Through the carefully-woven patterns of imagery and symbolism which distinguish Janet Frame's novels runs a dominant theme—that of oppositions. These range from the antinomies of treasure and rubbish around which Owls Do Cry is organised, to the juxtaposition of 'this' and 'that' world, discussed by Frame in a well-known interview [in Landfall, 19, March, 1965.] In Frame's earlier novels, the opposition is between perceptions categorised as the opposition between the 'sane' and 'insane' views of one's society, and it is clear that for Frame the insane view has ultimate validity. As she continues writing through the sixties, her characters' consciousness of radical dissociation from their surrounding society increasingly finds its culmination in death after a loss of touch with material reality. The emphasis shifts from mental to physical vulnerability, A State of Siege (1966) marking the point of greatest fusion of the physical and the psychological. We no longer know by the end of this novel if all of what is being recounted has in fact occurred; whether there is a violent storm going on outside Malfred's cottage on the island off the North Island of New Zealand and someone is knocking persistently on the door, or whether the storm and the knocking are simply an extended metaphor of her past and present beleaguered state of mind in which a symbolic situation appears to be actual, before being revealed to have been all in the mind (as with Golding's Pincher Martin whom we believe until the end of the novel of this name to be cast away on a rock in the ocean.)

The breaking in at the end of A State of Siege represents both an apparent attack on Malfred's physical self and the collapse of her mental defences. In the work which this discussion will focus upon—Frame's most recent novels, The Rainbirds (1967), Intensive Care (1970), and Daughter Buffalo (1972)—the expression of extreme and inevitable withdrawal, of saying 'no', is no longer insanity, a retreat into madness, but a retreat into death. The mental hospitals which provide the settings for part of Owls Do Cry and all of Faces in the Water, are replaced in Intensive Care by hospitals in which the elderly and diseased live out their last days, though the young too are not immune from the treachery of their bodies. The focus of breakdown has shifted from being mental to physical, and this shift implies a darkening of Frame's philosophical perspective, for there is no 'cure' for death, as there is for the divided self in the possibility of a different social system which would transform the relations of individuals within it. This paper will explore some of the implications of this development in Frame's fiction.

A central aspect of the expression of growing depression and despair in the novels is a preoccupation with the failure of communication, the collapse of language into silence. In Frame's novels in which the central characters confront the failure of their own language (particularly A State of Siege and The Rainbirds and the last part of Intensive Care) a contrast is clear between this verbal inability and Frame's own dazzling poetic expression in extended descriptive passages. The discourse of the main body of Daughter Buffalo, by contrast, is barren; Frame's consciousness of this being expressed in her insertion of a number of 'poems' into it that are a pale reflection of the lyrical passages that expressed Daphne's apprehension of the process of her life in Owls Do Cry. Godfrey Rainbird reads words he is presented with in an 'icy language' of anagram following his 'death' and subsequent revival after being knocked down by a car. This expresses the confusion of all his responses due to this event which has pushed him into a heightened consciousness of the absurdity of his existence. He loses any sense of having 'his personal control' on (over) his electric blanket for example, the dial of which appears to him to read, sinisterly, 'his responal clonrot'. When he receives his letter of dismissal from work, the 'cold spelling' again seems to Godfrey to express 'more truthfully' his sense of being lost, cast away.

A hundred pounds is indeed a moth's jaws to help us face the work at the door. No doubt my name is Dogrey Brainrid of Feelt Drive, Resonsand Bay, Dunndie, Ogoat, Shuto Sanlid, Wen Lazeland, Rotusen he-mis-phere, the Drowl. Or the Unserve, the reathe as a plante in the sky among the rats, the noom, the comtes, all the dewnors of speac.

