SOURCE: Wilcox, Leonard. “More Versions of the Pastoral: Postmodernism in the New Zealand Context.” Journal of Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (fall 1985): 107-20.

[In the following essay, Wilcox discusses postmodernism as it is expressed in New Zealand's literature, contending that it is closely related to the country's concern regarding ideas of national and cultural identity.]

Foreskin's Lament, a play by New Zealander Greg McGee, was greeted enthusiastically by critics and audiences when it first appeared here in 1981. One reason for its great appeal was its provocative exploration of Rugby and Rugby culture. But beyond this the play spoke to New Zealanders because McGee's treatment of Rugby offered a trenchant exploration of New Zealand identity and an issue central to it—the “provincial dilemma.” This dilemma is embodied in the character of Foreskin, the protagonist of the play. Foreskin finds himself, as a representative post-colonial subject, caught between two worlds: the traditional and indigenous culture of rugby, mateship and devotion to the team on the one hand, and the intellectual realm of the university, purveyor of privileged Eurocentric (and American-centered) cultural standards and forms on the other. The tension between the two worlds initiates Foreskin's crisis, for if the university provides a critical distance on the parochial and macho rugby culture, it fails to provide any alternatives, any perspectives that might shed light on the larger issue of New Zealand identity. Instead the University teaches the “great tradition”—the overseas tradition—and New Zealand culture takes on the character of a “lack,” an absent presence. While much of the “great tradition” is high British culture, Foreskin singles out American culture in his final “lament,” implying that its presence in the canonical course work at university is equally intimidating, equally the voice of the “other.” Ironically echoing Simon & Garfunkel, Foreskin explains that at the University he was

kerouacked into speed
kesyed into acid
rubined into protest
cleavered
luthered
blackmailered into mystical honesty!
But never, ever, blessed with the absence of resonance—
someone else's naturally.
Always the other
where the hell was I?(1)

At the conclusion of the monologue Foreskin hurls a question at the audience, a question which raises his individual quest for identity to the collective level:

What are you?
Mm?
Eh?
Whaddarya?
Whaddarya?
Whaddarya?(2)

As Foreskin's monologue indicates, the provincial dilemma involves a consciousness which, as one critic put it, “hovers uneasily between the old world and the new.”³ The dilemma suggests a kind of double estrangement: an isolation from one's own local culture due to a tendency to measure it in terms of standards derived from metropolitan culture; on the other hand a perpetual estrangement from metropolitan culture which is perceived in terms of alterity, as someone else's “resonance.” Ultimately this dilemma has to do with self estrangement at the deepest layers of cultural identity: “Always the other / where the hell was I?”

This discussion begins with Foreskin's Lament not because McGee's play is an example of New Zealand postmodernism. Few works that might be classified as “postmodern” have emerged in New Zealand. Nevertheless in the past few years an enthusiastic discussion of postmodernism has emerged in New Zealand which has revolved around precisely the questions of post-colonial identity that McGee's play raises.

For certain critics here, postmodernism signals a liberation from the metropolitan (and overseas) culture represented by high modernism. As concepts of difference and dissemination replace notions of “centeredness”, a new logic arises for the exploration of the local and particular, new potentialities emerge for the invention of a New Zealand cultural identity, new responses to Foreskin's question, “where the hell was I?”

