In the Memorial Room: The conditions of being a writer

Abstract

In the Memorial Room, the second novel by Frame to be published posthumously, announces many of the themes that she would develop only a few years later in Living in the Maniototo, including the role of the artist in her own fiction. The artist figure in this case is a young New Zealand man who has been awarded a fellowship giving him the chance to live and write in the same French town where Margaret Rose Hurndell, a national literary figure, and image of the famous New Zealand expatriate writer Katherine Mansfield, spent some time before she died. By staging the gradual erasure of its protagonist, In the Memorial Room allows us to reflect on the place of the artist in a society obsessed with the cult of celebrity, when being a writer should imply a dissolution of the ego and the foregrounding of language as the main driving force of his/her art. Through the seemingly trivial attention given to the artist’s material condition, and by introducing characters who epitomize the different modalities of being a writer, Frame dramatizes the dialectics of the author’s role with regards to his/her creation.

Keywords:

• metafiction
• autobiography
• romanticism
• Janet Frame
• death of the author
• In the Memorial Room

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As documented in King’s biography of Frame (2000, 380–390).

2. In his entry on Katherine Mansfield in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Roger Robinson deems her “at best a qualified national icon in New Zealand” (Robinson and Wattie 1998, 341).

3. Here, one may recall Frame’s autobiography, and her own difficulties at dispelling the myth of the artist as suffering hero (Frame 1990, 78–79, 109, 132).

4. Ruth Brown (2003) explains that “The contemporary phenomenon of literary celebrity has reinforced the process begun in 1953–63, whereby the Frame life story became well known and the fiction screened within a protective framework of respectful admiration” (135).

5. Michel Foucault (2001) shows that up until the end of the 19th century, the author figure was able to reach some form of immortality through his writing, which was represented as closely related to his ego, a unique production of unique self. With writers like Flaubert, Proust or Kafka, whose lives were undermined by their activity as writers, emerged the figure of the artist sacrificing himself for his writing, and letting it dissolve his ego. One thinks here of Proust, and the representation of his latter years, when he was literally consumed by the writing of his masterpiece.

6. Jan Cronin (2014) analyses Harry’s disappearance in similar terms: “One staging is simply replaced by another. As to what exactly is being staged, there is no stable and developed position here; and this is a reminder of the exploratory nature of Frame’s fiction” (11).