Embarrassment in the Posthumous Fiction of Janet Frame

It is generally assumed that Janet Frame suspended the publication of some of her
work in her lifetime because it was felt to be deeply personal, or potentially embarrassing
for people who might recognize themselves in the portraits provided. These
rationalizations fail to persuade, first because all of Frame’s published oeuvre anyway
consists of a fictionalization of private existential matter, and the posthumous
corpus hardly differs in this respect; and also because both Towards Another Sum-
mer (2007) and In the Memorial Room (2013) feature a Kafkaesque concern with
metamorphosis which serves to enhance the unrealistic tenor of the narratives, so
that the novels again seem on a par with previously published self-conscious material.
What is more distinctive about the new/old novels is less their allegedly embarrassing
nature than their unusual degree of frontal engagement with the experience
of embarrassment itself – their pondering of the pros and cons of shyness. This
theme is addressed in aesthetic terms mostly. Frame’s artistic characters blush and
squirm and writhe in ways which confirm the role played by embarrassment as an
inadvertent recognition of, and an unwilling subscription to, an oppressive societal
norm. Yet it can be shown that Frame, true to her customary dialectical mode of
conceptualization, simultaneously uses embarrassment as a decentring strategy
allowing the novels to work towards an exposure of so-called social normality. This
exposure is achieved through a systematic policy of borrowing from, and testily
reproducing, those very limited and limiting expressive codes which were found
mortifying in the first place.