Deep South v.1 n.2 (May, 1995)
This article introduces a series about theses currently being written by postgraduate students in the University of Otago English Department. Please remember that these dissertations are works in progress. The ideas described may appear inconsistent. The tentative conclusions reached may lack polish. That is why your constructive criticisms will be most appreciated. This first article is a rough draft summary of the introduction to Dale Benson's doctoral dissertation.
Several writers connected with New Zealand explored ideas that could be regarded as existentialist. In this article I will explain some of these ideas and then briefly speculate as to why, around the mid-1960s, they seemed to fade from New Zealand literature.
To do this I need to define the word existentialism. Since I am not a philosopher, my definition will necessarily be rudimentary. Fortunately, a thorough explication of the concepts of the most prominent existentialist philosophers is not particularly relevant to my thesis: I am not trying to trace individual existentialist ideas from New Zealand literature back to their original source. Furthermore, the writers I consider in this thesis were not themselves professional philosophers. That is why I intend to use non-technical language to describe, not the existentialist philosophy, but the existentialist mood that permeates a significant number of New Zealand's novels and short stories.
My task is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are two distinct yet related kinds of existentialist literature in New Zealand, both of which were eventually absorbed into New Zealand's literary tradition. The first evolved from New Zealand's pioneering experience in the late-nineteenth century and resulted in novels and short stories that were published, approximately, from the late-nineteenth century to just before World War II. This first variety I call New Zealand's "indigenous existentialism". That label is a little misleading, however: the pioneers and settlers were not indigenous to New Zealand, nor was their system of values. Rather, their fiction revealed their response to indigenous conditions. I use "indigenous existentialism" to distinguish some of the early fiction with existentialist qualities from the more modern "existentialism" of writers connected with New Zealand in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s who had adapted fashionable ideas from American and French existentialist literature.
Not only will my definition be uncomplicated, it will have to be flexible. Any definition that could stretch around the Christian and atheistic extremes of existentialism and include such diverse thinkers as Saint Augustine, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kirkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus would have to be very elastic indeed. However, from Saint Augustine, one of the earliest precursors of the modern existentialists, to Sartre, who popularly represents modern existentialism, there stretches a concern for the self-conscious individual which binds the thought of all the men listed above. Such an elastic definition can surely contain New Zealand's existentialist writing as well.
In Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy William Barrett explains that while Plato and Aristotle posed the question What is man?, Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, asked Who am I?. With this self-conscious question, Saint Augustine altered the focus of Western thinking from that of the objective third person to that of the subjective first person. Barrett calls this a decisive shift:
The first question presupposes a world of objects, a fixed natural and zoological order, in which man was included; and when man's precise place in that order had been found, the specifically differentiating characteristic of reason was added. Augustine's question . . . stems . . . from an acutely personal sense of dereliction and loss, rather than from the detachment with which reason surveys the world of objects in order to locate its bearer, man, zoologically within it. Augustine's question therefore implies that man cannot be defined by being located in that natural order, for man, as the being who asks himself, Who am I?, has already broken through the barriers of the animal world.[1]
Barrett goes on to explain that modern Western history, from the Middle Ages to the present, has been profoundly effected by the decline of religion and the rise of science in the West.[2]
Walter E. Houghton, in The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830- 1870, quotes from J. S. Mill's diary entry for 13 January 1854 an example of the resultant mid-Victorian doubt:
Scarcely any one, in the more educated classes, seems to have any opinions, or to place any real faith in those which he professes to have . . . It requires in these times much more intellect to marshall so much greater a stock of ideas and observations. This has not yet been done, or has been done only by very few: and hence the multitude of thoughts only breeds increase of uncertainty. Those who should be the guides of the rest, see too many side to every question. They hear so much said, or find that so much can be said, about everything, that they feel no assurance of the truth of anything.[3]
Houghton points out that while the doubts expressed by Mill would not sound out of place in the twentieth century, which is also characterized as an age of uncertainty, no mid-Victorian would ever describe the Victorian era as Bomany Dobrée described the 1930s:
All the previous ages . . . had something they could take for granted, and it never occurred to the older writers that they could not take themselves for granted. We can be sure of nothing; our civilization is threatened, even the simplest things we live by . . . In our present confusion our only hope is to be scrupulously honest with ourselves, so honest as to doubt our own minds and the conclusions they arrive at. Most of us have ceased to believe, except provisionally, in truths, and we feel that what is important is not so much truth as the way our minds move towards truths.[4]
According to Houghton, the Victorians were unlike Dobrée in that they never doubted their eventual ability to discover rational answers to all mysteries.
It can be inferred that New Zealand, a British colony in the South Pacific populated mainly by the British, was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affected by the Victorian doubts summarized in the excerpt from Mill's diary. Because the writers of several early New Zealand novels and short stories emulated Victorian forms and ideas, it can be further inferred that the doubts they explicitly or implicitly expressed in their fiction would have been closer to those summarized by Mill, the Victorian rationalist, than to those of Dobrée who expressed the modern European's doubt in everything. Finally, it can be inferred that the doubts produced by rational inquiry and the doubts generated by uncertainty in any method of inquiry are revealed in the two related types of existentialist fiction in New Zealand.
Both the early and modern fictions depict characters who contend with uprootedness, isolation and alienation, all symptoms which are often associated with modern existentialism. New Zealand's indigenous existentialism is thus superficially similar to existentialist literature, but it does not portray the aforementioned symptoms of existentialism as inevitably part of the human condition.
The fundamental difference between the indigenous existentialism of New Zealand's early pioneers and settlers and the existentialism of writers connected with New Zealand from the 1940s to the 1960s is their respective attitudes towards contingency and the human condition. The early pioneers and settlers regarded their failure to thrive in their new environment as evidence of their personal inability to cope with the hardships of pioneer life; they doubted that they could live up to the ideal envisaged in the rationalism they espoused, and this doubt was sometimes reflected in their literature. Later writers of existentialist fiction, by contrast, were intellectually convinced that failure was inevitable because of human mortality; the symptoms of their crises--feelings of uprootedness, isolation and alienation--were inherent in the human condition. Despite this essential difference between New Zealand's two kinds of existentialism, the similarity of their symptoms makes it possible to surmise that the indigenous existentialism which grew out of the pioneer experience of the nineteenth century prepared a fertile seed bed for the thorough- going existentialism which developed around the war years.
New Zealand's existentialist novels and short stories are characterized by the kind of doubt that Fyodor Dostoyevsky dramatizes in Notes from Underground. In his novella, Dostoyevsky emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the universe and cautions that rational thinking will encourage people to rely on generalizations that will inevitably disappoint them.[5]
Dostoyevsky's fundamental doubt in the rationality of the Universe was also expressed in works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and was utterly opposed to the Victorians' optimism: if the nineteenth century had witnessed the decline of religion and the rise of science, then the twentieth century proved that science could not adequately satisfy questions about the human condition. Deprived of their traditional hope in God and having learned through experience to doubt their modern faith in science, many Europeans (and New Zealanders) recognized that they had to rely wholly on themselves when deciding their values and their destinies.
As the New Zealand wilderness became increasingly settled, the prime reason for the pioneers' and settlers' feelings of isolation and alienation was invalidated: their seemingly arbitrary environment had become predictable. Similarly, as most New Zealanders survived the social and economic upheavals of the Depression and World War II, their certainties became easier to maintain. Even so, existentialism did not really fade from the literary scene in New Zealand until the mid-sixties, around a decade after French existentialism waned as a philosophical fad in Europe.
To be continued . . .
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