New Zealand concepts of postmodernism vary, however, and are often ill-defined or simplistic; nevertheless they are all tied up with the overriding issue of national and cultural identity. This essay proposes to examine some varieties of postmodernism in New Zealand—in relation to this issue of New Zealand cultural identity. I take my cue that a place such as New Zealand might have its own unique concepts and examples of postmodernism from Fredric Jameson's suggestion that postmodernism may be diverse in kind and local in manifestation … “that there will be as many different forms of postmodernism as there were high modernisms in place, since the former are at least initially specific and local reactions against those models.”⁴ But Jameson's use of the word “initially” is important here, for ultimately he sees postmodernism as closely related to the emergence of late capitalism and the consumer society, and as developing within a society that is media and image-saturated, a society in which (in the words of Guy Debord) “the image is the final form of commodity reification.”⁵ New Zealand has fairly sizeable cities—Auckland and Wellington—with an urban culture, yet one could argue that with its small population, its declining economy and sagging dollar, its two television channels, and relative paucity of billboards New Zealand is not properly a consumer society or an image-saturated society. Nor is it, with its pastures full of sheep, a properly “postmodern” culture, one in which, as Jean Francois Lyotard puts it, data banks “are nature for postmodern man.”⁶ Thus in New Zealand one is uniquely placed to observe what happens to “imported” notions of postmodernism—notions which neither emerge from nor are sustained by the culture—and the way these notions are interpreted and transformed in some cases beyond all recognition, to “speak to” New Zealand cultural circumstances. On the other hand, in some critical renditions and cultural productions one sees the broader implications of postmodernism—the “crisis” of Western hegemony and its master narratives of legitimation, the vitality of indigenous and local narrative—“working” here, beginning to provide a context in which writers and artists can better address the issue of the post-colonial subject and explore the dilemmas of emerging cultural identity.⁷

I

In 1982 Parallax: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Art was launched from Wellington. Three issues of Parallax came out, with critical articles striving to define postmodernism, and with poems and drawing offered as examples of postmodernism. After Parallax folded in 1983, two Auckland journals devoted to postmodernism appeared in 1984: And and Splash. Like Parallax, they featured criticism and creative writing, the criticism dissolving the line between formal critical discourse and creative writing (possibly emulating some of the American deconstructionist critics). Like Parallax, the format and the material presented rather self-consciously displayed familiar characteristics of postmodernism: the collapse of formal distinctions between high and popular discourse, the tendency toward pastiche, and an indulgence in the simulacrum.

All these publications imply that postmodernism has arrived in New Zealand, and all are committed to the project of defining New Zealand literature and art in postmodern terms. Yet ironically such definitions are heavily influenced by American popular culture. And and Splash are more self-consciously kitschified than Parallax; articles are interspersed with cartoons and comic strip images, and covers feature images from grade B Hollywood westerns of the thirties and forties. There is a discernible effort to “Andy Warholize” these publications, to generate an ambience of pop art with touches of nostalgia and the Saturday afternoon serial.

Perhaps more to the point, the concepts of postmodernism put forth in these journals are heavily indebted to models derived from American literature. But one must add that if these models are “postmodern” at all, they are very early examples thereof, derived primarily from the talk-poetry that came out of the 1960s as a reaction to complex academic modernist poetry. In the lead article of the first issue of Parallax by Wyston Curnow (perhaps the most influential article yet written here on postmodernism), “Postmodernism in Poetry and the Visual Arts,” Curnow cites as postmodern par excellence David Antin's Talks, Charles Amirkhanian's “sound poems,” Charlie Morrow's “Chants” and “Jerome Rothenberg's “total translations” from the Navaho.⁸ Curnow asserts that in contradistinction to the (modernist) New Criticism which saw the poem's ontological status restricted to the page, the postmodernist views the text as “clearly secondary to live or recorded performance.” Curnow continues:

This preoccupation with voice and with performance is a recovery, a returning to origins of poetry in myth and ritual. And it has brought into the canon a whole range of “primitive” poetries heretofore neglected. The post-modern attitude to tradition is in this respect and in other respects anthropological rather than historical.⁹

Rather than textuality, ecriture, discourse, one gets a privileging of voice and “presence,” if not suggesting Derrida's contention that such notions would invariably “creep back” into critical discourse, then suggesting that they have yet to come under critical scrutiny in New Zealand definitions of postmodernism. Moreover, Curnow uses the postmodern vocabulary of “systems” and “interfaces,” but such systems are not conceived in terms of ecriture, not in terms of an autonomous system beyond human subjectivity nor an impersonal play of intertextuality, but rather in terms of a wholistic organic system, specifically a Batesonian “ecology” of individual, interlocking, biological and cultural systems which are living sustainers of their component organisms. According to Curnow, postmodernism has an affinity with Gregory Bateson's view that “the exploration and adoption of modes of thought which deflect conscious purpose and disclose the cybernetic nature of self and world is essential to our survival.”¹⁰

