Abstract
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Janet Frame reserved for last what is arguably the most ambitious project of her career: the deconstruction of Western conceptions of truth and knowledge. Taking us on an imaginary return to the origin of Western civilisation as we know it - the Biblical Garden of Eden - she introduces us, in The Carpathians, to the myth of the Memory Flower, implicitly asking what may have been if, "in the beginning," humans had gained memory instead of knowledge. Behind this question, I suggest, stands a desire for an ethical sociality (the likes of which we find more fully developed in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) to replace the violent sociality that, for Frame as much as for Levinas, is engendered by the knowing subject that narcissistically projects itself into the world to "own" its otherness. What is at stake in the novel is thus ultimately the transformation of a form of subjectivity invested in knowing/owning the world into one able to take responsibility for the world - which requires the kind of reckoning with our own complicity with structures of violence that Frame's novel both enacts and demands of its readers.