[In the following essay, Mattei interprets the story "Two Sheep" as an existential fable.]

'Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise ear to the keyhole of my mind', says the narrator-protagonist—who is, significantly, a writer—of 'Jan Godfrey', a story included in Janet Frame's first collection, The Lagoon. And the reader-friend who embarks on a story by New Zealand's most distinguished author, 'putting a wise ear to the keyhole of her mind', must be prepared to listen to disturbing things, things from 'that world' at the edge of the alphabet—the border-land between the imaginary and the real—often evoked in passages which strive to attain the condition of music and whose compact, contrapuntal texture dissolves in a rhythmic sequence of chromatic intervals, pure, independent sounds, cries of the soul.

The reader is immediately struck by the visionary, prophetic quality of these passages, which are almost expressionistic both in their moments of extreme dynamic tension, and in those of rapt stillness. They combine mytho-poetic fantasy with rigorous logic, a taste for paradox with a passion for consistency, a bare essentiality of style with a daring use of language, resorting, to achieve this unique synthesis, to all possible linguistic and stylistic devices. While apparently employing an impersonal narrative method, this brilliant but difficult and disconcerting writer creates her own distinctive, intensely emotional world, bending, at times, the shape and structure of her work to match the inner rhythm of her vision, or, at other times, exposing beings, people and things to the light of 'a sun . . . everlastingly at noon' ['A Sense of Proportion'], with no chiaroscuro or shading, no concession to 'tricks of the eye', to the distortions of a perspective which does not distinguish between reality and appearance, fact and fancy. In the final analysis, however, the presumed objectivity of such moments is seen to be compromised by the lack of that 'sense of proportion' typical of someone who—like the young narrator-protagonist of the story 'A Sense of Proportion' in The Reservoir—sees everything in the foreground, 'objects . . . stripped of their shadows, forced to stand in brilliant light, alone'. So, even the most pitilessly lucid vision of the torment of an unshaded world betrays that 'wrong way of looking to life' acknowledged by the narrator of 'My Last Story' in The Lagoon.

It was almost inevitable that the essentially visionary quality of Janet Frame's art should find expression in parables of a faintly Kafkaesque flavour, at times inserted by the author in her novels in the form of 'a story within a story'; in Mansfield-like slices of life about the capacity of the characters, mainly children, to knit the 'unintelligible pattern of dream' (The Lagoon); in 'stories and sketches' (the subtitle of The Reservoir), characterised by a crystalline cogency of style and by great allusiveness; finally, and above all, in 'fables and fantasies' (the subtitle of Snowman, Snowman), apologues and allegories which contain the essence of the author's existential meditations, or which present, with an almost fauve technique, feverish hallucinations, landscapes of the mind menaced by an ominous sense of anguish and doom, basically the result of the perception of the cosmos as chaos.

Frame's preference for a certain kind of fiction goes back to her early childhood, as is testified by her well-known first story, 'a fable that provides the recurrent symbolism of her later work' [Jeanne Delbaere, Introduction to The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame, edited by Delbaere] and suggests, along with a sense of inexhaustible, primordial energy, the impending presence of Death. 'The common denominator of all fractions', as wise Uncle Blackbeetle in Scented Gardens for the Blind calls it, is always present in Frame's stories, short and long, which raise decidedly existentialist issues and reflect an ontological vision akin to that of Martin Heidegger. Also for Frame death is the only certain possibility of existence, the possibility which cancels all other possibilities, revealing, as it does, the contradictory nature and essential finitude of life. It is a stage in the cycle of creation, metamorphosis rather than extinction. Death 'as a simple darkness . . . a pure personless darkness like the original void of the universe' [Daughter Buffalo], 'the shrine of non-being' [Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze], the 'nullifying nothingness' (Heidegger's 'Das Nichts nichtet') in which man, 'thrown into the world' and confronted with the ineluctability of his human predicament in an absurd universe, finds the key to the understanding of his own essence.

This Weltanschauung pervades also 'Two Sheep', a paradigmatic story which, with the unadorned simplicity of a naive painting, presents a disquieting vision of existence, subject to oppressive and destructive forces. There is no trace of sententiousness, no overindulgence in sentimentality, no complacent moralizing in this short fable, based, as is typical of Janet Frame, on the fundamental reality/illusion antinomy—the core of her ontology—articulated in the dichotomies that occur throughout her works: true/false, authentic/inauthentic, vision/sight, light/darkness, innocence/experience, eternity/time.

