Magic of the meta story

The former hospital and the township in 2001.  Photo by Stephen Jaquiery.
The former hospital and the township in 2001. Photo by Stephen Jaquiery.
The road into Seacliff is skinnier than the footpath along Tamaki Dr, and certainly narrower than a single lane of a main street in Invercargill.

The village houses huddle together within one residential block, despite the vast surrounding nothingness.

The air is salty, and the wind is unwelcoming.

I wondered, as I wandered past the battered dwellings, why would one live here?

I'd have asked somebody, if there'd only been anyone to ask.

The place seemed peaceful to the point of desolation.

It all appeared very In My Father's Den-ish.

Perhaps it was uninhabited; I didn't see a soul except for one small boy (or was he a ghost?) standing, waving at us, on the corner.

To be fair, the view alone almost tips the stay-worthy scales.

Yes, it's a sublime view of rocky coast, white-capped ocean, and tumultuous sky.

By night, it's an unusually lightless view (save for a squid ship or two, anchored in the bay).

Judging from the creatively painted dwellings, the sheer isolation of the settlement, the brilliance of the scenery, it's possible Seacliff is home to arty-types.

Is it? Feel free to clarify.

Regardless, it's the type of place one could easily imagine an artist living. And we like to do that, don't we?

It's interesting to imagine the real-life setting of a painter's landscape, or the shack in which a writer wrote, or the piano upon which a song was composed.

Posthumously, artists' possessions are saved, and their homes become museums.

Perhaps we hope by walking where they've walked - from the bedroom to the bathroom - we may become privy to the ideas behind their works.

This same deconstructive analysis is suffered by famous authors' characters, even - no - especially fictional characters.

Centuries after Carroll put pen to paper, we're still searching for the Alice behind Wonderland (as is the title of Simon Winchester's recent book).

Wonderland's Alice may share her name with some Liddell girl that Dodgson befriended, but it's an obvious stretch to claim any further connection; after all, Liddell was a brunette!

Occasionally, art works become so entwined with contextual details audiences may struggle to separate fact from fantasy.

With the topical centennial anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, and the coinciding re-release of Titanic, the line between history and fiction is certainly blurred (and further smudged by the discovery that J. Dawson was a real passenger aboard the sinking ship ... Gasp!).

To associate the film inextricably with the maiden voyage disaster of RMS Titanic in 1912, limits our aesthetic appreciation of it as a work of art.

It makes more sense, in my opinion, to relate Titanic to Titanic as Paradise Lost is to the Book of Genesis.

Disturbingly, some of my acquaintances didn't realise until recently Titanic was anything more than James Cameron's cinematic creation, I kid ye not.

In reading about John Keats, it's apparent he suffered similar retrospective combination of historical/autobiographical context and his work.

Many biographers attach his life (which was, admittedly, the perfect Romantic tragedy) to his writing, in a way which makes it difficult to discern where his person ended and his poetry begins.

Janet Frame is another author who, in Kiwis' memories, has a personality inseparable from her works.

As much as I claim to compartmentalise, I'm also a sucker for background info, especially about Frame (my favourite).

We didn't travel to Seacliff to see the village, and we didn't travel for the view.

Our intention was to scope out the old asylum which, annoyingly for us, was fenced-off and closed.

However, peering from the gate, consciously stepping where she might have once stepped, seeking the sights that she might have seen, I'll not deny that I also succumbed to the magic of the meta-story.

Katie Kenny studies English at the University of Otago

 

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