III. Sustento Pedagógico
3.1.7. Los procesos pedagógicos
Stead’s juxtaposition of local and continental settings and literary aesthetics, and
Frame’s themes of cultural imitation and derivation in her work written in Britain and
America could be seen to complicate this thesis as a study of a “national” literature.
Indeed, the metafictional writers in this study could be seen as largely transnational: as
well as Frame and Stead who have spent significant periods producing fiction offshore,
Russell Haley is originally from Yorkshire and writes on problems of migration; Michael
Jackson is an expatriate living in the US whose fictions draw on his career of travel as an anthropologist; Albert Wendt’s novels document his attempts to reconcile his immersion
in European culture with the traditions of fa’asamoa; and Charlotte Randall has written extensively from her experiences in Europe and, as already noted, has been criticised for
participating in an homogenous international style. As well as these diverse geocultural
influences, it is evident that international trends toward reflexivity since around the 1960s
have had a large bearing on the performance of narrative in New Zealand metafiction –
trends which, as this chapter discusses, coincide with some significant changes in New
Zealand’s broader cultural make-up during the period, particularly in Auckland where
the writers in this study - except the most recent, Charlotte Randall – have mostly been
performances of reality/realism, post/modernism, anti-illusionism and authorship, to
contextualise ideas of “place” that underpin fiction in the latter half of 20th century New
Zealand, outlining some significant cultural trends in the national/provincial literary
context, before re-engaging the previous threads of discourse to discuss performances of
place and identity in the metafictions of Russell Haley.
Most cultural writers in New Zealand would agree that the mid 1960s through to the
early 70s were the beginnings of a large cultural shift in the country. As Michael King
puts it, at the beginning of the 70s: “it seemed to some as if the maelstrom of change was
gathering rather than diminishing” (2003, p. 457), or as Patrick Evans has it: “Around
1970 living in New Zealand began to feel different from before” (2007, p. 15). During
this period New Zealand was undergoing a change from what is often described as a warmly insulated colonial outpost to an independent minor-leaguer in a globalised world,
and the country’s dominant cultural premises, and with them the politics of identity in
New Zealand’s fiction output, were beginning to respond to these changes.
To begin with the broader cultural shift, some commentators have argued that one of
the most significant factors in the transformation was Great Britain’s move into the
European Union. American Phillip O’Neill, discussing the different trajectories in post-
colonial development between New Zealand and Australia has argued that New Zealand
settlers were more economically and culturally dependant on England than Australians, so
when England joined the European Economic Community in 1973 the impacts on New
Zealand were greater: “The relatively quick post-EEC smashing of New Zealand’s self-
conception as the overseas farm of England meant that it was ripe for a
steadily, and replaced England with the influence of the US after the Second World War.
Broadly, Australia looks outward, New Zealand looks inward” (1993, p. 6). The last
clause of O’Neill’s statement regarding a perceived inwardness in New Zealand culture
will be an on-going area of discussion as this thesis progresses, but perhaps there is some
validity to the hypothesis that the opening of global markets, as well as exposing New
Zealand to new forms of culture, contributed to a kind of self-reflecting inwardness of
culture that developed in response to its perceived isolation and insulated social structure.
On one hand Pākehā New Zealanders had long considered itself a colonial elsewhere – a
“chilled and sealed” outpost of the world, as Evans puts it – but Britain’s entry to the
EEC meant New Zealand “was being defrosted, its citizens socially, psychologically and
economically exposed to the air, abandoned by the mother country to an indifferent and newly challenging world in which its competitors were unfamiliar nations outside the old
colonial matrix” (Evans, 2007, pp. 16-17). Arguably, this sudden exposure, while
providing the country with a variety of alien cultural influences, also created a new culture
of inward self-negotiation, a mode of meta-cultural self-inspection, or as Alan Brunton
puts it, “a reflexive turn”: while asserting its independence from Britain, the country was
looking back at itself and rediscovering (for Māori and Pākehā alike) its own indigenous
culture: “Independence promises a future but, because its origin is the past, it is also a
movement back into history, a demand for a genealogy” (Brunton, 2000, p.2).
