Freie Universität Berli The Productivity of Empathy Inhibition The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child Yvonne Liebermann This essay analyses the politics of narrative framing in Caryl Phillips’ penultimate novel The Lost Child (2015). It argues that The Lost Child frames the main story through allusions to Emily Brontë’s canonical text Wuthering Heights and the life of its author to shed light on the universal restriction of socio-cultural, ideological frames which influence readerly empathy, instead of furnishing an alternative version of the past as is the aim of the ‘writing back’ paradigm. Ideological frames manipulate our perception and guide how we distribute value and empathy. In The Lost Child, the framing technique emphasises the working of frames by juxtaposing two stories; whereas one story triggers empathy in the reader through a clear construction of causality and sequentiality, the other story lacks cohesion and consequently which inhibits the reader’s empathy for the main protagonist. However, the narrative framing by being visible and destabilising also challenges the reader’s evaluation of the main protagonist Monica and more broadly asks the reader to reconsider how ideological frames distribute value and control empathy. Therefore, the framing makes readers consider framing mechanisms on a meta-level and reconsider how they distribute empathy in the first place. Contrasting instances of ‘easy empathy’ in the novel with more complex forms of empathy invited by the framing of the novel, this essay argues that mechanisms of empathy inhibition can constitute a specific form of readerly engagement. 1. Introduction: Beyond ‘Rewriting’ The field labelled ‘postcolonial literature’ is often not primarily analysed regarding its aesthetics and capacity to ‘world’, but rather with focus on its capacity to ‘write back’ and challenge “the manifold legacies of Eurocentrism” (Helgesson 2014: 484; cf. Gikandi 2011: 164, 166). Scholars AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0003 Yvonne Liebermann 48 analysing literature from the former colonies, therefore, according to Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, often show a “lack of interest in seeing post-colonial literature as part of the same system as the literature of the West” (2008: 25). Texts from the former colonies are often seen as “representative cultural artefacts” (Ponzanesi 2014: 13) rather than as literature in its own right. Similarly, Graham Huggan in his influential study The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) cogently argues that while “postcolonial literatures may be simply defined as those English-language writings which have emerged from the former colonies of the British Empire, the term ‘postcolonial’ clearly has a wider valency” which he links to a “perceived imperative to rewrite the social text of continuing imperial dominance” (2001: ix). Approaching literature from authors that could be considered ‘post-colonial’ primarily focusing on this ‘perceived imperative’ thereby runs the risk of reducing this literature to a counter-movement to Eurocentrism and understanding it “exclusively in terms of political power and domination” (Helgesson 2014: 484). A development away from this too simple equation of literature from diasporic authors with a mandate to address colonialism or its consequences is highly desirable as it allows for creative variety and multi-layered narratives whose affective capacities are not limited in one direction and do not solely follow one predestined political mission. Along these lines Derek Attridge demands that analyses of literature should abandon a “utilitarian model that reflects a primary interest somewhere other than in literature” (2017/ 2004: 17) and instead pay more “attention to the specificity and singularity of literary writing as it manifests itself through the deployment of form […] as well as to the unpredictability of literary accomplishment” (2017/ 2004: 17). Caryl Phillips’ penultimate novel The Lost Child (2015) is one such multi-layered narrative whose singularity is closely connected to its form. The Lost Child interacts with an English classical text, but it cannot be reduced to this relationship to the English canon: The novel makes different places on the globe and different moments in time resonate with each other and establishes multi-perspectivity 1 , bringing together different stories in an undirected, open way. The interplay of these story lines is thereby not limited to a superimposed political agenda but rather works through productive gaps that the readers have to fill in themselves to make sense of the novel’s implicit socio-political inferences. Though The Lost Child is not an instrumentalised novel and does not equip its readers with an overtly moral message, it is still implicitly concerned with moral questions. However, these moral questions are negotiated on the level of form and not on the level of content, because as Wolfgang Müller emphasises, “narrative technique and point-of-view” can also have “profound ethical implications” (qtd. in Erll et al. 2008: 6) without 1 As Bénédicte Ledent rightly notes, this technique is frequent in Caryl Phillips’ fictional work (cf. Ledent 2017: 9). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 49 being effusively polarising. This paper sets out to examine the narrative technique of framing and its ethical implications in Phillips’ penultimate novel. The literary frame is a concept that, although long established in literary studies, remains under-researched regarding its ethical and affective implications. Frames have long been regarded as guides for interpretation that facilitate the reading process and stabilise the text’s meaning. In this paper, however, I want to scrutinise a destabilising potential of frames 2 and their capacity to draw attention to the normative nature of framing processes - both literary and non-literary - and their effect on our interpretation of literary texts. As Judith Butler illustrates in her study Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2010), frames are not innocent guides for interpretation but rather coercive tools to make visible some life while excluding other forms of life from our perception. Frames are culturally and politically saturated and modulate a society’s values and norms by perpetuating some values while making others impossible. This forestalled regulation of value has a huge effect on what is considered as a good, successful ‘life’ in a society and what is not even considered to be ‘life’ at all. The Lost Child participates in this ideological discourse by having a main protagonist whose life is often read as a ‘failure’ and as inexplicable within the story realm. 