Repetitious beginnings: New Zealand literary history in the late 1980s.

Williams, Mark

New Zealanders tend to see themselves as differentiated from Americans by virtue of their greater honesty and simplicity as a people, and above all by their resistance to slick imagery. The sense of a lack of authenticity and depth to contemporary American life was usefully figured for New Zealanders by Ronald Reagan, the B-grade movie actor who became President and proceeded to enact foreign policy as a repetition of the westerns in which he had starred.

In the late 1980s New Zealand public life took on all the despised qualities of America. The close of the decade in New Zealand was a period of public self-parody, not always unconscious. Local politicians had learned to manipulate political images which repeated treasured myths of the past but behind which lay no substantial meanings. The images of New Zealand proffered to the populace during the Lange-Palmer-Moore years floated increasingly free of all contemporary referents into a blissful surreality. The Labour Party, going into an election bankrupt of ideas, energy and talent, attempted to resurrect the David Lange and Roger Douglas of x984 in the forms of Mike Moore and David Caygill. Moore himself prepared for the election by having his researchers sift through records of Michael Joseph Savage's 1930s 'fireside chat' campaigns.

The 1990 election presented the country with two wholly nostalgic and meretricious images of what New Zealand had been and thus, desirably, might become again. Labour offered a folksy image of the 1930s, a time of material want but also of small-town virtue and a sense of community. It was an image of pubs and bingo halls, old people in cardigans rapturously listening to Prime Minister Moore's Monty Python-like tales of a background of poverty so extreme that holes had to be drilled in the family home to let the flood waters out. It was an almost exclusively Pakeha image; evidently the polls showed a weariness with the Treaty of Waitangi.

National responded with images culled from the 1950s, a time of prosperity, moral certitude and law and order. National's slogan promised 'a decent society'. Jim Bolger's palpable lack of intellect was presented as something positive and soothing, reminiscent of Keith Holyoake. After six years of ideologically-driven change, New Zealanders were offered a spurious reconstruction of the post-war period when the Korean War kept wool prices buoyant and Britain was still motherly. The prospect of a bland stagnancy was irresistible, and the voters cast Labour out with an unstinting viciousness and leaped boldly into the 1950s.

This essay looks at the themes of repetitions and new beginnings in New Zealand literary history. The main focus is on Patrick Evans' The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990), but other recent histories by Heather Roberts and W. H. New are also examined and used as points of departure to a discussion of earlier histories. My aim is to show that the recent histories, in spite of the determination of Evans and Roberts to depart from previous instances, repeat long established themes. In the late 1980s literary history appears as something being done for the first time. It partakes of the sense of new beginnings and sharp breaks with the past that characterised the period. By 1990, however, literary history was already a genre with precedents. The revisionary efforts of the late 80s belong in a continuity of such revisions.

Historical repetition (or outright pastiche) was an ubiquitous feature of the literary scene in the late 1980s. Witi Ihimaera in Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1989) rewrote Katherine Mansfield from a Maori viewpoint. Stevan Eldred-Grigg in The Siren Celia (1989) rewrote George Chamier's A South-Sea Siren (1895) with an overlay of 1980s gender-and-class moralising. Noel Virtue produced a number of novels which pastiched Sargeson's early style and echoed his favourite themes. C. K. Stead in Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers (1989) revisited the radical cultural criticism characteristic of New Zealand letters in the 1930s, but from a conservative rather than a liberal position.

History was an obsessive preoccupation. The historical novel thrived with notable contributions to the genre by Maurice Shadbolt (Season of the Jew [1986]), Ian Wedde (Symmes Hole [1986]), Ihimaera (The Matriarch [1986]), and a number of minor contributions. In some respects the fascination with the past was positive and needed. It pointed to a desire to confront wrongs done in order to face the problems of the present with greater maturity and knowledge. It reflected a deep uncertainty about the meaning of the past in terms of the present, an uncertainty which offered a welcome contrast with the exuberant self-congratulation of the bicentennial celebrations across the Tasman. It showed a concern to reexamine the nation's past in order to reconstruct its sense of itself and to reformulate its identity, stripped of the carapace of myths that had accumulated over 150 years.

But this same concern to revisit the past in terms of the preoccupations of the present had its dangers. Historical fiction can easily serve as a kind of travel literature in which the past figures as exotic territory to be interpreted in terms of the customs of the familiar world left behind; the result is usually the reinforcing of favourite myths rather than their banishment. The problem was that the very effort to debunk key national myths--in particular, the myth about the conspicuous virtue of New Zealand in respect of race--itself fostered counter myths. In place of New Zealand as an 'integrated seaside nation' (1) peopled by well-meaning Anglo-Saxons and grateful natives, New Zealanders were offered versions of an older settler myth of a pastoral Eden projected onto those most oppressed by the settlers, the Maori. Behind the effort to deconstruct the myths of official history lurked familiar themes and images, hence the air of stale repetition about those revisitings of the past.

This is the context in which Patrick Evans' Penguin History of New Zealand Literature appeared. Published in 1990, the book, for all its air of impudent iconoclasm, echoed current preoccupations and approaches. In a very loose sense Evans' book did for New Zealand literature what Eldred-Grigg had been doing for history (without Eldred-Grigg's piety) and Jock Phillips for kiwi male culture (without Phillips' sense of mission). It offered a mixture of debunking and revaluation. The canon was deconstructed; the cult of masculinity decried; the literary nationalism of the 1930s was exposed to vigorous attack; eminences were deflated, marginalities inflated; the past was revalued in terms of the priorities of the eighties: feminism, indigeneity and so forth.

