Critical Survey

The stranger’s words addressed to the hero in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K bring home in a very concrete way the relentless binarism not only of the apartheid order (revealingly figured in its truth as the disorder of civil war), but also of many Western forms of life and thinking: a typically high-modern technology sums up an epistemology no less typical. The train abolishes the age-old institution of the crossroads, the three- or four-way junction which puts before the traveller two or more options besides the one of retracing his steps back along the way he came. Daredevils who ‘ride staff’ on township trains may be rebellious terms in a system, but terms of that system they remain. Yesterday’s staffrider on the train of progress is today’s builder of his own locomotive. This is the logic whereby we have seen in South Africa rival nationalisms arising out of the early transcultural flux of Empire and then, at length, imposing their different inflections of the modern project upon the rest of their compatriots.

Olive Schreiner? South African writing at the crossroads? The title of this issue of Critical Survey connotes contemporaneity: Schreiner died when this century was only twenty years old. Provisionally to lift the weight of this seeming paradox off the reader’s mind – if not wholly to resolve it – I would only suggest that both ‘South Africa’ as an entity and its writing were as much (and critically) at a point of intersection – a choice of paths – in the 1890s as they have been in the 1990s, and that one century’s end speaks eloquently to another. It is of course always and only thanks to our own effort-free hindsight that we can speak of a writer’s foresight: of all those who exerted themselves in gazing forward as the last century ended and this one began, Schreiner scores in my view highest; and not on any yardstick of empirical prediction but rather because her brand of countercultural thinking and imagining is – and here another and harder paradox looms – always so productively non-contemporaneous, always so open to the other and to the future. We find this quality in the shortest no less than in the longer of her fictions, and the thousand or so words of ‘The Woman’s Rose’ from Dream Life and Real Life deliver its effects as strongly as any. Schreiner brings her experience as a woman on the frontier to bear upon the new South Africa that was emerging in the late nineteenth century. The story I have chosen offers a way in to the historical narratives of her formation as well as a commentary upon the ethical and sociopolitical options before the (new) new South Africa a hundred and more years on.

One of the most fraught and, possibly, most tricky issues, both in theory and in practice, for current literary criticism in post-apartheid South Africa is how to read and reread the texts of those now-canonical white South African writers whose reputations were made, both nationally and internationally, by their ‘writing against apartheid’, now that this particular kind of literature of resistance could be seen as passé. What is at stake here is not just a critical re-evaluation of such writers as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and André Brink, whose voices may now be seen to be marginalised in favour of those ‘subaltern’ voices freed to speak in a post-apartheid state, but a re-situating of the very nature of their literary resistance. Inextricably tied to any such discussion is the complex nature of literary resistance itself and the debates surrounding the categorisation of ‘South African literature’ within ‘world literatures’. These debates have evolved around such questions as whether post-colonial theory and criticism have any relevance to such texts; whether ‘white’ South African literature should be regarded as part of other settler literatures (despite its obvious differences in not having just one ‘imperial centre’ and in the neo-colonial structures of apartheid); and whether even locating such a division between ‘white’ and ‘black’ writing in South Africa imposes a retrospective form of apartheid within critical practice itself. This article addresses some of these issues and considers them as part of a process of reconciling differences and moving beyond the fixed binaries that characterise both the apartheid mentality and colonialism itself.

In a 1969 study of metaphysical poetry, Earl Miner distinguishes between the private mode of John Donne and the public mode of Ben Jonson. Schematic as this distinction might seem, it sheds light on the poetry of Donne because it takes up the proposition put first by J.B. Leishman in 1951, and developed by others after him, that Donne was a ‘coterie-poet’, whose work was significantly shaped by the small and intimate readership for whom he wrote. This means, for example, that he can assume an audience of friends and equals who will ‘understand not only the allusions and witticisms, but (what is harder) just when he is serious and when not, and just what kind of seriousness is being displayed; they will understand also where the poems are “personal” and where not, and again just what kind of “personality” is involved’. Now it might seem strange to begin a consideration of Coetzee with a disquisition upon Donne; the medium, of course, is Eliot, whose early opinion of Donne has been famous and formative for generations of readers in the twentieth century: ‘Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. Athought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility’. As Leishman has shown, Eliot’s opinion of Donne itself underwent some degree of modification: by 1931 Eliot had discovered in Donne a ‘manifest fissure between thought and sensibility’. Irritating as Leishman appears to find Eliot and his public pronouncements, I will argue that the theory of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ has uses for a study of Coetzee in South Africa at the turn of the century: one, because it directs us to seek explanations of characteristic features of the writer within the mind of the writer, and two, because in doing so it enables the converse line of approach that Leishman followed in relation to Donne – of seeking explanations for such features in the readership to whom the writing is directed (or at least by whom it is influenced).

