Modernity and the Holocaust counter-memorial: Janet Frame’s American fiction

Abstract

Janet Frame’s novels Intensive Care (1970/1987), Daughter Buffalo (1972), and Living in the Maniototo (1979) were written in the United States and, like her final novel, The Carpathians (1988), in part set there. These works might be termed her “American” fiction, as against the fiction of her earlier “European” phase, to which it is linked by the common experience of western modernity and episodes of the Cold War and, more particularly, the analogies with Jewish experience in Nazi Germany first expressed in Faces in the Water (1961). This article examines Frame’s more specific explorations of Holocaust themes in some of this later fiction and An Autobiography (1989), and suggests a recontextualization of her work in recent theories of Holocaust remembering and especially in Foucault’s concept of the counter-memorial, which emphasizes the importance of individual, idiosyncratic and small-scale remembering and the formal implications this has for art.

Janet Frame first visited the United States in October 1964 to see her friend John Money in Baltimore (King, 2000: 279-280). In May 1967, February 1969 and February and March of 1982, she spent time at the Yaddo artists’ colony in New York State (King, 2000: 317-320, 337-340, 347-348), and, in September and November of 1969, at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire (King, 2000: 342-345). Whether sheltered in these artists’ residences or exposed to the dangers of the bleak Baltimore neighborhood in which Money lived while teaching at Johns Hopkins University (King, 2000: 315), she seems to have found North American life in all its complexity and contradiction attractive, interesting, and stimulating: it was there, she said, that she felt “closest to the human condition” (Endeavour Television, 1975).

Significantly, Frame’s first visits to the United States coincided with the Vietnam War (1964−1973) and her first two spells at Yaddo and McDowell came at its height. Her own country, too, was involved in this conflict: 3890 members of the New Zealand Army served in South Vietnam between June 1964 and December 1972, 37 of them killed and 187 wounded (New Zealand History, 2008a); and an organized and increasingly vociferous New Zealand anti-war movement began early in that period (New Zealand History, 2008b). The Vietnam War’s presence in her thoughts during these years marks her poetry collection The Pocket Mirror (1967) in titles such as “Napalm”, “Instructions for Bombing with Napalm”, and “People Are Ill, Dying”. And, as we shall see, awareness of the war marked the fiction she wrote during it.

Some aspects of the uproar the Vietnam episode of the Cold War caused in both Frame’s home country and the United States would have been familiar to her already, however, since she had spent the period 1957−1963 amid an earlier episode of that long, undeclared conflict: living in the Europe of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Hungarian uprising, the Poznan protests, the CND’s Aldermaston marches, the U-2 incident, and the building of the Berlin Wall. While in Europe, beginning with Faces in the Water (1961), she wrote novels and stories that expressed not only the mood of the times but their provenance in western modernity. Gina Mercer has seen this modernity as involving a kind of imperialism, with Frame’s psychiatric hospitals “isolated punitive colonies … empowered by an imperialist culture” that imposes a patriarchal subjectivity on women (Mercer, 1994: 46). Significantly, too, she describes The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) and Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) as presenting aspects of “the death drive of western post-Hiroshima culture” (Mercer, 1994: 74-75): as showing, in effect, a final unfolding of dystopic modernity consummated in the nuclear destruction of Britain at the end of Scented Gardens and the circle of fire that is the descending chandelier at the end of The Adaptable Man (1965). In The Edge of the Alphabet, Mercer sees a change of emphasis from Faces in the Water, towards the inculcation of ideologies of servitude and docility in the public at large (Mercer, 1994: 57); in Scented Gardens, the second of Frame’s two “nuclear novels” (Mercer, 1994: 86), she sees an emphasis on human survival under the threat of a nuclear holocaust in Europe (Mercer, 1994: 83-86).

More recently, and still thinking about modernity, I have argued that in Faces in the Water Frame can also be seen to imply general links with the Nazi Holocaust and particular links between some of her characters and the Jews of Europe under the Nazis. Through the etymologies of the curious name Frame gives her protagonist − literally, the “truth” (‘istina” in Serbo-Croatian) about “death” (“mavet” in transliterated Hebrew) − we are led, I have suggested, to the figure of Maria, a Yugoslavian survivor of a Nazi death-camp who is among Istina’s fellow-patients, and to the implicit meaning of her history, in which, under the shared experience of a utopianism gone wrong, there is a possible link with Frame’s own history (Evans, 2011). Both this interpretation of Frame’s “European” fiction and Mercer’s show Frame as extraordinarily well-attuned to large meanings in the world around her − meanings which, in some cases, have found full recognition only in the later twentieth century, in discussions of the links between methods of industrial mass production and the treatment of animals and Jews. ¹

