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•Ÿexegesis to His Cryptic Utteranceâ•Ž View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Online Kunapipi Volume 29 Issue 1 Article 11 2007 Riley’s handbook: ‘Exegesis to his cryptic utterance’ Joel Gwynne Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Gwynne, Joel, Riley’s handbook: ‘Exegesis to his cryptic utterance’, Kunapipi, 29(1), 2007. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol29/iss1/11 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Riley’s handbook: ‘Exegesis to his cryptic utterance’ Abstract On her departure in 1920, the novelist Jane Mander described New Zealand as ‘a positively exciting country’ (Belich 335). On her return in 1932, she lamented ‘the barren wastes of Victorian philistinism’, the ‘brain-numbing, stimulus-stifling, soul-searing silence’ (335) of colonial provincialism. Ironically, her grievances were expressed in a year that witnessed the birth of the vibrant literary journals Tomorrow and Phoenix; journals that would soon establish their reputation as preeminent voices of contention to a cultural landscape described by Frank Sargeson as ‘The Grey Death, puritanism, wowserism gone most startlingly putrescent’ (quoted in King 255). This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol29/iss1/11 137 JOEL GWYNNE riley’s Handbook: ‘Exegesis to His cryptic Utterance’ on her departure in 1920, the novelist Jane Mander described New zealand as ‘a positively exciting country’ (belich 335). on her return in 1932, she lamented ‘the barren wastes of Victorian philistinism’, the ‘brain-numbing, stimulus-stifling, soul-searing silence’ (335) of colonial provincialism. Ironically, her grievances were expressed in a year that witnessed the birth of the vibrant literary journals Tomorrow and Phoenix; journals that would soon establish their reputation as pre- eminent voices of contention to a cultural landscape described by Frank Sargeson as ‘The Grey Death, puritanism, wowserism gone most startlingly putrescent’ (quoted in King 255). First published in 1935, Sargeson was New zealand’s architect of literary decolonisation and principal exponent of realist short fiction. For Sargeson, literary expression was a process of catharsis and rebellion, and over the subsequent years, expatriation, suicide, anti-nationalism, political internationalism, and authorship were the disparate responses of the talented local artist. Indeed, Jane Mander’s literal expatriation can be compared to Janet Frame’s escape to the mind, robin Hyde’s to the grave, rex Fairburn’s to a sub-culture of masculine literati, and Frank Sargeson’s to his retreat on Auckland’s North Shore. Sargeson’s literary response refuses to document exclusively the negations of a stagnant culture, but rather locates the beauty and affirmation of moments of transformation. Despite the diversity of responses, all of the prominent colonial writers recognised mainstream New zealand society of the 1930s and ’40s as a ‘sterile, materialist and dreary … wasteland’ (belich 335). Duggan’s narratives were collected in three volumes, Immanuel’s Land (1956), Summer in the Gravel Pit (1965) and O’Leary’s Orchard and Other Stories (1970), and by the publication of his first collection literary visions of New zealand provincialism had not perceptibly changed. considering the cultural milieu of the decade, this is perhaps not surprising; the Waterfront dispute of 1951, which led to the disestablishment of the union and censorship of apparently dissident material, proved that in the context of the Korean War and a continuing Anglo-American political deference, Sidney Holland’s National government was not averse to practices that sustained cultural sterility. The impact of James K. baxter’s consequential call for free expression of opinion, ‘recent Trends in New zealand poetry’ (1951), was diminutive outside of literary culture. bureaucratic despotism prevailed; the customs Department censored Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Dan Davin’s For the Rest of Our Lives, while New zealanders’ first 138 Joel Gwynne sight of Marlon Brando in The Wild One occurred in 1977, twenty-three years after its release. It was only as a consequence of the liberalising Indecent publications Tribunal that the 1967 film adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses was screened to gender segregated adult audiences. It was in this climate that Maurice Duggan’s writing developed, and his publishing career, which spanned 1945–1974, also spanned much of the ‘provincial’ and beginning of ‘post-provincial’ periods. For the purposes of this discussion, the terms ‘provincial’ and ‘post-provincial’ refer to the multitude of cultural transitions that occurred in New zealand and their representation as themes/tropes in literature. The ‘provincial’ period is often marked by significations such as puritanism, nationalism and the ‘Man Alone’, as discussed famously in bill pearson’s Fretful Sleepers (1974), and usually in the mode of realism. by contrast, ‘post-provincial’ literature often focuses on