“No earth tones”: Origins and Literary History.

Patrick Evans

The great given of the postmodern era which we started to become aware of about thirty years ago is its banishment of the idea of the authentic. After a decade in which the interiors of public buildings had been decorated in the natural colours of green, brown, purple and orange, in which new home-makers had been encouraged to pull out the azaleas in their gardens and plant cabbage-trees and five-fingers instead, and the banks of the River Avon had undergone a long-term replanting project intended to return it to its genuine pre-European state, we were suddenly told that nothing could be natural, nothing could be authentic, that everything was socially constructed—our sense of identity, our bodies, our sexuality, even the very idea of nature itself. This was the arrival of a mode of thinking probably best expressed in the early 1980s by the creator of the new television series “Miami Vice”, who, when asked the philosophy behind his programme, replied, “No earth tones” [1]. The age of what Andy Warhol used to call the “deeply superficial” had arrived [2].

Warhol’s ironic designation catches something of the pleasure artists and critics seem to take in the social manifestations of a world-wide post-industrial capitalism. Since 1990, when the term first emerged from the field of international relations studies and entered the popular imaginary, “globalisation” has had a certain up-to-the-minute chic about it, a reassuring sense of surfing into a future just as fragmented and accelerated as we have been promised it ought to be. But this need to name the present moment is itself an historicising impulse, and in particular has a nostalgic, modernist feel to it which grates against the pleasure of finding that we are in the moment and up with the play. In this paper, I want to examine where our present moment comes from in our own cultural history, in order to argue against the notion that it is discrete and distinctive, against the idea that we have suddenly begun to produce a literature that could come from anywhere, written by new young writers who are a series of interchangeable replicas in a chain of fractals that disappears off into the northern hemisphere. Against this, I am going to argue that our literary culture has always been constructed by global contexts and always superficially connected to its environment as a result, so that our most recent writing and the rise of the creative writing school that lies behind it, and of the commodifying publication industry that lies before it, are merely the inevitable developments of what is, in fact, a grand tradition of disconnexion and misprision.

I am going to begin with James H. Mittelman’s assertion that globalisation originated in fact 500 years ago, at the dawn of modernity, when Europe began to enter the New World under the twin impulses of mercantile capitalism and human wonder (Mittelman 2000: 19). The yoking of these two energies, the one to do with the material and the other to do with the ideal, has continued throughout our culture to the present moment, the second compensating for the work of the first as a manifestation of the sublime, an imaginative dematerialisation by which the realities of colonisation, particularly its absences and its awkward violations, are transformed into apprehensions of what Burke identified as the terrible and the marvellous, what Kant found expressed in that awe-inspiring first Commandment [3]. Thus, as Mary-Louise Pratt has argued, the sublime compensated Columbus for finding something less than Cathay; nearer home, it compensated Europe’s Pacific explorers for the lack of a Great South Land (Pratt 1992: 81). The sublime civilises, aestheticises, both the absence of what the observer wishes or expects or hopes to see and the presence of its opposite; it exaggerates scale in order to control unexpectedly exaggerated scale, as in Heaphy’s painting of an elongated Mt. Egmont like an inverted icecream cone; it supplies stock effects for different uses, so that the same brooding, promissory mist that appears in Petrus van der Velden’s paintings of the Otira Gorge appears again 40 years later in a painting reproduced on the cover of Michael Burleigh’s study of fascist Germany, in which sensitive Nazi stormtroopers faint away at the manifestation of a swastika hovering above them. As an instrument of this sort, the sublime was a crucial tool of colonisation, in New Zealand as anywhere else, a way of painting over an Other too terrible to contemplate unsublimated, something John Newton has shown us gnawing at Ruskin’s vitals as the Sage of Brantwood imaginatively contrasted the familiar sublime of the Swiss Alps with the unfamiliar mountainscape of a forbidding, alien New World Elsewhere (Newton 1999: 86).