3 At the core of this paper lies the question why the reader might perceive Monica Johnson - the protagonist of the story set in the twentieth century - as a ‘failure’ and why her story is framed by stories related to Emily Brontë and her ground-breaking novel Wuthering Heights. What does the framing do to possible readings of the story and the lives of its main protagonists? How does it relate to established norms and values of what a valuable or successful life is? The juxtaposition with not only Wuthering Heights but also a chapter on the life of the Brontë sisters highlights how the ideological frame constructed around questions of ‘failure’ and ‘value’ breaks through its application to new contexts and thus foregrounds its constructedness. The Lost Child challenges hegemonic social framings of a successful life through its literary framing strategy. The novel’s formal composition initiates frame breaking as it shifts the idea of personal responsibility and the ideological frames of ‘success’, ‘value’, and ‘failure’ from one context to another. Like many other novels by authors who are predominantly labelled ‘diasporic’ (cf. Ledent 2017: 3), The Lost Child at first glance offers itself as an instance of rewriting, as it apparently takes a canonical English classic as its point of departure. In this paper, I want to outline other effects that the intertextual relationship between a postcolonial text and a canonical classic can have - effects that are grounded more in the present than 2 See Werner Wolf’s concept of defamiliarising frames (2006). 3 Not every reader might perceive the character this way, of course, but many reviewers read her this way (cf. Miller 2015: online; Woodward 2015: online). Yvonne Liebermann 50 the past -, because, as Ankhi Mukherjee critically notices, “not only is all writing doomed to be rewriting, the function of criticism too seems to be defined by its dialectical relationship with a hyperbolic literary past” (2014: 20, my emphasis). Mukherjee convincingly criticises the writing back paradigm, asserting that the “‘empire writes back’ formulation is fundamentally flawed in the way it relates all contestations of modernity in the non-western world to what is perceived as the primal trauma of colonization” (2014: 116). In the words of Phillips himself, “[a] novel is not a sociological pamphlet”, it should not be reduced to narrowly confined political purposes, as “it has other aesthetic concerns” (Ward 2012: 644). However, putting more focus on aesthetic or, more generally, narrative concerns hardly means that fiction does not exercise a critical potential, for it also, Phillips emphasises “should have a structure that at least bears the introduction” of the “many things that are swept under the carpet” (Ward 2012: 644). The novel as a literary genre has a special relationship to frames and empathy, because it has a “moral form” 4 in that it is centred on questions of “sequence and consequence” (Ali Smith qtd. in Lea 2017: 62). Many novels are still centred on ‘eventness’ which is reliant on this understanding of sequence and consequence, as “the novel is conventionally a model of individual and social dynamism, in which initial situations are pushed into eventual action and change” (Sayeau 2013: 183). The literary text, however, has further potential: It is not only driven by the events of its plot, but it also constitutes the ‘event of literature’. As Ilai Rowner rightly outlines, “[n]arrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself” (2015: 13). Negotiating and putting to the test contemporary societal norms that work through ideological frames can be at the core of a ‘narrative event’ 5 and manifest itself through the literary composition and a work’s literary frames. These literary frames can generate ‘events’ that are removed from the plot and hegemonic societal discourses and that pursue a politics of their own. It is thus that a “work’s moral outlook, in short, may be as much a question of form as of content - a parallel between plots, for example, a way of handling a storyline or a two-dimensional mode of depicting character” (Eagleton 2012: 65). In this sense, paying attention to the form of the novel might shed light on “the historical workings of political power” and allow to investigate the “relations between politics and aesthetics” (Levine 2017: xiii). As the novel “traditionally promises its readers meaningful events as well as serious depictions of social and/ or psychological life” (Vermeulen 2015: 6-7), what happens when neither ‘meaningful events’ nor the 4 Of course, this assumption is debatable. 5 However, it is not the only or foremost task of the narrative event, as the literary event to a certain degree “must retain its enigmatic force” (Rowner 2015: 25). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 51 depiction of a psychological life manage to enter a literary work’s centre stage? One possible effect is that the ‘event of literature’ which asks for a “different kind of attention and emphasis” (Rowner 2015: 12) enters the spotlight. It is therefore the structure and the concomitant literary event of The Lost Child that is at the core of this paper. Instead of using the canonical text as a point of departure to articulate a postcolonial position, The Lost Child uses Wuthering Heights as a frame story to shed light on the ideological frames of value in the present rather than furnish alternative versions of the past. The novel thereby fosters an understanding of interconnectivity and relation between the canonical text and the subsequent text that goes beyond a hierarchical understanding of ‘original’ and ‘rewriting’ and positions The Lost Child in a wider frame of critical thinking. 2. The Literary Frame and the Construction of a Valuable Life The Lost Child makes use of a frame story, which is a very common literary device that can have different functions. Monika Fludernik emphasises that there are different relations that a frame narrative can have with the main text. “If the tale is conceptualized as subsidiary to the primary story frame,” she explains “a relationship of embedding obtains; if the primary story level serves as a mere introduction to the narrative proper, it will be perceived as a framing device.” (Fludernik 1996: 343) The framing technique in The Lost Child is not one of embedding, “serving to render the more ample inset or inner tale (Binnenerzählung) accessible and/ or to authenticate it” (Pier 2014), but rather one of “introduction”. The novel according to its blurb deals “[a]t its heart” with the story of “Monica, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors” (Phillips 2015: online). Monica’s story is framed by the story of a slave woman and her young son at the