1The publication of the collection of short stories entitled The Lagoon literally saved Janet Frame’s life. She was on the list for a lobotomy but was spared at the last moment thanks to The Hubert Church Award she won for her writing. Throughout her autobiographical trilogy she repeatedly and legitimately says that literature saved her life. So it is fitting that in return she dedicated her life to literature: ‘It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life’ (II, 106). ‘Keel and Kool’ is one of the fictionalized versions of Frame’s eldest sister’s death, a childhood episode, which is also the subject of another story, ‘The Secret’, of one chapter in Owls Do Cry (Frame’s first autobiographical novel), of a poem ‘Some Thoughts on Bereavement’ and the object of one chapter – entitled ‘A Death’ – in the autobiographical trilogy published thirty years later, as a kind of new prism through which to re-read the rest of her work.
2The story tackles the taboo of death and the strategies of avoidance the family – or rather each member individually – sets up to try and forget the pain, centering on the photograph as a ‘proleptic reminiscence’ of both the ‘ghost photo’ preceding Myrtle’s death in the Autobiography and the photograph reconstructed after her death. Through these intertextual echoes, ‘Keel and Kool’ enters into dialogue with both ‘The Secret’ and the Autobiography, creating what Lejeune in his Pacte Autobiographique calls a ‘stereographic effect’ (Lejeune, 42). The autobiography sheds a retrospective light on Frame’s novels and short stories. All her works, I would argue, participate in the construction of an autobiographical monument or an autobiographical space: there is not only one autobiography stricto sensu but every work, be it a novel, a poem or a short story is marked with the autobiographical stamp. There is only one family of texts, or an autobiographical jigsaw puzzle. This is particularly striking in Frame’s case: ‘the writer’s affective investment comes through the fiction as sure as daylight’ (de Lauretis, 54). Once one has read the autobiography – let’s call it the official version – the rest of her production cannot but be read through the autobiographical prism, especially the works dealing explicitly with ‘real’ events, such as Myrtle’s death or Frame’s repeated stays in psychiatric hospitals (which is the core of the autobiographical novel Faces in the Water which Frame herself calls ‘documentary fiction’, as if she meant to warn her readers against the tempting equation between ‘bio’ and ‘graphy’). Frame is always in an ambiguous, in-between, paradoxical position, which leads her to choose to write an autobiography, while simultaneously denouncing the genre as burdensome or treacherous. But Janet Frame declared in an interview that autobiography is ‘found fiction’ and that it was just another manner of working on the same matter: ‘I am always in the fictional mode, and autobiography is found fiction. I look at everything from the point of view of fiction…’ (Alley, 3).
3What is interesting from a critical point of view is the back and forth movement between the autobiographical novels and the autobiography: if readers want to ‘know more’ or to fill the gaps left by the elliptical narration of her stays in hospitals, they should read Faces in the Water. Autobiographical material is transformed into fiction – ‘reality is the ore of polished fiction’ (III, 19) – before the writing of the ‘official version’, as if Frame had needed all those years to ‘tell the whole truth’ (to use Gisèle Mathieu Castellani’s terminology and judicial metaphor in La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie), as if the ‘real’ truth were too painful to be told ‘directly’ and easier to tell under the guise of fiction. One of the reasons for this may be that her first autobiographical essay, written at University and in which she related an attempted suicide, was the cause for her confinement: ‘the truth is always painful to extract, whether it be the truth of fact or the truth of fiction’ (III, 168). The autobiographical gesture implies exposure, taking the ‘I’ from the shelter of fiction. In one of her interviews, Frame spoke of ‘the burden upon the I to tell all’, hence the procrastination of the autobiography as both a personal and narrative strategy she may have found painful but nonetheless necessary and cathartic.