Understanding this explains why the inevitable corollary to the triumph of colonial capitalism in the European conquest of the Maori by the end of the Land Wars about 1872 was the arrival of the tourism which Lydia Wevers has recently told us brought the British travel agents Thomas Cook & Son to New Zealand as early as 1880 and the rapid carving-up of the newly-conquered country into what were called Scenic Wonderlands, the first northern, hot and nativised, centred around Rotorua and New Zealand’s own Lake District, with Maori villages, mudpools, geysers and (until their extinction by the Tarawera eruption of 1886) the famously sublime Pink and White Terraces, Otukapuarangi and Te Tarata; the second Scenic Wonderland southern, cold, devoid of Maori and featuring the great snow-covered chain of the Southern Alps plus the wonders of fiords, lakes, glaciers and waterfalls (Wevers 2002: 169-86). These new Antipodean Wonderlands were soon a stage in a world circuit of marvels to be looked at by Europeans after the nineteenth-century colonial conquest of the indigenes of the New World—or, alternatively, packed up and exported in the kind of reverse tourism represented by “Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West” travelling circus, which made several trips through Europe (1887-1906), displaying large numbers of Sioux Indians, including, famously, Chief Sitting Bull. The New Zealand equivalent was the “Maori Village Concert Party” tour of Britain during 1910-13, led by Maggie Papakura, a Rotorua tour guide (During 1989: 766-7).

Outside the new Scenic Wonderlands lay two categories, the first “badlands” such as Taranaki, the King Country and the Urewera, where the white man feared to tread, the second the dull urban quotidian in which the burgeoning European population lived their daily lives. Against these different kinds of colonial negatives, the Scenic Wonderlands became sources of sublimation, two domains of the internal exotic which could be used to validate the new European presence and negate its threatening indigenous Other, both through guidebooks and, increasingly, through works of creative literature often written, according to Lydia Wevers , by the same people who had written the guidebooks. Thus the editor of New Zealand’s first literary monthly Zealandia also helped write the Union Steam Ship Company’s guide book Maoriland (1884), and one scenic travel-guide even quoted parts of Alfred Domett’s long poem Ranolf and Amohia to convince prospective British tourists to visit a country which Domett himself couldn’t wait to get out of (Wevers 2002: 175-7).

This realisation, that from the first the colony’s literature was deeply allied to the larger business of naturalising the white settler conquest, is a crucial step in stating my larger argument. We can find this naturalisation in narratives which turn away from the unpleasant realities of colonisation, like Edith Searle Grossmann’s novel The Heart of the Bush (1910), which rejects the nasty business of the new meat exporting trade for an Arcadian (and presumably vegetarian) existence below the snow-topped Southern Alps. We can find it in the pages of our first major poetry anthology New Zealand Verse (1906; collecting back to 1850), which shimmer with a language that yearns to the sublime: “crystal”, “fairy”, “golden”, “silver”, “spectral”, “starry”, “ethereal”, “tender”, and “soft” are just some of the words with which our early European poets sought to dazzle or conceal.

Far more interesting than all this, though, are the moments when words fail and we glimpse something deeper in the colonial mind. In 1901, a young Englishwoman called Blanche Baughan, recently arrived in the country, found herself cooking the porridge on a farm at Ormondville in the southern Hawkes Bay and confronting the reality of what white settlement was doing to native forest and bush, the “acres of barren devastation”, the “enormous rotting logs, and the mouldering black stumps from which they had been severed” Baughan 1912: 120). This evidently disturbing vision she took down to Christchurch with her where, during the next few years, she worked it through in a series of poems, from an initial registration of destruction through a process of rationalisation to dematerialisation. The first of these poems, “Burnt Bush”, nakedly confronts the raw devastation of settlement, but in the second, “A Bush Section”, she tries to rationalise her initial shock: all that destruction, we are told, was just the price of progress, and the New World that replaces it—represented by a train that hurtles past the new farm—belongs to a new (Pakeha) generation. Her unease is evident, nevertheless, in a clumsy attempt to sublimate the dead logs into “star-logs” twinkling in the sky.

While Baughan was writing her poetry on Banks Peninsula , Katherine Mansfield was, famously, taking her trip through the semi-conquered Urewera to Rotorua and eventually back to civilisation. Like Baughan, she was deeply shocked by what she saw. “Everywhere on the hills—great masses of charred logs”, she noted in her journal: during the day “like strange fantastic beasts”, but during the night incapable of being subdued by metaphor, “a veritable nightmare” (Mansfield 1978: 34). Near the shattered remains of Tarawera, she had her first, sulphurous, whiff of thermal New Zealand and an apprehension of overwhelming, destructive forces barely held back. “[D]isgusted and outraged”, she arrived in Rotorua, where she became ill and depressed (Mansfield 1978: 65). Over the following years, Mansfield worked at that initial “veritable nightmare” vision of burnt trees, turning them from “fantastic beasts” into “shabby beasts”, till she finally settled the whole business in the description of weed-hung rocks in Section VII of the late story “At the Bay”, “like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink” (Mansfield 1978 : 27, 30).