It is significant that Frame chooses as protagonists two representatives of the sacrificial animal par excellence, the symbol of patience, meekness, gregariousness, but also of proverbial stupidity. Two sheep were travelling to the saleyards . . .': two sheep going to their ultimate destination, the slaughterhouse at the freezing works, along 'a hot dusty valley road' that winds through rocky hills pitted with old rabbit warrens and spotted with tussocks of grass, under a burning sun. The drover rides along in his trap, leisurely, inexorably; one of his dogs sits beside him, while the other darts here and there, keeping the sheep together.

Right from the beginning of the story the author skillfully interweaves three narrative levels: the realistic, the metaphorical, and the mythic. A familiar sight in New Zealand, the flock of sheep going meekly, passively towards death suggests man's own destiny. Here the figure of the drover who takes the sheep to the slaughter recalls the mythical Hermes Psychopomp leading the souls of the dead to their final abode in the Hereafter. The landscape, too, whilst retaining certain realistic traits, assumes archetypal connotations: the journey in the desert, through the valley of tears along that hot dusty road which dominates expressionistically the surrounding countryside and returns like a haunting leitmotif.

Two sheep in the flock are singled out by the eye of the omniscient narrator. They are not named, they are referred to simply as 'the first' and 'the second'. This namelessness seems to reflect a conviction clearly expressed by the narrator-protagonist of 'Jan Godfrey', when she says that although 'we cling to our names because we think they emphasize our separateness and completeness and importance', nonetheless 'deep down we know that we are neither separate nor complete nor very important, nor are we terribly happy'.

The depersonalization of the two sheep here—in accordance with a basic convention of the fable—stresses their lack of individuality, their universality, bringing into focus two distinct types: one who 'knows' and reflects on the present in the light of his knowledge of the future, and one who 'doesn't know' and, immersed in the here and now, is incapable of looking further. The 'first' sheep, in fact, who is aware of what lies at the end of the journey, lives the present to the very full, without seeing it for what it really is. Thus the burning sun for him is just pleasantly warm on the fleece, the sky is beautifully terse, the grass fresh and juicy. Clearly his love for life, his capacity to appreciate its wonders—for such seem even simple everyday pleasures—are sharpened by his awareness of approaching death. The 'second' sheep, blind to this fate, is oppressed and exasperated by the suffering and squalor of his condition: the long, hot dusty road, the intolerably heavy fleece, the threatening hawks circling overhead, waiting to seize their prey. When the prospect of death enters his mind, it is instantly removed in the name of the presumed immortality of his species, vouched for by some mysterious authority. Finally, in a climax that turns possibility into certainty, according to a highly personal logic, this reality is dismissed as 'malicious rumours', vivid dreams as terrifying as nightmares, but at bottom illusory.