4‘Keel and Kool’ centres upon a death that is never mentioned directly, the mother, as in the autobiography, resorting to the usual euphemisms meant to alleviate the pain: ‘passed or went’ (even preceded by a dash that translates the speaker’s hesitation and reluctance to say the word). As Mercer again points out, ‘Frame is not evading the taboo of death but, on the contrary, examines the many techniques commonly used in our culture for that evasion’, (Mercer, 26) so many strategies of avoidance. The aptly named Eva (she was the first born) is the omni-absent presence in the story, haunting all the members of the family without any of them actually mentioning it explicitly, as if, by adopting the mother’s creed, the very fact of talking about death could make it even truer, could perform it and certify its reality. ‘Silence, in its semantic indeterminacy, is another form of cliché’ (Lecercle, 129; my translation), and euphemisms are just another form of silence. Frame denounces the collective euphemization of death, even if she herself often resorts to euphemisms (when she relates her stays in psychiatric hospitals, for example). This paper addresses three topics that are actually closely interrelated as they all centre around death – the prime mover of the story –, but that are also at the core of Frame’s creative enterprise. And in this respect, ‘Keel and Kool’ is emblematic of her writing in general. The first topic is words and their ambiguity: one can be saved or killed by words, as Frame’s own life testifies. Like words, photographs are just as ambiguous (they either kill or preserve life), but also just as useful. Art, in all its forms (and the short story is itself a kind of snapshot) both lies and tells the truth, like the autobiography itself where Frame declares to a puzzled reader: ‘I’ve created selves but I’ve never written of me’ (III, 154).
5The whole story could be interpreted as a series of three pictures, three scenes, with the two direct references to the photographs as the embedded emblematization of photographic activity. The incipit of the short story is a direct echo to the episode of the ghost photo in Volume I of the Autobiography where Myrtle does not come out in the picture, a harbinger of her imminent death: ‘Myrtle appeared to be transparent’ (I, 106) with the chapter ending on this eloquent metaphorical sentence: ‘the buried fear’ (I, 105). As Susan Sontag puts it, the photograph reveals a hidden truth. What comes out in this ‘autobiographical photograph’, what is revealed, is Myrtle’s approaching death. Here the father, as the master of ceremonies, conducts the stereotypical ritual of the family photograph, meant to keep/preserve/frame/ a precious moment, or to try and recreate what is lost through photographic recording or memory (the camera itself is a precious object he wants to store in a safe place) which he describes as ‘happy’, the very adjective being resumed by the mother: ‘children were such happy little things’. Clichés are so many shields or buttresses against the intrusion of Reality.
6In the collection of essays on Clichés already quoted, Anne-Laure Fortin writes that the semantic field of killing and photographing is the same: ‘to shoot’, a snapshot, or even a shot. (Fortin, 305; my translation). The photographer is a predator. There is indeed something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder (Sontag, 14-15) . I would however argue that it may be a necessary murder, at least for the living, who desperately cling to the (false) idea that the dead are not really dead, since one can still see them in a picture. The aim of the photograph is certainly paradoxical or ambiguous: it is ‘an image that produces death while aiming at keeping life’ (Barthes, 144; my translation) but also at escaping death by vanquishing/stopping/ time.
7In the short story, the father ‘shoots’ the living in a very stereotypical scene where the verbal and the photographic clichés are united: ‘the French word means both trite expression and photographic negative’ (Sontag, 173). Winnie, for her part, is concerned with their ‘looking good’, another form of cliché question people anxiously ask when being photographed: the photographed want an idealized picture, ‘a photograph of themselves looking their best’ (Sontag, 85). The mother, for her part, would like to resurrect dead Eva with her picture. Though meant to celebrate life and happiness, the snapshot establishes a direct link with Eva’s/Myrtle’s death: the ‘you’ve got her photo’ is a verbatim echo, a self plagiarism, to and of the autobiography, an eloquent instance of the circumstantial clichés Frame keeps debunking: the photograph is supposed to be a remedy, a pseudo-presence that is only ‘the dramatic accomplishment of absence’ to resurrect the dead, who, as Frame ironically writes, ‘are no longer photographed’ (unless they are famous). In the Autobiography, dead Myrtle, who had lost an arm in the initial picture (‘he was forced to leave behind one of Myrtle’s arms’, I, 87) acquires a new one thanks to a photographer’s skill, to photographic surgery as it were: she is literally re-membered (after having been dismembered) as if her whole body was needed to help the process of mourning.
