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“I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence will come my aid!” or, Pakeha and the condition of modernity

11 November 2007

Byline:	Dr Mike Grimshaw (Religious Studies, University of Canterbury)
Source:	Humanities Research Network

A paper given at Transformations '07: Composing the nation: ideas, peoples, histories, languages, cultures, economies, the Congress of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities (VUW, Wellington, 27-28 August 2007).

We could be forgiven for thinking we live in an age of 100% nationalist purity, a volk-geist of the salvific hills promoted by Tourism NZ and the government via the work of M&C Saatchi. Yet is a pure New Zealand - and by implication a pure New Zealander - necessarily something we should be striving toward? As was recently reported in the Christchurch Press, according to the 2006 census, at 11% the third largest ethnic group in New Zealand is New Zealander, comprised primarily of South Island (or Taranaki) middleaged, wealthy, non-urban males.(1) In the words of the Press: 'Ethnic Kiwi most likely a SI Bloke.'

Reading out of the work of D'Arcy Cresswell, from a position engaged in the current continental debates on religion, I want to institute a counter-narrative taking its starting point from the challenge laid down in the post-foundational thought of Gianni Vattimo. For Vattimo, the death of God signals the birth of hermeneutics, for a post-foundationalist world enacts what he terms the age of interpretation. Arising in response to Nietzsche's aphorism 'there are no facts, only interpretations, and of course this too is only an interpretation!'(2), the age of interpretation is qualified as an age of 'not neutral but engaged knowledge because it is not placed at an ideal place that would claim to be external to the process.'(3) That is, hermeneutics is the expression of knowledge that is necessarily provisional and contested, because the hermeneutic event is not an objective event that we respond to by thought, but rather a transformative event that transforms our existence.(4)

Pakeha, as a condition of modernity, is an act of hermeneutics, a form of participant knowledge that by its very self-expression is a type of engaged knowledge. Claiming to be Pakeha is an act of self- interpretation that transforms the interpreter, for it is giving up the foundational, essentialist claim of New Zealander by engaging in an interpretative strategy similar to Winquist's positioning of postmodern theology whereby Pakeha, as an interpretative strategy 'has had to rethink its warrant without authority from outside its own productive formulation'. Pakeha, as an interpretative strategy is therefore, like theology, 'a textual production that is always in the middle of existing discourses' that, because it is anti-foundational is a claim without special privilege.'(5) Pakeha is thus a self-interpretative claim against any claims for either a collective, foundational New Zealand identity or an essentialist European New Zealander identity. However, it also seeks to disestablish foundationalist or essentialist claims that Pakeha is either primarily an expression of birthright or skin-colour. Borrowing from the work of Derrida and Vattimo in Religion(6), in which they coined the expression 'religionless religion', I wish to argue for the deconstructive positioning of what can be termed, Pakehaless Pakeha. Just as religionless religion is an act of interpretation, the slippage between what religion is and yet what religion could or should be, what I term as Pakehaless Pakeha is the interpretative slippage between what Pakeha is- the essentialist and foundational claims - and what Pakeha could or should be. For me, reading out of Vattimo, Pakehaless Pakeha is an expression of the interpretative frame of weak thought, the claim that being is an event that reveals itself through weakening.(7)

What follows is the beginning of the discussion of the origin of the weak thought of the Pakehaless Pakeha as a condition of modernity; a deconstructive reading making, as Winquist notes, 'all existing texts unsafe'(8). Just as Winquist asks whether perhaps Derrida's religion without religion is accompanied by 'a theology without theology'(9), that is 'a theology of god who is not being God'(10) (god who is not being foundational), then by implication, is the hermeneutic of the Pakehaless Pakeha the hermeneutic of Pakeha who are not being Pakeha?

Let us consider what happens if we interpret the poet and critic D'Arcy Cresswell as a Pakehaless Pakeha. Cresswell, as one always ready to mythologize time and place (and in this a particular influence on 'the South Island school') in a letter of 1923 makes a claim of personal distinction:
I am a New Zealander. I endeavour to say it simply, with no challenging idealism. I believe I am the first New Zealander. Someone has to be, and of course the last shall be first.(11)

This puts Cresswell's famous statement on the poet Ursula Bethell into context. Bethell's importance in discovering New Zealand whereby 'almost everyone had been blind before'(12) is recognized by Cresswell because, as 'first New Zealander', he embodies the New Zealand she sees: a New Zealand, and New Zealander, glimpsed from the suburban garden. Cresswell the first New Zealander is a new type; that is the New Zealander born here who feels located yet dislocated; a particular type of indigeneity that will come to be expressed as Pakeha.

