A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury by Mandala White Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….....i Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….….ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Modernity and Nature: A Theoretical and Historical Overview……….7 1. Mystical to Mechanistic: Western Culture’s Developing Vision of Nature 2. God’s Own Temple: Romantic Appreciations of Nature 3. Deep Versus Shallow: Contemporary Environmentalist Responses to Nature 4. Ontological Promiscuity: Postmodern Rethinking of Nature-culture Dualism 5. Ecocriticism: The Literary Response to the Environmental Crisis 6. Conclusion: Defining My Ecocritical Approach Chapter Two: In a Fishbone Church and the Variable Sublime……...……………...43 1. Clifford: The Neo-colonial Masculinist Sublime 2. Etta and Gene: Cultural Victimisation and the Maternal Sublime 3. Bridget and Christina: A Foot On the Pavement, A Foot in the Water 4. From Fishbone Church to Rainbow Trout: The Ecological Sublime Chapter Three: Transformations of Nature: Modern Mastery and Medieval Metaphysics..........................................................................................86 1. Transformation as Control: Modernity’s Mastery of Nature i. Colonial Transformation ii. Industrial Transformation iii. Monsieur Goulet: The Master Figure Unmasked 2. From Skin and Bones to Divine Art: Medieval Transformations of Nature Chapter Four: Fearing the Feral: The Threat of Recalcitrant Nature…………...…..128 1. Elemental Ferality: The Might of the Hurricane, The Strength of the Sun 2. Hybrid Ferality: Tracing the Ghosts of Nature Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..………161 Notes……………………………………………………………………………..….170 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………193 i Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my supervisors, Dr Philip Armstrong and Associate Professor Patrick Evans who have coached me through my writing and research with good humour, commitment and enthusiasm, and who have continually impressed me with their perceptiveness and academic expertise. It has been a privi- lege to work with scholars of their calibre. I am grateful to the University of Canterbury for the scholarship that supported me throughout much of this project. Thank-you to Jennifer Middendorf for her admin- istrative assistance. Thank-you to Catherine Chidgey who generously provided me with information that was otherwise inaccessible. I am also grateful for the input of my family and friends: thank-you to my par- ents, Ken and Ruthanne White; to my siblings; to Shanta Milliken—dear friend and fellow animal-lover; and to Jessica Ritchie, Sarah Forgan, Fiona Tyson and Nicholas Wright whose friendship and critique of my ideas (academic and otherwise!) proved an invaluable aid. Finally, thank-you to my partner Kon Zakharov, whose encourage- ment throughout this project is but one of the many things I have to thank him for. ii Abstract Although nature is a dominant presence both in historical New Zealand literature and in New Zealand’s current international image, literary critics observe a tendency on the part of young writers to neglect nature in favour of more human, urban and cul- tural themes. I write against this perception, basing my argument on the hypothesis that such urban-based literature may in fact be centrally concerned with the natural world and with human-nature relations. In locating nature within the urban fictional environment, I demonstrate a model of analysis that extends literary critical ap- proaches to nature both within New Zealand literature and within the field of ecocriti- cism, both of which are largely consumed with analysing representations of sublime, non-urban nature. I test this urban ecocritical method of reading in my analysis of Catherine Chidgey’s three novels, In a Fishbone Church , Golden Deeds and The Transformation , all of which adhere to the human-centred trend typical of contempo- rary New Zealand novels. I reveal within Chidgey’s fiction a gradual progression away from archetypal representations of the sublime toward a more complex, frac- tured and rebellious variety of nature that co-exists alongside humans within urban space. Thus, while the characters in her first novel predominantly interact with nature as a sublime, non-urban entity, those in her second and third novels face the daily possibility of encountering “the wild” within domesticated settings that are apparently severed from any connection with the natural world. This kind of urbanised feral na- ture poses a significant threat to Chidgey’s characters, overtly in the form of the pow- erful natural elements, and covertly through the myriad varieties of transformed na- ture with which they surround themselves. I read this portrayal of nature as a com- mentary on contemporary modernity’s relationship with the natural environment, and iii I suggest that this kind of agentive, autonomous nature demands a new theory of envi- ronmentalism which will consider nature as an actor alongside humans. 