The two protagonists continue their journey, one skipping nimbly and joyfully along, the other stumbling, tired and angry, accusing his companion of blindness. Once more Janet Frame uses the metaphor of blindness, of key-importance within her symbolic framework, where it represents darkness, both literal and figurative, but also prophetic insight (those punished for seeing too much are often compensated with the inner eye of the seer). Here everyone seems somehow to be condemned to this condition, since it is impossible to possess both vision and sight, gifts belonging respectively to the artist and to the ordinary, 'adaptable', man, symbolized in this story by the first and the second sheep. The former has an aesthetic relationship with reality, the latter a practical one. These two attitudes may also be seen in terms of Blake's innocence/experience dialectic, where innocence is the gift of the artist, the enlightened, 'different' individual, 'the man alone'. In fact the description of the first sheep 'gambolling like a lamb in August', underlines not only his natural disposition to sacrifice, but above all his spontaneous élan vital. 'I could walk through this valley forever, and never feel tired or hungry or thirsty', he says at a certain point. But, having to cope with the repeated complaints and accusations of his companion, he says nothing about the fate that awaits them, not so much out of compassion as to avoid confronting the truth. In an attempt to exorcize the dread of death, he gives himself up to the pleasures of the present, which, transfigured by his fantasy, becomes more and more alluring. So the filthy pen in which the flock is closed after leaving the valley road is for him 'a pleasant little house', and the lines of railway trucks, 'red caravans for our seaside holiday'. His urge to live is such that he even ignores the unjust accusations of 'a kind, elderly sheep', a chance travelling companion who tries to comfort the second sheep, weeping, so he believes, since he has been told of their true destination. In reality, the second sheep is distraught because he is imprisoned within a narrow and miserable existential condition: the fact that his fellow creatures are in the same situation does not seem to lighten his load, for, although part of the flock, the individual is an island, or—as Frame would put it—'an I-Land', and in the end must face his destiny alone, since 'nothing can ever help' [Owls Do Cry]. All attempts to escape one's fate are vain; there is no stopping time, the undefeated 'impure enemy' [Scented Gardens for the Blind], and the changes it brings. The day of reckoning inevitably arrives, as always catching unprepared even those who, like the first sheep, were aware of its coming. 'Then suddenly he was taken by surprise and hustled out a little gate and up the ramp . . .'. The journey of the flock is now nearing its end. The sheep are jostled into the waiting truck and 'everywhere was commotion, pushing, struggling, bleating, trampling'. (The 'crescendo' of gerunds following the 'andante' of the sentence suggests effectively the increasing excitement of the moment). Suddenly faced with the tangible reality of their final destination, the two sheep seem to exchange roles. The first, brusquely forced to abandon his pleasant reflections on the beauty of life, now sees the glaring sunlight in 'its true colours': the 'gigantic burning bars', the hawks 'sizzling the sky with their wings', the pall of dust that thickens over the parched hills. In Janet Frame's universe, the sun—'the noon sun' in particular—is not only the opposite of darkness, in both a physical and a metaphorical sense, in Bergsonian terms 'intelligence' versus 'instinct', but also, in its stark, implacable fierceness, the other side, the 'lining' of death, before which 'the shadows are razed and the sun stands pitilessly at perpetual noon' ['A Sense of Proportion']. In this merciless moment of truth, the moment of pure vision attained, for example, by Miss Collins in 'A Sense of Proportion', and by Turnlung in Daughter Buffalo, as has been noted elsewhere 'the individual merges into the Other, language into Silence, life into Death' [Jeanne Delbaere, Introduction].

The second sheep, who now 'sees' all too clearly what awaits him, becomes suddenly quite calm: after his futile complaining and grumbling, he begins to appreciate everything he has previously criticized, looking back upon it with the nostalgia that springs from the discovery of the fleetingness of life, which is valued all the more because it is soon to be lost. He acknowledges the far-sightedness of his companion, who nevertheless pays no attention to him. Face to face with death, dumbfounded 'he could hide from it no longer'. The transition from innocence to experience has been made. However much foreshadowed, the revelation of the truth always comes as a trauma to Frame's characters, a shock from which they recover either with immense difficulty, or not at all. Usually, it is the certainty of death which grants them a deeper insight into life, giving it meaning and resulting either in their annihilation, physical or spiritual, or else in madness—for Janet Frame, as for R. D. Laing [whose Divided Self appeared only two years after Owls Do Cry], a higher form of consciousness, the real authenticity of Self.

Giving up all forms of struggle and rebellion, the first sheep lies exhausted in a corner of the truck. The man responsible for unloading the sheep takes the motionless body for dead—the play on appearance and reality continues—and throws it out onto the track, to be shifted later on. 'We can't have dead sheep', he said. 'How can you kill a dead sheep?' (The implied author's detached irony, witty and at times even sardonic, is present in this story too.)

