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Journal of Southern African Studies

Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimerand J. M. CoetzeeAuthor(s): Paul RichSource: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Oct., 1982), pp. 54-73Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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Tradition

and

Revolt

in South African

Fiction:

the

Novels

of

Andre

Brink,

Nadine

Gordimer

and

J.

M.

Coetzee

PAUL

RICH

I'm

suspicious

of

lines

of division betweena

European

and

a

South Africancontext,

because

I think our experience emains argely

colonial

J

M

Coetzeel

Coetzee's statement might

not receive

unanimous

approval

from critics

of

South African

literature,

but

it

does

pinpoint

a central area

of

concern

with

which

all

white writers at

least have had

to

come

to

terms. This

is the

legacy

of

a

colonial

ideology

which

has

permeated

South African white society

and

indeed became tightened

throughout

the era of industrialisation.

As recent

historiography has shown, the hegemony of white racial ideology, whether

expressed

in the

form of some variant

of "segregation",

"trusteeship",

"baaskap", "apartheid"

or

"multinational

development" is not merely

some

atavistic

legacy

from

a preindustrial

frontier era.

In a complex

and

multivariant manner,

white

racial

ideology

in South Africa had represented

a

pragmatic

form of modernisation

of an essentially

Victorian colonial

ethic

imported

through

both the mercantile and

trading

links with

theimid'-

nineteenth

century

Cape and later through the

impact of

mining in Kimberley

and

the

Witwatersrand. Thus,

while

accommodating

this ethic to the needs of

an expanding capitalist economy and adjusting it to the continual processes of

urbanisation and proletarianisation,

white power in South

Africa can

also be

said to have fostered a continuing

link with the Victorian

colonial tradition

which has retained at

its core an essentially anti-industrial

and agrarian

view of

a

rural golden age.

It is in this

sense

that the essential South

African

experience

can

be said,

following Coetzee, to be still colonial

in

essence.

It is

proposed,

therefore,

in this

paper

to

look at

this

tradition

through

three

important

contemporary

South

African

novelists,

concentrating

in

particular

on a single work by each. In Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974),

Andre Brink's Rumours of Rain (1978)

and J.

M. Coetzee's

In

the

Heart

of

the

Country

(1976, English

ed.

1977) many

of the

essential

tensions and

contradictions

latent

in

the

South

African colonial

experience

can

be

unravelled.

If much South

African literature

has,

via such

works

as

The

Story

I

"Speaking:

J. M.

Coetzee",

Speak,

Vol

1.

No 3

May/June

1978,

p.

23.








Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction 55

of an African Farm, The Little Karoo, The Beadle and Cry the

Beloved

Country,

owed a

considerable

amount

to

the metropolitan tradition

of

literary

realism which has underpinned the rise of the novel in the West,2 the era of

the

search for a more autonomous South African

literary-identity

since the

early

1960s has been accompanied by a growing realisation that that tradition itself

is becoming increasingly obsolete. Dating from about 1966 with

the

publication of Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World, this crisis in

the

traditional novel form of literary realism and its inherently liberal assumption

of

individual meliorism and character development was compounded by

the

political turn inside South Africa itself. As increasingly repressive

security

legislation became established in the early 1960s, white writers found

themselves

in

growing isolation culturally and politically. The

short-lived

renaissance, as N. W. Visser has termed it, of black writing in South

Africa

ended

by about

1965

as writers like Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can

Temba,

Bloke

Modisine, Todd Matshikiza and Mazisi Kunune

were silenced

through exile or death.

3

For another decade or more, white writers wrote in

a

literary vacuum as links with black writing became sharply reduced and

this

tended to encourage the lurch towards a literary post-modernism which it

was

hoped could transcend the unwieldy instrument of the conventional

English

novel form whose cultural assumptions bore so little relationship to a

changing

South

African

scene. Already avant-garde Afrikaans literary circles via the

Sestigers had, in the early 1960s, begun the exploration towards a version of

literary existentialism, stimulated by such writers as Samuel Beckett, Jean Paul

Sartre

and

Eugene

lonesco.

The

effect of

this,

so

Andre Brink

claimed,

was to

escalate the

decolonising process

in

South African literature despite

the

European origins

of these writers

(although

his

own novels

were

to evolve

considerably beyond the youthful assertions of early Sestig towards,a search

into

the South African literary landscape4).

In

English writing, however,

it

was

the

publication

of

Nadine Gordimer's

The Conservationist

in

1974 which

significantly marked

the

direction for an

alternative literary standpoint

to

that

of the conventional colonial form. The degree of success of her achievement

and

her

influence

on

the

subsequent writing

of Brink

and

Coetzee

is

a

question

which

we propose

to

discuss later

in

this paper. However, before taking

this

up

it

is necessary

to

understand exactly what the essence

of

the

tradition

that

these

writers

were trying

to revolt

against really was.

The

substance

of

the

colonial

literary

tradition

While

The

Story of

An

African

Farm

represents

a crucial

landmark

in

the

emergence of a distinctly South African literary tradition and an assertion

2

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London, Chatto

and Windus, 1957.

I

N. W. Visser, "South Africa: The Renaissance

that failed", The Journal of Commonwealth

Literature, Vol XI, No 1, August 1976.

4

Andre P. Brink, "Die Kontek Van Sestig: Herkoms

en Situasie"

in

J. Polley (ed), Verslag

van die Simposium oor Die Sestigers, Cape Town and

Pretoria, Human and Rousseau, 1973, pp.

25-26. See also Eben Meiring, "The Case for the 'Nouveau Roman' Sestig, Vol 1, No

4

August

1964, pp. 27-33.








56 Journal of Southern African Studies

really of colonial revolt against Victorian metropolitan orthodoxy, its

significance can be over-rated

for

later South African

works.

Despite

its

individual success, The Story of an African Farm contrasts

with

the failure

of

the author's hopes

for

South African political development.

The

attainment

of

Union

in

1910

marked

the rise

of

an alternative

polital strategy by

South

Africa's ruling class of mine magnates and landed capitalists

to

that

of

Victorian liberalism. Instead of seeking the progressive incorporation of a

burgeoning proletariat

into the

central

institutions of

the state,

the

South

African system

of

segregation post

1910

began

to

evolve

into

the direction

of

exclusion via the process of progressive rustication and denial of civil rights

to

the black majority

in

the central urban areas

of

wealth creation. Pass laws,

influx control and the bolstering

of the

traditional chiefly power

in the

native

reserves via the 1927 Native Administration Act laid the foundations of what

was later to be known as the apartheid strategy of seeking to deflect the

political energies

of

the black political leadership

into

the rural tribal

reservations.

This

system, furthermore, underpinned an ever harsher process

of

primitive capital

accumulation

on the land

as

a

system

of

Prussian-style

neofeudalism was established from the time of the 1913 Natives Land Act.

Thus was established a tightly locking system

of

settler power

in

South Africa

rooted in close links between urban mining capital and control of large landed

estates, and

which

ensured unified

white

hegemony

to

facilitate the destruction

of the nascent African peasantry in such areas as the Eastern Cape, Orange

Free

State

and

Western Transvaal.

