Rereading Aotearoa
A new assessment of the idea of a national literature recasts what we thought we knew.
What was New Zealand literature? This question opens John Newton’s new history of the topic. The past tense is deliberate: according to Newton, the idea of a distinctively NZ Lit is a thing of the past. He’s thinking, of course, of that version produced by a generation of writers who tried to define ‘‘New Zealandness” during the 1930s, 40s and 50s: Glover, Curnow, Sargeson and some other blokes, along with a (very) few women, all Pakeha.
From the 1950s onwards, that narrow definition would be challenged and expanded – by secondwave feminism and the Māori renaissance – and eventually exploded by the impact of postmodernism. Yet the power it wielded, both in its heyday and as an antecedent for subsequent generations, makes it a vital part of our history.
For those who don’t know the story already, Newton tells it more engagingly and accessibly than anyone before him. For those already familiar with the received version, he recasts what we thought we knew. He does so by introducing the notion, derived from Welsh critic Raymond Williams, of the “structure of feeling”: a way of describing the social operation of emotion, that most slippery but potent of historical forces.
If that sounds wishy-washy, then imagine trying to understand the
Trump presidency, for example, without considering the conflict between the emotions – the structures of feeling – shared by
his supporters, and those of his opponents.
In Hard Frost, the structures of feeling in question are ones whose history shapes our present: the shift from a culture of female companionship during the 1920s, within which women’s writing could flourish, to the ‘‘hard frost’’ of the 1930s and 40s, when “an embattled masculinity’’, as Newton crisply puts it, “threatened … by suffrage feminism, and unmanned too by the carnage of the war, … bulked itself up and evolved new forms of gendered behaviour”.
The conflict between these contending emotional forms explains some of the oddest features of our mid-century literary culture: its refusal to recognise
Katherine Mansfield; the near-total disappearance of women writers; the homophobia (I’m looking at you, Rex Fairburn) as well as the subversive homoeroticism (thanks, Frank).
Over recent decades, we have been richly supplied with popular histories – by Michael King, James Belich, Judith Binney, Anne Salmond and others – and Hard Frost deserves its place among them. This is partly because it tells an old story anew, at a time when it’s being forgotten, but also because the book exemplifies how to write both history and criticism with vividness, grace, dynamism and charm.
Like a novel, Hard Frost has narrative drive and pace. There are sub-plots that generate suspense, mysteries to be figured out. Why can’t our literary modernists see how remarkable Mansfield is? Where do the women writers go in the 1940s? Why does D’Arcy Cresswell keep ‘‘photo-bombing our literary history’’?
There are narrative arcs that are heroic, tragic (Robin Hyde’s story is both) or comic (Sargeson’s outrages against homophobic orthodoxy, perpetrated in full view of its muscle-bound myrmidons). Again, like a really worthwhile novel, the book’s psychological acuity brings to life its subjects in a three-dimensional manner, showing that what matters is not the judgments we pass on these characters, but our capacity to understand them in the context of the stories they’re caught up in.
The sensibility at work here manages to be both exacting and generous at the same time. This, more than anything, is what makes it such good reading – an achievement very rare in historical writing, and literary history in particular. Newton’s narrative voice is judicious without being judgmental, incisive without being cutting. In a book full of interesting characters, the one who makes you want to stay with the story is the
storyteller himself.