Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and
Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive
practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of
narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic
aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression.
Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I
suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual
or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others.
I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation,
focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With
Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the
hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text
"speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1910) and The Adaptable Man (1965)
address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to
recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality
driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin
Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning
writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual regime
that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference.
The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual
relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a
transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial
inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates
masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6719 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Lawn, Jennifer |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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