Collaborative Work: An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame

 

Collaborative Work_ Reading Club_ Books Up! de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

Volume I: Janet Frame’s Autobiographies

 

"To the Is-Land”

The Hyphenated

 Space

When Janet Frame is asked to write a review of “A Fable “ and other William Faulkner’s novels from the library. She thinks 

“ spinning, spinning, awhirl in pools of words and feeling… How could I write a review of a novelist who clouded my vision with feeling? I returned to the book, reading it again and again, slowly emerging into the clear-fountain light where the characters, the scenes, the meaning appeared starkly outlined, solid, real, good. This was William Faulkner’s world, and I had found it to keep it” (page 309 / Volume 2: An Angel at my Table)

Janet Frame’s words about William Faulkner could as well express the feelings one has when approaching Frame’s biographies: “clouding one’s vision with feeling.” This is all about feeling, poetry, reading about vulnerability, pain and beauty. Jane Campion admits “she has disarmed me” / “struck a blow right to my heart.” I run attuned with these thoughts. She has given a voice to us, the teenage girls and children we were (Jane Campion).

To the Is-land

New Zealand, an island, Janet’s island, a country full of rivers. The book opens with a parade of the many family arterial connections through different lands: Flemish Weavers, descendants of William of Orange, a tinge of Scottish blood, and even African and Maori ascendency...people like places running like rivers through firm land. The narrative spins up through place, physical and metaphorical.

Frame is an island inhabiting the hyphenated vacuum of the is-land, her choice of word ushers us into the first volume of her autobiography. What does Is-land mean? How does the word unthread in this hyphenated separation of a verb and a noun?

Island / Is-land: Janet hoisted in isolation, a piece of land adrift in the immensity of the ocean, a land that resists conquering, and a land to be claimed as the territory of the self. Her body, her land is subjected to plunder: everybody wants to change her, straighten her hair; she must use a girdle so her behind will not be seen; she should not use red lipstick as it does not match her hair. The coarse tunic girdling her body, tightening her, restraining her …

As James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, she forges her way into conquering her ground, her land, the territory of the self, of her imagination. This is a journey of self-discovery as a writer and conquering the land of words, a journey that takes place outside and inside. She describes herself as a commonplace, practical woman.

That year I discovered the word Island, which in spite of all teaching I insisted on calling Is-Land. In our silent reading class at school, when we chose one of the Whitcombes school readers, those thin, fawn-covered books with crude drawings on the cover and speckled pages, I found a story, To the Island, an adventure story that impressed me so much that I talked about it at home. ‘I read a story, To the Is-Land, about some children going to an Is-Land. //’ ‘It’s I-Land,’ Myrtle corrected. //‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s Is-Land. It says,’ I spelled the letters, ‘I-s-l-an-d. Is-land.’ // ‘It’s a silent letter,’ Myrtle said. ‘Like knee.’ // In the end, reluctantly, I had to accept the ruling, although within myself I still thought of it as the Is-Land. (Page 35)

Her parents’ artistry—and their world overflowing with books, music, and painting—shapes her early imagination and forges the passion that would lead her to become a writer. Words captivate her: their meanings, their deceptions, their force. She ploughs her way into poetry.

The process of growing takes place through physical pains, poverty, dereliction, death and through many convulsive historical moments: The Great Depression, the Second World War, the lack of Social Security ( the first Labour Government in New Zealand that guaranteed access to Social Security was elected in 1935). At home, there is the struggle with disease (Brudie’s epileptic fits), death (Myrtle), economic penury and hardship. At Willowglen, the kitchen floor is made of earth. 

In the real world, as she calls it, she shifts through the different pronouns, the family “we”, the students “we,” the institutional “she" of the asylum. She fumbles in search of her "I,” which she finally finds in writing. Upon discovery of the Grimm Brothers’ Tales, she discovers a world where fiction and reality cohabit and blend as she interiorizes and fleshes the stories under the veil of magical impersonations. 