This is not to suggest that Evans writes as a feminist or that he takes it on himself to represent a Maori perspective. On the contrary, he makes it abundantly clear that he speaks as a man, moreover as that despised figure, a middle-aged, Pakeha academic, and confesses that being such involves an inevitable limitation of ideological perspective. What is interesting is his nervousness about asserting his authority as an author and historian. Evans' introduction is remarkably apologetic by comparison with a previous work of literary history like E. H. McCormick's New Zealand Literature: A Survey (1959) or with Allen Curnow's introduction to the 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (an essay with strong elements of literary history), against which Evans' book reacts.

Evans is not only self-deprecating as a literary historian but also self-conscious about his methodology in a way that separates him from Curnow and McCormick (though not from Kendrick Smithyman in his A Way of Saying [1965]). Evans is concerned primarily to shift critical method away from the focus on a few commanding individuals who 'see history as beginning with themselves, and themselves as central in that history'. (2) He is speaking here of the Phoenix generation, but he sees the assumptions of this group persisting into the 1960s when, to him as a young man, Ian Wedde, Alan Brunton and others seemed to be updating and extending the tradition. Evans records his own education in the intervening space towards the view that canons and traditions are intrinsically flawed critical terms (similarly, Lawrence Jones in his introduction to Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose [1987] records his education towards a broadening of the realist preferences that informed the early articles and reviews which formed the genesis of his book). For Evans, the problem with the idea of 'tradition' inherited from the Phoenix generation is that it excludes or downgrades the work of Maori and women. To be avant garde, male and middle-class in the 1960s was to confirm rather than break with the limitations of the established concept of tradition.

Evans does not aim simply 'to reconstruct the canon as seen in the hindsight of repentant white middle-class males' (by which he means Wedde and McQueen in their 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse); he seeks to do away with the idea of canons and traditions together. (3) He is sceptical about separate traditions of Maori and women's writing because these too confirm implicitly the concept of the canon. Nevertheless, his own literary-critical assumptions are infected by what he condemns. As Lydia Wevers shows, he himself concentrates on male writers. (4) Moreover, his own critical stance, in particular his habit of praising works which reflect local realities, reflects many of the values of the 'masculine realist' school. At one point he dismisses poetry which lacks 'an increasing sense of the local' and offers instead 'a sort of Disneyland of the mind that has no connection with anything at all'. (5) This is not far from Curnow's 'local and special at the point where we pick up the traces'. (6)

Evans describes his method as 'soft post-structuralism'. (7) By 'soft' he means that his book does not tax his readers with abstruse terms. Nor does he follow the argument from linguistics that texts contain only signifiers adrift from their signifieds. His use of the Disneyland metaphor shows his instinctive repugnance for the notion that novels are lexical playgrounds. Novels, for Evans, are measurable ultimately in terms of their faithfulness to reality, by which he understands not a set of geographical references but the actual experience of groups and individuals.

Evans' debt to post-structuralism is manifest chiefly in his preference for the marginal over the mainstream. His concern not to undervalue those groups or individuals who have been underrated by previous literary historians leads him at times to over-generousness. Take the book's concluding paragraph in which Keri Hulme's the bone people is celebrated for its muscular energies:

 Historically, it has been so disadvantageous for a writer in New
 Zealand to be a Maori or a woman. But as the resources of
 traditional writing have been slowly ground away, those attributes
 have increasingly looked like the only ones a writer should have.
 In its robustness and unpredictability, Hulme's writing makes many
 of her male contemporaries look effete, as if what they are doing
 is no longer actually about anything much. It is so different from
 what seemed to happen for so long in a tradition that has been so
 kind to men, a pleasant irony with which to close a book that has
 tried to make that plain. (8)

Evans is not only sympathetic to marginalised groups or individuals on social-humanitarian grounds; he also appears to believe that being on the margins carries some automatic literary advantage. Hence his claim that the attributes a contemporary writer needs most in the 1980s are those of racial and gender rectitude (that is, she must be Maori). Curnow's 'minimum requirements' for good writing of 'accuracy, purpose, coherence of design and original vision' do not figure here. (9)

Evans subscribes to the view that being marginalised makes writers more open to literary radicalism, and thus more advanced. Of Blanche Baughan's treatment by Bulletin editor, A. G. Stevens, he writes: 'As a male guardian of Australasian literature he was blind to the things that made her different, and particularly to the way in which the marginalising of women made them open to international movements men had hardly heard of. In the search for her own way of saying, she had discovered the New World of Whitman and the Transcendentalists, acquiring a barbaric yawp of her own and a perspective of colonialism not as regional but as an international and historical development of democracy'. (10) There is, no doubt, some truth in this, but the attribution of Baughan's literary radicalism to her status as woman seems strained. Christopher Brennan around the same time in Australia was making himself over in the image of the French Symbolists without the advantage of being female. In literary terms, to suggest a link between Baughan and Whitman is inevitably to raise a comparison that is unflattering to the former.