beginning, a chapter about the Brontë sisters in the middle, and an ambiguous chapter that might deal with Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff at the end. However, apparently being unconnected with the main story, the frame story remains enigmatic for the reader: What purpose does this kind of ‘introduction’ serve? What is the connection between the stories and how does this framing of the main text by a different story completely removed in terms of time and space influence its reception? The framing policy in The Lost Child, however, due to the inscrutable connection between ‘the narrative proper’ and its many framings, has to be analysed not only from a strictly narratological perspective, but also with regard to the wider ideological implications of framing processes. Literary frames are not only hermeneutic devices but are also connected to ideological political framings, as they are “cultural constructs” that depend “on a period’s épistémè, norms, conventions and the totality of the Yvonne Liebermann 52 ‘frames of reference’” (Wolf and Bernhart 2006: 4). Given this entanglement of frames, culture, and norms, Butler is right in noting that [i]nterpretation does not emerge as the spontaneous act of a single mind, but as a consequence of a certain field of intelligibility that helps to form and frame our responsiveness to the impinging world […] Because such affective responses are invariably mediated, they call upon and enact certain interpretive frames. (2010: 34-35) Literary frames can make these ‘interpretive frames’, that is ideological frames, of a society visible and deconstructible. As framing is not solely a literary phenomenon, an unconventional use of framing mechanisms in a novel can stage how interpretation is always manipulated or at least guided by different framing mechanisms and thus can operate as a meta-commentary of meaning-making processes in more general terms. The framing mechanism in The Lost Child forces the reader to think stories alongside each other which without the framing would not be considered as sharing crucial similarities. Thereby the framing makes the reader realise that sometimes what is missing is the lens through which to see otherwise invisibilised similarities. While categories and pre-given lenses through which to read a literary text are inevitable to a certain degree, Butler emphasises the importance of questioning our assumptions, stressing the general power that normalised categories have, “preced[ing] and mak[ing] possible the act of recognition itself” (2010: 5). As Martha Nussbaum also underlines with regard to literature and ethics, literature, because of its connection to norms and cultural discourses, “cultivate[s] sympathy unevenly, directing our attention to some types of human beings and not to other” (2000: 101). This does of course not mean that literature is simply a mimetic representation of hegemonic discourses. Without a doubt, literature itself already points its finger at the “blind spots of knowledge formations” and helps “impeding social power formations and processes” (Neumann 2006: 33). While literary texts themselves can act disruptively, they, however, resulting from their involvement in the ever-ongoing production of new knowledge, always run the risk of becoming just another discourse among many (cf. Neumann 2006: 34). Frames, however, as a formal element of literature, can counteract hegemonic societal discourses without being considered a typical ‘counter-discourse’ as they do not form part of the textual body. Therefore, engaging with literary frames is an act of questioning the way society regulates recognisability - the central feature of our perception and our capacity to act ethically (cf. Butler 2010: 77). In other words, frames determine our capacity to react with empathy 6 to other peoples’ stories and 6 Empathy in this paper is dealt with as an affective form of perspective-taking, not necessarily of identification. Literary empathy, in this paper, describes the capacity The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 53 whether or not we can be pulled out of “the confines of our own world” (Ritivoi 2016: 52). The norms that are central to and negotiated in The Lost Child evolve around the question of societal circumstances and the fulfilment of one’s potential. 7 The framing of The Lost Child draws attention to societal expectations related to a discourse of accomplishment connected to personal responsibility and attitude as the main factors for ‘success’. The Lost Child’s framing results in a juxtaposition of a Victorian classical text which is canonised throughout the Anglophone world, a chapter on its author’s life, and finally a post-war British family and thereby creates a “field of intelligibility” (Butler 2010: 34) that sheds light on our contemporary ideological framing of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ and ultimately puts centre stage “the relationship between empathy and conformity” (Roszak 2014: 151). 8 By making these different stories resonate with each other, the text portrays the breaking of the ideological frame that makes the main protagonist of one of the stories - Monica Johnson - appear as a societal ‘failure’. 3. “As a Family We Had Nothing”: The Lost Children The Lost Child is made up of various ‘events’. However, these events do not manage to take centre stage and develop into ‘meaningful events’ that propel the narrative forward or provide the plot with a ‘meaningful’ structure. It might be said that the plotline which centres around Monica Johnson and her two sons revolves around the ‘event’ of Tommy’s abduction and subsequent death. But what makes The Lost Child such an intriguing narrative is that the event lacks ‘meaningfulness’ in that it does not trigger change 9 or psychological insight. The novel portrays the development of Ben Johnson, it features the abduction of Tommy Johnson and it depicts the not quite explicable development of their mother. These, of course, are events in that they induce ‘change’: The family moves houses, the children are taken into foster care, Monica gets ill and so on. These ‘events’ happen but they do not generate meaning, they do not lead to “an intensification that leads from a quantitative augmentation to a tipping point” (Sayeau 2013: 19) and are therefore not ‘events’ as classically understood in narratology. The events occur, but they do not seem to matter. Instead, The Lost Child’s driving force seems to be “an interest that exceeds the event’s sense” of novels to trigger readers into making an “effort in feeling toward the positions and decisions of another” (Leake 2014: 176) and in the process revisit their own parameters of empathy in the first place. 