Robert Plummer
WRITING SOUTH AFRICA: LITERATURE, APARTHEID, AND DEMOCRACY, 1970-1995 edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge University Press, R100)
NOVEL HISTORIES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE IN SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION: by Michael Green (Witwatersrand University Press, R120)
Just over a decade ago, in a South Africa drawn in stark chiaroscuro rather than rainbow nuance, JM Coetzee made an embattled appeal against “the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history”. Coetzee’s protest against the journalistic demands of protest literature followed earlier critiques by Lewis Nkosi and Njabulo Ndebele. Albie Sachs, too, argued in 1989 for a ban on “saying that literature is a weapon of struggle” for “a period of, say, five years”.
Demonstrating its relevance beyond these suggested five years, Sachs’s injunction is reprinted in Writing South Africa, a collection of essays on the simplicities and complexities of recent South African fiction, poetry and theatre. Central to the collection is the exploration of literary forms other than realistic documentation of apartheid wrongs. Part re-examination of recent literature, part exploration of future directions, the collection looks beyond the main lines of black/white, apartheid/struggle.
Several of the essays examine in-between zones which were obscured by these lines. Zo Wicomb, for example, explores “coloured” writing, and Michiel Heyns’s essay on gay writing brings out a group whose struggle was overshadowed by a more urgent liberation. And throughout the collection, gender equality is reiterated as the post- apartheid struggle.
Tied to the question of subject matter – the relationship of the personal to the political – is the issue of literary form, taking us back to the debate on the relative merits of realism and more inventive forms, such as postmodernism.
Elleke Boehmer calls for the “narrative uncertainty” which was “constrained within the deathly binaries of a long history of oppression and opposition”. Coetzee is a model for such writing, as he is for Graham Pechy too, for “having so thoroughly and critically internalised the centre’s traditions of writing that he can invent in fiction a ‘South Africa’ which challenges the settled truths of centre and margin alike”.
Coetzee is the focus of two other essays in Writing South Africa, demonstrating his inventive fictions’ shift from mistrusted periphery to a new orthodoxy. Andr Brink, too – a new-look, post-modernist Andr Brink – argues in the opening essay for inventive re-imaginings of South African history.
The obverse question, asked by Lewis Nkosi, is why black writing remains unaffected by post-modernism, and part of his answer is in the negative: “It is important to trace much of the backwardness of black writing to its state of internal isolation and surveillance under the apartheid regime and some of its disabilities to wounds inflicted by cultural deprivation and social neglect.” Realist writers are given voice in the collection – in the form of interviews with Miriam Tlali and Mongane Wally Serote, both of whom justify the need for realistic protest during apartheid’s dark years.
Their juxtaposition with other writers does them little service, however. Serote’s championing of “the masses” as the subject of art, rather than the individual, is succeeded by Brian Macaskill’s insightful exploration of the fusion of the personal and the political in Jeremy Cronin’s prison poetry. Tlali describes her sacrifice of aesthetic standards in order to make people “conscious of the system”, only to be followed by two essays debating Coetzee’s complication of such an approach.
Coetzee’s 1987 appeal against history’s demands on fiction was not aimed at the historical novel, but rather political novels treating the present as historic. Contemporary and historical novels alike are the subject of Michael Green’s Novel Histories, a sustained treatise on history in South African fiction.
The main part of Green’s book is about historical fiction written as well as set earlier than the literature covered in Writing South Africa, but in its arguments about history it engages with similar theoretical territory.
Green argues against “continuous history”, which casts the past in the image of the present, and thus not only teaches us nothing about that past, but also ironically tells us nothing new about the present. Green is aware of post-modernist arguments that all history is a construction of the present, aware too of the Marxist teleologies of Georg Lukcs and Frederic Jameson, but he enlists their insights without ever joining up. Green’s working hypothesis is “resistant form” – the ability of novels to recreate historical events as a point of difference from which to challenge the present. He pursues this paradox by meticulous analysis of the novels’ contexts, composition and reception.
Discussing Oliver Walker, for example, the author of two novels about the “miscegenator” John Dunn and the fall of the Zulu kingdom, Green distinguishes between the earlier Proud Zulu (1949), in which characters move on the wave of historical events, and Zulu Royal Feather (1961), which degenerates into erotic sensationalism and erratically motivated character.
The difference, he argues, has much to do with the decline in the historical role of Walker’s liberal beliefs between the two dates of composition. Such is Green’s investigation of the two drafts of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi or of Daphne Rooke’s Wizard’s Country. His strategy is not to make simple one-to-one correspondences between historical fiction and the historical record. Instead, by investigating narrative structure, genre, prose and tense, he charts the various authors’ historical visions.
Green also considers novels which treat the present and future as history. His investigation of the present-as-history via the detective genre, however, while an absorbing essay in itself, shifts the focus away from mainline political novels. True, this is a well-covered corpus – in the Writing South Africa collection, for instance – but Green’s writing is so insightful that the analysis is missed.
The concentration of Novel Histories on form recalls Coetzee’s interest in writing which “evolves its own paradigms and myths” in order “to show up the mythic status of history”, though Green’s argument at the same time does give history real status. But then critics like David Attwell, writing in the collection, do find historicity even in Coetzee’s post-modernist fictions, so the paradox is not Green’s alone. Perhaps he is letting himself eat cake and keep it too, but Novel Histories remains compulsory reading for anyone interested in the details or theories of fictional treatments of history.