The anxiety of influence: Janet Frame’s In the Memorial Room and Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

This article argues that Frame’s anxiety about the influence of her famous literary predecessor Katherine Mansfield, as represented in her posthumously published novel In the Memorial Room, instigated a crisis about writing and authorship. The novel features an anti-imperial “memorialisation satire” on excessive adulation of authorial fame, focused through Frame’s self-deprecating narrator Harry Gill, who undertakes a residency fellowship in Menton in honour of Rose Hurndell (i.e. Mansfield). The article builds on Harold Bloom’s Freudian theories about the anxiety of influence including the concept of misinterpretation which Frame appears to resist. It is informed by Jan Cronin’s (2014) claim that the novel represents Frame’s interest in exploring states of perception and expression, triggered by Gill’s apparent deficiencies of sight and hearing: labelled as “Mr Metonymy”, Gil acts as medium or container for these concerns. In this literal/fabulist response to literary influence, Frame thus expands the author function, notably through Gill’s appreciation of the Menton light and sun when working in the Memorial Room, which I suggest is mediated by Katherine Mansfield’s diaries and their modernist aesthetic response to the Mediterranean landscape. Narrative experimentation, intertextuality and reflection on perceptions of various entities and phenomena enable Frame to accommodate the threat of her precursor through a provisional reshaping of the author presence.

Introduction: Frame and Mansfield

Janet Frame wrote her thirteenth novel, In the Memorial Room, in 1974 when she held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial fellowship and took up residency in Menton, France as the Winn-Manson Menton Fellow. ¹ The unsigned preface suggests that she did not consider the work suitable for publication at the time, however, for fear of offending some of the people mentioned. Irrespectively, “she always intended the novel to be published at the right time” (Frame 2013, n.p. [subsequent references to the novel will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text; see Dean, 2021: 98]). It was published posthumously by the Janet Frame literary estate nearly 40 years later, in 2013. Scholars have described In the Memorial Room as an experimental novel like the nouveau roman of Natalie Sarraute, because of the author-protagonist’s experiments with language and perception (Braun, 2015: 600; see Delrez, 2015: 581). Critics reading it biographically (Dean, 2021; Braun, 2015: 592; Delrez, 2015; Cronin, 2014) identify it as a crucial source for her next novel Living in the Maniototo (1979). Jan Cronin, in a linguistic, semiotic reading sees it as a fine example of Frame’s self-conscious compositional processes (2014: 94, 95, 101). Yet reviewers like CK Stead (2014) and Peter Simpson (2013) found the novel uneven, and its conclusion, a collocation of disconnected formulaic phrases, unsatisfying (see also Cronin, 2014; Dean, 2021: 99).

In this article, I argue that the literary influence of Katherine Mansfield, in whose memory the Winn-Manson Menton Fellowship was instituted, is central to the compositional problems of In the Memorial Room. The looming ghost of Frame’s literary predecessor, I suggest, created an “anxiety of influence”, and since Mansfield was a colonial-metropolitan modernist writer, the system of the European literary canon with which she was associated also came under scrutiny. I draw here on Harold Bloom’s definition of influence as a “disease of self-consciousness” ([1973] 1997: 29) where creativity is inhibited through anxiety or Freudian melancholy about the father-son relationship, even as this inaugurates some “movement toward self realisation” (26). The threat of both her illustrious predecessor and the celebrity cult surrounding her in Menton elicited in Frame’s narrator a heightened preoccupation with authorial presence. Her anxiety accords with the “fruitful” poetic influence that, according to Harold Bloom, “always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation” (30; emphasis in original). Frame’s ambivalent tribute — a satire of Mansfield’s celebrity status — also involves a covert intertextual response to the latter’s writings about the Cote d’Azur. This has some affinity with Bloom’s view of wilful and fraught revisionism, in which the aspiring artist poet sees mediately through the precursor and has problems in “correcting the eye of the self” (Bloom, [1998] 2000: 224).

Frame’s satire involved adapting names from the English literary canon, as in calling the author-protagonist Harry Gill, a name taken from Wordsworth’s poem, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”. This overlays the hero’s British-New Zealand identity, while the phrase “Oh what is’t that ails young Harry Gill?” (Frame, 2013: 170) signals his agitation and insecurity. Gill’s ailments are apparently physical: increasing blindness which is then substituted by growing deafness. Mansfield was often identified as a colonial outlier to the English tradition of writing, and Frame saw her as “very frail” (2011: 94). ² But the author figure’s impairments in In the Memorial Room are also material manifestations of the “disablement” and “belatedness” associated with the anxiety of influence (Lodge, [1988] 2000: 217); they enable Frame to usher in a critique of imperial hegemony and Eurocentrism (which can be traced in Mansfield’s New Zealand stories; see Wilson, 2021: 325–344). Her unique revisionism, however, is less a misinterpretation of the force of influence as Bloom defines it than a revaluation of the authorial presence privileged in the text. This author or “Frame function” (Cronin 2011: 13-14n) ³ is represented as metonymic, as the part for the whole, and a motif of the partial.