The links Frame makes between the Holocaust and her own hospital experiences, and between the Holocaust and North American and New Zealand experiences, are not simple claims that psychiatric hospitals are like Nazi concentration camps or that one institution is a metaphor for the other. They are based, clearly, in an empathetic identification, one in which her own institutional experience drew her closer to another that was even worse. She seems to have seen her experience as one manifestation of the reckless, unanchored scientific rationalism of western modernity and the Holocaust as another, and also (most important of all, since, for Frame, language is always a fundamental issue) to have seen in the experience of the Holocaust a challenge to the capacity of language to bear witness to trauma that was similar to the challenges she herself had been posed as a result of her damaging years in hospital.

The prescience we have seen in Frame’s “European” novels continues to the next, “American” phase of her writing, in novels written about, and often set in, North America.”Writing under the weight of the Cold War”, Jenny Lawn has said of one of them, Intensive Care (1970/1987), “Frame conceives a world in which the physics of splitting prevails as the dominant metaphor, and in which authority functions as ‘a reactor smashing human atoms’” (Lawn, 2005: 393). Much of Intensive Care was written in New York (King, 2000: 321); Daughter Buffalo (1972), like Living in the Maniototo (1979), was written in various parts of the United States and is set there (King, 2000: 314, 343, 403); her final novel, The Carpathians (1988), though written and largely set in New Zealand, has an American protagonist and later scenes set in North America. In these works, the western modernity that was so significant in the European phase of her writing has itself gone west, so to speak, and has become naturalized in the United States; her earlier themes reappear, especially the distrust of the repressive, reifying, and homogenizing effects of western modernity that Mercer has pointed out, its normalizing urges towards institutionalized docility to the point of extermination, and, above all, the insistence on the place of language as both a site of the problems of the twentieth century and, properly conceived, a means of redeeming those problems as well.

Along with the change of setting, there is a change of tone in these novels of Frame’s “American” period and the autobiography they encompass, a development that must be seen in the context of Weber’s well-known proposition that modernity disenchants. Frame’s earlier fiction had its occasional quirky moments, but in these later works there is a lightness and playfulness far from the grim tone of, say, Scented Gardens for the Blind. Living in the Maniototo is a masterly ludic display in which a character is bleached from the text by mention of a household detergent and others move in and out of it according to whether they belong to the reality of the novel or the reality of the novel-within-the-novel the protagonist is writing. Daughter Buffalo features what might be interpreted as a sex scene between two men that brings them the “daughter” of the title, newly-born at the local zoo; and one of Frame’s most remarkable achievements in the novel is sometimes to present animal mutilation in a way that is − disturbingly − not always entirely repellent. The Carpathians, too, is a bravura performance of playfulness, as something called the Gravity Star sucks language from the mouths of the denizens of a suburban New Zealand town and then rains letters back down on them before collapsing time and space. If modernity disenchants, fiction like this goes some way towards establishing a level of re-enchantment, a return to the magical and ludic dimensions of writing and an assertion of those qualities in the world itself.

Predictably, perhaps, what we might describe as the most nearly light-hearted of these “American” novels, Living in the Maniototo, has the least connection with the issues being discussed in this essay. In the remaining three, though, for all their ludic aspects, there is no lessening of Frame’s earlier concerns with the workings of western modernity; rather there is an enhancement of her expression of them. In particular, her interest in the Nazi Holocaust as a means of figuring modernity at its most extreme becomes far more overt, the rhizomic nature of her earlier writing in (for example) Faces in the Water − the tendency for recurrent images and themes to appear without full elaboration, disappear underground and then reappear in later fictions demanding further attention (see Evans, 2011) − developing into a fuller and more specific account of the meaning of the Holocaust in some of this later work. It is as if her experiences in and of the United States at a time of war had reactivated her earlier interest, enabling her in this final phase of her career to explore a 12-year period of German history more fully as one manifestation of a wider, deeper modernity: a modernity she found both in the Northern Hemisphere and in the New Zealand to which she often returned with great reservations but with full awareness that, as her home country, it was inescapable. Inevitably, given the latter understanding, these “American” fictions begin or end in New Zealand settings and their references to the United States are always in the context of a home country that was part of her being but whose culture urgently required larger explanations.