Curnow's definition of postmodernism, with its emphasis on voice and performance might be understood in part by the predominantly British influence in aesthetics and linguistics in New Zealand, especially the influence of the J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle tradition coming out of Oxford which stresses the “speech act” and views language as an eminently social phenomenon. His definition at any rate is not influenced by the post-Saussurean legacy of structuralism and post-structuralism, and the continual theory which is so central to current concepts of postmodernism. Beyond this, however, his sixties style postmodernism with its ludic emphasis on process, its celebration of “postmodernism's wholesale abrogation of the creative will of modernism” (in this regard Charles Olson is his chief examplar) suggests a cultural lag, a tendency of New Zealand critics to be grounded in the sixties when “post”-modernism was in some sense “anti”-modernism, a reaction against established and canonical forms of high modernism. This cultural lag seems characteristic in an isolated country such as New Zealand; as critic Gordon H. Brown has pointed out, modernism in literature and art was not “discovered” here until the forties and fifties.¹¹ Nevertheless, Curnow's “pastoral” postmodernism with its stress on ecological systems is, perhaps, what one might expect in a culture which has defined itself in consistently anti-modern and pastoral terms, in a society (as critic Patrick Evans has suggested) which sees the average New Zealander “living in a huge pasture filled with sturdy citizens who enjoy an orderly and secure existence far superior to any way of life elsewhere in the world.”¹²

Not only has Curnow's definition of postmodernism been extremely influential—provoking young poets to study and emulate the work of Charles Olson as the postmodern poet, but it does in fact describe characteristics of some New Zealand “postmodern” art. One such is a performance piece entitled “Membrane” by New Zealand musician and composer John Cousins. This work was performed both in Dunedin, New Zealand and in the Fringe Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1984. The cultural materials of Cousins' piece are glass perspex tubing, clear polyethylene membranes and Cousins' own naked body. Cousins reclines on a bench in a chamber of semi-darkness broken by infiltrated light. There are two perspex hoses, one attached to his mouth, the other attached to his penis. These hoses lead to a many tiered chandelier-cum-waterfall arrangement, suspended twenty feet above the floor of the chamber. Fluid is produced by condensation from his exhalations, and having drunk numerous cups of tea Cousins yields copious amounts of fluid in the form of urine. The fluid then produces sounds through the random descent of droplets from top to bottom of the chandelier. The pattern of sound rises or decreases depending on the amount of fluid being conducted through the system.

Cousins' work is obviously influenced by John Cage: music is a kind of research, an exploration of the logic of the materials, not just the materials of music but everything in the natural and cultural worlds. Cage's “postmodern” influence also emerges in the randomness and the element of probability in the pattern of sounds. Moreover, the work has a certain postmodern spirit insofar as its use of urine and breath to produce sounds is antagonistic to notions of “high” culture. One critic, in fact, saw the composition in terms of pop art, likening the “subject” in the piece to David Bowie's Major Tom in space who hears only the music of his biological support systems.¹³ This observation, however, brings up another issue: Cousins' work does have a “subject”—centered, unitary. masculine—and this problematizes its postmodern status since it retains strong elements of “presence,” of the human (male) body as center, as locus and logos of the musical text. In fact, Cousins' piece seems a perfect example of Curnow's “pastoral” postmodernism: it embodies Curnow's notion that postmodernism exhibits an ecological awareness of the “cybernetic nature of self and world which is essential to our survival.” Curnow insists that “the arrangements on postmodernism project a continuous universe,”¹⁴ and Cousins' work projects such a continuous universe with a uniform exchange of natural products. But this is far removed from what are features of contemporary postmodernism, conceived in terms of quanta that shape the universe through the action of discontinuous packages, or in terms of transformational language systems—impersonal, self-referential, decentered and “subjectless”—or in terms of texts without origins or teleology, texts characterized by ruptures and discontinuities.

