The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame (review)

Abstract

CRONIN, JAN. The Function: An Inside-Out Guide to Novels of Janet Frame. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011. 222 pp. $35.00. Published in May 2011, Jan Cronin's The Function is, if I count well, tenth monograph to be entirely dedicated to study of New Zealand's best-known author Janet (1924-2004). Aside from constituting a significant contribution to Janet scholarship, Cronin's study is, as its title indicates, a helpful inside-out guide for students and teachers alike insofar as it delineates author's system of stagings or enactments (13) and in so doing facilitates navigation across or around Frame's sea of ideas. To anyone unfamiliar with but wishing to apply a similar inside-out approach to another author, Cronin's work certainly a first-rate starting point. Amateurs will also relish inclusion of an important segment of Framean paratext--i.e, reviews of novels, interviews with and, courtesy of Janet Literary Trust, fragments from Frame's unpublished correspondence with Bill Brown--which Cronin utilizes to circumscribe Frame's artistic intentions and measure effects of the frame function on readers and reviewers. Within ambit of Janet scholarship, specificity of Cronin's contribution resides in its postulating that Framean text characterized by operation of a prescriptive authorial presence (19) and that resulting tension between discourse and story or, as she expresses it, between a text works and what it says (13), determines tenor, and reception, of a text. Faces in Water (1961) for instance polarized around Frame's desire to trigger off a compassionate response to madness and her commitment to notion of madness as inviolable and inscrutable (31). To preserve and advance both agendas, author has no choice but to deflect reader's attention away from that [inviolable] otherness (35). A similar tension between how and what underpins A State of Siege (1966) where Frame tempts reader into replicating Malfred's [the main protagonist] reading practices (46) although, this time, text itself geared against Malfred's Neoplatonist (41) interpretations, her pursuit of ideals (41) beyond shadow world. To enact a privileged scheme, quite prepared, then, to interrupt any attempt at creative collaboration (50) on reader's part--the reader, Cronin explains, is very much marshaled by whether s/he realises it or (50). In same vein, author displays a surprising propensity in The Edge of Alphabet (1961), Scented Gardens for Blind (1964) or Intensive Care (1970) for using her characters as vehicles for enactment of central preoccupations (67)--at cost, sometimes, of their credibility as human beings. As such, image that emerges from Cronin's work of as a manipulating demiurge dangling characters and readers alike at other hand of authorial umbilical cord not flattering for her audience. Yet, in granting both a tyrannical agency and a voice of her own (through inclusion of her letters and interviews), Cronin goes some way towards contravening a well-worn tendency among 'experts'--be they doctors or critics--to maintain erroneous diagnosis of as a schizophrenic or to re-diagnose her, posthumously, with autism in order perhaps to explain away complexities of her art. A corollary achievement of The Function that it shows process through which herself flouts authority of some characters but also, even more daringly, of entire narratives. …