This sort of progression, from a state of extreme alienation in which white settler guilt becomes projected onto the environment, to a state in which all affect has been burnt away in an environment that is heimlich, acts out the dominant culture’s ideal sublimation. That Mansfield had to do this at the personal level, though, is typical of our white settler experience, which, according to Stephen Turner, is unique for its lack of those collective myths (I presume he means like convictism in Australia or the Afrikaaner myth of the Battle of Blood River) by which, through sacrifice, the colonial European achieves that impossible indigenisation which Terry Goldie has told us is at the heart of the white settler sensibility anywhere (Turner 1999: 20-3; Goldie 1989: 13). Because of our distinctive sense of a “destiny apart” from other colonies, so this argument runs, because of our early identification with the imperial where Australia (for example) identified with the colonial, European New Zealanders sit uncomfortably in their own country, distinguished by a great melancholy that marks the constant falling-short of our attempts to sublimate, the return of what it is that we have been repressing.

If we add all this up, we get a New Zealand literature whose purpose is to deny the basis of the white settler presence in the country: the distance of its origins, its status as interloper, the unlawfulness of its conquest, and the violations colonial capitalism inflicted on the environment. In this argument, the kind of revulsion we saw in Baughan and especially in Mansfield is what all Pakeha conceal, ready to be triggered by any unconscious reminder of how it is that we have really got here. The kind of sublimation made by Mansfield —by which the guilt of white settler expropriation becomes eventually worked out amid Arcadian imagery, fully dematerialised—is an ideal, representing a desired working-through to the final state of necessary misprision which successful colonisation requires. In fact most of our writing falls short of this state, leaving it caught up in the kind of striving we find in Baughan: a literature which urges towards the sublime but never quite gets there—which, instead, represses and denies, risking all those affective surpluses and returns that come with repression and denial.

In this analysis, what was settling out around a hundred years ago were two realities, a material one created by an agrarian economy and the secondary industries that came out of it, and a dematerialising one, evolved and sustained not least through our creative literature and expressing a powerful compensatory ideology which effaced material reality and urged towards a collective forgetting. From this ideology there was no escape—even for Maori, who, according to Steven Webster, were drawn into the colonial project during the first three decades of the twentieth century, becoming a mobile rural proletariat of shearing-gangs, scrub-cutters, timber-workers and so on, and consequently drawn into its false consciousness, its colonial sublime (Webster 1998: 77). In compensation for the traditional way of life they had lost, according to Webster, Maori themselves constructed from the wreckage of Contact a programme of weaving, carving, kapa haka and language-preservation which by the 1920s came to be known as “Maoritanga”—in effect, a factitious “Maoriness” formed not out of resistance to white settlement, but out of white settlement itself, as an inevitable stage in the ongoing colonisation of the country. The proponents of “Maoritanga” were the Maori parliamentarians Peter Buck, James Carroll—who coined the phrase in its current usage—and Apirana Ngata, all active assimilationists whose work amounted to a progressive neutralisation of the Maori Other on behalf of colonialism: thus Ngata encouraged Maori to break up larger hapuu into smaller whaanau in order to become what he called, revealingly, “useful settlers” (Webster 1998: 92, 98). In place of genuinely resistant nineteenth century Maori institutions like the Kingitanga and the Kotahitanga, “Maoritanga” was, in Webster’s view, a toothless ideology derived in large part not from traditional Maori history—by now irretrievably muddied by European interposition—but from the writings of the English anthropologist George Pitt-Rivers, much influenced in turn by the Pakeha Elsdon Best (Webster 1998: 82-94).

Webster’s argument compels not least because it makes sense of other major developments in the emerging New Zealand culture of the time. Identifying the 1920s as a period when Maoridom openly became a part of colonisation—in a sense giving up that part of itself which lay beyond the reach of white settler society and finalising its own reification as “Maori”—helps us to understand the curious “reappearance” of the Treaty of Waitangi in public life soon after. Since its signing, the Treaty had fallen on hard times, rendered irrelevant by the same juggernaut of colonial occupation we have just seen destroying traditional Maori society; in 1877 the Chief Justice himself declared it a nullity, and a few years later—so the story goes—it was found forgotten amongst the waste paper in a desk of a government building in Wellington [4]. But in 1932, the Governor-General Lord Bledisloe gifted the Treaty site to the nation, beginning a process by which the document, the signing ceremony and its implied bicultural relationship of Maori and Pakeha have become fetishised as part of the dominant culture’s ideology of partnership and progress. This was the version of Maoridom, as a willing partner in the business of colonisation, that was celebrated in the 1940 Centennial exhibition at Lyall Bay in Wellington , from the giant statue of Kupe which greeted visitors in the foyer to the bas-reliefs further in, which depicted Maori and Pakeha celebrating their successful partnership. Emerging here was an enhancement of the dominant culture’s sublime narrative, one in which Maori were given a new “history” which duplicated the white settler’s triumphalist version, down to the celebrations Apirana Ngata encouraged in 1950 for the 600th anniversary of Kupe’s “discovery” of New Zealand: no matter that Ngata himself believed no more that this had actually happened than he believed in an historical Kupe: better a fake history, in his view, than a past without any history at all (Belich 2001: 214).

