Exploring the “room two inches behind the eyes”: A Husserlian approach to Janet Frame’s A State of siege

Abstract

This thesis reads Janet Frame’s novel A State of Siege (1966) through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl sought to detail a method of philosophical inquiry that would ground a logically rigorous account of reality in a direct and unassuming engagement with conscious phenomena. His phenomenological method is characterised by the deliberate suspension of concepts presupposed in the ‘naturalistic’ and ‘objective’ attitudes of Western thought. Such suspension or ‘bracketing’ aims at opening up what Husserl calls the “field of absolute consciousness” to direct, unfettered exploration. While Janet Frame was not herself a philosopher, this thesis argues that her novels strongly partake in Husserl’s exploratory bent and sensitivity to the life of consciousness. Frame herself claimed on several occasions that she wrote “explorations”; this thesis argues further that Frame wrote novels as a means of exploring her field of consciousness by way of a phenomenological attitude that enabled her to traverse the structures of social, novelistic, and metaphysical convention. Moreover, I argue that Frame’s novels provoke her readers into taking up a correlative phenomenological attitude and exploration of consciousness. Proceeding by way of a loose analogy with the phenomenological method, the first two chapters of this thesis are concerned to read the novel closely to a) identify the protagonist as a ‘folk-phenomenologist,’ and b) establish the protagonist’s existential motivations. Upon this groundwork, chapter three reads the novel as performatively staging the epoché and reduction of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.