Individualism and its Discontents: Man Alone in Contemporary New Zealand

Abstract

The figure of Melville’s monomaniacal captain, who would subdue all the forces of the world to the exigencies of his tormented mind, and who at any rate drives the living community on board the Pequod into oblivion in his obsessive hunt for “his” white whale, would not appear to be the obvious character to introduce a work of political analysis. But in Bruce Jesson’s Only Their Purpose is Mad (1999) – the title is a loose adaptation of a line spoken by Ahab – this classic character makes a striking appearance. In seeing the nineteenth-century Ahab as representative of certain problems in our times, Jesson is as much interested in the role and influence of ideas as he is in examining the political causes of what he sees as New Zealand’s on-going social ills. And in using this potently emblematic character from Melville’s novel to illustrate his concerns, Jesson refreshes the seemingly outdated notion that literature – and the range of ideas generated therein – allows us revealing glimpses into the complex experience of our lives through altering the perceptual light through which we view our social-historical atmospheres. That Jesson’s trenchant analysis is political in content and intent breathes vigour into his methods and prompts us be alert to the changes occurring around us. Looking at contemporary New Zealand in the presence, as it were, of the towering figure Captain Ahab, I found myself thinking more and more of John Mulgan’s novel Man Alone and how this too, although aesthetically and stylistically opposite to Melville’s massive tome, offers an interesting perspective on the present situation.