Associated with displacement and the substitution of one thing for another, metonymy and synecdoche had long fascinated Frame (2011: 134). ⁴ In the novel, at the symbolic level, Gill is “Mr Metonymy, the container for the contents” (Frame, 2013: 155). In other words, he functions as a vehicle or container for other figures but also, through the concept of contiguity (the state of bordering or associating with something else), for exploring certain states or issues. A typically Framean complexity is apparent here, for while Gill (“Mr Metonymy”) may signify emptiness or the absence of contents, Frame also uses metonymy to connect her colonial characters to the English literary system, and in such a way as to indicate their difference to it. Gill’s name reveals him as a container borrowed from Wordsworth’s poem (Cronin 2014: 96), while his illustrious precursor, Rose Hurndell/Mansfield, is later imagined as a container, borrowed from a poem by Victor Hugo.

In summary, Frame’s 1974 close encounter in Menton with the shadow of Mansfield was both enabling and defeating. But I suggest that her anxieties catalysed a search for a new model of the author function, based on her scepticism about the impact of the imperial centre on cultural production from the periphery and implemented through her experimentation with language, specifically with the figure of metonymy. Even the literary avatar’s haunting presence — the celebrity cult of Mansfield/Hurndell fostered by the British and New Zealand expatriates in Menton, or Gill’s dream encounters — might be interpreted metonymically, testifying to the shifting perception of reality catalysed by this rhetorical trope. Frame’s satire of the Mansfield legend foregrounds concerns about influence, but the novel’s experimental “metonymic enactments” that Cronin (2014: 101) sees as based on Harry’s ailments of diminishing sight and growing deafness and introduced to explore conditions of hearing, perception, and expression, reflect a metonymically-defined authorial function in which narrative will become a “dwelling place” for the author (as Frame calls it in Living in the Maniototo [1979: 219]). Frame’s/Gill’s enactments are prompted by her engagement with Mansfield’s journals and modernist aesthetics, both of which privilege sight and perception as exploratory modes.

Katherine Mansfield left New Zealand in 1908, never to return. She died at the early age of 34 in 1923. Her reception in the decades that followed was established through different media, modes of transmission, and avenues of influence. ⁵ In New Zealand, despite her impact on female writers like Robin Hyde, her reception was contested. Only 19 years old when she departed, she was later excluded from a New Zealand tradition of letters by the cultural nationalists, who from the 1930s to 1960s were defining a shared literary identity based on realism and a local voice. Her reputation as a modernist writer, and hence her New Zealand stories, remained under a cloud for decades because this male circle of writers, in the “belligerent masculinity” of their project (Schwass, 2019: 19), situated her in a “feminine” or “minor” tradition (Sargeson, 1983a: 29; see also Stead, 2011, 2015; Wilson, 2015), which they identified through English rather than local models. Yet she was recognized as the first New Zealand writer to bring international distinction to her country, so proving that “the Dominion could make it as the nation of independence” (Stead, 2011: 214; King, 2000: 380). Most recently she has been seen as the “great ghost” of New Zealand cultural life, on “the margins of literary history”, whose presence was “felt but not quite grasped” (Wilkins, 2001: n.p.).

For Frame, then, taking up the fellowship represented an uneasy proximity to Mansfield as a national literary celebrity whose aura extended to each year’s Mansfield Fellow. By 1970, the year the fellowship was founded, Frame had an international reputation as New Zealand’s preeminent writer, and as author of ten novels, three books of stories and one volume of poetry, was enjoying her own literary stardom. To most overseas publishers, reviewers, and critics she was a successor to Mansfield, but Frame’s biographer, Michael King insists that “she was in no way influenced by her better-known compatriot” (2000: 380). From her earliest stories in The Lagoon (1952) Frame helped move New Zealand fiction away from its predominantly masculine orientation through her concern for marginal voices and groups; her wide-ranging exploration anticipated the expansion of the literary milieu to include those sectors of society (notably Māori and women) that had earlier lacked representation.

This cultural nation-building occurred during a period when the opposition to Mansfield posed by cultural nationalists like Frank Sargeson — with whose values Frame identified — kept her contained in a box (Stead, 201l: 215, 216). On the other hand, the fellowship’s inauguration by Wellington donors Cecil and Celia Manson and the founder Sheila Winn, had been encouraged by Mansfield enthusiasts in the New Zealand Women Writers’ Society. They venerated her as a literary icon, as had Australian and New Zealand women writers (Ailwood 2015) of the 1930s and 1940s, despite the disapproval of this “female” influence from Sargeson, Denis Glover and ARD Fairburn (King, 2000: 381–382; Sargeson, 1983b: 153–154). ⁶

In the clash of values over Mansfield’s importance in New Zealand literature, Frame’s loyalty to Sargeson and his circle helps explain her reluctance to glorify Mansfield by memorializing her. Mansfield did not count as a New Zealand writer in her view because she had “transplanted herself”, and Frame identified Frank Sargeson as “the first New Zealand writer” (Frame, 2011: 94). The unsettling revival of Mansfield’s reputation represented by the fellowship would have been compounded by the residency in Menton. The sense of dislocation Frame felt by traveling to Britain in 1957 provided the structural framework for The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). In that novel Frame drew on a foundational myth of the white settler colony: that of the return to the ancestral homeland and the search for original belonging. But in Towards Another Summer (2008), written in 1963 and also published posthumously, she turned her homesick gaze longingly back to New Zealand and her imagined audience, the cultural nationalists (Dean, 2021: 95–96). By contrast, the journey to Menton to take up the residency in 1973–1974 offered a less compelling reason for writing about overseas travel. Furthermore, the cult of the celebrity artist that the fellowship encouraged, was one into which Frame’s mythologising of experiences in mental hospitals in novels like Faces in the Water (1961) and Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) did not fit. The expectations of the fellowship, magnified by the author’s ghostly presence, and Mansfield’s earlier marginalization by Frame’s literary mentors all posed impediments to embracing the Mansfield myth.

