Working Through Anger: Keri Hulme's *The Bone People*

Before class on Wednesday, I was having trouble writing or thinking anything at all about Hulme's *The Bone People* other than, "This is the most reprehensible book I have ever read." Not that it is poorly written; in fact, at the same time that I was repulsed by the story Hulme tells, I was enchanted by the dreamy quality of her prose and her use of language as a visual artifact. Fortunately, this was not a book I had to deal with on my own. After Shannon's excellent presentation of secondary source material and a very enlightening class discussion, I was finally able to get beyond my initial reaction. My general opinion of the book--that it is ultimately an apologist account of a horrific story of child beating--remains unchanged. Now, however, I can at least begin to explore those aspects of the book that triggered my initial response as well as those that may suggest an alternative, more useful reading.

The thing that disturbs me most about *The Bone People* is how the story seems to blame Simon for the abuse he suffers, while taking great pains to portray Joe as a likeable fellow, and a victim of abuse in his own right. In searching for answers about why I am reading the book this way, I believe that I may have stumbled upon the keys to a more productive, even if still problematic, reading. For me, Hulme's use of Simon as a focalizer for the action in Chapter 8 makes him appear as the agent of his own destruction. He goes to Binny Daniel's house and Kerewin's Tower even though Joe has expressly declared both locations as off-limits. Then, in his encounter with Kerewin, he refuses to return her talisman, the knife, and proceeds to attack her physically. Thwarted in his efforts to injure her person, he settles for destroying her cherished guitar. At the point that Simon leaves the Tower, a possibility remains that his disobedient and disorderly conduct might remain unknown to Joe, but instead of going home, he stays out, destroying the shop windows, slowly and deliberately, just begging to get caught. Had the chapter been focused through another character, Joe or Kerewin, the reader would have had to hear about at least part of Simon's behavior second-hand, because only Simon is present in the scenes where he makes his first visit to Daniel's house and engages in his spree of vandalism. By using Simon as the focalizer for the third-person, external narration, Hulme has emphasized both the linear progression of the behavior that leads to Simon's punishment, as well as Simon's deliberate escalation of his disobedience. Having already learned how Simon forced the confrontation between Joe and Kerewin at the beach, a scene that--to use Barthe's terminology, I would label an index--one has the sense that we are supposed to see him as the master of the situation in Chapter 8 as well. Although, in the end, Kerewin viciously renounces Simon, giving Joe permission to go ahead with the beating, I could not help but feel that she simply fails a test that Simon himself has set for her.

I think that, in Hulme's narrative, Simon unquestionably shares some of the culpability for a crime that has in fact been perpetrated against him by numerous people who simply should have known better. This is the aspect of the story that offended me the most and led to my strongly negative, initial reaction. Making Simon the agent of his own victimization begins to make narrative sense, however, if one begins to think--as we did in class on Wednesday--of *The Bone People* in terms of Christian iconography. As a figure for Christ, Simon would necessarily be the agent of his own sacrifice, understanding that this is the inevitable final step in creating the Trinity with which the book begins: "They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. . . . Together, all together, they are the instruments of change" (4). As Kerewin finally recognizes in Chapter 7, "O God no, Himi's in the way" (291). It is in the act of Simon's sacrifice that Joe, the avenging Old Testament-style God figure, is united with Kerewin, a figure for the more forgiving God of the New Testament. Simon, their sacrificed son, is the bridge between the old world and the new: "But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great" (4).

By re-examining the book in this light, I slowly began to make sense of other facets of the story that had been bothering me. For example, I found Hulme's characterization of Kerewin to be particularly problematic. During my initial read, Kerewin struck me as an extraordinarily selfish construct, and I questioned whether Hulme had offered sufficient motivation for Kerewin's betrayal of Simon. As a figure for the Christian deity, though, Kerewin begins to make sense. She is androgynous, solitary, enencumbered by familial relations, and she prefers vague benevolence to active involvement. Similarly, Joe's character, as a portrayal of the avenging New Testament father-god, is also strangely apt. Joe is more gendered than Kerewin, but he remains relatively asexual. He sets clear boundaries, and severely punishes their transgression. He wants to be kind and loving, but he inevitably ends up seriously over-reacting and then regretting his vengeful actions after the fact.

Although the mythology seems to map well onto Hulme's narrative, I do not think *The Bone People* could as a result be placed into the category of Christian allegory. Allegory familiarizes myth through the use of ordinary symbols that stand for extraordinary things. To make an allegory is to allege that the story one tells is somehow universal or inevitable, part of the natural order of things. What Hulme has done defamiliarizes the story of the Passion; in her narrative the reader can see it as a story of the brutal sacrifice of a son by his father. The myth has been recast, made Other, in Hulme's treatment. For this reason, I think it is possible to argue that Hulme has achieved success in writing from the position of a non-Western other, even if that success is somewhat limited because *The Bone People* merely interrogates the supposed universality of the Western mythological tradition without offering a truly alternative perspective.