The Same People Living in Different Places: Allen Curnow's Anthology and New Zealand Literary History

New Zealand has produced few literary histories, and only one of those, E. H. McCormick's 1940Letters and Art in New Zealand, is sufficiently interesting and influential to merit much critical analysis in its own right. What immediately strikes the reader of McCormick's history, however, is that it is in many senses a "pre-history" of New Zealand art and literature, and consciously so. McCormick's task is the somewhat melancholy one of noting how artists in New Zealand have failed to "come to terms with their social environment," so that New Zealand literature has failed to become a "national literature"—and consequently has failed to provide the essential precondition for a national literary history. ¹ At the close of McCormick's account, New Zealand literature has still not attained the authenticity he seeks, and his hopes for the future are, at best, uncertain: "It is unlikely that a healthier social art will be possible until the gap between the New Zealand artist and the New Zealand community is narrower than at present. For that reason the appearance of the state as a patron of art may prove to be significant" (193-94).

Only five years later, however, the poet Allen Curnow issued the anthology A Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923-45. From its appearance and, in the same year, that of Frank Sargeson's anthology of short fiction, Speaking for Ourselves, a genuine "national" literature is conventionally assumed to have arrived in New Zealand. This essay does not explore the writing of national literary history so much as the making of it: in this instance, the complications of making a national literary history in a colonial or postcolonial context. National literary history is nearly always a form of postcolonial history, of course. Like any generalization, this claim can be as true or false as you like, but it points toward an interesting truth. National literary history, at least of the post-Romantic era, emerges in response to some sense that the "authentic" identity of the nation has been threatened and that the work of literature is to recover that identity. Some initial psychic or cultural wound—a foreign invasion, a dominating cultural metropole—must be overcome, allowing the true expression of the national genius.

New Zealand's literary history is literally a postcolonial one, and the cultural reinventions of colonial conflict may seem an obvious breeding ground for the standard comic plot of Bhabha-inspired postcolonial history: the overcoming of the psychic wound of colonialism in the discovery of the authenticity of inauthenticity; the exciting hybridity that lurks in apparently crippling colonial mimicry. No doubt something like this plot could be applied to a history of Maori literature and culture and to an account of more recent developments in New Zealand culture in general. What I want to explore in this essay, though, is the period that conventionally marks the emergence of a distinctive "New Zealand literature" as produced by the European colonial population: the 1940s. To be sure, the "convention" is steadily eroding; the literary nationalism of that day has come to seem more and more a false dawn, its erstwhile heroes discovered to have all-too-predictable feet of clay: too male, too pakeha, too Anglophile. ² Yet at least some of them were only too conscious of the limitations of their historical and cultural situation and saw them as problems of forging a literature that might take its place within a national literary history. More controversially, I argue that an increased sensitivity to Maori cultural and political aspirations, particularly as embodied in the renewed attention to the Treaty of Waitangi, could only make the situation more problematic for these writers. ³ If this argument has implications beyond local arguments about New Zealand literary history, they are that national literary history, in its...