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• Title: Whole Men'? Re-Reading Masculinity in Frank Sargeson's Stories.
• Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 1996
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 217 KB

Description

The work of Frank Sargeson has long been a privileged site of enquiry for New Zealand literary critics. The canonical status of his texts has meant that many of our understandings of literature in New Zealand have been generated in the textual field of his writing. The years since his death have produced readings of his work which, while maintaining certain links with earlier criticism, have endeavoured to recontextualise its place in national literature. That Sargeson should still be the focus of such work is hardly surprising, given his cultural weight, nor is it surprising that some of this critical work has begun to address issues of gender and cultural identity, given that such issues are now (in various ways) part of popular discourse in this country. In so doing, recent work has stressed the need to move beyond easy assumptions of the notion of realism in the work of Sargeson and his generation. Indeed, it would be difficult to argue now that Sargeson's work should be read primarily for its 'realist' qualities: various critiques of that position over the last two decades have now become common. (1) In particular, the past few years have seen increasing attention paid to issues of gender and sexuality in Sargeson's work. When I wrote an earlier version of this article in 1993, Kai Jensen had already published two essays on masculinity in New Zealand literature. (2) The intervening period has now seen publication of another essay on Sargeson by Jensen, 'Frank at Last', his book Whole Men, and Michael King's impressive biography of Sargeson, Frank Sargeson: A Life, which devotes considerable attention to Sargeson's homosexuality. (3) In returning to Sargeson's work at this time, then, I have taken the opportunity not only to reconsider my own thoughts on masculinity in his work, but also to engage with Jensen's recent criticism. I hope that by coming to Sargeson's versions of masculinity from a more explicitly psychoanalytical angle, I might extend the scope of existing readings of them. To this end, I will use a close reading of two stories ('Sale Day', 1939, and 'City and Suburban', 1965) to tease out some of the ways in which the stories offer ambivalent renderings of male subjectivity which gesture towards an alternately utopian and misogynistic vision. In so doing, I will be turning not only to Freud, but also to recent feminist revisions of his work. In the final part of the article, I hope to use the issues raised in my readings of the stories to pose further questions of the way we understand the connections between realism, nationalism, and masculinity that have been remarked upon recently by other writers. (4) In particular, I will compare my readings of these stories to Jensen's recent comments on the 'whole man' of New Zealand male writing.

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