The

basis

for

an indigenous folk tradition

in

South Africa rooted

in

an African peasantry became more or less strangled

at

birth,6

and

the formation

of

an

indigenous black culture had

to

await

the

emergence

of

a proletarian consciousness rooted

in

the life of the townships.

Into

such a cultural vacuum, the "colonial tradition" of South African

literature was laid in the formative years between the Anglo-Boer war and the

attainment

of

Union. Many

of

Olive Schreiner's hopes for South African

cultural evolution became bypassed.

8

Milnerism during these years marked the

intrusion

of

an aggressive and militantly self-conscious ruling class ideology

rooted

in

Bismarkian state socialism, whilst at the same time manipulating

some

of

the more

conspicuously vulgar

of

Victorian colonial stereotypes.

In

this milieu the Kiplingesque affection for indigenous colonised cultures (later

For a study of these developments

on

the land

in

South Africa see

Colin

Bundy, The Rise

and Fall of

the

South African Peasantry,

London, Heinemann, 1979.

6

For Sol Plaatje's hopes for an

organic African culture in South Africa

rooted in folk

tradition see the study by Brian Willan,

"The Role of Solomon T. Plaatje (1876-1932)

in South

African Society",

PhD

Thesis, School

of

Oriental

and African

Studies, November

1979.

7

David Coplan, "The African Musician and the Development of the Johannesburg

Entertainment Industry, 1900-1960", Journal of Southern African Studies,

Vol 5, No

1

April

1979, pp. 135-164.

8

For the political context

of this see Stanley Trapido, "The Friends of the Natives:

merchants, peasants and the political and ideological structure of liberalism

in the Cape,

1854-1910", Shula Marks and Anthony

Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial

South Africa, London, Longman, 1980 pp.

247-274:

Paul Rich,

"The

Dilemmas

of

South

African

Liberalism:

White

Liberals, Racial Ideology and the Politics of Social Control

in

the era

of

South

African industrialisation, 1883-1948",

PhD

Thesis, University of Warwick, 1980.








Tradition

and Revolt in South

African Fiction

57

expressed

in

a

novel

like

Kim

(1906)) and

derived

from British

paternalism

in

India failed

to

take root.9 Instead,

the

colonial novel became

inseparably

wedded to the

entrenchment of

settler colonialism

and the

eulogising in

Carlylean terms of the

white

adventurer-hero.

The archetypes of this

form

came to be such characters as Rider Haggard's Alan Quatermain and John

Buchan's David

Crawfurd who

seek both to

extend the limits

of "white

civilisation",

of

which

they

are

guardians, and stave off threats

to

it

in

the

form

of

potential black

resistance such

as the Reverend

Laputa

in

Prester John.

10

This form

did not, even

in

its

heyday

in

the

early years of the

century, enjoy

a

totally

unchanged sway, as

investigation

into

a writer such

as

Douglas

Blackburn

-

author

of

anti-Haggard type works

-

indicates.

"I

However, the

popular vogue left an indelible mark on the nascent South African literary

tradition and helped to

shape the

eventual reaction

against it.

What was

particularly

significant was

its

widening and

coarsening of a

pastoral-type

tradition that

can be traced back in

the English

novel to its eighteenth

century

roots.

In

the classic novel

form of Defoe,

Richardson and

Fielding developed a

genre

centred around a

particular view

of

the landscape. This

grew

out

of

the

pastoral

idiom

and became expressive of

an

ideology that

particularised

between city,

on

the one hand, and

countryside

on

the other. The

countryside,

in

the form of

its

domination by the great

landed

capitalist estates of the

eighteenth century, became the ultimate repositary of moral worth and social

standing and the

ideological focal

point for a

society that

perpetuated

aristocratic

social norms

during

an

age

of

industrialisation

and

the

emergence

of a

middle class. In

terms of

narrative, too, the

pastoral genre

frequently

underpinned

the

social tensions

portrayed

in

the

eighteenth

century

novel such

as

Tom

Jones who, after

losing

his

inheritance

becomes

eventually

restored

to

effect

the

right

iharriage

match and retire

into

the

country

as

a

gentleman

squire.

Not

that this tradition

sought

only

to

portray an

active,

settled and

"traditional" society, for

it

continually sought

to

explore the

changes

of

fortune and

social status that

underpinned the

central area of focus

in

personal

relationships.

In

another

sense, though,

the

development

of the

novel tradition

in

the

English cultural

core was also

intimately bound up

with

the

development

9 For Kipling's failure

to

get much from South Africa see Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of

Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works, Panther Books, 1979, esp. chap. four. His journeys from

Cape

Town

were narrow

-

5 miles

to

Newlands, 16 miles

to

Muizenburg and 26 miles to

Simonstown.

With

Milner's recall briefly

to

London

in

1901 and Rhodes's death

in

1902, Kipling

found his role change from the herald of the Anglo-Saxon dream in the Transvaal to "the recipient

of continuing news of disaster, the court poet of a dynasty that was at its end" (p. 302). See also

the important essay by Eric Stokes "'The voice of the Hooligan': Kipling and Commonwealth

Experience"

in

Neil

McKendrick

(ed),

Historical

Essays:

Studies in

English Thought

and

Society,

London, Europa publications, 1974, pp. 285-301.

"

For

Buchan and

his

manipulation of the pastoral idiom

in

Prester John, see my paper

"Milnerism and a Ripping Yarn: Transvaal Land settlement

and

John Buchan's novel, Prester

John, 1901-1910", History Workshop Paper, University

of

Witwatersrand, February

1981.

" Stephen Gray,

"Piet's

Progress: Douglas

Blackburn's Satire

on

Capitalist

Penetration

of

the

Transvaal

in

the 1890s", History Workshop Paper, University of Witwatersrand, February 1981;

special issue

of

English in Africa, Vol 5, No 1, March 1978 on the journalism of Blackburn.








58

Journal

of Southern African

Studies

of the metropolitan

capitalist economy

on the basis of colonial and imperial

expansion: Sir Thomas Bertram,

for

example,

in

Jane

Austen's Mansfield

Park

is

an estate proprietor

in

the island

of

Antigua

in

the Caribbean. Thus,

what one

is

observing

within

this

novel tradition is, as Raymond

Williams has

observed, "that

most difficult world

to

describe,

in

English

social history: an

acquisitive, high bourgeois society

at the

point

of its most evident interlocking

with an agrarian capitalism that

is

itself mediated by inherited

titles and by the

making

of

family

names".

12

However,

it

is this

alliance

between a rising

entrepreneurial

class and

the landed

aristocracy

which

indelibly shaped

the

form the English

novel was to take through the nineteenth

century, just as it

shaped

the

pattern

of

political

transformation

during

the Victorian age.

Indeed, despite

the continuing process

of

industrialisation

throughout the

nineteenth century and the emergence of a fully-fledged working class, the

English industrial novels lived only uneasily

with the

city.

As Martin Wiener

has recently shown in an important essay

on

English culture,

this can perhaps

be

in

part explained by

a

society

that

has

only

half

accepted

the

consequences

of

industrialism

despite being

the

first

to

push

through an industrial

revolution.

13

The

protracted nature of English industrialisation

certainly

ensured

the

continuing importance

within

English political

thought

of the

rural landscape

and

it

became

interwined

too with the rise of

class conflict.