Critical responses to In the Memorial Room have so far only gestured towards reading the novel as an abortive commemoration of Mansfield, yet this was an anxiety-inducing expectation of the fellowship (King, 2000: 382). Harry Gill states: “I was asked if I had any plans for making a study of Rose Hurndell”, the thinly disguised Mansfield figure (Frame, 2013: 7). Anxiety about memorializing the author is reflected in the text’s self-consciousness about genre, the presentation of (invented) poems by Hurndell, and the intertextual generation of multiple genres — linked to Mansfield’s journals with their disparate modes such as diagrams, newspaper comments, poetry, notes, shopping lists, and items of clothing — which contribute to the novel’s generic heterogeneity. These and other satiric allusions to Mansfield’s life and works function on a literal level to interrogate the resurgent imperial canonization implied by the celebrity cult of the writer in Menton. Frame’s satire on the consumption of the celebrity writer which destabilises Mansfield’s identification with European modernism is displaced by her anxiety about authorial presence: this underlies the conception of the author as metonymic (a vehicle, both full and empty), and the evisceration of Harry Gill. In her search for new authoriality Frame surreptitiously turns to Mansfield’s visual habitation of the Cote d’Azur.

In sum, Frame’s problematic proximity to New Zealand’s most famous literary figure in the national pantheon prior to her own ascendancy shows influence functioning both as gain and loss (Bloom, [1973] 1997: 29). As a New Zealand writer and expatriate Frame had affinities with Mansfield’s colonial positioning within the European literary tradition. But she rejected any idea of “creative correction” of her predecessor’s colonial metropolitanism, which Bloom claims is necessary for the strong writer to emerge (29). Instead, her anxiety is dramatized through her character Gill’s disabilities. Identifiable as signs of his so-called inferior colonial status, his afflictions register the resistant anti-imperialism (evident in the satire) informing the metonymic author function of In the Memorial Room, and in stronger terms, the complex authorial figure of Living in the Maniototo.

Harry Gill and the anxiety of influence

Frame’s Menton novel operates in two overlapping narrative modes, one literal, the other symbolic and fabular. Both represent the anxieties of Gill as the Watercress-Armstrong fellow due to different types of displacement: personal, physical, social, geographical. At the literal level is his dismal experience of residency, represented partly through his shyness and deference to the Menton expatriate communities. ⁷ This becomes a “satire of memorialization” (Cronin, 2014: 101), specifically of the expatriates’ consumption of the literary heritage — namely, the fetish for collecting the deceased author’s unpublished works as relics, imagined not as texts to be read but as “solid gold fruit” (Frame, 2013: 113–114) — and the depiction of Hurndell’s death as a pagan feast at which they are nourished with “the power of permanence” (65).

Among those who vie for Harry Gill’s attention Frame targets Connie and Max Watercress, New Zealand benefactors of the Hurndell fellowship, whose literary ambitions for their son threaten to overwhelm the shabby, unprepossessing Gill. Michael Watercress, a Hemingwayesque “handsome richly bearded man” (Frame, 2013: 30) and the “perfectly presentable stereotype of “the young writer” (34), seems a more convincing figure of literary success than Gill. This description of the two vying authors allows Frame to play with the question of real or fake artistry, projecting Gill’s uncertainty about his suitability for the role by way of advancing her satire of the Watercresses. In grooming their son for a takeover and aiming to “obliterate both the life and death of Margaret Rose Hurndell” (55) the couple are set to exploit memorialization. Their desire to appropriate cultural power through the “politics of permanence” (55) underpins the belief that canonization fixes a writer in perpetuity. In this spirit Gill approaches the Rose Hurndell Memorial Room as a place of death and desolation: “Here […] if one were a spirit or dead, is a sanctuary” (44–45).

Harry Gill’s physical disabilities, which disadvantage him in the competitive cult of literary celebrity, dominate the novel’s fabulist, symbolic level. Gill believes, at first, that he is losing his sight; but about two thirds of the way through the novel he unexpectedly begins to lose his hearing and then becomes totally deaf. The symbolic nature of these conditions becomes clear in Gill’s exchange with the local doctor, Dr Rumor, whose name hints at a social rather than a medical condition and who is another vehicle for Frame’s experimentation. Rumor claims that Harry’s eyesight is perfect and that he is displaying incipient signs of “intentional invisibility” (Frame, 2013: 60), or a wish not to be seen. Of his sudden deafness Rumor says: “A sealing-off, a closure. Auditory hibernation” (152). Total deafness is considered by the expatriate community as a more serious affliction than shortsightedness in this hierarchy of disabilities (195). Gill points out that his conversation is reduced to writing only. This minimalist communication prefaces the novel’s interior monologue ending, and recalls Frame’s other apocalyptic reductions or annihilations of language —such as the alphabet rain that concludes The Carpathians (1988).