Equally telling is Evans' assertion that Robin Hyde's writing promised 'an accommodation to local things far more authentic in fact than any self conscious mythology of attachment male writers were devising'. (11) Although Evans' critical terms here (authenticity, the local) are notably romantic and realist, he sees Hyde's writing as breaking with the limiting assumptions of contemporary writing by men, and thus as in advance of its time. At one point, Evans quotes a passage from Nor the Years Condemn (1938) as evidence that Hyde's species of realism 'does not conform to the definitions of literature that had become established in her time'. Here is the passage:

 At the bay one morning a relief squad found a dead girl under a
 hedge; she had taken lysol, and the bottle was there beside her,
 against a hand like a bird's claw. She had a shabby yellow jumper
 and a black skirt which had worked up, showing suspenders and cold
 flesh between her stocking-tops and her underwear. Nothing about
 her was pretty but the back-fallen short hair, of a yellow colour
 and coldly beaded with dazzling dews. The men's first impulse was
 to pull down her clothes, and the voice piping up, 'She was wearing
 pink scanties--can't a minded the frost,' meant her no harm. The
 men leaning on their grubbers, stared down at her. (12)

This passage involves a sense of direct humane sympathy for women's suffering rarely met in Sargeson's writing, but the writing is certainly 'literary', in spite of Evans' assertion to the contrary. In fact, it is strongly reminiscent of George Orwell and could almost have been taken directly out of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In other words, its realism, far from breaking through to some new orientation reflecting women's vision, is in line with the prevailing international style inherited from Hemingway and consolidated by Orwell and Isherwood in England. (13)

At the centre of Evans' literary-historical method lies the notion that the description of New Zealand reality by the writers of the thirties generation, which remained for so long the dominant influence on our writers, was a construction which reflected the perspectives and interests of the white, male, middle-class writers who propagated it. Evans makes the point that the kind of realism favoured by the Sargeson, Curnow and Holcroft myth was too muscular, too active and too restricted in 'the geographical colouring of its ideology' for women. (14) (Ironically, a book called Wilderness Women appeared in 1989 which subverts and parodies the muscular outdoors theme by focusing on a number of 'good keen women'). (15)

It is quite true (by now a truism) that Sargeson's realism, for example, was a partial view rather than an accurate picture of national life, but is this not true of any writer? Moreover, can we not regard the ideological perspectives in the work of a given writer, however repugnant we may find them, as givens that shape and influence the writer, but do not necessarily prescribe its interpretive interest? Sargeson's very narrowness of focus is a source of the power that is so inescapably present in his stories. Even his notorious misogyny, which has generated more articles in the 1980s than his technical mastery or his linguistic concentration did in the 60s and 70s, can surely by now be seen as a means of opening up interpretive possibilities within his work rather than closing them off. (16)

Evans' tendency to see middle-class male elites operating literary-political plots and staging coups to 'seize control of much New Zealand writing' conforms to a common pattern of critical thinking in the 1980s. (17) A prominent strain of contemporary criticism sees literature as a field of power where judgements enforce ideology. Predictably, C. K. Stead is for Evans a conspicuous example of the literary politician. In All Visitors Ashore (1984), according to Evans, Stead reaches back in time in order to associate himself 'with a period that is seen as heroic and historic'. (18) There is, of course, truth in the view that aesthetic preferences conceal individual interest, and it is always useful to remember that literary judgements do not occupy some ideal space outside ideology. But there is a danger that the political will become all we see, so that valuation will entirely disappear from the practice of literary criticism. No amount of looking behind the texts for evidence of a man seeking power will account for Stead's ability to write poetry, novels and criticism that will outlast the quarrels that surround the moments of their production. The question is, by how long?

Curnow is a more instructive example than Stead in this respect because of the certainty that his work will survive that much longer. As Evans notes, Curnow was embroiled in literary political battles over his editing of the 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. Evans is determined not to be daunted by the extraordinary authority of Curnow's voice (as critic and poet) that has served to elevate him above the fray of magazine and anthology squabbles that are so much a part of the life of the man of letters, though concealed by the myth of greatness. He resists the tendency to present Curnow as a 'great' poet and distinguished editor rather than as a journalist, anthologist and writer pursuing a literary career. Moreover, Evans is determined to poke fun at the male sense of hierarchy that has been so marked in New Zealand literature, and Curnow does not escape Evans' gibes.

In justice to Evans it must be acknowledged that New Zealand poetry from the 1930s to the 1980s has been male, hierarchical, lineal and anxious, with the newcomers of each succeeding generation looking back over the shoulders at Curnow, the Abrahamic figure. Still, having acknowledged the core of truth in this picture, one needs to allow for some moderating and complicating influences. One must acknowledge the extent to which Curnow's own poetry consistently offers a critique of the source of all this masculine authority, the Judaeo-Christian image of the vengeful deity, and one must grant the complexity with which fathers figure in his poetry generally. In his recent poems Curnow's father appears, and the poet evokes the sense of authority that went with his voice, the elevation of his words. For Curnow, the image of the Father, as distinct from his actual father, is both consoling and threatening. The Father guaranteed the metaphysical securities of the pre-modern world, but his was also the face of the God humans had fashioned in their own vengeful image.

This latter God lies behind some of the most terrible acts in Curnow's ungentle poetry (Michael Hulse, as Mac Jackson has pointed out, is surely wrong in seeing Curnow as 'gentle'). (19) In 'Bring Your Own Victim' he traces the movement from the ancient world of myth to the modern world of history as the persistence of violence without the justification of the heavens. We live now in history, where history means Hiroshima and Jonestown. The gods have been forgotten; we are alone. The universe is empty; stars 'spit' and 'shit'. Yet the knives are still poised above the sacrificial victims.

The point is that the thematic concerns are worked out in the poetry with extraordinary complexity and ambivalence. It is the ambivalence that drives the poetry into its most productively sinewy knots of language. This is where critical concentration needs to be fixed: on the language of the poems as achieved things. While the poems never wholly transcend the ideological particularities of the man that made them, they translate them into terms we must respond to on grounds other than the moral, biographical or historical (which is not to say that these will not be part of our response).