By the last quarter

of the century, a gentrified ruling class

tended increasingly

to assert the pre-eminence of rural values in opposition to the burgeoning

labour movement in the cities and the

rural ties of deference

and subordination

became

easily

linked

by

the 1890s

with

the

fresh

phase

of

jingoist imperial

expansion

that

hit

the

popular

mind.'4

In

many ways

the town-country

division became internationalized

in

fictional imagery as

colonies

became rural

areas

to

metropolitan,

urban Britain.

It

is in this

latter

respect that we can locate the growing

significance by the

early

twentieth

century

of

the landed estate model and the pursuit

of

rural

gentility

with

colonial

expansion.

This

represented

the culmination

of

a longer

term

middle

class

pursuit

of

both profits and respectability

abroad; and the

literature

of

this colonialism,

in

its

diverse forms, can be

seen

to

supplement

in

many respects the earlier landed

estate genre dominant

in

English fiction.

Thus,

it

is the

plantation-estates

of

Kipling and Somerset Maugham which

come

to

replace Jane

Austen's landed

estates,

whilst

Joseph

Conrad and Joyce

Cary

introduce

a

new

trading

world. In this

context,

England becomes

the

locus

of

"home"

and an idyllic rural

memory standing in sharp contrast to

tropical

humid climates

of

the

east

or

the darkness

of the African bush.

15

At

12

Raymond

Williams,

The Country

and

the City. London,

Paladin

Books, 1975,

p.

143.

13

Martin

J. Wiener,

English

Culture and

the

Decline of the

Industrial

Spirit, 1850-1980,

Cambridge

University Press,

1981.

14

One

key

event

in

what

can be seen

as a

cultural

conflict

between

the

fin

de siecle

mood,

represented

by The Yellow

Book,

and

the jingoist

spirit, represented

by

the yellow press

of

Northcliffe,

was the trial

and conviction

of Oscar Wilde

in 1895 and

the outbreak of the Boer

War

in 1899. See

the neglected

The

Eighteen Nineties,

by

Holbrook Jackson,

Penguin Books,

1939,

p.

47

and passim.








Tradition

and

Revolt in

South African Fiction 59

the same time, in some potentially friendly climates such as upland areas of

Eastern and Southern Africa

or

parts of India and the Caribbean, it serves as a

setting

for

the reproduction

of

the old landed estate form in new colonial

conditions.

It

becomes possible therefore

to

see how the genre can take such a

ready hold

on

Southern African literature and shape a settler consciousness.

Interacting

with

the pressures

of

local sentiments, the dominant metropolitan

literary tradition became colonised in its outlook and the pastoral genre

became transformed

to

serve the needs of a new fictive geography rooted in a

different set

of

social conditions.

In

the work of Rider Haggard and Bertram

Mitford, for instance, African Societies became frozen in a timeless, pre-

colonial noble

savagery

that

stands completely antiposed

to

the

dominant

thrust of white settler colonialism. In this world, the imagery of the untamed

landscape that has not yet been subjected to European penetration becomes

richly laced with a conception of primitive licentiousness

-

in King Solomon's

Mines,

there is

the continued domination

on

the

horizon of the

twin

mountain

peaks

of

Sheba's Breasts, while

in

Jess, as Michael Rice has pointed out, the

landscape is described in terms denoting covert sexual passion and a

mythology of Africa as a corrupt Eden.

16

The

degree

to

which

this

imagery has continued

to

define popular fiction in

Southern Africa is

a question that has begun

to

receive some investigation,

especially

in

terms of

the

more recent

reformulation

of

African "Savagery"

and the vulgar pastoralisation of rural and animal imagery to suit the needs of

bush war

and counter insurgency.

17

Certainly, though,

the

growth

of

war

fiction

in

the late 1960s and 1970s

in

both Rhodesia and South Africa was

not

a

simple

re-invention of certain

long-held

settler

myths,

for

throughout

the

previous decades the genre had survived through the writings of,

for

example,

Stuart

Cloete,

Francis

Brett

Young

and Vera

Buchanan-Gould.

Cloete's

Turning Wheels (1937), especially, perpetuates the Buchan-Haggard genre

of

sinking fierce African

tribesman

back

into

the landscape and

the

corrupting

implications this entails for the white settler presence. As the wise woman

Anna de

Jong,

who in

some

ways

acts as the conscience

of the

novel,

at one

point ruminates:

... the dangerhad seemedmost likely

to

come from the slow wearingdown

of

disease

and from

the outside

pressure

of

the wilds

which, forcing

them

always

nto

a

smaller

circle, restricting

hem

and

ringing

hem

about,

was

reducing

heir numbersand their

vitalityby

its

passiveweight;

but when one

came

to

think of

it

these

nativeswere

only

about

another

manifestation

f this

malignant

orce.

8

The

deeply

embedded nature

of this

kind

of fiction

can

in

part explain

the

kind of dilemmas confronting English-speaking writers such as Alan Paton

and

Nadine Gordimer

by

the

late 1950s as

they sought

to

break out

of this

51Williams,

op. cit., p. 337.

16

Michael Rice, "Fictional Strategies

and

the Transvaal landscape", History

Workshop paper,

University

of the Witwatersrand, February

1981, p.

5.

17 See D. Maughan-Brown,

"Myths on the March"

in this issue.

18

Stuart Cloete, Turning Wheels,

London,

Collins, 1937, p. 314.








60

Journal

of

Southern

African Studies

constricting idiom. While Paton can

be

said

to have become

bogged

down by

the time of his second novel Too

Late the Phalarope (1955) with the massive

weight

of the

white racial imagination

and

its

fears and psychosis towards

inter-racial sex, Gordimer's development

is a slow path towards the realisation

of the historicity of African culture and the move towards seeing the African

landscape not as a deadening

backdrop for the white segregationist

imagination but the focus for a liberating African consciousness that

will

eventually transcend

white

cultural

and political

domination.

These features are only

to

be

partly seen in Gordimer's first widely

successful A World of Strangers (1958)

which is notable for its rejection of the

orthodoxy of the landscape. As the novel's central character Toby

Hood

moves along the towns of the East Rand, for example, he becomes aware

of:

the queernessof the landscapemanmade o a startlingdegree - as if the peoplehad

beenpresented

with

an uplandplateau

and

left

to

finish

it,

to

createa

background

f

natural eatures nsteadof to fit in with

one

-

and at the same ime curiously mpty,as

if trulyabandoned

o

man.

19

Almost the

exact opposite

of the

Eden

myth

associated

with

Haggard

-

for

here Gordimer is emphasising the

artificial aspects of a seemingly "natural"

landscape through the impact of gold

mining and the failure of man to blend

in with

the natural surroundings. Similarly,

in

the case

of

a hunting trip,

Toby

sees a landscape signally lacking

any

of

the eroticism

of

Haggard

and

maintaining a frightening malevolence more akin to Conrad's Heart

of

Darkness:

Walking hrough his landscape,so

thinlygreen, so hostile with

thorn

that the living

growthseemeda thingof steel rather han sap, I thoughtof old religiouspictures,

with

their wildernesses

nd

their

bleeding

attenuated aints. This was a Gothic landscape,

where

he

formalized attern

of

interwoven

horns

hat often borders uchpictures,

was

real; here

one

could imagine a martyrdomsymbolized by the brutality

of these

clutching, nanimateyet live instruments

f

malice20

This is certainly no tamed pastoral wilderness and the association with old

religious paintings suggests more

of a barbaric nightmare. However, Gordimer

at

this

stage

has

not

fully

resolved

through

her fiction the exact

form

of

the

relationship between the European intruder and the African landscape

and

most of the African figures in her novel emerge from within an urban,

township milieu. Certainly

she has

no

stereotyped African figure such as

Paton's Reverend Stephen Kumalo, and

it

took her

a considerable

time

to

evolve a

more

complex

view

of

African

society as

in

The Conservationist.