Later, she is marked by the impossible- to - utter - grieving caused by the death of her sister Myrtle. It is only the poets, she broods, following her mother, who can voice the lashing pain of this bereavement.  "Annabel Lee, in a Kingdom by the Sea"  by Edgar Allan Poem serves Janet to articulate the pain of Myrtle's absence:

Eden Street, in Oamaru, New Zealand, the world, in the outbreak of the Second World War… (See: "A Portrait of the Artist" by James Joyce with a similar categorization) She becomes her heroines and her heroes, and as Madame Bovary (Bovarism), she outpours and feeds from the imaginative worlds she reads: 

Gradually I was acquiring an image of myself as a person apartfrom myself as a poet, and in my reading I identified most easilywith the stoical solitary heroine suffering in silence, the ‘plain Jane’content to love the strong, inarticulate hero, who was easily beguiled by the flashily beautiful woman but who turned always in the end (regretfully too late) to the shadowy shy woman he had failed to notice. I saw myself as a ‘background’ person watching, listening. I was not Becky Sharp; I was Emma. Yet I was also Tess and Marty South, as I had once been Anne of Green Gables and Charlotte Brontë (Isabel being Emily, and June Ann). I was Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre and Cathy. And when I could find no heroine to become, I was myself simply adoring the heroes – Jude the Obscure, Raskolnikov, Brutus, rather than Mark Antony, whom everyone liked.

And Shakespeare.

"The End" by Samuel Beckett

“Nothing to be done”

in "The End" by Samuel Beckett

“My way is in the sand, flowing between the shingle and the dune ...hurrying to its beginning, to its end.”

Source:Silence to Silence, a documentary on Beckett

Impassioned, deprived of agency (Petra’s highlight), the old man from Beckett’s novella, “The End,” originally written in French, lets himself be clad and done, on his way out of an unnamed charitable institution, as no more use may be derived from him. Church, hospital, asylum, the place remains uncertain, the man lacks a name, and a string of other unnamed ones, a girl with red braids, an owner, a Turkish/ Greek woman, a boy, a policeman, a man, a priest ... parade the ghostly ride to the end.

“Unreal city, under the fog of a winter down” (T.S.Eliot “The Waste Land”)

The man, well on years, as most of Beckett’s characters are ( “Silence to Silence) walks towards the sought for and inexorable path of his end from the beginning of the narrative (Eva's highlight). The old man, but a shadow, “All I remember is my feet emerging from my shadow, one after the other” (highlighted by Sonsoles ), wears a death man’s suit, and, impervious to the world’s ruthlessness, lives in the small world rather than the big one, as Beckett stated ( “Silence to Silence”), an outcast who wanders through city and countryside in search of a dwelling, a place for self-abandonment.

He feels more identified with the objects that have morphed into his own shape rather than the surrounding human element. A wooden stool bears the shape of his cyst, a bench in the park is indented with his hindside, and the window at the charitable institution has the shape of his eyes. Sleeps in a dung heap, lives in a basement, eager to share the place with a pig, rolls in excrement, brews sores, itches (Sonia’s highlights), pain, physical restlessness keeps him going. Even the crocus he has manured with his own urine has a “wilting stem and a few chlorotic leaves” (page 16).

Despite the dramatic situation of his physical deterioration and isolation, no air of tragedy insufflates the narrative, but just a perfunctory way of facing his destiny. However, some emotional undertones are strewn here and there: a priest offers help, but he does not write his name ( Sonia’s highlight), a man who offers him his abode, and an articulate moment of anger about his son, “that insufferable son of a bitch” (Marian and Geni highlighted this moment):

“One day I caught side of my son. He was striding along with a briefcase under his arm. He took off his hat and bowed and I saw he was as bald as coot. I was almost certain it was he. I turned round to gaze after him. He went bustling along on his duck feet, bowing and scraping and flourishing his hat left and right. The insufferable son of a bitch” (19)

His perambulation not only marks his physical deterioration and stalwart perusal of the end, but it also exposes the cruelty and the disaffection of the many he encounters in his way:

“He was bellowing so loud that snatches of his discourse reached my ears. Union….brothers….Marx….capital...All of a sudden he turned and pointed at me, as at an exhibit. Look at this down and out, he vociferated, a leftover...old, lousy, rotten, ripe for the muckheap” (26) (Nuria and Emma highlighted this passage and commented on it).

An epiphanic moment of social awareness by contrastive output of external perception?

