Questioning morality in the modern age: Janet Frame’s fabular realism

Abstract

‘Fables and Fantasies’ is the subtitle of one of Janet Frame’s collections of short stories, entitled Snowman, Snowman (1962). Directly hinting at the question of generic hybridity, this subtitle does not apply only to this collection of short stories, as Janet Frame’s interest in the genre of the fable is to be found in other short stories from different collections. Nevertheless, Snowman, Snowman presents us with Frame’s more systematic adaptation of this classical, ancient genre of the fable to western modernity, and tries to come to terms with a seemingly insoluble paradox: how to write moral tales or fables, in a seemingly amoral time? Indeed, being deeply anchored in modernity’s materiality, individualism and consumerism, Frame’s fables make the fabulist’s voice extremely precarious and likely to fail in their attempt to re-create a sense of ‘moral community’. In this article, I demonstrate that Janet Frame’s use of the fable has a double aim. First, it seems to be in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s later lament about the death of the figure of the narrator in his 1977 essay entitled ‘The narrator’. Indeed, most of her fables stage the many ways in which the modern age dehumanizes and alienates the individual, thereby jeopardizing the fabulist’s transmission of wisdom and morals, in a time when interpersonal communication has been replaced by the artificiality of screens and monitors. Then, Janet Frame, while appearing to state the irrelevance, in this context, of such a genre as the classical fable, manages to redefine the very genre of the fable and to imply that the modern replacement of a ‘we’ by a multiplicity of ‘I’s still allows for a (new) form of universalism, and for the creation of an ‘a-moral community’ in which the fabulist still has a role to play.