As Frame comments, 'Not a prepossessing address!' Her playing with orthography has in it, however, an element of regressiveness that goes beyond an appealing naïveté to being at times irritating, coy or over-contrived, particularly for example in the formula language of Milly Galbraith's monologue in the last section of Intensive Care. The 'cold spelling' in which Godfrey Rainbird reads everything seems to lack a dimension of psychological probability; seems at times more on the level of game than having any organic connection with the reality it endeavours to express. R.D. Laing, one of the most prominent members of the anti-psychiatry school in Britain in the late fifties and sixties comments [in his The Divided Self] on schizophrenic speech, 'A good deal of schizophrenia is simply nonsense, red-herring speech, prolonged filibustering designed to throw dangerous people off the scent, to create boredom and futility in others'. If this is the function of the distorted language that Milly Galbraith uses in Intensive Care, then it might be argued that Frame's own alienation has taken her to the point where the language of her novel becomes mystifying or alienating rather than expressive; that there has been a failure of art. We have moved from the deviance of Daphne that was expressed through poetic utterance in Owls Do Cry to a formulaic language of advertising jingles, knitting patterns and recipes—a superficial discourse inadequate to express the reality Frame seeks to embody. Language is moving towards being a closed system (without the internal consistency, albeit convoluted and almost undecodable of, say, Finnegans Wake and lacking that novel's virtuoso surety of touch). Eventually this can lead only to silence: any message that can come through to us from the author will be only that brought by the messenger at the end of Ionesco's Les Chaises: he opens his mouth and no words come out or, in the alternative ending, she writes on a blackboard in incomprehensible characters: the implication is that there is no point in trying to understand or communicate the meaning of experience. Significantly, at the end of the novel which preceded The Rainbirds, A State of Siege, the stone which Malfred Signal dies clutching in her fist has wrapped around it a piece of paper with 'last century's or tomorrow's news in verse … not in any language she had learned' and the words 'Help Help' scrawled across it in red crayon. The meaning of Malfred's experience has become incomprehensible and undescribable.

Frame's increasing despair seems to be produced by a capacity for apprehending but not for suggesting ways of transforming the conditions of life in the predominantly petty-bourgeois societies in which her novels are set—those of New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States. The hegemonic ideology of these societies asserts that characteristics such as acquisitiveness and greed (prominently displayed by all the characters who are part of 'this' world in Frame's earlier novels) are inherent in universal 'human nature' rather than being aspects of a particular transitional stage (that is to say, capitalism) of the historical development of such societies. Lucien Goldmann argues [in his Introduction to the Problems of a Sociology of the Novel,] that the homology which exists between works of art and the society in which they are produced can in bourgeois society be more clearly seen in the novel form than in any other. The controlling theme of Frame's fiction is the conflict between the inner life and the social life, that must inevitably be particularly pronounced under late capitalism; the increasing predominance of the inner life leads in Frame's work to an increasingly pessimistic view in which the individual resists but is gradually dragged under by social and institutional forces.

This perspective having become dominant, a capitulation on the part of the author to the inevitability of fascism then becomes possible, and Intensive Care in fact concludes with a Human Delineation Act which determines who will be eliminated and who survive. The fascist mode of human relationships demands three main groups of participants—those who classify, those who are classified and a public called upon to accept or reject these classifications. Thomas Szasz has argued that throughout history different social groups, religious dissidents, witches, the 'mentally ill' and Jews, among others have been classified by the hegemonic groups and subsequently incarcerated or destroyed. In early Frame novels, the central character was frequently shut up in a mental hospital for part or all of the novel. In The Rainbirds, Godfrey Rainbird is classified as abnormal, a kind of walking reminder of the reality of death, and so he becomes an outcast. His wife Beatrice fantasises about escaping this by moving to another town, but the outcast brand is indelibly etched on their minds.

Relevant to this is Szasz's identification of the labelling of certain groups as a 'rhetoric of rejection' which involves the selection of some members of one's society for social stigmatisation. Frame both shows the operation of this in bourgeois society and tries herself to challenge the norms from which this labelling is conducted. But in parts of Frame's more recent novels this creation of a group of outcasts moves beyond being a social force which must be resisted; rather than a mental collapse which is hopefully temporary (though Daphne's becoming forewoman at the mill at the end of Owls Do Cry is hardly an achievement in Frame's terms), the inability to resist any longer is expressed through a physical collapse or decay which usually appears to be an irreversible process: there is little prospect of regeneration when you have cancer or a stomach ulcer like some of the characters in Intensive Care or Daughter Buffalo. Physical collapse can be read as a metaphor of profound despair in Frame's work. Her characters increasingly fail to resist and become subjected to the 'withering institutions' of society. A near hopelessness in the face of this is embodied in a vision such as that of the hospital in which most of the characters in Intensive Care live out their last days.

People fastened like dead leaves to a blossomless tree, the incomplete bodies, the lost limbs, the icy paralysis, the slow reptilean or swift lush cancer growths nourished and sheltered by the old house as a forest accommodates its fungi; the amputation of limbs seeming as natural as the loss of limbs from the trees, the institutional withering of mind and body accepted as is the withering from time to time of healthy trees in a forest or orchard.

