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

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.