Theoretical allegory/allegorical theory : (post-)colonial spatializations in Janet Frame's The Carpathians and Julia Kristeva's The Old Man and the Wolves

'The allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities'.Fredric Jameson1A large slice of the critical reception of Janet Frame is occupied by post-colonial readings,2 while a smaller but still significant constituency has deployed certain psychoanalytic concepts of Julia Kristeva's to interpret Frame's texts.3 An even smaller number of scholars have combined these approaches.4 Albeit numerically limited, this particular intersection of Frame criticism-what might be called the Kristevan psychoanalytic post-colonialist nexus-raises a number of issues, related to theory and allegory (a mode currentiy witnessing a renaissance of interest amongst various groups),5 that have implications for Frame literary studies far more generally.Leaving aside my own contribution to this sub-set of Frame criticism, Janet Wilson's article 'The Abject and the Sublime: Enabling Conditions of New Zealand's Postcolonial Identity' sandwiches her literary analysis of Frame (and of Allen Curnow and Keri Hulme) between Kristevan-influenced Oedipalism and the incipiently post-colonial circumstances of New Zealand's history. For example: 'New Zealand's colonisation, like that of Australia and Canada and perhaps Singapore, can be described in terms of parent-child relations'; 'all the white setder colonies born out of the crucible of the parent, in this case the Maternal British Empire, it can be argued, emerge into postcolonial subjectivity through a difficult rite de passage'6; and, 'nationhood [can be imaged as] a child gradually differentiating itself from the Maternal Empire in order to acquire subjectivity-conflated with the narrative of psychological identity [emphasis added]'.7 The compression of psychoanalysis and history admitted to in these passages, more particularly the sense that psychoanalysis and history are being related one to one, exposes Wilson's article to the charge of forcing post-colonial New Zealand-ness to conform to a procrustean bed of theory.By slightly resituating the investments of such a critique of Wilson, the argument of the present article may be stated thus: the spatiality of Kristevan psychoanalytic theory does violence to the post-colonial spatiality contained in Janet Frame's last novel, The Carpathians (first published in 1988); furthermore, both these spatialities are expressed via allegorical manoeuvres and recur upon the operations of (literary) theory.8 The oblique methodology that enables this argument constitutes the first occasion (to the author's knowledge) that Kristeva's practice as a novelist has been actively used to reconceptualize her theory. That is, how space operates in Kristeva's allegory The Old Man and the Wolves (first published in 1991 in French and in 1994 in English)9 prompts both a reconsideration of her theory's spatiality and a more general revision of the relations of allegory, theory and spatiality that can be usefully drafted into the service of an interpretation of Frame's The Carpathians. (Allegory itself, therefore, is not the theme of this article, so much as the mutual implications of allegory with notions of spatiality, theory and fiction). Comparison of Kristeva's and Frame's novels-a comparison made piquant by their shared preoccupation with the Eastern European mountain range, the Carpathians-suggests that Kristeva's novel involves theory territorializing fiction, while Frame's novel is an instance of fiction territorializing theory. This article argues that spatiality subtends the operations of both theory and allegory, and also that allegory has always already slipped inside the sleeve of theory, where it inhabits theory in degrees latent or manifest as circumstances determine. As for fiction, depending on how it is situated in relation to theory-whether territorializing it or being territorialized by it-fiction can be either the site of theoretical allegory (as in Frame's novel) or of allegorical theory (as in Kristeva's novel). …

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