Modernity and the Holocaust counter-memorial: Janet Frame’s American fiction

Abstract

Janet Frame’s novels Intensive Care (1970/1987), Daughter Buffalo (1972), and Living in the Maniototo (1979) were written in the United States and, like her final novel, The Carpathians (1988), in part set there. These works might be termed her “American” fiction, as against the fiction of her earlier “European” phase, to which it is linked by the common experience of western modernity and episodes of the Cold War and, more particularly, the analogies with Jewish experience in Nazi Germany first expressed in Faces in the Water (1961). This article examines Frame’s more specific explorations of Holocaust themes in some of this later fiction and An Autobiography (1989), and suggests a recontextualization of her work in recent theories of Holocaust remembering and especially in Foucault’s concept of the counter-memorial, which emphasizes the importance of individual, idiosyncratic and small-scale remembering and the formal implications this has for art.