“My writing saved me” – Janet Frame
In 1951, following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Janet Frame was admitted to a mental hospital.
In an era before the development of psychotherapeutic medication there were few treatments available for patients suffering from severe mental illness.
One “cure” did exist, however: the transorbital lobotomy.
To perform a transorbital lobotomy, a surgeon inserts a modified ice pick through a patient’s eye socket using a hammer. The pick is then moved from side-to-side to separate the frontal lobes from the thalamus, the part of the brain that controls sensory input.
The theory behind the procedure held that cutting the “emotional” input within the brain would control or lessen the symptoms of a wide-range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia.
The post-lobotomy reality however, was very different. Many patients suffered a distinct mental dullness and an impairment of their capacity to think abstractly and creatively. Some suffered permanent brain damage.
In 1951, Janet Frame was scheduled to undergo such a procedure.
Then her short story collection “The Lagoon” won the Hubert Church Award, and the procedure was cancelled.
[tweetthis]Janet Frame had been saved. Her writing had saved her.[/tweetthis]
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‘Schizophrenia is a severe brain disorder in which people interpret reality abnormally. Schizophrenia may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior.’
This is not an essay about madness. Nor is it an essay about Janet Frame’s perceived madness.
Too much has been made of that already, and Frame herself was more than aware of it.
‘Until Jane Campion’s film I was known as the mad writer. Now I’m the mad fat writer’
Rather, this is an essay about the way a writer sees the world, and the specific sensitivities a writer brings to their experiences; experiences which may come close to madness at times, but which we would do well to avoid labelling as such.
In particular I want to look at the stories in the book which saved Janet Frame: ‘The Lagoon’.
Abnormal Reality
The world depicted within the stories in ‘The Lagoon’ is a familiar place. It fascinates, delights, and terrifies, in ways the world always does.
And yet, there is no denying it is also a little off centre.
It’s as if the familiar has been placed behind splintered glass, leaving the outlines recognisable, while the whole becomes disturbingly disjointed.
It’s there in the way the landscape is described.
In the title story ‘The Lagoon’ for example, the water clearly harbours secrets.
‘At low tide the water is sucked back into the harbour and there is no lagoon, only a stretch of dirty grey sand shaded with dark pools of sea water where you may find a baby octopus if you are lucky, or the spotted orange old house of a crab or the drowned wreckage of a child’s toy boat.’
What’s so intriguing about this story is the way Frame uses her observations of the landscape to help build up the revelations and secrets which will unfold as the story progresses.
It’s as if the landscape itself is prepared to reveal hidden truths to us if only we are capable of stopping to look.
And I think this is the specific insight a writer of Janet Frame’s calibre can bring to the world.
That child’s boat in the water is a portent of sorts but we only recognise it as such because it is pointed out to us. It is not some discarded trash, washed ashore without meaning.
It holds the key to the entire story.
The narrator in ‘The Lagoon’ is in some ways like the reader. We, and she, are being shown things, we are being made aware of a subconscious understanding, slowly and deftly, guided by a writer who sees the world from a different perspective.
A writer’s perspective.
It’s a distinct way of seeing the world that goes beyond the immediate and the sensory to reach a newer kind of understanding through imagination and an ‘abnormal’ take on reality.
Perhaps this is what the committee of the Hubert Church Award also understood when they read these stories back in 1951. Here is a woman who can present the world to us afresh, who can take this ‘abnormal reality’ and give it form and meaning. Who’s unique articulation of the world allows us to understand it better.
The Voices In Our Heads
Writers have long puzzled over the source of their ‘inner voice’. The inspiration that often grips a writer is, in some ways, a process of letting go of your ‘own’ voice, in order to let in that of ‘another’ – the characters in your stories.
Charles Dickens was reputedly so attuned to the voices in his head, that at public readings he was able to delight audiences by producing animated characterisations for each them.
When asked about the process of channelling these voices and characters he explained: “some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don’t invent it – really do not – but see it, and write it down“.
As readers we too experience something similar when we read – ‘hearing’ our own inner voice interpret and imagine the story on the page in front of us.
But what is it like for a writer to experience the actual creation of such a voice? To transform that auditory hallucination into a character and voice which can be absorbed and understood by another person, namely, the reader.
In ‘The Lagoon’ Janet Frame comes very close to providing us with a glimpse into what it may be like to experience such a magical process.
In the story ‘Dossy’, we are invited into a little girl’s world – a world full of daydreams and innocent observations.
As the little girl plays with her bigger friend, Dossy, she imagines her friend’s home, a fantastical place full of wonder and allure:
‘The little girl thought that Dossy must live in a big house at the end of a long long street. With a garden. And a plum tree. And a piano in the front room. And a piano-stool to go round and round on.’
The voice in this story, as with so many of the stories in this collection, is a child’s, a quaint and slightly old-fashioned voice, all ‘goshes’ and ‘golly’s, and it can easily fool the reader into believing the world is just as sweet and innocent.
But a dark undercurrent lurks nonetheless. In ‘Dossy’ the language, and the voice set the reader up for the final twist in the tale. But it’s not so much that you ‘see’ the ending coming as much as you ‘feel’ it.
For Dossy and her little friend are one and the same. But for most of the story we do not know this, and so we experience Dossy’s imaginary world as she is experiencing it. We believe in it in the same way as she believes in it.
And the revelation, when it comes, is shocking, not because it is some sort of trick played on the reader and revealed with a flourish and a ta-da! Rather, it is shocking because Frame has so thoroughly succeeded in allowing us, the reader, to step inside Dossy’s mind that the understanding that there is nothing there – nothing beyond the dreams of a lonely and imaginative little girl – hits us hard.
Every time I read this story, I am struck by the poignancy of that idea. By the sense that those things Frame has encouraged me to imagine, the world she has allowed me to enter and envisage, seem very real while I am experiencing them. The vividness of the girls’ play and conversation in the story is so rich that to accept it as nothing more than an imagining, a hallucination, detracts from its solidness, its realness, even though I know I am inhabiting a world which exists only as a story on a page
Is this as close as we can ever hope to get to the mind of a writer? Is this as close as we can ever hope to get to a mind which is ‘disordered’ and ‘deluded’?
I think it is.
And what it shows us is that in the right hands – in the right mind – there are writers out there, people out there, who can take us beyond ourselves and help us consider the world through others’ eyes. And as such, I think this can only enrich our experience and help us develop the compassion and empathy we need to feel truly human, truly humane.
We too can be saved by writing such as this.
And so I’ll leave the final word to Janet Frame herself:
‘We were all walking inside ourselves. We were sitting in little brown summer-houses, and touching brown picket-fences in our minds. And sometimes if, like Helen, we went running in our bare feet down the path and over the stones, we weren’t running home, we were running from ourselves.’ The Park
You can find out more about Janet Frame and her extraordinary life over at the official Janet Frame website
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