7 For a discussion of other works by Caryl Phillips that negotiate concepts of achievement, see Pirker (2017). 8 For a connection between empathy and Caryl Phillips’ works, see also Gunning 2012. 9 For instance, the psychological decline of Monica precedes Tommy’s abduction and is thus not a consequence of this event. Yvonne Liebermann 54 (Rowner 2015: 11) and this interest is emphasised by the novel’s structure that makes stories resonate with each other which are plot-wise not connected at all; in other words, the framing politics of the novel becomes its ‘event’. Prefixing the main narrative with another story completely unrelated to the main text establishes a dialogue between the different storylines without subordinating one to the other. This dialogue not only makes the different stories interact but also invites the reader to establish links and find similarities between what at first sight seems to be unconnected. While the framing of the main text by a different story strives for entanglement and connectivity, the text’s title - being a paratext and thus similarly a frame - seemingly counters this mission. With regard to the text’s overall dialogic structure, The Lost Child’s title is at first sight misleading. The direct article conveys the impression of a unified subject at the centre of the story. Initially, the novel seems to work against its title, as it does not deal with the lost child, but with lost children. The allegedly lost child of the title, Tommy, is juxtaposed to an equally, though differently, lost child: Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. Although the novel might invite a comparison between these two children of different times and different backgrounds, it does not fulfil the classical function of a postcolonial furnishing of a voice for a subaltern character. The Lost Child clearly distances itself from the postcolonial writing back paradigm as its representation strategies are characterised by their opaqueness rather than a desire to counter a hegemonic western discourse. The Lost Child does not grant Heathcliff further voice but only alludes to this figure of canonised fiction. Whom the reader later identifies as this character enters the narrative as an unnamed seven-year-old son of a former slave. Although he is still so young, the responsibility for his mother “sits surely on his young shoulders” (LC 4) and he is described to have a “strong and tenacious heart” (LC 6). The connection to Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is never made entirely explicit. Rather, it is the result of The Lost Child’s montage-like form which establishes this link. Only the combination of Liverpool as the setting of the first scene, the later chapter on the Brontë sisters, and finally the penultimate chapter that features a man named Earnshaw who travels to Liverpool and returns home with his illicit son (cf. LC 246) make it probable that the young boy from the opening scene is indeed young Heathcliff. What then is the function of this opaque intertextuality, if it seems neither to aim at “restructuring European ‘realities’ in post-colonial terms” (Mukherjee 2014: 116) nor sets out to “contest […] the authority of the canon of English literature” (Thieme 2001: 1)? Though the novel reimagines Heathcliff as Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate son with a slave woman and thus reimagines his story and background, this extension of the canonical text is hardly the main focus of the novel. Instead of providing an extensive backstory for Brontë’s character, the young boy of the frame story serves as a mirror figure for Tommy, Monica’s The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 55 youngest son. Although the novel at first glance seems to betray its title, its composition might exactly aim at reading the two children as one, thereby making the lost child metonymically stand in for the lost children as a trope, stressing their common fate rather than their manifold differences. Still, Tommy is not Heathcliff and vice versa, and this is an important assessment. The two children who get lost in different ways do not seem to share many characteristics. The novel is composed in a way that mirrors these two children - though in a very distorted way. What they share is a connection to the diaspora: Tommy’s father is from the Caribbean and Heathcliff is described “as dark almost as if [he] came from the devil” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36). However, while Heathcliff’s physical appearance plays a huge role in Wuthering Heights in making him the ‘other’, that is an outcast who is associated with uncivilisation, which makes him wish for “light hair and fair skin” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 57), Tommy’s skin colour is hardly ever mentioned. 10 What Tommy and Heathcliff share is their victimisation: Both are subject to psychological as well as physical abuse. However, they differ regarding their dealing with this victimisation. Though both children express a wish to belong and to be accepted, Heathcliff’s being continuously rejected makes him fight for himself whereas Tommy seems to embrace the role of the victim. Whereas Heathcliff right from the beginning appears independent and fearless, Tommy relies on his elder brother for comfort and companionship. While Heathcliff is more resilient and anxious to stand his ground - “I shall not stand to be laughed at, I shall not bear it” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 54) - Tommy cannot stand up against being bullied and after summer camp, “where he’d had a particularly tough time” (LC 137), he shuts down and becomes even more reclusive than before. While Heathcliff is described as “a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to illtreatment” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 38), Tommy is also a quiet child though for different reasons. He has not hardened to ill treatment nor patiently waits for things to change. Rather, he seems to have surrendered to his desolate situation as statements such as “he wished he was an orphan” (LC 159) or his general lack of enthusiasm for anything other than football demonstrate. It is particularly interesting that despite the two characters having utterly different character traits, the framing technique makes them merge in the end and literally appear as one lost child. The very last chapter 10 While I agree that racial discourses are latently present in The Lost Child, I do not read Tommy or Ben as the ‘racial other’ (cf. Ledent and O’Callaghan 2017: 236). The only time that the reader might deduce that Tommy is bullied because of his skin colour is when his school comrades laugh at him claiming to be English: “‘And where are you from, Thomas? ’ ‘I’m from England.’ His fellow pupils release a volley of scornful cackling that threatens to swell into hysteria” (LC 117). However, it is not explicit whether they laugh because they do not consider him to be truly English or whether they only laugh because Tommy might have misunderstood the teacher’s question. Yvonne Liebermann 56 ambiguously hovers between these two children: titled ‘Going Home’, it seems to be the extension of the previous chapter and might describe Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw returning to Wuthering Heights. However, the ending scene could just as well depict Tommy’s abduction by Derek Evans, which is underlined by the remark that “[t]he boy stares […] at the man in whose company he has suffered his long ordeal” (LC 260). Given the fact that Derek Evans probably abused Tommy for some time before abducting him (cf. LC 159), this narrative commentary would better fit their relationship than that of young Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw whom - at least in Wuthering Heights - Heathcliff comes to see as a father figure. The ending scene could fit both characters: Either it describes the last moments of Tommy’s life, who until then had lived under a shadow for quite some time, or it describes the moment Heathcliff’s life changes when he gets introduced into the Earnshaw family as the “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36) that Mr Earnshaw found “starving, and houseless” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36) in the streets of Liverpool. What this juxtaposition produced by the narrative framing does is not primarily rewrite a character of canonised fiction but compare two children whose lives are very different but who still - for partly different reasons - both end up miserable. From different times and different backgrounds, both boys feel abandoned by their respective families who could not care for them. What is emphasised is the common experience of neglect that can be as much a part of children’s lives in the 21 st century as it used to be for children in Heathcliff’s Victorian England. As Tommy’s brother Ben reminds the reader towards the end of the narrative, “[a]s a family we had nothing, so of course it was straightforward enough for somebody to turn our Tommy’s head” (LC 189). 11 The novel’s framing stresses the widespread and ever-present abuse of children and the importance of family ties - thereby avoiding a differentiation between orphans and outcasts on the one hand and children growing up with their own mother and therefore seemingly more sheltered on the other hand. Although the two boys differ regarding their attitude towards their victimisation, the reader presumably does not have difficulties to feel empathy for either, because “who would not want to empathize with those who are the victims of abuse by others, social circumstances, illness, or fate? ” (Leake 2014: 175) This form of “easy empathy” (Leake 2014: 175) - feeling with victims - is challenged by the more complicated juxtaposition of the two boys’ mothers. The focaliser of the last chapter - who could either be Derek Evans or Mr Earnshaw - says about the boy’s mother: “Despite her headstrong nature, it was evident to him that the woman was ill-suited to be a mother. It wasn’t her fault, but life had ushered her down a perilous course and 11 Bénédicte Ledent and Evelyn O’Callaghan offer an intriguing reading of the family trope in The Lost Child connecting it to the dysfunctional ‘family’ of Empire (cf. 2017: 236). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 57 delivered her into a place of vulnerability” (LC 257). Eerily, this description fits both, the vulnerable slave woman of the frame story and the headstrong Monica, who both - for very different reasons - have been ‘ushered down a perilous course’. 4. “All Tarted up, and a Mother too”: Framing the Failed Mother The comment at the end about the boy’s mother - regardless of which boy is meant - opens up a field of comparison between the slave woman of the frame story and Monica Johnson in the main story. The gap that the final framing creates activates readerly engagement and invites them to see this comment in relation to both women. But are these two women really comparable? Have they really both been ‘ushered down a perilous course’ to the same extent? Starting in medias res on the docks of Liverpool, The Lost Child’s frame story introduces an undefined ‘she’ who “likes to sit down by the docks where sunlight can discover her face” (LC 3). On the docks, this woman “leans back and listens to the monotony of seawater lapping against the quayside, and she has no concept of the hour” (LC 3). Without further context, this passage might read as an idyllic, lazy afternoon spent by the water. However, this initial impression turns out to be deceptive. The woman that the reader is introduced to on the first pages has a hard destiny: A woman from the Congo, enslaved and sold to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, she ended up in England, got pregnant, and now lives her life as a prostitute by the docks, troubled to find work as nobody is “willing to employ her at the loom; she is a diminished woman who, before her time, has yielded reluctantly to age and infirmity” (LC 3). Only slowly does the reader learn that this woman’s story is set in another time, the time of slavery and its aftermath; the first few lines do not give her circumstances away, but the narrative step by step provides a backstory for this ‘diminished woman’. This woman wants to tell her story: “She wants to tell the man that it hasn’t always been like this, truly it hasn’t” (LC 3), and although the woman never addresses that man, the reader still gets to know her story. The first chapter, which deals exclusively with this woman and her seven-year-old son, switches between past and present, juxtaposing the woman’s desolate situation with memories of her harrowing past (cf. LC 5). The backstory being directly juxtaposed to the narrative present furnishes a cause-and-effect frame for the slave woman’s story. Her story constitutes a typical story of retrospective teleology, stressing a development “in which the present emerges from the past” (Brockmeier 2001: 253) as its inevitable consequence. After having endured years of hardship on a plantation in the Caribbean and on the slave ship, the woman meets a ‘gentleman’ who woos her. She gets pregnant and slowly the man abandons her. Left with child, the woman then has problems to find employment and succumbs to illness. The narrative framing induces the reader to feel Yvonne Liebermann 58 sympathy for this woman, even if she seems to neglect her son and mistreat him, at least verbally: “He reaches down and takes her hand, which she snatches away from him. (I will kill you.) […] The unblinking child stares back at her in a manner that suggests that the requirement that he bear responsibility for her well-being sits surely on his young shoulders” (LC 4). The woman is incapable of providing and caring for her seven-year-old child, but the text invites sympathy rather than contempt for her, because the reader can retrace her experience and thus relate to her development. The flashbacks to her past frame her present situation as a consequence of her hard life and thus portray the present as an inevitability. In other words, the construction of her story allows the reader to engage with the woman’s story and thus feel compassion for her and her story, because she - like Tommy and Heathcliff - is depicted as a victim. 