Janet Frame.(Biography)

When considering the late Janet Frame's oeuvre, critics often focus on the autobiographical aspects of her writing. Frame was, after all, widely known for her life, particularly her movement in and out of mental institutions during a twelve-year period. Yet Frame's creative enterprise was not autobiography; her writing is first and foremost the rendering of the imagination. In fact, Frame's three-volume autobiography, which appeared as the penultimate project of her literary career, attempts to elucidate, not to justify, her creative project. To borrow the title from her third novel, Frame's project was sharing her imagination--to capture what is at the edge of the alphabet in writing.

Frame's autobiography is a type of bildungsroman. From childhood she was a voracious reader, particularly after winning a grammar-school award that gave her a membership to the local (membership only) library. As she sketches her artistic development, Frame considers the distinction between her life and her art, specifically the time she spent in mental asylums. Reducing Frame or her work to the equation asylum = Frame = writing = Frame is extremely problematic. Yet it is impossible to dismiss the importance of life experiences, as Frame herself freely admitted. She readily accepted that writers do not exist in a vacuum, and she believed life experiences are acutely intertwined within the workings of the imagination, be they childhood experiences in rural New Zealand or incidents within mental institutions. However, at each creative moment, at each imaginative moment, Frame was aware that writing is a construction. This awareness is made inextricably clear both by the manner and the mode of her writing.

Much of her writing, in fact, is metafictional--metafictional in the sense that the process of writing and the constructedness of writing appear within the narrative. In her autobiography Frame defines the constructedness of autobiography: "Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as looking back, can just as well be looking across or through" (191). Writing, for Frame, regardless of whether it is autobiography or fiction, is always a construction. In one of the most useful critical readings of Frame's work, Judith Dell Panny argues that Frame's work is allegorical where "the work's moral purpose will be achieved through contrasting examples and highly equivocal situations.... The reader is impelled to think and judge ... leaving space for each reader to connect images and ideas and to draw individual conclusions" (7). By examining the allegorical nature of Frame's works, Panny establishes a discourse that considers Frame's playfulness as well as the ethical dimension of her writing. Yet for Frame, the ethical is always entwined within the creative; she is never didactic. Some critics, like Gina Mercer, fail to do Frame justice when they establish arguments that are solely political. When Mercer defines Frame as "other," she conveniently ignores that Frame participates without reservation in literary discourse, specifically high modernist discourse. When Frame read works by William Faulkner or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, she felt her creative project wholly justified and unabashedly situated within literary discourse.

Frame valued literary experimentation as a means to more fully explore the imagination, which she considerd, to use one of her favorite metaphors, a mirror city, the metaphor at the core of her third volume of autobiography. In that volume Frame writes that the "self must be the container of the treasures of Mirror City, the Envoy as it were, and when the time comes to arrange and list those treasures for shaping into words, the self must be the worker, the bearer of the burden, the chooser, the placer and polisher" (405, italics added). The craft of writing is a craft of manipulation. The craft of writing is the craft of shaping into words the imagination. And in line with the Coleridgean notion of the artist, it is the Envoy who is able to imagine most fully. Yet to live life in the imagination carries burdens: "Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border on an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning the unique functioning of Mirror City, its skies and space, its own planetary system, without stopping to think that one may become homeless in the world, and bankrupt" (Autobiography 406). Having grown up poor and having chosen a profession that provides at best an erratic income, Frame was often concerned with her material well being. Her pattern of checking into the hospital, in fact, usually corresponded to her anxiety of managing worldly logistics.

Janet Paterson Frame, born in August 1924, changed her legal name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha: "Nene because of her admiration for the Maori chief Tamati Waka Nene, and the fact that she had been called 'Nini' as a child; Paterson, her Scottish grandmother's surname, had previously been her second name; and Clutha was a tribute to the river that had so impressed her on her fruit-picking summer in Central Otago in 1944, as well as being the Gaelic name for Clyde, in whose valley her father's parents had been born" (King 191-92). In her later years, after giving up publishing, she lived contentedly in New Zealand, the home of her imagination. Even as she lived and traveled extensively, Frame's heart was never far from New Zealand, largely because the physical landscape captured her so completely.

When exploring Frame, we cannot escape contradictions. Even as she lives in her imagination, she recognizes her surroundings. Even as she insists that Owls Do Cry is not autobiography, she argues that moments of the novel are factual. Even as she writes autobiography, she admits it is a construction. At each moment Frame forces her readers to pay attention to the specific and particular constructedness of each work; each work operates within an assembled framework. Yet the dualities do not work in opposition, but rather in dialogue, a dialogue that occurs within the imagination. When readers read her work, be it her fiction or her autobiography or her poetry, Frame empowers their minds. Frame allows readers to participate in the imaginative process.

One of Frame's narrative trademarks is the use of radical jumps within narratives. Yet Frame never asks readers to traverse spans that are not unmanageable. From her perspective, narrative and social constructions exist because of language; they are entwined. And neither construction is seamless. As Frame imagines the world, she is bombarded with remembrances of her sisters who drowned, Myrtle in 1937 at age sixteen and Isabel in 1947 at age twenty-one; of her mother, a struggling housewife who vastly preferred scribbling poems at the kitchen table to managing the household; of her father, who left New Zealand to fight in Europe only days after getting married, who worked for the railroad on returning to New Zealand, who enjoyed embroidery and playing bagpipes; of her brother Gordon, who as an epileptic had seizures and problems with alcohol and stable employment. Her memory also contains remembrances of a shy adolescent with poorly fitting clothes and frizzy red hair; of being forced to stand in front of her classmates until she admitted she had stolen money from her father; of feeling an outcast at the teachers' college; of spending the better part of twelve years moving in and out of mental institutions; of having a miscarriage while in Andorra; of being erroneously diagnosed a schizophrenic.