Facing south with Andrew Dean
Dean has returned to New Zealand to launch his first book, Roger, Ruth and Me, which promises to examine the impact of the neo-liberal 'reforms' of the 1980s and '90s on a generation of young Kiwis.
I thought it was about time that I excavated and digitised an interview I did with Andrew in 2012, when I was guest editing an issue of the literary journal brief. I'd given my issue of brief the theme of Oceania, and I wanted to see how Andrew, as a son of the south, would respond to a word so often associated with lagoons and palm trees. The interview appeared in brief alongside Andrew's essay 'The Seeing Men: Paul Theroux and William Pember Reeves'.]
SH: You’re probably best known as the main contributor to keaandcattle, a Canterbury-based blog that features original literary work as well as some interesting analyses of New Zealand culture, but recently you’ve also distinguished yourself academically, by winning a Rhodes Scholarship and a major American scholarship on the strength of your researches into Kiwi literary history. How easy is it to reconcile academic work with blogging?
AD: At the moment, unfortunately, the scales are tipped in one direction – I last updated keaandcattle a month ago. Recently I’ve been holed up editing papers and working as a Business Analyst for the Digital Humanities project, UC CEISMIC (www.ceismic.org.nz), which is the digital earthquake archive at the University of Canterbury.
I find it hard to write well on literary and political topics when I’m not involved in direct research. It’s out of close reading that I find the material for blogging. Yet blogging does have a special place for me: it’s engaged with a community, in a way that sitting in my office carefully unmixing my metaphors just isn’t. If research is at home in the office, blogging is at home in the pub: research and blogging, for me anyway, are part of the same academic and literary ecosystem.
It’s more than that, though. Academics in the humanities have a duty to be public intellectuals. We’ve been asleep at the wheel, I think, for a long time, while the society we thought we were responsible to has been dismantled around us. Publicly discussing history, literature and history – speaking back to Mark Sainsbury, in other words - admits at least one dark, fusty corner where considered analysis is still possible, where the possibility of change is still considered.
SH: You’ve written often from a distinctly South Island perspective, expressing an affinity for southern landscapes and for the work of southern writers like Charles Brasch. In one particularly interesting blog post you described holing up in a high country hut and reading through a pile of early issues of Landfall. Do you identify as a regionalist writer, and for that matter reader? Kendrick Smithyman once said that, for him, the South Island was a “foreign country”. Do you feel that way about the north?
AD: You’re using your (north-of-the-bombays) imagination – I couldn’t carry all those Landfalls up to a country hut! I’d break my (already fragile) shoulders!
To answer your question, I definitely identify as a southern reader. How can I not? When I was a child I never read New Zealand literature, and I was worse off for it: I didn’t have the literature bowling into a nor’wester at the close of play; I didn’t have the language to describe the oncoming front in July. What I was lacking was a literature of loneliness and isolation – the South Island Myth, in other words, however problematic its ideological operations.
As a writer – well that’s very much a work-in-progress. Inevitably, I am influenced by what I’ve been reading – everything from Pynchon to Curnow, Carver to Frame. Now all I’ve got to do is learn to write. And as for the North Island? It has a lot to answer for. People up that way eat in cafes rather than tearooms. I find it hard to orientate myself up there. Where are the mountains, which normally stare down at you from the end of the main road? Where are the soggy out-of-season asparagus rolls? It’s a different place alright, and I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable up there.
SH: How does the notion of the Pacific, or Oceania, look from the south of New Zealand? Can an alternative version of the notion perhaps found in a place like Christchurch, which has historic connections, through sea and air ports, with Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands? Do southern writers like Graham Billing advance a different understanding of the Pacific, when they describe the sub-Antarctic seas, and visits to Antarctica?
AD: How does it look? We don’t look north from here. That’s why our cities are built facing south. I mean how else can you explain Invercargill? Our understanding of the Pacific is very different. I remember reading a truly bizarre narrative by John Caselberg, which won the Landfall prose prize, in which he followed a water molecule from creation into eternity. The water headed south, into the wind and cold; it was swallowed by a skua; it turned into ice. It’s this constant troping of the environment as inimical to human habitation that marks southern literature, and, inevitably, that marks southern representations of the Pacific.
