Clasificación de Técnicas e Instrumentos de Evaluación

Although Haley was less than flattered when Stead dubbed him the “probably / The

best Yorkshire surrealist / writing in New Zealand” (Stead, 1979b) it was probably not the

sly qualifier or the triviality of the mantle accorded to him that rankled as much as the

suggestion that Stead - and others such as Hone Tuwhare - saw him as an English rather

than Pākehā New Zealand writer. Indeed Haley went to some pain to straighten the

record in an afterword to his second collection of stories Real Illusions (1984) noting that

due to his vague genealogy he could not “lay claim to a tribal connection with Yorkshire” (p. 123), had elected to become a naturalized New Zealand citizen, and was in the process

of recreating his sense of personal history in and through fiction set in New Zealand:

“The New Zealand element in these stories does not merely reside in place names nor in

the planting of indigenous trees and shrubs; it derives, I believe, from my transportation

here of the family ghosts” (pp. 123-24). These questions of migration and belonging in

Haley’s metafictions then can be seen to complicate the “here and now” assertion of the

Freed generation. As this chapter hopes to show, in Haley’s metafiction all certainties of

the here and now are constantly undermined by doubts of where and when? Haley’s

fictions are concerned with histories of place and identity, but what gives them weight

and complexity is their epistemological uncertainty - their deliberately indeterminate

places and times which are shrouded in elusive memories and ambiguous points of

that is doubtful of its own abilities to interpret reality. As he pointed out in 1984, when

discussing the difficulties of writing fiction as a recent migrant: “I must confront a

landscape here which still rears with all the strange familiarity of a place constructed in a

dream. I suppose that is why many of the stories […] circle around the theme of building

a house. I am trying to make a place in the world” (pp. 122-23).

Questions of place aside, the other half of Stead’s description was quite right: Haley’s

fiction does spring in part from the surrealist tradition - with perhaps elements of the

Dadaist movement that proceeded it and the Absurdist Theatre movement that followed

it thrown in. Where Stead’s Modernism is concerned with authorial control and

aesthetics, Haley seems to pass over such concerns in favour of producing more what

could almost be expressed in the terms of André Breton’s surrealist manifesto: “Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and

moral preoccupation” (1924[1978], p.122). Indeed, Haley has pointed out that as a

would-be writer in London from the mid 1950s to early 60s, he was inevitably caught up

in the explosion of surrealist and absurdist drama: “I was as engaged with drama as I was

with prose fiction […] Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had new plays produced

and I saw the first London performances of absurdist playwrights such as Ionesco and

difficult to classify dramatists such as Jean Genet.” (See Appendix C). Certainly these

influences can be seen in Haley’s preoccupation with mental ghosts, which force his

fiction into the inner world of dreams and mindscapes - but while, generally speaking, the

surrealists and absurdists deliberately flattened characters, placed exaggerated stereotypes

in cyclic situations performing meaningless actions and speaking in dialogue full of

Frame’s, is more concerned with the absurd realities of the human condition than with

the strictly “surreal”. As Janet Wilson puts it, Haley shows a desire to explore “the tragi-

comic conditions of existential angst leading to an absurdist worldview” (Wilson, 2001) or

as Haley has conversely revised it “an absurdist worldview […] that leads me to explore

tragi-comic situations” (See Appendix D). Either way – as this chapter points out - the

absurdist points of view in Haley’s fiction mean that reason and logic always require

qualification and are often rejected in favour of narrative performances of mental chaos,

narrative uncertainty, and unanswerable doubts. Haley’s fiction exhibits a clear

preoccupation with human uncertainty, focussing less on character development or plot

structure than on characters who find themselves subject to illogicality, characters subject

to severe - although entirely human and “real” - states of consciousness, through events such as memory loss in The Settlement (1986), extreme self-consciousness in Beside Myself

(1990), dream-states in “The Balkan Transformer” and “The Cosmetic Factory” (1978)

and social isolation in Tomorrow Tastes Better (2001). These are not stories of human

triumph: through all of the mental fragmentations and uncertainties Haley’s protagonists

undergo, they rarely arrive at satisfactory answers to their existential questions. But

perhaps this is what drives the narratives on. To borrow another famous quote, this time

from Breton’s friend, absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco: “It is not the answer that

enlightens, but the question” (Ionesco, 1970).

From a narratological standpoint, one can easily divide the epistemic dubiety of

Haley’s work into two levels of the text: within the diegesis - as characters explore their

uncertainties about world and self - and extra-diegetically or metafictionally - as the

the reader. To begin with, Haley unsettles the reader’s epistemological certainty within

the diegesis through elusive settings, uncertain variables, unpredictable interactions,

altered mind-states, elusive memories and, most prominently perhaps, the expectations of

his characters. Haley’s metafictional novels – and many more of his short stories - begin

with a character in an uncertain world. Indeed, his narratives can almost be read as a

protagonist’s attempt to make sense of the world he is thrown into, except that most

often, it is the protagonist’s failure to make sense of the world. As Michael Morrissey

usefully notes, Haley’s characters are invariably lumped with dubiety and illogicality which

is ultimately never settled: “Haleyian impersonations are epiphanies in reverse. Rather

than given insight, the recipient realizes he is confused, mistaken” (1985, p. 49). And this

is perhaps where Haley departs from his metafictional predecessors: Haley’s metafictional protagonists do not highlight and then parody forms of realism as Frame’s do, or use an

objective reality to create stable or logical base for the reader-writer relationship as is the

case in Stead’s work. Rather, Haley’s characterisation completely undercuts any sense of

objective reality, throws logic out of the window, and denies the reader any final frame of

reference for the world in which the character finds him/herself. The reader, with the

central character, ultimately ends up “failing” to make sense, (or succeeding in not making

sense) of the story-world.

