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Sport 40: 2012

Lost in the gulches and the sages

page 425

Lost in the gulches and the sages

Issues of genre in Nigel Cox’s The Cowboy Dog

Nigel Cox’s six published novels are markers of a trajectory towards an increasingly interesting fictional practice. It is right to speak of his last four novels, Skylark Lounge, Tarzan Presley [Jungle Rock Blues], Responsibility and The Cowboy Dog as a group, but apart from chronological proximity the reasons are not transparent. One could not speak of a coherent authorial ‘voice’, and yet they are all unmistakably of a kind. It is their strangeness, their fictional elasticity and willingness to experiment that make them distinctive. Central to their machinations is an understanding both on the part of the author and the reader of genre fiction. It is Cox’s talent for creating intrigue through the device of genre that this essay will examine, looking at what I consider to be his best novel, the posthumously published The Cowboy Dog. By helping define its place in New Zealand literary discourse I hope to align his work with some of our other treasured authors’, so that it will be called upon more frequently in the future.

In Leaving the Highway (1990), Mark Williams asserts that ‘there has been a progressive, radical and international shift in the genre of the novel towards the fictive and the fantastic at the expense of the mimetic and the sober and this has been mirrored by the fiction in this country’ (207). It seems that this shift emerged partly from a new attention to form—a literary playfulness that inevitably permeated these novels’ subjects—and partly from a shift in New Zealand’s national identity. The insecurities of postcolonial settler society had abated to a significant extent, and the New Zealand author was able to turn away from the plaguing questions of how best to represent New Zealand reality, as if that were their only rationale. The shift ‘towards the fictive and the fantastic’ has been cemented in the twenty years since Williams wrote this. Novels such as Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck and Catherine Chidgey’s In a Fishbone Church are page 426 notable for their creation of an overtly literary ‘non-rational universe’ (Jackson, Stafford, 12). As Anna Jackson and Jane Stafford note in their introduction to Floating Worlds (2009), ‘these novels are at ease with place because place is not as pressing or as real a notion as it has hitherto been’ (11).

New Zealand fiction has long been resistant to being branded in terms of genre. Sentiments such as Allen Curnow’s, arguing that New Zealand fiction should represent ‘an uncompromising fidelity to experience, of an unqualified responsibility to the truths of themselves, in this place and that time’ (Curnow, 146), have meant that ‘New Zealand fiction’ is the only term we can apply with any sense of conviction. ‘Gothic’ is a term sometimes applied to the fiction of authors like Janet Frame or Ronald Hugh Morrieson; Carl Shuker and Paul Shannon more recently; but only as subordinate to the work’s primary character—its fidelity to reporting New Zealand experience.1 Patrick Evans recalled the spectre of cultural anxiety when he argued that New Zealand authors were being increasingly conditioned to write an ‘international’ style of fiction, where precedence of form denied a ‘significant connection between an individual writing sensibility and a comprehensive, meaningfully localised world’ (‘Baby Factory’). For Evans, this erosion of ‘meaningful’ localised content threatens to invalidate a designation from which authors could previously not escape—being labelled ‘New Zealand writers’—for if one is not writing about something related to New Zealand then it no longer seems to merit inclusion. I will address Evans’ comments later in this essay, but for now I want to observe what I see as being unique about Nigel Cox’s novel The Cowboy Dog. In the binary discourse of ‘here and there’—assertion of a national identity by comparison to what we are not—this novel inverts the tradition of emigration. Rather than a story of experience overseas from a New Zealand perspective (that is still ‘New Zealand fiction’), here we have a genre, with a whole cast of characters, props and plot conventions, imported and deposited, without so much as a Customs declaration of intent, into New page 427 Zealand. Not only is this an inversion, but it is also a subversion. The novel’s fictions deny much of the cultural history of rural New Zealand that cultural nationalists have asserted so fervently. The fantasy of The Cowboy Dog comes at the expense of expressing a ‘fidelity to experience’ of modern-day New Zealand. However, far from being lamentable, this constitutes a large part of the enchantment the novel serves its reader, as fantastical fiction should. This being said, the ease with which one is willing to see similarity between Western cowboys and the New Zealand ‘bloke’ is intriguing. But ultimately to read this novel as an attempt to conflate the American Western genre with New Zealand rural history is to adapt too far from the text. Jackson and Stafford put it well—this endeavour is ‘not a disguise for cultural politics, but rather a registration of more complex ways of being in the world, both actual and textual’ (15). What registers most consistently in The Cowboy Dog, and indeed in much of Nigel Cox’s fiction, is a loyalty to the playfulness that fictional writing allows.

