Embattled Fictions: New Zealand Literary Intellectuals and Their Controversies

Abstract

This thesis analyses New Zealand literary intellectual culture from the 1930s through to the end of the twentieth century. The chapters focus on seven major literary figures, each of whom has produced a body of critical, autobiographical, and imaginative writing featuring intellectuals as major characters. This project aims to trace a history of a distinct literary figure I term the “embattled intellectual”. I am interested in how this figure is created through the oeuvre of an individual author and in how it evolves over time, and in relation to key variables such as gender and ethnicity. A period of seventy years brought many transformations to different areas of New Zealand life, changing the nature of the battles in which literary intellectuals found themselves engaged. While some concerns such as biculturalism, feminism, or environmentalism have emerged with urgency only recently, other themes like art, truth, or identity, without disappearing, have been subjected to major renovations. My representative authors are Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Lauris Edmond, C.K. Stead, James K. Baxter, Witi Ihimaera, and Ian Wedde. A naïve or common sense approach to this cultural history would perhaps involve conflating the figure of the embattled intellectual with an actual person and assuming the work that they produce as their complete creation. My thesis, however, shows that the figure of the embattled intellectual is a more complex compound evolving through various sources including the authors’ imaginative fiction, critical and autobiographical nonfiction, and also through the public perception of the authors and their work. It is generally assumed that the figure emerging from critical or autobiographical writing must be the closest to the actual author while fiction is seen as an adaptation of views represented in the author’s nonfiction. A closer analysis, however, reveals more nuances, complexities, and exceptions behind these generic assumptions. Every genre offers different prospects and opportunities for the public intellectual. The formation of the figure of the embattled intellectual is a cultural and artistic act involving choices of one sort or another. By communicating their ideas through literary works, public intellectuals are able to participate in the work of culture, maintaining and moving cultural boundaries.