Destabilizing the local referent: The flight of Laurence Fearnley’s Butler’s Ringlet

Abstract

In her novel Butler’s Ringlet, New Zealand novelist Laurence Fearnley pays equal attention to the signs that act as local referents for a specific locale – the Southland region of New Zealand – and to the modes of signposting that have been used to simultaneously construct and destroy the specificity of local realities more generally. The novel’s process of examining various forms of signposting (from the signs that demarcate tourist spots, to the stereotypes that permeate a cultural psyche) provides a lens to consider literature’s participation in a semiotic economy. In such an economy, signs can all too readily become mistaken for the scene. Sharing the New Zealand realist tradition’s preoccupation with place, Fearnley, nevertheless, destabilizes her own local referents, preventing them from fixating into an authoritative presence of a local reality. Fearnley’s duty of care to her subject matter rests in allowing the un-signposted uniqueness of a local reality to hover between her textual and visual representations.