Of course, this aesthetic is deeply political. Heading south entails heading away from human habitation. Moving away from the Pacific, in which Pakeha are implicated in the history of colonialism, allows us to fantasize about a great southern terra nullius where these problems seemingly evaporate. If the South Island won’t do (those pesky Ngai Tahu keep getting in the way), then look at Antarctica instead, where the only indigenes are penguins.
The anxieties of settlement are pervasive in the south, and our literary energies are displaced upon the landscape – Allen Curnow, no less, commented upon the ‘Awareness of what great gloom / Stands in a land of settlers / With never a soul at home.’ The northern Pacific, in the end, doesn’t get much of a look in as we busily produce our myths about the south.
SH: You’re off to Oxford later this year, to take up your Rhodes scholarship. What lines of research do you hope to pursue there? Do you feel an affinity with some of the Rhodes scholars of the past, like the group of young men whose fateful lives were described in James McNeish’s Dance of the Peacocks?
AD: At Oxford I have applied to undertake an M. St. in English (1900-present), which is a one year taught masters. This is a preparation course for the D. Phil., which I intend to undertake immediately upon completing the M. St. I plan to focus upon the life-writing of women writers, such as Janet Frame, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. My interest is in the way that writers with such a high autobiographical quotient to their fiction work through experience; I’m not an essentialist seeking to locate the ‘skeleton in the oedipal closet’, rather I want to find sensitive ways to read and write about writing subjectivities.
I actually read Dance of the Peacocks when I was preparing to fly to Wellington for the Rhodes interview. Jim Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin and Ian Milner went over Rhodes Scholars, while Charles Brasch and John Mulgan went over separately. They were all very influential in New Zealand letters. They are an inspiration. In getting such an incredible opportunity I feel that I have a responsibility, not only to New Zealand but those who have gone before and who, with the exception of Milner, achieved so much of value, and who, again with the exception of Milner, showed such integrity.
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
12 Comments:
re anzac day http://100yearsoftrenches.blogspot.co.nz/p/blog-page.html
'I tried passing my English Literature O-Level based only on seeing the films of the set books. But alas my unorthodox interpretations were not deemed adequate.'
I have that 'Dance of Peacocks' I started reading it. It was good but somehow I was diverted onto something else. I think I picked it up from an op shop. Amazing how sometimes things like that turn up for a dollar or so...
I've been busy so out of all this. Will get back. Keep up the road project etc
I recall this interview. Why was Milner and exception? I recall his name on some text book that was around in the old days...
'I tried passing my English Literature O-Level based only on seeing the films of the set books. But alas my unorthodox interpretations were not deemed adequate.'
Yes, in general it is advisable to read the texts but it is amazing how many great and interesting novels or their issues have been put into film. Joyce himself tried, early on, to start a movie theatre and a movie business in Dublin I think it was, and there is a definite interconnection between the phenomena of film and movies. I wonder if Roger Horrock's new book (a kind of poetic musing called 'The Ghost in the Machine' ) will reflect his interests in art, film, and literature (and clearly philosophy)? He should put the publish date up on FB when it is near the launch.
'Yes, in general it is advisable to read the texts'
WHY????
'Why was Milner and exception?'
I think AD objected to him spying for the Soviets, because that activity involved various breaches of trust.
On the plus side, though, he translated Miroslav Holub...
http://www.kiwispies.com/
That's interesting. I looked at my copy of Penguin Modern European Poets 'Miroslav Holub, Selected Poems' and inside & on the title page I see it was translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner. Alvarez was the general editor.