12 It is therefore interesting to see the slave woman’s story, which induces compassion and sympathy in the reader, framing a very different woman where background and social position are concerned and whose story might not initially ignite sympathy. The former slave woman’s story constitutes the initial framing for a very different story which starts in the second chapter: The story of Monica Johnson, a British woman of a bourgeois family who grows up in Leeds and later moves to Oxford to study. Just as Tommy is juxtaposed to Heathcliff, Monica becomes a distorted mirror image of the slave woman. Even though it seems as if Monica had - contrary to the slave woman - the best preconditions to lead a ‘successful’ life, she, too, loses control of her life and ultimately loses a child, succumbs to illness and dies. Because of Monica’s upbringing and her general circumstances, Lucasta Miller is inclined to draw the following conclusion: Her strange passivity and emptiness cannot be fully explained by her difficult relationship with her parents, who are presented as conservative and unimaginative but not wicked; nor is it illuminated by the communication failures in her marriage; nor is it related to wider social factors arising from her impoverished and liminal situation as a single mother on a council estate. Depressingly, the message seems to be that some people are born outcasts, regardless of circumstances. (2015) Monica’s circumstances, so Miller’s assumption, should have resulted in a ‘better’ life. Monica’s development is clearly contrary to her father’s expectations who perceives Monica as a failure and wishes that her education 12 The presentation of her story allows for readerly engagement through a creation of sequentiality: “Stories can achieve the effect of consolidating situations - making them seem well defined to outsiders, people who are not in them - by grounding the plot in sequences of events that appear both chronologically and causally connected” (Ritivoi 2016: 69). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 59 would have withdrawn her from her mother’s influence for whom he does not have any respect: “And now what was she trying to do to their daughter, whose education should have placed her beyond Ruth’s influence? Was this to be his legacy, two gossiping women and two misfit children? ” (LC 60). Of course, this statement is as much a judgement of Monica as it is an indirect characterisation of her patriarchal and xenophobic father. Still, the reader similarly might wonder how the woman, initially described by her husband as an “oddly intense northern girl” with “the right resources of strength and courage” (LC 25) to face society’s snobbish reaction to her Caribbean husband, could lose control of her life so unexpectedly. Indeed, it remains a mystery how the “remarkable young woman” (LC 26) defying her family and societal expectations alike ended up being described by her own son Ben in the following fashion: “At the end of the day Mam was always tired, and sometimes she didn’t even have the energy to talk to us, so to my way of thinking, she needn’t have bothered making the effort” (LC 159). While the story of the slave woman induces sympathy, Monica’s enigmatic development inhibits the reader’s sympathy and empathy as it does not frame the present as an inevitable consequence of the past. The reader might be more inclined to sympathise with Monica’s son who wonders: “Why couldn’t she just go somewhere and get better instead of all this? ” (LC 179). Indeed, Monica’s behaviour is enigmatic and not anticipated within the logic of the narrative, which does not offer an easy actio-reactio situation that would culminate in her self-inflicted death and thus lacks narrative motivation. 13 The narrative structure deviates from what Ian Watt calls the “importance which the novel allots the time dimension” (Watt 2006: 22), which is “its use of past experience as the cause of present action” (Watt 2006: 22). In this vein, Anna Lindhé rightly points out that “while rhetorical strategies elicit readerly empathy, they also serve to inhibit it” (2016: 20): As the framing invites the reader to read Monica’s story alongside the sad fate of the slave woman in the opening chapter, the sympathy that the reader feels with the slave woman might “trigger, or even be contingent on, the reader’s antipathies or indifference” (Lindhé 2016: 20) towards Monica. Indeed, the reader, who is also made to sympathise with Tommy and Ben, might be inclined to not fully disagree with Mrs Swinson, the temporary foster mother of Tommy and Ben, who remarks: I can’t abide women who are all over the shop when it comes to their responsibilities. On behalf of the blessed council, I seem to spend half my life mopping up the mess people like you make. I mean, look at how you’re all tarted up, and a mother too. (LC 154) 13 Ritivoi defines narrative motivation as follows: “Motivation prompts us to understand the coherence of a sequence of events as they unfold from the perspective of those implicated in them” (2016: 70). Yvonne Liebermann 60 Sympathy with the two boys, who try to get along as best as possible, might induce antipathy for their mother and inhibit a perception of her which would frame her as a victim, too. Although Monica is perceived as irresponsible, detached from reality, and even mad (cf. LC 170) by her father, husband, and son Ben, the chapters told from her perspective tell a different story. The shift in perspective introduces a different angle that highlights a divergence between perception from the outside and self-perception. Talking to her husband Julius, whom she describes as “this sad dreamer of a man she had married” (LC 51), Monica bursts out: What’s the matter with me? Nothing, Julius, except I’m tired, poor, and worried that because I don’t know how to be myself, I don’t know how to be a mother to these two boys, who deserve a damn sight more than we’ve been able to give