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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 15. 1964.

Social Integration in Fiction — —The Lost Tribe

Social Integration in Fiction

—The Lost Tribe

Les Cleveland. the archetypal New Zealander, served overseas during the war and has been welder, bushman, journalist and editor of various technical publications. He completed his MA last year and is now tutoring in English and Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington.

Because some of the serious New Zealand fiction written since World War II strongly emphasises the Ideal of social integration, the pessimistic rhetoric of so much writing of the 1930s now takes on a larger significance. Isolation and failure, the threat of hostile nature and the vision of the alien, encircling wilderness are only one negative and frustrating pole of individual experience. Opposing it are positive potentialities that may be more important. They suggest that the archetypal image in New Zealand fiction may not arise from the endurance of an isolation situation, as some critics have tried to assert, but rather from a fundamental desire for community and communication.

The New Zealand novel shows the tension between these polarities. Its heroes are descended from fictional prototypes like Johnson in "Man Alone" (Alan Mulgan) and Cedric Tregarthen in "The Greenstone Door" (a historical romance by William Satchell published in 1914). They may be socially alienated and forced by temporary hostile circumstance to run away or hide in the wilderness, but they also possess self-awareness and a dominant yearning for unity with the social group. Thus Cedric rejects the chance of fortune and romance in Europe and stays in New Zealand out of loyalty to his father and a sense of identity with the rural community in which he was reared. Johnson is always searching for some way of sharing in a life that will bring warmth and meaning to his activities somewhere in which there is "good food and drink and men moving, making something together."

When the disturbed adolescent hero of "The Backward Sex ' (by Ian Cross) has an unsuccessful encounter with a mature and sophisticated, sexually desirable woman with a European background, he is reassured by the familiar sights and sounds of a North Island beach and his sense of being a "Pig Islander." Rankin, the civil servant hero of "After Anzac Day" (Ian Cross) wryly questions all myths and traditions, but finds an outlet for loyalty and Integrity as well as ambition in the upper levels of public administration.

The Welfare State with its collectivist policies has provided ready-made answers to Johnson's demand for a life that is socially constructive but can do little to satisfy his need for emotional happiness. Paradoxically, its proficiency at solving social problems with automaton formulas has intensified the emotional needs of its individual dependents. The more that state-provided substitutes are allowed to take over responsibility for individual moral decisions based on close personal relationships, the more the beneficiaries of the State may become its abstract victims. This is because institutional formulas and superficial calculations cannot replace the warmth and emotional spontaneity of intimate personal life. Does the idea of "men moving, making something together" become an empty Illusion when it is enforced by legislation? Do the processes of the modern State satisfy superficial physical needs but obscure the existence of deeper spiritual ones?

These questions have been urgently formulated in the novels of Janet Frame. They are moral fables behind which is an elaborate organisation of themes of life and death. Isolation of the self, and frustration of the individual attempt to communicate with others at levels other than the superficial. In her work the obstructions of plot, characterisation scenic description and other formal conventions have, where necessary, been trimmed away in order that the writer may pursue a carefully-selective, symbolic vision of the problem of individual survival in a world of ambiguous potentiality.

Whether or not the tone of these novels is one of morbid, ironic obsession with the mentally disturbed the failed, the lonely and the Incoherent; whether they amount to anything more than an extraordinarily dextrous exposition of the mechanics of personal despair a laboured reiteration upon reiteration in dreary interior monologues of the modern cliche that we are all prisoners of our own consciousness and that some of us are more baffled, more desperate more imprisoned than others; or whether their protest contains Important Implications of a peculiarly positive significance to a New Zealand reader depends on how some of their ironies are Interpreted.

Janet Frame's first novel. "Owls Do Cry." characteristically inverts the values of the everyday New Zealand world. The rubbish tip becomes a source of imaginative vitality, and its surroundings supply the imagery for a private consciousness of natural forms which are beautiful and meaningful; but as the Withers children grow up the forces of industrial society and the State (identified in the woollen mills and the social security department) seem like mechanisms of Imprisonment to them. People who work in the mills are thought of as shut in and Toby Withers wonders if they are blind. Institutions can destroy people it is suggested, because they frustrate their imaginative potentialities.