1 Introduction Tokyo: rush hour. The lights have changed and the evening traffic momentarily halts to allow passage to the swarm of commuters making their way out of the city. The streetscape is gripped in a metropolitan pandemonium: lights flash; people jostle each other; beneath the ground, the subway rumbles. But above the heads of the crowd, suspended amidst skyscrapers and kanji florescent advertisements is a window to an- other world, a world which beckons viewers, tempts them with a panoramic image of a winding river and snow-capped mountains, suggests that they might stand dwarfed against the vast skyline alongside the two tiny figures who survey the scene ( Pure 7). 1 Property of Tourism New Zealand, the billboard promotes an image that has defined New Zealand since the 1880s when proto travel agent Frank Cook, son of Thomas, pronounced the South Island a place of “solitary grandeur, [boasting] waterfalls higher than those of the Yosemite and lakes that will bear comparison with those of Switzerland and Northern Italy, with mountain ranges and peaks which [will] test the powers of the best Apline climbers” (Brendon 214). 2 As a visual descendant of New Zealand’s foundational touristic narrative, the Tokyo billboard attracts potential cus- tomers with the same earnest fervour that Frank Cook adopted, reinforcing a percep- tion of New Zealand as a naturally beautiful, primeval country whose 100% pure en- vironment boasts the most untouched, ancient and majestic natural landscapes in the world. While New Zealand’s tourist industry faithfully reproduces this image for in- ternational consumers, its contemporary fiction writers seem determined to neglect it. New Zealand’s face may retain a green hue in the global public eye, but in the private interiors of its literature the country has a more multi-coloured visage, its themes cen- 2 tred on human, urban and increasingly globalised concerns that retain little connection to virgin landscapes. Philip Temple observes in contemporary writers a “preoccupa- tion with issues of ethnicity, gender and urban moralities [and] a contempt for, or at least, discomfort with a whelming natural landscape” (9). In the introduction to his 1998 nature-writing anthology, Lake, Mountain, Tree , he perceives in contemporary writers a lamentable disregard for nature, the realm he sees as definitively characteris- ing New Zealand: It has become fashionable in literary circles to ignore or condescend to the natural environment. It has been post-modernly uncool to see mountains over malls, to weigh forests more than French fries, to hear the louder sound of riv- ers under te reo…. The evidence of much recent “creative” writing supports the notion that nature and landscape are irrelevant to what New Zealand is cur- rently all about. (9) Implicitly, Temple suggests that New Zealand literature ought to be more attentive to the distinctive markers of its identity, the lakes, the mountains and the trees that grace Tourism New Zealand’s billboards the world over. Why, he seems indignantly to ask, do New Zealand’s young writers so doggedly avoid the thing that makes their country unique? Why does the New Zealand novel now include protagonists like a nineteenth- century French vintner infatuated with a male angel or an ambitious entomologist scouring the Amazon jungle for a mythic butterfly? While the Japanese are contem- plating New Zealand nature on a billboard, why is a young writer like Karl Shuker turning away from the picturesque scenes just outside his office window and instead composing a novel set almost entirely in claustrophobic Tokyo? 3 Dunedin-based Catherine Chidgey is an exemplary representative of the gen- eration of writers that Temple criticises. Voted “the most fabulous New Zealand 3 writer alive” by a group of thirty literary professionals in a 2003 Listener poll, she has to date produced three highly acclaimed novels that demonstrate the globalising and increasingly urban trajectory of contemporary New Zealand literature (Braunias 50). Her first novel, In a Fishbone Church , was originally composed as her MFA thesis at Victoria University, and is set primarily in Wellington, with short jaunts overseas and several flashbacks to the 1950s Christchurch suburbs. Whereas this novel is centred in New Zealand, her second novel, Golden Deeds , has half of its action set off-shore in the United Kingdom, and her third, The Transformation