8Like the photograph, words aim at euphemizing death, and the mother (who, in accordance with the traditional distribution of roles, is the one who speaks), is the champion in the field: ‘better to forget’. The words are a denial of the very need to remember, of the impossibility to forget, emphasized on the contrary (and simultaneously) by the photo (the form of the inner monologue indicates the extent to which she has integrated/interiorized the clichés). Eva ‘passed’ or ‘went’, says the mother, beating about the word, in a repetition of her interdictions: the children were forbidden to utter the word morgue as if its very utterance had the performative power of making death come true, in an illustration of Deleuze and Guattari’s version of the ‘speech-act’: not a mere utterance but ‘an act of power which produces transformations or make things happen’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 79). In ‘Keel and Kool’, death has already taken place, but saying the word would confirm its reality, would definitively ‘bury the dead’, and the mother advocates the repression of expression, contrary to what happens in the autobiography where the word is allowed (Myrtle’s death is linked to a word which it actualizes), even encouraged as a form of catharsis, relieving, deadening the pain. For this family there are many clichés, but no word (I would add ‘of their own’) with which to express their actual grief. The language of everyday usage renders their feelings ‘inexpressible’, literally ‘unspeakable’. And the language of everyday exemplifies what Terry Sturm in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature calls the predominance of a form of collective langue over individual parole, a predominance which Frame herself denounces. In the second volume of the Autobiography, Frame is shocked on receiving a letter from her admired teacher John Forrest on her second sister’s death by drowning (in a frightful repetition of the first tragedy): ‘I remember the complete shock of its language and my inability to accept the formal conventional expressions of sympathy and to accept that John Forrest was so lacking in imaginative understanding’ (II, 91). As Mercer again points out, ‘She is merciless in her depiction of the pathetic inefficacy of the conventional phrases of consolation’. What Frame expects of others and tries to create herself, is a kind of new poetic language that may use the ‘old’ words (the best example is the way she writes and pronounces Is-Land) but that is conscious of its own inadequacies. What she denounces is the kind of clichés used by both her mother and Forrest, clichés that fossilize language, are only ‘pre-cooked thought’.
9However, when Janet’s sister brings her the published version of ‘The Lagoon’, Janet is surprised that there is no photograph on the cover, and on coming out of hospital, her first act is to have her photo taken to convince herself she is not dead or rather no longer dead – ‘a nothing, a nobody’: ‘Well I was alive again’ (I, 130). She also insists on the discrepancy between her self as she perceives it and the image she sees in the picture: ‘A photograph is the birth of oneself as other’ (Barthes, 28). But I would argue that it is at least a birth (‘other’ is better than ‘nothing’), which again confirms the ambiguous status of a photograph which we could compare with the ambiguous status of fiction. As I have argued at the beginning, this story, itself built on three scenes, is like a series of photos. And though it is fictional, it is also cathartic for the writer, as cathartic as the photo is for the living. It is interesting that the most recent version of the autobiography should contain photographs of Frame and her family, to increase the ‘reality effect’, or maybe to authenticate the narrative (as for the photo Frame would have wished to see on her book). Frame is again caught in a double-bind: she cannot avoid the snare of clichés. When she herself talks of her time in hospital, she resorts to ellipses or paralipses (so many discursive strategies of avoidance) so as not to frighten ‘the normal’ and