In two of them, there is no doubt what particular mode of modernity Frame had in mind. In Intensive Care, Culin Hall − a “Recovery Unit” full of the reified, dehumanized victims of industrial modernity, reconstituted with artificial limbs, glass eyes, wigs, and so on − has chimneys that resemble those of “crematoria” (Frame 1987: 12). In the final section of the novel, when New Zealand has “become” Vietnam, with its North Island destroyed, possibly by nuclear attack, it “becomes” Nazi Germany as well, since the US troops who overrun its South Island have been brought in to help carry out the Human Delineation Act, by which the locals are to be designated animal or human with a view to selective extermination. This policy is intended to produce in New Zealand a familiarly Voelkisch Utopia: “beautiful families”, homes and gardens, and a docile, reified population (Frame, 1970/1987: 266): but, as it happens, it also produces a completely unanticipated “nostalgia for things and purposes animal”, for “even in spite of the Classification and the Sleep Days the animal in man could not be subdued” (Frame 1987: 266).

It is this reference to the animal that alerts us to the train of Frame’s thinking even more clearly than the overt references to Nazism that inflect the novel. “Animal” is a loaded word, first picking its burden up in Faces in the Water, with that clear equation of animal slaughter, industrialization, and the events of the Holocaust noted above as significant evidences of the work of western modernity. Writing Intensive Care 10 years after that novel, Frame sets out the equation again, producing a narrative in which it is argued that to be human is to be animal, and, by strong implication, to be animal is to be Jewish: in the sense that, in the twentieth century, both Jews and animals have been industrially processed and exterminated. This implication is reinforced by the fact that much of what we know about the events that occur in the final section of Intensive Care comes from a young woman whose diary survives her in a clear reference to the story of Anne Frank. As in the case of Anne Frank, what we know of Millie is posthumous, following her presumed execution, and the mass incineration with which the novel concludes.

Intensive Care is the bleakest and grimmest of Frame’s fictions in its depiction of New Zealand as a version of Nazi Germany; certainly, it never pauses to re-enchant its readers. In Daughter Buffalo, Frame turns the same remorseless vision to the city of New York, seen as an emblem of the United States at war, a country in which “death appears to be more important than life” (Frame, 1972: 28), ² but where at the same time it is euphemized, with dead derelicts removed from the street like dog faeces (81), shot pedestrians hastily removed (83), corpses “managed” in crematoria (193) and the wealthy father of the novel’s protagonist adding yet more paintings to his art collection to help him forget. The garbage disposer is the protagonist’s mother’s “only baby”, able to deal with the “detergent and bleach bottles” (151) of an industrialized consumer society, less able to manage “the DDT in the lichen of the far north” (151). The North America of this novel is the ultimate theatre of a modernity unmodified by the experiences of a recent history obvious within it yet studiously forgotten.

Death is presented as one of the things that American society seeks to control and deny by means of scientific rationalism, for example in the work of the novel’s protagonist, Talbot Edelman, a doctor who works in the Department of Death Studies in New York, and his girlfriend Lenore, who works in a clinic for “sexually unfinished children” (16). Talbot imports abortion brains from Sweden to use in his studies of embryology; for relaxation, he surgically mutilates his dog Sally, experimenting on her heart (127), breaking and resetting her hind legs (82), removing one of her eyes (18), taking out her ovaries (140) and collapsing her lung (141). This “medical treatment” he carries out “on the assumption that she was a human being” (128) and as acts of love: at one point he and Lenore copulate after watching a child die, while Sally observes them “with her one eye” (18). Later, the prospect of Sally’s death causes Edelman to become sexually aroused (127), something he finds more difficult to achieve with Lenore alone, since the dog is their “only link” (129): he has never loved Lenore as he “loves” Sally, and Lenore’s death, unlike the dog’s, is something he has never feared (141). “I’d never owned anything so completely as I’d owned Sally”, he states (129); she is “a diseased but living part” of him, and “he did everything to her but make love” (140).