This indigeneity is different from those in the present day who choose to call themselves 'New Zealander'. For Cresswell's indigeneity was a critical one, perhaps a type of cosmopolitan identity that looked both here and abroad for meaning, because Cresswell is torn between the land he was born into and the culture he is separated from. The struggle to reconcile the two was, and still is, a major component of Pakeha identity. It is expressed in James Traue's Ancestors of the mind:a pakeha whakapapa(13) whereby the indigenous Pakeha is also connected to a European cultural legacy that struggles to properly locate and acquaint itself here. Something similar happens in another manifesto of Pakeha indigeneity, Charles Brasch's 'Notes' for the first issue of Landfall. For Pakeha, being a condition of modernity, is accompanied by those expressions of modernity that are angst, doubt, the struggle of the enlightenment and rationality, the search for meaning and location that requires the engagement with the past and yet recognises the need for a new expression and identity in the new context. In short, being Pakeha, as a condition of modernity struggles with the collapse of foundational claims and experiences and seeks in turn to express a new, interpretative non-foundational identity arising out of self-reflexivity. For example, Cresswell, arriving by ferry off the Lyttleton heads of Banks Peninsula at daylight, in seeing the Southern Alps 'arrayed in that ancient light which the Titans took from Jove' is both delighted and confounded. On the one hand he gazes 'with awe and delight' and yet, there is the qualifier of 'but my heart inquired, 'what country is this?'(14) Just prior to this declaration, Cresswell refers to 'England, my spirit's true parent on earth'(15) and so sets up a tension between spirit and body later echoed by Curnow as the tension of inhabitation and locatedness. In his manifesto of Pakeha identity otherwise known as the introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse Curnow refers to the Pakeha modernist poetical task as 'a conflict of the exiled spirit'(16) arising out of the awareness of 'the tension between the New Zealander and the land his body inherits but his spirit has not yet won'(17).

Cresswell and Curnow are important because, as a condition of modernity, Pakeha is a tension of non-foundational, hermeneutical indigeneity recognizing that 'this here' is not all that makes one who one is. In this way we can argue for a specific attitude and 'being as event' that is the self-reflexive, modern turn of being Pakehaless Pakeha. The tension is one of what, in old religious grammar, was termed body and spirit; a tension perhaps better expressed as one of locatedness and dislocation. Just as Cresswell extends classical mythology to the South Island, separating it off from Tikanga Maori, so do later Pakeha of the South Island myth express Pakeha as inhabitants of an empty land that needs to be articulated through cultural myths of classical and biblical language. In so interpreting location and dislocation, the tension of past and present context, the action of the Pakehaless Pakeha is making a particular non-foundational statement. For such interpretations seek (perhaps more so implicitly than explicitly) to recognize a new type of indigeneity - while also recognizing the indigeneity of the Tangata Whenua. For to appropriate Maori myths of origin as now applicable to non-Maori is a form of domestication and assimilation that too often makes them 'New Zealand'; that is, a New Zealand recognised as constituted and expressed by the wishes and interests of the majority European culture. Such appropriation turns culture and mythology into acts of cultural phrasing that subsume the minority into the new collective of (European-organised) 'New Zealand', in doing so asserting a new collective volkgeist with a Tangata Whenua branding (in short 100% Pure NZ). The challenge expressed by D'Arcy Cresswell is the challenge of a new, more recent indigeneity that recognises its transferred and shallow roots in this new land, and yet also recognises that being born here does create a sense of belonging; but a sense of belonging continuously in tension with another, older culture and identity. The reason the modernist challenge of Pakeha as Pakehaless Pakeha develops down in the South Island because the new indigeneity is articulated in what appears an empty land. Cresswell's mythmaking articulates a terra nullis history, a history of a colder and therefore 'barely inhabited' South Island which in turn means that settlement here has a different basis, not involving a struggle whereby Europeans 'wrested the North Island' from Maori(18).