thus to sound more credible, not over-dramatic: ‘If I talked of my time in hospital, I described only the amusing incidents and the stereotypes of patients – the Jesus Christ, the Queen, the Empress’ (II, 101-102). In the present case, the loss is both emotional and material: Eva was the first born, and would have been old enough to help the family (Myrtle does so by working for ‘unsavoury’ Mrs P). The signifier ‘blow’ is repeated twice (like a deformed echo to ‘happy’), and applied to both mother and father. There is no way of trying to forget the unforgettable. Father and mother try, but in vain, to exorcise their pain by turning their attention to other trivial activities such as fishing or reading. The mother’s sigh is an explicit though unworded expression of her suffering which finds a repeated echo in the surrounding landscape. After taking the picture, after ‘shooting’, the father goes fishing, ‘as if trying to dodge (yet another) blow” from above, like a character in a film (‘the End is printed across the screen’) or in a book, as unreal as Myrtle in the ghost photo, as diminished as Joan at the end of the text. Reality and fiction are fused and confused as usual in Frame’s works ever since she epiphanically discovered Grimm’s Fairy Tales: ‘The world of living and the world of reading became linked in a way I had not noticed before’ (I, 54), to the point that she feels that famous authors such as Proust or Tolstoy – so many angels at her table – are sharing her life when she works in Frank Sargeson’s hut. Winnie is afraid her father might drown – ‘once bitten…’ – or even that her two parents might die, because since Eva’s death, the whole world has turned hostile or upside down, and Winnie steps out of her role as daughter to become her father’s mother, worrying for him, protecting him, like her mother, Mrs Todd, whose name, an eloquent bearer of death, (at least in German) could be a determinism (the name of the parents will be visited upon the children). ‘Don’t go near the river’ warns the mother. Sky and river are taken in a specular threatening relationship where grey, the colour of death, prevails.
10As in most of Frame’s short stories, the point of view is that of a child and the stories are childhood stories. Frame emphasizes the gap between adults and children, and the latter’s superior knowledge or instinctive wisdom. If Mrs Todd’s clichéd commentary ‘children are such happy little things’ is ironically undermined by the narrator in the second part of the text, the irony is also Winnie’s who, even at her age, is only too well aware that children are not necessarily so: ‘The family is anything but happy (…) the story sets about disproving the accuracy of this ready cliché (…..) Frame reveals the desperate unhappiness which can be experienced by a bereaved child belying any notion of childhood as inherently innocent and carefree’ (Mercer, 24). The child’s way of thinking or speaking is rendered through the polysyndetons, an accumulation of the coordinator ‘and’, mimicking childish language in its refusal of subordination. The coordinator ‘and’ plays its role fully in the misleading title, since the coordination significantly disappears at the end, Keel and Kool being forever separated. Patrick Evans notices that ‘sudden pain or death intrude often in the form of dark or threatening birds, as in ‘Swans’’ (Evans, 42). At the age of three, ‘Frame composed her first story: ‘Once upon a time there was a bird. One day a hawk came out of the sky and ate the bird. The next day a big bogie came out from behind the hill and ate up the hawk for eating up the bird’ (Hansson, 5). The alliterative onomatopoeic pair not only mimics a bird’s cry but could also be read as a variation on the clichéd sentence: ‘dead and gone’ (‘kill/ed and cool’), a reality the parents cannot bring themselves to face. The verb ‘pretend’ ending the photographic session could be the family motto. The photo aims at recreating a ‘normal’ stereotypical family, both mother and father behaving as if nothing had happened, the two girls playing at being ladies: all the world is a stage.
