D. División de números naturales
III. Sustento Pedagógico
3.7. Medios y Materiales educativos
In Beside Myself (1990), Haley’s penchant for maintaining epistemic uncertainty in
the narrative becomes less dreamlike and more determinately recognisable as he takes the
fragile membrane of personality and embodies it in an agonizingly thin “envelope of skin”
(p. 14). The protagonist Midge Cochrane is endowed with morbidly self-consciousness
traits which are exacerbated by a recent divorce, unemployment, and general boredom.
As he tries to pull his life together, navigate a new relationship and make sense of his past
he becomes more and more conscious of the distance between his projected self and his
personal sense of identity until he can only see himself as an “actor” playing out the script
of his life. Not that his existential dubiety is a new development – even in childhood his
parents believed his “reality used to falter under the scrutiny of others”(p. 9). To Midge,
own untiring self-scrutiny. He sees himself as a duality – an immediate self that is
constantly accompanied by a reflexive self, one who is constantly monitoring the actions
of the other as a spectator does a performer: “But the underlying truth is that the world is
a set which is built by and furnished for ourselves and we walk around on it and in it and
we sometimes watch and do. We observe our performance as ‘the one sitting here, the
one walking over there, the me that’s saying this.’” (p. 10). Like Walter Lemanby, whose
fragile mode of existence in The Settlement is constantly under pressure from the tyranny
of language, Midge’s consciousness is “a wedge of words” (p. 11). Language is not just
post-experientially descriptive, or even pre-experientially prescriptive; it is a constant of
the present-tense, an invisible wedge, causing him to narrate his life as it is happening.
Midge has a number of metaphors for this state of being; he is variously a trapeze artist and audience, a mirror and mime artist, a pair of Siamese twins, a driver and
hitchhiker, a parasite and host. But he most identifies with himself as an actor in the film
of his own life:
What new movie can this undistinguished face appear in? Or if I’m stuck for life in
this one can I write myself additional scenes in the hope of being allowed to try
them? […] There isn’t anyone directing this B-grade movie. The cameras just keep
rolling. I’m sick of myself. I’m tired of this script (p. 152).
The script of Midge Cochrane’s life is not exactly enviable. His general dubiety is
compounded by what he sees as the chaotic nature of his day to day existence, a life
constantly subject to contingency and randomness: “There are no closed human systems.
Time flicks at us with an infinity of filaments. We are bound to lift a hand, take one step,
The butterfly effect of these arbitrary events has had dire consequences in Midge’s day to
day life. Since his return from a disastrous second honeymoon in Europe, his ex-wife
continues to send him vindictive postcards boasting how it is “marvellous to be free”(p.
17). His old friends are upwardly-mobile and living in expensive Auckland suburbs, while
Midge has been made redundant from an archiving job, drives an old Triumph, and is
considering buying a half-share in an old Kaipara bach with his friend, although even this
plan is about to fail when his friend Tony dies in a car accident. His new relationship is
dubiously desperate: twelve hours after meeting Estelle at a party in Mt Eden he becomes
desperately jealous of her past and begins to make plans for their lives together, deciding
to sell his place in Wellington and make the move to Auckland.
Metafictionally, Midge is equally as doubtful and self-conscious about the story he is telling as he is about his life and personality. He compares his story to actor Lawrence
Olivier’s autobiographical work On Acting, which he sees as case of masculine bravado
masking a terror of loneliness and a solitary death. Midge pities the all-too-obvious
subtext under Oliver’s metaphors of the actor as an ox, lion, bull, tiger - personifications
of power and virility used to describe an eighty year old man about to “drop off in his
sleep” (p. 39). Like Olivier, for whom acting appears to have been an attempt to
transcend his mortality, Midge attempts to extricate his sense of self by re-narrating his
life, but unlike Olivier, he is invariably frustrated by his own unrelenting habit of self-
examination. This self-consciousness invades every aspect of Midge’s story, from its
structure (“I ought to begin at the beginning but I don’t know where that is […] how do
stopped being me and started to watch me instead” [p. 15]), to the language of his
narration:
The discovery that I’m an actor – or rather, the fact that I can’t stop observing
myself so I appear to be performing, putting on an act, pretending, is changing my
life. Why did I say that? Everything has already changed. I can’t avoid picking
away at fragments. For example – I just checked the word ‘act’ in my dictionary
and its primary meanings are to do with deeds, actions and then off it glides into
performance, the stage, drama, and pretence. So acting has no real opposite
because the converse is rolled up in the same verb. If you fail to act does it mean
that you don’t take action or that you are authentically yourself? (pp. 27-28)
Midge attempts to answer his own question by deciding, in a moment of philosophical whimsy, that the only escape from his perpetual state of self-consciousness is by ceasing to
act altogether. He comically elects to lie motionless in complete darkness, but
inadvertently falls asleep and wakes the following morning, realising that his
“maunderings” were portentous nonsense. Nevertheless, they lead him to a kind of
Sartrean revelation that even ceasing to act involves intentionality: “The very fact that I
had recorded what I was thinking belied the notion of letting go, doing nothing. I had
never been so self-conscious as in those moments when I was attempting to free myself of
consciousness of self” (pp. 165-66). His attempts to free himself inevitably lead him
further and further into self-reflexivity, self-consciously performing the narration of his
life and leading him into a series of metafictional intrusions. Whether he is reminding
the reader of novelistic conventions (“In novels new lovers manage to fuck magically and
launching into nonsensical ramblings on the page (“Cody Bill snatched leather and forty-
fived his fans. Chill Bodies, verified as dead, are pee-emmed for their glands. I’m
doodling. Filling in time, using up space” [p. 127]) Midge’s storytelling is humorously
and painfully self-aware, an agonising metaphor for the more absurd aspects of the human
tendency to self-reflection.