Perhaps one might argue that as R.D. Laing gradually rejected the social orientation of his work in The Divided Self, to the point where he could become for a time a monk in Sri Lanka, or as Doris Lessing gradually moved from her preoccupation with social action to a fascination with Sufism and futurology, writing in 1971 in the Preface to a new edition of The Golden Notebook of her certainty of coming apocalyptic collapse, so Janet Frame has, over time, gravitated towards one side of the opposition at the expense of the other, the dominant imagery patterns of treasure, darkness, death, and disintegration profoundly and pervasively embodying her thesis on a deeper level. There are striking correspondences between Frame's essential philosophy and Lessing's as expressed in her most recent novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), and they are bleak philosophies that offer little prospect of social renewal. Relevant here is ["Self, Symptom and Society,"] an article by Peter Sedgewick which suggests in relation to Laing's development:

Peaceful co-existence between the normal and the psychotic ideologies is impossible, and it follows that any person who accepts the psychotic vision as authentic must at once declare war on the world-view of the normal consensus.

Does this rejection of 'the normal consensus' mean that Frame's writing lacks breadth, or 'universal validity'? While not in any way subscribing in the traditional criticism often levelled at women's writing that it is deficient since it portrays a circumscribed universe and a small and generally domestic compass and does not express general or 'important' conflicts or events, I would nevertheless agree that one can find in Frame a limitation of perspective that is perhaps a function of the naive anarchism that is the only identifiable political tendency of her work. An examination of the general direction of her writing shows that in her two most recent novels (despite the expansion of her range of characters beyond the types that she has habitually drawn) she presents a partial view that gives little hope of positive change, merely a dialectic of decay. Lucien Goldmann asserts that the hero of the novel, that literary form which embodies most centrally the dominant features of bourgeois society, must be 'mad or a criminal … a problematic character' in conflict with his or her surroundings. Increasingly, psychological conflicts associated with usually unsuccessful attempts to come to terms with sexuality and with death dominate the lives of her central characters. Almost invariably in Frame's work sexuality is associated with misunderstanding, thwarted love or desire, and death: in all her novels someone dies, but in her three most recent works death becomes the pervasive motif. (Evans argues that there is not this development, that 'death has been the common denominator of all her work'.) The mass slaughter at the end of Intensive Care represents to me the inevitable perhaps, but greatly intensified culmination of earlier tendencies. The world of work and action, present as an alternative to withdrawal into the self in Owls Do Cry is gradually replaced by the world of institutionalisation, usually in mental hospitals: in Daughter Buffalo Talbot Edelman works, but his work is the study of death. Murder and violent death are staple motifs in most of Frame's novels but become more and more pervasive, the New York setting of her most recent novel Daughter Buffalo being perhaps a rationale for this. And where, after all, could Frame go, after portraying her vision of the Human Delineation Programme and mass murder at the end of Intensive Care? If the characters are not dead, they exist in a living death like Godfrey Rainbird, or have amputated limbs, or are dying of cancer (like Ciss Everest, or Naomi, or Turnlung's Aunt Kate). Sexuality with its potential for fulfillment and regeneration provides no positive alternative in Daughter Buffalo; indeed it is explicitly connected with death: for Talbot and Lenore first make love after they 'share' the death of a child. The death of Edelman's dog Sally, to whom he is almost as devoted as if she were human, is the signal for Lenore to leave him. Turnlung's recollection of a scene of two copulating dogs and a linesman electrocuted above them is an almost medieval image of the terror of sexuality. Hold back, or you will be hurt, if not killed! This pattern can be observed in the earlier books. In Intensive Care the marriage of Peg and Tom never occurs because Tom dies of a stomach ulcer, while in Owls Do Cry Francie is burned to death on the rubbish dump at the onset of adolescence.

Frame's habit of drawing characters who are in the process of, or in an advanced state of retreat from their society has in a sense led her into a cul de sac from which there is little chance of escape. It would seem that in this cul de sac death is the only reality which matters and the life to which it is opposed lacks an equivalent force. Frame attempts in Daughter Buffalo to evade the implications of her own conclusions: we are asked to believe that the death of Turnlung has not actually occurred, because he is alive and well and writing the epilogue at the end of the novel; that the gaiety of the artist has 'transfigured all that dread.' But it can hardly be denied that Frame is given over almost entirely to 'that' world. The evidence of Frame's three most recent novels is that she has written herself into a dead end and perhaps only the development of an increased consciousness of the necessity of challenging the institutions and the power structures of 'this' world with a more valid base than individual resistance unto death can carry her out of this. She has published almost nothing for the past few years, and one wonders if she is grappling with, or is in fact submerged by, this central problem in her work.