the ‘new’ generation of New zealanders who, by the 1960s, began to move away from such imperatives and instead explored new concerns through increasingly divergent styles (rather than simply realism). Thus, when contextualizing Duggan in the history of New zealand short fiction, it is important to state that his narratives are anomalous in both their affirmation of and resistance to ‘provincial’ fictional practice. consequently, even though Duggan’s work has elicited a limited critical response, the responses are diverse. Many see his mode as extending the provincial, secular realist story exemplified by Frank Sargeson, who remained a close friend and mentor until Duggan’s death in 1974. In opposition to this view stand critics who identify his prose as firmly developing the Katherine Mansfield tradition of symbolic, experimental impressionism: ‘reviewers noted that the stories seemed to focus on moments of experience in a way that New zealand literature, with its largely social concerns, had seldom done since Mansfield’ (richards 216). both assessments invite re-evaluation, especially in the context of the critical neglect of Duggan’s work. The first paragraph of Terry Sturm’s 1971 article, ‘The Short Stories of Maurice Duggan’, unwittingly predicted the response of critics for the remainder of the century and beyond: It is surprising, in view of Maurice Duggan’s reputation as one of New zealand’s major short story writers, that so little has in fact been written on his work. Apart from reviews of individual collections, commentary has been wholly confined to short discussions in general surveys of the New zealand short story. (Sturm 50) It is even more remarkable that, with the exception of a few articles in over thirty years, Sturm’s appraisal remains accurate. Even the most extensive study of Duggan’s work, Ian richards’ To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan, is limited. Although the author acknowledges Duggan’s status and makes an important concession: His stories are also among the most complex in New zealand literature, and a detailed analysis of each would require another book altogether. As a result, I have limited Riley’s Handbook: Exegesis of his Cryptic Utterance 139 myself to including comment on stories only insofar as the work throws some light on the development of Duggan’s thinking, or on his developing strengths as a writer (Richards 3), in declaring this in the introduction of his biography, Richards confirms that despite the importance of Duggan’s prose, the critical attention to his work has barely developed since Terry Sturm’s article, and that his biography cannot, understandably, fill the void. Maurice Duggan’s early narratives and the more established ‘Lenihan cycle’ in Immanuel’s Land (1956) and Summer in the Gravel Pit (1965) testify to the difficulties in attempting to locate Duggan in either the realist or impressionist tradition. This is, perhaps, why his writing has received so little critical attention; it is stylistically anomalous in the genre of short fiction. Yet, there are important intersections that can be made between Duggan’s non-‘provincial’ mode and ‘provincial’ subject, and in doing so, it is possible to locate his writing in the history of New zealand short fiction. To achieve this, it is necessary to examine ‘riley’s Handbook’, Duggan’s most brilliant and complex narrative that explores the process of self-destruction and self-identification. Simply put, the narrative describes one man’s psychologically detrimental exploration of who he is, what he searching for, and how he can achieve contentment in a society he fails to comprehend. The narrative concerns Fowler, an artist who flees the community, changes his name to Riley and presents the reader with a bleak vision of his current state of existence, isolated both geographically and metaphorically from humanity. Like the early narrative, ‘That Long, Long road’, it is almost entirely absent of plot, taking the form of a sustained tirade against both the absurdity of provincial life. While the often anthologised and established provincial parody ‘Along rideout road that Summer’ is often cited as Duggan’s finest story, and sometimes the finest in the history of New zealand literature, ‘riley’s Handbook’ has suffered from comparative disregard, despite its intelligent intensification of the ‘Man Alone’ motif that is the subject of parody in his earlier ‘Along rideout road that Summer’. Although unfortunate, this neglect is to some degree understandable, for ‘riley’s Handbook’ is a vast multi-textured narrative, far too long for any anthology, and the eclecticism of its style would prove incongruous in any anthology in a country where realism is not merely the most dominant, but also the most critically acclaimed mode.1 Richards astutely comments that ‘Although many of his themes and subjects are similar to those of other New zealand writers, his attitudes towards them are difficult to relate without distortion to any particular pattern in New zealand fiction.
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