An author on why she writes about ferals who do awful things and have no redeeming qualities
I’ve been writing a bunch of really awful short stories lately. I mean it. They’re absolutely ghastly. Stories about women performing abortions upon themselves, about people who pretend they are family but are vicious and towards each other and without heart. Stories of unloved children and violent small towns, of lost places and hateful, entitled communities. I’ve been working on this stuff pretty much nonstop for over two years now, adding one unpalatable tale to another, making an entire collection of difficult, dangerous and really horrible fiction. Why can’t it be more…publishable? This book of mine? Is what my agent and friends and family and a lot of magazines and journals advise me. Why can’t these stories read the mood music and be… serviceable? More mindful of the issues of the day? Relevant and pleasant and palatable and, well… - that adjective people do love to apply to fiction - readable?
For sure, placing this kind of work can be tricky. A story I ran in Landfall (and was later published in ReadingRoom) received emails and outcries about its nasty content. A lot of readers don’t think they should be confronted by stories of racist white middleclass people and actively hate that sort of thing. It’s “offensive”, this material. It runs up against the groove of received wisdoms and the cultural status quo. Which is the very reason I’m interested in making this sort of writing in the first place, I might reply. For since when did fiction have to conform to ideas of tastefulness and decorum? Or come to pass that we would redact from the written word any passages containing revolting things happening at the hand of revolting people?
All books have a life spirit, the poet John Milton wrote back in the 17th Century in a famous essay railing against the censorship and book burning that was raging across Europe at the time. We need stories of all kinds in order to stay alert in the world, he said, to be vigilant as what is good and bad in it. Books, lovely or awful, whether we agree with them or like them or not, help us live larger more interesting lives. For me it's been cheering – more than cheering - to have discussions with the literary editors of those journals who have been robust and enthusiastic about publishing these stories of mine that are awkward and sick-making and downright hideous in their attention to the works and opinions of really unpleasant people. These editors talk about about how important it is to avoid self-censorship and keep wide open the doors of conversation and dialogue when writing and reading and thinking about all manner of short stories and novels.
All these toxic themes that persist in our here and now and so-called liberal societies…Why would I not want to attend to them?
Literary engagement is one way of extending our imagination and ideas about human values and ethical boundaries; it’s a means of staying open to a great range of discussions about society and how to find a place within it. By allowing us to live, via the words on the page, all kinds of lives, led by all kinds of people, reading helps keep us mindful of the dreadful things that are going on in the world alongside all that is lovely, that we might learn of ourselves by going deep into the lives of others. Literary researcher at UCLA and Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader Come Home, associates this kind of neural engagement with “innovative thinking, critical judgement and the capacity to form insight and empathy” - and certainly I’ve found that writing awful fiction is invigorating and exciting in the way it opens up the vistas of internal debate. When I finish a horrible short story about a gang of antisocial thugs I’m not able to stop thinking about it, I’m infected by it, is how it feels. Meanings keep accruing and I can’t not reflect more…and more… upon the nature of racism, say, in a story about a group of white men targeting a new mixed race family who’ve come to town. Or consider feminism’s riveting double standards when working on a narrative based on a well-educated writer who has a murderous, exhilarating secret life. Or go back to worry again at the patriarchal values still embedded in contemporary masculine myths in a story about a father and son and a way of life that has damaged both and become undone.
All these toxic themes that persist in our here and now and so-called liberal societies…Why would I not want to attend to them? A story about a shy girl and her vicious white cousins or a dangerous dog being taunted by boys on the street provides a means to go rummaging around in the dark recesses of our communities and belief systems and look closely at what is contained within them. Ugly stories don’t tell me what to think. They’re there to help me think for myself.
On the whole, though, readers prefer not to be too troubled by fiction. “Could there be more champagne and roses, please” even my sister, an artist and so not someone given to much in the way of groupthink, said to me recently about my new collection, referring to a story in that book containing both. She and my agent and many others are keen as anything that there be loads more pleasantness of this kind. Since my first novel was published, and the US movie company who first wanted to buy the rights to it back then provided I give the story a happy ending made clear, I’ve been aware that my work is not as marketable as it could have been. That it should have been more outward facing, perhaps. More cheery, even. That it might have about it “less of the dark” as my sister described it. And then, just last week, her adding: “Less of that gothic New Zealand thing you do…”
“Could there be more champagne and roses, please” even my sister, an artist and so not someone given to much in the way of groupthink, said to me
Well, there’s a remark that got me thinking. For though I have long known why I’m interested in the kind of fiction that jumps out and causes discomfort, and have also, since I started writing, been sure that I wanted to forge the sort of prose that doesn’t lie flat but wants to spring around and won’t settle, it’s also true that I’ve always been aware that if I’d wanted to run with the pack I should no doubt have been more mainstream in my use of cultural references and tropes. “Writing Global”, is what some publishers call it, meaning that the work can be understood in all languages, all territories, that it’s easy traveling. If I’d wanted to be safe, I would have either explained it fully or stayed out of the New Zealand bush entirely, say, kept well distant from the mysteries and unknown qualities of my imagined and remembered New Zealand past. I might have adjusted my use of its energies and temperatures and translated them into an English kind of fiction, come fully into the European northern hemispherical light. And from the very start of my writing career I could have done that. I might have. At times I even seemed to do so. And yet. And yet. That “New Zealand thing I do” is what I do – and what I've always done. And, yes, I get it. I do. I can see now how it’s kind of feral, this fiction of mine. Not quite one thing nor the other. How it doesn’t sit pretty with current mores and systems; how it doesn’t educate or elucidate or tell and won’t settle at all within the domestic spaces and safe political arrangements of so much contemporary fiction.