In spite of his penchant for making value judgements in the form of asides, Evans generally emphasises the political at the expense of the aesthetic. His attitude towards Curnow is like that of a cheeky schoolboy towards a stern schoolmaster while the latter is out of the room. Part of the motivation for this stance towards Curnow springs from a desire to direct attention back towards the generation of female writers who were supposedly denigrated by the self-promotion of those associated with Phoenix. Evans lays considerable stress on the politics of the Phoenix group's rise to power, and the justice of much of what he says must be granted. One is left, however, unconvinced by his efforts to rescue the pre-Phoenicians from obscurity.

The fact is that Brasch, Glover, Curnow and Mason were vastly more talented than their predecessors, with the notable exception of Katherine Mansfield. More important, they made up a group with a concerted set of priorities (which is not to say that they were programmatic), and this allowed them to make a general impact on New Zealand writing. Baughan was due for some revaluation. Nevertheless, whatever her individual merits, she was never part of any coherent effort by writers in this country to develop an intelligently local literature based on clear principles about how to proceed and towards what end. Moreover, the finest fruits of the Phoenix group and of the thirties and forties--Landfall in its classic period, Curnow's poetry, Sargeson's stories--will remain impressive and generative for a very long time indeed. Once the 'masculinism' of the thirties writers has been exposed (and the business is becoming wearisome) and their claims to genius (not usually self-proclaimed, leaving aside Count Potoki de Montalk) have been deflated, we are left with a major body of work. Evans acknowledges this by listing some of the more important books published by the Caxton Press in the period up to 1942. (20) The 1980s would find it hard to compile so impressive a list.

Evans, in fact, is ambivalent about his own critical procedures. Hence his shifting position towards Curnow. He both cocks a snook at and inadvertently subscribes to the theory of literary greatness. He notes Curnow's ability in the late thirties and early forties to 'remake' the critical and poetic thought of his time 'with himself at its centre'. He immediately follows this up with the claim that 'For ten years ... the story of New Zealand poetry, and to some extent the story of New Zealand literature, is the story of Allen Curnow'. (21) Moreover, for all Evans' reluctance to tell 'stories', to impose mythic structures that give coherence at the cost of marginalising and distorting, he is an adroit story teller. His book constructs a lucid narrative out of New Zealand literature, albeit one in which the minor characters have been allowed some of the time to upstage the major ones.

For all his anti-Leavisism, Evans is very quick to make value judgements that praise books for their faithfulness to lived experience. He favours Hulme over her male contemporaries on the grounds that the 'robustness and unpredictability' of her writing make theirs seem 'as if what they are doing is no longer about anything much'. (22) The book is full of judgements which are usually entertaining, but never weighty in the way Curnow's are in his introductions, or even in his reviews. Nor are they permeated by that sense of literary history as an inescapable presence shaping the works of the significant writers in the present that we find in Stead's critical writing. Stead's 'From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in New Zealand Poetry' (1979) is still the most useful 'history' of New Zealand poetry up to the late 1970s because it is both historical and evaluative and because the two tendencies reinforce rather than exclude one another in Stead's critical practice.

Neither Curnow nor Stead, however, although both are dauntingly well-read and reliable as literary critics and historians, is 'scholarly' in the narrow sense. They write for the intelligent general reader, not exclusively for other academics. For the full scholarly apparatus applied to the various genres of New Zealand writing we shall have to wait for The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, edited by Terry Sturm. In the meantime, Canadian critic, W. H. New, in Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand (Toronto, 1987) offers the most scholarly literary history that we have so far.

New's prose, unlike Evans', is rarely entertaining. His asides take the form of lengthy clauses which further complicate an already dense argument. He does not indulge in witticisms. Above all, he is not overtly judgemental (although evaluations are being made). Not making judgements has an honourable tradition in Canadian literary criticism, going back at least as far as Northrop Frye, who mistrusted evaluative criticism because it is unscientific and who regarded Canadian literature as being too thin and recent to bear the weight of serious comparative judgements.

New is essentially a thematic critic who has built an elaborate structure of critical methodology on this base. He began writing in the field now called 'post-colonial literature', has established a reputation as perhaps the most distinguished authority on Canadian literature, and has remained interested in cross-cultural comparison. New's criticism presents a kind of palimpset of the critical schools and approaches that have appeared in the last forty years, from the New Criticism to 'Commonwealth literature' (E R. Leavis by way of William Walsh), to structuralism and beyond.

There are some unexpected similarities between New's critical approach and Evans'. Like Evans, New is reluctant to close off interpretive possibility, to impose an authorial narrative too authoritatively on a subject that is 'fluid and plural, evading simplistic codifications'. (23) But New goes deeper and carries his readings further than does Evans. He sees the characteristic form of the short story in Canada and New Zealand as fragmented. He resolutely avoids talking about the distinctiveness of either Canadian or New Zealand culture. He is wary of 'the limitations that any particular set of historical linkages will impose on interpretation'. (24) He is continually minutely attentive to the ways in which the writers he discusses write outside or break with inherited patterns of writing, particularly those received from England or America. It is the oddness of their usages of such patterns that attracts him, the ways in which they do not quite fit in. He refuses to accept that there is any 'universal set of "international standards"' (25) He resists the seductive concepts of wholeness and linearity. He prefers the metaphor of the mosaic--a pattern of fragments, dubiously bonded--to that of the living organism, in which all the parts are harmoniously joined to the whole.