them. I’ve lost myself, you buffoon, which is pathetic (LC 52) While the narrative parts that are told from other peoples’ perspectives - her father, her son - depict Monica as a woman who does not reflect on her actions and who in general does not seem to be concerned with the people surrounding her, her self-perception paints a different picture. However, her voice is not given sufficient space in the novel to really engage the reader in her perspective and investigate the latently present factors that might contribute to her development: the “dysfunctional relationship” with her father, who might even have abused her (cf. Ledent and O’Callaghan 2017: 246) and the racial stereotypes that Monica will have had to face because of her Caribbean husband and mixed-raced children in Great Britain in the 1960s. 14 Together, this might lead to a lack of sympathy, understanding, and empathy on the side of the reader. Still, the novel’s structure frames Monica’s situation within the horizon of the slave woman’s story and eventually highlights that different paths can lead to the same result in the end. Just as with Tommy and Heathcliff, Monica’s and the slave woman’s stories meet regarding their misery in the end. The framing of these stories, which makes the reader “reflect on what it is that unites them” (Craps 2008: 193) 15 , might induce a different morality than is typically connected with literary studies. Suzanne Keen claims that literature creates empathy through “the creation of commonality, even 14 Of course, these latent factors play an important role in The Lost Child. My point is precisely that these factors stay in the background, because the reader needs to become aware of them on their own account by questioning their initial reaction to the character. This questioning of pre-determined judgment is facilitated by the novel’s framing. 15 In his essay “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood”, Stef Craps analyses Phillips’ technique of fragmented narratives to generate empathy. The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 61 mutuality, between the reader and the protagonists of the story” (qtd. in Ritivoi 2016: 54). Ritivoi, however, rightly claims that this understanding of literary empathy is limited. According to her, “[b]esides being shallow, an understanding derived from the assumption of similarity is ethnocentric […] it is an understanding centered on our own point of view and shaped by only those realities that it reveals, while inevitably being closed to others.” (2016: 62-63) The framing of The Lost Child does not strive to create commonality. Resulting from a missing cause-and-effect relation between Monica’s circumstances and her development, readers might have a hard time to relate to her development. However, the fact that both women and both boys end up in a similar way might induce an ‘understanding’ in the reader that has nothing to do with commonality or empathy in the traditional sense - that is empathy through retracing a character’s experiences. Rather, in The Lost Child, “[u]nderstanding involves the adjustment of our familiar frame of reference - assumptions and expectations - to the frame of reference proposed by or contained in the object of interpretation.” (Ritivoi 2016: 60) Although both women are separated in time, family background, and position in society, the narrative structure still invites the reader to read the stories of both women alongside each other. After all, both women feel that they are invisible and neglected by the society they live in: Similar to the slave woman, who remarks that “[t]he sailors don’t see me; they never see me” (LC 6), Monica also feels excluded and on the margins of society: “I could see the people, but they couldn’t see me, and I can’t say it was a happy time” (LC 215). Despite their similarities - they both feel at the brim of society, they are both single mothers, and they both have to abandon their children due to illness - why might readers still judge Monica’s life as a failure while they might feel sympathy for the slave woman? The framing, so my claim, does induce readers to pose exactly this question and consequently re-evaluate their predispositions. Not only is Monica juxtaposed with the slave woman, but her life also resonates with that of another woman whose behaviour and manners were not entirely understood by society and her family: Emily Brontë, the author of the classical text Wuthering Heights with which The Lost Child interacts. Roughly in the middle of The Lost Child, the chapter ‘The Family’ starts in medias res with Emily Brontë observing her sister Charlotte from her sickbed. Although the chapter at first seems to be unconnected to Monica’s story, a closer look brings several similarities between the fictional character Monica and the fictionalised historical persona of Emily Brontë to the fore. Most of the chapter retells Emily’s illness shortly before her death, but the narrative also portrays Emily as “dwelling in another place” (LC 110) already four years before her illness. Descriptions of Emily, such as: “Emily retreated into an implacable silence that hinted at shyness, although her lustreless eyes invariably betrayed boredom, and her general demeanour indicated that she cared little for anyone else’s opinion” (LC 101-102) resonate with comments about Monica, who “had a lethargic, Yvonne Liebermann 62 expressionless gaze that was a little off-putting” (LC 25). Both Emily and Monica start out getting an education and both then “find contentment in cooking and cleaning” (LC 105, cf. 26), much to the astonishment of their surroundings, and they both devote their time to Julius and Branwell respectively without claiming recognition (cf. LC 27, 107). Both women, “secretive and inscrutable” (LC 29), share one more characteristic: They are both writers. The reader is aware that Emily’s “dreaming of the boy who came from the moors” (LC 105) later resulted in one of the best-known English novels. Contrarily, Monica’s writing activities are only mentioned in passing by her son Ben who comments that she “scribbled a bit at her stories” (LC 159) after work. The similarities of the two women are not made markedly explicit, but their implicit juxtaposition highlights that two similar lives can be judged differently, depending on socio-ideological framings of their time and the lenses through which they are scrutinised. While Emily Brontë’s novel today is widely-known and her personality is accepted as part and parcel of her artistic persona, Monica’s artistic endeavours hardly surface in the novel and remain unaccounted. The different framings of the main narrative therefore highlight that ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are socio-political