Firstly, it is worth noting that The Cowboy Dog is a novel that lends itself more to the traditions of film than literature. It is steeped in the images of classic Westerns, and so it is through this filmic tradition that the novel is best examined. The land that the novel’s protagonist Chester Farlowe grows up on is the desert land of North America. Chester’s homeland is a place of red dirt, lone cacti, soaring eagles and ‘mesas rising’ (88). Mesa rock formations, unique to the deserts of North America, remove any doubt as to the setting we are dealing with here. These are the images of Monument Valley, made famous by John Ford films such as Stagecoach (1939). This area, a vast uninhabited realm straddling what have become Arizona and Utah, was perfectly apposite to the themes of the Western. ‘Lone ranger’ characters were born out of the desert’s notable absence of people. An unyielding expanse of land where very little could grow suggested harshness as well as godlessness. Simultaneously, the giant mesas towering over the desert designated a significant imbalance between nature—grand and timeless—and man—small and transient. Monument Valley became, and remains today, the image par excellence of the Western. But as Jean-Louis Leutrat and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues note in their essay on John Ford and Monument Valley, the landscape has been extended to such a range of uses that it now seems infinitely malleable: ‘The page 428 landscape of Monument Valley has become a cliché, a stereotype, an empty signifier which can accommodate any number of signifieds’ (169). It is because of this that The Cowboy Dog’s use of such a setting, in spite of its incongruity with New Zealand landscape, is a permissible fictional venture.

Chester, in search of the cattle gang he intends to join, finds himself walking through the mesas of Monument Valley: ‘High on either side of me now mesas were rising, in strange layered shapes that sometimes looked like piles of flapjacks’ (88). The red dirt is another familiar image of the American West. ‘It was not the colours of sunset I was seeing but the lands themselves, which were red’ (66). Tumbleweed and sagebrush, as well as a cactus behind which Chester relieves himself, complement this ensemble (67). All of this would suggest a very typical example of the Western genre, were it not for the fact that the novel’s setting is the North Island of New Zealand. This giant incongruity is the pivotal conceit from which the novel expands.

The geography of Mr Stroud’s journey to find Chester confirms the locale as the Rangipo Desert. His journey takes him off State Highway One, somewhere between Turangi and Waiouru (190). Chester has grown up in these surroundings, on the side of a mountain that we may associate with Mt Ruapehu. The mountain on the one hand deviates from the barren flatland images of Western films, but its permanence and bulk replicate the sense of grandeur provided by the mesas. Nevertheless Chester’s homeland in the novel is resistant to being directly associated with the Rangipo Desert. The Rangipo desert region is indeed tundra, but its emptiness is caused by the arid coolness, rather than sweltering heat and sunlight. It is a desert, but a small one, when compared to the vastness of those in America, and it is effectively surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges. Finally the Rangipo Desert spends a significant amount of the year under snow, and this does not compute with Chester’s desert of red dust.

Setting is only one aspect of the Western genre. In the case of The Cowboy Dog, we might also focus on issues of Justice and Revenge. Chester justifies the murder he commits in terms of ‘balance’ and ‘just order’: ‘A balance has now been made against these two accounts and that just order is settled upon the world’ (19). Charles Bronson’s ‘Harmonica’ in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), page 429 who after witnessing his brother’s death at the hands of a man named Frank (played by Henry Fonda) spends a large part of his life tracking down his brother’s killer, is motivated by a sense of justice through vengeance. Justice, here, is based on fairness through retribution— an ‘eye for an eye’—and this is how Chester validates avenging his father’s death by killing Stronson. And yet Chester’s justification for his actions is not a very satisfying resolution for the reader. He does not fit into the simplest of Western binaries, that of Good vs Bad. The novel’s morality is of a more complex order of Western, one in which the moral dubiousness of revenge acts as a catalyst leading a character to a crisis. A desire for revenge does not necessarily give a character moral carte blanche to do as they wish. As Jon Tuska notes in his critical study of the American Western, ‘justice is equated with revenge; but in an appreciable number [of films] a distinction is made between the two, revenge being morally dubious and even dangerous when it takes the place of due process’ (29). This is certainly an aspect of The Cowboy Dog. Chester’s violent actions hang over the narrative, and judgement is never explicitly passed, leaving it to the reader. Supplementing this, the narrative constantly reminds us of Chester’s immaturity. His emotion repeatedly overrides his sense of reason. For example, Chester anticipates meeting his appointed enemy Stronson, his father’s killer, by practising his gun draw. He expects a showdown, where two combatants stand prepared, and survival depends on the speed of one’s draw. However, upon encountering the man Chester shoots him four times, not allowing his enemy time to speak beyond a ‘Hello, Chester’ (180). He is a character emotionally unsure, and this prevents us from identifying him as a traditional Western hero. The actor John Wayne, invariably the ‘good guy’ of Western cinema, is said to have objected to a film script for The Shootist (1976) in which his character shoots another in the back, saying, ‘I’ve made over 250 pictures and have never shot a guy in the back. Change it’ (IMDB). Chester is not above such a deed and his actions bear a similarity to those of the novel’s only overt villain, Lacey. Like Lacey, he attacks without warning and from afar, not allowing his target time to react (180, 189).

