SOURCE: "Linguistic Transformation and Reflection in Janet Frame's Living in the Maniototo," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 27, No. 2, Autumn, 1987, pp. 320-26.

[In the essay below, Ross analyzes Frame's use of language in Living in the Maniototo, concluding that Frame is able to transcend conventional narrative structures through the manipulation of language.]

Janet Frame has travelled often to the "Is-Land," the "Table" where the angel hovers, to "Mirror City," then returned to tell the truth allotted her. But she owns only language to transform this "view over all time and space" into a coherent vision that reflects the "treasures" she beheld and touched during her travels. Often, she admits, "the medium of language" fails, for the revelations she attempts "have acquired imperfections … never intended for them … have lost meaning that seemed, once, to shine from them." Frame has, nonetheless, consistently demonstrated that the tradition-bound barriers of language need not constrict—in fact, demonstrated this so fully that she has invented a new kind of novel that contradicts its very form.

Those approaching Frame's work critically always note its non-novelistic tenor. For instance, Margaret Atwood says in a review of Living in the Maniototo, "Frame spurns plot except as a device for prodding the reader." To C.K. Stead the work "challenges its own genre, questions its own 'reality,' and finally collapses in upon itself." Carole Cook, reviewing Living in the Maniototo, observes that "Geography and language stand in for plot." Patrick Evans talks of how in Frame's work "the rigidities of characterization have crumbled"; and H. Winston Rhodes of how the "power" of "Frame's imagination" does not show itself in "plot structure, in the creation of character, nor even in her capacity for 'naming things.'"

Thus, bypassing the accepted requirements of fiction, Frame carries out in their place a linguistic process of transformation and reflection. That is, she engages language in such totality that her fiction transcends conventional narrative and turns instead into an often anguished, sometimes comic, private record made public, in which narrator, plot, character, setting and theme are subordinated to their determiner, language.

The struggle to harness language as a means to transform and to reflect experience overlies Frame's three autobiographical volumes, To the Is-Land (1983), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). Although concrete in their treatment of her life, these books—as their titles suggest—more accurately provide a gloss to the fiction which that life has engendered, recording as they do her growing awareness of language, its weaknesses, inadequacies, mysteries, strengths, elusiveness. "I was learning words, believing from the beginning that words meant what they said," she recalls in To the Is-Land's opening pages devoted to early childhood, then tells how she read an adventure story titled To the Island but aloud called it To the Is-Land. Once corrected on pronounciation she "had to accept the ruling," but within herself "still thought of it as the Is-Land." So, early on, the vagary of language led her to entangle the outer world with the inner, a paradox central to her fiction. In An Angel at My Table she speaks of the private language which provides the substance for her writing: "My only freedom was within, in my thoughts and language most of which I kept carefully concealed, except in my writing."

Frame has continually sought the freedom this hidden language provides, a quest which has yielded astounding effects in her writing. Critics, on making passing reference to this phenomenon, have attempted to name it, albeit not always accurately or appropriately. It has been described as an "interest in communication," or by H. Winston Rhodes as "the gift of parabolic utterance"; by Margaret Atwood as a "voice" which is "quirky, rich, eccentric, nervous and sometimes naive," or by Carole Cook as "coy but militant solipsism," even by Patrick Evans as "esoteric experimentation." In grander terms, C.K. Stead has called this singular talent with language "the instrument of the imagination … the hawk suspended over eternity"; or as Frame herself says: "… the hawk suspended above eternity."

Although touching the edge of Frame's genius, such phrases fail to penetrate its core. In 1973 Patrick Evans observed that Frame may well be New Zealand's most successful contemporary novelist but one who "has reached this position, curiously enough, without the impetus of unified critical understanding"; the reason: "… the difficulty of sensing immediately where the centre of her work lies." As I see it, the centre, the core, lies in language for whose sake Frame has forfeited the conventions of prose narrative. Such has been the case to varying degrees in all her novels; but the one published just before the autobiographies, Living in the Maniototo (1979), shows that the linguistic transformation and reflection process has appropriated the fictional properties and made them its own.

Instances of that preoccupation with language as it emerges in some of the earlier works will serve to lay the groundwork for the fuller treatment of Living in the Maniototo. Frame's 1960 novel, Owls Do Cry, makes use of language in ways altogether original and suggested then—and continues to do so—that here is no ordinary piece of fiction. In it, for example, one of the characters tries to find words for her diary, a recurring device in the future novels which often include writing within writing. Stymied by the inflexibility of language, the character/writer in Owls Do Cry laments: "I should like to put in a simile, the way it is done by writers, to describe the loveliness of the blossoms in my old home. I can think of nothing to say except they are choking white." Similar frustrations with language appear in the succeeding novels, the writer either disguising herself as one of the characters or appearing openly to decry her talent to say things as she ought. In The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) Thora observes: "Home? The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech." The continued loss of that speech provides the focus for the next novel, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964); in it Vera decides not to talk to anyone, "because every time she opened her mouth to say something, her voice, in hiding, reminded her that there was nothing to say, and no words to say it."