The fact that Talbot is a Jew and Lenore’s father was a Nazi doctor (130) focuses and enhances these disturbing details. More than this, the fact that Talbot’s elderly Russian Jewish grandfather has been hidden away in Brooklyn and kept from his family’s daily life suggests that his society represses what it really needs most: history, memory, acknowledgement of the past in general, and of the Holocaust in particular: the noisy love-making of Edelman’s German neighbours is like history’s tap on the shoulder (140).At moments like these, Frame’s deep concern with the social and civic importance of memory, most obvious in An Autobiography, coincides with the post-Holocaust concepts of remembering and bearing testimony. It is here that her sensibility might be said to be at its most nearly Jewish, so to speak, in her understanding of what humanity and civilization are reduced to by the failure to remember, the failure to testify: the uninformed repetition of history such as is lived by the Edelman family, by the United States at large and, implicitly, by the United States once more at war. As the novel progresses, Edelman becomes more fully conscious of these connections: his packets of Swedish abortion brains, for example, begin to remind him of the packages he buys at the supermarket and, then, of further parallels that will be familiar to the reader of Intensive Care and some of Frame’s earlier fiction:

I would dream of what I had heard of the concentration camps, the time and motions studies put into effect to enable an inmate to go from one place fully clothed, and, divesting himself of everything without and much within, arrive at the end-place with nothing, yet with an economic completeness for death; and I felt the strange parallel of the supermarkets where instead of divesting ourselves of goods we collect them, we arrive laden at the exits where, exchanging our money for goods and receiving the green or blue stamp blessing, we come out into the street with the hope that in some way we have replaced the processions of death with those of life. (127)

The agent of Edelman’s progressive reclaiming of memory is Turnlung, an elderly New Zealand writer who appears in New York and enters his life. To Edelman, Turnlung seems vaguely familiar, just as much a part of him as Sally the dog, and he recognizes that, figuratively, the older man is the forgotten Jewish grandfather hidden away in Brooklyn (107). In other words, Turnlung is history, the repressed returned, come to show Edelman that “government is not by life and death but by language” (133) and particularly to give a voice to memory. Especially, he represents a pathway to a lost authenticity seen as a lost language, something represented by the word “jewel”: “He was the jeweller (did he not say the word ‘jewel’ was set in the centre of his life?) who makes a long, difficult journey to bring the genuine stone to one who had been deceived in his life not by an imitation jewel but by a genuine imitation” (143). Frame’s meaning here turns on the differences between “jewel”, “dual”, and “duel”, between the word that impounds and reveals meaning and words that sever language from its referents and thus make conflict. With their nostalgia for a language that (somehow) means, and their revulsion from mere post-Edenic language that no longer does, Frame’s puns show her as much a modernist as ever seven years before the postmodern games of Living in the Maniototo and 16 before those of The Carpathians. And, of course, the link between “jewel” and “Jew” barely needs pointing out, any more than the way the word “Mavet” must have seemed, in the echo-chamber of her imaginative thought, to be a jewel that impounds a Jew.

The jewel of lost integrity Turnlung brings back into Edelman’s life is the buffalo of the novel’s title: “She is my death-jewel / beauteous, and when she dies she will die a complete death, like a true animal / lying upon the prairie” (173). This animal is created figuratively, by means of a prolonged and quasi-sexual embrace on a sofa (107-108) between Edelman and Turnlung, “the old and the young Narcissus” (143-144): this is a meeting of science and art (150) that leads them to an actual buffalo they can visit nearby, “our daughter in the zoo” (146), and, hence, to the animal world that challenges human narcissism with its unreachable otherness. The six-month-old buffalo is not an abused lover like Sally − who, as Edelman’s possession, was the locus of all his self-revulsion − but the mutilated and deceased dog’s ideal replacement, a creature beyond his narcissism, an animal that might be loved properly and fully, and which, with its irreducible quality, represents a long-past integration of living and language, an “authentic” relationship to the Eden from which we have been banished. ³

It is easy to think of Daughter Buffalo as the terminus of Frame’s fictive thought on the Holocaust, since overt reference to it, and to Nazi Germany, disappears from the surface of her subsequent writing. But as long as that writing is about remembering, the Holocaust is still present in it: her final novel The Carpathians can be argued to be best understood as the complement to Daughter Buffalo and the final exploration of those large themes that mark much of Frame’s “American” fiction. This complementing is, initially, formal: where the New Zealander Turnlung goes to New York in the earlier novel, the New Yorker Mattina Brecon goes to New Zealand in the later one, an editor’s reader in exchange for an author; and where Turnlung, in a sense, brings the capacity for history and memory to New York, Mattina brings a desire for these to Puamahara, home of the Memory Flower. The latter is represented by a “crumbling plaster statue erected in memory of a forgotten Maori legend ‘seized’ by the town fathers in order to attract tourists” (Hogue, 2006: 128), demonstrating the continuing erosion of historical memory by commodification, a loss further acted out by the population of Kowhai Street, whose restricted and repetitious lives are the New Zealand equivalent of the fearful, blinkered, death-driven, death-denying lives of Edelman’s New York. Rather like Turnlung when he rents an apartment there and brings a return of historical memory, Mattina rents a house in Kowhai Street, Puamahara, New Zealand so that she can “read” its inhabitants, understand how memory itself has become forgotten, and repair its loss. In this particular emphasis, The Carpathians continues and completes the implications of the earlier novels’ Holocaust themes: together with Frame’s autobiographical project of the 1980s, it explores the significance of memory in the context of the traumas caused by dystopian modernity.