constructs and are not mainly connected to individuals. In this vein, Anna Lindhé is right when claiming that “[b]uilt into the form of the novel, there is a tension that reminds us that we are not innocent” (Lindhé 2016: 37). The text comes into being only through the practice of reading and it is the reader who “brings the work into being, differently each time, in a singular performance of the work” (Attridge 2004: 9). The perception of a fictional person as either a societal success or a failure is, of course, dependent on the literary framing, but also on the ideological frames that the reader brings to the text. While the empathy that the reader feels for Tommy, Heathcliff, and the slave woman is a “non-threatening form of empathy” in that it “does not much challenge our view of ourselves” (Leake 2014: 175), the troubled feeling that the juxtapositional framing of Monica, the slave woman, and Emily Brontë might create is indeed threatening to preformed understandings that western readers might have. Typical rewritings of canonical texts address historical ideological frames that lead to the perception of colonial subjects as inferior or less valuable, or even ‘mad’, caused by ideologies of race or ethnicity. The Lost Child turns this process around: Through its juxtaposition of a classical text with the story of an ordinary British woman, The Lost Child highlights that ideological framings as they were at work in colonial genres are still at work, only differently, adapted to contemporary discourses of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, that is of the value of a life which more often than not is judged according to these parameters. The Lost Child challenges contemporary ideological frames that equate success with possibility - e.g. that if you are given possibilities they must result in success or you, personally, have failed - and highlights the reader’s role in bringing this meaning to the The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 63 text. As “certain formulations of self (as active, voluntaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere” (Halberstam 2011: 140), a particular framing strategy can bring to the fore the constructedness of these formulations. Even though not overtly concerned with ethics, the novel still challenges frames of perception that are guided by societal discourses: After all, Monica’s behaviour could very well be interpreted as the symptoms of clinical depression - which might have been triggered by patriarchal and racial discourses which are only latently present in the novel -, a disease that does not follow a simple cause-and-effect logic and that is still not entirely acknowledged by society. Ultimately, Monica’s framing in The Lost Child destabilises the widely spread delusion that “success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions” (Halberstam 2011: 3). 5. The Productivity of Empathy Inhibition: Destabilising Hegemonic Fields of Intelligibility The framing strategy of The Lost Child can be described as a destabilising framing strategy in that it does not support notions of stability, closure, and a smooth, reliable guidance through the text (cf. Frow 1982: 27). Destabilising frames rely on a certain out-of-place-ness in order to achieve a degree of visibility which allows them to actively challenge heteronormative values. When they are out-of-place, literary frames can stop being stabilising additions to the text and instead become places of negotiation where the very norms and values that have attained a certain uncritical stability in society are critically scrutinised. The Lost Child’s juxtaposition of three unrelated stories in a manner that still suggests common ground between them leads to a questioning of ideological frames of what ‘failure’, ‘success’, and ‘value’ are. By re-negotiating the distribution of value, literary frames can therefore operate as much more than minor discursive devices in literature. As Peter Boxall rightly demands, [i]f we are to understand the value of the novel, its capacity to make the worlds in which we live, then we have also to understand its resistance to value as presently understood or constituted, its right to be judged not by the terms that we have available, but by those futural forms which it alone is able to summon into existence. (2015: 11) Resisting notions of value as formulated in contemporary discourses, the ‘literary event’ that The Lost Child creates can thus be described as challenging the correlation between empathy and societal conformity. In this vein, literary frames not only guide our interpretation of a text but can also make us question very basic assumptions about human life, subjectivity, and the norms that came to stabilise these concepts. Yvonne Liebermann 64 Destabilising frames use their heightened visibility to make the reader aware of the norms that unconsciously determine their meaning making processes and the discourses that unconsciously regulate cultural knowledge. In this vein, The Lost Child’s experimenting with traditional framing mechanisms can indeed be considered what Derek Attridge calls “ethical testing” (2004: 10): The destabilising framing of The Lost Child raises awareness of how empathy is generated and how cultural values influence the reader’s distribution of empathy. The limitations of being able to feel with Monica Johnson disrupt the reading process. The paradoxical juxtaposition of three women’s lives - or glimpses of their lives - that either start off similarly but end differently or start differently but end in a similar way “may increase readers’ awareness of their own role and responsibility in the activity of reading” (Lindhé 2016: 35), that is their own role in distributing empathy. Better circumstances do not automatically lead to better lives and The Lost Child’s framing makes us aware of the “fields of intelligibility that helps to form and frame our responsiveness to the impinging world” (Butler 2010: 34-35). Phillips’ text shows that a novel from a ‘diasporic author’ can offer various interpretations and become operable in different discourses without being explicitly instrumentalised for socio-political agendas. His novel implicitly deals with socio-political concerns through its form and thereby highlights the singularity of literary texts to engage readers in critical thought without being effusively didactic. References Attridge, Derek (2004). Coetzee & the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Attridge, Derek (2017). The Singularity of Literature. [2004]. Oxon/ New York: Routledge. Boxall, Peter (2015). The Value of the Novel. New York, NY: Cambridge U.P. Brontë, Emily (2003). Wuthering Heights. [1847]. 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