The result is the notion of a providential, empty Southern Island requiring its own indigenous mythology supplied by Pakeha: the notion of a new southern indigeneity existing alongside the North Island Maori indigeneity. If the North Island is contested and bears the recent scars of intercultural struggle, then the South Island is the land where a new, modern, struggle occurs. If the North Island is a land of struggle with indigenous inhabitants, then the South Island 'where there was never before to my knowledge, so large and so fair a land to be had for the taking'(19) is where a new struggle with nature occurs. In its emptiness, a land without history or landmarks needs to be created anew. The masculinity of 'taking a large and fair' land waiting without rival suitors needs also to be read back through the biblical tradition of a Promised Land, in this case, without Canaanites (or Maori). Creswell later makes explicit this mythology of the South Island biblical wilderness. Visiting his friend Cotsford Burdon at Mt Potts Station near Mt Summers in the Mid Canterbury foothills, Cresswell expresses the mythology of the pure interior, imaging 'David and his six hundred hiding from Saul and the Philistines of the plains.' The Canterbury plains, its provincial towns and cities are a 'Dead Sea of Bad business' and the location of a 'little Sodom of suburban shortcomings by the coast.'(20) Yet while Cresswell may use biblical language, seeing the South Island interior as a type of biblical refuge for the chosen outsider, it must also be remembered that he was a professed pagan.

Cresswell's paganism is crucial for understanding the Pakeha identity, for its willingness to use biblical language and imagery does not signal an adherence to Christian faith or belief. In this it is post-foundational. What it does signal is that which is later expressed by James Traue in his pakeha whakapapa; the cultural legacy of Europe, relocated in exile, which becomes the cultural standing point of Pakeha as hermeneutics. Cresswell is free to import European cultural heritage into the South Island because, for him, there is no competing whakapapa, no competing mythology, no competing culture down here. This perceived absence, and of course it was only ever a perception out of often deliberate blindness, paradoxically allows the space for a distinctly Pakeha indigeniety to develop that is not Christian, but rather post-Christian and pagan. It is, in the worlds of Jason Stanley, what can be termed, for Pakeha, as 'Landscape paganism'(21); a paganism of that is aesthetic and arises as much out of a way of seeing and interpreting rather than out of environmentalism or animism.

The Pakeha as mythologized by Cresswell, and as followed by other Pakeha mythologists, rejects what is described as variously 'the appalling materialistic standard of life - [whereby] - the one crime is not to get on an make money'(22) or an urban society of 'a fast, uncultured sort'(23). The tension Cresswell expresses is that the truth of the modern world for New Zealand is either to be found overseas in the ancient European culture or to be found in the land. In turn, the rejection of materialistic New Zealand urban society is a founding part of the South Island myth and sits at the centre of the Pakeha identity, an uneasy tension now most expressed in suburbia.

This tension occurs in Cresswell as he comes to perceive the reality of his native land, separate from any romantic perceptions. In the late 1920s he could write confidently concerning the restorative nature of New Zealand upon his health, with 'the traditions, customs and scenery of my native land' acting as the foundation of his poetry. Yet by 1932 a change had occurred; nature has become the focus for meaning while 'colonial humanity and its aspirations' has been found to be 'shallow, hostile and fruitless.' Of course, on the one hand this turn to nature as the essentialist, restorative force for 'the first New Zealander' is yet another expression of the Romanticist legacy. Yet it can also be seen as a type of post-colonial statement, in claiming an indigeneity separate from those who still exist as 'colonial humanity'. For to exist in an orientation separate from the suburban colonial society is to claim an identity that seeks a reference into what is not colonial. The indigeneity of course cannot pre-date the colonial period, but can rather exist as counter-narrative to it; an indigeneity of repudiation that no longer sees itself created or constrained by colonial realities. This indigeneity as post-colonial modern expresses itself in that at most central of modernist tropes, the exile. What makes the modernist exile in the South Island so fascinating is that it is not so much an exile as New Zealander from the world centres in the Northern Hemisphere, rather it is an exile within the continuing colonial realities that seeks a re-location as indigeneity within the empty southern land. This means that the role of the newly indigenous is to create meaning in what Charles Brasch termed 'The Silent Land', a society where:
"The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning, / the unproved heart still seeks a vein of speech'"(24)