Through the diagnosis of Rumor, however, Frame draws an equivalence between colonization, the brutalities of conquest, and the ontological condition of the artist under attack. Rumor points out similarities between “the annihilation of races” with its implications of genocide, and “the obliteration if you will, of a psychological nature, practised by human being upon human being” (Frame 2013: 62). ⁸ In his victim role, Gill is a paradoxical stalking horse for Frame’s bid to augment the authorial presence, for Rumor tells him “you are cooperating with your assassins” (62); in other words, he represents an authorial concern with annihilation, for these disabilities symptomize “the nothing nature of a novelist who lives only through his characters [and] must be obliterated, erased” (Frame, 2013: 65). As Alice Braun recognizes (2015: 600), the death of the author is essential for Frame’s new start. Although Harry Gill resists the Watercresses’ attempts to dispossess him of the fellowship, it is ultimately his difficulty in communicating that effects his exit from the narrative.

Frame’s “anxious” intertextual mediation of Mansfield, when read with reference to Bloom’s idea of influence as a form of mapping, of misreading or misprision, is closest to kenosis, or an emptying out of the self in relation to the precursor. This is a version of the “revisionary strife” necessary for individuation (Bloom, [1998] 2000: 219). In Bloom’s terms the “son” seems to take on the father’s or precursor’s stance but as he undoes his powers by “a willed loss of continuity”, this stance is “emptied of its priority”, and the son becomes isolated from himself and others (Bloom, [1973] 1998: 90; original emphasis). Yet despite the appearance of self-abnegation, kenosis tends to punish the father more than the son (91). In this ambivalent relationship both the self (Gill/Frame/the son) and precursor (Hurndell/Mansfield/the father) are distorted. Hence, Frame’s satire of Hurndell/Mansfield’s literary adulation in Menton, involves a false accommodation to influence in the novel’s first section. This is marked by two dreams about Margaret Rose Hurndell: one gothic and comic, the other more ominous and threatening. This section features paratexts that acknowledge Hurndell’s work, offering textual and biographical frames that filter Gill’s anxiety about authorship, notably his credibility as novelist, because he is best known as an historian or social recorder.

The middle section from chapters 7 to 13 (pp. 73–142) in which Gill works on his novel, sometimes in the Memorial Room, shows the most intensive engagement with Mansfield’s writing about the Mediterranean. This is juxtaposed with narrative experimentation as Gill entertains the notion of writing without nouns or verbs. This revisionary move helps determine the metonymic author function: Gill as container or medium, anticipating the parallel image of Mansfield/Hurndell as vessel. In this sense influence can be associated with Bloom’s understanding of the text as a synecdoche for a larger whole including many other texts (Allan 2021: 133, quoting Bloom Kabbalah and Criticism 1975b: 105). By contrast the novel’s final 60 pages (chapters 14 and 15, pp. 141–202) are marked by Gill’s sudden deafness and growing social dysfunction and constitute a refutation of influence that may be read as tactical, as Graham Allan claims of poets who “generate the illusion that their poetry is not influenced by and therefore not a misreading of, [a] precursor poem” (2021: 132). Through familiar images of Mansfield as fragile and suffering, Frame aligns Gill and his disintegrating faculties with the modernist artist as terminally ill, and this anticipates his eventual silence. The metonymic imaging of Mansfield/Hurndell as a container/horse in part two marks a momentary release from the anxiety of influence, but any new artistic pathway disappears in the novel’s fragmented ending.

Frame’s satire of celebrity culture

In introducing Harry Gill’s fraught relationship with his famous predecessor, Frame exploits the clash between imperial values and expectations on the one hand and colonial resistance and displacement on the other. Gill’s infirmities and apprehension about his possible obliteration by the Menton community, reflecting his limits as an “accidental novelist” (Frame 2013: 4), are identified with colonial oppression. This is also signalled by the novel’s nomenclature that evokes British class hierarchies and imperial power. Margaret Rose Hurndell, poet and novelist, is the Mansfield figure, while her sister, a British expatriate living in Menton, is called Elizabeth Foster. Both names recall the royal princesses, as they were when Frame was growing up, and they connote the social apex of imperial worth with implications of cultural value based on tradition and inheritance. The symbolic naming strategy extends to Ida Baker or LM (Lesley Moore), Mansfield’s loyal companion, here named Louise Markham, who is editing Hurndell’s letters. These naming practices imply the weight of the English literary tradition and class system upon emerging colonial cultures and writers. Nevertheless, that Mansfield/Hurndell, a writer from the margins, should represent the colonial diffusion of the English canon, reinforces the novel’s anti-imperial approach. The metonymic representation of the European tradition associated with this colonial-metropolitan writer, contrasts with its smothering effects symbolized by Harry Gill’s “real” ailments as an amateur novelist. Wordsworth’s lines in “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” — “And custom lie upon thee with a weight/ heavy as frost and deep almost as life” (Frame, 2013: 170) — underline Gill’s passivity. The weight or burden of custom, conjured by the name Harry Gill, points to the decolonizing potential of Frame’s resistance, one that her New Zealand readers might identify with.