The Imaginatively perceptive Daphne Withers resists the institutional pressures of society and the mental hospital where she is Zput away, only to be quelled by a brain operation. It is one of the novel's desperate ironies that while all the other characters who have been struggling to conform to the machinery of "normal" society come to various catastrophic ends. Daphne, "cured" of her insanity and ceasing her resistance to the materialistic values of "normal civilised life." takes a Job in the woollen mills and is so diligent that she is rapidly promoted and even given a presentation, for her valuable services.

In "Faces In The Water." the occupants of the disturbed wards of the mental hospitals where its first person narrator is detained, illustrate the general human condition. They nave an overpowering desire for a sense of identity and a means of adequate communication of their emotions, even if it can be conducted only in terms of bird cries and animal noises. The bewildered protagonist, in search of security. Identifies herself with the earth like a rabbit in its burrow, hides in the grass, and tries to reassure herself with the warmth of sunlight. At the same time, in the worst stages of her illness, she finds herself in a frightening collective relationship with the animal-like but all too human occupants of a disturbed ward called "The Park." This is not Just a documentary aspect of the backward New Zealand mental hospitals, however, as some reviewers have tried evasively to suggest; it is a probing of individual consciousness which becomes a search for security and a plea for love and understanding. The novel asks disturbing questions about the nature of reality, and it describes the heroic inner struggle of the personality to conform to some acceptable public version of actuality. Throughout, chaos is presented as the sinister, darkened alternative to light and imaginative freedom, and the "faces in the water" are fleeting aspects of those for whom we collectively in our false social pride, have evaded personal responsibility.

"Faces In The Water" describes the progress of its protagonist by means of simple therapies from an animal-like endurance of chaos, fear and loneliness, towards an attempt at adjustment to the world outside the mental hospital, but "Owls Do Cry" questions the possibility of ever adjusting the emotional and imaginative needs of the individual to the materialistic values of our society. It asserts that the fairy tale visions of childhood may have more validity than the fantasies of the adult world and that communication at other than superficial levels is impossible in that world. Most of the central characters in the novel are either overtaken by death, are destroyed, or are incapacitated by their own insensitivities. The epileptic Toby Withers escapes, but he is in a kind of limbo, "there and not there, journeying half-way, which is all torment . . ."

The Isolated, incoherent Toby continues his struggle for communication in "On The Edge Of The Alphabet." He is nourished by a sustaining belief in a fantasy about the Lost Tribe. This is a mythical band of Maoris who according to South Island folk lore, secreted themselves in the bleak forests and mountains of the far South and were not heard of again. Toby dreams of writing a book about them, but in the meantime he makes a futile Journey to England only to encounter on the way two other solitaries who "act out the lost traveller's dream of speech." The dream fails. None of them achieve any satisfactory or lasting form of communication. They remain isolated and lost: so, by implication, is the society around them because in it the superficial use of words is seen to be a successful way of avoiding rather than promoting full contact between people. Ironically, it is a society in which language can be used perversely to "keep us safe from human onslaught" while we "express our regret at being unable to supply the groceries of love and peace."

One of this group commits suicide when she realises the full nature of her loneliness and frustration. Toby's sense of place, however, saves him. It recalls him to New Zealand, where he is looked after by an aged relative with only the prospect of a State home awaiting both of them. But Toby remains in mortal danger because of the possibility that full self-knowledge will destroy him if he ever finds out the meaning of the "real expression" of the Lost Tribe.

What is that meaning? Taken page 4 literally it may be simply an imaginative fantasy like the rubbish dump fairy tales in "Owls Do Cry," which serve to Illustrate the dangerous disparity between lonely individuality and conventional, unfeeling society. But the work of this writer cannot be understood at bare literal levels; though it is loaded with rich particularity, it is a poetic structure with communication as its major theme. It is here that the full ironic ambiguity and ultimate importance of the edge-of-the-alphabet and Lost Tribe imagery emerges. Thora Pattern, the sinister chorus-narrator in "On The Edge Of The Alphabet" warns that awareness of moral isolation may lead to despair and death, but this is not the end of the matter; it also may lead to cautious, stoic endurance and to attempts at invoking a social tradition that stresses the supreme importance of personal relationships and a code of close, mutual trust between friends in daily life. This offers an idealistic, secular foundation for moral values based on the survival of the intimate social group as it is visualised by characters in New Zealand fiction like Macnamara in "Nor The Years Condemn" (Robin Hyde). Rogers in "Coal Flat" (Bill Pearson), Frank Fahey in "For The Rest Of Our Lives" (Dan Davin) and Sefton in "Gun In My Hand" (Gordon Slatter). For all their doubts and backslidings these men are animated, like Cedric Tre-garthen and Johnson, by a desire to "connect" and "communicate." They do not wish to be alienated, they are looking for social integration. They seek an organic, integral relationship both to their fellows and to their environment.