Given this claim, it will be useful to frame the last part of my discussion in the terms in which Holocaust remembering has been discussed. Behind such remembering lies the Jewish tradition of witnessing, confirmed in the Torah, the Talmud (Waxman, 2006: 178) and the Masoretic Bible, where the word zakar (“remember”, “recall”, “make a memorial of”, etc.) appears nearly 450 times. ⁴ The need to see the Fourth Commandment specifically as an injunction to remember the Holocaust was widely reaffirmed by survivors such as Bruno Bettelheim: for them, not to remember would have been some sort of crime against the dead (Waxman, 2006: 177-178). This is the meaning (for example) in Primo Levi’s poem at the start of If This Is A Man (1947): ‘I commend these words to you. / Carve them in your heart/ … /Repeat them to your children” (Levi, 1987: 17). It is there in passages in which he remembers being shown by a fellow-inmate that “one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness” (Levi, 1987: 47) and imagines showing a woman the number on his arm after the war, thus proving the past (Levi, 1987: 50). On the other hand, Levi implies the fundamental impossibility of writing what Zoe Vania Waxman calls “the Ineffable”(Waxman, 2006: 152) when he remembers a nameless “child of Auschwitz” who, before his death, utters a single word that none of his older fellow-prisoners is able to understand: it is the child’s meaning, his essence, his identity, his unreachable otherness (Levi, 1987: 198). From this point of view, it could be argued that there is a factitious element in Levi’s statement that “one must want to survive”, an implication of the willed, purposeful recalling of past events, as in the familiar injunction in Jewish culture to “remember to remember”. In this mode of cultural witnessing, the survivor does not simply remember spontaneously; the survivor sets out to remember, determines to recall specific events − a position that acknowledges the necessary elisions in the business of writing, its inevitable fabrications, and transferences. To counter this, Levi believed, the witness needs dispassion and objectivity.

Writing more generally about the role of the historian, Dominick LaCapra has termed this position “objectivism”, and defined it with some precision. The historical witness, he states, needs

to counteract projective reprocessing or rewriting of the past and to listen attentively to its “voices,” notably when they pose a genuine challenge by resisting one’s desire to make them say what one wants them to say or to have them become vehicles for one’s values and political agendas. (LaCapra, 1998: 48)

The concept of transference “facilitates a rethinking of the problems of subjectivity and objectivity” in historical remembering, LaCapra suggests, distinguishing between conventional and transferential modes of writing historiography (LaCapra, 1998: 47-49): the issue is how we deal with memories when we write, whether through “repression, denial, symptomatic acting-out, [or] more or less critical working-through” (LaCapra, 1998: 47-49). A symptomatic acting out is what he sees, for example, in the historical remembering in Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah”, particularly the transferential aspects of attempts to reincarnate aspects of survivors’ experience in the filming present (LaCapra, 1996: 245-257). In Shoshana Feldman’s response to Shoah he sees a complete identification by which “[t]rauma becomes a universal hole in being and history is marginalized” (LaCapra, 1996: 246).

If traumatic experience is seen as being so profoundly unavailable, Waxman observes, echoing LaCapra’s Freudian approach, “only the repression of the trauma, or the retrospective meaning attributed to the trauma…can be read in narrative accounts of the Holocaust” (Waxman, 2006: 155). Against this position, however, Waxman adduces the considerable evidence that direct witnessing did in fact occur during the Holocaust, most famously in the diary of Anne Frank (Waxman, 2006: 156), but more widely in the archival project of the Oneg Shabbat movement in the Warsaw ghetto, which attempted to record contemporary events as objectively as possible (Waxman, 2006: 3-4, 18-19). Witnessing also occurred in the work of individual diarists within the camps, who recorded their experiences on scraps hidden, later salvaged, and published unaltered (Waxman, 2006: 50-87). From this second position, experience is recorded as dispassionately as possible and secreted for the information and education of future generations: for this reason, the Oneg Shabbat movement avoided professional journalists, preferring the accounts of the unlettered (Waxman, 2006: 18). Resisting transference, those who write from this position of (in effect) LaCapra’s “objectivism” do not necessarily enlarge on their experience or seek a higher meaning for it. Like the collection of victims’ shoes at Auschwitz, the experience does not represent. It simply exists.

