Voyager: What Literacy Can't Do for Frank

The last two posts on Frank Randall examine his professional persona--from evidence of his scholarly inclinations to his teaching persona, which has little to do with books or bookishness, or the life of the mind in general.  Other posts of mine deal with various manifestations of literacy, including its uses, characteristics and benefits.  But it becomes apparent in the scenes of Claire and Frank in which his status as professor are in the forefront that there are definite limitations to how advanced--or even hyper-literacy, which is how I would classify anyone who makes a literacy-based living because of a particularly high level and intense use of advanced literacy--can influence a person's perspective for the better.

Frank, it seems, has particular reservations about Claire's--and Brianna's--associations with black people:

“Better [for Bree to be] swaddled than fucking a black man!” he shot back. A mottled red showed faintly over his cheekbones. “Like mother, like daughter, eh? But that’s not how it’s going to be, damn it, not if I’ve anything to say about it!” (268)

That is a particularly repulsive set of lines, and worse coming from a highly educated man.  The 1960s time frame does nothing to lessen my disgust, which increases as Frank continues speaking:

“You spend all your time with the man. It’s the same thing, so far as Bree is concerned. Dragging her into  …   situations, where she’s exposed to danger, and  …   and to those sorts of people  …”
     “Black people, I suppose you mean?”
     “I damn well do,” he said, looking up at me with eyes flashing. “It’s bad enough to have the Abernathys to parties all the time, though at least he’s educated. But that obese person I met at their house with the tribal tattoos and the mud in his hair? That repulsive lounge lizard with the oily voice? And young Abernathy’s taken to hanging round Bree day and night, taking her to marches and rallies and orgies in low dives  …”  (268)

So does the racism--which I see as wholly unexpected--add more to our perception of Frank's character than it does to the novels' theorization of literacy?  Well, I would say that it probably adds more to our perception of Frank.  Unnecessarily.  But since Frank's status as professor--like Roger's--is bound up with literacy and what it means or entails to be literate, I would say that the two are inextricably linked.  Frank is an ass in spite of his very advanced literacy, and by way of his advanced literacy, as in his affairs, which occur in the academic sphere by virtue of his position of power as a professor, and also as in his seduction-by-teaching or teaching-as-seduction.  It is a complex portrait--not only of a man whose ideas of sexual power are skewed--if in a more civilized way than his ancestral uncle, Jack Randall's--but of the role literacy can play in this game of sexual power, and of literacy's inevitable limitations--here, its failure to produce a humanistic awareness of others.

In a separate context, there is a slight suggestion that the position of hyper-literate academic in fact cements ideology rather than expelling stereotype and bias:

“Academics don’t give up theories easily,” I said, shrugging. “I lived with one long enough to know that.”  (280)

If you have a high perception of your own intelligence based on your scholarly activity, you can't always countenance the fact that you might be wrong.  Unlike Claire, however, I would not exempt doctors from this phenomenon.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.