New's methods as a critic might almost be characterised by Evans' equivocating term, 'soft post-structuralism'. New is not a poststructuralist in the sense that he has embraced a wholly theorised discourse. His textual strategies are not so radically deconstructive and his prose is never as repelling as that of committedly theoretical critics (though his sentences can be remarkably dense). Nor can he conceal his (richly productive) interest in the contexts that influence the text, particularly social and cultural ones. He merely adapts to his thematic and formalist studies of particular writers in their national contexts the post-structuralist concerns with language as the scene of play rather than representation and with decentering as the refusal to accept canonical authorities. Above all, he continually notes the ways in which the writers he is interested in 'deconstruct' the language that is available to them, 'using their own words against their own words'. (26)

Kendrick Smithyman's A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (1965) is a critical rather than a literary-historical work. More importantly, it is the only book-length study published to date which attempts to theorise the field of New Zealand poetry. Smithyman does not state a coherent set of principles and apply them, as Curnow does, nor does he sketch a historical context and fit particular instances into it, as does Stead. Instead, like New, Smithyman begins with a lengthy and involved consideration of the ways in which the genre under discussion has been approached, mapped, interpreted. Moreover, Smithyman recognises that the literary histories and criticisms of those who came before him, Curnow especially, rested on unacknowledged theoretical principles, however, fiercely their authors may have eschewed theory. He does not simply assume that 'the understanding of empirical reality and the quest for value ideas tenable in our situation' are the necessary preconditions to successful writing in New Zealand; he notes that they have been seen as such. (27) Here Smithyman anticipates the kind of critiques the And group set about making in the mid-1980s.

Smithyman, like New, shifts the stress on the writer's condition in post-colonial societies away from the sense of ambivalence about 'home' towards an ambivalence about language: 'If we suppose a tension in the mind when we relate "here" to "there" we have also to suppose a like tension in the very language we use for that relationship and for a good many others'. (28) (He thus anticipates the writers of the Freed group in the late sixties who expressed a weariness with the business of naming the hills and reflecting on the theme of isolation.) (29) It is not that he sees this condition of linguistic doubleness as peculiarly the post-colonial condition, any more than New does. He grants that it may be the condition of language per se (New could add that it certainly is the rule for writers using language under the general condition of modernity). (30) Like New, he prefers the condition of fluidness to that of neat resolution and, like New, he notes the stress, tension and ambiguousness in the post-colonial writer's situation (the terms applied here to culture are clearly drawn from the New Critical understanding of the poem). (31) Finally, like New, Smithyman has a love of sentences the convolutions of which reflect the endlessly equivocating knottiness of his thought: '"Must", it seems to me, in context is saying in effect, or is making the sentence persuade us that it means to say, that the poet who is functioning as a poet properly should cannot help conveying a sensibility (which is equated with reality) formidably giving evidence that it was nurtured in and shaped by peculiar circumstances of environment (physical character) and discrete influences (isolation and history)' (32)

By comparison with New's and Smithyman's books, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature is not a scholarly, detailed or laborious work. Evans is content to set a populist tone. His prose is lively, engaged and eminently readable. He works in broad sweeps of generalisation. He makes accessible ideas that have previously been circulated in more erudite and demanding form. Instead of criticism that is acutely aware of its own linguistic means, circling deeper and deeper into language itself, he offers a brisk survey in readable prose. Instead of theoretically-driven criticism, he offers the concepts of post-structuralism reworked in a cheeky, friendly and vague form.

This seems to me perfectly proper in a book of this sort. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduates and at the vagary which every publisher knows is not purely fictional, the 'intelligent general reader'. In fact, the book was for a time on the best-selling list in Metro magazine. (33) This is easy enough to account for. Evans' prose is full of barbs that bite, but not too deeply (his sentences produce none of the excited trepidation of reading Stead). He is adept at generalisations that seduce with their easy wit, as when he characterises the difference between Australia and New Zealand as that 'between the rabid and the genteel'. (34)

Sometimes, it is true, he lapses into the manner of the after-dinner raconteur with a tendency towards mild obscenity (the book contains endless plays on the expression 'well hung'). Often he appeals to favourite New Zealand cliches, as with the Australian example above or the comment that the 'English habits' which Blanche Baughan and William Satchell brought with them to New Zealand were 'tired'. (35) His generalised surveys of Victorian and modernist literature in England are superficial.

But to carp against Evans' breezy tone is merely to ask for another kind of book than the one he has written. There are other venues for theoretically sophisticated criticism, notably the little magazines and, in modified and occasional form, Landfall There is simply not a sufficient body of specialised academic readers in New Zealand to serve as a market for such criticism. In spite of the messianic expectations of some of high theory's practitioners that eventually their own preferences will entirely take over the practice of criticism, traditional kinds of criticism remain prominent and are likely to continue so. (Similarly, postmodern fiction has not simply consigned realist and story-telling kinds of fiction to the capacious dust-bin of literary history). There are no 'academic' publishing houses in New Zealand in the sense of those which aim at an exclusively academic readership. In so small a market that is likely to remain the case.

Nevertheless, it is clear enough that theory has touched most of those currently practising literary criticism in New Zealand. Even those who have resisted it most forcefully have been obliged to respond to it and thereby be influenced by its concepts, however antithetical they may find them. Certainly, Evans has been influenced and has managed to absorb what suits him.

