David Eggleton
The Social Space of the Essay 2003–2023 by Ian Wedde (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 480pp, $50
Ian Wedde’s The Social Space of the Essay is a kind of chronicle, book-ended by two world events: 9/11—‘On September 11, 2001, all suited up on a cultural mission, I found myself shut out of the New York hotel I’d left shortly before the catastrophe of the twin towers’—and the viral disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. But although his agglomeration of essays was all composed and published in the twenty-first century, between 2003 and 2023, it’s a book as much concerned with unfinished business from the twentieth century as negotiating the cultural fall-out from our immediate internet moment.
This is a bulky scrapbook assembly of pieces written for specific occasions, derived partly from contractual obligations and commissions—lectures, talks, reviews, interviews, travel writing—and partly from personal enthusiasms, remembrances and celebrations. We might see it as a gathering of fugitive pieces chattering and muttering together companionably in a community hall. As items extracted from other contexts, Wedde has imposed upon this gathering a kind of programmatic understanding, based around the concepts of home, memory, identity and cultural legacy, while extolling the virtues of consideration, patience, empathy and manaakitanga.
The image that features on the cover is of Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture ‘Yes We Are’ from 2009, which consisted of a large industrial neon sign with a curving arrow and the word OPEN. It travelled around the Wellington CBD on the back of a truck for a day to be viewed by casual passers-by. For Wedde, the ‘seductive word OPEN’ provokes questions:
Are we in New Zealand an OPEN nation and is Michael justified in pointing to us like that? Or does his pointing to New Zealand as an OPEN nation have a kind of ironic question-mark at the end: ‘OPEN, us? Really?’
The book’s title is a riposte of sorts to the dominating presence in daily discourse of ‘social media’, which Wedde himself mostly avoids, because of its cultural amnesia and labile emotionalism. The ‘long space of the essay’, he argues, offers a more coherent and cohesive way of being in the world. As a writer he rejects the dumbing-down and passive-aggressiveness of social media posts in favour of the multitude of fine discriminations and granular examination that extended prose writing allows. For him, an essay is ‘a text that records something like conversational thinking aloud.’
In an essay about the expatriate New Zealand artist Bill Culbert, he describes an art gallery opening as a form of ideal social space similar to that he would like his essays to occupy: a social space ‘in which perceptions, phenomena and artworks circulate together, in which the historical fraternity of artists enjoy each other’s company, size up each other’s work and engage their audiences’—a social space where ‘any appreciation of Culbert’s art has to be congenial as well as informative.’
So this is the essay as informed social engagement, something to argue against as much as to agree with: ‘the essays collected here hope for the pleasure of extended conversation, both in their content and in the critical participation of their readers’. But there’s something theatrical about this declaration in the Introduction, and indeed his essays are all a kind of performance: Wedde revealing himself to be a wily writer, busking up a crowd, as if uni-cycling skilfully back and forth while juggling various rhetorical modes.
He mobilises assorted lexicons, and as a jargonista, he can ladle theory out with the best of them. Linguistic virtuosity accompanied by generosity of engagement characterises his writing.There’s a sense of abundance about this book, a sense of a cup that runneth over, as he teases out tenuous surmises into connective threads, into glittering skeins of perception, and the intangible makes a play for profundity. There’s always a philosophical quality to his disquisitions, as he touches on W.G. Sebald’s Germanness, or the unheimlich (unhomely), or postmodern versions of transcendental idealism, or excessive bureaucratic red tape at Te Papa.
As a literary and art critic, Wedde uses vitalist language to pay attention to and admire praiseworthy evidence of cultural production. On one hand, he’s the knowledgeable docent who holds a candle up to the detail of a painting and whispers: Look! And on the other hand, he’s constantly cross-examining his own motivations, like a lawyer arguing both sides of a case and displaying extraordinary mental stamina as he tries to pin down his own thought processes. Here and there, language twirls and executes arabesques like a flamenco dancer. Writing about a painting by the artist Bill Hammond, he observes:
The sense of a carnivalesque biology that confused the capillary systems of veins and the plumbing of testicles and ovaries with the mess of guitar leads and cable on stage at a rock concert was a sure sign that Bill had no trouble grappling with the idea that culture and nature were in each other’s faces.
He appears almost intoxicated by his own thought processes at times; and his self-scrutiny becomes a kind of operatic aria:
One morning I enter the post office in my usual low attention state and there see a poster inviting me to Get a real piece of Middle-earth … I know I’m going to write this sentence down in my notebook … It’s … likely that what I’ve jotted down in my notebook will make its way into an essay … novel or even a poem. I don’t know where this little shock of noticing will end up and I don’t really care. The notebook I carry around with me is full of stuff whose final destination is very often uncertain or even unknown. What’s important is that I’ve noticed, that my mind has been happily provoked into thought, that my heart is beating a little faster, and that all at once the world seems to be more interesting than it was.
A principal Wedde strategy is to ask questions of everything in the attempt to establish clarity, resist complacency and throw light on unexamined thinking. Questions, as he puts it, are always ‘nagging at me’ … But the quest for lucidity can lead him up some curious by-ways and down dead-ends as his probing of the arcane becomes a tad abstruse, or even absurd:
Because I’ve just written about the work of Elizabeth Thompson, an artist exhibiting [in City Gallery, Wellington] … I have a clear pleasurable sense of its gallery spaces in my mind. Is my mind then also an institution? What constitutes the border between the mental space in which I can map the architectural space of the gallery and the gallery? Which of the two am I more within? Do I contain the institution, or does it contain me?