By

this

time, though, both her work as well as that

of

other modern South

African

novelists had evolved considerably from the dominant mode of literary realism

in

the 1950s.

It

was the transformation

in technique towards a more complex

symbolism

that

ushered

in

a

more detached view towards the surrounding

African landscape, and a search

for

an alternative focal point

of

reference

'9

Nadine

Gordimer, A World of

Strangers, Penguin Books, 1958, p.

116.

20

Ibid.,

p.

223.








Tradition and

Revolt in South

African

Fiction 61

away

from the

European tradition,

that marked the

developments

in the South

African novel over the following twenty years.

Three attempts at developing the South

African Novel

The

two

decades

from the time of the publication of World of Strangers

in

1958 saw significant political turbulence

in South Africa. Aside from the

crushing

of

black political resistance

to

white power, there was also a

continuous process

of

modernisation

of

capitalist control of the economy.

As

both mining and secondary industry continued

to

enjoy a long

boom

after the

initial hiccup post-Sharpeville

in

1960,

the business class came to occupy a

greater degree of political prominence in decision-making than it had in the

earlier years

of

Nationalist rule after 1948. Some observers

have

even seen

this

as

ushering

in

a

longer structural

transformation

in

the

political system

towards a deracialised and ultimately

more democratic society, though neo-

marxist critics of this thesis on the left have continued to argue the continuing

class basis behind this white power and the limits

to

which a semi-peripheral

capitalist economy such as South Africa's can co-opt an urbanised black

proletariat and institutionalise permanent black resistance in the "white"

urban

areas.

While this crucial political debate between liberals and neo-marxists

continues,

one

phenomenon

that would

probably be accepted by

both schools

is the greater political self-awareness

of the South African business class.

Having frequently arrived as a group

of nouveaux riches

within

a single

generation,

and

lacking any countervailing power

from trade unions and

labour organisations, this is a class

that can exert a far more visible hegemony

than its counterparts

in North

America

or Western Europe. Its equivalents

probably only

lie in

other right-wing semi-peripheral

regimes like Brazil where

labour resistance can also be checked

by an authoritarian state system.

This

significance

of this for

the South

African novel

is

reflected

in

both

Gordimer's

The

Conservationist

and Andre

Brink's

Rumours

of

Rain

which

have linked a critique of the traditional

pastoral view within the colonial novel

to

themes centred around the successful capitalist entrepreneur; Mehring, an

industrialist

in

iron

and steel

in

the case

of The Conservationist; and Martin

Mynhardt,

a commercial

magnate

and chairman

of

the "Afrikaans

Institute

of

Commerce"

in

the case

of

Rumours

of Rain.

The

similarity

of

these

two

figures

is not

merely

coincidental.

In North

America

or

Western

Europe

business figures as central characters in novels seeking to reflect underlying

social tensions and conflicts

remain comparatively

rare.

In

such

a

relatively

closed

and controlled

society

like South

Africa with

such

relatively

colourless

social areas as

politics,

the

media and even intellectual

life,

the

successful

business

elite

represents

an obvious

area

for

exploring

the tensions

within

South Africa's

modernisation.

As

the

one

South

African

group, too,

that has

entered

the

international arena

of

continuous jetsetting,

the

business group








62

Journal

of

Southern

African

Studies

can be used

as

a vehicle

for the

exploration

of

a

more

universal theme

of

human alienation within the modern order.

In

the case

of

Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist, Mehring

is

all

this

plus an added symbol

for

the thinness

of

white roots

on

the red, eroded soil

of

Africa.

Though

a

wealthy entrepreneur, Mehring

suffers

significant poverty

in

terms of human relationships: divorced, he has a son who goes

to

live with his

mother

in

New York

in

order

to

escape military

service.

Mehring keeps both a

flat and a mistress in Johannesburg but

for

escape and as a means of tax relief

he buys a farm outside the city which is within easy reach on the freeway. He is

basically only

a weekend

farmer, though

even so some of the faint strains

of

the

Eurocentric

view of what a white farm in Africa

ought

to be

creep through

in

the novel: he hopes

to

plant oaks

on his

estate and eventually does get round

to planting two expensive chestnuts at a hundred rands each, ostensibly to

provide a crop for the Africans

on

the farm when Mehring (and white rule)

have passed from the scene, but also

to

fulfill a certain rural ideal:

Two

great

round

chestnuts dark

over

the

stoep

on

a Transvaal arm.

It

would be

somethingextraordinary.

ut

on

the other

hand

indigenous

rees where

possible,

not

even

ordinary

xotics

ike

eucalyptus

nd

poplar;

he

has

the

companionvolume

to the

wild

flower

book, a book

of

indigenoustree species. Anyway there really isn't a

farmhouse

yet;

that

place

could

perhaps

be fixed

up

one

day but

it

hasn't the right

character,

doesn't

look

as

if it

were ever intended o

be a real

farmhouse.

The

curve

where

he road fromthe entrance o

the property urnsup towards he complexof farm

buildings

eems

right:a

sort

of

dignifiedapproach

o

where,oneday, a farmhouse nd

its

garden

would

be

differentiated rom the

farm proper, presideover it. 'Turn right

when

you

come to

the

big

chestnut rees'.2'

The chestnuts

fully grown

will

be able

to

blend

in with

a

'proper

farmhouse',

which

will

hopefully

be built

by then,

in order

to,

complete

the

creation

of

a

European-farm-in-Africa,

for even

the chestnut

trees he

planted

still

kept

the

earth

from

which

they

were

uprooted

in

Europe.

. .

The

Conservationist, therefore,

seeks

to

explore

the obsession within the

white South African psyche, as represented by Mehring, for emulating the

European pastoral

tradition

of

aristocratic

civility.

Here after all is

history

repeating

itself

again,

with

a

successful business class seeking

to

retire, as its

English counterpart did,

back

to

rural

gentility. Except

that

in

Mehring's

case

these are

very

much

pursuits

of

the

jet age.

There is

really

no

opportunity

to

completely

retire out

into

the

country

for

even here he

is

connected

by

telephone

to

New York.

Furthermore, Mehring cannot hope ultimately

to

connect

to

the rural

landscape

even as

much

as

the

English gentry

of

the

eighteenth century.

It is the

African farm workers led

by

the

astute Jacobus

who actually run the farm in his absence and ultimately bury the nameless

dead black

body

that

is

found

there, improperly

buried

by

the

police

and

rediscovered after a

flood

unleashed

by

rain

coming, significantly,

from the

Mozambique

Channel.

