There was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed that every novel telling a South African story had to be “set against the turbulent backdrop of a country in transition”. No more. That turbulent backdrop would appear to be receding ever further into the background.
South African fiction seems to be having a bit of a boom at the moment -— I have before me 12 novels published since the beginning of the year. All but two of those 12 are by white writers. So it would seem the bulk of our present literary production is white, but perhaps more fruitful than asking why would be to ask how: how such novels articulate their whiteness.
Finuala Dowling’s novel What Poets Need (Penguin) gives a clue. It is about a Cape poet, John Carson, living with his sister, e-mailing an absent love, writing the odd poem. He muses: “In my juvenilia there is a lot about the veld and nature. I thought that’s what one wrote about. Like Paton: There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. Later I thought the topic ought to be oppression, violence, atrocity. Like Serote: if I pour paraffin on a white child’s face. At last, I turned inwards, described what I saw …”
Apart from the fact that Alan Paton was not exactly a nature-writer, this is a neatly parodic history of South African poetry, or at least of major historic tendencies in both our poetry and our fiction. For a long time there was a tension between the need to deal with broad social realities and the desire to handle more subtle, personal inner states.
What Poets Need is itself an example of a turning inward. It makes no big statements; it eschews the big political gesture. It is more concerned with the texture of everyday life and the intimate dramas of ordinary people, which here obviously means ordinary white people. This is what Njabulo Ndebele called “the rediscovery of the ordinary”, though when Ndebele used that phrase in the early 1990s, he was offering such a rediscovery as a counter to fictions in which political issues were dramatised, and novels were over-determined by the history pressing upon them.
But it seems this new turning inward has been fruitful, possibly because turning inward is something novels do so well — the novel is, after all, the great bourgeois art form, the great avatar of individual subjectivity. Dowling’s novel has this inward turn in common with the majority of the other novels: the “backdrop of a turbulent” etc is far in the background, hazy. Barbara Erasmus’s Even with Insects (Penguin) gestures towards issues such as affirmative action, but doesn’t make much of them; her characters’ romantic and professional lives are in the foreground. Craig Higginson’s The Hill (Jacana) is about a period in the life of a schoolboy in old-South-Africa Natal, and the complexities of the relationships in which he is involved. Ken Barris’s Summer Grammar (Brevitas, published late last year) is a dark farce that puts the sex lives of a group of (white) people under the microscope.
There is a strong strain of auto-biography here, too — the classic form of turning inward. Helgé Janssen’s Tell Tale (Pine Slopes) is a chaotic, barely fictionalised account of one person’s cultural work and sexual/spritual evolution. In Foolish Delusions (Jacana), Anne Schuster entwines the stories of two women, one contemporary and obviously close to the author, and the other her great-grandmother. There is politics here, but it is not the racial politics that has so long been a staple of South African fiction.
Of course, at any given time you’re likely to find some South African fiction rooted in childhood. Troy Blacklaws’s Blood Orange (Double Storey) is the tale of Gecko from his cheery childhood to conscription into the (white) South African army and flight to Europe. Its attention to the textures of childhood and youth echoes Denis Hirson’s recent memoir-cum-prose-poem I Remember King Kong (the Boxer), as well as other South African works such as The Children’s Day and Gardening by Night.
The army experience Gecko escapes is at the centre of The Persistence of Memory (Double Storey) by Tony Eprile. This avowed Bildungsroman does deal with our history and politics, which perhaps has something to do with the fact that Eprile lives outside South Africa — his willingness to take on the big issues is shared with Lisa Fugard in her first novel, Skinner’s Drift (Picador Africa).
Fugard has lived overseas since the early 1980s. The book feels American in some ways — it’s as though Fugard has taken a clutch of tropes common to South African fiction and recycled them. There is a racial encounter in the first few pages of the novel, and Fugard continues to deal with race through the book. But much of it feels old. Perhaps it’s the racial encounter, and our tortured history more generally, that still defines South Africa for an overseas readership, but it would not be surprising to discover that white writers writing from within the country simply feel that at this moment they have nothing fresh to say about all that.
The greats of an earlier generation, André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, were compelled to put the drama of race upfront in their novels (though Coetzee, characteristically, pushes it further, into a consideration of otherness and power). White writers such as Dowling seem to be simply sidestepping the issue of race, choosing not to address it, unless very obliquely. They know it’s there, they just don’t want to talk about it.
Maybe that is as it should be. For today’s white writers to write about race is to risk falling into whingeing-whitey syndrome, or, perhaps worse, doing white guilt all over again. It’s not that race should be forgotten, or not discussed, but nowadays novels don’t really need to do what radio shows, the opinion pages of news-papers and online letters from the president can do so much better.