World Literature Today review of The NeXt Wave
I believe The NeXt Wave deserves a detailed
study.
The volume is an anthology of New Zealand writing which
presents some of the new directions young Aotearoa-New Zealand
writers (also known as Generation X and defined as those "born
between the early 1960s and mid-1970s") are taking. It claims to
mirror socioeconomic changes and to depict a further aspect of
literary postmodemism commonly based on pulp and commercialized
concepts. However, what soon becomes quite evident is that the
writers of the new generation are actually reacting against the
academic elitism - felt to be responsible for the decrease in
popularity of poetry in the country - in New Zealand literature of
the last two or three decades of the twentieth century. Despite
this, we still get an occasional dose of academic reference:
Dostoevsky in Bilbrough; Galileo, Kundera in Perkins; the Song of
Solomon in Figiel; Larkin in Lee; Pinter in Pirie; Spinoza in
Bernhardt.
These young writers opt for a more accessible urban culture
heavily influenced by commercialism, the mass media, hi-tech
computerization, and dominant American attitudes, often heading
toward anti intellectualism. Within the fence of the global village
it would be difficult to restrain or repress the effects of
internationalism in contemporary writing by the young in many parts
of the world, and in Aotearoa-New Zealand "postimperial" factors
increasingly contribute to the multiculturalism of the new voices.
Postimperialism is a concept the editor uses to imply postcolonial
factors from the point of view of those who were colonized by the
British (i.e. the inhabitants of New Zealand), and it also includes
the influence that Europe and America exert on the country.
To present the new trends in their writing, the young
Aotearoa-New Zealand authors had to use traditional techniques and
integrate them with postmodern ones; so the book's greatest
achievement is the continuation of postmodemism. Accessibility is
certainly increased through the use of English, which is left a
very distinct regional flavor most of the time, and when Maori
words and phrases are used for local color they are referred to the
glossary at the back, which is very helpful although not everything
is given in the list.
In its iconoclastic role of repudiating established academic
customs, The NeXt Wave presents innovative elements in
world literature today and simultaneously introduces some of the
emerging writers of the 1990s in New Zealand. The new trends are
both stylistic and thematic: imagination and realism are interwoven
with rhythmic strategies to deliver significant ideas and
subject matter relevant to the general public. This required a
swing from the extensive use of the esthetic potential of language
to the frequent use of the street vernacular: "The onus is more on
accessibility in order to reach the general reader rather than on
clever word-play and technical skill to enthuse the academic
critic," says the editor. But the services of the academic critic
might still be required to reveal the modes of energy release in
the stylistic strategies employed: for instance, the expressive
effects of contrasting rhythms that are used to convey not only
emotions and states of mind but also sociocultural atmosphere.
Emily Perkins uses fast-paced rhythmic structures in her prose
("Let's Go," one of the best pieces in the entire collection) to
depict a restless young female narrator who is made to feel
insecure by "cultural relation". Elsewhere, the tonal oscillation
from first-person to third-person narratives in Jeanne Bernhardt's
story "The Sight" reveals a disturbed and possibly unbalanced mind
which feels powerless against itself; the narrator's need is not
for his parents but for his brothers, a shrewd comment on familial
alienation. Other themes that emerge from the book include sex,
sexual abuse, violence, poverty, Maori demands, youth culture,
drugs, the decline of regionalism, internationalism, feminism, and
homosexuality, all presented in an array of tones ranging from the
angry and the cynical, to the disaffected and ironical, to the
disappointed and the indifferent. There is much here that might be
labelled pulp literature, and the language employed is simple,
unadorned, and frequently coarse or even vulgar, consciously
anti-academic, anti-traditional, and naturalistic.
The book claims to be innovative and experimental.
Stylistically it attempts some daring feats, and linguistically it
represents the common idiom even to the point of abbreviating the
unabbreviated. Thematically it treats contemporary social realism
and cultural values. And although established critics might find
little of literary merit in them (as the editor says in his
introduction), one must recognize the serious treatment of these
new directions and changes in New Zealand writing. One must also
appreciate the young writers' efforts to give their literature a
new shape "by taking it out of the universities and back to the
streets in order to popularise it to the general reader". And this
can only be done by "integrating and utilising the techniques and
methodologies of postmodern and traditional writers and continuing
the changes which postmodern and other literary theories have
occasioned". I think this publication is a successful attempt that
will eventually force established academics to think about these
new trends and to notice the new writers, even if they have to
redefine literature.
Charles Briffa, University of Malta
(from World Literature Today, Summer 1999, USA, pp. 604-605)