Gill’s psychological responses can be correlated to the textual transitions between non-fictional and fictional modes. The novel is self-consciously structured as a working document, opening with a seemingly respectful homage to Hurndell’s writings, most specifically her poems. ⁹ The paratexts comprising the book’s external presentation reinforce the myth of literary celebrity. ¹⁰ The title In the Memorial Room echoes the name of the cellar room in the Villa Isola Bella, where Mansfield worked in 1920–1921, and which was purchased by the municipality of Menton and set aside for the fellows (King, 2000: 382). Following the anonymous preface is an acknowledgement: “thanks to the publishers of Margaret Rose Hurndell for permission to quote from her works”. In fact, only one of two invented poems is quoted. Frame’s exaggerated deference to literary influence recalls the Bakhtinian dialogic notion of intertextuality, that any text is “constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva, 1986: 37). In In the Memorial Room these other texts include the unacknowledged journals of Mansfield and Gill’s “notes” for his planned novel, “The Tenure”. These exist outside the text (Frame, 2013:18), and act as invisible prompts in its composition.

Although Frame has stated that as a child she rejected her mother’s attempts to introduce her to Mansfield’s stories (2011: 92), King reports that she read Mansfield’s journals in French upon her arrival in Menton and found them more moving in this language than in English (2000: 184). Journal formatting features briefly in the novel’s composition: the opening title, “Harry Gill’s Menton Journal”, and the date, “September, 1973”, signal diary entries. Gill’s plan for writing to be undertaken after this “preliminary journal” includes notes “in between writing a novel” (Frame, 2013: 18), hopefully to be completed in Menton, and the “story of my tenure” to be written on return to New Zealand. But “The Tenure” is the title of the following section so that may be read as Gill’s novel. There is further generic dissonance in Gill’s claim to be an historical novelist (Frame, 2013: 4) rather than a creator of fiction, thus justifying the overlap of invention with biography and documentary, names that refer to a mix of invented and real people in Hurndell’s life, and an autobiographical narrative. This heterogeneity recalls what Fredric Jameson calls “generic discontinuity”, that is, switching from the novel to journal, creating interruptions in modes of reading, and offering “a kind of estrangement-effect practised on our own generic receptivity” (2005: 263). Frame’s destabilizing manoeuvres, the jumps between fabulism, psychological realism, historical information, literary experimentation and the multiple disconnected narrative endings and openings with which the novel concludes, can be read in the context of her attack on imperial hegemony in literary tradition, a form of disruption and defamiliarization. For an imagined community of readers, Frame’s decolonization of Mansfield’s writing modes creates space for readerly resistance to any homage of her as icon, but the novel’s reception suggests that greater exegesis was needed for this relationship to be recognized.

There are also dislocations of consciousness: Harry Gill’s dreams of his illustrious predecessor epitomize his uneasy relationship with the spectral Margaret Rose Hurndell. In the first, a dream-dialogue, Gill expresses insecurities about taking up the fellowship before he leaves for Menton. Hurndell appears both as a sovereign (as implied by her name Margaret Rose) complete with recognizable insignia of royalty — a 1950s dress style consisting of a cashmere sweater and “pearls, three rows, about her throat” (Frame, 2013: 12) — and a nightmarish prototype of the younger Frame. The image is distorted by imperfections that border on the grotesque: her false teeth and “horrible”, “unnaturally pink plastic gums” (12) that show, “a bright colour like carnations that have been painted for a flower show”. ¹¹ In the dream, Gill as writer is conflated with aspects of Frame his creator through issues of national identity: the dream figure berates the English-born, New Zealand-naturalized Gill for sounding too British and demands that in his novel he use New Zealand speech. This is no doubt Frame’s private warning to resist assimilation to the English inflected discourse associated with Mansfield’s writing, which was an anathema to cultural nationalist writers of the 1940s and 1950s. ¹²

A second, foreboding dream occurs when Gill visits the Memorial Room; his imagination is overwhelmed by an all-too-vivid image of red berries, symbolizing his precursor. Lying on a garden seat outside he says:

I fell asleep. I dreamed. The wine-coloured squashy berries which I had cleared from the seat and which came from a tree spreading across the seat, began to rain on me like ruby-stones, ruby-fruit and filled my eyes with red juices and in my dream I remembered my arrival at Menton and the blessing of the colour green which I now found that I could not visualise, being able to remember only the shape encompassing the green which was now being distorted by the overflowing of the red. (Frame, 2013: 46–47)

Unlike the first dream which Gill interprets as “absurd”, seeing himself as a “schoolboy out of a comic strip in the twenties” (14), this troubling vision is defined as “the literary dream of a literary blind man”, and the redness is attributed to the brain haemorrhage from which Rose Hurndell died (47). Furthermore, it illustrates his belief that dreams should only be used in novels when “the substantiality of the ‘apparently’ real world” is in doubt and the mind is preparing “for its own final material dissolution” (11). Appearing in “The Tenure” — Gill’s novel in progress (Frame, 2013: 18) — the dream anticipates the author’s final collapse amidst a welter of disconnected terms and phrases.

