"Turning the stone of being": Migrant Poetics in the Novels of Janet Frame

Abstract

This thesis sets out to examine Janet Frame’s eleven published novels in terms of a migrant poetics, born of Frame’s enduring concern with displacement and the tropes of journey and quest. The study will show that, while not literally a migrant writer, Frame expresses a migrant poetics in her characters and plots as well as in her use and examination of language, which together present the migrant’s trajectory as an evolution of subjectivity, climaxing in glimpses of the revivification of self and/as place; of what this thesis calls subjective arrival. Frame’s migrant poetics will be examined in terms of it operating on a continuum from literal through metaphorically transferred to ultimately universal expressions of the indeterminacy that is migration, so as to show that her migrant poetics thereby signifies most profoundly the possibility for transformation of not only the self, but also of the context that may provide one with a place-world in which to be. In so doing, Frame’s fiction will be shown to chart and excavate what this thesis refers to as the unbearable place so as to reveal therein the possible place that may sustain the migrant subject’s subjective arrival. Perhaps most importantly, this study concerns itself with charting the migrant subject’s transformed perspective as he or she traverses the unbearable place, and thereby with the migrant subject’s relative willingness and ability to recognise and occupy the possible place, or what is referred to as the new-country. As such, this thesis argues that Frame’s migrant poetics speaks to a universal condition and maintains that Frame’s fiction is primarily and fundamentally concerned with the ontology of Being: with what Martin Heidegger called Being-in-the-world. But while therefore largely concerned with the ontological implications of Frame’s writing, and therein largely influenced by theories of Being and discourses of displacement, rather than by Frame criticism per se, this study remains committed to the project of close-reading the actual texts at hand. Indeed, this thesis maintains that crucially Frame’s work never loses sight of the rudimentary, the material and the actual, and in fact works to refuse the separation between the expressions born thereof – the literal – with their metaphorically transferred and increasingly universal implications and manifestations. While informed by her autobiographical writing and poetry, this thesis almost exclusively concentrates on Frame’s long fiction, which it tends to consider as one body of work that traces the evolution of the writer’s project for reappraising the things of subjectivity and place.