In this analysis, the two processes, the extinguishing of the Maori Other through the rise of Maoritanga in the 1920s and the fetishisation of the Treaty from 1932, go side by side, the second compensating the first as a re-rhetoricisation of history that draws it towards a common sublime. According to Jonathan Lamb, this process is part of a larger aestheticisation most famously discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on art and technical reproduction, published in the context of the rise of European fascism. Provocatively, Lamb finds a similar process in certain forms of colonisation, particularly the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield with their distinctive assumption that the modifying effects of environment could be resisted by the ongoing availability of what the later ideology would term lebensraum (Lamb 1999: 87-90). Fascism, Lamb, says, fulfilled this ahistorical utopianism by offering the present as the completion of both the past and a future which it dragged towards itself by means of what he describes as “vast public displays, such as the rallies at Nuremberg, the Olympics in Berlin and the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth” (Lamb 1990: 664). A small but significant parallel to this neo-Classical utopianism, which was also evident in the architecture of Mussolini’s Rome, can be found at precisely the same moment in the neo-classical architecture of the New Zealand Centennial exhibition buildings in Lyall Bay—the outward and visible sign of a state ideology of harmony and progress that concealed the grimmer truths of its colonial past by denying history, collapsing it into a single, triumphant “now”.

In this interpretation—and through a complete and ironic change of its original relationship to settler society—the Treaty has become concretised into a series of institutions that stand in for a white settler ideology of biculturalism, thus rendering it invisible and therefore unquestionable. The real origin of this ideology is not the Treaty site of 1840 but the sequence of nineteenth-century trade exhibitions that celebrated the triumph of colonial capitalism and were represented most impressively by the second Christchurch Exhibition (1906-7), in which we see the realities of that capitalism yoked with the aesthetic for the first time, the relentless promotion of the export trade—which sold twenty million pounds worth of beef and mutton during the six months of the exhibition—euphemised by a fetishised Maori component, from the use of “Haere mai” as its slogan to its “authentic” Maori village which featured “real” Maori imported from the North Island and a fake Rotorua “Scenic Wonderland” complete with artificial geysers mechanically powered by steam [5]. A brief series of steps takes us from there through the triumphs of the Centennial and the desolations of our glum Sesquicentennial celebrations to the mechanical earthquakes of our officially bicultural national museum in Wellington, its very design—a Maori wing and a white settler wing converging on a third, unifying space—expressing the unquestioned ideology of a dominant culture which does not encourage alternative points of view.

As I have indicated, our literary culture has been caught up from the first in this business of normalising colonial capitalism in order to yield the illusion of a “natural” connexion to the land. Ours is a literature which “belongs” to a centripetal dominant culture that draws everything in to the necessary business of maintaining its collective false consciousness, ensuring that nothing escapes to form the basis of a genuine counter-culture: in this dispensation, you are either “in”, an agent of its ideologies, or “out”, rendered invisible; you join the collective forgetting, or are yourself collectively forgotten.

As a result, what seem like moments of rebellion in our literary history, points at which the culture is challenged by some new group or movement, are always moments at which it is actually renormalising itself, reaffirming the basic assumptions of its ideology while appearing to do the opposite. The most egregious example is the cultural nationalism we associate with Charles Brasch, who described it as a “frost” that killed off “weeds” (1980: 391), and Allen Curnow, with his macho talk of “dispos[ing] of older poets” (Curnow 1987: 251-2). Over the last twenty years, thanks to critics who showed up its misogynism, masculinism and homophobia, we have learned to see the movement as having been so enmeshed in the processes of colonisation as to be neo-colonial rather than decolonising, a means of sustaining and enhancing the ideologies of the white settler culture rather than a means of challenging them. So involved was it in these processes, in fact, that it is in there, in its literary products, that we can find most clearly registered the moment of the dominant ideology’s entrenchment, the moment of its reification. This is evident, for example, in the first instalment of Frank Sargeson’s autobiography, “Up Onto the Roof and Down Again”, which appeared in Landfall fifty years ago, a memoir which began a three-volume project in which he recast the story of his life as a Pilgrim’s Progess towards a moment of fulfilment in the far north represented—miraculously, improbably—by a single, emblematic kauri that has survived the destruction of the native forest. Sargeson’s quest for closure in the biography is unfailingly represented in terms of nature, in a kind of emotional and psychological re-afforestation that restores the culture’s burnt bush and, in particular, brings back the native honeysuckle Sargeson identifies with his uncle’s way of life and with his country—standing “not for New Zealand as it is,” he states, but for “New Zealand as it might worthily have been” (Sargeson 1977: 50).

