The return of the 'now'

[Roger Horrocks, legendary chronicler and contributor to New Zealand culture and author of the  neglected psychogeographic masterpiece Auckland Regional Transit Poetry Line, which records his adventures on this city's buses in the early 1980s, has let me publish the text of a talk he gave last Thursday night at the launch of Murray Edmond's book Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing.]

The thing I want to get across is that this is a unique book, an extraordinary book – not only because it’s beautifully produced but because it holds the essence of a lifetime of thinking about poetry, theatre, cultural politics, and the situation of living in New Zealand.

I’m overjoyed that such a collection can still be written and published in this country – it stands in utter contrast to today’s verbal fast-food, the “over-hasty volumes [of] blurb and guff” (to borrow one of Murray’s phrases), would-be best-sellers ghost-written by the invisible hand of the market.   

Murray’s Big Black Book is the real deal, an essential guide to our past, present and future. The title, a phrase from Janet Frame, covers that whole kit and caboodle - “Then it was Now Again” – echoing the time-travel in the title of Murray’s doctoral thesis, “To my Old Comrades of the Future.” Revolutions of the past look expectantly to new revolutions tomorrow. 

There are over 40 years documented in this collection. Today we have an urgent need for good critical history. I was talking the other night with a former colleague who observed that students are displaying an ever-shrinking sense of history. Technology is moving so fast that five years is now a distant horizon for them. So there’s relevance in launching this book in a pub dedicated to an Elizabethan poet and theatre man.

Murray is always interested in the big picture, though he also makes lovely detailed readings of particular texts. And if I seem to be making this book sound too serious and earnest, I should add that it is a hugely entertaining read. He describes the writer’s role as “a wrestling match with his own culture and the language it has debased.” For that kind of wrestling, Murray is a Superstar and he grapples with many flabby or pretentious forms of culture.  For example, he says of mainstream theatre: “Groups need good audiences to survive, but NZ theatres are invariably choked with the stuffy and the stuffed who cannot be shocked or overjoyed, who cannot laugh, and who love it all, [who] thank Christ they are here, safe in furs, and not out there threatened on the street.”

Of a would-be avant-gardist he writes: “I must point out…that all this postmodern posturing is just the shadow of a new orthodoxy and it is there to mask and hide the fact that the language is quite lifeless.” (Language is always one of Murray’s touchstones.) And of a reviewer in NZ Books: “Her demonstration of a lack of basic literary general knowledge, her inability to read tone, and her inattention to form and measure…-[these things are] trumpeted by her review, they are badges she wears with pride.” Such takedowns are only a warmup for when Murray gets in the ring with more vicious opponents such as Rogernomics.

In covering 40 years of NZ cultural history he identifies various bursts of “revolution” which were then tamed and domesticated by the establishment. Equilibrium was regained, establishing a new “staid parade” (so that “Now” became “Then”). But “now” can surge back up in a new form. Murray traces its ups and downs as a canny historian who is always looking for new energies but at the same time understands the complexities, ironies and naive “Romantic streak” that are a part of any revolution. In the Big Smoke days of the ’70s, for example, he notes: “There were elements of the messianic, the insane, the magical and irrational in the poetics of the period” – he is completely clear-sighted about that, but in poetry and theatre he still deeply respects the search for “Paradise,” “utopia,” or “revolution as carnival.”  Murray is a brilliant critic, rare in our culture, who has never lost his appetite for openness, for experiment and risk, for “making it new”. No doubt it helps that he has remained such an active creative figure, always on the front lines.  

In short, this book is history we need – it’s the tale of our tribe in its efforts to (quote) “transform a colonial society and its brutalisations into something else.”  Murray has (in the words of one essay title) managed to catch “the terror and the pity,” the humour and surprises of it. In my opinion this is not merely an excellent book but an essential book that every serious New Zealander must buy – and start wrestling with.  

-Dr Roger Horrocks