Novelist C.K. Stead has never been afraid to tell it as he sees it. Margie Thomson invites him to cast a critical eye over the nation's psyche.
AUTHOR C.K. STEAD is both one of our most successful and most controversial cultural figures. Resented at times by those in the literary and intellectual communities who saw his opposition to "social engineering" and "political correctness" in the arts as "reactionary," Stead maintains that he has always been a liberal radical.
"All I was doing was questioning the conventional wisdom of the time. As I see it, that's a critic's duty.
"When I was young, New Zealand literature and the arts were largely ignored. One had to work to see that they got recognition and status.
"Now they have that, and the problem has changed. One has to work to resist their being selectively absorbed into the official fabric and put to use by politicians and educationists. Official art is dead art.
"The most obviously engineered ingredient at the moment is the Maori one, and that's not surprising. We have a historical problem in that Maori collectively were so damaged by the process of colonisation. We're all aware of this and want to rectify it. But the trouble is, the arts are a delicate plant and you can't prescribe how they will best develop."
Stead says a foreigner looking at material about literature and the arts that comes from official sources, including Creative New Zealand, might think we were primarily a Polynesian society; or that the only aspects of our culture worth affirming were the Maori ones. Partly, he says, this is a cheap way of buying off Maori discontent. Politicians are willing to "give them the arts, because they don't really believe the arts matter."
"You should look to literature and the arts for truthful representation — a truthful image of things as they are. You shouldn't ask the arts to take responsibility for achieving social change. As soon as you do that you create distortions. The responsibility for change lies with the politicians."
When Stead, as a young man in the 50s, made his name as a poet and short story-writer, the big cultural debate was over New Zealand nationalism. Writers and intellectuals were rebelling against our status as a British colony.
"There was a feeling of colonial inferiority," Stead explains. "New Zealand had to rebel and assert its own individual identity if it was ever going to create works of art and literature that spoke with confidence.
The poets of the 1930s and 1940s saw this, and the movement gathered momentum after the war."
He found mentors in Frank Sargeson (who broke away from conventional British middle-class prose, adopting instead a New Zealand idiom and creating the mythic "Kiwi bloke") and Allen Curnow (who was a major figure of literary nationalism).
Nationalistic rebellion was meaningful and necessary, Stead says, but now that necessity has passed.
"My position has shifted, but only because the whole of New Zealand has changed. The problems are different.
With each generation we've moved further down the track, away from that colonial identity."
Writing now is "more various. And we have a publishing industry to sustain it." The fact that there are now so many women writers and Maori writers, Stead says, is one of the most noticeable developments, and he welcomes it.
But, he adds, "I just wish they could be accepted for whatever literary merit they possess — no more and no less — rather than pampered and patronised. There's still a Listener Women's Book Festival. Why not a Listener New Zealand Book Festival? And when did you ever see a Maori writer get a bad review?"
He notes that writers don't feel bound any longer to what Curnow once called "the New Zealand thing, the regional thing, the real thing." Instead they move about the world with ease, come and go, and write about a wide range of locations.
Elizageth Knox's bestseller The Vintner's Luck, for instance, is located in 19th-century France - although, Stead observes, in her case this setting was "not so much a movement inwards to the imagination. It's something new, and it broadens the spectrum of New Zealand literature."
Stead continues to be philosophical about the future while remaining circumspect about the present.
"We are not as good at frank debate as more secure societies are. There is still a general insecurity," he says.
"We get an agreement, a consensus about where we are and what's right to say about it, and anybody who challenges that is not welcome. You don't stand up in the dinghy."
And what about the new century?
"We have our independence," Stead says. "Confidence is still slightly shaky but it's growing. The accommodation between Maori and Pakeha is progressing. Maybe now it's time to stop pretending - time to acknowledge and celebrate those British and European roots from which literature and the arts still draw so much rich sustenance."
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