This reification of an imaginary plenitude that has been lost through the very acts by which the dominant culture has come to dominate is the true product of the cultural nationalist intervention, something which John Newton has shown us, in his discussion of Glover’s great poetry sequence of the 1940s, “Sings Harry”, involves an imaginative possession of the land through an imagined loss of it —a loss which, in my view, finally manoeuvres white settler culture into its yearned-for position as indigenous, enabling the Pakeha—in a final, cruelly ironic act of imperialism—to “become Maori” at last by dispossessing Maori even of their own dispossession (Newton 2002: 39-40). It marks the consummation of the urbanising and industrialising processes of the white settler capitalist project, the hegemonic moment, fifty years ago, at which the dominant culture revealed its domination. It is also the moment at which, with everything won, fully Westernised European New Zealand could afford to become a little sentimental, could afford at last to allow a few other voices to be heard: for it seems to me no coincidence that this triumph of the colonial sublime fifty years ago marks the point at which what we have come to see as the counter-narratives of the present suddenly started up: in the appearance of the expatriate gay writer James Courage’s early fiction from 1948, in the return of women to publication as represented by the appearance of Janet Frame’s first volume The Lagoon in 1951, Antony Alpers’s first biography of Katherine Mansfield, and Gloria Rawlinson’s collection of Robin Hyde’s poetry in 1953, and, in 1952, the arrival of Te Ao Hou, the Maori Affairs Department’s new magazine, what its first editorial described as a “marae on paper” for New Zealand’s increasingly urbanised Maori population.

During much of the last fifty years, all these narratives have struggled to some kind of existence as apparent counter-cultures. But it is important to remember the dominant culture’s ability to dissemble, and its need I mentioned a few moments ago to normalise itself through controlled acts of rebellion. Like the supposedly decolonising cultural nationalists of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, the writers of the last thirty years we have taken to represent genuinely alternative ways of imagining have actually written from within the dominant culture, relying in particular on its central validation of suffering and dispossession as markers of some kind of “indigenisation”. Thus Alpers’s Mansfield biography and Rawlinson’s account of Robin Hyde were both agonistic; thus, too, Peter Wells’s rewriting of James Courage’s story in his introduction to the anthology of gay male writing Best Mates emphasizes Courage’s loneliness and neglect, and Ihimaera’s gay novel Nights in the Gardens of Spain uses AIDS as a graphic marker of suffering and abjection. All these are versions of the dominant culture’s inherent yearning to “become Maori” in some way, to indigenise to some kind of originality by achieving victimhood.

Maori, however, are already Maori, already indigenous, and this has given the literature of the “Maori renaissance” a curious and distinctive status in the culture. In particular it gives an apparent authenticity, as if Maori writing represents a reality prior to the ones available to Pakeha, one that is somehow more “real”, more streetwise, authentic, honest, “tough”—as if it were a sort of default mode to all our other writing, a truth that is “really” behind it. Thus the Wellington-based Pakeha of the mid-twentieth century who first attempted rebellion against the Auckland-based cultural nationalists—Baxter, most obviously, but also others—instinctively identified with Maori as a way of doing so, as if Maori culture was a rock on which to place their crowbar. Thus Peter Beatson identified a new, radical phase of Maori writing in the ‘seventies (Beatson 1989: 12), one which we can associate with the awarding of first and second prizes in the 1977 Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition to Keri Hulme’s “Hooks and Feelers” and Bruce Stewart’s “Broken Arse”. Thus, too, more recently, Lydia Wevers has compared Pakeha Generation X writers with their coevals in the Huia short story series to claim that Maori Generation X writers know “that there are things at stake”, things she locates outside the text, in politics and a history which by implication seem to ground the Maori artist (Wevers 2001: 385).