Chester’s wanton killing of Boss Lennox and his company, including the sympathetic Miss Peet, is undertaken not from any sense page 430 of justice but from an overwhelming anger. Before Chester shoots at the herding party from behind a rock he pauses, not to re-evaluate whether his actions are morally right, but because of a pang for the comforts of community and food:

There they were gathered over the communal meal I had so often enjoyed and I confess that I did looking upon them feel a dull contentment inside me that almost gave me pause. But that is almost. The dull thing was nothing beside my anger, which was walking circles inside me, insistent and not to be denied (189).

Narrating in retrospect, Chester is able to see his immaturity. He suggests his childhood coat, which he retains in spite of its being too small for his adult body, as a metaphor for the immaturity he cannot shake off. ‘Late in the night I hung my head and cried. I have my boy’s coat on and that was about right—too short in the sleeves, narrow across the shoulders, covered in blood and dirt . . . I was stuck in my past and had to wear the bloody consequences’ (181).

Chester is more a character out of a revised Western genre, comparable to ‘The Kid’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), a character whose intensely violent actions subvert the reader’s attempts to assign him the title fitting for a traditional protagonist—‘Western hero’. Like ‘The Kid’, Chester is aware of his weakness, giving him a Shakespearian complexity. ‘When I was eighteen I came into my anger. It had been buried deep . . . it got its teeth into me. I was shaken as the anger flooded through me; I knew that there was no turning back’ (11). But Chester is unwilling to act to shake off these sunken teeth of anger. When it comes to the closing scenes one feels that he has lost sight of Justice, submitting to the urge of Revenge.

Another aspect of Western films is their propensity for melodrama. David Lusted writing on ‘Male Melodrama’ in Western films talks of a shift from the traditional Westerns of the 1930s and 40s, where ‘genre stars’ such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper played traditional masculine roles, characterised by stoicism and restraint, to the films of the 50s and 60s. New ‘method’ actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, argues Lusted, had an acting style ‘“feminised” by qualities of emotionality and intensity’ (64). Such films held on to the notion of laconic male hero, but these traits were unpacked page 431 through melodrama to become a negative sign of repression and inner turmoil. ‘A central trope of melodrama is the dramatic connection between social and psychic repression, leading to an excess of misery in the central protagonist and matched by emotional tension in the audience’ (65). This describes the tone of The Cowboy Dog well. While readers are never able to distance themselves beyond what a first-person narration allows, we get a sense of Chester’s instability. ‘Miss Peet, with Boss Lennox, with Spoons, with Henry Stroud. Every one of them had betrayed me and each betrayal had left me with an anger that was murderous in nature’ (173). Lines such as this are at odds with the way these characters have acted towards Chester in the novel, and so as reader we take steps towards disassociating ourselves from him.

Having identified these two different types of Western film, traditional masculine and ‘method’ melodrama, it is pertinent to introduce comparison with New Zealand’s laconic (and iconic) hero, Johnson, from John Mulgan’s Man Alone (1939).

Title aside, The Cowboy Dog doesn’t take long to establish its Western sensibilities.

The anger is gone from me and as I watch the tumbleweeds roll across the floor of the valley below I could settle; I could say to the past, I will let you be . . . But anger never dies. It shifts, it changes shape like a restless shadow that is searching for an earthly form. You look again and it has moved. But not gone. Never gone (12).

This is not the kind of stoic sentiment of New Zealand literature’s other desert crosser, Johnson. After ‘going bush’ for six months and nearly dying, Johnson comments, ‘I was trying to get across a bit of country, I found it tougher than I expected’ (151). Stoicism, oft cited and parodied as the keystone of the New Zealand temperament, is lacking in The Cowboy Dog. The first-person narration and our access to Chester’s thoughts certainly contribute to our understanding of him as a very emotional character, but his bouts of anger and tendency to cry further draw him away from identification as a stoic ‘man alone’.

