On Versions: II. Frames and Fingers

FRAMES AND FINGERS

Diagram from Appian's Cosmographia,  1539

“Where do you find it?” I pleaded at my window; the fisherman’s finger pointed, misleadingly, out to sea…” (175)

It seems we have moved rather inexplicably from the concept of objectivity to that of frame (in the literary sense); but the two concepts are in fact quite related.  Beyond the particular function of the old-Saleem-narrative-frame touched on above, what, in general, does a frame do? If we said, It protects the edges of your picture, we could mean this in a common sense way and in a wryly profound way. And it’s true – but we should also remark that the edges of your picture already constitute a frame: in fact, the painting (for example) was already framed by the painter the moment he chose the horizontal and vertical limits of his subject. And this framing is not incidental – nor is it peculiar to painting, or visual arts, for that matter. It is an essential aspect of finite representation: only with the imposition of limits can there be sense and content. The limit introduces the possibility of the center/periphery duality, which is itself a prerequisite of meaning. This is the sense of the philosophical concept of “horizon.” 

A telling example: the original model of the cosmos was ‘closed’: at the center was the earth, at the edge was the heavens. Up is heavenward, down is earthward. With the Copernican revolution, both the center and the periphery are lost: there is only orientationless, endless space. There is no up, and there is no down. Or: there is only up and down, relative to x. And what is x? The re-introduction of a (limited) framework – so there is up and down, if we take the earth as center. Or if we take the sun as center. Or the command console of the rocket ship as center, etc. Moreover, frames can be non-spatial – for instance, the choice to describe the world in the terms of the ontology of “medium sized dry goods” - as opposed to atomic physics or quantum physics or organic chemistry – is a choice we all make every day: we impose a lower limit on how we delimit object. The world is infinitely subtle and our language infinitely capable of precision; there must come a point where we say, precise enough, so we can begin to speak. Or: just imagine if we didn’t? It would be senseless. Reductio ad absurdum.

                Rushdie too must impose limits so he can tell a story, otherwise, he fall afoul of the narrator’s own doomed decree that “ to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (121). A book that “swallowed” the whole world would be much like a life-sized map which mapped the entire world in perfect detail – qua map, it would be useless (or we would need a ‘limited’, manageable sized map to navigate it!). We represent because we cannot handle the whole of everything at once. So an author must make choices, and any choice is a limitation. Rushdie does this, quite aptly, using the visual horizon (ie, a limit that grounds) itself as metaphor. In the beginning, Aadem is situated in the mountainous valley of his homeland, and, despite its expansion due to the recession of the ice, he notices “the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon” (5), which saddens him and makes him feel “enclosed.” It is from this very limit that the action proceeds from its Genesis-esque opening; and it is to this very limit that the action returns in the Revelations-esque Revelations. But now the ice has returned, and the mountains have closed in further (317).  So here we have Aadem, framed by the mountains, losing his religion; and later, finally dying, framed by those same mountains. Furthermore, the temporal stretch of his grandfather’s life – from Kashmir valley and back again, forms another frame for the first half of the book, which is a Recurrence of this initial Exile – from faith, from family, from childhood and finally, from India itself and the magical powers it bestows on Saleem. The horizon here is both birth and death. Which, or course, is our horizon too.  

Kashmir Valley (and beyond!)

So what has any of this to do with objectivity? Just this: our subjectivity, our always-coming-from-a-perspective, our need to impose limits in order to make sense, means that we only ever approach the Object, reality, from one angle at a time. (Horizon commonly means – the limit of the current state of knowledge). The fact of perspective sets up the never ending conflict between the finite perspective and the infinite, between belief and truth, between being as it is for us and being as such, ie, objectivity. This tension, which has been the spirit of the times since Descartes, is the strain and stress of doubt, uncertainty, and, at its extreme, solipsism. Since at least Kant we have had to deal with the threat of vicious idealism: that we – as a species, as a people, as an individual even – are, due to our “conceptual scheme” or framework, irreparably out of touch with reality. So even though a framework is a prerequisite of meaning, it also bears within it the inexpungible threat of radical doubt, relativism, falsity and meaninglessness.

                 There have been philosophical attempts to anchor our point-of-viewedness in objective reality (which would be tantamount to framing our frame in the ultimate frame, the Real). Early 20^th century empiricism was troubled by the question, how do we know we all mean the same things by our concepts? One concept is defined or explicated in terms of another, so finding agreement in definition just defers the problem – how do we know we mean the same thing by our definiens  and explicans ? How can we ever know that we mean the same things by our words, if we only ever verify our agreement through further words? Okay, so Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. It seems language is spinning in a frictionless void, never making contact with reality. What can you do? The empiricist solution was reductionist – all abstract concepts reduced to basic experiential concepts – and these basic concepts were not related to each other by verbal definition, but were related directly to the world through ostensive definition: When our concepts become simple enough, we can simply point to the thing referred to.

Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh

This discussion, I think, gives us a way of reading the strangely dwelt on topic and chapter namesake: the Fisherman’s Pointing Finger. Purportedly, it is via ostension that language breaks out of itself and anchors its meaning in the thing as such: symbolically, the fisherman points beyond the frame (139). Baby Saleem looks out his window (a widely used metaphor for a frame/perspective ) asking where he can find meaning (175), and he follows the fisherman’s pointing finger “even further than that shimmering horizon”  within the painting itself, and “beyond [the]teak frame…’ (139)…where? Out to sea… Here our gaze follows baby Naseem’s own: from the fingers, then beyond the horizon of the painted sea, beyond the painting’s frame, then out past his window frame, stopping on the sea. This radical de-framing, widening of context has its final resting place in what else but that never ending sign of the All, of the Object, of time and eternity, of alpha and omega: the sea.