The

Africans

on

the

farm,

in

contradistinction

to

the

latter day coloniser Mehring and the hemmed-in Indian trader-intermediaries,

21

Nadine

Gordimer, The

Conservationist,

London,

Jonathan Cape, 1974,

p. 212.








Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction 63

represent those forces in harmony with landscape. Just as the nameless body

ultimately

"took

possession

of this

earth, theirs; one

of them"22 so

the

Africans are perceived by Gordimer as representing the forces of true

tradition.

This tradition, however, is interpreted not in the conventional Western

historical sense but anchored by a restatement of Zulu mythology borrowed

from Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu. As Judie

Newman has pointed out, each quotation from Callaway, such as those

introducing the "Amatongo"

or

ancestors

or

the bringing

of

rain and floods

by

the

rainmaker,

coincide with an

event within

the

novel,

thus

forming

"organising points

for a

subtext which

slowly comes into the foreground".

23

Furthermore, Newman has emphasised the feminine basis behind much

of this

mythology and its counterposing the masculine colonialism of Mehring's

world with its latent sexual fascism. Especially via the spirit-possessed wife

of

one of the Africans

on the

farm, Phineas, Gordimer shows how the

unconscious

actions

of the woman

shape the life

of

the surrounding African

society and its articulation of a different set of values to the dominant white

society of South Africa. However, one is left wondering how strongly

Gordimer meant

this

mythological anchoring

to

be taken, for

in

one sense by

resorting

to

such an archaic and pre-industrial basis for African values there is

the danger of reinstating the same cultural fabrication as was endemic to the

colonial tradition represented by Haggard. Just as the novel of white

penetration

into

Africa

resorted

to

a mythological

view

of

the African

past

in

order to assert the hegemony of white power, so the withdrawal of that power

can

lead

to

the same

device, only

this

time

to

illustrate

its endemic

hollowness.

This, however, does

not

appear

to

have been Gordimer's main intention.

The black body comes

to

represent an important symbol for

the

possibility

of

the blacks coming at some future date into repossession of the land, though

this is not some simple Vicoesque resolution back to an already formulated

mythological culture. Gordimer also suggests the important cultural divorce

existing

between the female

spirit

medium

and the

surrounding

values

of

a

modern industrial culture, which indelibly intrude and shape the African's

thought processes:

Now

andthen herwordsbecame ongs

she

saidsheheard

n herhead

withoutever

having

learnt;and the songs became

words

again, telling dreams.She was

so

exhausted hat

sometimesher

voice

was lost;

Izak's radio

took

up

with

an

advertising ingle

about

washingpowder hat the childrenknewby heart.But the sweat hathad filled

the

room

with

the

smell

of

her (as if

she

were leaving her body like smoke)

while she

danced,

continued o pourandtricklewhile shetalked,startedand oozedcontinually,as if her

wholebody wereweeping,as

if

everyporewerea puncture

rom

which

ife were

running

out. There

was

no

point at

which this

gathering

of

hers broke up.

Released

rom the

bindingrhythm

of

clapping,peoplegot

restless

and

began

o

shift

and talk.

They simple

found

their way out

to

go about

other

things. AfterwardsSolomon suddenly

aw

her,

22

Ibid.,

p.

252.

23

Judie

Newman,

"Gordimer's

The Conservationist:

'That

Book

of Unknown

Signs"',

Critique: Studies

in Modern

Fiction,

Vol XXII, No 3, 1981, p.

32.








64 Journal of Southern African

Studies

washingher hands

n

a tin basin n the yard ike a womanwho hasjust finishedplucking

a fowl

or

some

other

ordinary

work24

The proletarianised farm labourers thus only indirectly related

to

this rather

exotic voice from the past and there

is

a considerable demystification of the

power of the religious symbols the spirit medium represents. Gordimer's

narrative suggests that the Zulu cultural component is but one part of a wider

political process of self-identification

on

which the novel does

not

seek to

elaborate but

which Gordimer

herself

starts

to

confront in

her

next

novel

Burger's Daughter (1979). Instead The Conservationist is centered around the

significance

of

sexual language

within

the text

as

a

substitute

for

a political

consciousness.

At its

crudest

it is

symbolised by Mehring's

assertion

of

white,

masculine, colonial power

on

a

universal

basis

on

the

jet flight

from

Europe

to

Africa. Fondling and petting a young Portuguese girl throughout the flight,

who

significantly remains both passive and silent, Mehring's act coincides

with

the parodying

of

the "traditional" Haggard

view

of

colonialism towards

Africa itself

in the

form of

the "Golden

reclining nudes

of the

desert"

which

lay beneath the speeding jet.

25

Rather differently, there is the curious case of

Mehring's

own

demise at

the

end

of

the

novel when

he is

trapped

with a

woman hitch-hiker

who

lures

him

down

a

side

road

for

sexual purposes.

This

scene represents

in

many respects

a finale

to

the

previous ongoing

tendencies

within the novel and serves as a bizarre coming

to

earth by Mehring from the

continual

flights

of

assertive

fantasy

that have hitherto

preoccupied

him

(and

which

is personified

in

the jet flight). Just as the previous flood has

''rearranged a landscape as a petrified wake" and smashed the basis

of

Mehring's pastoral dream,26

so

the encounter

with

the hitch-hiker

challenges

the sexual chauvinism endemic in Mehring's attitude to women. The woman's

features reflect

the

industrial wasteland

in

which he

has ended

up

with

here:

"The

grain

of the skin is

gigantic, muddy

and

coarse.

A

moon

surface.

Grey-

brown with

layers

of

muck that don't cover the

blemishes.

,

2 7

Mehring

however is led on, just as he has been continually led on by the idea of the farm

which

he

knows

in

some respect

is

only a romantic idealisation: "O Mehring,

how you romanticize,

how

you've fallen

for

that place

-

A stink

to

high

heaven."

28

The end product

of

this is the sudden emergence "as of a feature

of the

landscape

not

noticed before"

of

a

"thug

in shorts"

who

could be

"one

of

their

rugby

forward

dicks.

Or a

mine

detective

maybe".29

It is

almost as

if

the landscape

is

seeking revenge against Mehring's assertion

of

individual

autonomy.

The

"thug"

could be

part

of

a

blackmail

plot

with the

concomitant

risk

of a

Sunday newspaper

scandal

or

else a

genuine policeman

out to

prosecutehim underthe ImmoralityAct if the woman turnsout to be "coloured"

24

The

Conservationist, p.

158.

25

Ibid.,

p.

120.

26

Ibid.,

p.

232.

27

Ibid., p. 246.

28

Ibid.,

p.

236.

29

Ibid.,

p.

248.








Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction

65

(her dark complexion

leaves him uncertain). The end is left open, for in a

sense

the actual outcome no longer remains germane

to the central theme of

the

novel. By the end it is

the Africans and their relationship to the landscape

that

hold the central sway and Mehring disappears,

Faustus-like, behind a welter

of

public ridicule that

he imagines

to

be the consequence

of his

actions.

Another possible interpretation, though, lies

in Mehring's own relationship

to the white society of which he is a part.