And I can’t tame it. This irrepressible, unpredictable strain that runs through all my work…It continues to draw me on. It’s a river. It’s a lake. It’s a dark sea. And whether a story is set in a London house or in a South Island sheep station, that dark New Zealand thing I do is everywhere.
In Katherine Mansfield’s incomparable long short story “At the Bay” a great unlit, unnamed stretch of New Zealand sits at the edge of an English-seeming narrative set by the beach on a long summer’s day. “Very early morning… The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered”, Mansfield writes at the beginning of a story that just “unfolds“ as she put it, as though it’s no story at all but is simply following the events of a day as it moves from morning to night. Children play in the sand, adults chat together at the water’s edge. Nothing much seems to happen there, beneath the heat and beat of the summer sun, and yet a sense of menace, scattered moments of fear, of terror, even, interrupt and shadow the brightness of the day. “And from the bush came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly…and something else – what was it?” as Mansfield writes. In a letter to the painter Dorothy Brett, she had talked about a fiction “full of sand and seaweed and bathing dresses hanging over verandahs…and the tide coming in” and of the sound of the sea. How she wanted to bring all this into a story along with something else, a quality of feeling “possessed” as she put it in another letter, how these things “would not lie down.” That quality Mansfield admits into her work of letting something…out, somehow. A jack in the box of an idea that must spring from its lock and leap forwards to shock and disturb the equilibrium of the prose…This characteristic is part of her terrible, wonderful originality. It’s the writer showing the world that “island” of hers, as she wrote in another letter to the same painter - releasing its energy and unknown and inexpressible excitements as though an entire country had been lifted, dark and dripping out of the sea. The idea that these things come out of what she called her “secret self” “must be there”, as she wrote, in the narrative, no matter what… How I love her brave sense of risk in letting these parts of her story be part of it, too. That New Zealand thing she does, over and over throughout her work, letting the shadows show, the shiver in the air be felt even on the brightest day… I love that in her fiction.
I want narrative that strays into the shadowy places and can’t be tamed; I want it to live, and live and live
And so, for my part, perhaps I have finally come to understand - learning as I continue to learn from Mansfield’s mastery of the form - that it might well be my own wild streak of New Zealandness that is running strong and unmanageably through this pretty ugly collection of short stories I’ve been working on. A fiction made out of the shut away, the private and raw, like an untouched landscape that sits deep in the heart of a narrative that seems to be about something else… Perhaps, I wonder now, that this is the energy that has been charging the words I’ve set down on the page. Just as the bush edges the English looking park where an extended family have gathered for a picnic in my story “Transgression”, it’s there: A danger. A something that shouldn’t be there, awful, that is unchecked and unknown. Or in “Mirror, Mirror” it’s present: a dress that hangs on a rack and could go anywhere, anywhere. And in “Poor Beasts” or “The Round Pool” it rises up again, in a different guise, perhaps, but vivid, particular: A writing come out of a place that isn’t an Aotearoa or a New Zealand of today, or a country of history texts or guidebooks but is mine, all mine, made up of imagination and memory, thoughts, images, pulled together out of my past and worked and fashioned into this particular kind of fiction that can’t easily be packaged up into “content” and then “consumed” – as, I've noticed, to my dismay, literature is now so often described - wrapped up into being part of the entertainment industry, fast food and drink and movies.
And how I want to keep on writing it, too, this wild, jumped up stuff that is not “in tune” with today’s priorities and agendas, that doesn't play to the mood music and in fact won’t play nicely at all but only snarls and bites and horrifies. In the end I want narrative that strays into the shadowy places and can’t be tamed; I want it to live, and live and live. “That gothic New Zealand thing I do”? It comes straight out of being born and brought up in New Zealand and reading New Zealand short stories and novels and books. It comes from hearing about New Zealand in New Zealand voices and from listening to New Zealand songs and poems and being surrounded by New Zealand colours and smells and tastes and textures; it comes from the things I’ve seen and am familiar with and from the things that are strange to me and unknown and terrifying and energising. And how I am interested - oh, I’m interested alright - in the fact that this particular New Zealand of mine, with its wild places, its recesses and ravines and gullies and great expanses of land and light and water and miles of uncut forest and bush, should continue to power a story about a woman who lives in London and starts buying guns.
How could I not be? The stories are made up but they come at me from all sides, surrounding me and threatening and exciting me and they are real.
