“MEN’S FUNGIBLE MEMORIES”

Abstract

Carl Shuker’s first novel The Method Actors (2005) focuses questions raised in the decline of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism during the second half of the 20th century and discusses issues significant to the larger western experience of “Generation X”, with a clear inflection of his country’s biculturalist expectations. Shuker’s personal interests and idiosyncrasies in The Method Actors extend his postcolonialist analysis towards issues of form and epistemology. This article places The Method Actors in the context of the bicultural, the postmodern and the postcolonial, exploring issues of cultural translation in particular.

Keywords:

• Gen X
• translation
• indigeneity
• cultural nationalism
• new‐colonialism

Notes

1 Maurice Shadbolt’s New Zealand Wars trilogy comprises Season of the Jew (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988); Monday’s Warriors (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), and House of Strife (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994).

2 The Lazy Boys (2006) was published jointly by Penguin (NZ) and Shoemaker & Hoard.

3 And lasted for four issues and featured During along with others in Auckland’s English department: Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, Roger Horrocks and Leigh Davis. By the time of its appearance, a de facto, untheorized literary postcolonialism had been practised as a counter‐culture for 60 years, by Marxist writers like Jean Devanny, R.A.K. Mason and Hone Tuwhare, along with others less doctrinaire (e.g. Roderick Finlayson, Noel Hilliard, Bruce Mason, Barry Mitcalfe and James K. Baxter).

4 “Historically, the one island, Deshima, and the Dutch isolation there for nigh on 250 years is reasonably well‐known, and the island is currently being excavated from the Meiji‐era land reclamation around and turned into a theme‐park of sorts. Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki prefecture (but not Nagasaki city) is a larger Dutch‐themed proper amusement park of great kitsch where Dutch gaijin can get work [ … ]. Meshima [a second, parallel island in The Method Actors] is my invention, and is in a different area of South Japan—the Seto Inland Sea, off Shikoku” (pers. comm. from Shuker to the author, 20 September 2006).

5 With some assistance from Charles Brasch and others, this mythology was established largely by Allen Curnow during the Second World War, e.g. in “Landfall in Unknown Seas”, the poem he wrote to commemorate the tercentenary of the Dutch “discovery” of New Zealand in 1642, where Abel Tasman becomes reified as the Sailor (“Death discovered the Sailor / O in a flash, in a flat calm …”) and his doomed attempt to land becomes a premonition of New Zealand’s vulnerability to the Japanese in 1942 (“Always to islanders danger / Is what comes over the sea”). The cultural nationalist identification of their “New Zealand” with the South Island was reinforced by Curnow’s reification of islands during the Second World War in Island and Time (1941) and Sailing or Drowning (1943).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Evans

Patrick Evans has taught New Zealand Literature at the University of Canterbury since 1978. His books include Janet Frame (1977), The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990) and The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand (2007).