'the Uncreating Word': Janet Frame and 'Mystical Naming' (Critical Essay‪)‬

In her first novel Owls Do Cry (1957) Janet Frame shows the sisters Daphne and Francie Withers imagining a bicycle by taking turns to name its parts--the dynamo, the tail-light, the headlight and so on. (1) Diane Caney has suggested that the girls are like Shakespeare's Prospero, using words as magic spells (2) rather as they seem to have been used in Frame's own family, where (Frame tells us), they 'were revered as instruments of magic'. (3) Caney then follows the trace to Vincent O'Sullivan's use of Barthes's Writing Degree Zero and the possibility of 'a dreamed-of language' and an 'Adamic world' in which 'language would no longer be alienated' (4)--in which the girls' naming would make an actual bicycle, presumably, and thus confirm the retrieval of a prelapsarian realm in which word and world have not fallen apart after all, where we have not been thus consigned to the unsatisfactory present and its used-up, inauthentic language. Frame's apparent nostalgia for such a realm, evident throughout her writing, has been most fully addressed by Marc Delrez in Manifold Utopia: the Novels of Janet Frame (2002), where he describes it as utopian, a desire for an ideal state to be achieved through 'a new language for humanity', (5) In pursuing his argument, Delrez in effect divides Frame's principal characters into two groups, what we might call the seekers and the sought. The first group encompasses the duplication of narrators and protagonists like Daphne in Owls Do Cry (1957), characters who share Frame's self-reflexive attitude towards how we write and speak: Istina Mavet, the psychiatric patient in the second novel (1961); Zoe Bryce, the artist manque in the third, together with Alwyn and Aisley Maude in the fifth and Malfred Signal in the sixth; Turnlung, an actual artist in the ninth, together with Mavis Halleton in the tenth, and the oddball imposter-novelist Dinny Wheatstone in the final novel, where we also find the literary critic Mattina Brecon. These are characters whose business is with language and whose urge is to understand what they see.