By the time of A State of Siege (1966) Frame had introduced another of her devices to stress the fragility of language, this time scrambling the accepted signs to represent nothing while they appear to do so. A newspaper with a stone wrapped inside is thrown into a room, and Malfred reads its account of the news, although "not in any language she had learned." Pure nonsense, this "last century's or tomorrow's news in verse":

Soltrin, carmew desse puniform wingering brime commern in durmp, a farom a ferinwise lumner, sturph, wolpe,…

Across it in red crayon someone has scrawled "Help Help." Godfrey, whose return from the dead Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room (1969) tells, may have thrown the newspaper-wrapped stone, for language stands as the invisible barrier between his mistaken death and never-retrieved life. Why, he wonders, had he "ever trusted so obvious a deceiver as language". Some of Frame's other linguistic concerns also play freely in this work, such as the cliché, tense and the language of advertising.

But Living in the Maniototo, more than any of the previous novels, shows what happens when language is allowed to hold absolute sway over the conventions of fiction, thus exposing those conventions for the liars they are. Incorporating all the devices used in the earlier work and adding new ones, Frame has produced a novel that tells the whys and the how of its writing: to reveal truth about life and to depend on lies in doing so. For truth does emerge in spite of the conveyor's unreliability.

In criticism of fiction, questions concerning reliability usually arise, even if unconsciously. How reliable is the narrator? Is the plot convincing? Or does it depend too heavily on the tricks of coincidence or farfetched reversals? Are the characters consistent? motivated? "real"? Are they allowed their own lives? Or does the narrator manipulate them? undercut them? Does setting serve as background, or at times, as the instigator of action? Or does it provide the place for yet another deception? How does the author reveal the theme? Is the meaning too obvious, too much in the foreground, too didactic in its presentation? Or does the theme ridicule itself, making light of its own pretensions? If these elementary questions get the wrong answers, then the work's failure is likely to be assured. Yet, while Living in the Maniototo draws all the incorrect responses, it succeeds. So the concern changes to how Frame did not execute the demands, how she rejected the accepted dictums of her craft and turned the novel inside out to exhibit the seams and the lining and unsightly stitches that hold together the fabric woven from words.

For one thing, the identity of the first-person narrator in Living in the Maniototo remains uncertain. She calls herself a "'writer'", and has published a novel and a volume of poems. She might be Mavis Furness Barwell Haleton, or the "penultimate Mavis," or "Alice Thumb" or one of a dozen or so other persons made real by names, or even "Violet Pansy Proudlock, ventriloquist." That a novelist might be a ventriloquist suggests how far she has removed herself from the original, feeding words to the dummy whose lip movements and voice form a linguistic deception the public accepts. Even though the narrator has already published, she enrolls in a creative writing course, there learning about what she once called the "I-book." Disagreeing with her teacher's view that first person relies on perfection, on the turning of "the writer into a god or goddess with perfect vision", she forms her own definition:

A writer taking on the "I," takes a straight line that can be turned upon itself to become a circle or curved to become a hook or left alone as a prelude to infinity or have its back broken into the hypotenuse, the opposite, the adjacent.

Such, then, becomes the approach of this "'I' writer," whose straight line language comprises, a line that turns on itself, circling, curving, twisting, finally serving "as a prelude to infinity."

Because this novel relies on the first person narrator—whoever she may be—it should probably tell her story and those events familiar to her. Mavis—so she will be called for the time being—begins to do just that, revealing first how events in her life conspire to make her socially acceptable through language's magic; for now in public she can say "I've buried two husbands, you know", thus gaining the immediate regard of others while standing in bus lines, shopping, or walking along the street. The burial of the second husband also allows her the freedom to travel and write, for no longer a housewife in Blenheim, Auckland's "young new suburb," she takes up a new life, first in Baltimore, then in Berkeley. The outward action, although easy enough to summarize, still suggests little to indicate the intensity of the inner action, at which even the table of contents only hints:

PROLOGUE: Naming people and places.

PART I: Paying Attention to Husbands, Dead Writers, the Blue Fury, Debtors and Debt Collectors.

PART II: Paying Attention to The Ice Pick, the Diamond Account Book, a Family Heirloom and an Invitation.

PART III: Attending and Avoiding in the Maniototo.

PART IV: Avoiding, Bound By the Present Historic.

PART V: Avoiding and Paying Attention to Keepsakes and Shelter and the Withering of a Tongue Blossom.

Language, this peculiar assortment of topics promises, is to play the central role, as an often undetermined feminine "I" takes up the subjects outlined in the contents and makes them her own. But before long she turns into a second narrator, equally evasive in identity, and creates situations that the initial narrator undoes, showing them to be the artifice of fiction, not the stuff of real life. Fully realized incidents and their participants vanish in a reversal of words; they existed, after all, as mere replicas, as reflections of the real, false as the prints of the paintings on the walls of the house Mavis sublets in Berkeley.