But I don't think I ever read more than a few poems in it, if any. He ws Czech, so Milner must have known that language and Russian. How the hell can people learn all those languages. I think you share my almost total ignorance of most languages so you know how hard it is to get a good translation of these poets. I cant find any D'Annunzio, and I would like to read better translations of Leopardi, whose journal has been translated - it is vast and considered a great work alone, and I've seen a copy in our library, but it's about 2000 pages long! -
I have a number of those Penguin MEPs but have only read a few of them - Rilke, Transtromer (I think I only have Trakl - my favourite, I cant read Celan much, I don't get much from Celan except his Todenfuge etc and few of his short enigmas!) in those Penguins where there is a prose translation under the German but he is the kind of poet that suits that I think) and more recently Montale. It took me a long time to 'get' Montale. But I also like Ungaretti and D'Annunzio).
Milner, a spy eh, none of that seems to matter now really, but it is interesting. I heard somewhere that Brasch and a chap who was to become one of the first directors of something of the CIA were friends and the to be CIA chap was very cultured and keen on literature.
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تهتم شركة قمم التميز باعمال وخدمات التنظيف فى اى مكان فى تنظيف الشقق – البيوت – شركة تنظيف منازل بالجبيل
– المصانع واى مكان يحتاج الى اعمال التنظيف من اجل ان تساعد فى الوصول الى افضل ما تجدة من نتائج مميزة
تنظيف يحتاج للاشياء معقدة من الادوات ، مثل الغرف المنزل لها ادوات التنظيف الخاصة، الصالون المدهب يحتاج لمنظف الخاص ، وسطح فى المنزل يتطلب مواد متخلفة ، فكثير من المنظفات المطلوبة حتى تكون عملية التنظيف سهلة ومن المنظفات : مبيض التواليت ، منظف الحمام، المطهرات ، المنظف للنوافذ والارضيات والغسيل ، سائل الغسيل و اعمال المنزل الصغيرة يمكن انجازاها بفوطة جافة ومنظف جيد ، المنظف المصنوع بقل الامكنيات ، معلقتين من الخل الابيض مع لتر من الماء الساخن وضعهم فى بخاخة . بيكربونات الصوديم لتنظيف البلاط يمكن مزج ثلاثه اجزاء من الماء الساخن مع جزء من الصودا لتنطيف الفرن والثلاجة ، وبيكربونات الصوديم بقليل من سائل الجلى يتكون معجون سميك صالح لتنظيف الحمام ، يمكن استخدام بيكربونات الصوديم وضعه فى صحن صغير ولطرد الروائح الكريهة من الثلاجة ، كربونات الصوديم فعالة فى ازالة البقع الدهنية لانها قلوية ويجب لبس قفازات لاستخدامها .
شركة تنظيف بيارات بالقطيف
الخل الابيض وعصير الليمون يمكن تنظيف السطوح الزجاجية والخشبية المصقولة ، ويمكن استخدام الخل الابيض والليمون للتخلص من الروائح الكريهة والتعطير .
عند التنظيف يجب لبس القفازات لحماية الايدى من المواد المنظفه ، ويمكن لبس الفقازات عند غسيل الصحون وتكون مخصص لعمل فى المطبخ .
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والمنزل النظيفة من غير فوضوى أجمل بكثير وافضل ،وإذا توفر جميع الادوات النظافة داخل بيت تكون عمليه النظافة سهلة ،
للتنظيف المنزل من اعلى الى اسفل ، اى تنظيف الغبار من اعلى الى اسفل ويمكن استخدام الاجهزة الكهربائية فى عملية التنظيف . شركة نقل اثاث بالجبيل
تنظيف النوافذ باستخدام قطعة قطنية فى مسح الزجاج وللتجفيف بورقة من الجرائد ، وتنظيف الاسطح الزجاجية للمنضدة باستعمال عصير ليمون ودعكها ثم تجفيفها بفوطة ورقية. ويمكن استعمال معجون الاسنان فى ازالة الخدوش الصغيرة من الزجاج .
لتنظيف الاثاث استعمال منظف على قليل من نشادر ، عدم وضع الاثاث فى أشعه الشمس فالشمس تجفف الأثاث ، للتخلص من الحلقات التى تكون على المنضدة بقليل من المنظف مع النشادر ثم مسحها بفوطة جافة ثم تلميعها بالملمع .
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