Scholarship, like theory, has tended to have a marginal place in New Zealand criticism. The most scholarly New Zealand critics have been mediaevalists (though Brian Boyd has recently brought scholarship closer historically, if not geographically, with his biography of Vladimir Nabokov). The most solidly scholarly commentator on New Zealand fiction so far has been Lawrence Jones. His Barbed Wire and Mirrors is a critical rather than a literary-historical study, but an essay he has written, 'Versions of the Dream: Literature and the Search for Identity', indicates the density of detail and thoroughness which will no doubt mark his essay in the forthcoming Oxford History. (36) The essay offers an historical survey of New Zealand writing from 1840 to 1985 by tracing the movement through four chief periods: the colonial, late colonial, provincial and post-provincial periods. Jones usefully establishes the links between particular writers and groups of writers and the larger cultural and historical trends that shaped them, without lapsing into determinism. It is this kind of detailed attention to particularities and individual idiosyncrasies coupled with a sound grasp of the large sweeps of historical period that will make possible a developed literary history in this country.

Still, scholarship has its own dangers when applied too rigorously to young literatures. There is always the risk that Oxford may produce another version of the Literary History of Canada, a sieve so fine nothing can drop through it. (37)

The chief limitation of Evans' book is that he seems embarrassed about writing something so respectable as a literary history of New Zealand. Evans himself describes his book as 'a readers' book rather than a scholarly one'. (38) This modesty seems designed to deflect criticism of the book, as though Evans is anticipating the criticism of his peers by taking his work out of their ground. But the problem goes deeper. The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature engages with its strong local precursors, usually vigorously and directly but without the respectful independence of mind that truly shifts and revalues the past. If New Zealand literature has been characterised by intense generational struggle, with fretful sons fighting to supplant authoritarian father, Evans' book changes the tone of the quarrel. He is facetious rather than wilful or authoritative, and this dilutes the force of the book. He is cheeky enough to describe Curnow's late poetry as geriatric, (39) but not brave enough to submit the verse to close and sustained scrutiny. His significant precursors--Holcroft, McCormick, Curnow--appear in the book, but their presences, however forcefully felt, have not evoked the calculated acts of resistance they deserve.

Leaving aside Joseph and Johanna Jones' New Zealand Fiction (Boston: Twayne 1983) which is minor, sketchy, inaccurate and outdated, and the few literary histories such as J. C. Reid's Creative Writing in New Zealand (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1946), Joan Stevens' The New Zealand Novel, 1860-1960 (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1961) and H. Winston Rhodes' New Zealand Fiction Since 1945 (Dunedin: McIndoe, 1968) which are by now of chiefly historical interest, Evans' major precursors in the field are Holcroft, Curnow and McCormick, especially the last. Mention should also be made of the excellent studies by Bill Pearson of Maori literature from 1938 to 1965 in his seminal essay reprinted in Wystan Curnow's Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Heinemann Educational, 1973) and Ian Reid's Fiction and the Great Depression: Australia and New Zealand, 1930-1950 (Melbourne: Edward Arnold, 1979). But the strongest figures in the field for Evans are undoubtedly these three, and of these, McCormick produced the book which stands as the most obvious precursor to Evans'.

Evans' reference to McCormick is tellingly brief. McCormick's assessment of New Zealand's literature becomes, says Evans, 'a prolonged deferral of the crucial moment which is to occur, exactly on cue, a century after European colonisation began'. For Evans, that moment is, of course, the attainment of national self-consciousness. McCormick's approach thus 'crystallise[s] the notion that the Thirties saw a growing nationalism that had been the purpose of the initial European settlement'. (40) This settler nationalism which justifies colonialism in terms of the Pakeha culture it produced is what makes McCormick so antipathetic to the 1980s. Yet McCormick's sense of purposive continuity leading towards a tradition proper gives his survey a confidence and authority lacking in Evans' history.

McCormick's great crime from the viewpoint of the 1980s is that he justifies colonisation in terms of the national culture it triumphantly produced after a 100 year gestation (41)--no 1980s guilty fixation here. Literature, for McCormick, gives shape to the anarchy of life in New Zealand. (42) This view is directly opposed to the predilection shown by New and to some extent Evans for fragmented form. It recalls Eliot's 'mythic method' and reminds us that McCormick's sense of tradition has familiar modernist precedents, although his modernism is not as high or as Eurocentric as that of Eliot or Pound. Essentially, his understanding of tradition is that of Leavis adapted for the colonies. The new literatures are seen as sturdy independent branches springing off the main trunk. To McCormick's mind this process was not yet fully formed at the end of the 1950s, but signs of it were evident in the local literary associations found in Hyde's work, particularly her debt to Mansfield. (43)

McCormick shows no embarrassment about his role as surveyor of a literature in the making. As Evans points out, he has a story to tell, the story 'invented' by the generation who came to prominence in the 1930s and 40s who saw their own decade and their own literary efforts as the culmination of the previously scattered and ineffective efforts to produce a distinctively New Zealand kind of writing. McCormick made a signal contribution to the view that New Zealand literature came into existence as something meaningful to discuss and build on in the 1930s. Certainly, McCormick is limited by a set of assumptions that belong to a particular period of New Zealand literary endeavour and which now have historical endmarks around them (though the view remained entrenched as late as the 1970s). Nevertheless, McCormick's survey remains useful and perspicacious thirty years after its publication as do Curnow's anthology introductions and Keith Sinclair's History of New Zealand, which also appeared in 1959. Moreover, his history anticipates many of the themes that became current in the 1980s, including themes found in Evans' book.