Throughout the novel

many

inherently political relationships have been translated

into sexual terms,

which

come

to

serve as an almost surrogate form

of political action. As the

prototype of the new style verlig industrialist

who looks towards at least

a

loosening of some of the more rigid mores

within South African Society,

Mehring's

own

moral stance

within

the novel remains

in

many

respects

ambiguous: a white coloniser, but unprepared to follow through at all costs

the political consequences

of maintaining white

power in South Africa. Whilst

thus seeking so far as

possible to live still off the benefits provided by South

African capitalism,

Mehring's position also reflects

a latent legitimation crisis

felt

by

a

crucial section

of

white political opinion, but never openly expressed.

Thus the "thug" can be seen as the extreme,

fascist response within

white

settlerdom

to

this moral and political ambiguity.

Significantly emerging

from

the

landscape of industrial

waste, the thug asserts

traditional white fears of

blacks

as

he warns

of the

threat

of theft:

"They

find you people here,

they rob

you. . . I'm telling you. They leave you naked. You won't have

nothing."30

Mehring,

in

a state

of

effective paranoia, imagines this

to

be the signal

for

others

to

come out and

expose him with the woman. He reveals himself as

in a

state

of

moral unease

with

a seeming representative

of white authority

who can

assert the

rigidities

of

the law

against

inter-racial

sex.

When pushed

to

the

limit, Mehring's seeming

autonomy and Eurocentric

liberalism stand weakly

bowing

before

the

crude representative

of

white

authoritarian power.

Gordimer's exploration

of

Mehring's political

stance can thus be

rooted

in

the limited verligtheid

which emerged within

the past decade as the effective

political successor

to the white liberal tradition that fell into demise with

the

disappearance

of

the Liberal Party

in

1968.

Its moral weakness

is

parodied

more

fully by Gordimer

in her next novel Burger's Daughter

in

the figure

of

Brandt

Vermeulen

who

has a "newspaper

image

of

the wordly man-about-

town

Afrikaner divorce, in a penthouse with

a sauna and squash

in

the

basement, apeing

the

parvenu luxury

of

Johannesburg"

1

and

indulges

in

collecting

various modernist

European

works

of

art

by Kandinsky, Georgia

O'Keefe

and

Picasso.

Unlike Mehring,

who

comes

from

German

South

West

African stock, Vermeulen is a full-blooded Afrikaner with important political

connections that secure Rosa

Burger

a

passport

to

Europe, despite

her father

having died in jail for his communist beliefs. Vermeulen

is a representative

of

the "new Afrikaners"

of

aesthetes and well-travelled

intellectuals who,

in

a

3' Ibid.,

p.

249.

11Nadine

Gordimer,

Burger's Daughter,

London,

Jonathan

Cape,

1979, p.

179.








66

Journal

of

Southern

African

Studies

contrastingly politically

self-conscious

novel,

seeks

to

rationalise

any

moral

inconsistencies within his political position

by appeals

to

an

historical

dialectic.

As a director

of one of

the

first

insurance

companies

to

break

into

Anglo-Saxon and Jewish domination

of South African

finance,

Vermeulen

is

keen

to

modernise

the

ideological legitimation

of white

power

and move

Nationalist thinking away

from its more

traditional,

biblical basis

in

the

Dutch

Reformed Church:

He did

not

come

back, Europeanized,

Americanized

y foreign

deas

of

equality

and

liberty,to destroywhatthegreat-great-grandfather

ied

for

at

the

hands

of the

kaffir

and

the

Boer

general fought

the

English for;

he

came

back

with

a

vocabulary

and

sophistry

o

transform he

home-whittled

estiny

of

white

to

rule

over

black

in

terms

that the generation f late twentieth enturyorientated,Nationalist ntellectualswould

advance as

the

first true social evolution of the

century,

since

nineteenth

century

Europeaniberalismhowed tselfspent nthefailureof racial ntegrationwherever his

was tried, and Communism,accusing the

Afrikaner

of

enslaving

the

blacks under

franchise

f

God's will, itself enslaved

whites

and yellowsalong

with

blacks

n

denialof

God's existence.

2

The

language

of sex

in

the

novel

remains also

consciously

subordinated

to

a

more overt political expressiveness

-

the

five

intervening years

since the

appearance

of

The

Conservationist

in

1974

had seen

the riots

in

Soweto

in

1976

and

the

succeeding

events

in

Cape

Town

and

elsewhere.

Reflecting

the

changed

political situation, the sexuality

of

Mehring

becomes significantly muted

in

Vermeulen and is confined

to its

symbolisation in a

"life-sized plastic female

torso, divided down the middle

into

a blue and red

side,

with its

vaginal labia

placed horizonally across the outside of its

pubis, like the lips of a mouth. The

tip of a clitoris poked a tongue. The nipples

were perspex suggesting at once

the hardness

of

tumescence and the ice

of

frigidity". Here the sexual

dimension

to

white, masculine,

colonial

power

appears

reduced

almost

to

the

level of the grotesque, a crude parody of

the modernist tradition otherwise

represented

in

Vermeulen's collection. Confined

to

the surface of "an antique

Cape yellow wood kist", the plastic female torso has become a virtual

historical memory

-

bypassed by the

resurgence of political forces that in

1974 were still muted.

Vermeulen, though,

remains a

peripheral character

in

a novel centred

-

unlike

the

Conservationist

Mehring

-

around the

figure

of

a

young

woman

Rosa

Burger and

her rise

to

growing political

consciousness in the

shadow

of

her father. In the case of Andre Brink's

Rumours of Rain, the figure of Martin

Mynhardt

as the

modern, verlig

Afrikaner industrialist remains central and the

novel reads almost as a pastiche of Gordimer

at certain points. The use

of

symbolism in the work remains starkly subordinated to a far stronger sense of

historical tradition than in Gor Jimer's works.

Writing first in Afrikaans and

later translating his

own work into

English, Brink

sees

his

writing as coming

within

a

distinct

tradition

of

South

African

writing, represented by figures like

32

Ibid.,

p.

175.

33

Ibid.,

pp. 181-2.








Tradition and Revolt in South African

Fiction

67

Bosman

and Paton, emerging out

of

a renaissance in the 1930s that produced

"a

vital

and

viable

new

literature

bearing

the

paradoxical stamp

of

art

in

being

both

utterly local

and

utterly universal

in

its

exploration

of

man

in

space and

time".

34

It is not surprising therefore to find in Rumours of Rain an

emphasis

upon

both

geographical space and

the

continual reassertion

of

historical

tradition, though not in a manner that suggests that Brink is bothered by

the

weight

of

a liberal colonial.tradition

on

South African writing in the manner of

Nadine Gordimer.

