the narrative in these accounts. Driven by various motives, including a desire for adventure, the women traveled far from home to take up their unusual teaching posts on or near reservations in various parts of the US. In every case, the memoirs reveal that their duty as teachers to assimilate the children by wiping out their language and traditions contradicts their instinct toward the “savage” anthropology that their photographs exhibit. The photographs capture poignantly a story of traditional cultures under the intense pressure of an education policy designed to ensure their “vanishing.” Published in the 1950s, several decades after the events that inspired them and therefore already out of phase with their own historical moment, the memoirs tell a different story from the one the photographs tell. Now viewed from a twenty-first-century post-colonial perspective, the photographs, with their revealingly incongruous captions, proclaim the grim paradox of “Indian” education for the authors of the memoirs, “whose job it was to erase the cultures in the classroom that they were dedicated to preserving on the page” (Cantiello 80). Cantiello’s overview in relation to one of the memoirs is broadly applicable to all five: “By emphasizing the primitive, as she does in her captions, [Flora Gregg] Iliff justifies her assimilationist agenda and invokes what Renato Rosaldo has termed an ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ wherein she mourns the loss of what she has helped to destroy” (Cantiello 90). Her analysis of the early photographs lays bare the vulnerability of the children by providing evidence of their humiliation—exposed in the details of demeanor, dress, and facial expression, as well as in the nuances of the added captions—which the writers of the memoirs were either blind to or preferred not to see.⁴

Using two experimental autobiographies, Lee-Von Kim’s contribution also provides an illuminating exploration of the interactions between verbal and visual representation. By focusing on Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions, produced almost half a century apart, her aim is to “foreground the traffic between verbal and visual self-representation in making lives and selves visible” (Kim 104). While photographs in autobiography traditionally offer the promise of “intimate revelation,” Kim argues that neither Cahun nor Barthes satisfies this expectation. Barthes, though incorporating family photographs into his work, wants to liberate himself from photography’s “image-repertoire.” He attempts this by refusing to give photographs their traditional place and force, instead leaving them enigmatically dislocated and unframed. Cahun, on the other hand, uses photography for the incessant revisioning of her own self-image by “dissecting, fragmenting, and recontextualizing her self-portraits” (Kim 120). In other words, she seeks liberation through and within photography. “Life’s role,” writes Cahun, “is to leave me uncompleted, allow me only freeze frames. Start again. Connections, repairs, reiterations, incoherence” (Kim 120).

A number of the essays acknowledge the therapeutic role that autobiography can play by enabling the subject to take personal control—and to refuse external control—of representations of the self. This is the central preoccupation of Elisabeth El Refaie’s work, “Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in Two Graphic Memoirs.” Her essay explores the ways in which the creators of comics can utilize strategies that are unavailable to authors of written narratives to break through or transform conventional metaphors of illness in order to tell their stories in individual ways. Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales, based on diaries he kept when he worked in an acute psychiatric ward, reveals the stories of the people there and “challeng[es] many of the common stereotypes and prejudices about a range of mental conditions” (El Refaie 153). As a sufferer of severe anxiety and depression himself, Cunningham also tells his own story in a sequence of visual frames. As El Refaie explains through detailed analysis of specific panels, comics allow artists to make use of conventional metaphors of illness while transforming or destabilizing them, often through irony or other kinds of humor, but sometimes through the use of blank or “blind” panels, which are left to be filled by the audience. Originally published in installments as a blog, Psychiatric Tales “received an overwhelmingly positive response” (159). Readers affected by mental illness were encouraged by Cunningham’s graphic memoir to follow his example through finding ways “to identify whatever it is that helps them recover their sense of self and their connection with the world around them” (El Refaie 159).