11Whereas the parents try to read or fish in order to forget, Winnie, the youngest and Joan, Eva’s best friend, engage in games which end up in fights for the possession of dead Eva. The very first sentence that marks the withdrawal of the two girls into ‘a world of their own’ could be read as a prolepsis of what they do next: ‘they raced each other’, which finds a verbal echo in the tit-for-tat, parrot-like dialogue: ‘she showed me too’ where the two girls try to outbid each other. Joan, Winnie grudgingly admits, has long dark hair, like Eva. The reader of the autobiography knows what a torment Janet’s hair is for her, emphasizing a physical difference she finds difficult to bear as it means ostracization, whereas Joan’s long hair is a privilege that seems to enable her, like Marguerite in the Autobiography (it is significant that the two girls should be foreigners) to use a ‘fashionable’ vocabulary Winnie envies. To her mind, it is as if physical beauty were giving her the freedom and the right to act and speak the way she likes. The reference to clothes is another of Frame’s obsessions which we could call the Cinderella syndrome. In the Autobiography, she complains about the inadequate uniform, which, instead of concealing difference, only emphasizes it, about the terrifying list of clothes she has to buy to enter University, the too narrow school tunic (a softened version of the straight-jacket?). Women’s autobiographies, Irigaray argues, are more concerned with the body than men’s. What starts off as a game or a fairy-tale, with the two girls, like in the autobiography, pretending to be ladies or princesses, quickly deteriorates into a fight for the possession of dead Eva, who has become the stake. The nostalgic recreation of the past (the game follows a movement from present to past and back to present) misses its cathartic compensatory function, only increasing Winnie’s suffering. Eva and Joan had shared secrets, with Eva playing the initiator, – ‘she taught me’ – like Poppy in the Autobiography, but Winnie, because of her age, was excluded from their games, desperately trying, like Janet in the Autobiography, to decipher their codes. Winnie cannot bear the intimacy Joan evokes in a familiar childish-sadistic-rhetorical question: ‘Didn’t Eva show you?’ (The question finds a mute echo in Winnie’s inner monologue: ‘Why hadn’t Eva told her?’). What Winnie regrets is that Eva never showed her how to make Christmas trees, which are beautiful magic objects, as Winnie again grudgingly admits: ‘Winnie had never seen such a beautiful thing….’ Winnie tries to put an end to the game by yawning, a sonorous silence, aiming at breaking communication and arousing Joan’s exasperation and boredom. Her ‘I am tired’ aims at the same effect: the ‘happy little things’ are tired of pretending to be happy.
12Winnie’s accusations against Joan are but another illustration of the confusion between fiction and fact: she revisits fairy-tales, legends (the Homeric siren) and romantic poetry: the Albatross is ‘a Christian soul one must hail in God’s name’ (Coleridge, l.65-66) and not kill. Winnie pictures in Joan a figure of the Unheimlich, a kind of witch, who is supposedly punished with green hair, the colour of sea-weed, for the sin of her father who had shot an albatross. The accusations culminate in the final sentence (The word ‘sentence’ has to be taken in its semantic ambiguity): ‘You are a liar’, both a direct judgement from the accuser but also Eva’s reported and post-mortem opinion of the accused, according to the accuser. Winnie’s transforming Joan into a baby is also the revenge of the youngest against those who had excluded her from their games. The verbal violence turns into a physical attack through which Winnie destroys the beautiful Christmas tree and pushes Joan violently as a form of retaliation for one who is too beautiful and was too close to Eva. Winnie’s reiterated anaphoric wish that punctuates the whole story: (‘she wished’) fails in its performativity. Her discursive witchcraft is not powerful enough to eradicate the intruder: ‘she wished Joan were away and there were just Father and Mother and Winnie, and no Joan’ (KK 4) with the comma typographically ostracizing the outsider, the intruder, the disruptive element. Joan is not a member of the family as the father’s hierarchical code of kissing shows: ‘he pulled Joan’s hair too but he didn’t kiss her because she was the girl over the road and no relation’. Yet, after Winnie’s attack of Joan, the roles might be reversed with Joan, the martyr, the offended party, becoming a surrogate daughter, replacing either dead Eva or bad Winnie, usurping her place in the family, dispossessing her of her home. What Winnie fears most is that Joan might ‘tell’, an echo to the scene in the Autobiography where Janet stole money from her father to buy sweets for her schoolmates and was punished by the teacher. And if Joan tells, Winnie’s life will be hell, with nowhere to go, ‘no place on earth for me’ (I, 32). Winnie’s obsession and fear is what Frame so eloquently calls ‘homelessness of self’, the feeling of not belonging, allied to a desperate wish to belong – ‘the euphoria of belonging’ (II, 18) – which is Frame’s personal dilemma. The self is to be built through geography: ‘ Frame’s desperate quest for identity, belonging and integration is expressed in the obsessive compulsive repetition of the signifier ‘place’, systematically associated with the possessives ‘my’ and ‘mine’’ (Bazin, 314). The Todds may recompose a new family, a new trinity, excluding Winnie, punishing her for her crime: she has sinned against society, morals and religion. Ostracization or exile are the price to pay. Taking refuge in the tree answers Winnie’s quest for a nest, a cradle where the branches, in typical pathetic fallacy, rock her up and down, sighing a lullaby. If her parents are about to reject her, Winnie finds a surrogate family in nature. The tree is home but the scenario she creates with the reiterated ‘would’ throughout the antepenultimate paragraph of the story only increases her despair, denying her this home she is pining for. She pictures a new family with Eva sharing the biscuits but she would not be part of it, just the not-so-detached observer, taking pictures or recording the event.