Of course for the colonial, the plains are not nameless (they are the Canterbury plains) and the cities, by their existence, are a statement of meaning in themselves while 'the vein of speech' is speaking as a New Zealander. Yet the newly emergent modern indigeneity of Pakeha can accept all this but still find themselves in exile precisely because of it: because they are no longer colonial. Here the distinction between 'New Zealander' and 'Pakeha' needs to be noted because it is too easy to conflate the two. For example, Lydia Wevers has recently stated,' Pakeha', with its connotations of a chosen indigeneity, is the hegemonic term of 'New Zealander''.(25) Such a reductionist approach actually fails to stand up, either historically or in contemporary culture. Historically, Pakeha is the identity that can be attached to a particular type of expression of being a New Zealander, but of being a type of New Zealander that transcends being a European New Zealander. Conversely, in contemporary usage, Pakeha is only really used as a hegemonic term by those seeking to implement a particular type of bi-cultural agenda that takes all European New Zealanders as a collective identity that can be reappropriated under the emergence of bicultural treaty language over the past twenty years. In effect, tying Pakeha to a hegemonic New Zealand identity is to continue the colonial context into the present day. It is also to deny the central importance of regionalism as discussed by Gregory O'Brien at the same conference that Wevers made her statement.

O'Brien's nuanced assessment seeks a way out of nationalist assumptions, agenda and labels and proposes the case of "misrepresented regionalists."(26) Re-reading the New Zealand Pakeha quest for identity through a European lens O'Brien positions regionalism as "more a recognition of divergence and chaos, dialects and difference' over and against nationalism's "call to order."(27) I wish to extend and rework O'Brien's regionalism and state that what has been perceived, and latterly more often dismissed as the South Island Myth was in actual practice a particular experience of South Island, East Coast regionalism that became instituted as the basis for a de-facto Pakeha nationalism. This regionalism begins with the first Pakeha regionalist of the East Coast, D'Arcy Cresswell, as the first modern precisely because he situates himself as anti-modern. That is, Cresswell locates himself as against the particular 'just now' of the late colonial society in a manner that partakes of a specific regionalism over and against the local expressions of an emergent nationalism. In 1960 Charles Brash describes Cresswell in terms that can be seen to locate him as antimodern; that is as antimodern in defiance of the emergent modern New Zealand. Cresswell, according Brasch was what could be termed, in both cultural and sexual terms, the inverse New Zealander, an "eloquent contradiction of everything New Zealand then put its faith in, the New Zealander in reverse."(28) Cresswell was therefore the antimodern modern, the regionalist anti-nationalist, the one who positions a new identity that creates a new, regional voice over and against any claim of a national coherence.

The antimodern repositioning of Cresswell occurs because as Arthur Verluis has argued "antimodernism is fundamental to the creative impulse in modernity" Furthermore, "modern industrial society in its very nature calls forth antimodernism in the creative individual."(29) Cresswell's antimodernist stance, in its celebration of the regional identity and a specific regional identity at that, is also situated in opposition to the towns and cities of the plains, the locations of industry and modern life. His claim to be the first New Zealander is, in its paradoxical identity, the basis of an antimodern regionalism precisely because as O'Brien later parenthetically muses:'(Maybe a nation is a fiction but a region is a non-fiction - a fact?)'.(30) Cresswell had returned home to New Zealand in search of a nation, in order to discover his nation; but the more he searched the less he found palatable and meaningful. Yet at the same time, in his writings he expresses a growing rediscovery of the regionalist identity, an identity that enables him to not only claim to see New Zealand, as Ursula Bethell would likewise, but also, enable him to claim the proto-Pakeha identity of being the first New Zealander precisely because he has seen through the pretence of the nationalist claim. The Pakeha is, pace Cresswell, first and foremost the creative regionalist, the antimodernist, because they are opposed to the order of nationalism. As O'Brien, eighty years on echoes, regionalism involves "a realisation that nationalism is at its most palatable when its country does not exist."(31) O'Brien's "epiphanous moment"occurs when he is in the Catalan nation of southern France and northern Spain. Conversely, for Cresswell, his epiphanous moment occurs when he returns to his home country and finds the nation he sought sadly lacking. As Toss Wooloston wrote to Rodny Kennedy upon meeting Cresswell at Ursula Bethell's house in 1933 and in particular reference to Cresswell's Poet's Progress: "So amazingly detached and critical about New Zealand it reads like the diary of an early discoverer, supposing such had discovered us as we are now."(32)