But according to Steven Webster, the literature of the “Maori renaissance” is no more than a continuation of the Maoritanga of the 1920s, like it a consolation, a distraction from the real business of colonial capitalism, “the sequel of the nineteenth-century moral education of the British working class in bourgeois culture: the moral education of the Natives in their own culture” (1998: 83). Just the WEA in the evenings, it would seem—but before we rise up against this remarkable piece of political incorrectness, let’s put it to the test. For a start, there is no doubt that what we think of as the “Maori renaissance” began under the paternalistic umbrella held by Te Ao Hou’s Pakeha editors, and that those editors, with the Maori Affairs Department and the Maori Purposes Fund Board breathing down their necks, took no risks. Much of the magazine was devoted, as Nelson Wattie has said, to the kind of articles on “wood carving and other crafts” that were prescribed by Maoritanga (1998: 21); elsewhere, according to the editor in 1960, its contributors were to use the same language and tradition as Pakeha, but would just do a better job of it. A card-carrying Marxist like Hone Tuwhare was far too hot for Te Ao Hou to handle: a poem he submitted during the 1950s—on no more dangerous a topic than Samson and Delilah—was banned (Underhill 1998: 1375), causing the poet to complain about what he called the magazine’s “sexlessness”: “Maori experience isn’t a Sunday School picnic and prayers”, he grumbled to a friend (Hunt 1998: 61).

But the Maori writing that seemed to begin to express that experience twenty years later, in that radical phase initiated by Hulme’s “Hooks and Feelers”, looks now less like a spontaneous eruption of long-suppressed Maori rage than a part of the dominant culture’s sudden taste for historical recuperation. From about 1975, with Dick Scott’s Ask That Mountain, Pakeha culture has explored our collective past through works by Anne Salmond, Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, James Belich, Harry Evison, Michael King and many others. All of these have attempted, in effect, to bring into the dominant discourse experiences which belong to its historical other, through a process of what is effectively translation —the kind of balancing-out that we can find in Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds (1991), which scrupulously seeks out similarities between the two cultures at contact, emphasizing the primitiveness of the European as against the sophistication of the Maori, as if bringing authentic, primordial Maori culture into the known and knowable Pakeha world.

The assumption that Pakeha can do this like Alice going through the looking-glass was demolished in the debate that followed publication of Wedde and McQueen’s 1985 Penguin poetry anthology, with its clutch of translated waiata like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. More difficult to shift, though, has been the assumption that, because of their ethnicity, Maori themselves are able to enter and recuperate that world where Pakeha are not. Believing this validates works like Heretaunga Pat Baker’s two historical novels Behind the Tattooed Face (1975) and The Strongest God (1990), for example, which try to recreate a precontact and early contact past, and June Mitchell’s historical novel Amokura (1978), which tries to reconstruct the experience of her nineteenth century ancestor Meretini Cook. It also validates supposedly truth-telling social realism like Bruce Stewart’s, Alan Duff’s, and some of Apirana Taylor, and explains why recuperation, in the sense of recovering physical wellbeing and wholeness, is the dominant trope of the bone people, a recovery brought about on behalf of all of us by the mysterious, witch-like figure whose fruity potions put paid to Kerewin Holmes’s mysterious intestinal growth, in a triumphant conclusion to a novel which rolls confidently on through the tapu wall, impelled by the recuperative energies of the dominant culture of the day.

Our belief that Maori writers can actually bring this off is part of the wider validation increasingly given to indigenous writing everywhere through the establishment of what Graham Huggan calls The Post-colonial Exotic, that commodification of liberatory-struggles-to-political-identity in the material domain of the Third World for First World Western markets keen to experience the oriental in dematerialised, aestheticised forms while still in the comfort of their armchairs. We can see this in the recent success of “The Whale Rider”, the film of a book which for sixteen years attracted little attention in New Zealand, until becoming a part of the Western culture’s endless appetite for reassuring images of the “natural” and the “real”. Using precisely the tropes that construct the Maori literature it comes from, it depicts the recuperation of a fragmented indigenous community through use of a mystified and spiritualised Nature to which only Maori are shown to have access, implicitly confirming the acceptability of indigenous victimhood, and the rightness of the larger capitalist processes which create it, by giving to Maori a compensatorily superior authenticity bestowed in spiritual terms invented by the dominant culture and available in your own living room courtesy of your DVD. In this way “we” can watch “them”, as “they” experience “our” spirituality for us in digitalised technology.