Closer to contemporary concepts of postmodernism is New Zealand art critic Francis Pound's discussion “The Relevance of Art with Art Theory,” delivered at the Art Theory Conference in Dunedin in December 1983. Unlike Curnow, Pound has some notion of the relationship between semiotics and ideology, and the way a text “constitutes” its object in ideological terms. Pound suggests that the key concept of modernism—a notion which postmodernists reject—is “essence.” The modernist contention that the artistic imagination pierces the veil or achieves an apprehension of “reality underlying phenomenon” is precisely what the postmodernist finds objectionable. For the postmodernist the world is simply given; the point is to study the way it is represented in an arbitrary system of signs. Beginning with this assumption, Pound shows how the genre of landscape painting was a way of “inventing” New Zealand—in the codes and ideological matrices of European culture. The typographical landscape painting that had been assumed to “record” certain “essential” aspects of New Zealand—such as its special light—embodied a fallacy

that there is a “real” New Zealand landscape, with its “real” qualities of light and atmosphere, to which some artists are true and others untrue, the true artists being then “good” and the “real” “bad.” And a corollary fallacy: that the “real” New Zealand causes style in painting—a kind of geographical determism.¹⁵

Pound argues that the genre of landscape painting “symbolically annexed, colonized and made European New Zealand.” Pound sees postmodernism as liberating, not only from the modernist notion of “essence” but from an older lingering and tenacious naive realism which permeates New Zealand criticism and art theory. Both the modernist notion of essence and the realist notion of naive mimesis have ideological underpinnings. For the postmodernist, however,

all this talk of underlying essence and truths is a bourgeois mystification, whether the claim is of the underlying essence of a painting, or of the underlying essence of things in the world. And it is dangerous—because in proclaiming a permanent essence to things, it grants permanence to privilege to all tyrannies of the present social and political order.¹⁶

For Pound, postmodern art has a progressive political dimension; its deconstruction of “essence” is, perforce, a critique of ideology.

The New Zealand artist who is most fully involved in this deconstructive project, according to Pound, is Richard Killeen. Killeen, whose reputation is well established outside New Zealand, is concerned with liberation from the picture frame which suggests a window through which one glimpses some sort of essence. His is a visual language based on cut out and colored metal shapes. The images, for example, in his “Pooled Memory and Some Empty Fish” (1984) exhibited in Edinburgh, are meant to evoke Roland Barthes' statement that “meaning is above all a cutting out of shapes.” Consequently Killeen wishes to avoid any suggestion of essence or transparency in his works, opting instead to call attention to their arbitrariness and contingency as representations.

Pound's concepts of postmodernism and Killeen's postmodernist images have a direct relation to New Zealand cultural identity: both envisage the project of postmodernism to be that of deconstructing the ideological “frames” of European genres and forms, of clearing a space for the local and particular. If modernism was concerned with alienation and the search for an “essential” identity, this concern was contained within the framework of a Euro-centred hegemony; postmodernism breaks through this hegemony and opens possibilities for the development of an indigenous cultural identity. Pound's concept of postmodernism, with its radical egalitarianism, challenges the privilege status of the modernist work; Killeen's images, refusing to put the viewer in touch with a pure reality or essence, challenge the modernist work's claim to represent some authentic vision of the world. Thus for both Pound and Killeen postmodernism means liberation. One might add that for both modernism means the weighty, imposing, intimidating cultural authority of the old world; postmodernism means the freshness and possibility of the new. Modernism means Europe; postmodernism means New Zealand.

Certainly Pound's concept of postmodernism, with its relatively sophisticated notions of ideology, is not one that lends itself to cultural nationalism. The cultural nationalist version of postmodernism in New Zealand is “post-provincialism”—a term recently introduced by several New Zealand critics to describe what they take to be a new phase in their country's fiction. Post-provincialism, like postmodernism, describes what happens after modernism. The Euro-centred hegemony of modernism heretofore gave New Zealand its provincial status, defined it as existing on the margins rather than at the center. In the new phase of post-provincialism, the artist is no longer compelled to pursue the center; he realizes, as critic Peter Simpson puts it, that “the center of reality is wherever one happens to be.”¹⁷ Ultimately, the emergence of post-provincial fiction signals a liberation from the nation's adolescent identity crisis, and from the bonds of an oedipal relationship—with all the attendant guilt, hostility and sense of inferiority—with the “master culture” overseas. Like the postmodern artist, the post-provincial artist relinquishes modernism's oppositional stance, its critical, negative and contestatory function. The post-provincial artist puts aside the modernist stance of alienation, of living perpetually on the margins rather than at the center and “accepts that he belongs to the new world and is undismayed by his condition.”¹⁸