What Cresswell claims to discover is the antimodern disruption "that there are two 'countries'", one being "the native and all its physical forms, which abide, as mountains and rivers," and in opposition - and rejected by Cresswell - "the European imported society."(33) Against this must be re-read his claim of being the First New Zealander; that can now be seen to be the first to be able to relocate an identity from the "European imported society" to being part of "the native and its physical forms". The first New Zealander is the one who, as with Bethell, is able to see the "native and physical forms" as that which frames the borders of their native land. Such relocation is to be truly regionalist, to be of the region first and foremost as indigenous identity that involves the antimodern rejection of the unifying demand of "the European imported society." For to be the First New Zealander is to reject being one with "the European imported society"; it is, as Brasch noted, to be the New Zealander in reverse, just as today, to be Pakeha is likewise to situate oneself in a reversal from the hegemonic modernist unitary claim of New Zealander. In this way, Pakeha is a regionalist identity involving being within yet against, in critique, and often in rejection of, the national and nationalist demand to be a New Zealander. It is, perhaps, to be 100% impure.

Endnotes

"Ethnic Kiwi most likely a SI bloke" Weekend Press, August 4-5 2007: 2
Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, the meaning of hermeneutics for philosophy (Cambridge, England: Polity Press ,1997): 6.[ref. orig: Nietzsche, aphorism 22 in Beyond Good & Evil 1886].
Gianni Vattimo After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002):15.
Ibid:13.
Charles E. Winquist, "Postmodern Secular Theology" in Clayton Crockett ed., Secular Theology. American Radical Theological Thought (London/ New York : Routledge 2001): 28
See Religion, Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo ed., (Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 1998).
Gianni Vattimo, Belief (Stanford, Calif; Stanford University Press, 1999): 39; & Vattimo, After Christianity:43.
Winquist: 29
Ibid: 32
Ibid: 30
W. D'Arcy Cresswell, The letters of D'Arcy Cresswell [selected by Helen Shaw], Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1971): 28 [To C.E. Carrington, June 3, 1923].
W. D'Arcy Cresswell, 'Ursula Bethell: Some Personal Memories', Landfall 2, Dec 1948: 283.
J.E. Traue, J. E. Ancestors of the mind: a pakeha whakapapa (Wellington, N.Z.: Gondwanaland Press, 2001).
W. D'Arcy Cresswell, The Poet's Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1930): 153-154.
Ibid: 152
Allen Curnow, "Introduction", in Allen Curnow ed., A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-50 (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1951): 18.
Ibid: 26.
W. D'Arcy Cresswell, Present Without Leave (London: Cassell, 1939):7 .
Ibid: 8
Ibid: 181.
Jason Stanley in conversation with the author, July 2005.
Cresswell, Letters: 56 [To Douglas Cresswell (brother), July 20, 1931].
Ibid: 64. [To Sir Wiliam Rothenstein, February 21, 1932].
Charles Brasch, "The Silent Land" in Allen Curnow, ed., A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-50:133.
Lydia Wevers, "The Politics of Culture" in Mark Williams ed., Writing at the edge of the universe: essays from the Creative Writing in New Zealand conference, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, August 2003 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004):110.
Greg O'Brien "Creative New Zealand?" in Williams ed. Writing at the edge of the universe: 35.
Ibid: 36.
Charles Brasch, 'Notes' Landfall 14, no.2, 1960:117.
Arthur Verluis, "Antimodernism", TELOS 137, (Winter 2006):96.
O'Brien: 45.
Ibid: 46.
Toss Woollaston: a life in letters, Jill Trevelyan, ed.,(Wellington: Te Papa press, 2004):24 [To Rodney Kennedy 23 March 1933].
Cresswell, Letters [To Maurice Baring Oct 28 1932]: 73.