[DOWNLOAD] "Dr Clutha's Book of the World: Janet Paterson Frame, 1924-2004 (Obituary)" by JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

📘 Read Now     📥 Download

eBook details

• Title: Dr Clutha's Book of the World: Janet Paterson Frame, 1924-2004 (Obituary)
• Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 201 KB

Description

Now she belongs to the ages, she who from the first made her constant awareness of death, its presence in all things and her mordant, fear of it, the dark sun in the solar system of her writing; she who invented Uncle Black Beetle in Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), the fairy-tale insect which tells parables of death to a mute girl, and who figured death as the giant spider that gobbles up the dying boy in 'Yet Another Poem About a Dying Child', has herself succumbed to leukemia. The overwhelming sense, as we responded to her death, at the age of 79 on the morning of 29 January, was of a personal loss as with a family member, someone who had lived deep within the warp and weft of our daily lives. I had long been used to my students' insistence, over the years, on referring to her as 'Janet'; in the days after her death I listened to expressions of similar intimacy mingled with the bewilderment of people who clearly did not yet know how to weigh up what they had lost or how they would come to terms with it. I listened, too, to other, more occult, expressions of connexion that seemed equally appropriate to a writer who has always appeared to be in touch, in her writing, with something over and above the merely quotidian--for whom Rilke's angel really did visit her table. Thus I heard from people who claimed to have been thinking of her, or to have experienced a sudden, vivid, sense that something was wrong, or to have been reading her writing around the time she died; and especially from one, a teacher, who had his reading of her story 'The Linesman' to a Year 12 class interrupted that Thursday morning by the arrival, through the window, disconcertingly, of a fantail. Clearly, she is still with us: only the very greatest of writers penetrate us like that, charging up our minds, changing forever the way we think and see, inducing a healthy little touch of paranoia with which to transform the doggy trot of our everyday lives. Following her autobiography, Jane Campion's film of it and Michael King's official biography, the details of Frame's life are too well-known. I say this because I want to preserve the scepticism I have always had about the hardening of that official narrative over the last twenty years. Since 1976, when I first travelled to Oamaru to pester people about her, I have always known that there has been, if not a single, contradictory counter-narrative, then sufficient divergences from parts of the official account to produce what Barthes liked to call narrative grating. Without exception, the details I picked up back then make a reality that was darker and more harsh than the details of what, over the years, has hardened into the 'official' story. Some of these details I will continue to withhold, since they seem to involve no more than the usual smalltown scuttlebutt, but some continue to intrigue, like a former Eden Street neighbour's memory of Lottie Frame, the gentle, beaten-down, hopeless mother of the autobiography, as a looming, terrifying woman the local kids fled thinking she was a witch (in fact the picture Frame gives in her autobiography not of her mother but of her mother's mother); like a former classmate's recollection of Janet and Isabel, so close as to be almost twins, regularly arriving late to class at Waitaki Girls' High, their clothing filthy, their hair even more awry than usual, and in a state of primitive, almost feral, excitement over something they couldn't talk about; like the account by a former teacher of how the Frame girls used to play chicken with the south-bound train late at night, lying on the track in their nighties till the engine was almost upon them; like the description, by a doctor who had been in training in the late 1940s, of a visit to Seacliff in which the young meds were shown a 'typical' violent schizophrenic in a straitjacket, a young woman he remembers as Janet Frame.

Free PDF Download "Dr Clutha's Book of the World: Janet Paterson Frame, 1924-2004 (Obituary)" Online ePub Kindle