PRIVATE AND PUBLIC REALITIES: A STUDY OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOVEL IN NEW ZEALAND A thesis submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. in English in the University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand by Heather R. Roberts University of Canterbury 1979 .R64~~ ________________________________________________-, j~gv CONTENTS Page Preface ----------------------------------------------- 1 Abstract ---------------------------------------------- 2 Introduction ------------------------------------------ 4 SECTION I THE WORLDS OF THE REALISTIC AND SUBJECTIVE NOVELS -------------------- 16 Point of view ------------------------------------- 16 Time ---------------------------------------------- 30 Space --------------------------------------------- 39 Death -----~--------------------------------------- 56 Art ----------------------------------------------- 65 Insanity ------------------------------------------ 71 SECTION II THE WORLD OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOVEL -------- 80 PART I THE FEMALE VISION ------------------------ 82 A Introduction --~-------------------------- 82 B Robin Hyde ------------------------------- 91 C Janet Frame ------------------------------ 107 D Sylvia Ashton-Warner --------------------- 145 E "This world" and "that world" - the search for self and the need for communion ----------------------- 168 Marilyn Duckworth's A Gap in the Spectrum -------------------------- 169 The novels of Joy Cowley ----------------- 175 The novels of Margaret Sutherland -------- 199 The novels of Jean Watson: Stand in the Rain and The Balloon Watchers ------------------ 207 PART II THE MAORI VISION ------------------------ 213 Tangi and Mutuwhenua --------------------- 216 The failure of Whanau -------------------- 234 PART III : THE MALE VISION ------------------------ 241 I Saw in my Dream and The Log of a Superfluous Son ------------- 243 Dick Seddon's Great Dive and The Slipway ------------------------------ 255 The novels of Ronald Hugh Morrieson ------ 262 Conclusion 268 Bibliography ------------------------------------------ 274 1 PREFACE I would like to thank the following people for their help while I was writing this thesis: Peter Simpson and Cherry Hankin for their assistance in the early stages of my work; the staff in the library at the University of Canterbury; the Ph.D. students in the English Department at the University of Canterbury for their interest and friendship; Nigel Roberts and Evan Roberts; and my supervisor, Patrick Evans, who unfailingly gave of his time and support. Heather Roberts. 2 ABSTRACT The assumption lying behind most criticism of fiction written in New Zealand has been that the realistic novel and short story most adequately convey the experience of living in this country. This thesis questions that assumption in respect of the novel. The argument presented here is that the realistic novel adequately conveys only the experience of young European men who are physically and mentally healthy and renders as insignificant any other perceptions of life in New Zealand. writers wishing to convey a vision of the world which is unacceptable in the world of the realistic novel have turned to another fictional form, that of the subjective novel. In this mode of fiction the authors' concern is with their characters' inner world - the world of the imagination and the emotions - rather than with the physical, outer world which is the domain of the realistic novelist. Three groups of writers in New Zealand have used the form of the subjective novel. They have used it consciously as a vehicle for expressing those visions of the world that are excluded from the realistic novel. These three groups are women writers, Maori writers, and a group of men authors. The main part of this thesis is devoted to an examination of their novels - to the ways in which they define their characters' exclusion from what is considered significant and acceptable in the realistic novel, and to a discussion of perceptions of the world which their characters have. 3 In the section on women writers I consider two novels of Robin Hyde - The Godwits Fly and Wednesday's Children - the novels of Janet Frame, Sylvia Ashton-Ytlarner, Joy Cowley, Margaret Sutherland, Jean Watson, and Marilyn Duckworth's first novel A Gap in the Spectrum. Three novels by Maori authors are discussed in Part 11 of the section on the subjective novel - witi Ihimaera's two novels Tangi and Whanau and Patricia Grace's novel Mutuwhenua. In the final part of this section I have grouped together eight novels by male writers: Frank Sargeson's I Saw in My Dream and Michael Henderson's The Log of a Superfluous Son, Graham Billing's The Slipway and Ian Wedde's Dick Seddon's Great Dive, and the four novels of Ronald Hugh Morrieson. The conclusion of this thesis is that the subjective novel offers us one more way of "seeing" and that to ignore the forces of the imagination is to ignore part of the experience of life in New Zealand. 