It is important to place Frame’s particular experience of twentieth-century modernity in New Zealand psychiatric hospitals within this general context of traumatic witnessing. The difficulties of finding a mode that would adequately bear witness to her particular experiences in these hospitals were evident in Faces in the Water (see Evans, 2011). But, after more than “200 applications of unmodified E.C.T” (Frame, 1989: 224), ⁵ and other, related treatments, including insulin therapy, larger issues of remembering were also significant for her. Inevitably, she placed the factitious nature of remembering in the foreground of An Autobiography, particularly in its earliest pages, where passages of what seems like vivid total recall culminate in an open statement that her memory ought not to be relied on: “I remember, as my earliest memory, something that could not have happened” (12). By this stage, the thoughtful reader will already be dubious about the luminosity of Frame’s apparent memories of events that occurred when she was three; at various stages thereafter, our attention is further drawn to issues of remembering, as when she mentions classmates supposedly called Shirley Grave (whose father is in an early grave) and (improbably but not impossibly) Nora Bone, or in her references to the fragility and unreliability of what she calls at one stage “memories created from the past” (149). And central to all three volumes of the autobiography, after all, is the image of Frame’s dead sister Myrtle, restored to “normality” and “wholeness” by the Oamaru photographer who has airbrushed into existence a replica of Myrtle’s arm obscured in the original photograph from which the image was taken, thus allowing a “re-membered” Myrtle − in effect, re-membered before being able to be remembered − to license the inventions that occur throughout. Not least of these are two photographs of herself Frame mentions, in which she is careful to point out her “obvious false teeth” in order to jog our memories of Myrtle’s false arm, and appears as the successful author returned from overseas, falsity implicit (240). One recalls Lanzmann’s description of Shoah as “a fiction of the real” (quoted in LaCapra, 1996: 232).

Obviously, Frame is aware of the limitations of the very project of which she is a part in accurately retrieving any kind of experience, and of the inherent and necessarily factitious nature of the literary project at large. But as often as she shows this awareness, she pushes us away from the literary and (in effect) towards Waxman’s second pole, the point at which witnessing occurs simply as a matter of record (Waxman, 2006: 156): she pauses to note objects of the world in their mysterious otherness − in her parents’ duchesse (10), for example, or the “patch of bright green grass where the tap leaked, next to the clump of dock” (38). Elsewhere, reading her in this mode of dispassionate recording can be hard work, a business of getting through details that are more unpleasant, from the anarchy of psychiatric hospitals to the worm-ridden faeces of her childhood potty (23) and her father’s stained underpants (427): arbitrary details, there on the page simply because, once, they were there in the world. This kind of “extreme” remembering is at the other pole from willed, determined and sometimes even factitious remembering, and is the aspect of Frame’s writing that might be thought most convincingly that of a survivor of traumatic experience: the indifferent, dispassionate, sceptical element in her work that simply presents the world unredeemed, as seen by a gaze undistracted by humanistic issues. However much her interest in language drives her towards the recuperation of a sublime past, her work always has an undertow that drags us away from easy responses. It emphasizes discontinuity, the literal, the arbitrary, the independent existence of small events and things; at its most unpleasantly relentless it approaches a sublime of a different sort, one that makes the reader want to look away. ⁶ It is always important to keep in mind the assessment of Frame by C.K. Stead, who knew her for 50 years: a “meek anarchist, an intellectual suicide-bomber, who rejected the whole human order, and whose work, structureless, directionless, brilliant, with flashes of genius, offered not hope but a black hole” (Stead, 2010: 318).