And so, without wanting to draw Mulgan’s novel into discussion of the Western genre, of which it is undoubtedly not a part, we might understand Man Alone as being analogous with the John Wayne page 432 films of the 1940s. Correspondingly, The Cowboy Dog is similar to the kind of Western one critic has called ‘pathetic melodrama’ (Stewart). In comparison to Man Alone, which tends towards a minimalist narrative style, where feelings are largely communicated through dialogue, melodrama of The Cowboy Dog’s kind is ‘defined by the way in which everything happens “inside”’ (Stewart). The two novels are quite different enterprises. In Man Alone Johnson’s reticence deflects the reader’s attempts to understand his opinions, his motivations. When his employer, Stenning, suggests that Johnson should get married, Johnson’s replies are evasive and opaque. ‘I’m not the marrying sort’ . . . ‘I guess it wouldn’t work so well with me’ . . .‘I’ll think it over all right, but I guess it wouldn’t suit me so well’ (104). Johnson’s character is mysterious; Chester is much more transparent.

Nevertheless, David Larsen in a New Zealand Listener review of the novel makes a connection of this sort. ‘It’s a brilliant conceit. The western mythos is an immediate, natural fit with the Barry Crump strand of New Zealand culture: it feels precisely right that there should be lonely, far-seeing men wandering the high country on horseback, and the tumbleweed and the rattlesnakes are just details’ (‘Shadow of the mountain’). This reading suggests that the character-type of the Western cowboy and that of the New Zealand farmer are analogous. The popularity of Speights beer advertisements, where two wandering farmers (dressed in cowboy-esque attire) find various ways to exhibit stoicism through the line ‘good on ya mate’, undoubtedly cemented such an association. But when Larsen speaks of ‘lonely, far-seeing men’ he is also invoking another image of the stoic man: Man Alone. Why is such a comparison tempting, in spite of the protagonist’s over- sentimentality? The authority of Mulgan’s novel and its continuing influence on our literary landscape is compelling. Any New Zealand fiction that includes some sort of rural location and a male protagonist invites a prima facie comparison with Man Alone. The fact that both novels have extended passages around the Rangipo Desert region of the North Island (as well as around Auckland) is another reason. Beyond this, however, there is little connecting the two novels, and to view Cox’s novel as part of a national tradition of writing about identity and place in New Zealand is to read what isn’t there. Instead of this, rather than being ‘mere details’, the use of genre—the page 433 ‘tumbleweed and rattlesnakes’—constitutes a large part of the novel’s readability. As the success of Western cinema has shown, people are ever delighted by the historically exotic and this novel is no exception.

At the same time, The Cowboy Dog makes extensive use of Auckland city. The realist sections of the novel set in Auckland stop the reader fully surrendering to the conventions of the Western. Instead, these two worlds are made to coexist. One of the reasons that The Cowboy Dog works, in spite of its incongruities, is the separation made between Chester’s homeland and Auckland city. Very little narrative takes place in between, and so the two settings remain exclusive of each other. Huntly is the only place that Chester stops on his way to Auckland; its representation as a ghost town serves as an appropriate bridge, the reader recognising such a setting from films of the American West as well as experience of small New Zealand townships come across hard times. The author allows an obligatory dismissal of one of New Zealand’s less appreciated townships. Asking to be let off, Chester is told by a truck driver ‘No one ever stops in Huntly unless they threw a rod’ (14). And so, within the novel there are two separate worlds, connected only by ‘the great highway’ (13). Chester lives in exaltation of the highway, its dynamism a source of wonder: ‘If I ever was to leave these lands it would be to the great highway I would go, to ride the mighty vehicles and chase the bunny rabbit’s tail of the broken white line’ (13). But at the same time, this highway, along with the power pylons, jeopardise the harmony with which these two worlds, effectively two separate narratives, can coexist: ‘The trucks on the great highway are loaded with knowledge which every day passes back and forth before my eyes and somehow that knowledge is a threat’ (61).

The pylons become a recurring motif in the novel. If the highway connects the world of cowboys and longhorns to Auckland city, allowing exchange and interaction, the pylons cut through the desert and its inhabitants, ‘drinking from them’ (137).2 Grand towers of man-made steel sent from another world compete with the landscape page 434 of mesas, and the two cannot peacefully coexist. In recognition of this, nothing can live under the pylon’s wires: ‘I saw that beneath them was a long, raw strip where nothing stirred. Bare dirt, and not even an ant crossing’ (139). Chester’s dad describes the general feeling towards the pylons of those living on the land—‘There’s just somethin’ about them that ain’t right’ (137). His words resonate beyond his own understanding, the reader also trying to make sense of this unnatural narrative fusion. The pylons, electrically charged and threatening, terrorise the balance on which this narrative exists. In the manner of a Western, the natural sense of order is threatened. Like a stranger come to town, Auckland disrupts the fictional homogeneity of the novel.