4 INTRODUCTION Because her country had had so little direct experience of the hunger and fear that were the daily life of millions of people in the world, it had to increase, train, its imaginative force; even in its lack it had the power to produce an overwhelming force of imaginative experts, trained to see the invisible, the intangible, the real. 1 This thesis is an examination of those novels which have been written in New Zealand by Malfred Signal's "force of imaginative experts", those writers who have been trained to see and write about the world of feeling and imagination. The term I have used to describe these novels is "subjective", the term used by Leon Edel in his critical work The Modern Psychological Novel, in which he examines a similar fictional development in English and European writing which began prior to Norld War 1.2 DEFINITIONS The subjective novel distinguishes itself from other modes of fiction in certain verifiable ways. The subjective novelist is interested in the world of feeling and imagina- tion. Writing of the work of Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, Edel describes them as turning "away from external to internal reality, from the outer world that Balzac had charted a century before to the hidden world of fantasy and reverie into which there play constantly the IJanet Frame, A State of Siege (Pegasus, Christchurch, 1967), page 72. 2 Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (1964; rpt. Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1972), page v. 5 life and perception of our senses". All sUbjective novelists, writes Edel, seem to write from "an acute need to cope with inner problems and project their inner life before the world". 3 In New Zealand the language used to describe the subjective novel has been similar. Niti Ihimaera describes himself as writing about "the landscapes of the heart"; 4 Patrick Evans, reviewing a novel by Joy Cowley, describes Cowley, Janet Frame and Sylvia Ashton-Warner as "making voyages into the interior". 5 The concern with the inner self, with the conscious- ness of the characters in the novels, leads to a radical change in certain formal and thematic aspects. The point of view of the novel is no longer that of the omniscient narrator. Instead the reader of the sUbjective novel has what Edel has described as "the creation of the illusion that the reader actually follows the character's flowing thoughts". 6 This illusion of following the character's thoughts influences the use made of time by the subjective novelist. For him or her "Life is not a series of gig-lamps systemati- cally arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.,,7 From this attitude comes an approach to time which is best expressed by the following lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always 3 I bid., page 12. 4Witi Ihimaera, "The Maori in Literature" in Michael King, ed., Tihe Mauri Ora (Methuen, New Zealand, 1978), page 84. SPatrick Evans, "Review of Joy Cowley's Nest in a Falling Tree", Landfall, Vol.22, No.4, December 1968, page 422. 6--Edel, op.cit., page 50. 7Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction" in Collected Essays, Vol.ii, 1966; rpt. in David Lodge, ed., Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (LongIDan, London, 1972), page 88. 6 present."e The ever-present moment held in the conscious- ness of the novel's characters is what interests the subjec- tive novelist. The mechanical time-span is usually short, providing a structure within which the character is emotionally and imaginatively free to wander in "Time past and time future". Similarly the physical space covered in a subjective novel is small. The emotional and imaginative space is much larger so that the physical space is also a structural device containing the inner world of the character of the novel. The treatment of certain themes distinguishes the SUbjective novel from other modes of fiction. The themes I examine in this thesis as indicative of the subjective novel are those of death, art and insanity. Because the SUbjective novelist is concerned with his or her characters' inner life, death, which marks the end of physical life, is not the fearful and mysterious event that it is in other types of novels. The subjective novelist is interested in the artistic process rather than in the artistic product, because what is real for him or her is not what is tangible and visible as an artistic product is, but what is intangible and invisible, the inner life that produces the artistic creation. It is the individual consciousness that is the focus of the subjective novel, and for this reason questions of what is normal and what is abnormal do not concern the subjective novelist, except insofar as his or her characters' behaviour or thought patterns might be considered abnormal by others. Insanity is of concern to the subjec- tive novelist because many of them are aware that the experiences they relate in their novels may be considered eT . S • Eliot, Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton" I. Quoted in Edel, op.cit., page 97. 7 insane. Most sUbjective novelists ask that their readers' definitions of what they consider sane and insane be widened to include many various experiences.