As Written in the Flesh. the Human Body As Medium of Cultural Identity and Memory in Fiction from New Zealand
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As Written in the Flesh. The Human Body as Medium of Cultural Identity and Memory in Fiction from New Zealand. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften / Graduate School of the Humanities (GSH) der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Vorgelegt von Kerstin Schaub aus München Würzburg 2013 Gutachter/-innen / Mitglieder des Promotionskomitees: Vorsitz des Promotionsprüfungsverfahrens: Frau Professor Dr. Barbara Hahn Universität/Fakultät: Universität Würzburg, Phil. Fakultät I, Geographie und Geologie Gutachter/-in und Erstbetreuer/-in im Promotionskomitee: Herr Professor Dr. Ralph Pordzik Universität/Fakultät: Universität Würzburg, Phil. Fakultät I, Englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft Gutachter/-in und Zweibetreuer/-in im Promotionskomitee: Herr Professor Dr. Stephan Kohl Universität/Fakultät: Universität Würzburg, Phil. Fakultät I, Englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft Zweitbetreuer/-in im Promotionskomitee: Frau Professor Dr. Brigitte Burrichter Universität/Fakultät: Universität Würzburg, Phil. Fakultät I, Romanistik Tag des Promotionskolloquiums: 21. Juni 2012 Acknowledgements This project was realised in the academic and interdisciplinary framework provided by the Graduate School of the Humanities and the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Würzburg. I am sincerely grateful to Professor Ralph Pordzik for supervising my doctoral thesis, his encouragement and invaluable advice and comments, and his enthusiasm and teaching throughout my student years at the University of Würzburg. I wish to thank Professor Brigitte Burrichter and Professor Stephan Kohl who also agreed to supervise my project and offered helpful advice and suggestions. Generous financial support was provided by a BayEFG scholarship which also allowed me to undertake a research trip to New Zealand. I would therefore like to express my gratitude to Universität Bayern e.V. and the University of Würzburg. The Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies and Victoria University of Wellington have provided a lively intellectual environment in which to pursue this project. I am very grateful to Professor Lydia Wevers and the staff of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, where I completed a research residency from January to March 2009. The Stout Research Centre provided me with an office and access to resources and library. I also thank the staff of the Victoria University of Wellington Library and the National Library of New Zealand for their assistance with research. Many thanks to Sarah and Taki Gaitanos for their friendship and generous hospitality and the many enlightening conversations during my research trip to Wellington. Many thanks to my parents Manfred and Katharina Schaub, my amazing brother Jens, and my entire family for their love and support on the way. Special thanks to my father and my brother for their help with computer-related emergencies. A big thank you to Eugene and Regine for their help with proofreading this thesis and to all friends for their valuable suggestions, love and good humour. Finally and most of all, I would like to thank André for his boundless love and unshakeable belief in me, for his heartfelt generosity and encouragement, and for the countless funny moments we share. André, the following pages are for you. 1 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 1 As Written in the Flesh ............................................................................................ 22 1.1 Towards Sensuous Inscription ........................................................................................ 22 1.2 Bodily Frameworks ........................................................................................................ 32 1.3 Translating Feeling ......................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 2 “Skeletons and Skins” – Keri Hulme’s The Bone People ....................................... 56 2.1 From the Nonsense of the “Godzone Babytalk” to Spiral Skeletons and Resuscitation ............................................................................................................ 60 2.2 Bones and Skins, Utu and Aroha .................................................................................... 76 Chapter 3 “The clock in the crocodile began to tick again”– Gay Identities in Witi Ihimaera’s novels Nights in the Gardens of Spain and The Uncle’s Story ............. 100 3.1 Nights in the Gardens of Spain: The “Master Bedroom” and the “Unspoken Request” of the Flesh ................................................................................. 105 3.2 “Beyond constraints. Beyond respectability. Beyond the country of decorous behaviour” – Steaming Up Vision in the Spectacle of The Steam Parlour .................. 120 3.3 Beyond “the Slow Silent Choreography of Sex”.......................................................... 132 3.4 From Nights in the Gardens of Spain towards a Queer Maori Perspective .................. 135 3.5 The Uncle’s Story: Warriors ......................................................................................... 138 3.6 “It’s just the beginning. It takes guts” – Facing Fear and Homophobia in Maori Culture ............................................................................................................ 147 3.7 Towards a Queer Genealogy ........................................................................................ 159 3.8 New Warriors ............................................................................................................... 164 Chapter 4 “But out here you get a sense of…what? Scale? Distance? No, more personal than that” – Sensescapes in James George’s Hummingbird .................. 171 4.1 Beyond the Face: Maps, Moko and Texture ................................................................. 175 4.2 “The circle now complete” – Community, Boards, Planes, and the Pathways of Cultural Remembering ............................................................................................. 196 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 211 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 221 2 A Note on Abbreviations In the course of this project I will use the following abbreviations for the fictional works discussed here: Albert Wendt’s The Mango’s Kiss (TMK), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (TBP), Witi Ihimaera’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain (NGS), The Uncle’s Story (TUS) and The Rope of Man (TRoM), and James George’s Hummingbird (Hum) and Ocean Roads (OR). Unless not specified otherwise, I left the italic emphases from the works cited here unchanged. 3 Introduction At the beginning of his novel The Mango’s Kiss, Albert Wendt creates a striking image that propels a sensuous experience to the foreground.1 The passage focuses on the physical sensation of a mango pressed against Peleiupu’s cheek and mingles Peleiupu’s first childhood memory with the touch of mango against her skin. Words and definitions are pushed to the background in this passage of first self-awareness; they are only later added to the picture. Closely linked to Peleiupu’s memory are the impressions of her senses – the scent of her father Mautu, the texture and image of the mango and the feeling in her body – and they remain the central force of recollection of this particular memory. Yet, the final and perhaps most important sensation that should be coupled with the fruit has been severed from her mind. Whether Peleiupu actually had a taste of the fruit proffered by Mautu remains a secret of the past: Down-pressing round coldness on her right cheek, radiating out across her face and down through her body to her tingling toes. She jerked away from it, hands clasped to the wet spot on her cheek. In her father’s hand, at the centre of her seeing, was a round green-orange object. (A mango, she’d learn later.) From the object to his hand, to his face, she looked, recognising he was smiling. She moved closer to him, her hand taking the object, the fruit, which assumed the shape of her grip: solid, fitting, apt, balanced. Her father nuzzled his forehead against hers. During the final moments of her dying, years later, that was how Peleiupu (or Pele, as everyone came to call her) was to recall, in slow vivid detail, that incredible dawn when her father, Mautu Tuifolau, pressed the dew-covered mango against her right cheek. At that startled moment, she was conscious for the first time she was an entity (I, me), separate from everything and everyone else – including her father, who was encouraging her, with repeated nods, to raise the fruit to her mouth and bite it. She would try, in her dying, to remember whether she’d taken that bite or what the mango had tasted like, and not be able to. (TMK 11) This first encounter with a mango imprinted upon Pele’s mind and her skin reveals the thematic trajectory encompassing the fictions discussed here, namely that of cultural memory and identity and their relation to the flesh/body as a sensuous entity. The touch of the mango affords Peleiupu with a sense of self – the sensations perceived by her body, slightly removed