“They kill on Wednesdays”: Janet Frame, Modernity and the Holocaust

Abstract

Janet Frame’s third novel Faces in the Water (1961) is now agreed to be more than the autobiographical documentary some took it for on publication, and instead a consciously wrought work of art dealing with themes crucial to twentieth-century thought. These themes are sometimes indirectly indicated by means of a rhizomic method, whereby crucial images and phrases appear and reappear in a particular novel, story or poem, or throughout her corpus, without commentary or obvious synthesis. At times, this exploration involves single words or phrases. Beginning with her use of the Serbo-Croatian “Istina” and the Hebrew “Mavet” to form her protagonist’s name, an exploration of Frame’s references to the Holocaust in the novel, themselves few in number, reveals her awareness of the connections between the utopianism of Western modernity, the industrialized processing of animals for consumption, the Holocaust and the treatment of psychiatric patients. In this she anticipates the work of significant public intellectuals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.