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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 8. August 3, 1959

Single Class

Single Class

"The main reason for the difficulties of the New Zealand novelist is, of course, not that New Zealand is such a small country, but that it is a country of a single class; almost of a single type of people. This means that it is extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible, for a novelist to get outside his subject if he wants to set his novel in New Zealand.

"In England or America one has only to get outside one's class or region to achieve a sanitary distance from it—to see one's setting, one's characters, in perspective. Having achieved his distance and perspective, the novelist finds his task possible. The English provincial and the American regional writer can not only retreat from their subject—they can write in the terms of another class, another audience, within their own country. This other class or audience has values and judgments within which they can work, certain that their audience will be interested and willing to share their recognitions. . .

"But in the past at least the New Zealand novelist has found it impossible to get outside his class, his subject, within his own country because the vantage point of another class or reality simply does not exist.

"Now if fleeing overseas were the solution, the aspiring New Zealand novelist would have no problem whatever. It's easy enough to get away. But the painful fact is that the New Zealand novelist has not yet found his nationality sustained by an interested overseas audience. To return to our English provincials and American regionalists—when they retreated to another class, another way of thought, another region—they could write of what they left behind for an informed audience. . .