McCormick is keenly aware of the way in which European views shaped and distorted Maori. He describes how the dispute between Rousseauists and the followers of the Old Order in France influenced whether Maori savagery or nobility was in the ascendant in the early historical accounts. 'Eighteenth-century New Zealand', he observes, 'formed a debating ground for the clash of ideas which, a few years later, was to culminate in the French revolution'. (44)

In the late 1980s a similar dispute emerges around an article by Allan Hanson in American Anthropologist suggesting that at crucial stages in its history European intellectuals, particularly anthropologists, have constructed or 'invented' versions of Maori culture that suited their purposes, assimilationist in the late nineteenth century, separatist in the late twentieth. (45) Terry Goldie, in his Fear and Temptation, takes up the dispute, seeing Maori as the subjects of European concepts. (46) Evans pursues this theme when he observes the extent to which Maori myths were translated into an English conceptual system at a very early stage of colonisation: 'if it had ever been possible to recreate something authentic to Maori culture, which is doubtful, that possibility had gone by the last years of the nineteenth century'. (47) Like McCormick, Evans is scathing about literary sentimentalising of Maori by Pakeha.

Evans presents McCormick as a nationalist, but this description needs some qualification. In crucial respects McCormick criticised the nationalism of the mid-century, as did Curnow. None of the literary figures of the 1930s and 1940s favoured retreating behind cultural tariffs and promoting the virtue of indigenous products. McCormick points out that many of the writers of the 1890s 'theorized in terms of a local "indigenous" culture when expanding communications were abolishing, or at least modifying, that conception'. (48) In this sense McCormick anticipates the position of postmodernists like Simon During against the kind of nationalism to be found in the bone people. (49)

McCormick's sense that the beginnings of a New Zealand literary 'tradition' is to be found in the echoes of Mansfield in the work of Hyde looks forward surprisingly to Heather Roberts' effort to trace a female tradition in Where Did She Come From? New Zealand Women Novelists, 1862-1987 (Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1989). Roberts' book is built around her belief that 'the women novelists in New Zealand belong to a strong female tradition in which the writers are linked across the generations by personal contact and friendship, by common themes and subject matter, and by a universal commitment to describing and interpreting women's lives in New Zealand since settlement'. (50)

It is difficult to see how Anne Kennedy fits into this scheme. Evans notes a notorious instance in which a review by Kennedy of New Women's Fiction provoked a vitriolic response from local women writers ignorant, apparently, of Roberts' sanguine view that women writers and editors, unlike their male counterparts, are not susceptible to political squabbling. Kennedy had had the temerity to criticise the outdated realism of much of the fiction included in the book. (51) Her treatment in response to this recalls that dealt to Curnow by the Wellington poets annoyed by his representation of them in The Penguin Anthology.

The uncomfortable fact is that Kennedy, perhaps the most promising young woman writer (and the epithet is insulting) of fiction in New Zealand at the moment, is not primarily committed to 'describing and interpreting women's lives in New Zealand'. Her most significant link is undoubtedly to another New Zealand woman writer, Janet Frame. But the debt here is a literary and linguistic one, not one of spiritual affinity or gender ideology. It is the kind of debt that Curnow, Holcroft and McCormick would recognise as obvious and positive.

Roberts' history is written in conscious opposition to the male tradition of New Zealand letters that has been entrenched since the 1930s. Her aim in placing the writers she discusses within a single pattern is 'to free them from literary traditions which have suppressed and ignored them'. (52) Roberts does not, however, merely substitute a line of great women for one of great men. Rather, she sees 'tradition' as the continuity of specifically female concerns, expressed and embodied by women writers, over generations and decades. Moreover, she avoids the tendency to single out particular decades as crucial moments in the formation of a tradition, thus distancing herself from the preoccupation of male writers with the 1930s.

Roberts carries further Evans' general critique of the generation of the 1930s and displays none of his ambivalence towards the 'fathers'. Where Evans continually refers to Curnow in particular, pitching his own readings against those of his notable precursor, Roberts largely ignores the male critics. Curnow is referred to briefly and on a peripheral matter. She prefers to conduct her dialogue with other women writers, living and dead, in a spirit of conviviality rather than engage in open dialectic.

The consequence of this is that her book lacks argumentative drive, although her method of procedure is founded on an implicit argument. No doubt, this is calculated. Dialectic, after all, is under suspicion these days as a cover for masculine self interest. Nevertheless, Roberts has a case to make and her polemic would have been more challenging if it had been more explicit. The other problem with her method is its essential conservatism. Literature is important chiefly because of the interpretations of New Zealand life it offers. (53) Is this not a feminist version of socialist realism?

The late 1980s were a period comparable to the late 1950s and early sixties in terms of the outpouring of novels, anthologies and histories. But there are significant differences. The productivity of the earlier period reflected the consolidation of nearly two decades of literary activity seeking to redefine and redirect the cultural situation in this country. Sinclair, Curnow, Oliver were not by 1959-60 part of a newly arrived generation asserting themselves against an entrenched one. They were setting in place an establishment already sure of its importance, its force and its chances of longevity.

The literary-historical writing and cultural criticism of the late 1980s was characterised by aggression and iconoclasm rather than self-confidence and authority. It was writing pitched against that of precursors, resented but still potent. Hence the mixture of defensiveness and self-deprecation in much of the work. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the new generation was conscious that the scale of their endeavour was smaller than that of the older one. Compared to Landfall in its classic period, Pearson's Fretful Sleepers essays, Curnow's anthology introductions, Chapman's essay, 'Fiction and the Social Pattern', much of the historical and cultural criticism of the late 1980s looks decidedly frail.