Until this collision occurs, The Cowboy Dog is able to work within both realist and fantastical modes. If we are to continue this notion of the desert and the city being two separate narrative worlds, Chester is the component that bridges them. Chester travels to Auckland having escaped his father’s killer, Stronson. For the twelve-year-old boy the city promises a safe haven away from the land, and it is here that he grows up. He is quickly taken in by a Maori burger merchant, Mr Stroud. Chester recognises Stroud as a father figure, and in consequence latches on to the promise of domesticity and protection. ‘It was a man’s voice, deep and strong, and pleasing to obey. Anyone with a brain inside them will know that I heard my father in it’ (23). As a novice to all things urban, he must learn from scratch. Interaction with the opposite sex (having never seen a woman before) is one activity that occupies much of his attention. Compared to Boss Lennox’s troupe of cowboys, what takes place in Auckland is realistic, ordinary and mundane. The typical images are all there: airports, cars everywhere, an IMAX cinema complex. Concrete referents help to solidify the fiction’s realism. The I Fry Burger Bar is on Jervois Road in Herne Bay, a road taken from the real world. Spoons and Chester spend a lot of their time in Myers Park, an area infamous for its transient vagrant population.

In spite of this separation of place, the novel’s narrative structure works to entwine Chester’s homeland and Auckland city; causing a normalisation of the fictional absurdity the reader is confronted with. Metaphorically, Chester brings the West with him to Auckland. The page 435 perspective through which the reader encounters Auckland is mediated by Chester, whose grounding is inexplicably in the stereotypes of the Wild West. Hence Auckland is recast as a setting for the plot conventions of the Western to play out.

Chester develops an intense relationship with Judy Spooner, a vagrant girl of uncertain background. Spoons, as she is known, hyper- westernises Auckland by consciously superimposing the Western mould onto her and Chester’s relationship as she learns of his past. She takes delight in the stories of his childhood, and scripts their relationship as if it were from the American West, complete with Southern twang. Her notion of the Western is a romantic one, with an eroticised and hyper-masculinised cowboy.

‘Is you mah baby, cowboy?’
‘Sure am, darlin’.’ She taught me to say this. (83)

Having never known his mother, Chester has never interacted with a woman before, and Spoons becomes an Eve to Chester’s Adam, drawing him blindly into danger. Chester is led away from the filial comforts of the I Fry Burger Bar, where he works for Mr Stroud, and into the world of Auckland’s homeless population. They pass the time foraging for food and comforts, smoking dope, but also being very in love. The Auckland University Library is one of their haunts. ‘In the books room I just sat still like she told me and felt the warm slowly spreading through my legs and shoulders, though you had to make sure you didn’t fall asleep’ (146). But this place, popular with vagrants for its comfort, brings them into contact with a boy called Lacey— described as having ‘a pointed little face and dirty eyes . . . everything about him was dirty’ (147). Lacey is an ex-boyfriend of Spoons, and she warns Chester to avoid him. But Lacey manages to separate Chester and Spoons, and Chester unwittingly leads him back to the I Fry. The suburb of Westmere is recast as the setting for a showdown, its street lights becoming the local denizens: ‘I crossed the road called Jervois, which was like a river, and came quietly along beneath the street lights hanging as though they were required to witness and to warn’ (153). This setting is completed by Lacey, who plays the role of villain. His combination of vulgarity, street smarts and costume make him an urban cowboy. ‘He had pointed shoes on, that made a page 436 sharp clipping noise, and there was a gap between his knees that made a hole when he walked’ (149). Lacey, however, is not a noble villain, and so, as in a Western film, is not worth too much screen time. By literally stabbing both Spoons and Mr Stroud in the back he becomes the figurative backstabber, a coward in the Western genre.

Chester, ironically unaware of the role in which he has been cast, must learn to become a caricature of himself. He is innocent of this notion of ‘role-playing’ and is completely ignorant of stock images of the American West held by urbanised mass culture. Auckland becomes just another setting for his Western melodrama, albeit with a different set of props. Sparseness is replaced by density, moonlight with neon light. Chester’s descriptions of the city are full of romantic melodrama. Auckland acquires a melodramatic force more potent than we may usually attribute to a city. ‘[Auckland—] they call it that instead of saying its true name, which is a word for a hole where life runs into the ground’ (19). His conception of the world is stuck in the pages of a Western, and he is maladjusted to urban life. Were it not for the constant reminder of Chester’s status as a ‘real’ cowboy through narrative prolepsis, his fictional authenticity during his time in Auckland would slowly erode, as he begins to figure more as a typical vagrant youth than a cowboy. But this authenticity is constantly reaffirmed as the narrative skips backwards and forwards when, back on his homeland, his ability to shoot a gun, ride a horse and pluck a turkey are solidified in the narrative. Finally it is Mr Stroud who eliminates any doubts the reader may have over Chester’s reliability as narrator. As a character the reader can relate to for his sense of having come from ‘the real world’ of Auckland, Stroud is willing to accept the script in which he has been cast: ‘and then a surge of strangeness came over him, his bumps sang. Horses, cattle, fine, but snakes, here in New Zealand? Though he had known it would be so’ (197). By travelling south to experience this alternate reality, crossing the boundary between these two worlds, Stroud authenticates Chester’s story and by extension the novel’s main premise.