Martin

Mynhardt,

the central character in

Rumours

of Rain,

has

become

reduced

to

psychological and geographical rootlessness after his life in

South

Africaandthetimehegrewup onhisparents' arid farminGriqualand West. Unlike

Mehring, Mynhardt's

roots

go

back

deep

into

South African

soil

for

successive Mynhardt's had trekked into the interior since the eighteenth

century. Martin's

own

career

in

a sense develops out

of

this, except that this

jet-age

trek is more

one

of the

mind

in

search

of

a personal identity than land

and material possessions. Martin

is

an industrialist who has invested

successfully in mining interests and is now no longer concerned (unlike

his

brother

Theo)

with

the one farming possession

in

the Eastern Cape that

has

remained

in his

family

for

a century and a half. Martin's relationship to the

African

landscape

is

mainly confined

to

his suburban home where his garden

is

significantly stocked with prizes from within South Africa: strelitzia,

proteas

and three cycads illegally smuggled from his father's farm. This indulgence in

nature

for

material self-gratification partly resembles Mehring's weekend

farm,

for

through

connections within the

Nationalist establishment, Mynhardt

hears of a plan

to

consolidate the area where the farm is into the

Ciskei

Homeland and

is

able

to

bargain

with

the Minister concerned, Calitz,

for

a

price

of

R250,000

for

it, way beyond

its

true value

of

only some R40,000. The

central

action of the

novel

thus revolves

around a

weekend

trip Mynhardt

makes

with

his

son

Louis

down

to

the farm

to

persuade

his

ageing

mother

to

sell.

Unlike

Mehring's fantasy

world

of

jet

connections

to

Europe

and

Japan

and

simple freeway

drives

out

to his

farm,

which

is

only suddenly brought

crashing

down, Mynhardt's

one

is of

gradual

re-assessment

and

the

recognition

of

growing

loss

of

confrol. The

start of the trip

on the

Friday

afternoon

begins

in

the context of the conviction of his best friend from childhood days, Bernard

Franken,

for

political activities under the

Terrorism

Act,

while

his own son

Louis

has

returned

from

the

South

African

army's

invasion

of

Angola

in

a

state

of

bitterness with the

South

African

system and

loss of

respect

for

his

father. Furthermore Martin's own condition has been shattered by his sexual

excesses, culminating

in

a

heart

attack

whilst

making

love

to

his mistress Bea.

34 Andre P. Brink,

"English and the Afrikaans Writer", English

in Africa, Vol 3, No 1,

March

1976, p. 42. Brink too, argues that the South

African literature coming

in the wake

of The Story

of

An African Farm

failed to

advance her

sense of the Africanness

of the landscape and English

writers "seemed interested in the land only

what local colour it could

provide, with a number of

misspelt kopjes, sjamboks,

veldtschoens or

Vrouw Grobbelaars thrown in for good measure."








68 Journal of Southern African Studies

These

weaknesses are

compounded by the events

of

the weekend at his

mother's farm during which Mynhardt

breaks

his glasses.

Mynhardt's

world is

haunted

by

moral

inconsistencies

and loss

of

control

and his near-exile condition in London while

writing

the memoir reflects

this:

unable any more to indulge in full sexual relations, he is reduced to having a

Thai

call-girl come round

to

massage

him. This

is

the

fruition

in

a sense

of his

obsessive desire

to

fulfill the Western ideal

of

personal autonomy at the

expense

of

any

social

obligation,

the

culmination

of

the

capitalist

ideal

he

has

staked

his

career

on:

Call

t the

luxury

of the

perfectpasha,

the

arrogance

f the

supreme

male

chauvinist;

r

simply

he

easiestway

out

for

a man

with

a

"heartcomplaint" I've

never

had

sex

since

that afternoon

with

Bea). Yet I am inclined

o

see muchmore n this total surrendero a

woman

no

morethan an arranged ee and who, outside he serenehour she has shared

with you (nice romanticphrase his), has no furtherclaimson you at all.

3

Mynhardt's

sexual

relationships

with

women

is

thus reduced

to

the

cash

nexus.

In

the same way

his

verligte

ideal

dictates

how

white

relationships

with

blacks

should be determined

-

by

the

ideal

of

"development". Blacks have

to

earn

their stake

within

the

South

African

capitalist economy and,

in

accordance

with

the government's

own

separate development philosophy, Mynhardt

ensures that

there is

a

flow of

capital

out towards the African

Homelands

for

"that is the place where any raising of living standards should take place".

36

In The Conservationist this philosophy is cynically mocked by Mehring's

mistress: "Your

peace

will

have

to

go

for the

sake

of

growth

and

expansion,

ay?

But

isn't

that what

you

believe

in?

Development?

Isn't

that the

idea??"

while

Mehring privately ruminates

on

the apparent rootlessness

of

female

intellectuals:

"no

home-making, Emmychen instincts, only theories about the

disruption

of

family

life

by

the

system

of

migratory

labour

in mines

etc,

oh

God. You run

on

-

You'll

opt yourself

out

of

existence

Mehring."

And

the

master's

response

at

this

point

is to

assert

his

masculine superiority

in

the

most

primitive

sense he knows how:

The

only way

to

shut you up

is

to

establish

he

other, the only millenium,of the body,

invadeyou

with

the easy paradise hat truly knows

no

distinctionof colour, creedand

what-not.37

The

example serves

to

indicate the

basic difference

in

approach between the

two

novels. Brink has adopted a detached attitude towards his central

character

of

Mynhardt

whose

autonomy

as a

private

individual

is

never

critically

examined

in

the novel. For

Gordimer,

on

the other

hand, Mehring

exemplifies

her

long-held

belief

that no

basic

distinction between "culture"

and "politics" can be made in such a politicised society as South Africa38 and

35

Andre Brink, Rumours of

Rain, London,

Star Books, 1979, pp.

357-8.

36

Ibid., p. 14.

37

Ibid., p. 55.

38

Nadine

Gordimer,

"The

English Novel in

South

Africa"

in

NUSAS, Winter

School

Conference,

1959-1960,

The Novel

and the

Nation, p. 16;

Kenneth

Parker, "Nadine Gordimer

and the Pitfalls of

Liberalism"

in

Kenneth

Parker

(ed),

The

South African Novel in

English,

London,

The

Macmillan Press

1978, pp.

114-130;

Michael

Wade, Nadine Gorditner,

London,

Evans

Brothers

Ltd.,

1978.








Tradition and

Revolt

in

South African

Fiction

69

that the seemingly autonomous sphere of privatised consciousness in

many

ways reflects the basic impulses of the surrounding political struggle.

Thus The Conservationist moves a considerable way beyond Rumours of

Rain

in

its

understanding

of

South

African

social processes.

In

The

Conservationist we see the

beginnings

of a

significant

new

departure

in her

work and a search, as Michael Wade has pointed out, for an African landscape

that can stand opposed to the metropolitan tradition in a manner

reminiscent

of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis

Borges.39

In contrast Rumours of Rain

signally fails

to

reflect in any deep

or

real sense the underlying tensions within

South African society and far too easily glosses over them

in

favour

of the

melodramatic and improbable. The "violence" of South Africa is

perceived

by

a series

of

isolated

events:

a crowd

encouraging

a

suicidal black

to

jump

from a high rise building, a bad road accident, the murder of his wife by a

black

farm labourer.

This is

linked

to

a

pastiche

of

the harsh, drought-ridden

South African landscape and its hordes of gnats which force Mynhardt to

stop

the car on a journey down to the Eastern Cape. The "loss of control"

by

Mynhardt ultimately seems

to

accrue

from

the landscape itself and the finale

of

the novel is both the change of the weather to a long-hoped-for thunder

storm

and the beginning

of

the Soweto riots

in

1976. Blacks and

their

impression

on

the society of South Africa seem to accrue in Brink's fiction in

that best of colonial traditions: from the pastoral, rural hinterland.