13Winnie is gradually grasping the full meaning of death, of loss: ‘the cost was the entire removal of Myrtle (…) a complete disappearance and not even a trial, just to see how it worked’ (I, 107). Myrtle/Eva is dead for good, and not merely playing at being dead. Winnie’s feelings however are ambiguous: she can now wear her sister’s much envied pyjamas, while regretting her absence at the picnic. The privative prefix ‘un-’ drives Eva’s death home: the pyjamas are no longer needed by their owner (neither is the yellow quilt that remains as ‘unruffled’ as a dead bird’s feathers) whose death however and paradoxically, not to say comically, entitles her to an impressive number of possessions: ‘It was so funny about Eva and the flowers and telegrams and Auntie May coming and bringing sugar buns and custard squares’. Winnie resumes the list at the end in a verbatim echo of the autobiography where Frame ironically remarks that the dead have far more than the living, thereby denouncing another stereotypical social rite. Winnie’s tragic scenario momentarily gives way to a new more hopeful one with Eva no longer dead, but resurrected as a twin, both she and Winnie wearing at last the same pyjamas and playing Tinker Taylor. The two youthful happy birds of the autobiography ready to take flight are however reduced to a death-like ‘white as chalk seagull’, who plays alternately Keel or Kool’s part. Winnie’s voice has subsided into the mere murmur of one who knows that the dream, or fairy-world, she has just been creating, was but another form of make-believe. Neither Keel nor Kool will now ever cry: ‘there was no one to answer her’(KK 6). The attempt at recreating the lost nest of sisterly union is a painful failure. The coordination of the title has disappeared for good, appearing retrospectively as a stylistic mark of wishful thinking: Keel and Kool are forever apart. The whole story is a story of possession and dispossession, of memory and loss. The pain of death remains, be it expressed or repressed, without any possible alleviation, the last word testifying to its unavoidable eternity.
14The story takes place in the autobiographical space Janet Frame has constructed from work to work till the publication of the official autobiography. ‘Keel and Kool’ is a variation on the same, autobiography ‘with a difference’, a generic mixture we could call autofiction. ‘The story of a life is always the fiction of a life’ (Barry; my translation). It is a mixture of fiction and memory as if fiction were a way of exorcising a trauma brought onto the page with the help of memory and imagination, hence the key role of fiction, or fictional autobiography, or simply writing (and I will stress once more Frame’s refusal to distinguish between autobiography and fiction). In his autobiographical essay L’Initiative aux maux Serge Doubrovsky writes: ‘A writer’s life is his life in his text. The very movement and form of writing are the only real trace, the only possible inscription of his self, both completely invented but totally true/faithful’ (Lecarme, 282; my translation). Writing literally saved Janet Frame’s life, writing her off the lobotomy list, but could not alleviate the pain of the loss, which the very last words of the text so powerfully express.
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