These passages also make the point that stories aren’t necessarily just communicative
acts from one person to another. Humans narrate to themselves, for themselves, and
stories can express and reorder fragments of the individual - even stories intended for an
audience are first self-audited. If the narrator is the first voyeur then the reader takes a
secondary role: not the Sartrean peeper-through-the-keyhole, but the “other” that
stumbles on the voyeur and immediately activates his consciousness. When Midge nearly falls asleep at the wheel of his car on the way to Wellington, the narrative is interrupted
and he reflects on himself in the third person:
I have an abiding interest in seeing that Midge Cochrane survives. He would not
have been able to tell you the last part of his story if it weren’t for me. That’s if he’s
telling it to you. I suspect he is doing all this for myself. But I’m the other he
thinks of as his self-voyeur, his enraptured and entrapped audience. Of course I am
an actor too, just as he is, and isn’t our profession the very one that enables us to
simulate profound emotions but at our core remain somehow indifferent to the
agonies and ecstasies which we portray?” (p. 117)
Midge’s self-reflection reaches its peak at the conclusion of the story when he gets a part
as an extra in a TV commercial - a simple walk-through part which would have him
but by the time comes to shoot the scene he is aware of a gathering crowd of onlookers
and has counted eighteen panes of reflective glass he has to pass before he reaches his
mark in the café. On the first take his self-awareness gets the better of him and he is
scolded by the director for walking with a hunch. On the second take, he
overcompensates by deciding to ad-lib a flirtatious smile at a young woman on the set,
and when the director calls for a cut he appears to have something of a panic-attack.
Ignoring his directions he continues his walk-through – down the street to the café,
where he has a hallucinatory memory of his father, apologises to his co-actors for ruining
the take, and talks to his vision of James Dean. When the director throws her clipboard
at him he continues his walk, off the set, past the café and down the street, at which point
the reader must have doubts as to whether the entire scene Midge is describing is as contrived as the commercial itself – a whimsy the narrator has contrived to illustrate his
ideas on acting and self-reflexivity. In fact it is hard to read the scene Midge is painting
as anything other than pure ideation – he walks off set into a city of brick façades lit up
with a contrived sunset: “I’d escaped from the film but I still had to get beyond the
boundaries of the set” (p. 184).
The central question of Beside Myself is not whether Midge is going to buy a house
or “get the girl”, but whether he will be able to make any sense of himself or the world he
inhabits. And the answer to that central question remains, of course, in doubt. The final
three lines of the novel recapitulate Midge’s characteristic uncertainty, when after
wandering around the city and spending a night in a backpackers hostel he contemplates
to my room to think about whether I could bring myself to call Estelle. I’m still thinking.”
(p. 186)
This final passage, I think, sums up Haley’s preoccupation with epistemic doubt.
The sustained questioning of Midge Cochrane, (or Walter Lemanby or Harry Rejekt)
becomes, not only the mode of text but the meaning of the text – a pointed reminder of
what humans can and, more importantly, cannot be certain of. Like The Settlement and
Haley’s early stories, it suggests that human understanding of the world is always a by-
product of a necessary failure to grasp any final or ultimate meaning.
Perhaps it is apt that Haley’s concluding statement in his interview for this project
was one of personal dubiety: “I’m still not sure what I’ve made with my metafictional
engineering” (See Appendix D). Like Frame, Haley couples the theme of epistemic uncertainty with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections, but
unlike Frame, no attempt is made to settle these uncertainties in terms of the broader
structure of the narrative: rather than tidy up and close off the plot structures with
framing narrators or admissions of fictionality, Haley’s narrators hold to their Keatsian
negative capability, content to occupy undefined spaces and to abandon the approaches of
discursiveness and rational progression. From the absurdist treatments of Harry Rejekt
whose isolation in rural New Zealand sets him to invent a petting machine for an
abandoned dog in Tomorrow Tastes Better (2001) to the desperate uncertainties of Walter
Lemanby in The Settlement and Midge Cochrane in Beside Myself, Haley’s portraits
consistently undermine the predictability and stability of perception and replace them
Despite Haley’s differences from Frame and Stead, he is also a writer who seems to
extend realist techniques rather than doing away with them altogether, as he looks to
uncover real processes of the human mind. As Lawrence Jones says of Haley’s
metafictions in Real Illusions they “are not attempts to evoke a publicly recognisable New
Zealand world so much as attempts to capture an interior world” (1990, p. 243) or as
Haley has said himself – he intended to create fiction in which “history and the present
resonate as dream and myth, and where ‘world’ is seen as a transaction with ‘mind’” (1980,
p. 37). If there is a tradition of “inwardness” in New Zealand fiction as O’Neill has
suggested, then Haley’s roots in Dadaism/Surrealism seem to have found fertile soil. To
take a final example from Beside Myself – when Midge Cochrane begins reading
“confessional books”, he learns that he is not the only person “in the universe who lived in the kind of soft buzzing cave that I inhabited […] The world was filled with secret selves
who fumbled around in their own darkness”(p. 13). But it is the “fumbling” that is really
the key to understanding Midge and Haley’s other protagonists - they invariably have
more questions than they have answers, they are subject to forces of both their own
overpowering subjectivity and the contingencies of the ‘place’ they inhabit, and their
resulting state is one of constant epistemic doubt. As a reader it can sometimes be
difficult even to be certain about what is even uncertain in Haley’s fiction, but, as I hope is