Like postmodernism, then, post-provincialism stresses things “as they are”—locally. Critic Peter Simpson's definition of post-provincialism emerges from his study of Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a writer who lived his life in the small Taranaki town of Hawera and wrote brilliant and bizarre gothic stories of small town life. Morrieson is one of New Zealand's first post-provincial writers, Simpson asserts, because he escapes the constraints of a provincial consciousness hovering “uneasily between the old world and the new.”¹⁹ Morrieson immersed himself in local culture and in so doing he freed himself “of that cultural melancholy and sense of alienation that pervades provincial writing.”²⁰ Here, “provincial” can be read as “modernist”: the modernist writer in New Zealand is provincial precisely because he pursues the center abroad and feels alienated and marginalized at home. It is precisely the “cultural melancholy” and alienation of the provincial modernist that Simpson deplores in rhetoric that takes on the tone of national chauvinism:

Isolated by his minority tastes and interests the provincial tends to sympathize and identify with others on the periphery of society—the disaffected, the nonconformists, the deviants, the foreigners, the loners and losers. Provincial fiction (whether by Sargeson, Duggan or Frame to name only the best examplars) typically focuses on the conflict between the isolated individual and society, which is seen as homogeneous, dull, conformist, philistine, puritanical, bourgeois, materialist, Anglo-Saxon and hostile.²¹

So much for the writers who refuse to be “undismayed” by their provincial condition, who won't “get with the program” of creating a national identity: they form an unhappy alliance with the “loners and losers.” Besides its populist tone, post-provincialism suggests a retrogressive search for a lost vernacular. Simpson suggests that Morrieson's work displays affinities with the robustness and democratic spirit of Australian literature, a kind of writing (and here Simpson quotes Frank Sargeson) “full of boozing, women, and open spaces; writing that doesn't give a bugger about niceties and that opened up Australian literature.”²² In the postmodern moment when feminist discourses are challenging patriarchal modes of representation and patriarchal models of cultural identity, the macho cultural nationalism of “post-provincialism” seems, if nothing else, anti-modern rather than postmodern.

II

To say that the concept of postmoderism is not well understood in New Zealand—that critical concepts are often based on early American notions of postmodernism or in some cases permeated with the anti-modern bias of cultural nationalism—is not to suggest that all works of New Zealand art and literature are devoid of postmodernist characteristics. Certainly Richard Killeen's works with their impulse to break the “frames” of inherited and inscribed ideology suggest an awareness of the postmodern “crisis of representation” and exhibit a generally deconstructive thrust.

In literature, too, examples of emerging postmodern tendencies are evident, the most notable of which is Keri Hulme's recent novel The Bone People, perhaps one of the most important works of recent New Zealand fiction. Hulme's novel is concerned with Maori cultural identity and its origins, but beginnings that are post-lapsarian, post-European: Maori identity already constituted by the patriarchal insitutions and representations of Pakeha culture. In a counter-hegemonic movement, Hulme uses an electric melding of Maoritanga, Suffic mysticism, Christianity and Japanese aikido to make sense of the Maori experience. The Bone People is the story of Kerewin Holmes and her emergence from death in isolation (she lives in a tower, an emblem of phallocentrism, of the bourgeois monad of European culture) to a new beginning in an extended family, in a return to original Maori family structure. Hulme's protagonist herself is a critique of the Western idea of the feminine: Kerewin is “heavy shouldered, heavy hammed, heavy haired,” an “iron lady” with no urge to procreate.²³ She represents a challenge to the notion that the procreative process be at the center of female identity; essentially androgynous Kerewin is “neither horned nor slatted, [she is] a twilight of genders.²⁴ Hulme's narrative is a critique of binarism (the presence/absence of the phallus, the male female dichotomy); her character's discovery of family and communalism beyond life in the phallic tower is achieved by rejecting polarity (as opposed to difference) in the sexual, social and spiritual realms.