The issues raised here are part of a larger debate about history, power, and remembering recharged by the traumatic interruption of the Second World War but originating in earlier sea-changes the rise of modernity brought about in traditional European thought. This debate has been most closely associated with Michel Foucault and the works he wrote to “create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (quoted in Rabinow, 1984: 7). ⁷ Here, it will be useful to concentrate on what is in effect an essay-length redaction, titled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in which he opposed to Hegelian conceptions of history Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy and the need to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality” (Foucault, 1984: 76). Both Nietzsche’s position and what Foucault makes of them are familiar to the contemporary consciousness. The events we know as “history” are not destined, Foucault argues, but random, “haphazard conflicts” (Foucault, 1984: 76); they do not spell out an original purpose and they have no particular conclusion. Evoking Nietzsche’s distinction between these traditions and what he called “wirkliche Historie” (“real” or “effective” history), Foucault proposes “a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory” (Foucault, 1984: 93). Introducing”discontinuity into our very being” (Foucault,1984: 88), the “new historian” (Foucault, 1984: 93) will parody “monumental history” (Foucault, 1984: 94), itself a parody; guided by pursuit of individual genealogy, the new historiography will not seek to discover “the roots of our identity, but … commit itself to its dissipation” (Foucault, 1984: 95); the pursuit of “essential meaning” (Foucault, 1984: 86) will be replaced by a careful interrogation reminiscent of the processes of objective witnessing advocated by LaCapra.

Frame’s proximity to this postwar European mode of thought is evident as we look back through An Autobiography, at the way she shows us the fragility of the body and the concept of the integrated self that is imagined in the illusion of the integrated body of the individual. ⁸ She shows her own girlhood body as if “molded [sic] by a great many distinct regimes”, in Foucault’s translated words (Foucault, 1984: 87): “I was my body and its functions and that body was clothed during most waking hours in a dark grey serge tunic that I hated increasingly because it was far too tight now in the yoke”, with the result that “because of these clothes I found myself powerlessly in harness” (116). This creates a process of entrapment culminating in the leucotomy she narrowly avoids (222). She shows, too, the ways in which the body “constructs resistances” (Foucault, 1984: 87): in the embarrassments of concealing evidence of menstruation − “I knew it showed” (118) − and also in her apparent immunity to adornment:“ [b]racelets always broke, necklaces were too small, brooches came apart, earrings unclasped or were too tight” (394). Her body resists “femininity” as coded in the culture of her time: the autobiography traces her slow discovery of her own “clothing”, starting with the writerly thread of the silkworms to which Sargeson introduces her during her time with him − the worms of her childhood potty, perhaps, redeemed at last by art.

The constructed nature of individual identity is obvious in a project that so clearly shows a self being put together, bit by bit. In her fiction Frame shows the same fragilities at work, not least in the dispersal of identity that is one of the hallmarks of her writing − in the proliferation of narrators early in Living in the Maniototo, for example, in the revelations that Scented Gardens for the Blind has been narrated not by three characters, but by one, and that one character in Daughter Buffalo has been imagining the other. There is no “essential meaning” within Frame’s writing, just individual knowledge, which she thinks of − in writerly fashion − as contesting points of view. Thus Mattina in The Carpathians must struggle with Dinny Wheatstone, “imposter novelist, the thief of roving points of view” (Frame, 1988: 165), who, at one point, takes over the narration of the novel, including Mattina’s point of view; and as Mattina lies dying, she feels “her point of view … shifting, almost imperceptibly” to her husband and, possibly, to others “in the weeks to come … as her self, like a character in fiction, became less important and vanished” (Frame, 1988: 165). Foucault, too, saw “knowledge as perspective” (Foucault, 1984: 90):

Effective history can also invert the relationship that traditional history, in its dependence on metaphysics, establishes between proximity and distance. The latter is given to a contemplation of distances and heights: the noblest periods, the highest forms, the most abstract ideas, the purest individualities. It accomplishes this by … placing itself at the foot of its mountain peaks … Effective history, on the other hand, shortens its vision to those things nearest to it − the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies; it unearths the periods of decadence and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with the suspicion − not vindictive but joyous − of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion. […] It reverses the surreptitious practice of historians, their pretension to examine things furthest from themselves, the groveling manner in which they approach this promising distance … Effective history studies what is closest, but in an abrupt dispossession. (Foucault, 1984: 89)

