The Function of Frames
Aspects of Ong’s theory illuminate the framework for Miss Jane’s narrative. Technologies of writing and recording let the unnamed editor remediate Miss Jane’s narrative as literature. As a work of literature, her story supplements the textbooks that exclude her as subject and student of history. The editor even draws attention to Miss Jane’s manner of speaking to explain the orality of the text: “I have tried my best to retain Miss Jane’s language. Her selection of words; the rhythm of her speech. When she spoke she used as few words as possible to make her point. Yet, there were times when she would repeat a word or phrase over and over when she thought it might add humor or drama to the situation” (x). As Ong might point out, these notes on style point more directly to the writer’s craft than the reproduction of oral communication.
Gaines anticipates that point by framing the autobiography as the product of editorial work rather than a fictionalized transcript. “I could not possibly put down on paper everything that Miss Jane and the others said on tape during those eight or nine months,” the editor explains. “Much of it was too repetitious and did not follow a single direction” (ix). What readers have in their hands is the product of collaboration, first between the editor and Miss Jane, later between Miss Jane and the others who contributed to the story. “When she was tired, or when she just did not feel like talking any more, or when she had forgotten certain things, someone else would always pick up the narration” (ix). The editor’s frame suggests how a supposedly authoritative text must integrate multiple perspectives, unify multiple voices, and organize scattered threads of story into a single narrative. Still, having done that work, the editor accepts Mary’s point: “Well, you don’t tie up all the loose ends all the time” (ix). The frame self-reflexively comments on its own narrative strategies, hinting in advance how readers might respond to gaps in the story.
If the frame works to instruct readers on how to read the novel, as Ong argues, it also stages a negotiation that invites readers to question the literary status of the text. In that sense, the framing device for The Autobiography better illustrates what Bertram D. Ashe calls “narrative negotiations” (6). Ashe emphasizes dynamic negotiation to correct for the assumed didactic authority of textuality. By showing how African American writers have used frame stories, he develops a theory of the literary device as a tool for upsetting reader expectations as much as guiding them. African American writers did not—still may not—have the luxury of assuming full authorial control over their own narratives. Robert Stepto’s formative work on slave narratives showed how they relied on paratextual framing devices from white writers, editors, and publishers for authentication, both in terms of their factuality and their rhetorical power (From Behind the Veil). Even before Stepto, John Edgar Wideman made a similar point. “The fact of black speech,” he argued in 1976, “existed only when it was properly ‘framed,’ within works which had status in the dominant literary system” (36). From that perspective, the frame acts as a container for Black writing, to domesticate it for mainstream audiences. Scholars of African American literature remind us to look for social antagonisms if we hope to understand the process marginalized authors undergo when negotiating entry into literate culture.
Gaines stages that negotiation by recreating the framing convention for his neo-slave narrative. Instead of reassuring readers, the introduction complicates what they might expect. What sort of story should readers expect from someone who does not want to tell it? How much of the narrative represents Miss Jane’s perspective versus those who help tell her story? The frame tells its own story of community drama, with intergenerational conflict and hierarchical intrigue, that undermines certainty over what will follow. The frame unsettles reader expectations at bibliographic levels as well: Is it a novel or an autobiography? Is Gaines the unnamed editor? Is it really based on an interview? Is it the authentic voice of a woman who suffered enslavement in America? Is it history? Those questions do not find resolution once the novel’s status as fiction grows clear; they move toward a literary critical register instead.