If Craig Owens is correct in his assertion that the “feminist position is also a postmodern condition,” then Hulme's new novel is arguably a postmodern one, particularly when it is feminist in the broadest sense, taking exception to the phallologic of the West, and representing—both as a woman and Maori perspective—the “voices of the conquered” (as Owens puts it) that are currently challenging the authority and universal claims of Western representation.²⁵

In the area of film, postmodern tendencies are also evident. Roger Donaldson's superb film Smash Palace is not an instrument of pastiche, pop or pseudo-historical form—characteristics one sometimes associates with postmodernism in film. Yet it exhibits what Kenneth Frampton calls “critical regionalism,” a critical mediation between world and local culture and an exploration of the tensions and contradictions between the two.²⁶ World and local culture intersect in Donaldson's film, the former in the “European” world of automobile racing, the latter in the form of small town New Zealand life, the male world of the pub, the “do it yourself” world of repair work and automobile reconstruction in which Al, proprietor of the auto-wrecking yard “Smash Palace,” involves himself. Al is himself split between these worlds, and the tensions between world and local culture are replicated in his own marriage. Al's French wife teaches at the local school; she finds New Zealand culture raw and vulgar, and feels not only an oppressive vacuity in small town New Zealand life but an uneasy tenuousness, something unreal in the splintered, make-shift culture hovering on the edge of nothingness—the sort of culture perfectly evoked by the auto-wrecking yard, the film's central metaphor. “I've never been able to stand the place; it's like a graveyard,” she tells the constable who later becomes her lover. On the other hand Al is the perfect colonial, satisfied and uncritical of his efforts to “shore up the ruins,” to make something coherent out of the scraps and detritus of imported cars. Al's incessant work on the reconstruction of a classic car, a project, significantly, handed down to him by his father (“my father spent a bloody lifetime getting it together” he protests when his wife suggests the project might be futile) suggests the colonial project: to perpetuate the patriarchal order and its symbolic forms in the New World. Al is the colonial bricoleur, attempting to construct a cultural artifact, a representational form from transplanted materials from the old world, a “classic” work of “high” culture.

Yet Donaldson's film suggests that the effort to construct a unique or “emergent” culture from aging and left-over scraps, to define New Zealand cultural identity in terms of patriarchal British or Western culture—a culture whose hegemony is breaking down—is contradictory and futile. Al himself exhibits the contradictions of his culture, caught between his desire to finish his father's incomplete project—an act which would symbolically assert the continuity of the patriarchal tradition—and the unravelling of that tradition in the break-up of his marriage. Donaldson's film suggests the breakdown of the patriarchy most effectively, however, in his deconstruction of the “man alone myth”—the New Zealand patriarchal myth of self-sufficiency and control, the chief variant of which is the masculine hero-victim fighting against a constrictive and repressive society. When Al's wife obtains a court order to prohibit him from visiting his daughter, Al takes his daughter and flees. To erase all traces of their flight, he pushes his truck over a cliff and into a river, and then begins the long trek into the bush. Holing up with his daughter in a small cabin, he finds the man-alone dream of self-sufficiency inadequate. Since it is his daughter's birthday, he gives her a “party” with the few materials available in the cabin; she quickly becomes bored and restless, then falls ill. Al is thus forced to return to civilization with his daughter to procure medicine, then when the police close in, to take a chemist's assistant hostage; later to strike a bargain with the police, exchanging the chemist's assistant for the constable, his wife's lover. Al's stand-off in “Smash Palace” with the policeman as hostage recapitulates the “last stands” of Stanley Graham and all the other “men alone” in film. Yet at the same time it functions as a parody of the archetypal man alone stand-off. In what appears to be a combination murder and suicide, Al forces the constable (affixed to the end of a shotgun by a noose made of bailing wire) into a car and drives onto a railroad track in the path of an oncoming train. The train appears to have crushed Al's car, yet when it rumbles by the car and its occupants are still intact. Al breaks out in maniacal laughter: he has knowingly parked on the adjacent track; he has gotten the whole thing up “for effect.” The police swarm in and take him away. But the imperative of escape into the bush, the struggle for absolute rights to the children, the desperate act of alienated loner are demolished in an act of Kiwi zaniness, an act which implicitly recognizes the futility and exhaustion of the patriarchal “man alone” myth.

