Reflecting on memory, imagination and place: reading Janet Frame's The Envoy from Mirror City through a cognitive literary lens

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.