This demand for greater self-understanding was perhaps registered most strongly in
Auckland where the convergent boundaries of the various Pacific and European cultures
were most active. While the ethnic make-up of all the main centres was certainly
Māori were migrating to Auckland to work, and the proportion of Māori in the city rose
from 0.9% in 1936 to 8.1% in 1976 (McClure, 2009). In addition, the opening of
Mangere International Airport in 1966 confirmed Auckland’s status as New Zealand’s
main gateway to the world, and Auckland as the world’s first port of call in New Zealand.
Over the 70s the rate of immigration increased and two-thirds of immigrants from the
Pacific Islands (the Cooks, Tokelaus, Western Samoa and Niue) made Auckland their
home. By the late 70s, hundreds of Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the city and by
the mid-1980s when a change in New Zealand’s immigration policy occurred, thousands
of Korean and Chinese migrants made the journey. Along with these arrivals and
departures - regular flights to the UK had begun in the late 1960s - Auckland was the
first city exposed to the currency of global trends. Many new cultural features were taking root in the cultural landscape, from European cuisine, Asian automotives and other
technologies, to American fashion and music.
If Auckland was perceived as a more interesting place in terms of cultural and ethnic
diversity, it may have been seen as more exciting place to create art, and perhaps the move
of many writers, artists and musicians from the southern regions to Auckland could be
read as confirmation of a shift from provincial to more international interests. As Peter
Simpson has pointed out, Christchurch had previously been the hub of creativity in the
1930s and 1940s in terms of the fine arts, as well as literature, music and theatre:
institutions such as the Little Theatre at Canterbury University College, and Denis
Glover’s Caxton Press were the main outlets for our most important contemporary writers
(Simpson, 2007). But throughout the 1950s their dominance was dwindling, and many
Baxter, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Colin McCahon) had relocated to the other main
centres – predominantly Auckland or Wellington. This movement, Simpson points out,
was indicative of general movements in New Zealand culture (2004, 2007).14 Indeed
those who remained in provincial regions were often thought to be doing themselves a
disservice - as Frame’s narrator in Living in the Maniototo says of her character resembling
the ever-provincial Ronald Hugh Morrieson: “Why hadn’t he come to live in Auckland,
the cosmopolitan city, to get experience, to keep his art alive and in the swim?” (1979, p.
56).15
The passage of cultural influence from America to Auckland is well-documented in
the New Zealand poetry scene. While Wellington had some outlet for new innovations
in the magazine of Victoria University’s Literary Society (Experiment [1956-69]) the literary milieu of Dunedin in the 1960s was locked in a staunchly European outlook. As
Bill Manhire recalls it, the literary tastes he met as a student at The University of Otago
were “Eurocentric” - in some part due to the selective tastes of its chief literary benefactor,
Charles Brasch, and in another part due to the way publishing rights in the
Commonwealth were dominated by London publishing houses (Manhire, 1987, pp. 142-
54). Ian Wedde puts it in more general terms: “You think of poets like Brian Turner or
Bill Sewell in Dunedin where the phantom of Charles Brasch still hangs around. It was
an Anglophile centre, whereas in Auckland, say, from earlier, there was the interest of
The foundation of New Zealand’s largest professional theatre, Auckland’s Mercury Theatre Company in 1962, can be seen as another sign of the shift, and elsewhere Simpson sees the 1951 Writer’s Conference as the “last hurrah” of Christchurch’s cultural pre-eminence. See Simpson, ‘A Country in Search of Itself:
The 1951 New Zealand Writers’ Conference’ in Williams, M., Ed. (2004). Writing at the Edge of the
Universe. Christchurch, Canterbury University Press: 135
(Frame, 1979, p.56). Peter Wallstead is, according to Patrick Evans, based on Ronald Hugh Morrieson, “the novelist who has lived all his life in the obscure Taranaki township of Hawera” (1984, p. 78).
people like Curnow in Wallace Stevens and so on […] From Auckland the lines always
tended to run more readily towards the West Coast of America” (Wedde, 1986b, p. 47).
