The Carpathians by Janet Frame
"The Carpathians" is a complex novel by Janet Frame that delves into themes of identity, language, and the postcolonial experience in New Zealand. Central to the narrative is Dinah Wheatstone, an impostor narrator, who embodies the novel's exploration of authenticity and reality. The story begins with Mattina Brecon, who relocates to the town of Puamahara, where she becomes entangled with her neighbors and particularly with Dinah, who challenges the nature of existence and authorship.
The narrative structure is unconventional, as it features multiple voices taking turns to narrate, creating an illusion of authorship that mirrors the disorientation experienced by the characters. As the plot unfolds, the town faces a surreal disaster characterized by a metaphorical "rain" of letters, which reduces individuals to their most primitive forms of expression, signifying a profound existential crisis. Ultimately, the inhabitants of Kowhai Street fall victim to this calamity, leaving only Mattina to reflect on the events.
The novel concludes with a haunting sense of loss and the preservation of memory through those marginalized in society, such as the mentally ill and poets. Frame's work invites readers to contemplate the nature of reality, the power of language, and the fragility of human connection in the context of cultural and personal dislocation.
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The Carpathians by Janet Frame
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1988
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Carpathians is one of Frame’s later novels. In this work Frame has fully developed the themes found in her earlier books. These themes include the imposture of the writer and of language itself, postcolonial New Zealand, and the experience of insanity.
The Carpathians has an impostor narrator, Dinah Wheatstone. In the novel multiple narrative voices take turns assuming the role of author or central authority. The reader assumes the novelist is JHB, a writer and husband of Mattina Brecon, but finds out at the end that it is her son John Henry, who announces that both his parents died when he was young, and that he never knew them. This series of illusory authors describing illusive experience becomes an analogy for mistaken notions of reality.
Mattina begins the narrative by recounting her trip to the town of Puamahara, where she rents a house on Kowhai Street. Mattina becomes acquainted with her neighbors and meets Dinah Wheatstone (Dinny), a self-proclaimed impostor and novelist. Mattina agrees to read Dinny’s manuscript and, in part two, the narrative voice shifts to Dinny, who describes herself as a graduate impostor and who denies the “existence of anything, of anywhere and anytime.” In the course of the novel the reader becomes familiar, one by one, with the “ordinary, extraordinary” people of Kowhai Street. At the same time, Mattina begins to experience what she calls the presence of the disorder of space and time.
Mattina is awakened one night by cries in the street. Her neighbors are being destroyed in a deadly rain of words and letters, which are falling on them as seed and jewels and excrement. The rain is the letters of all the languages of the world, and the work of “transforming being, thought and language” has begun. The people are reduced to primitive, prelinguistic sounds. Within these sounds there is “a new music, each note effortlessly linking the next, like dew-drops or mercury.” The people of Kowhai Street experience the disaster of “the unknowing and unbeing that accompanies death.” The following morning all the inhabitants, including the impostor novelist, are dead. Only Mattina survives.
Mattina returns to New York. Before she goes, she buys Kowhai Street—a reminder of America’s new economic power. Mattina dies soon after, but not before asking her husband to go to see her new property in New Zealand. She also asks him to visit a former inhabitant of Kowhai Street, Decima Townsend, who is autistic and who lives in a mental institution outside town. Jake visits New Zealand but is unable to learn anything about what really happened at Kowhai Street, since everyone has either forgotten about it or denies the calamity occurred. In the end, the memory of truth is kept alive only by the “Housekeepers of Ancient Springtime”: the insane, the poets, who live at the edge of the alphabet.
Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill, et al., eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.
Delbaere, Jeanne, ed. The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame. Sydney, N.S.W.: Dangaroo Press, 1992.
Evans, Patrick. Janet Frame. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
King, Michael. An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame. Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Books, 2002.
King, Michael. Wrestling with an Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
Oettli-van Delden, Simone. Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness. Wellington, New Zealand: Victorian University Press, 2003.
Panny, Judith Dell. I Have What I Gave. New York: George Braziller, 1993. Rev. ed. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2002.
Ross, Robert L., ed. International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. New York: Garland, 1991.
Wilkse, Maria. Materialisations of a Woman Writer: Investigating Janet Frame’s Biographical Legend. New York: P. Lang, 2006.