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eBook details

• Title: From Sargeson to Marshall: The Male Hero in Recent Short Fiction by Male Writers (Critical Essay)
• Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 1991
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 230 KB

Description

When Sargeson's hero, old Fred Holmes ('Last Adventure') befriends the young narrator of this story (in the first volume of New Zealand Short Stories (1)) he offers an image of 'a life of adventure' (p. 144), with his stories of gold-prospecting, corpses in the lock-up, and sexual adventures at the age of fifteen. The younger man determines to follow in the path of these adventures--not so much the 'grim stories' but the 'romantic ones'--and 'live a life of adventure'. But at the end he finds Fred in a coffin, rattling along a country road, which has a 'profound effect' on his heroic aspirations. What the 'profound effect' was, is not explained: some diminution of heroism no doubt, in the shock of 'waking up' to death as the end of all things. The question lingers: how has the younger male hero fared since the days of Sargeson? (2) I use the term 'male hero' to balance the term 'female hero' (used for my review of the women writers of this period, 1988-9). (3) Joseph Campbell's mythological Hero with a Thousand Faces, now somewhat elderly and sometimes in need of a feminist modifier or three, is nevertheless an appropriate starting point. (4) In Campbell's account, the hero 'ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man' (p. 30). These three stages--Departure, Initiation (with trials and dragons and 'atonement with the father', p. 126) and Return--seem pretty far removed from life in New Zealand, but as Campbell points out, 'the incidents ... represent psychological, not physical, triumphs' (p. 29). Indeed, the heroism may involve an inner spiritual journey with little to show on the surface. (5)

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