And while writers like Manhire, Wedde and Stead had previously found it difficult to buy
modern American poetry, bookshops in the main centres (especially Progressive Books in
Auckland) were by the early 1960s beginning to stock writers like Creeley and Ginsberg,
as well as collections of verse such as Donald M. Allen’s 1960 anthology The New
American Poetry whose representation of the avant-garde became an archetype for
anthologies produced here later, such as Morrissey’s The New Fiction (1985), Mary Paul
and Murray Edmond’s The New Poets (1987) and Bernard Gadd’s Other Voices: New
Writers and Writing in New Zealand (1989).
American literature had already impacted what could be called the first and second generations of New Zealand writers – Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson on
Sargeson’s generation, Ezra Pound on Stead’s – and it was to do so again when the ideas
of the Black Mountain poets (especially those of Robert Creeley who made a visit to the
country in 1974) began to be appropriated in the “open form” movement initiated by
poets such as Alan Loney and Alastair Paterson, as well as Manhire and others (Ellis,
1998, p.13). These new overseas influences and international perspectives certainly played
a part in bringing about a self-consciousness that ended much of New Zealand’s
provincialism. But at the same time this self-consciousness seemed to reinforce notions of
the national boundary. As Maurice Shadbolt has noted, up until the 1960s “there was no
New Zealand literature thought worth academic inspection” (1993, p. 170-71) but by the
beginning of the decade national literature and history were becoming an established
curriculum in 1956). By the time the National English Syllabus Committee was formed
in 1970 it was evident that the school language curriculum was “no longer seen as an
outpost of the British empire, but as a genuinely home-grown indigenous product”
(Catherwood, 1986, p.1). And where previously only unsubstantial and occasional
criticism16 on specifically New Zealand literature had appeared in reviews in magazines,
newspapers, school journals, radio and the like, by the mid-1960s there was evidence that
theory-based criticism was to take a more prominent role in the country’s literary
proceedings – if not yet in Landfall, then in the genesis of a new cluster of often short-
lived journals and magazines devoted to avant-gardism.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the first marked thread of new theoretical writing came
from students at Auckland University in the late 60s, where Sargeson’s protégés were now teaching. One of these students, Russell Haley, had taken English papers on modern
literature (including a widely revered paper on modern poetry taught by Roger Horrocks,
and another taught by C.K. Stead), and during the course of his studies had met fellow
students Bob Orr, Murray Edmond, Jan Kemp and Ian Wedde – the “third wave of New
Zealand literariness” as Edmond jocularly puts it (1986, p. 168). Another student Haley
met, at the university cafeteria in July 1968 at an event called Young Aucklanders in the
Arts, was poet Alan Brunton. Following their meeting, Haley became a part of what he
describes as the “wild-looking” bunch of young arts students who congregated around
Brunton’s flat, an ex-drughouse in Boyle Crescent in the Auckland suburb of Grafton.
The group, with its agenda to reinvigorate what they saw as a buttoned-down and
In the 1950s, it was widely believed that there was nothing more to add to criticism of fiction (novel, short story) in New Zealand - due, in Robert Chapman’s estimation, to a lack of quality work produced before 1946. Excluding Katherine Mansfield, Chapman holds: “There were not thought to be enough works to sustain examination more than once in, say twenty years” (Chapman, 1973, p. 71).
outmoded New Zealand literary scene, was a neat fit for Haley: “I’d always run to catch
up with the avant-garde and so I slipped into place quite naturally here with fellow writers
who weren’t Presbyterian realists” (See Appendix C). Soon after establishing their
common ground, the manifesto-wielding “Cultural Liberation Front” was born - a group
propelled by the charismatic Brunton which served “some ill-defined purpose like
overthrowing society or changing consciousness or reinvigorating the imagination”
(Brunton, 2003). Indeed, there was an air of confidence in Auckland at the time which
gave some of this new generation a large estimation of their own significance. As Ian
Wedde recalls his first meeting with Bill Manhire: “I was contrastingly pretentious. It
was part of the Auckland thing at the time. He was much more interested in New
Zealand literature is another way of putting it. He wasn’t not interested and didn’t have an attitude. He was a much more mature, open-minded individual than we were”
(Wedde, 2001,p. 60).