Under these pressures, writing by Maori seems to me to run the risk of becoming further conventionalised, becoming no more than a series of practices marking a particular work of literature as being “Maori”. Thus, for example, we have James George’s two recent novels, Wooden Horses (2000) and Hummingbird (2003), strongly romantic, lyrical works in which “Maoriness” is denoted by characters’ names, by their status as victims of a destructive urban culture, by their “natural” recourse to rural and beach settings as an antidote, by the theme of recuperation and, in the first novel, by the suggestion of some essential, primal quality denoted in the wooden horses of the title. “Maoriness” here is something lightly applied like makeup, a series of inflections that stand in for the hard work of establishing a fully imagined world; too easily, by gesturing at meanings and values by now an unquestioned part of our dominant culture, they claim seriousness of purpose and significance of theme.

This validation of our internal exotic by the global market, its pressure to authenticate the dominant culture through reference to Maori experience, places a wider pressure on our contemporary writing. Craig Marriner’s novel Stone Dogs, (2001), for example, can hardly have won its success through the limpid qualities of its prose; what marks it out instead is its apparent realism, its unflinching account of the lives of people we want to read about but would prefer not to meet. But Marriner’s novel reads to me as being written in the tropes of the “Maori renaissance”, with its emphasis on the destructiveness of urban capitalism, social reconstruction into the gang, and, especially, recourse to nature as a source of escape and renewal—in this white trash version, a pine plantation, but one which does the same work of psychological reafforestation that we find in Duff, Grace, Stewart and other Maori writers who in their turn have imitated the Pakeha writers of cultural nationalism. From how deep in our collective cultural unconscious comes the scene in which Marriner’s unsavoury protagonist pauses in his illicit activities to express his appreciation of our Great Outdoors: “Morning sun paints the scene so vividly idyllic that for an instant my heart leaps clear of the stress miring it”, he says, in a suddenly-changed register that reveals him as an unexpected follower of the Lake poets. And from just how much deeper comes next, when his spiritual experience is confirmed, authenticated, by the appearance of—naturally—a fantail, which meets him eye-to-eye with a gaze which is—again, naturally—“far too wise” (231). The same unconscious yearning for a supposed indigeneity, for the conventionalised authenticities of what the dominant culture knows as “Maori writing”, can be seen elsewhere—for example, in the fantasy world the protagonist of Peter Wells’s novel Boy Overboard reaches through reading books whose pages seem, as he turns them, to change “in some fundamental way”—to sublimate, in short, in the way that Blanche Baughan yearned for—into their original wood, back to the point where he can smell “all the highly scented earth-sourced smells of the forest, drawing up from the moist forest floor all the cries of the earth” (1997: 162).

By reaching like this for the reassurance of that native forest which cultural nationalism reified as a provisional absolute, Wells marks his novel as part of the literature of identity politics which closes the cultural nationalist period—as an episode in that series of struggles by which dominated groups such as Maori and gays sought some sense of their own smaller “nationhoods”, while still locked in the terms of the dominant culture. I think this is what Simon During was referring to when he criticised Hulme’s novel for resiling into modernism when confronted by the post-colonial project: like Mark Williams commenting on Ihimaera’s parallel venture in The Matriarch, he saw the danger of an essentialism that fell back into a popular-culture kitsch that evoked Steven Spielberg rather than ancient Polynesian mythology (Williams 1990: 123). Against Hulme’s novel, significantly, During placed one by Janet Frame, her postmodernist masterpiece Living in the Maniototo, pointing with considerable prescience to the way out of the essentialist wood: for him, the task of the post-colonial writer is to enter the postmodern rather than fall back from it, to embrace its provisionality, to accept the writtenness of the written and the sublimity of the sublime (During 1985: 372-3). In Frame’s novel, the Maniototo of the title is fully dematerialised from its geographical referent in Central Otago, becoming less a country of the mind, even, than a quality that keeps changing as the novel develops; characters come and go (not least a sculptor who disappears from the text whilst bleaching his bath), their status even within the novel never certain. In her next novel, The Carpathians, she does the same to the landscape, melting the middle-European mountain chain of the title into the Ruahine range by means of a celestial visitor called the Gravity Star, which abolishes distance in a way that obviously represents the work of globalisation. Here we have an anticipation of Arjun Appadurai’s prescription for what we write at the intersection of the postmodern and the post-colonial, a regionality that is provisional and a provisionality that is regional—a literature that is meaningful to a local constituency while retaining the capacity to be meaningful beyond it (Appadurai 1996: 29).

