Lawrence Jones reviews Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature by Erin Mercer. Publisher: Victoria University Press.
A significant amount of research and publication concerning New Zealand literary history stands behind Erin Mercer's book, Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature.
Her first book on New Zealand literature, In Johnsonville or Geraldine: A Guide to New Zealand Literature (2013), was aimed at non-specialist secondary school and university students. But her publications since then have appeared in specialised academic journals and have been absorbed into this book, including an essay on "The Gothic Slaughterhouse in New Zealand Fiction'', which appeared in the Journal of New Zealand Literature, a special issue on "New Zealand Gothic'', which she edited and introduced (she is the New Zealand Deputy Officer for the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia).
Her prodigious research into New Zealand fiction and the critical and historical writing about it (despite the general subtitle, the book concentrates on fiction) is evident in the 30 pages of notes and the 24-page bibliography that follows the text. She seems to have traced most of the reviews of the novels she discusses and has even consulted unpublished dissertations and letters held in academic libraries.
The title of Mercer's earlier New Zealand book had been taken from the last line of Denis Glover's 1936 poem Home Thoughts, epitomising the realist New Zealand-focused aesthetic of the mostly male writers denominated "cultural nationalists'' who dominated New Zealand literature from the mid-1930s through the 1960s.
A primary aim in these academic essay, culminating in this book, is to show that one result of this realist aesthetic was what Mercer, quoting Lydia Wevers, describes in her first chapter as the "relentless 'middling' of our literature''. This process led to the denigration of pre-1930 New Zealand writing as too derivative of British and European writing and to the marginalisation of the works of such women writers of the time as Robin Hyde as neither realistic nor truly dealing with New Zealand life.
A significant aspect of the realist aesthetic was a rejection of such popular genres as the romance, the Gothic tale, the adventure story, the detective story, the Western, science fiction, melodrama or fantasy, and the rejection of any elements of setting, plot, character, theme, style and tone taken from those genres as unworthy of the high culture hierarchy necessary for the creation of a truly national literature.
The real story of Mercer's book is that of the emergence of New Zealand literature from the "restrictions of realism'', the opening out to and the naturalisation of non-realist generic elements to represent the full spectrum of New Zealand life.
Mercer's book is a revisionist piece of New Zealand literary history, but hers is an inclusive revisionism. She does not attempt to replace the traditional cultural nationalist story of the development of New Zealand fiction as the rise of a truly native realism with a fashionable new equally narrow non-realist orthodoxy but rather chooses to demonstrate that there has been an "untold story'' of an interplay between realism and non-realist generic elements, an interplay that was not recognised or encouraged by cultural nationalist critics and historians such as Allen Curnow, but that has increasingly since the 1970s, come out in the open and been recognised and encouraged by such critics and historians as Mark Williams and Peter Simpson.
In her chronologically arranged essay-chapters, Mercer has not attempted a full survey of New Zealand fiction but has concentrated especially on selected post-1920 texts seen against the critical background of their times, showing the interplay of realism and non-realist generic elements in them.
One of the few pre-1930 writers she discusses at length is Katherine Mansfield, concentrating especially on The Woman at the Store which, along with Millie and Ole Underwood, she sees as exhibiting "generic hybridity'' in the way that they "meld realism with the brooding atmospherics and shocking violence of the Gothic tradition'', a "colonial Gothic'' using New Zealand materials.
Mercer's strategy in discussing works associated with the New Zealand realism of cultural nationalism is to show that some of them also meld that realism with generic elements, especially Gothic ones, that cultural nationalist critics tended to overlook or downplay. She finds such elements in both such early Frank Sargeson stories as A Good Boy and such longer later works as The Hangover, elements that could be related to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, but without Poe's heightened rhetoric. Similarly, she finds overlooked Gothic and Western elements in the bush section of the novel seen by cultural nationalist critics such as James Bertram as the quintessential work of true New Zealand realism, John Mulgan's Man Alone.