Apart from disseminating its ideas - the Cultural Liberation Front’s manifesto “Who
as a Slug …” was published in Craccum in 1969 after some controversy - the group had
still another, more tangible purpose: to act as a front from which the group of friends
would get funding out of the AUSA through the Literary Society to fund Brunton’s
proposed new literary and arts journal Freed. The first edition of The Word is Freed (later
editions made variations on the title) came out in July 1969, and arguably put forward the
first real evidence that European critical theory, as well as the American Beat aesthetic,
had begun to register on Auckland’s literary circles.
Like the generation that preceded them at Esmonde Road, the Boyle Crescent group
extrapolate from Wedde’s obsession with being up-to-date: “I was utterly paranoid. I was
terrified not to have read the latest issue of a magazine X, Y or Z. There was this awful
fear, a longing. It was a fear of not being up with the game. […] In the end it wasn’t
about servicing an intelligence or a sensibility or anything like that, it was just about
obsession” (Wedde, 2001, p. 59). But they were also conscious – perhaps more so than
the previous generation – of broader socio-political issues, of “otherness, ‘differences’, slips
between reality and history, social policies and foundation myths, the conventions of
cultural identity” as Brunton, Edmond and Michelle Leggott term it in their reassessment
of the 1960s and 70s in the Big Smoke anthology (2000, p.2).
Although only lasting for five issues (Brunton only intended four) Freed is now often
seen as the patriarch publication of a succession of internationally-conscious, loosely “post-modern” journals, produced (mostly) in Auckland: Edge (1971-1976), Spleen (1976-
1977), Morepork (1979-1980), Parralax (1982-83), And (1983-85), Splash (1984-86),
Antic (1986-90), and the most durable heir of the Auckland avant-gardes: brief (1995-
present). The publication of Freed expanded the group of literati - to 19 members
according to a head-count by Janet Wilson - and gave them what they felt was a collective
confidence (or a “very inflated sense of our importance” as Wedde puts it [2001, p. 59]) to
step away from what they saw as the nationalist flag-waving of the preceding generation
of writers – the so-called Phoenix writers – Brasch, Curnow, Glover, Sargeson (and Stead
by virtue of his siding with Curnow in an infamous debate).17 As Haley has commented:
17
For an extended discussion see Newton, J. (2003). “The death throes of Nationalism.” Jacket 22.
Retrieved 13/03, 2008, from http://jacketmagazine.com/22/newt-stead.html
“we were all opposed in our different ways to timeworn ideas about NZ
nationalism…why go through all that Curnow thing about finding a place to stand. We
didn’t need to do that. We were here and now” (See Appendix C).
There was perhaps an element of bravado to the “Freed” sentiment. If the
imagination was released from the need to find a place to stand, there was no end to the
preoccupation with geographic place and cultural identity. For Haley at least, “place”, and
its relationship to nationality is at the foreground of his work; certainly far more the
source of its imaginative power than broadly social concerns. But perhaps what the
confluence of the New Zealand cultural context and American and Continental critical
theory in the Freed generation did do was complicate notions of cultural place and
identity and create a new freedom to explore territories beyond the national boundary. For Haley this meant imaginative crossovers between New Zealand and his place of birth
in Leeds, as well as accounts of other places he had travelled. As Haley says in his
afterword to Real Illusions (1984) he often felt fragmented about place - stretched
“between here and there” - which seemed to result in a near solipsism: “But you have no
real country out there. It is all in here. So juxtaposition rather than ‘realistic’ continuity
becomes the way you re/present the world through language” (p.122). Again, what
O’Neill has noted as a tradition of “inwardness” seems to prove a sticking point – the “in
here” that Haley speaks of - the focus on the internal processes of the mind - is, as it has
been for Frame and Stead, a defining characteristic of his metafiction. As his narrator