Reflecting on Memory, Imagination and Place: Reading Janet Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City Through a Cognitive Literary Lens

ABSTRACT

Although Janet Frame’s oeuvre has attracted sustained critical attention, her autobiographical writing has sometimes been characterised as inferior to her ‘innovative, sophisticated, post-modern fiction’ (Bazin 2011, 1). Contrasting with such views, I explore the textured literary construction and potential cognitive impact of Frame's central metaphor of Mirror City in her third autobiographical volume, The Envoy from Mirror City (1984). This interdisciplinary discussion builds on, and extends the critical approaches of scholars such as Claire Bazin and Simon Petch, who examine the wide-ranging ‘hermeneutic’ capacities of Frame’s Autobiography (Bazin 2011, 4), and its ‘processes of transformation of fact into autobiographical truth’ (Petch 1991, 59). Focusing specifically on Mirror City's components of memory, imagination, and space, my bi-focal study of narrative representation and potential readerly impact strives to illuminate how Frame’s autobiographical writing facilitates the markedly interactive nature of exchange that characterises literary life writing. In analysing textual and cognitive interplays among narrative technique, memory, imagination, place, visual imagery, conceptual blending, and the default mode network, I demonstrate how Frame constructs her shimmering textual vision of Mirror City, and how this cognitive configuration encourages interactive readerly engagements with personal recollections, and/or active contemplations of the roles of imagination and place in experiential remembering.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• imagination
• place
• Janet frame
• ‌Mirror City
• cognitive literary approaches‌

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper. My grateful thanks also to Lara Keys and Adrian Howie for their support, assistance, and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Simon Petch notes, Frame’s writing displays an ongoing ‘obsession with mirrors and figures of reflection’ (1994, 51).

2 For interdisciplinary discussions on the interrelations of literary comprehension and readers’ personal memories, see, for example, Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic ‘Writing as Thinking’, and Patrick Colm Hogan Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts (2008; 2003, especially 155–165).

3 For further perspectives on the interactive phenomenon of autobiographical writing, see David McCooey Artful Histories (1996, 4); and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiograhy (2011, 207).

4 See for example Marc Delrez (2002), Anna Smaill (2019), and Manon-Lili Morand (2015). In probing certain ambiguities that emerge concerning Frame’s simultaneous portrayal of the ‘spatial image’ of imagination as both external and internal, together with the oscillating role of the Envoy in the third volume of her Autobiography, Simone Oettli van-Delden highlights the influence of Romantic writers – especially Coleridge – on Frame’s conceptualisation and depiction of imagination in this text (2003, 80).

5 There has been much debate (including, as Susan Ash points out, apparent contradictions by Frame herself (1993, 22)) about the extent of autobiographical content in Frame’s fictional works, as well as the fictional nature of her autobiographical writing. Lydia Wevers has highlighted Frame’s overt awareness of ‘shifting between authentic and inauthentic modes’ of subjectivity construction in her Autobiography (2009, 57), while for Max Richards, her entire oeuvre ‘has attended to the inner story’ with all her writing ‘grounded in the ordinary life of her own living’ (2001, 48).

6 I discuss the interwoven dimensions of temporality and memory in life writing in my forthcoming article, ‘Time and Memory in the Twilight Zone: Cognitive Literary Perspectives on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights’, (in press, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies).

7 The crucial importance of this interplay between personal memory and orientation to future events is underscored by the fact that cognitive and neuroscientific studies demonstrating ‘that brain regions traditionally linked with memory are also involved in imagining the future’ were collectively recognised as ‘one of Science’s Top Ten Breakthroughs for 2007’ (Addis 2018, 65).

8 Frame is by no means the first author to foreground links between imagination and memory. See, for example, Alan Richardson’s ‘Memory and Imagination in Romantic Fiction’ (2011).

9 See Turner’s chapter, ‘The Way We Imagine’ in Theory of Mind and Literature (2011).

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by a 2022 Macquarie University CRFS grant.

Notes on contributors

Merril Howie

Merril Howie is an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University. Drawing the sciences into dialogue with literary studies, her interdisciplinary analyses of literary life writing tease out significant interrelationships among narrative techniques and the cognitive processes they may trigger in the reader – focusing particularly on the representation and impact of memory and emotion. Her 2022 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship project, ‘Cognitive Literary Considerations of Memory in Life Writing: Imagination, Time, Space and Scaffolds’, explores the potential for skillfully written autobiographical texts to mobilise readers’ personal memories, re-shaping perceptions and interpretations of particular recollections, thereby impacting personal and collective identities. Her work has been published in Antipodes, Life Writing, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph that examines the textual and readerly interchange of memory and emotion in literary memoirs.