The symbolism of the red berries as death, dissolution, and sacrifice has a possible source in Mansfield’s own memorial poem “To L.H.B.”, dedicated to her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp following his death from a hand grenade accident in Ploegsteert Wood, near Armentieres in Belgium on 6 October 1914. In the first version of the poem, an allegory of transubstantiation, red and white berries are “poisonous”, associated with “Dead Mans’s Bread” and the sacrament; for with the berries in his hand the dream figure says: “These are my body, Sister, take and eat” (Mansfield, 2014: 96). The flowing red juices of Gill’s dream might similarly be seen as transformative in relation to the Memorial Room as their haunting power, he explains, undermines his initial rapturous impressions of verdant green palm trees in Menton. As the “the red” overflow no doubt combines with other “hauntings” that resulted in Gill’s “ideas” for his novel (Frame, 2013: 79), Hurndell/Mansfield’s ghostly influence is also a potentially creative source. For although his dream reinforces the view of the Memorial Room as a haunted, death-filled sanctuary, it anticipates Gill’s occupancy and his “dreamed of imaginative novel” (Frame, 2013: 72).

Frame and Mansfield’s literary impressionism

In the second section of the novel (from Chapter 8) Gill withdraws from the parasitic expatriates and seeks to write creatively by experimenting with alternative modes of perception and expression — modes that, according to Cronin, can be read as contiguously metonymic enactments of his ailments of blindness and deafness (2014: 96). In aiming to produce a purified language without the interference of mental images, he writes prose that is “unadjectived, unadverbed, fully nouned and verbed, and numbered” (Frame, 2013: 81), taking on the persona of a retired professor, “beneath the spectacles, the rather shabby clothing, the skin” (Frame, 2013: 80), who had experimented by writing without nouns and verbs. Cronin points out the paradox that Gill is “both container and thing contained”, becoming a “container for the absent novel he creates and for the retired professor character within it, while the character of the retired professor is simultaneously inhabited by Harry” (2014: 95). This contradicts Gill’s argument that he is only “the container for the contents”, because being a “person of extreme nothingness” he has no contents (Frame, 2013: 154). Yet these configurations of the author’s metonymic identity anticipate Gill’s commemoration of Hurndell/Mansfield as a “GENIUS”, that is a shelter, container, or model for subsequent writers (136).

Gill’s admission of partial sight early in the novel, signalling his sense of insignificance and deficiency, heralds Frame’s engagement with Mansfield’s meditations on time, perception and the Mediterranean setting: “I am a dull personality, almost humdrum, a plodder from day to day with only an occasional glimpse of light, literally as well as figuratively for the disease in my eyes has worsened” (Frame, 2014: 4; emphasis added). This is a covert introduction to Mansfield’s credo, for although referring to his failing eyesight, Harry’s “glimpse of light” also recalls her modernist view of the glimpse or moment of vision consisting of a flash of identity between subject and object. As a perception of natural phenomena, a moment out of the flux and flow of durational time, the glimpse can be associated with the modernist epiphany (Van Gunsteren, 1990: 57, 64). Mansfield describes the power of these short moments of observation in her notebook:

And yet one has these ‘glimpses’ before which all that one ever has written […] all […] that one ever has read pales . . . The waves, as I drove home this afternoon and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell . . . What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is ‘held’ and down, bright, broken, glittering on the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow (2016: 310).

At the narrative level Gill’s perception of the glimpse as an illumination might elevate him and not his competitor, Michael Watercress, as the true inheritor of the Hurndell legacy. For this glimpse can be linked to the light and landscape of the Mediterranean, as well as the art of the impressionist painters like Matisse, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne, whose aesthetic was inspired by that location. Gill’s glimpse responds to time’s flow and to transience by contrast to the permanence associated with death, the Memorial Room, and the canonization of the celebrity writer. Such a moment enlightens Gill’s occluded vision: “My life-long disability with my eyesight has accustomed me to the belief that others see the real world, but I do not — how can I when my eyesight is defective” (Frame 2013, 26). In this expanded sense the glimpse invites comparison with what John Middleton Murry defined as Mansfield’s “glimpses of reality that in themselves possess a peculiar vividness” (1924: 142). Furthermore, parallels between Gill’s ocular impairment due to disease and Hurndell’s/Mansfield’s declining health, and sense of fragmentation caused by her reduced possibilities, as in comments like: “Don’t I live in glimpses only?” (Mansfield, 1996: 236; emphasis in original), suggest that the glimpse functions both as metaphor and metonym.

Gill’s limited perception of external reality inspires his experimentation with perception by removing his glasses, or expanding their focus telescopically, to either enlarge or reduce things. In aiming to describe “only what was external and visible, the common property of human sight” (Frame, 2013: 100), he emphasizes the literal continuum by contrast to the glimpse that exists outside the flux of time. This focus on the literal/real differs from literary impressionism, which is the perceiving of the outside world through the mediating consciousness of the observer, or “the process by which impressions are absorbed by a perceiver” who sees the world subjectively (Van Gunsteren, 1990: 53). As Cézanne wrote: “Art should not reproduce nature but should reproduce the sensations aroused by nature” (qtd in Van Gunsteren, 1990: 17). Gill’s experimentation with perception yields similar results to impressionism, although the cause and process — his manipulation of distance between subject and object — are different. Without his glasses, looking from his window at the roof of a villa about 100 metres away, he sees two human figures talking and gesticulating; with his glasses on he discovers that “I had been looking at two tall narrow chimneys standing side by side” (Frame, 2013: 100); with magnification of vision (if given glasses of increasing power) he speculates that the same chimneys would become “a moving mass of molecules, a city with a population of stone particles, furiously in motion” (101). Likewise with magnification, and akin to Alice looking through the telescope, teacups are set out on “flower bordered craters”, and a bookshelf is like “a cliff with ordered crevices neatly filled with gold and red bricks which opened and were leaved with rectangular white sheets” (105).