We do not need to believe that Frame knew this passage to be impressed by its evocation of the eponymous mountains in The Carpathians, of the pairing in that novel of distance and proximity to figure two different modes of remembering and writing “history”, and its echoes of Foucault’s notion of bringing about an “effective” seeing by means of “an abrupt dispossession” − what he called “a transformation of history into a totally different form of time” (Foucault, 1984: 93). All these are in the novel, as we know: the Romanian mountains as if brought near New Zealand, the perspective-altering Gravity Star, its capacity to bring about Foucault’s “sudden annihilation” that drastically alters “the usual perception of distance and closeness”, so that (in Frame’s words) “[n]ear and far, then and now, here and there, the homely words of the language of space and time appear useless, heaps of rubble” (Frame, 1988: 14). This is what the Gravity Star leaves behind after its visit to Kowhai Street, the annihilation of its citizens’ language and (significantly, in this novel of deliberately-collapsed perspectives) of their individual viewpoints. They are translated to “the other side of the barrier of knowing and being” (Frame, 1988: 129) − into death, possibly, or, alternatively, the sublime or superlative domain that her fiction always implies and yearns for; but, also, into that Ineffable which Waxman indicates when she talks about writing the Holocaust, epitome of experience beyond language. Frame’s treatment of the body in The Carpathians comes into focus again, too, as we think of Foucault’s notion of experience inscribing itself on the individual body to make a locus of enquiry for the “effective” historian. Most spectacularly, this is suggested when a small sore on Mattina’s hand erupts in a trickle of alphabetical letters (Frame, 1988: 129), as if her lifetime of experience has begun to burst out of her in all the languages of the world. Co-existent with these letters, there is within her, too, a “malignant tumour so deep-seated that excision would sever an artery in Mattina’s chest”: the product, possibly, of “a number of unrelated symptoms” (Frame, 1988: 163), it suggests the inheritance of her particular past − her “genealogy”, perhaps − and what is repeatedly insisted on as the extinction of “her point of view” (Frame, 1988: 170).

All this is to suggest that we ought to acknowledge that in much of her later fiction and the autobiography, Frame is writing forms of “counter-memorial”, works that acknowledge the open-ended, fugitive nature of extreme experience and the arbitrariness of the kind of recuperation that produces “official”, public remembering. Her method is rhizomic; characters pop up and then disappear, narrators are unexpectedly replaced, the dead come to life again and the living die; more often than not her reader has no idea of the status of what is being read, whether realistic or fantastic: her fiction seems constantly to undermine itself as it goes on, pointing backward to unspeakable experience as, elsewhere, it points forward to a putative sublime. The tension throughout is between the two modes Waxman gives for Holocaust remembering, the repression-through-trauma we sometimes know as literature, with all its evasions and inventions, and the historian’s dispassionate accumulation of detail that, at best, speaks for itself if it speaks at all.

In The Carpathians, it is tempting to see these poles as represented by the Memory Flower, the public memorial falling into neglect, and the Gravity Star, with its abolition of the kind of “seeing” we associate with public remembering, its shattering of contexts and certainties. This is a nice, tidy reading; and, of course − and symptomatically − in Frame’s fictive world it remains no more than a temptation, a possibility that flickers before us but is not authorized, in a novel that does as much as any of its predecessors to disrupt a stable reading position and any established conventions by which we might form confident interpretations like this. In fact, Frame herself saw The Carpathians as a whirlpool, and stated that she wanted “those reading it to be … within this whirlpool … with everything broken by the gravity star, but not lost” (Alley, 1991: 163) − in this articulation, a parable for the Holocaust’s interruption of history, perhaps, with the Gravity Star breaking the continuity of a community of lives and casting its members onto that “other side of the barrier of knowing and being”, leaving nothing lost, but leaving nothing retaining any of its old meanings, either. Reduced, effectively, to much the same position as the descendants of trauma survivors, her readers confront their heritage of “everything broken”.

Much of what is noted here − the use of reversed perspective, unreliable narrators, vanishing characters, parody and pastiche, and so on − has long been familiar to commentators on Frame’s writing. Contextualizing her as a post-Holocaust writer, however, and in the European intellectual’s postwar assault on ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology, historicizes these practices, neutralizing judgments of her as a wantonly “idiosyncratic” writer and placing her next to counter-memorialists of the first rank such as Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Mishima Yukio (see Tachibana, 1998: 2-24) and, most obviously, the German writer W.G. Sebald, who, frustrated by received and “official” modes of thinking and writing, began “to create works that defy precise definition”, not fiction but “a blend of autobiography, biography, literary criticism, [and] intellectual history” (Bigsby, 2006: 2). In blurring the boundaries between genres, writing fiction that contains poetry, novels, and stories that implicitly cross-reference one another, novels that contain autobiographical detail and autobiography that is overtly fictional, Frame, like other postwar/post-Holocaust writers, acknowledges the fundamental unavailability of traumatic memory, the near-impossibility of a reliable testifying, and the essentially factitious nature of all remembering. She herself worked between two poles, the first of them caught in Stead’s description of her as “an intellectual suicide-bomber”. Against this was her awareness, like that of Sebald, that “memory has a moral force” (Bigsby, 2006: 2) − that we must always remember to remember.