1 - Introduction

Summary

Janet Frame, one of the most famous New Zealand writers of her time, died in January 2004. It is significant that what won her international fame is essentially her Autobiography published as a trilogy twenty years before and made into the famous Jane Campion film An Angel at My Table in 1990. A number of critics, Gina Mercer among them, tend to consider the Autobiography as a far less interesting production than the more innovative, sophisticated, post-modern fiction. Theirs is not, however, an opinion that I share, and it is a work that I think needs re-evaluating. I will defend the Autobiography on the grounds that though it has none of the sophistication of the novels, it is also far more readable. Which is perhaps the reason why some critics find it less interesting. It remains to be decided whether readability is a valid criterion for critical evaluation. Marc Delrez repeatedly speaks of the feeling of unfamiliarity, even of destabilization, the reader experiences on reading her fiction. And though such destabilization can be challenging, it also risks putting the reader off because it resists our interpretation, or even sometimes repels our understanding.

Like most writers, Frame did not write the Autobiography until she was about 60, as the writing of one's life requires a retrospective look upon the past, one that logically can only happen quite late. The interest of studying all Frame's work is that it illustrates the theory of the French specialist of the genre, Philippe Lejeune, according to which the writer of an autobiography does not simply write an ‘official ’ autobiography but inscribes all his/her works in what he convincingly calls an autobiographical space, which may corroborate Frame's own belief that there is no more ‘pure’ fiction than there is ‘pure’ autobiography – ‘and so the memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath, with different memories rising to the surface at different times and thus denying the existence of a “pure” autobiography’ (I 161). It is just another manner of working on the same matter.