Returning to Jackson and Stafford’s introduction to Floating Worlds, there is a useful separation made between two types of fantastical fiction. In one, exemplified by Keri Hulme’s The Bone page 437 People, the fiction’s non-rational elements, ghosts and spirits in the case of Hulme, ‘are really there’ (12). Their affirmation is a rewriting of the history and traditions that European settler society has imposed upon New Zealand and their effect is a political one, ‘undercutting the notion of the authoritative and authorising master narrative’ (12). The other type of non-rationality in fiction, exemplified by angels in The Vintner’s Luck and the ghosts of In a Fishbone Church, is consummately literary in its significance (12). These novels are post-modern in their conscious subversion of what the reader deems plausible, and much of their power emerges from these overt fictionalities. The Cowboy Dog fits into this second category. The novel’s success derives not so much from content—such an overplayed set of stereotypes aligns it more with pulp dime-store fiction—but the effect of this ‘non-rational’ deployment of genre on a modern New Zealand locale.

Regular oscillations in popularity aside, ‘American Western’ films have spanned the entire history of film itself. The first Western is widely recognised to be Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) (Lusted, 67). Running at a mere twelve minutes, and without sound, it is a distant ancestor of films like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, which was so notable for its recurring soundtrack and slow pacing. The genre’s durability became evident when Italian directors appropriated it in the 1960s and 70s, following a lapse in popularity in Hollywood. These ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ reinvigorated the genre by moving beyond the traditional and stale. In this way, ever since the first silent Western films at the turn of the century, the genre has been unceasingly reappropriated and redeployed, retaining only a few essential elements. More recent ‘genre borrowing’ has allowed filmmakers to accentuate the classic themes of the west while abandoning any notion of historical accuracy.3 The Cowboy Dog goes so far as to transfer not only the abstract themes of the Western, but the landscape itself. It is this more challenging departure from reality, by its overt inauthenticity, that gives the novel its intrigue.

New Zealand fiction or film has never really appropriated the page 438 Western before in this way.4 Perhaps it was never felt relevant by writers who subscribed to Curnow’s thoughts on the obligations of a writer. ‘Fidelity to experience’ for a New Zealander could hardly include sombreros and cacti. New Zealand film’s most recognisable foray into the Western genre was the cameo of the ‘Tainuia Kid’, played by Billy T. James in a 1985 film adaptation of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Came a Hot Friday. The Mexican stereotype is incorporated into a New Zealand setting by assimilating Mexican-ness (the Western cowboy’s ‘other’) with Maori-ness (the New Zealand Pakeha’s ‘other’).

The language of The Cowboy Dog is inherited, not from the ‘homeland’, Britain, but from the pop music and film genre cliché of America. When Chester speaks of the mesas he describes them as ‘flapjacks’, an unmistakably American usage. In this way it recalls the shift in New Zealand away from British cultural imperialism towards American popular culture following World War Two in the 1950s and 60s. In Janet Frame’s novel Owls Do Cry (1957) there is a short passage which points to this split. Two cinemas, the Regent and the Miami, act as bastions for high and low-brow culture respectively.

At the Regent the prices are higher and the films are what are called first-class without any intrusions of moronic cartoon or ride-’em- cowboy serials . . . the toffs, the rich and educated, go to the Regent in their best clothes and furs . . . rows of looking and rustling and hushing rich and prosperous people. (82, qtd. in Stafford, Williams,30)

Compare this with the scene at the Miami:

The unenlightened people go there to whistle and sing out and rustle chocolate papers and blow through their teeth. Whe-e-e-e whenever the hero and heroine kiss, or when she throws her clothes from behind page 439 a curtain and you know that she is either going to bed or about to have a censored bath. The crowd like the hissing and the touching and the fights with pulled hair and slapped faces. (82, qtd. in Stafford, Williams 30)

Cox’s novel is born out of this era. Its celebration of the Western genre as well as its indulgences in American pop are strikingly distinct from the dated colonial obedience to Britain. It sides firmly with the atmosphere of Frame’s Miami cinema: pop music, melodramatic cinema, dime-store fiction. The novel’s persistent use of Western cliché refers less to the historical reality of the nineteenth-century American Wild West than it does to the fascination for that time seen during the 1950s. The 1950s remains the most prolific decade for Western genre films—a total of around 515, according to Lusted (69). The decade saturated itself in the fantasy of the West, and popular cinema responded by producing increasingly realist recreations to sate this desire.