The characters, shown to be made not of flesh and blood but of nouns and verbs, function ultimately to represent the novel's concern with language. This creates a circular proposition, considering that language brings them to life and, in turn, often kills them. Some die and stay dead; others die, then come back to life, always at the will and convenience of their linguistic manipulator. The two husbands, for example, she remembers mainly in light of their verbal oddities and tells little else about them, except their deaths. The first husband, Lewis, after his stroke, no longer possessed the ability to name things, only to give definitions and wait for his wife to feed him the words. This loss strikes Mavis as the saddest part of his ten-year illness: "Lewis had been struck by lightning that burned great holes in his language and scorched the rest so as to make the pattern unintelligible; he had no more sustenance or warmth from language." A few years later she remarries, this time to a French teacher, Lance, who soon sets aside the refinements of French grammar for the cruder rhetoric of debt collecting, a profession he pursues with dedication and vigor. When she pleads with him to return to "the humanities," to "language which never harmed anyone," he responds: "I've known more rape and murder and debt in language … Suicide too! This is what partly persuaded me to give up teaching language." She realizes that his changed attitude "could be blamed on words;" then, defending her work as a novelist, she insists that "a novel doesn't prosecute or haunt anyone," to which Lance replies, "I wouldn't be too sure." In the simplest terms, when Mavis writes that "language in itself may be a force to prompt behaviour," she has summed up her approach to characterization.

Through selective detail, the novel's "I" draws graphic pictures of the three cities she inhabits. Blenheim in New Zealand she calls a "disinherited suburb-city where the largest, most impressive building is not a cathedral, a community hall, concert hall or theatre, but a shopping mall" built in the architecture of North America. The Baltimore she creates is one of "grey asphalt and red brick and black iron of gratings and windowbars," a place where time is not measured by blossoming flowers but from the blossoming of robberies and murders, where the drifts are not of flower petals but of litter. She captures the decaying eastern city in more concrete terms as well, showing how she can through language transform and reflect the substance of experience which Mirror City has provided her:

… the Roxy, the strip-tease club where you could watch porn movies and see a middle-aged strip-tease artist making her breasts dance, and throwing lace handkerchiefs (wiped between her legs) to the men in the front rows; past the market, the stale goods bake shops, bargain stores, Five and Dime, the Salvation Army, the veterans, Volunteers of America, Purple Hearts, the launderettes with their half-dozen Speed Princess machines, mostly out of order, where the old man used to go, without any laundry, pay a quarter, and watch the water whirling around as the machine completed its cycle. For company.

To the gentler and more natural landscape of Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay area she gives kinder treatment, and landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge she considers "a memory-marvel," something she had known years earlier from American films seen in New Zealand.

However vivid the three cities beginning with the letter "B," though, the novel takes for its only valid setting the imagination, represented by the plain of Maniototo. Such a place indeed exists in the interior of New Zealand's South Island, a high plain, cold, distant and rarely visited, not even in the novel which bears its name. Mavis tells about a New Zealand writer named Peter Wallstead, largely unknown until after his death, then more recognized for "living in the Maniototo" than for writing. "Goodness knew what he had discovered on that secret plain," Mavis exclaims. Or in Mirror City, she might have said, for the Maniototo has its replica, as surely as Blenheim and Baltimore and Berkeley reflect one another. The Maniototo, which Mavis never visits except in the imagination, stands as the source of experience and its understanding, whose transformation and reflection Mavis records through language in her "manifold," another name for the narrator/character's diary that so often figures in Frame's earlier work. "A writer," Mavis observes, "will hoard scraps from the manifold and then proceed to gnaw obsessively." While living in the cities of the three Bs and setting the action and characters within their confines—as any first-person narrator would do—this "I-writer" shows how the replicas she has constructed depend on a single source for their fictional reality: the Manifold, drawn from Mirror City atop the Maniototo's plain of experience.

Although the theme emerges, as it should, from the plot, characters and setting, the narrator—whether in the voice of Mavis or any of the other shifting personas—expounds endlessly on language theory. Through revealing the workings of the fiction-making process, the novel's "I" proves how unreliably art treats the truth it supposedly serves. The purpose of the novel Mavis and her replicas deny, for she/they have turned the novel against itself and destroyed all that it has set out to do: to name, to pay attention, to attend and to avoid. In their hands the novel, the "Tongue Blossom," has withered. Or has it?

Certainly, if judged in conventional terms, Living in the Maniototo could only be called a withered replica of the real thing. It goes about everything in the wrong way: the narrator is admittedly unreliable; the characters wander into fictional exile, experience death and rebirth; the setting shifts about in its "house of replicas"; the theme of language intrudes, resembling at times a textbook treatise on diction or syntax.

But how petty and worthless these complaints when set against the originality, the depth, the immensity of Frame's talent to transform and to reflect the keenest truth about the human condition, which she sees as the pawn of language. Like her questionable narrator in Living in the Maniototo, Frame proves: "I decided to break the rules, not because I felt my writing would even approach the shadow of perfection, but because nothing in art is forbidden. By critics and teachers, yes. By the painters, writers, composers, sculptors, no."