Though New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924–2004) lived at a time of growing dissatisfaction with European cultural models, and though her (auto-)biography, fiction and letters all testify to the fact that a direct encounter between herself and Buddhism occurred, her work has, so far, never been examined from the vantage point of its indebtedness to Buddhism. It is of the utmost significance, however, that a Buddhist navigation of Frame’s texts should shed fresh light on large segments of the Framean corpus which have tended to remain obdurately mysterious. This includes passages centering on such themes as the existence of a non-dual world or a character’s sudden embrace of a non-ego-like self. Of equal significance is the conclusion one then draws that this unharnessed world which human beings are often unable to embrace has always been right under their nose, for, whenever the aspect of the intellect that filters perceptions into mutually excluding categories fails to function, he or she finds a place of subjective arrival in, and sees, this supposedly unknowable ‘beyond’. Thus, possibly against the grain of mainstream criticism, this study argues that Janet Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, though not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards evoking such alterity.

Table of contents

Foreword

Preface
Fear and Temptation

Introduction
Janet Frame in East-West Encounters
1. A Buddhist Exploration
2. Reception and Methodology

Chapter One
The Dissolution of the Self and the Selfishness of the Author: “Jan Godfrey” and Other Texts

Chapter Two
The Ground of Our Deepest Vibration: The Edge of the Alphabet

Chapter Three
“Nothing, Not a Scrap of Identity”: A State of Siege

Chapter Four
Being in Equilibrium: “Two Sheep,” “The Day of the Sheep” and Other Short Stories

Chapter Five
Fences of Being: “A Note on the Russian War,” “Prizes” and “Royal Icing”

Chapter Six
Prometheus Unbound: Scented Gardens for the Blind

Chapter Seven
And “Time Racing, Unexplained”: The Adaptable Man

Chapter Eight
On Cut Fingers, Unreal Deserts and Real Tears: Living in the Maniototo

Chapter Nine
In the New-Old World of an “Elsewhere Race”: The Carpathians

Conclusion
This Is It

Appendix A
A Letter by Janet Frame

Appendix B
The “Gravity Star” Clipping

Notes

Bibliography

Index