CRITICAL ATTITUDE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 5, 14 March 1947, Page 6

CRITICAL ATTITUDE

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

“We tend, I think, to regard ourselves as helpless victims in cultural matters, of our colonial origin, and our relatively isolated situation,” said Mr Allan Curnow in a lecture on New Zealand literature to South Island post-primary school teachers when attending a refresher cource in English at the Training College.

“This leads to two extremes of falsity in our critical attitudes,” he said. “Either everything written here is condemned at the start, or else everything is forgiven and exempted from the normal rigours of literary criticism. On the one hand, a general contempt or mistrust of our own writers may blind us to real merit in its rare occurrences. On the other hand, indulgence and tolerance have often led to the publicising and encouraging of the flimsiest and most miserable productions.” No Longer a Pioneer The New Zealand writer was no longer today, like the pioneer New Zealand writer, simply “an Englishman in a special situation.’ “Through the greater part of New Zealand’s first century,” he said, “by some Gresham’s Law of literature, bad writing tended to drive out good. By diluting our standards of the encouragement of what was felt to be a native art, we lost fruitful contact with our great sources in English and European literature. “Perhaps we should praise our early writers for doing so much, not blame them for doing so little. Great writing, great art of any kind, seldom springs immediately from the great experience or the unusual situation. New Zealand’s pioneer experience has only in the last 20 or 30 years begun to find expression in prose and poetry of intrinsic merit. It penetrates subtly the strangely stilled world of Katherine Mansfield —strangely near to us, yet strangely remote, as she is.” Contrast To Idiom Katherine Mansfield had succeeded in finding a method and an idiom in her stories which touched the imagination of England and Europe, he said, “because she learned to choose out of her New Zealand memories those universal elements which belong to the memory of all mankind.” He contrasted her account of a child’s journey from Wellington to Picton with other such journeys in English fiction. In the latter, “the dominant anxiety is how to deal with the people one meets—will they be helpful or dangerous, dull or interesting?” Katherine Mansfield’s “voyage” contained few people—the grandmother, the man with the rope, the man with the cart. “It is like a ritual,” he said, “in which every detail must be observed' with extreme care or else the fragile imagines of traditional living and manners will crumble and dissolve into the awful pale sky, the silent bush and fern, the indifferently slumbering sea.”