The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone

346 Pages·2017·1.27 MB·English

S M O K I N G
The Homoerotic Subtext of
Man Alone
JANET CHARMAN
SMOKING
The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone
A Matrixial Reading
Janet Charman
Foreword by Tracey Slaughter
genre books
ISBN 978-0-473-42833-4
A catalogue record for this text is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
© Janet Charman 2018
This work is copyright. Except for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or
review as permitted under the Copyright Act no part may be reproduced, stored or
transmitted by any process without the prior permission in writing of the author.
Design & layout: Chris Brickell
Editor: Lesley Marshall, Editline
Frontispiece Greek Painting (1998) and photographs: Max White
Text set in Museo Sans and Janson SSi
genre books
44 Ann Street
Dunedin, New Zealand
www.genrebooks.co.nz
In memory of
Paul Gundesen, Debra Guthrie and Peter Legge
Taranaki

CONTENTS
Foreword by Tracey Slaughter 8
Introduction 14
1. True blue 25
2. “Hail fellow, well met” 30
3. Scott’s death: “the letter was not nice, but full of charge, Of dear
import” 38
4. Femininity-effeminacy and the Queen Street riot 49
5. “via regia” 59
6. The Oedipal engine of Man Alone 75
7. Rua and masquerade 84
8. Sexual dirtiness: Straight pot vs. bent kettle 90
9. “I could tell you worse things about the peace” 97
10. The removal of Stenning 107
11. Marital rape and sexual agency: At home and abroad with
Rua and Johnson 114
12. Wild Rua and the wasted land 127
13. Louis: A Rangipo exile 136
14. Taranaki, Ruapehu, Tongariro: Ménage a trois? 155
15. “It was a legend-haunted country” 162
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16. The Rangipo dogs 170
17. Rua’s party 174
18. “Ce chien est à moi” 187
19. Onetapu: “The Place of the Shivering Sands” 200
20. Ruapehu and the winds of change 205
21. The Rangipo, Onetapu and the Kaimanawa: A
transsubjective borderspace 208
22. “To reach the heart of it all” – “Dead Timber” for the
Rangipo 222
23. Antigone at the scene of Johnson’s “crime” 237
24. Three Primal Mothers met in the Kaimanawa Forest 257
25. Johnson and The Fisher King 278
26. The Not-Enough Earth-Mother & Son and the Old
Sky-Father 288
27. The Abandoning Mother: Walking out with [on]
Mabel 299
28. Tiresias 315
29. “Peace is not in dialogue with war” 319
30. The Orpheic gaze – The Eurydicean moment 327
Works cited 337
Acknowledgments 344
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FOREWORD
AN IMPORTANT and impressive feat of scholarship, Janet
Charman’s Smoking: The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone takes
up a text that has been seen as a mainstay of masculinist New
Zealand literary history and activates a vastly different account.
Taking apart the masculinist surface of Mulgan’s text, with
its seeming valorization (even to the Spartan minimalism of
its narrative style) of the stereotypical dominion hardman,
Charman foregrounds the “calculated subtextual ambiguity”
which animates an alternative reading, working with stunning
and stringent skill through the connotative intricacies of the
novel to show how Man Alone both raises and elides, asserts and
disavows a homoerotic content.
Charman’s examination makes original and illuminating use
of Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic theories, moving beyond
the binaries of “the phallocentric discourse on whose terms
Man Alone has been conventionally read” to mine the rich and
resonant seam of “matrixial alternatives” embedded in the
text – in a matrixial reading, Charman finds, Mulgan’s tough
uprooted protagonist is not a conventional masculinist hero
but an out-law of an-Other kind. Pointing out the paradox that
in a text that opens and closes with war – and whose original
title centred on Talking of War – the body of the novel talks
solely of Johnson’s nomadic civilian (mis)adventures with his
mates, Charman moves to explore “what goes without saying”
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in Mulgan’s narrative, finding that it’s not matter-of-fact and
militaristic male courage but covert homoerotic comradeship
that’s “at the heart of it all.”
Through a series of sharp-eyed and dazzlingly executed
examinations of textual detail, structural significance and
subtextual sleight of hand, Charman exposes Man Alone as a
novel subversively “in touch with” homoerotic content – her
rigorous and razor-sharp analysis follows the “dog-whistle
implication” of homoerotic desire which penetrates the subtext
“at a frequency imperceptible to the implied reader,” exploring
the methods via which Mulgan enticingly yet circumspectly
deploys “an enigmatic subtextual symbolism” which both hints
at and hides a homoerotic undercurrent. In stunning close-
analysis of passage after passage in the protagonist Johnson’s
encounters with his fellow mates, Charman pinpoints with
inspired scrutiny how the text’s seemingly “straight-faced
delivery” of masculine norms is embedded with subversive
“double entendre.” Examining the major structural phases of
the text – the spousal bond with Scotty which develops during
the protagonist’s wandering labourer days, the Queen Street
riot which violently parts them, the Stenning farm where
the hero enacts his Oedipal revenge, the wilderness in whose
“psychic terrain” he seeks his deliverance – Charman moves
through the phallocentric surface of the narrative, to reclaim the
matrixial resonances which offer resistance to heteronormative
models. Yet she also identifies with striking insight the features
of the phallocentric framework the text keeps strategically in
place to supply a surface the implied reader “habituated to the
constraints of homophobic society will endorse.”
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With acute analytic attention to the major structures,
the historical context and the fine linguistic details of the text,
Charman charts how characters, constructs and connotative
terms both mobilize and mask, energise and deflect the matrixial
subtext, convincingly examining the manifold symptoms of
textual ambivalence which mark Man Alone. Her analysis also,
importantly, illuminates Man Alone’s significant “borderlinks”
to other texts of the period which raise subversive or same-sex
desire. Within Aotearoa she links the novel to The Story of a New
Zealand River, Jane Mander’s notorious work of “‘sex-problem’
fiction,” for which (Mulgan’s own sister) Dorothea Turner’s
critical reappraisal gained some respite from the local hostile
and dismissive reception. Internationally placing Man Alone on
the continuum between the “full on” confrontation of Radclyffe
Hall’s Well of Loneliness and the more slippery finesse of Virginia
Woolf’s “now you see it; now you don’t” lesbianism in Orlando
and A Room of One’s Own, Charman establishes the shared
lexicon of homoerotic connotation which resonates between
the novels – including, brilliantly, Hall’s metaphor of a war less
troubling to “inverts” than peacetime casualties, and Woolf’s
deliciously ambiguous idiom of ‘liking.’
Picking up on Man Alone’s array of likewise sexually
charged signifiers – including character names, terms and
objects – Charman tracks the sexual lexicon implicit in the
linguistic particles and participles the text uses to ‘touch’ upon
its subversive content. Highlighting Man Alone’s absences,
innuendo, tongue-in-cheek, infiltrations and double-play
Charman conducts a dynamic exposure of the subtext Man
Alone ‘likes’ to both stage and conceal, diagnosing the minute
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