Also aware of the healing power of artistic creation, the creator of the second graphic memoir, Depresso, presents a “dizzying array of metaphors of depression” (160). Although, as in Cunningham’s work, conventional metaphors of illness are used, they are handled differently: “they are typically given an ironic twist or exaggerated” (160). They play with readers' expectations and assumptions, setting up puzzles and inviting multiple interpretations: the lizard-like monster that pervades the world of Tom Freeman (the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Depresso), for example, is everything from a “guardian angel” to a “fire-breathing dragon,” and the reflection of Tom in a mirror visually enacts the ambiguity of the self “that both is and is not me” (161). “[T]he mirror,” as El Refaie explains, “becomes a metaphor for this appalling mutability, its slipperiness reflecting our inability quite to grasp, or even clearly see, our ever-shifting selves” (Laura Cumming, qtd. in El Refaie 161). Her essay offers a demonstration of the capacity of the graphic memoir to both mirror and transcend conventional metaphors of mental illness, and thus suggests parallel strategies for the autobiographical self to evade culturally entrenched stereotypes and frames.

Cynthia Huff’s “Framing Canine Memoirs” examines three best-selling “animalographies”—Jon Katz’s Soul of a Dog, Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin, and Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog—in the context of the current memoir boom and the explosion of interest in books about dogs. Focusing on the visual as well as written dimensions of these works, Huff critically examines this multimodal genre in terms of its capacity to illuminate key aspects of life writing. Huff analyzes the writers' strategies for generating an “authenticity effect” in order to persuade their audience that they are able to capture the “reality” of the lives that they are trying to enter and represent. The frame they choose in each case shapes the kind of pact that is set up with the reader|consumer of their product. Although the three examples differ greatly, Huff finds in each case that these books, and films, reveal as much about the authors’ lives, values, and social contexts as about their dog subjects: “While such works purport to narrate a dog’s experience, or human experience enfolded with dogs, they narrate instead the ideologies from which they spring” (142). Falling outside the category of critical posthumanism and the genre of “new biography,” they “re-enact ideological frameworks of spiritualism, commodification, and scientism” (123). In the case of Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin, Huff argues that the book “is a tour de force of life in the twentieth-century US” (134). The estranging effect of the subject matter in these life stories of animals serves to foreground the tool-kit of tactics used, here and in all life writing, to generate an illusion of authenticity. This, in turn, reflects back critically onto biography’s defining quest to “enter” or “capture” human lives through art, and lays bare the resistant otherness—the unknowableness—of every biographical subject.

Through their deployment of the visual, the works that are the focus of this collection create gaps and disruptions in narrative continuity, and invite readers|viewers to question the connections being made between reality and art in the “play space.” However, in auto|biography, the space of narrative is also the space of life. Writers and visual artists choose cryptic or disruptive approaches to escape the tyranny of the “reality effect,” and to force attention instead on things that cannot be captured in words or photographs, cannot be collected and contained, and are hidden in the labyrinths of people’s memory and framed only by the certainty of closure in death.

Notes

1. Benjamin’s archives, his editors comment, “reveal the passions of a collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds, . . . crucial to life” (2).

2. See, for example, comments recorded on the back cover of Ellmann: “Here is the definitive work, and I hope it will become a model for future scholarly biographies” (Dwight Macdonald, The New Yorker); “A biography that we are justified on every count in regarding as definitive” (Stuart Gilbert, Saturday Review of Literature); and “A truly masterly biography, wise in its completeness” (Cyril Connolly, The Sunday Times [London]).

3. Trinh, as a filmmaker, was deeply interested in “framing” and its political power. In Framer Framed, she reports on her conversation with Leslie Thornton, who makes the comment: “I think work that stretches the form is often hybrid in genre, crossing the traditional categories of narrative, documentary, and experimental film. My own interest is in the outer edge of narrative, where we are at the beginning of something else” (244).

4. Barthes’s explanation of the relationship between captions, or written text of any kind, and the photographs they accompany is relevant here and for the other essays in this special issue where there is interplay between text and image: “the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text—title, caption or article . . . the analysis must first of all bear on each separate structure; it is only when the study of each structure has been exhausted that it will be possible to understand the manner in which they complement each other” (16).