Jane Marie Gaines and Charlotte Cornelia Herzog argue in their essay on Western costume that the Western genre of film is unique in its ‘interdependence of the mythic and the authentic’—a ‘fantasy of authenticity’ (172). As such, Western films consistently strive to achieve new heights of realism. Gaines and Herzog cite progressions such as William S. Hart’s early Westerns, which employed ‘real’ Native Americans, and later Marlon Brando’s sombrero in One- eyed Jacks (1960) (admitting the truth that the Hispanic influence in the Wild West was bigger than Hollywood had previously given it credit) (174). As these ‘re-realisations’ show, the Western genre is self-regenerative because each time its signifiers tire, new ones fall in to place that are ‘more real’, ‘truer to history’. The Cowboy Dog is in part allowed to get away with its overt fictionalities by tapping into a mythos, the Western, that has been stretched more than any other to fit innumerable plots and settings. This is a novel concerned more with popular culture than historical accuracy, demonstrated by the fact that few familiar signs—eagles, cacti, red dirt—are enough to trigger, in Roland Barthes’ terms, ‘the reality effect’ (229). Ed Minus is his essay ‘Westerns’ writes ‘[Gangster films] have never totally eclipsed the Western, which has been mythologized, demythologized, romanticized, deromanticized, spoofed, mongrelized, inflated, page 440 deflated, politicised, allegorized—transmogrified in every conceivable way’ (82–83).

In this way The Cowboy Dog can be read as a conscious pastiche, testing the malleability of the genre. The novel is not to be limited by the constraints of the Western genre but instead deploys this genre in a playful manner. Its allegiance is to indulging the fake-ness of fiction rather than asserting the reality of history.

This is not a new approach for Nigel Cox. His other novels, most significantly Skylark Lounge (2000) and Tarzan Presley (2004), include a provocative narrative improbability. Part of these novels’ intrigue then becomes not only ‘what will happen next?’, but ‘how can this possibly play out in some sort of convincing manner?’ In Skylark Lounge, the protagonist Jack Grout is contacted by aliens, which would be acceptable were this pulp science fiction, but the novel sets out to remain within a realist framework. In an interview with Damien Wilkins, Cox explains the incentive for such an enterprise.

The idiocy of trying to write a serious book about aliens. It was standing there a dumb fact in the middle of the room. I knew that from the first minute I started work on that book the whole problem, of dealing with the nitwit alien culture that’s around on the one hand and on the other actually sort of thinking, Yeah but you are at some point going to have to write a real encounter with some real aliens if this book is going to work . . . At every moment of that book I was thinking, how are you going to deal with this, how are you going to do it? How? . . . I love it and there’s nothing like standing up from the machine and thinking, I did it. (Interview with Damien Wilkins)

Returning to Frame, we find a passage that to me seems to identify the heart of the New Zealand authors’ endeavour from which Cox’s novel breaks away. It is a passage from Living in the Maniototo (1979)—a novel that Mark Williams praised for its ‘spillage of unreality’ (25), a symptom that could be equally applied to The Cowboy Dog. The narrator considers the problem of New Zealand in relation to America.

Where indeed? Jet flight, crossing the line, skyscrapers, the land of Hollywood and westerns and the songs with the names, names, names with which Palmerston North, Marton, Foxton, couldn’t page 441 hope to compete unless a spark of imagination, kindled somewhere (by Peter Wallstead, Margaret Rose Hurndell?) set the place alight like a bushfire. The Maori names—Wanganui, Waikato, Tuatapere, Taranaki—were more powerful because they were welded to the place by the first unifying act of poetry and not stuck on like a grocery label; nevertheless, the real triumph would be to set the spark raging in the mundane places (96–97).

In an era of jet flight and instantaneity, where the proliferation of American culture brings it into direct juxtaposition with that of New Zealand, the narrator assigns responsibility to writers, in this case citing the fictional Peter Wallstead and Margaret Rose Hurndell as possible candidates, to bring New Zealand out of the ‘mundane’ and into the realm of ‘Hollywood and westerns’. The grand imaginations of Hollywood and the proliferation of ‘celebrity’ accentuate how ‘small town’ New Zealand is. The Pakeha writer’s history is that of a ‘stuck on grocery label’, superficial, insignificant and ephemeral. The ‘real triumph’, then, will come when a ‘spark of imagination’ finds the kind of grand material of Hollywood that authentically speaks for Pakeha experience. The irony of all this is that Hollywood is the home of the inauthentic. And yet its innovations in inauthenticity have given it an authenticity of its own. The Cowboy Dog understands this equation, the sparkle of Hollywood and the insipidness of New Zealand, and it rectifies it in the most inauthentic way possible—by bringing Hollywood to New Zealand. The mischief with which Cox dismisses the notion of an authentic New Zealand novel complements this sentiment. ‘I was bored by . . . the heaviness of the great cultural book, you know, all that crap about the Great New Zealand novel. Thank god we are all over that’ (Interview with Damien Wilkins).

