This is the story of my childhood.
In August 1924, I was born Janet Paterson Frame,
my twin who was never named died two weeks
later.
Although Janet Frame is recognized as one
of the most famous and successful New Zealand
writers, the academic discussion around her
and, more importantly, the number of people
reading her, is scarce.
Academics (mostly) focus on her troubled life
and mental health as the only narrow line
of approach when dealing with her literary
work.
I think it is necessary to go beyond those
arguments that constrain her possible readings
to the private and personal sphere, and rediscover
her as an author of
Let's talk about
Both short stories present an issue in communication.
"Screaming" tells the story of how an incessant
noise disrupts the life of an otherwise normal
city, while in "Mythmaker's" the eponymous
office decides to ban death via the prohibition
of the word "death" itself.
In both texts there is an instance of disruption
in the relation of "signification" and "signal."
Saussure defines the concepts sign, signification,
and signal like follows:
So in Frame's stories, the linguistic signs
"Death" and "Terrible Screaming" present a
disconnection between their concept and their
sound pattern, disconnection that is used
to oppress.
The narrators of both texts perform their
narrative exercise as a frame to approach
this disconnection inside the linguistic signs.
In his concept of "Frame," Jacques Rancière proposes
to
Rancière's concepts central to my approach
are the "identifying travel" understood in
its broadest terms as a displacement, not
necessarily physical; the discovery of the
"other" in the "same" as a new approach to
identifying; and the "same" that is the "I,"
the frame from which any observer observes.
In both stories there are characters living
in the fringes of the central society, in
the "otherness" that the rim represents.
But no entity is more distant than the two
homodiegetic narrators.
From their spatialization, they focalize on
the characters and the actions, as a travel
of the non-physical way.
This represents the frame from which they
are narrating.
Studying their narrative exercise allows us
to approach the issue of finding the "other"
in the "same," even when that "same" represents
our own language.
I argue that the two narrators are of homodiegetic
nature.
Luz Aurora Pimentel theorizes that what differentiates
an homodiegetic narrator from an heterodiegetic
one is "the unfolding of the narrator as a
narrative voice and as an actor in the diegesis."
Only the narrator in "The Terrible Screaming"
recognizes a narrate.
And that is sufficient to categorize her as
homodiegetic for:
To claim that the other narrator is homodiegetic
as well, it is necessary to consider the metalinguistic
and metafictional consequences of the important
role of signs in both stories.
By addressing the nature of words, both texts
call attention to the very fabric that composes
them.
Form is linked to content, or in this case
the content goes back to the form.
In "Screaming" the renaming is an action of
the narrator, addressing the myse en abyme
of linguistics signs always linking back to
other signs.
While the narrator of "Mythmaker's" on the
other hand, writes the same word that is being
banned in the diegesis she is narrating.
To consider her inside of the same diegesis
not only echoes one of the passages of the
text, but also adds a layer to the prohibition
of the word inside the story.
Thus the two acts of narration vindicate the
use of language.
One narrator is trying to assign the correct
signal to a signification, the other is writing
in actual physical paper, using the corporality
of the real world text, a prohibited signal.
In Rancière's definition, this homodiegetic
nature of the narrators places them in their
"space" in relation to the story being told.
So their response to actions that try to destabilize
their language is
The first narrator declares:
Naming that incessant noise not as the "terrible
screaming" that the other characters ignore,
but as the silence that finally speaks.
The second narrator constantly rewrites the
acoustic image "death" which has been censored
by the authorities, rebelling against them.
But both narrators encounter the walls of
their own frame: language.
By renaming the noise, the narrator only moves
from one signifier to another, attempting
to come closer to the signified.
It is tautological.
The trouble of the singularity of "silence"
also arises.
The 
other narrator encounters a similar problem.
The relation between "signifier" and "signified"
is arbitrary, so to remove one from the equation
leaves the other one meaningless.
"Death" becomes a shell in which every other
censored word can enter, just like in the
quote:
Any other five-letter word can be written
over, or even worse, the rebellious use of
the word
is repurposed.
Rancière comments on this:
This 
definition echoes the way the Mythmaker censors
"death."
But when "death" is printed and defended in
its value as a text, "death" then becomes
a culture of the city.
So, both narrators travel and try to find
the "same" by moving to the place of the "other"
to somewhat mixed results.
But the other option is to crash with the
limits of language and miscommunication.
It seems like the narrators are confined to
the arbitrariness of the sign and its simultaneous
mutability and immutability.
Let us explore then the option of the spoken
word.
Rancière exemplifies through the biblical
narrative of the Word becoming flesh the dichotomy
of the living logos.
However, the problem in "Screaming" is that
the spoken word is already silenced since
the "terrible screaming" becomes a written
word in every character's mind, but no one
utters it, reproducing the oppression.
In "Mythmaker's" the prohibition poses the
same problem: the dead letter is what works
when the living logos has been silenced.
So the relationship between signification
and signal is broken, as well as the living
logos and the dead letter are constricted
within the diegesis of these stories.
To synthesize in both cases, to reconcile,
seems to be the shift in the displacement
that Rancière proposes to understand the
binaries.
Just as the linguistic relationship is corrupted
and devoid of meaning when one of the terms
is removed, the relation between the living
and the dead logos is mutual, one needs the
other and viceversa.
But to synthesize is just another form of
making "same" of the "other."
So to abandon the desire to synthesize is
the start to "learning to miss one's way."
To recognize the bound of language inherent
to the narrators' projects of reconstructing the
relationship between "signifier" and "signified"
brings the allowance of this disruption without
making any effort to reconcile it.
The narrators acknowledge the two instances
of "otherness" in
their own language.
The narrations use this finding of the "other"
in the "same" to potentialize the disruption
of the linguistic signs "death" and "terrible
screaming."
In "Mythmaker's" the ban of the one acoustic
image brings forth the fatal consequence:
The frontier between the signals "death" and
"life" blurs because of the simbiosis of the
concepts of death and life.
So the linguistic sign is ever changing and
unstable in Janet Frame's stories, just like
in language itself.
However the narrators do not attempt to reconcile
the instability, they just present the possibilities.
Silence, Death, Life, Screaming, all of these
are temporary substitutes for those unheard
sings; and, paradoxically, for a moment contains
them all in the very act of narrating: it
is only necessary to lose one's way.
