Embarrassment in the posthumous fiction of Janet Frame

Abstract

It is generally assumed that Janet Frame suspended the publication of some of her work in her lifetime because it was felt to be deeply personal, or potentially embarrassing for people who might recognize themselves in the portraits provided. These rationalizations fail to persuade, first because all of Frame’s published oeuvre anyway consists of a fictionalization of private existential matter, and the posthumous corpus hardly differs in this respect; and also because both Towards Another Summer and In the Memorial Room feature a Kafkaesque concern with metamorphosis which serves to enhance the unrealistic tenor of the narratives, so that the novels again seem on a par with previously published self-conscious material. What is more distinctive about the new/old novels is less their allegedly embarrassing nature than their unusual degree of frontal engagement with the experience of embarrassment itself – their pondering of the pros and cons of shyness. This theme is addressed in aesthetic terms mostly. Frame’s artistic characters blush and squirm and writhe in ways which confirm the role played by embarrassment as an inadvertent recognition of, and an unwilling subscription to, an oppressive societal norm. Yet it can be shown that Frame, true to her customary dialectical mode of conceptualization, simultaneously uses embarrassment as a decentring strategy allowing the novels to work towards an exposure of so-called social normality. This exposure is achieved through a systematic policy of borrowing from, and testily reproducing, those very limited and limiting expressive codes which were found mortifying in the first place.

Keywords:

• Janet Frame
• Towards Another Summer
• In the Memorial Room
• embarrassment
• poetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. 'Thus it appears that Gavin Hopps's (2002) thoughts on shyness and embarrassment, as deployed in his discussion of pop music, provide a fruitful approach to the way the subject is treated in Janet Frame's posthumous fiction.