Mansfield’s comment about the effects of too harsh a light on the perceiving consciousness also notes the flawed perception of external phenomena: “in the naked light buildings and people appear suddenly grotesque — too sharply modelled, maliciously tweaked into being” (Mansfield, 2016, 118). The same problems are registered in different ways. The literary impressionist experiences what Sarah Sandley describes as the “fragmentary evocative reality that is or becomes reality” (2011: 73); for as Julia van Gunsteren says: the writer presents “an expression of an impression” (1990: 57). The blurring of focus is comparable to the momentary distortions that the literal-minded Gill finds through his experimentation, but then dismisses. His responses resemble those of characters in a literary impressionist text who “may make errors of perception, seeing fragments of nature and forms which decompose before their eyes. They may hear words and phrases that make little sense to them. They cannot grasp the relationships around them” (Van Gunsteren, 1990: 57). Gill’s engagement with sunlight as he follows the sun’s movement through the day from his desk also heightens his consciousness of perception. He observes the shapes of light created in the Memorial Room according to the time of day in ways that recall Mansfield’s descriptions in her journal. Both writers bring this background momentarily to the fore, with their heightened sense of time passing and light creating different geometric patterns.

Mansfield’s pictorial descriptions of the animating effects of sun and light emphasize the creation of geometric shapes: “The sun came full through the two windows, dividing the studio into four — two quarters of light and two of shadow” (Mansfield, 2016: 242); and “The sun throws the shape of the window on to carpet, & in these four little square fields the silly flies wander” (257). Her comment on its movement — “The sun comes slowly, slowly the room grows lighter. Suddenly, on the carpet there is a square of pale red light” (314) — repeats the word “slowly”, to convey the experience of a whole emerging from the part. Likewise Gill emphasizes how the sun, coming from the outside to inhabit the interior, makes the part indivisible from the whole:

Each day the patterns of light in the room were different. […]. When the sun shone, window-shapes patterned themselves on the rust-red rug of which there were two, of equal size, square, on the polished wooden floor. The light fell on the table by the window […]. I looked at these patterns from time to time during the day to observe their changing positions and to note, when the sun had moved out of the range of the room where I worked, the moment when the yellow light was withdrawn and there was no longer window-shaped yellow light lying on the carpet. (2013: 88–89)

Gill further develops such observations of sun and light metonymically in terms of parts and whole when defining the emptiness of the erased author whose consciousness needs to create a home (or a container) for his characters (Stead, 2014: 176). “Have you sensed the nothingness of my nature, that I am as empty as the carriages of the trains that pass, dusty, used in the morning sun?” (Frame, 2013: 116). He is inspired to reconfigure the empty moving trains metonymically as a form of double habitation (as with the deceased professor of Shakespeare), both as conveyor of his characters and of the novel in which they appear so that as author-container he can enter their minds. He continues:

A novelist must be that way, I think, and not complain of it, otherwise how shall the characters accommodate themselves in his mind? To this you reply that it is he who must enter the minds of his characters? Certainly, but where shall he house them while he enters their minds, but in those empty used trains that pass and pass forever before his gaze? (116)

This doubling of the metonymic figure as shelter for both the contents (the characters) and the container (which signals this representation) anticipates the use of metonymy in Living in the Maniototo as Frame deconstructs form and content to enable the telling of new stories.

The phenomena of sun and sunlight encourage authorial habitation by warming up the empty carriages of the trains that pass below the Memorial Room between Menton and Ventimiglia — “those empty carriages that pass and pass for ever before his gaze” (116) — seen as a suitable location for future characters and authors:

The sunlight shone through one side window of the carriages and out the other, revealing the dust-beams travelling with the train and lighting up the emptiness of the compartments. The sun was always a morning sun, approaching a midday sun and its beams were hot against the windows. (90)

The metaphor of the journey, reinforced by that of the artist as an empty railway carriage incorporating the play of the sun and movement of light, might be one of Gill’s “glimpses of light”, a space heated by the sun’s warmth that the chilly inhospitable Memorial Room, in thrall to tradition, conspicuously lacks. The sun’s heat also answers Gill’s quest for warmth, which Frame saw as indispensable for the creative flow (Braun, 2105: 595). The empty sun-filled carriages conceived as a receptacle for characters are an antecedent of the House of Replicas in Living in the Maniototo, a literal house in Berkeley that is the metonymic vehicle (container) for the author’s conceptual house of replicas.

