The poetics of dissolution: The representation of Maori culture in Janet Frame's fiction

Abstract

This essay examines Janet Frame's early short story “The Lagoon”, and argues that the story alludes to Maori experience, albeit tangentially, in a way which anticipates similar evocations in novels such as A State of Siege and The Carpathians. A close reading shows that cultural imperialism in Frame runs parallel to, or is a side‐effect of, interpersonal appropriations. These, in turn, seem to be rooted in human beings' reluctance to accommodate otherness. Recurrently Janet Frame points to a model of cultural and interpersonal interaction which is detached from proprietorial forms of appropriation, but which entails nothing less than the dissolution of the ruling ego. Self‐dissolution shall emerge in this reading as the key to a utopian state consisting of the total permeability between the self and the remainder of the world. In this state, transactions become reciprocal since the divisions between self and non‐self no longer exist.

Keywords:

• Janet Frame
• self‐dissolution
• the Maori
• cultural and metaphorical appropriations
• accommodating otherness

Notes

1. This is evoked not only in “Prizes” but also in, for example, “The Window”, “The Chosen Image” in The Reservoir or in “On the Car” and “A Note on the Russian War” in The Lagoon.