Another contrasting subtlety of the story should not be passed unnoticed as commented on by Cándido and which points to a possible transformative otherness of the old man as a woman. Protean metamorphoses of bodily and situational place: 

"They all refused to take me up. In other clothes, with another face, they might have taken me up. I must have changed since my expulsion from the basement...The face notably seemed to have attained its climacteric. The humble, ingenuous smile would no longer come, nor the expression of candid misery, showing the stars and the distaff."

His final dwelling, a mesmerism, or a real tomb?

“I found a boat, upside down, I righted it, chocked it up with stones and pieces of wood, took out the thwarts and made a bed inside… The sea, the sky, the mountains and the island closed in and crushed me a mighty systole ...The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on” (27)

Note: The title to this essay is an echo of  the last sentence in “Waiting for Godot” which also appears in this story ( Sonia’s highlight)

Carson McCullers "Short Stories," reviewed.

"The Ballad of the Sad Café" by Carson McCullers

Intonations of melancholy in Carson McCuller’s

The Ballad of the Sad Café

 Once upon a time ...

there was a dreary Southern town, imbued with the desertic, thirsty yellow of fading autumnal colours… nothing to do here but listen to the chain gang in the distance. A face, a hand, a shadow lurks behind the window panes of the once lively, but now gone Café. Nothing remains but a half-painted wall, Cousin Lymon gone, and a dismembered heart, Amelia’s.

The whispers of the chatting and prattling community have subsided, and only the narrator’s voice is left to recount in a flashback the events of such a miserable outcome. Tricky narrator, heterodiegetic, omniscient, and unreliable, crooked to the side as the buildings, characters, and hearts (Mónica pointed to the crooked metaphor). A love triangle —Mrs Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Mrs Amelia’s former husband, released from the penitentiary—comprises the parade of poetic grotesqueries to come. 

Miss Amelia’s marriage to robber and seducer Marvin Macey only lasted 10 days due to some “perchance unholiness” (Sonsoles higlighted this)  on their wedding night. A green-cape-clad hunchback ensues. Amelia, who had love galore in her heart, despite her ruddy nature, softens at the sight of Cousin Lymon’s deformity.

Amelia’s infatuation with cousin Lymon is somehow endowed with the same magic quality that her whisky oozes (Sonia pinpointed this), and explained as “Then Miss Amelia did a rare thing; she pulled a bottle from her hip pocket and ...handed it to the hunchback to drink” (page 14).

The whisky in Miss Amelia’s store has the power of uprooting hidden truths; it is elixir-like and transforms the coarsest spirits.

 Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man, it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper, there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire, then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man -- then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood. 

Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again -- this spinner might drink some on a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm, he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart. Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk 

The marsh lily anchors itself in dark, silty depths, its roots clutching unseen beneath the surface. Yet it rises through the murk to bloom out of the swamp, radiant in its full beauty. So too the weaver and the spinner, bound to their labor of endless, rhythmic repetition, are gradually transformed under the spell of Amelia’s liquor. Faerie-tale like the story drifts through distant memories that soothe the ache of solitude. 

Cousin Lymon preys, abuses, twists, and tricks Amelia, but love is all-powerful. Marvin Macey comes back to take his grudge due to his unrequited love, and as if a spell was cast, or a curse … (Sonia pointed at this), he mesmerizes Cousin Lymon and subdues him in vassalage (Medieval love). Greedy and sneaky Cousin Lymon is transformed by the sole presence of Mavey. Cousin Lymon’s volatile nature is brandished in the visible lemon traces of his own character, once kindled  by the spark of admiration, infatuation, or perverseness  are visible to the eye.

They both fleece Amelia off love and material richness, shatter her cabinet of curios (Eva pinpointed how Amelia treasures beauty in her small world), and leave her pining and alone, a forsaken lily engulfed by the swamp.

The Ballad of the Sad Café bespeaks thus of the transformative power of love, which, unrequited, lacerates the heart and ensues in the searing loneliness of the human soul. 

All is broken, deserted, torn, cracked, and crooked, only the singing of the chain gang in a coda can be heard, but the "Twelve Mortal Men" dwell outside the story, they are liminal to it.  It is the same chain gang that ushered us into the town and the story but their song has now somehow changed, inviting us to brood with a broader heart about the story of the Sad Café.