Gill’s holistic image of Hurndell occurs at the point in the novel where his near-blindness is about to change to the affliction of deafness. Dissatisfied with the romantic memorialization of writers practised by the expatriate communities of Menton who “seek shelter and permanence in the dead and the work of the dead” (136), he dismisses his entire prior narrative for colluding with these romantic assumptions. In the metonymic configuring of the precursor as container, however, he makes a complex intertextual accolade to her superior creative powers as “GENIUS” by imagining Hurndell as a horse. Referring to a poem she had always been fond of (2011: 103), Victor Hugo’s “The Retreat from Moscow”, about the fate of Napolean’s Grand Army and the survivors who sheltered from blizzard in the bloated bodies of dead horses, Frame turns to Walter de la Mare’s poem dedicated to Mansfield, “‘Horse in a Field’ (To Katherine Mansfield)”, quoting its epigraph: ¹³

A fancy, certainly, to talk of Rose Hurndell as a horse, but I had seen her described as one, and written of as one by a poet who had known her. “And there was a horse in the King’s stables: and the name of the horse was, GENIUS”, was his prefaced quote from The Arabian Nights (2013: 136). ¹⁴

An English poet who knew and corresponded with Mansfield, de la Mare’s celebration (here of Hurndell) may be contrasted to the adulation of the English and New Zealand expatriates (Frame 2013: 136) and their romanticizing of “the politics of permanence” (Frame, 2013: 55). This memorialization images Hurndell/Mansfield as sustaining the life force of her successors. A turning point, it signals what Dr Rumor calls Gill’s “Auditory Retaliation”, his “sealing off” (Frame, 2013: 151, 152).

Conclusion: Exiting the narrative

In the novel’s middle section Frame sets up her interaction with her predecessor’s vision in anticipation of Gill’s deafness, then exit from the narrative. De la Mare’s homage to Mansfield, however, is authoritative because personal, based on their friendship, unlike the provincial worship in the novel associated with the Memorial Room. This implies some allaying of the anxiety induced by the Menton expatriate communities. Frame draws back from the postcolonial satire suggested by the regal nomenclature of Hurndell and her sister, as Gill’s further authorial transformation is catalysed by this metonymic reconfiguration of the illustrious ancestor. The emptying mode of kenosis with which she addresses the Mansfield influence sustains her anti-imperialism as a form of passive resistance, now embodied in her narrator’s greater affliction and ultimate stasis.

In the novel’s last 60 pages Gill’s encounter with his famous precursor dissolves in paralysis as obliteration threatens (Frame, 2013: 174). His reiteration of the metafictional comment, “I would never have let this happen in fiction — a man going blind who instead becomes deaf” (Frame, 2013: 148) — signals narrative collapse. The belief that the expatriate communities have made him a “removed man” (149), brings an intensified focus on Hurndell’s/ Mansfield’s affliction: limping, walking with a stick (123, 171), needing care. Yet another generic transformation illustrates the fallibility of processes of textual transmission, and so further undermines the received Mansfield myth. Transcriptions of Gill’s written exchanges are mixed up with Mansfield’s/Hurndell’s, demarcating a process of literary decline and diminishment — beginning with Louise Markham’s criticism of the improving efforts of Mansfield’s first editor, her husband John Middleton Murry, and the heterogeneity of her writings: “her letters are full of grocery lists and prices and buying things – most unpoetic” (124). ¹⁵ Markham’s critique is reinforced by the banalities of the “seeming ‘manuscript’” (195), with which the novel ends: a list of invitations, commonplaces, anonymous discordant voices, and unauthored epistolary endings that have echoes of Mansfield’s lists of shopping and clothes recorded in her journals.

Detached from the novel’s opening concerns with colonization, celebrity culture and literary influences, the ending nevertheless offers more optimism than Bloom’s kenosis argument, which partly explains Gill’s effacement and exit. The anxiety of influence is partly alleviated by the metonymic configuring of Gill’s and Hurndell’s authorial identity. Overtones of Christian symbolism redolent of sanctity or salvation, signalling transitional states, also appear throughout the novel in the references to tomb, shroud, sun, and transformation. In replacing Hurndell as the ghostly “shroud” (Frame, 2013: 185), as imagined by the Menton expatriate community, with the likeness of a horse (136), as a container in which to host new work, the threat of literary fame is metonymically “contained” by being appropriated into a new paradigm.

In summary, in In the Memorial Room the rhetorical trope of metonymy as applied to the author informs Frame’s strategic response to the anxiety of influence. But the narrative effect is of provisionality, of work in process, of a novel that Frame did not want to publish because it satirized those admirers of her work who wished to support her Menton tenure. It hardly meets the claims made on the dustcover of being a “brilliantly witty masterpiece” (Frame, 2013). Metonymy allows her the ontological freedom to decolonize assumptions about the inherited literary tradition, and to acknowledge the difference and division of the colonial margins represented by Mansfield, but not to configure a new narrative. While Gill or “Mr Metonymy” disappears, an alternative mode for memorializing Hurndell emerges to contrast with the moribund Memorial Room and the literary fellowship. Unstable in implementation, manifesting both with and without content, the container metaphor holds potential for a creative habitation. But the new novel is not incubated in In the Memorial Room, for the railway carriages with their Mediterranean warmth, dustbeams, and light, remain empty. Although the names Margaret Rose Hurndell and Elizabeth Foster reappear in Living in the Maniototo (Cronin, 2014: 101; Dean, 2021, 98), the novel’s guests or inhabitants do not arrive until the transformation of the house in Berkeley into the equivalent House of Replicas. Gill’s deafness and disappearance in In the Memorial Room merely underlies that this crucial phase of the journey has been embarked upon and is still in transit.