The Literal and the Metaphoric: Paradoxes of Figuration in the Work of Janet Frame

This essay attempts to address Janet Frame’s fondness for strategies of literal expression, a formal aspect of her work often pinpointed by the critics but never examined systematically, perhaps because it displays a mercurial quality, inseparable from the author’s wit, which resists easy classification. What can be established at any rate is that Frame’s leaning towards literality cannot be dissociated from her interest in metaphor – rather as if the literal, by virtue of constituting the ground zero of metaphor, implicitly pointed to further layers of meaning subliminally encoded in her texts. Thus it is argued that the literal in Frame tends to gesture towards its equivalent in metaphor, and vice versa, in a way which can be correlated with her thematic preoccupation with another shift of levels, occurring whenever she stages a creative personality keen to transform the ontological given provided by the real in terms of intuited correspondences in a more visionary dimension.