This article explores two relatively unknown areas of Alex La Guma’s work – his comics and painting. While there is plenty of the former, information on the latter has come from his family and contemporaries. It is based on their memories and impressions of paintings that have not survived or have been lost. La Guma gave them away or left them with friends to look after when he and his family moved from Cape Town to London, and then from London to Havana. Necessarily, this article falls into two parts distinguishable by their respective emphases. While the first part relies on documentation, the second is more speculative and draws on the work of analysts associated with the object relations school of psychoanalytic theory.

Raymond Chandler used to say that whenever he got stuck writing a novel he would get going again by having a character come through the door with a gun in hand. Reading the opening pages of Nadine Gordimer’s new novel with its account of a sensational murder, one might wonder whether South Africa’s 1991 Nobel laureate, faced with the end of apartheid and the consequent lack of a subject, was operating according to Chandler’s principle. The House Gun, however, indicates not so much the lack of a subject as a new way of looking at an old subject facing new circumstances – the old subject being the psychological and material effects of white racism on whites, the new circumstances being those of post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, the apparent narrowing of focus from the macropolitics of Gordimer’s three most recent preceding novels, None to Accompany Me (1994), My Son’s Story (1990), and A Sport of Nature (1987), to the micro-politics of The House Gun suggests that we can read South Africa’s transition to full democracy as a paradigmatic change from a modern to a postmodern condition. Gordimer’s post- 1994 publications, and The House Gun in particular, lend themselves to being read as illustrative of two of Michel Foucault’s central insights: the ubiquity of power, and the consequent idea that given that ubiquity, care of one’s self (‘souci de soi’) becomes a new kind of political obligation.

J.M. Coetzee is not known for confessional self-revelation. In a series of seven novels, from Dusklands in 1974 to The Master of Petersburg in 1994, he has honed a fictional style that, whatever the mode of narration, offers no hint of a personal authorial presence. The characters through whose consciousness the narrative is relayed, characters such as Magda in In The Heart of the Country, the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, Susan Barton in Foe, or Mrs Curren in Age of Iron, whether they are represented in the first or third person, absorb the entire affective and axiological space of the fiction. Coetzee’s substantial body of critical commentary, too – which includes the books White Writing and Giving Offense as well as the articles collected in Doubling the Point – while moving away from the highly technical stylistic analyses of the early essays to issues of more autobiographical relevance like censorship and animal rights in the later work, is not in any way self-revelatory. His reluctance to account for his fictions in the terms provided by his own life reaches a somewhat absurd extreme in the written interview that was published in the 1994 special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly devoted to Coetzee: questions that occupy some thirteen pages in all receive answers that add up to little more than a page.

Treblinka RICHARD GODDEN

Life Slips By A Lake’s Progress HUGH UNDERHILL

Golconda ANDREW SANT

The Gift The Trespasser ADRIAN CAESAR

For MJB Wherever This May Find Him MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Surprise: St Paul’s PETER DE VILLE

ILLUMINATIONS: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing – New Writing from South and Southern Africa. The Rathasker Press; Summer 1998. ISSN 0736–4725. Subs $20; STO £5, Illuminations, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424–0001, USA

Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Susanne Becker (Manchester University Press, 1999), ISBN 0–7190–5331–5

In the Shadow of the Holocaust and Other Essays. C. Ponomareff (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), ISBN: 90–420–0562–9

Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory and the Novel. Joseph Litvak (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), ISBN 0–8223–2016–9; £14.95

Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History and Politics. Brian Hollingsworth (London: Macmillan, 1997), ISBN 0–333–68166–5.

Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting. Ian Haywood (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997). Writers and theirWork Series, ISBN 0–7463–0780–2; £8.99

A Preface To Greene. Cedric Watts (Longman, 1997), ISBN 0–582–25019–6; £14.99 (paperback)

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture. John Lucas (Five Leaves Publications, 1997), ISBN 0–907123–17–1 paperback; £11.99

Lives of the Poets. Michael Schmidt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), ISBN 0–297–84014–2; £22.00

Jonz. Philip Ramp (Athens, 1997). Translated by Lydia Stephanou. Bilingual edition.

Studies in Classic Australian Fiction. Michael Wilding (Sydney and Nottingham: Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, and Shoestring Press, 1997), ISBN 0–949405–13–2; £12.99

Notes on contributors