Donaldson's Smash Palace provides one of the most penetrating perspectives on New Zealand culture: the small town closeness and incestuousness (Al's best friend, the town constable, becomes his wife's lover), the masculine domain of the pub (“somebody's got to stay home and look after the kids,” Al explains to his friend at the pub), the surreal conjunction of the “raw” and the “cooked”—the rawness of a post-colonial society and the ill-fitting and superficial overlay of British culture—and the world of the New Zealand tinkerer, the “do it yourself” Bricoleur. But more than this, the film is concerned with the postmodern condition and its significance for post-colonial culture: with the crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in patriarchal western society, with the problematic relation between “master” and potentially “emergent” cultures, more especially with the ferocious contradictions that develop in a culture groping for a national identity in a postmodern world, seeking to define itself in terms of the grands recits of modernity (the archetype of the masculine will to power, the narrative of “man alone” as builder of culture) at precisely the point at which such “master” narratives are in their moment of crisis and dissolution.

III

Smash Palace sheds light on postmodernism and the “provincial dilemma” in New Zealand: not only the problem of defining a national identity in terms of inherited materials that represent alterity, Foreskin's “other,” but the problem of constructing a cultural identity from inherited “scraps of notions” whose authority and validity have been called into question. In a larger sense the dilemma involves the construction of a national “character” when the postmodern moment has made such a concept—defined in patriarchal, cultural nationalist terms—at the very least problematical, at most obsolete. Such notions of national or regional character belong more properly to an earlier period, a modernist period (one thinks for example of the American Southern Agrarians); at any rate the quest for an essential or authentic identity—whether individual, regional or national—is a central thematic of modernism rather than postmodernism.

New Zealand critics seem ensnared in this dilemma. Approaching the concept of postmodernism in terms of its implications for an emerging cultural identity, they define it in terms of primitive poetries, “presence” and voice (as does Curnow) or in terms of the absolutely centered, unitary, masculine subject (implicit in Cousins' work)—terms which are amenable to a project of grounding an identity but, as such, terms that are more properly associated with modernism than postmodernism. This search for a “primitive,” essential identity moves in a Rousseauesque direction, the logical outcome of which is Curnow's postmodernism as a version of the pastoral: a postmodern “consciousness” based on Batesonian ecologies and upon romantic premodern notions of a “continuous universe.” When definitions are more consonant with those abroad they are nevertheless skewed by issues of cultural identity. Thus while they stress the element of aesthetic freeplay as a revelling in the particular, while they celebrate postmodern “decentering” as a liberation of local culture from the imposed standards of metropolitan culture, they ignore the “darker” side of postmodernism, specifically that aspect of postmodernism which occupies a problematical relation to consumer society. As one might expect in a small, largely agrarian society that views itself in pastoral terms, there is virtually no discussion of postmodernism and its relation to a media society or to dispersed and commodified images, no discussion of the commercial strip a la Venturi; nor is there any discussion along generally Marxist lines that postmodernism might be integral to a consumer culture, that in relinquishing modernism's “negative dialectic” some forms of postmodernism might in fact hold a one-dimensional relationship to the given order. Rather New Zealand critics view postmodernism as liberating per se, the path toward an authentic indigenous culture.

