NATIONAL CULTURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25870, 14 June 1945, Page 4

NATIONAL CULTURE

LITERATURE AS A FACTOR ADDRESS BY DR SEIDEL CANBY What might be construed as a shrewd tilt at a national self-complacency that sometimes rears its head in the Dominion was a remark made last night that no civilised country can possibly understand, itself until it is made articulate by a distinctive literature. The speaker was Dr Seidel Canby, onetime professor of English at Yale University, who delivered a notable lecture at the Otago University. Dr Canby traced the development of American literature from the earliest days of the republic, emphasising the influence of religious, political, and international events on the literary expression o£ American novelists and poets. The factors in the modern American standard enumerated and discussed by him included Puritan doctrines, early colonial ideas and misunderstandings, the war of 1812 with Britain —which he represented whimsically as a conflict between America and Dickens, Scott and Thackeray—the emergence of Poe. Bret Harte, and O. Henry, and the dawn of transatlantic sophistication. Effect of Great Events

Great national and international occasions, Dr Canby said, determined .the trend and quality o; national cultures, and the extent to which these influenced national literature decided the culture that a nation might achieve. Understanding arose, he said, from creative imaginative literature and not from any study or assessment of the historical past. When he had returned to America from the last war he had agreed with H. G. Wells that the determining facior in world culture in the post-war years was going to be American literature. To-day, with another world conflict in its last throes, he would not like to be so explicit, though he did think the deciding factors would be Chinese or Russian literature or both.

Dr Canby devoted some time to a comparison between American and New Zealand literature, and indicated various common denominators. Both peoples, he emphasised, occupied newly-settled lands, and even though their respective rhythms of life might differ widely, each was conditioned by environment in a manner that was not so apparent in Old World communities. For a long time Americans had written as if they were still Englishmen. In fact, it was years before American leader writers ceased writing as if they were still in England. Americans had developed a staccato quality of writing because they had known that unless they could produce a style that was different from ordinary Eng-lish-speaking standards they would be inarticulate. And he felt that until New Zealanders discovered such an articulation founded on a.rhythm of life timed by their new sky and new region they could not hope to have a literature of their own. ’ The Democratic Idea The fact that both America and New Zealand were committed to the democratic way of life was quoted by Dr Canby as another marked, similarity between American and New Zealand literature. The similarity implicit in this trend gained importance by the fact that the literature of both countries might be expected to have the same effect on those numerous countries in the world to-day where the democratic idea had suffered a check or suppression. Both literatures stemmed back to English literature that was a thousand years old, and it was futile for anyone to suggest that such a consideration was of no importance. In a behaviouristic and psychological sense, designs of living and expression had probably a much closer relationship in the bastions of democracy in the Pacific—America, Australia, and New Zealand —that in ordinary world States. The moral, Dr Canby concluded, was that in both America and New Zealand people should know more about their respective literatures, "not for the purposes of imitation, which would be dangerous, but with a view to a greater and more practical understand-

ing. A vote of thanks to the speaker, moved by Professor H. Ramsay, was carried by acclamation.