In its insistence on turning away from modernist ideas of the essential, from the notions of “inspiration” and “originality” which he rejects in the introduction to his anthology Mutes & Earthquakes, Manhire, through his creative writing classes, has provided a significant ingredient for During’s recipe, ramming his students’ noses as he has over the years into the provisional, the playful, the factitious, and above all the ironic as the only sources of that which it is possible to write. More recently this has been theorised by Annamarie Jagose as an area of “difference”—that incommensurable, untranslateable space between cultures which Lyotard denoted by the neologism différand and which she sees as “characteristic of post-structuralism in general” and “a crucial term for queer knowledges and modes of organisation,” (1996: 77). This change of emphasis is represented in her two novels of the period, In Translation (1994) and Lulu: a Romance (1998), which rewrite the culture’s baffling collisions of colonial otherness as collisions of individuals: the latter uses that standard trope of Otherness, adultery, but with the intriguing variation that the Other Woman in this case is a chimpanzee, with which, or whom, the protagonist’s cuckolded husband eventually runs off to a desert island, to enjoy an idyll of primordial bliss and simplicity, ironically presented. Like Jagose’s novels, David Lyndon Brown’ s two collections Spilling the Beans and Other Stories (1995) and Calling the Fish and Other Stories (2001) push towards a different construction of the gay subject, with stories in which gay lifestyle is normalised not by some kind of “translation” to a bogus prior essentiality but as a function of a larger, everyday life.

It is at least interesting that the recent fiction which has moved farthest from our culture’s long pursuit of a factitious “original” has been from writers who in an earlier age we would label as gay. But the point of their writing is the redundancy of that label and the emergence in its place of other dimensions which belong properly to an aestheticised sublime. To show what I mean as I close, I turn to the New Zealand novel that has most impressed me for its fulfilment of many of the prescriptions I have been discussing today—which has, in fact, helped me to crystallise those prescriptions. Written by an expatriate New Zealander in Melbourne like Jagose, it wears its origin lightly on its sleeve, the only place in fact which tells us where its author comes from; inside its covers, its gay element is, as it is in her writing and Brown’s, lightly worn, a given, a determinant of its characters’ world to the same degree as other elements determine it, no more, no less. Themes familiar to the informed, educated New Zealand reader Simon During called for in 1985 are evident but dematerialised in this novel, taken out of the ruck of realist, politicised history—thus the utopianism I associated with Wakefield earlier, and which I saw as so determining of our culture’s white settler consciousness, is represented by a minor character’s model of an ideal city which he builds in his apartment, and which is a memory in the novel even as he builds it. The trope of cultural reafforestation that seems to sneak unnoticed into so much of our writing is present in this novel but, again, dematerialised: “managed”, distanced, ironised, by being set in the outback of Victoria, where of course there are fewer trees and the intensities of the New Zealand referent can be implied. “New Zealandness”, with its reliance on an authenticating Maori “lining”, becomes notional in this novel: one character’s most intensely “New Zealand” experience comes near Tenerife, where an unexpected grove of karaka trees evokes for him moa hunters’ caves. “Gayness” as an identifying theme has become something ambiguous and sublte, for example in a sequence involving a wan brotherhood of unemployed middle-aged men living together in a motorcamp under the cautious euphemism of mateship, none of them quite able to take the plunge into overt homosexual behaviour.

A novel, then, that we might call “post-gay”, as in “postmodern”, “post-colonial”, and “post-national”. “I can’t say I even come at nations now”, one of its characters says. “They’re not making them any more” (328). Instead, what constitutes “New Zealandness” here is taken out into the world, where it is experienced as a trace, as something “true” and “real” at last when its fundamental fictionality is exposed through recontextualisation. In that sense we are freed by the world, and in fact that is the title of this novel: The Free World , published by Victoria University Press in 1996. And the fact that its author’s name is J.H. MacDonald seems, ironically, to acknowledge a final truth of that world I have been talking about, the world that is made in the constructions and misconstructions of post-industrial global capitalism: wherever you go in it, whatever it is you think you’re doing, you always end up at McDonald’s.

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1. Michael Mann’s prescription is now a part of ‘Miami Vice” lore. See http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/10251/comment12.html

2. Warhol used the phrase to describe himself. For this and other Warhol witticisms see http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Andy_Warhol

3. Burke defines the sublime in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Kant’s in his Critique of Judgment (1790).

4. Lamb 1999: 79; but see also Claudia Orange 1997, chapters 9 and 10, for her discussion of the Treaty’s progress.

5. Thomson (1998) discusses these and other details of the Christchurch exhibition.