This thrust – from finger-tip to Being – resonates with the Empiricist’s thrust beyond subjectivity; indeed, this thrust is in turn mirrored in Baby Saleem’s own first attempts to “acquire the essential characteristics of human beings” (144), that is, his attempt to ground himself, to stand on his own two feet:

‘[E]veryday, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman’s pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot” (144).

“Alone” with the fisherman’s ostensive motion, what is symbolized is none other than the empiricist’s own vision of the attainment of truth: the (semantically) self-grounding movement that is at once the transcendence of all frames (objective reference) which is in turn contact with objective being (truth). What adds weight to this interpretation is the narrator’s own switching, in a single passage, between the subjective, first personal pronoun (“I tried to heave myself erect…”) to the objective, third personal pronoun (“the moment he would acquire the essential characteristics…”). From the attempt to the attainment, the limited individual perspective is transformed to the impersonal, omniscient third.

                But there have already been hints that this transformation is doomed from the outset. When our narrator tries to understand how his own future hung over his baby-crib in this painting (140) he has trouble determining just what is being pointed to. The finger may be pointing to another frame – the framed copy of his headlined birth announcement in the Times of India. Or, it points to the fishermen out to sea, to the “dispossessed” making their living in the shadow of men like Sir Walter Raleigh, the purported subject of the portrait, whose role in the Colonization and expansion of the Empire contrasts sharply with the referent of the Fishman’s ‘accusing’ gesture. Or, thirdly, the author considers that its purpose is “to draw attention to itself” (139). The author does not settle on one of these readings – he doesn’t even present them as though a choice is necessary or even desirable. But at any rate, we already see a problem with ostensive definition, namely, it does not escape the equivocality and ambiguity of its verbal counterpart. Pointing is not opposed to concepts, the latter being grounded in the former; rather, pointing and concepts are both part of a single framework – the symbolic. And the symbolic is sui generis – signs and symbols are grounded in signs and symbols and thus susceptible to interpretation and divergent meaning. So pointing too has different meanings, which are only determined contextually against a background of shared beliefs, intentions, values and projects.

            As Quine “points out”: imagine trying to translate the utterances of someone from a radically new and different linguistic tradition – they say gavagaii when they point to what we take as a rabbit. But since we do not know how they conceptually carve up the world, we have no way in principle of deciding, when they point and utter, ‘gavagaii’, whether they are pointing to a rabbit, or an “undetached rabbit part”: everything they point at, and any way they point at it, will be consistent with both interpretations. But of course, in our mapping of their lexicon, we will take them to be referring to the whole rabbit, and thus attribute to them the same concept as we use. How else could we begin to translate any foreign symbolic system, with all its potential ambiguities, without already assuming not: a ground of shared, non-verbal experiences which are anchored ostensively and from which meaning flows upwards; but assuming rather: a stratum of shared concepts, from which meaning flows downwards, and disambiguates given instances of ostension.  Ostensive reference does not ground the meaning of concepts. Rather, the assumption of shared concepts make possible the disambiguation of ostensive reference.

                Moreover, this ‘ambiguity of ostensive reference’ has a meta- layer: for just as the possible meanings of the fisherman’s finger indicate a sort of failure of univocality qua falling sort of objectivity, so too these possible interpretations suggest certain ways of reading Midnight’s Children itself – the first, pointing to the photograph of his birth, is the straightforward, mimetic reading: the story as representation of events; the second is the social realist reading: ostensibly a ‘story’, but really as a critique of existing social order and its “dispossessions”; the third, the finger pointing to itself, is clearly the modernist reading, where the text’s principle effect is self-referential: it raises questions about textuality and the literary as such. Of course, there is no need to decide here. What’s important is that we see, once again, how the attempt to transcend subjectivity is a self-defeating behavior: here in the attempt to univocally fix symbolic meaning the result is rather the proliferation of meanings, ambiguity and equivocality.  Or: the quest for monophony ends in polyphony. (A fate awaiting our narrator himself.)

             Any attempts to have a frameless interaction with Being are at worst paradoxical, and at best, ineffable. (Early 20^th Century Empiricism learned this lesson too.) Here’s why (in the form of a two pronged dilemma): either (1) the subject must exempt herself (her subjectivity, her framing activity) from being, in which case she sacrifices her ability to represent her experience (for any such presentation would involve framing—after all, language is a frame, as is any particular language); or (2) the subject must  attempt to account for the whole of (o) objective reality – ie the reality without her - and then add herself and her (S(o)) subjective representation to that – for this too, is part of (r) reality. So she represents thus: r = (o) & (S(o)). But part of her (S(o)) subjectivity is what she’s just represented, namelyS(r), which is defined as (o) &(S(o)). So that means she must represent r’,  which is equal to: (o) & (S(o) & S(r)). But part of her (S(o)) is this S(r’), which is defined as = (o) & (S(o) & S(r)), so that means r’’ = (o) & (S(o) & S(r) & S(r’)). And so on, ad infinitum. By including her representation of reality in reality, she makes reality a little bigger – and then must include this representation in reality – which makes it a little bigger… Or consider what happens when a video camera is pointed at its own display: reality is not contained but multiplied endlessly. Or, just watch the movie Synecdoche, New York...
            And we have seen these ill-fated attempts before: The (1) first horn is that of the mystic. He dies outside of Saleem’s house waiting for the truth to drip into him. The (2) second horn is that of Nadir Khan’s roommate  when he was a young man, a painter “whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into art” (49). He kills himself.

Girolamo Andrea Martignoni, Spiegazione della Carta Istorica dell' Italia