Conversely, Mercer finds that the male literary critics and historians of the cultural nationalist movement tended to downgrade non-realist fiction by women (quoting E.H. McCormick) as the "unrestrained exercise of personal fantasy'', too melodramatic or fantasy-based to be included in the national canon. In subtle discussions of Jean Devanny's The Butcher Shop, Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Spinster and Robin Hyde's Wednesday's Children, Mercer defends the non-realist modes of melodrama and fantasy as "appropriate'' for depicting "female subjective experience and powerful emotion'', not to be rejected out of hand.
The cultural nationalist formula for the true New Zealand novel she sees as a realism that, according to Bill Pearson, "aimed to represent the real lives of 'common people' of New Zealand'', usually focusing on, according to Cherry Hankin, "the spiritual impoverishment of society at large and the loss of independence suffered by the imaginative individual who is forced to live within restrictive social contexts''. However, Mercer is able to find even in the oft-praised chapter 22, the white-baiting episode of Pearson's Coal Flat, the novel usually seen as cultural nationalism's realism at its purest, passages drawing on elements of the nonrealist colonial pastoral romance.
Using a different strategy, in the same chapter on fiction of the "provincial period'', Mercer examines the critical reputation at that time of David Ballantyne. She notes that his first novel, The Cunninghams (1948) was praised by McCormick as a "masterly study of working class life in a New Zealand town'' which exhibited "the utmost fidelity'' to the "minutiae of small-town life''; 20 years later the novel which she sees as Ballantyne's best, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, "was largely ignored by New Zealand reviewers who may have been ill-equipped to deal with a book'' that draws heavily on and boldly naturalises, non-realist elements from the Gothic tradition. Thus it became "the great unread New Zealand novel''.
Mercer gives Ballantyne's novel a Gothic-focused reading and two chapters later gives a Gothic-focused reading of a New Zealand novel that rather than being ignored was welcomed by critics and reviewers, Keri Hulme's Booker Prize book, The Bone People (1983). The contrasting receptions of the two novels Mercer presents as a result of changes in the literary culture over the 15 years separating them. Quoting a 1976 essay on the "Provincial Dilemma'', by Patrick Evans, in her title, Mercer traces in the intervening chapter how the "point of inbuilt crisis'' in New Zealand fiction caused by the narrow aesthetic of cultural nationalism led in the 1970s to a revolt "breaking the restrictions of realism''.
If Mercer sees the positive reception of The Bone People as made possible by the literary changes of the 1970s, her focus on the Gothic elements leads her to a more complex reading of the novel than the usual one as "an uncomplicated celebration of bicultural identity''. The Gothic elements of violence and the tensions of sexual identity and the underlying Gothic theme of the way past pain and trauma live on in the present in individuals and ethnic groups as a kind of haunting lead her to a more complex reading of New Zealand's bicultural identity in the novel than most New Zealand critics gave it.
Mercer's Gothic-focused re-reading of The Bone People is perhaps her most impressive critical tour de force, but in the densely argued and difficult final two chapters focusing on such more recent novels as Paula Morris' Hibiscus Coast (2005) and Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize novel The Luminaries (2013), she rounds off her "real story'' by celebrating how New Zealand novelists have overcome the restrictions of cultural nationalist realism and have incorporated in their work a range of genres, including the non-realist colonial sensation novel, and have utilised such non-realist narrative methods as postmodern metafiction, and have used their freedom to internationalise their narrative settings instead of focusing on New Zealand alone.
Putting the new fiction in the context of the full range of texts from the past that had been ignored or downgraded by cultural nationalism, she can arrive at her triumphant conclusion, answering Lydia Wevers' statement about the absence of variety in New Zealand literature which she quotes at the beginning of her book: New Zealand literature does in fact include thrillers, science fiction, Gothics and romances.
This is not a "middling'' or "beige'' national literature, but one whose range of colours has simply not always been clearly visible.
Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