From the outset of “The Balkan Transformer”, in Haley’s first collection The Sauna

Bath Mysteries (1978), the narrator’s epistemic doubts about his character are announced

with a marked nonchalance: “As always it seems impossible to give him a name. It seems

sufficient that in some way he has been transformed” (p. 28). To add to the deliberate

transformed: having woken under the light of a stained-glass window somewhere in the

Southern hemisphere, the character appears to have been marked either with “an

ordnance survey map” or with pustular sores, but this is uncertain. The reader is then

transported to another setting, an evening party in suburban Parnell, and this setting is

described by reference to its subjective texture rather than by standard imagery of outward

appearance. The light from the windows of the house is “sharpened” by the branches of a

tree; the furniture is “hard” formed with right-angles, and the rooms contain “objects like

chairs and settees which are covered in velvet and sometimes feel like skin” (p. 28).

Minor characters are also described in textural terms, “people who bump each other

gently with murmurs” and are defined by a series of fallacious or “illogical” statements:

non-sequiturs, negative propositions, truisms and axioms:

So the people in this room connect. They move. But they do not shimmer as

leaves might curl and turn and reflect and wave and shimmer.

I can make almost nothing of them. In their nakedness in spite of their clothes

– in which they move around the room.

Two people come into the house from outside. Both of them have lived for

more than thirty years. Both of them think different things in spite of their having

had many common experiences. One is a man and the other a woman. All of the

people in the room are men or women. (p. 29)

The deliberate equivocality, almost fallaciousness, of the description begs a number of

unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, questions. In what way are they naked in spite of

their clothes? How much more than thirty years have they lived? Is it possible that two

hermaphrodites or children at the party? Who is the “I”? Of course these questions are

not answered – the indeterminate and dubious beginning of the narrative rather serves to

establish a pattern of doubt across all of the character interactions, a constant vacillation

between the characters’ definite and indefinite knowledge which is continued throughout

the remainder of the story. Why is a psychologist performing chin-ups on the

architraves? A dog digging a well in the centre of the living room? A mysterious figure in

a military uniform asking for passports? Why is the host remodelling his home with a

chainsaw and nailing an Indian carpet over a hole he has created in a wall? And why is

somebody outside knocking feebly on the carpet hoping to be allowed in? These questions

simply beg more questions, and any possibility of certainty begets more uncertainty:

Now he stood in the cold knocking on the underside of a carpet and there was no one who could hear him above the roar of music and the chain-saw.

Why did he not simply push against the limp resistance of the carpet? Did it

remind him of the hanging leather door of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul? (p. 34)

There are no answers to these questions, and the questions themselves enlighten or

inform the story through a querulous mode of characterisation: the sorts of questions the

character asks (or fails to ask) comes to define them.

“The Cosmetic Factory” from Haley’s collection Real Illusions (1984) constitutes a

similar performance of doubtful questions – the narrative progressing not through “real”

events or tangible cause and effect but through a series of conceptual leaps, unanswered

questions, and non-sequiturs. From another party in suburban Auckland, the reader is

taken on a conceptual journey to a cosmetic factory in Germany. Like the room in “The

sea anemone” (p. 88) the narrator of “The Cosmetic Factory” has a vision of a room above

the ceiling which may be opened by climbing a chimney: “If the ceiling and roof were

removed it might be possible to plot the movements of the planets”(p. 94). The

protagonists of both stories, struggling to understand their surroundings, seem almost

completely disassociated and unable to escape their own inner narratives. Beset by vague

memories of his father’s visit to Germany with an inadequate English camera, visions of

the party’s hired barman in a military uniform, and images from what appears to be a

wartime film archive shown by the host, the narrator inexplicably climbs up the chimney

and finds himself in an imaginary realm, being towed on skis behind a truck into

Germany. The story progresses with stark illogicality – almost in the manner of a dream,

where the elusive variables of the events are incomprehensible but accepted without questioning. Once in “Germany” the protagonist is issued with a visitor’s pass to a

cosmetic factory where he encounters beauty advertisements, photo-electric beams, filmic

backdrops and a naked feminine holograph. To explain the chaos, he simply becomes

convinced that “his visitor’s tag is imprinted with a magnetic code which will allow only

particular events to occur” (p. 99). These conceptual “events” consistently refer to motifs

in other places and other stories in Haley’s oeuvre: memories of volcanic hills, cameras,

passports, men in military uniform, even the leather doors of the Blue Mosque from “The

Balkan Transformer”. By the end of the story, when the narrator is dressed in a gold

frock, made-up, and photographed as an advertisement for a magazine, the vision seems

to contract, as if in an expectation of a return home. And while it may be expected that

the narrator will return through the chimney to suburban Auckland - Lawrence Jones is

take us back to the beginning” (1987, p. 242) - the ending of the story ultimately takes us

back to a place we have never left. At the conclusion, the narrator leaves the factory and

“emerges into Germany dressed in a navy suit of impeccable cut” (Haley, 1984, p. 101),

leaving the protagonist and the reader stranded in, literally and figuratively, foreign

territory. Like “The Balkan Transformer”, the events of “The Cosmetic Factory” seem to

contradict the protagonist’s expectations - or in fulfilling them, contradict the reader’s

expectations of the protagonist, leaving the reader to wonder how the character continues

to operate within and make sense of a world that seems essentially incomprehensible.

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