Amid all this, it must be granted, were some examples of historically significant and informed reinterpretation. The historical revisionism associated with And at its best was exhilarating and productive of work that was genuinely new, in the sense that the legacy of existing works was not discarded or downgraded but assimilated to new historical perceptions and priorities. Simon During on Sargeson, Leigh Davis on Curnow, Roger Horrocks on the making of a New Zealand 'tradition', Wystan Curnow's revisitings of Bill Pearson's famous 1952 essay and Coal Flat (1963)--all these changed the terms in which New Zealand 'literature' as a body of received texts and received opinions could be read. The effects of that change are still being felt.

On the other hand, the sense in Evans' book that something not merely different from its precursors, but actually new is being essayed involves a different sense and reception of the past. Lydia Wevers endorses this by describing the book as 'the first attempt at writing a literary history of New Zealand'. (54) McCormick at least needs a mention here. The precursors are present in Evans' book, but not as a vital body of existing works in need of rereading, reinterpreting, updating and assimilating to current purposes. Evans does not take the past instances of the genre he works in seriously enough. His facetiousness is a way of sidestepping rather than confronting the strong figures from the past.

In obvious ways the generation of the 1930s, especially Curnow, constituted resented fathers for the generation of critics who appeared in the late 1980s ('Curnow was the father', as Evans puts it). (55) Their assumption of authority, the confidence with which they generalised about New Zealand history, literature and identity provided a body of fixed opinions in need of shifting and undermining. Nevertheless, although the function of these writers in the 1980s has often been to provide conservative positions against which the arriviste generation of the 80s can define itself negatively, they have a value and a meaning outside these strictures.

Evans' History partakes in that delirious sense prevalent in the late 1980s that new beginnings were truly being made. But the past has not been avoided or remade; too often it has merely been repeated.

Notes

(1.) Wedde, 'A Short History of Rock and Roll', Georgicon (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1984), p. 7.

(2.) Evans, 7.

(3.) Evans, p. 10.

(4.) Lydia Wevers, rev. of The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, Listener, July 9 1990, p. 110.

(5.) Evans, p. 45

(6.) Allen Curnow, Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) in Look Back Harder: Critical Writings, 1935-1984, ed. Peter Simpson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987), p. 133.

(7.) Evans, p. 14.

(8.) Evans, p. 276.

(9.) Allen Curnow interviewed by Gregory O'Brien, Moments of Invention: Portraits of 21 New Zealand Writers by Gregory O'Brien (Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1988), p. 33.

(10.) Evans, p. 49.

(11.) Evans, p. 112.

(12.) Evans, p. 139.

(13.) See my '"Would You Like to be Maori?": Literary Constructions of Oral Culture', Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, 4 (Fall 1990), pp. 90-3.

(14.) Evans, p. 113.

(15.) Christine Dann and Pip Lynch, Wilderness Women: Stories of New Zealand Women at Home in the Wilderness (Auckland: Penguin, 1989), p. 9.

(16.) Evans, p. 137.

(17.) Evans, p. 76.

(18.) Evans, p. 142.

(19.) MacDonald P. Jackson, 'Still Reflecting: Curnow's Continuum', Landfall 171 (September 1989), p. 360.

(20.) Evans, p. 88.

(21.) Evans, p. 98.

(22.) Evans, p. 276.

(23.) W. H. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand, p. 3.

(24.) New, p. 10.

(25.) New, p. 17.

(26.) New, p. 24.

(27.) Kendrick Smithyman, A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (Auckland: Collins, 1965), p. 11.

(28.) Smithyman, p. 12.

(29.) See Murray Edmond, editorial, The Word is Freed, no. 3, n.p.

(30.) Smithyman, p. 12.

(31.) Smithyman, p. 17.

(32.) Smithyman, p. 41.

(33.) The August 1990 edition of Metro listed Evans' History at number 5 on its Best-Selling New Zealand Books list; the September edition listed it at number 4.

(34.) Evans, p. 30.

(35.) Evans, p. 37.

(36.) Lawrence Jones, 'Versions of the Dream: Literature and the Search for Identity', Culture and Identity in New Zealand, edited by David Novitz and Bill Willmott (Wellington: GP Books, i989), pp. 187-211.

(37.) The metaphor is borrowed from Douglas Grant's review of Carl E Klink's Literary History of Canada quoted in William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 67.

(38.) Evans, p. 14.

(39.) Evans, pp. 233-7.

(40.) Evans, p. 95.

(41.) McCormick, New Zealand Literature: A Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 100-2.

(42.) McCormick, p. 114.

(43.) McCormick, p. 124.

(44.) McCormick, pp. 7-8.

(45.) Allan Hanson, 'The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic', American Anthropologist, vol. 91, no. 4 (1989), pp. 890-902.

(46.) Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation (McGill-Queens University Press, 1990)

(47.) Evans, p. 48.

(48.) McCormick, p. 81.

(49.) Simon During, 'Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?', Landfall, 155 (September 1985), pp. 366-80; see also During, 'Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits', And/I (September 1983), pp. 75-92.

(50.) Heather Roberts, Where Did She Come From?: New Zealand Women Novelists, 1862-1987 (Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. 3.

(51.) Evans, p. 280.

(52.) Roberts, p. 7.

(53.) Roberts, p. 7.

(54.) Wevers, p. 110.

(55.) Evans, p. 119.