So an Ironic tension develops in "On The Edge Of The Alphabet." Conceptions like the "chosen race" and the "unhappy few" invoke the paradox of the New Zealand community which professes humanitarian ideals and has a belief in the possibilities not only of an "alphabet" of communication but of a self-identity, a heightened national consciousness. This at times has the mythopeic force of the quasi-tribal conventions that are defined in Davin's war novels, but seems to fail on ordinary occasions to satisfy the full emotional needs of its baffled individual members. Consequently, "On The Edge Of The Alphabet" is not a novel of manners or a documentary study of shipboard life as one puzzled critic has suggested, it is an exposition of ideas, a presentation of states of feeling in which characters are symbolic and the phrase "edge of the alphabet" can be accepted as a primordial image expressing the unconscious predicament of the individual in any modern society as well as the deep-felt urge of its members to communicate.

But does the novel admit any possibility that the New Zealand society of which Toby Withers is a part, might be something more than a replica of the greater Western one, and does the New Zealand microcosm contain any alternative to total despair? Once allow that personal relationships possess a heightened significance to some groups inside New Zealand, and the Lost Tribe can be accepted as a metaphor for a society which is astray merely in a wilderness of its own perversity through not realising the full potentialities of its dormant, tribelike, collective identity. Full awareness may bring death, but for that very reason the fiction of a Lost Tribe may be a necessary illusion for survival. Belief in a Tribe may be a better state than belief in nothing.

More than specifically local questions are raised by Janet Frame's novels. Their themes relate to any modern industrial society and the allusions to tides of death in the sky, to the Bomb, to images of entombment and clogging by dust as well as to "clouds clustering like soft white maggots about the sun," give its plea for a more sensitive understanding of each other's human needs an urgent universal significance that is lacking in most other New Zealand fiction.

"Scented Gardens For The Blind" continues this ruthless, melodramatic inquiry into the individual inability to communicate. Erlene, the daughter of Vera Glace, the narrator, has lost her power to speak and Vera tries to devise plans of speech which will be clear and beautiful, the words patterned like daisy chains with the "smell of the earth and the sun and the Juice of man." But the speech used in everyday life is useless for the kind of communication she dreams of. It is a case of going on and on saying nothing with "the tattered bargain-price words, the great red-flagged sale of trivialities, the shut-down sell-out of the mind." A blindness theme is used somewhat confusingly throughout the novel to suggest that in its secret gloom it may be possible to detect the "perpetual cry of yearning" for the one message which Vera Glace believes each person's life contains.

Light is paradoxically identified with death and deception, so that the sun is said to be "pampering us with too much light dripped down to our quiescent minds and bodies from its golden medicine spoon." This is a device which was used in the short story, "Snowman. Snowman." Sun and warmth are symbols of insensitive normality which ultimately destroy the snowman's mute consciousness and his power to speculate creatively about human processes

Erlene fails to respond to the psychiatric wiles of a Dr. Clapper and has conversations instead with a black beetle on her window sill. She feels that the human race is acting out the fable of the dung beetle, exhausting itself in the pursuit of useless material objects. In her surrealistic dreams she wonders how anyone will ever be able to speak effectively unless a new kind of language is discovered in time to save us all from destruction.

There is a savage denouement to this parable. The entire narrative is revealed as the stream of consciousness fantasy of two old women patients in a mental hospital. It is the means by which they survive. Vera Glace was really a librarian who lived in a small South Island town until, at the age of 30. she was struck dumb. No treatment was successful and she has no family left. Her only human possession is her friend Clara Strang, who "tucks her in bed like a mother, who combs her hair, ties her shoe laces . . . and is her sole means of survival." However, there is a drastic modernisation of the neglected hospital about the same time that atomic warfare breaks out and the world is "numb with fear." Vera is finally made to "speak the language of humanity."

It is an inarticulate grunting.