Nigel Cox was published by Victoria University Press and had a running association with the literary journal Sport—two institutions that Evans suggested in the essay ‘Baby Factory’ as being the mechanisms whose output had become directed towards fiction that would ‘reach an international audience’ (Evans). However, the author’s close relationship with the Wellington literary scene does not help in identifying or grouping his fiction. It is a fiction that does not avoid the New Zealand referent, and it does not ‘go out of its way to seem like something else’, as Evans describes Elizabeth Knox’s Black page 442 Oxen doing. In the case of The Cowboy Dog, the reader gains more from the novel if they recognise various New Zealand settings. In particular there is a pleasure derived from seeing the Desert Road, until now a barren stretch of nothingness observed through a foggy car window, given such a leading role in an exotic fictional world. Like a Hollywood Western, The Cowboy Dog triumphs in transporting the imagination of the reader.

The Cowboy Dog stands out as an anomaly within New Zealand fiction. There is a sense of newness to its form, a reckless collision of the familiar with the exotic. It holds no concern for the incessant debate over what New Zealand fiction is or should be, and it is as if its features were put there deliberately to deny the permissibility of the question. New Zealand farming is signified more than anything by fences and the number 8 wire used to build them. However, in the novel the reader is repeatedly reminded of a definite lack of fences (107, 139). The signifiers of the Western simply do not relate to the reality of rural New Zealand, as David Larsen has claimed. The Cowboy Dog speaks of New Zealand but only at times is it the New Zealand we know. Modern-day Auckland is forced to co-exist with the complete fantasy of the Wild West. Frame might accept that this kind of subversion of genre and place is what is required to ‘set the spark raging in the mundane’. It is a liberating experience, not because it turns away from a meaningful localised world, as in Evans’ critique of contemporary New Zealand fiction, but because, set in New Zealand, it has no sense of the cultural burden that is so frequently borne upon the backs of the novels written here.

An extract from The Cowboy Dog was published in the Winter 2006 edition of Sport. Six years on it is time this novel is fully recognised for the part it plays in the continuing evolution of New Zealand fiction.

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Works Cited

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Cox, Nigel. Interview with Damien Wilkins. Sport 34, Winter 2006. NZETC. n. pag. Web. Nov. 2010.

Cox, Nigel. Skylark Lounge. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000. Print.

Cox, Nigel. Tarzan Presley. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004. Print.

Cox, Nigel. The Cowboy Dog. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006. Print.

Curnow, Allen. ‘New Zealand Literature: The case for a working definition’. Essays on New Zealand Literature. Ed. Wystan Curnow. Auckland: Heinemann, 1973. Print.

Curnow, Wystan. ‘Progress Never Came Without a Fight.’ And, 1 (Aug. 1983): 95–98. Print.

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Frame, Janet. Living in the Maniototo. New York: Braziller, 1979. Print.

Frame, Janet. Owls Do Cry. Christchurch: Pegasus Press Ltd., 1958. Print.

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Jackson, Anna, Jane Stafford. ‘Introduction: the gaming halls of the imagination’. Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction. Eds. Anna Jackson, Jane Stafford. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Print.

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1

Timothy Jones devotes a section of his thesis ‘The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic’ to examining whether New Zealand fiction can claim to have a discrete sub-genre of ‘New Zealand Gothic’.

2

As one drives through the Desert Road the power pylons are indeed striking. A double row of squat steel structures follows the highway. If one is to look into the distance the road fades into obscurity but the pylons stand out, fencing off one side of the desert from the other.

3

John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) and Takeshi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) are two good examples of this.

4

This is not to say that New Zealand authors have not tackled the genre in other ways. Bill Manhire has a poem ‘Out West’ (published in Collected Poems (2001)), focusing on the language of Westerns, from which this essay borrows its title. Wystan Curnow wrote a kind of Western dialogue called ‘Progress never came without a fight’ which appeared in the journal AND 1. In Barbara Anderson’s novel Long Hot Summer (1999) a group of youths decide to film an amateur Western. Witi Ihimaera looks at Maori identification with the native Indians of Western films in his story ‘Short Features’.