In keeping with the notion that critical theory is always better at diagnosing problems than providing solutions, Wedde’s restless interrogation, the constant worrying-away at the surface of things, can provoke a crisis of sincerity in him as the gossamer of his word-filigree expands into a fog-like cloud of recrimination and obscurantism, and his questions become wilder: ‘What does it mean to stage pictures of Asia by non-Asian image-makers for an ‘Asian’ audience in ‘Asia’?’ This smacks of self-parody.
Mostly, though, the rhetorical flourishes of his endless questions can usefully expose such things as hidden agendas around privatisation and secret neo-liberal business, as in his essay ‘Tuning the Museum: the harmonics of official culture’, about his time working at the Museum of New Zealand as a concept team-leader, where he writes of the sacramental dazzle of Te Papa’s early days, the status of official monuments, and the changing of the guard at the palace of culture on Wellington’s waterfront: ‘Why would the museum privilege an exclusively normative esoteric … over simple information? Why would it wish to exclude feelings of belonging, tantalisation or envy? The cognitive displacements caused by the esoteric may be what stimulate audiences and rewire epistemologies.’ Here, ‘reactionary rebranding’ involves conflict between ‘loyalists determined to cement the status quo of the museum’s initial success, strategic revisionists determined to tune and recalibrate the museum’s functions, and impatient lobbyists and stakeholders (possibly including the government).’
Over the course of his collection of essays Wedde is by turns a boulevardier in Wellington, a psycho-geographer in Berlin, and a flaneur in the south of France. As a gunslinger with keyboard for hire, he lassoes spooky coincidences at a conference on the New Zealand Gothic at Massey University’s Albany campus; and draws a bead on the way Peter Black’s dawn photograph of the Christchurch Edmond’s Baking Powder SURE TO RISE sign speaks to optimism and the beginnings of a new day, while a grizzled member of the lumpen-proletariat slowly cycles past it. He avers that Anne Noble’s photographs of Antarctica are not ‘of Antarctica at all; they are about consciousness’. In them, ‘the imaginative condition’ is rendered as ‘a white-out’. And although Bill Hammond displays a keenly-aware ‘morally satirical intelligence’, the pipe-smoking poet Allen Curnow is recalled, in a centennial remembrance that wittily channels his canonical poem ‘Spectacular Blossom’, as obliviously ‘dropping flaming matches into the pile on the ashtray on the tutorial table, and from time to time the pile would burst into flames—the tin altar would combust, the knees of light would crash down, and the dying would ejaculate their scarlet blooms.’
The Social Space of the Essay is also a book of elegies and eulogies and funeral orations. There are magnificent remembrances for artists Ralph Hotere and Tony Fomison and for poets Dave Kent and Russell Haley. Of Russell Haley, Wedde writes: ‘he was the funniest man I ever met’; Haley’s writerly personas or poetic selves included: ‘Harry Lurber, Commissioner Gerder, Simon Fesk, Harry Rejekt and Jervis Kraik.’
There’s also Wedde family history, centred on Cook Strait, and brief portraits of his mother and father. His parent’s actions profoundly shaped his childhood years—and those of his twin brother, Dave—and consequently his whole life. And this establishes perhaps the overarching question in The Social Space of the Essay: where is home? In 1954, when Wedde was seven his father was given a job as a developmental advisor as part of a UNESCO-related project and the whole family was uprooted from their quiet suburban home in Blenheim and transplanted to the remote hinterland of tropical East Bengal, where Wedde’s father supervised accounts at the Chandraghona paper mill. In a sense the family never went ‘home’, as they continued to move around the world—to South Korea, Jordan, Zambia—on various developmental missions, for the next forty years and Wedde wound up being educated in a boarding school in England.
As he writes here: ‘Most of the books I’ve written have had the question, “Where and what is home?” as a theme at some level.’ In the essay ‘A River Ran through It’, he tells us: ‘In 2005 I spent a month in Bangladesh looking for traces of my childhood there between 1954 and 1958.’ He remembers that on the banks of the Karnaphuli River ‘vultures tugged the guts of drowned cattle’, and the air was smoky and aromatic, while ‘immense bamboo rafts’ were floated down the river to the paper mill.
But you can’t go home again. As James Baldwin wrote: ‘home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’; perhaps a perpetual longing for something vanished: the prelapsarian, the paradisial. Having spent part of his childhood growing up in the tropics in a house with servants and colonial privilege, and then being experiencing absent parents and a peripatetic adolescence, Wedde describes himself as ‘at home in homelessness’, or at least ‘contented in living in his head imaginatively.’ The past, then, is another country, a kind of haunting and requires transmogrification or at least translation, which is why, perhaps, Wedde is so adept at different linguistic registers, while also sceptical of them.
And meanwhile memory itself might be fallible. By turns, sage, guru, insider, outsider, dissident and exile, Wedde is a tireless globetrotter in the world of ideas, who occasionally thinks six improbable things before breakfast, but more often he grounds himself, and us, in wise and telling observations that speak home truths.
DAVID EGGLETON is a poet and writer based in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
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