From Jay to Bee to Daughter Buffalo: Outlining ekphrasis in the work of Janet Frame

Abstract

A thorough examination of Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s Letters to William Theophilus Brown (2016), which provides a selection of Janet Frame’s letters to her American painter friend Bill Brown, confirms her propensity for viewing her own life-writing primarily as an instrument of fictionalization. Frame’s letters should then not be considered as a mere textual adjunct documenting a period in her life or a phase in her poetics. By dint of actually inventing, or imaginatively adding to, the story of her friendship with Brown, she constructed a complex corpus which proves formally and thematically consistent with the novels of her middle to late period. This is where she first explored intuited links between the arts of painting and fiction, which would lead to the enhanced metafictional self-consciousness characteristic of her latest novels.

Keywords:

• New Zealand
• Janet Frame
• letter-writing
• painting and literature
• fictional autobiography
• animals

Notes

1. Further references to Jay to Bee contain the date of writing, followed by the page number in the collection.

2. The name, lifted from William Faulkner’s (1932) Light in August, will lead Frame to designate her own epistolary narrative as Cat in August, “a great book” (November 1970; Frame 2016, 344).

3. For a list of the sensitive items (indeed beyond hair loss) see King (2000, 276).

4. Both William Theophilus Brown and Paul John Wonner belonged to the “bridge generation” of the Bay Area Figurative School, a group of artists active in the San Francisco Bay area as of the 1950s, who gradually relinquished the conventions of abstract expressionism in favour of a return to figuration.

5. Claire Bazin (2011, 53) refers to Daughter Buffalo as “a tale told by an idiot”.