Saved from death by pure chance, the sheep struggles to his feet and trots away from the freezing works, walking warily along the railway line. Thus begins the second part of the fable, in which he remains in the foreground. He goes down one road, then another, till he finally meets up with a flock being driven in the same direction. Avoiding the watchful eye of the drover, he slips in among the other sheep in search of safety. And soon he finds himself on 'a hot dusty road through a valley where the hills leaned in a sun-scorched wilderness of rock, tussock, and old rabbit warrens'. This is clearly an echo of the description of a scene which is by now familiar to the reader. As in a refrain, the recurrence of the same words recalls the valley at the beginning of the story. Lexical repetition, with or without stylistic variations to mark the rhythm of the narration, is often employed in this short fable, and is typical of Frame, who, in this way, underlines the obsessive return of significant themes and motifs, ultimately achieving 'what might be called a parabolic unity' [H. Winston Rhodes, 'Preludes and Parables: A Reading of Janet Frame's Novels', Landfall, June 1972]. The story, therefore, seems to repeat itself. We are back to the original situation, except that now the first sheep—who, previously, knew he was heading for death, and has been very close to it—takes on the attitude of the second sheep. In an attempt, which will prove illusory, to conceal his individual identity in the anonymity of the flock, he wishes, in vain, to renounce the privilege of vision and return to the reassuring ordinariness of everyday life. So he abandons himself to purely sensorial perceptions, which emphasize the harshness of reality. But as he complains of his present predicament, like his erstwhile fellow traveller, another sheep contradicts him and enthusiastically exalts the pleasures they are offered. And then it dawns on him . . . '"You mean", the first sheep replied slyly, "that your are on your way to the saleyards, and then to the freezing works to be killed'". Wise in his experience, he recognizes the signs ('I know the code') and interprets them infallibly. But after experiencing, in the face of death, the irreconcilability of 'fact' and 'fancy', he finds himself in the infinitely precarious situation of someone 'at the edge', in a kind of twilight world, a no-man's land between being and non-being. Incapable of 'fitting in', he is no longer sure of anything, a pathetic figure, rather than a tragic one, like many of Janet Frame's characters. Uncertain of the distinction between the 'inauthentic' and the 'authentic', he does not know where truth lies. What, then, is left, except silence?

Once again the author acknowledges here the difficulty inherent in the search for truth and thus the difficulty of saying something true about the world: hence the futility of all discourse. As Vera Glace, a character associated by her very name to truth—she is, in fact, the 'mirror' of mankind (true glass) in whom words are frozen (true ice)—recognizes in Scented Gardens for the Blind, 'this compulsory stopping of communication is a dismal reminder of our ultimate dependence upon silence, of the fact that in the end there is really nothing to say, that silence is our true companion and partner and lover'. This awareness inevitably entails a renunciation of language, of communication—a problem of crucial importance for Frame—and therefore leads to a painful experience of alienation, which becomes, however, the root not so much of the weakness, as of the 'diversity' of one who has seen the ultimate reality and must somehow live with this terrible knowledge. This leads to the existential choice of the first sheep: 'For the rest of my life I shall not speak another word. I shall trot along the hot dusty valleys where the hills are both barren and lush with spring grass'. The subjectivity of truth is stressed here, together with the knowledge that, as Patrick White says in The Aunt's Story, 'there is sometimes little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality'. Having progressed beyond the frontier of language, beyond the reach of 'the alphabet', the first sheep has no alternative: "'What shall I do but keep silent?" And so it happened . . .'.

The fable resumes its natural discursive rhythm, addressing a hypothetical reader with the final message. The tone of the authorial voice, however, does not become sententious, but remains subdued, almost muted as it traces the destiny of the protagonist of the story, that first sheep which 'over and over again . . . escaped death, and rejoined the flock of sheep who were travelling to the freezing works'. This endless wandering in circles is peculiar to Frame's characters, especially in the short stories, this 'muddling backwards and forwards in little irrelevant journeys' ['The Day of the Sheep'], 'mostly just going backwards and forwards doing this and that' ['Spirit'], 'up and down and round and round . . . up and down inside her own mind . . . round and round inside herself ['The Park']. Perpetual motion, which paradoxically becomes paralysis, along the same inevitable road, as in a Dantesque circle of hunted and haunted souls. In this world, life and death are tightly interwoven, and at any moment a hawk—a familiar figure to the readers of Janet Frame, a recurrent symbol of looming cosmic danger threatening the sensitive individual—may swoop down onto its defenceless prey, or a bogie may come out from behind the hills.

In a succession of desperate attempts to escape his ultimate destination, death, the individual finds himself once more with the flock, making his way down a desolate valley at the end of which destiny lies in wait. Timid and insecure, with a delirious look in his eyes, the survivor, who has come up against his own nothingness and has shaped his life in the light or darkness, of that encounter, stands out from his fellow travellers. There is an extraordinary affinity here between this sheep and the outsider, solitary, inadequate, different, who, as such, is doomed to silence. This autobiographical character—recurring again and again in Frame's fiction—represents a paradox for the artist who claims to belong to the 'country of words' [Beginnings] and who is deeply aware of their beauty, danger and power, but also of their inadequacy to express the ineffable.