Article (Scientific journals)
Fossil Capacities in the Work of Janet Frame
Delrez, Marc
2014In Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, 2 (1), p. 69-81
Peer reviewed
 

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Keywords :
Janet Frame; New Zealand; National identity; Realism; Towards Another Summer
Abstract :
[en] The Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris defines the word fossil in an idiosyncratic sense, to invoke ‘a rhythmic capacity to re-sense contrasting spaces and to suggest that a curious rapport exists between ruin and origin as latent to arts of genesis’ – prior to hinting that such a ‘heterogeneous scale’ of temporality can be seen to exist within the fictional universe fashioned by Janet Frame. This, in turn, implies that any appreciation of her work’s embeddedness in local (South Pacific) realities must simultaneously take account of the depths of spatiality created by means of her particular aesthetics. This article attempts to address Frame’s strange interest in ghostly vestiges of superseded experience, which she expresses through recurring allusions to subterranean strata of landscape encrypting a sense of ‘epochs and ages gone’ – as she phrases this in Living in the Maniototo. Indeed her settings beg the question of a ‘native capacity’ (another Harrisian phrase) possibly underlying her approach to New Zealand contemporary culture. Intriguingly, she probes the matter through her repeated evocation of reputedly extinct animal species – dinosaur, moa, takahe – which she sees in some cases to be gesturing towards the possibility of resuscitation, as with the tuatara mentioned in Towards Another Summer, and quite in keeping with an aesthetics of excavation subordinated to her quest for occulted forms of being and knowing. As some of Frame’s characters conceive this, it is a matter of realising that ‘the human eye is not consistent’ and can be supplemented through a form of third-eye vision paradoxically inherited in spite of the losses of history.
Research center :
CEREP - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales - ULiège
Disciplines :
Literature
Author, co-author :
Delrez, Marc ;  Université de Liège > Département de langues et littératures modernes > Littérature anglaise moderne et littérature américaine
Language :
English
Title :
Fossil Capacities in the Work of Janet Frame
Publication date :
2014
Journal title :
Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies
ISSN :
2050-4039
eISSN :
2050-4047
Publisher :
Intellect, Bristol, United Kingdom
Volume :
2
Issue :
1
Pages :
69-81
Peer reviewed :
Peer reviewed
Available on ORBi :
since 19 January 2017

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