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The Pursuit of Wholeness in Maurice Gee's Fiction for Children

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The Pursuit of Wholeness in Maurice Gee's Fiction for Children The Pursuit of Wholeness in Maurice Gee’s Fiction for Children Vivien Jean van Rij A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Victoria University of Wellington 2008 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the loyal and generous support of my supervisor, Dr Kathryn Walls. She has been unstinting in her guidance and criticism, and endlessly patient throughout six years of endeavour whilst I have been in fulltime employment. Her advice on all matters of content and style could not have been more thorough, and her tactful suggestions on how to deal with adult concepts present in novels that are written for children have on more than one occasion saved me from myself. I would like to thank family, friends and colleagues who have patiently listened while I have expounded my ideas. Chief amongst these is my daughter, Dr Inge van Rij. In what is known as a role reversal situation, she has taught me to be unfanciful and disciplined. My heartfelt thanks are due to my parents who had little opportunity to pursue a tertiary education and who always helped me through difficult times. Thanks also to the staff in the library at Victoria University of Wellington College of Education who so willingly and quickly tracked down various sources, to Harry Ricketts for his scrupulous editorial comments, to Vincent O’Sullivan for several stimulating conversations, and to Susan Kaiser for her skilful proofreading and formatting. Above all I would like to thank Maurice Gee for his willingness to be interviewed in person and on the telephone, and especially for his novels which have given me hours of pleasure and not a little puzzlement. I have read them in bed during winter weekends, on the beach during summer weekends, and at the computer all year round, and have found in them the dark and the light; “the broken arcs [and the] perfect round[s]”. 1 i Abstract Towards the end of Maurice Gee’s Prowlers Noel Papps comments: “A morning on my sundeck passes like the turning of a wheel. Time present and time past, now and then, bring their motions into agreement and I know the joys of congruency” (p. 217). 2 Here Noel describes a fulfilment which is circular and in which antitheses are brought together in harmony. A scientist, he has not always felt such joy. For much of his life he has been concerned with breaking things down and analysing them according to dry chemical formulae. Yet this process has been necessary for understanding, and in effect for creating the whole novel he narrates. Noel Papps seems to reflect Gee who is also concerned with division and forming a whole rounded book. This thesis examines Gee’s concept of parts and their possible congruency. The Introduction considers Gee’s novels for adults, especially those in which protagonists, speaking for Gee, describe the process involved in creating a whole work, whether literary, non-fictional or artistic. Their descriptions contextualise my exploration of Gee’s pursuit of wholeness in his fiction for children. I turn first to the O trilogy in which the Motherstone is an explicit image of balance. Thereafter the focus is on Gee’s five historical novels, in which the presence of lived experiences, real history, allusions to creative works, characters’ illusions, and the universal are considered at length. Drawing on interviews, photographs, archival material, and non-fictional, historical, and literary texts, I attempt to establish the authenticity of Gee’s reproduction of these dimensions and, where there are discrepancies, their effects. The narrative technique involved in bringing diverse dimensions together is also examined. Finally I consider patterning across Gee’s five historical novels as a representation of a whole work. ii Contents Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................i Abstract..........................................................................................................................................ii 1. Introduction.............................................................................................................................1 2. The O Trilogy ..........................................................................................................................19 3. The Fire-Raiser .........................................................................................................................30 4. The Champion ..........................................................................................................................68 5. The Fat Man ..........................................................................................................................102 6. Orchard Street .........................................................................................................................141 7. Hostel Girl ..............................................................................................................................177 8. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................205 Bibliography..............................................................................................................................209 Endnotes ...................................................................................................................................220 Figures Figures 1 to 12: Landmarks of Henderson (photographs).................................................138 Figures 13 to 20: Newington Road (photographs)..............................................................175 Figures 21 to 24: The Hutt Valley (photographs) ...............................................................204 iii CHAPTER 1 Introduction Defining Wholeness In his five realistic novels for children Maurice Gee sets out to help the New Zealand child reader understand the past that has shaped him or her and the contemporary world. Step by step the five novels cover defining periods in New Zealand history. They document real locations, people, and events during two world wars, the Depression, the Cold War, and the mid-fifties. Gee’s five fantasy novels also include much that is to do with war and, indeed, may be analogous to war. Many of Gee’s novels for children could almost be read as history books whose intention is to provide the reader with a factual account of the past. But during a debate about history in Games of Choice , one of Gee’s earlier novels for adults (first published in 1976), Bart Somers, the local historian, makes ironically explicit the limitations of a scientific approach to the past: “History is more science than an art [ . ]. It’s the search for the pure incontrovertible fact. Rather like dissection. One lays each part out to see – one makes a list, an inventory. But no interpretation. No ‘intuitive leap’. That’s novel-writing, not history. [ . ] Fact alone is pure” (pp. 87-88, 91). 1 As a novelist, then, Gee is interested not simply in history as science, pure fact, or dissection, but in history as interpretation and intuition. Indeed, the re-naming of the settings of Nelson and Henderson as Jessop and Loomis frees Gee from fact and allows him to write fiction. As fiction, the novels for children include characters, places, and events that are often, to use Gee’s words, “absolutely straight invention”. 2 Gee also shows characters interpreting history, responding to it emotionally and imaginatively, and experiencing dreams of longing or despair. Far more than any textbook history, then, Gee’s novels are concerned with human psychology and, as Rex Petley puts it in Going West , with letting the eye “look inside and back” (p. 279). 3 It is not only what is revealed about the past that is of interest, but also what is revealed in terms of Gee’s ideals. As I shall argue, what links these dimensions is Gee’s preoccupation with wholeness. In Gee’s writing wholeness has various applications. Indeed, the very choice of historical realism as a genre in which to write suggests the ideal of combining fact and fiction to make a unified whole. As Nathan Uglow has pointed out, the historical novel is a “hybrid genre [that is] based upon the assumption that history and fiction are categories that overlap each other and that therefore appeal to and derive from an originally unified experience of the world”. Thus, Uglow notes, the historical novel reveals the confusion 1 of public and domestic, personal psychology and impersonal historical forces, and dry historical fact and literary melodrama. 4 These comments apply to Gee’s fiction in which, as described by W. H. Oliver, “The private, the intimate, and the public intersect and clash [and] the equal and conflicting necessity of both inner and outer worlds is held in a balance”. 5 Furthermore, that Gee, through allusion and analogy, explores history far beyond the periods of the books’ settings, seems evidence of an attempt to give the New Zealand child reader a view of the whole human race. And in reconstructing history for children Gee is concerned with balancing a sometimes alienating adult reality with what will appeal to (and can be tolerated by) younger readers. Central to Gee’s concept of wholeness is thus a concept of disparate parts that are to do with fact and fiction, the private and public, and adult reality and child appeal, and that must be brought
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