One might speculate that since New Zealand became aware of modernism as late as the forties and fifties, and since New Zealand critics have been until very recently guardians of a realist tradition, the crisis of mimetic representation that was underway in modernism—the implications of which are central to postmodernism—has yet to be fully comprehended. Moreover, given New Zealand's isolation, and given its conviction “that individual dissent from collective truths must have a malign and external origin”²⁷ the internal tensions of modernism (individual and society) have been mistaken for, or projected outward as, external tensions: New Zealand and the outside world.²⁸ For if one side of the modernist coin in New Zealand has been provincialism-in-search-of-a-metropolis, the other side has been alienation from the metropolis, metropolitan culture as alterity, us against them. One has to look no further than Foreskin's “lament” to detect an animus against metropolitan culture. Such animus is also evident in cultural nationalist notions of “post-provincialism” which castigate New Zealand's modernist writers for emulating metropolitan standards rather than turning their attention to the possibilities of local culture. All this suggests not only the extent to which New Zealand constitutes its identity negatively, against the overseas metropolis, but that New Zealand culture—perhaps because of that negative definition—has yet to assimilate and work through the problematics of modernism, and this accounts for the curious mixture of pre-modern, anti-modern and modernist notions in local definitions of the postmodern.

If there are any indications of an emerging postmodernism in New Zealand it would have to be defined in the broadest possible way, as having to do with the crisis of representation on a global scale, that is with the crisis of authority vested in Western European culture and its “master narratives.” Ironically postmodernism in this sense has most to do with questions of New Zealand cultural identity, but it is an area that New Zealand critics have largely overlooked. Thus one might see indications of an emerging “postmodernism” in works that have been overlooked by critics and excluded from the discourse of cultural nationalism—minority and women's works, for example, such as Hulme's The Bone People, which challenge the authority and “centredness” of Pakeha representations of New Zealand.

Indications of postmodernism might also be found in an area New Zealand critics have completely overlooked—popular culture. Donaldson's Smash Palace, perhaps more than any other work, explores the relation between the postmodern and provincial condition. Together, Hulme's novel and Donaldson's film go further than any works thus far to explore the issue of a post-colonial subject, to suggest what a postmodernism in New Zealand might look like, and to provide new perspectives on Foreskin's question “Whaddarya?”

Notes

1. Greg McGee, Foreskin's Lament (Wellington: Price Milburn & Co. limited, 1981), p. 95.

2. Ibid., p. 96.

3. Peter Simpson, Ronald Hugh Morrieson (Auckland: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 58.

4. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic; Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), p. 112.

5. Fredric Jameson, “Preface” to Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), p. xv.

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 51.

7. For this more global, totalizing “crisis” in narrative function, again see Fredric Jameson's preface to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge p. xi.

8. Parallax, 1 No. 1 (Spring 1982), 21.

9. Ibid., 21.

10. Ibid., p. 12.

11. Gordon H. Brown, “The Pursuit of Modernism in the 1940s and Early 1950s,” Art New Zealand, (Winter, 1984), 50-55.

12. Patrick Evans, “The Provincial Dilemma: New Zealand as Vietnam in Fiction,” Landfall, Vol. 31, no. 1 (March, 1977), 11.

13. Louise Wilton, “Art in Dunedin: Installations and Performances by Artist from the South,” Art New Zealand, (Spring, 1984), 23.

14. “Postmodernism in Poetry and the Visual Arts,” Parallax 1, No. 1 (Spring 1982), 24.

15. Francis Pound, Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (Auckland: William Collins, 1983), p. 11.

16. Francis Pound, “The Relationship of Art with Art Theory: Lecture II,” Art Theory Conference, Dunedin, December 1983.

17. Peter Simpson, Ronald Hugh Morrieson (Auckland: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 59.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., p. 19.

20. Ibid., p. 59.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Wellington: Spiral, 1983), p. 19. For a discussion of Hulme's critique of Western definitions of the feminine, see Shona Smith, “Keri Hulme: Breaking Ground,” Untold, No. 2 (Spring 1984), pp. 44-49.

24. Ibid., p. 288.

25. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 57-77, 64.

26. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post Modern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30, 21.

27. Patrick Evans, “The Provincial Dilemma: New Zealand as Vietnam in Fiction,” Landfall, Vol. 31, No. 1 (March 1977), 11.

28. Thanks to my colleague Craig Harlan, who suggested the idea.