In this context, J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country must be

seen as a landmark

in

the search

for

a genre that breaks

with this

tradition.

Coetzee

himself has

pointed out that Gordimer's attempt

to

turn against

liberal meliorism by seeking

to

turn back towards an African landscape

might

be

only a provincial achievement.

In

a larger sense

the

collapse

of

Western

liberalism

in

the post Auschwitz age has already been reflected

in

the rise of

literary modernism

in

the West and a

vision of

the collapse

of

conventional

culture.

0

Coetzee's approach thus comes

from within

a considerably different

tradition. Standing outside the literary mainstream

in

South Africa, Coetzee

was abroad during the critical period of the 1960s and the

most

important

events

shaping

his

early thinking

were the issues

surrounding

the

Vietnam

War.

4'

This is

exemplified

in

his first

novel Dusklands (1974)

which

attempts,

in

a somewhat imbalanced manner,

to

connect

the events

in

Vietnam

to

European penetration

into

the Southern

African interior. The

importance

of

the

novel, though, lay

in

its

technique

derived

from

Borges:

conventional

western linear time was effectively collapsed

and

the

reader is

confronted with.

mind rather than character and situations rather than

action.42

This provided

3

Wade op. cit.,

p. 229. For a

critical review of this book

by J. M.

Coetzee see Research in

African

Literature, Vol 11, No 2,

Summer

1980, pp. 253-256.

4(

Coetzee op. cit., p.

225.

"

"Speaking: J.

M. Coetzee"

p. 23.

42

Sarah Christie et

al, "John Coetzee:

Dusklands, (1974),

in

Perspectives

on

South

African

Fiction,

Johannesburg Donker, 1980, p. 181.








70 Journal of Southern African

Studies

a good

basis for Coetzee to mount a far more

penetrating

assault on the

mainstream tradition as

it

has

been represented

within

South

African

literature

by going back

to its roots within the

pastoral

idiom. In The Heart of the

Country emerges

as

an

"anti-pastoral"

novel in that it takes an idealised

rural

situation,

in

the Borgesian sense, and subjects

it to

a merciless scrutiny

in

order

to try and reveal some inner truth about the nature of real social reality.

Compared

to

the shallower

effort in

comparing

the Vietnam

and South

African experiences

in

Dusklands,

the

novel succeeds

in

that

it

unravels the

unchanging,

sterile and ahistorical

reality

at the

basis

of white

colonialism in

South Africa. There

is

no

coherent plot as such

for

the

narration occurs

through the distorted and fragmented fantasies and experiences of one of the

most

obsolete and useless

relics

thrown

up by

this

colonialism,

a lonely and

unloved white spinster, Magda. The novel, in effect, is a series of rambling

fragments which are numbered and the voice of the narrator is further

disembodied by the use

of

English

and

Afrikaans (in

the

original South

African edition)

to

heighten

the

degree

of

cultural alienation between

the white

world

of

the coloniser (English) and that

of

the colonised (Afrikaans).

The

unmarried white woman

in

a colonial

society

is

usually

a

marginal figure: part

of

a masculine dominated colonial world, but

not of

it;

sharing a certain

common

cultural oppression

with

the

black colonised, yet alienated

from

them

by an insuperable cultural barrier

defined

ultimately through

violence. It

is

a

theme that has been successfully depicted in South African fiction in Doris

Lessing's

first

novel, The Grass is Singing. Coetzee

is

concerned

to

extend

this

unravelling

of

the inherent illusions

underpinning

both

the

pastoral

ideal and

the myth of a progressive civilisation governed by the concepts

of linear time.

As

in

the writings of Borges, this is a revolt against the Western romantic

concept

of

unilinear

history

of

Spenglerian cycles and part

of a search back for

racial or tribal folk memories. 43 Except that the white coloniser has no history

or culture

to

appeal back to. Deprived of this the white spinster

becomes a

pure embodiment of Borgesian idealist mind, standing starklycounterposed to

surrounding matter which becomes relatively superfluous:

. .

.the truth

is,

I

fear

that there is no

past

or

future,

that the medium

I

live

in is an

eternal

present

in

which,

whether

heaving

under

the

weight

of that

hard

man

or

feeling

the ice of the scissors-blade

at

my

ear

or

washing

the

dead

or

dressing meat,

I

am

the

reluctant polestar about

which all this

phenomenal

universe

spins."

The

ultimate

logic

of

this

cultural rootlessness (in a colonial

context),

Coetzee seems

to

be

saying,

is

the reduction

of

human relationships

to

ones of

pure violence,

whether

they

be

murder

or

rape. And

it is

violence which

is

dwelt upon in the novel to an almost unrelenting degree. The spinster murders

her father twice in the novel, first with a wife he brings back

to the farm with

him and the second time

with

Klein

Anna the

wife

of

the

coloured

worker

on

43 For a critical review

of these novels see Jean

Marquard,

"Novel as a Critical Tool",

Contrast,

Vol 12,

No

1,

1978, pp. 83,

86.

44

J.

M. Coetzee, In the

Heart of the

Country, Johannesburg, Raven

Press, 1978,

p. 116.








Tradition and Revolt in South

African Fiction 71

the

farm, Hendrik.

The Afrikaans dialogue between

white mistress and

coloured servants,

too, is one of

suppressed violence expressed ultimately

through the force of tautology:

'Toe nou, Anna, daar is niks om oor bang to wees nie. Weetjy wie is ek?'

She looks

straight

nto

my eyes.

Her

mouth

is

trembling.

Her

eyes

are

not

black but

dark

brown, darkereventhan Hendrik's.

'Toe, wie is ek?'

'Mies

is die

mies.'45

Out

of this

accrues the ultimate

violence

within

the colonial

mythology, the

rape of

the white

mistress by the black servant in a state of

growing despair

and

degradation

following

the

second murder

of the

father. The same

rape

occurs four separate

times in different

ways and represents the collapse of the

white spinster's colonial world. While having longed for the love of some man,

this

has been

subsumed by a suppressed incestuous

relationship with her father

described

in most

graphic

terms

of

faecal

imagery: "somewhere

on

the farm

there is a pit where, looped in each

other's coils' the father's

red snake and the

daughter's

black embrace and

sleep and dissolve."46

This

Joycean device,

though, represents the collapse of the

liberal individual

identity and stands in

stark contrast both to

the individual self

gratification

of

Leopold

Bloom in

Ulysses and

of

Gordimer's

Mehring

who

defecates as a

means

of

expressing

his

own

bourgeois self-possessiveness

and

ownership

of

his

farm:

like

any healthycreature

till

in

its

prime,

he

squatsprivately

n

the

sweet

wet

lucerne

and

has

produced,

with

easeand

not

without

pleasurethe

cherootunlit ast

night moking

past

his

nose)

a

steaming

urd.

The

faint warm

mell,

out

here

n

the

open,

is

inoffensive

as

cow

dung.

He

kicks loose some earth and lucerne

and

buries

this

evidence

of

himself.

7

If

Mehring's only way

to

relate

to

the

landscape

is to

defecate

on

it,

Coetzee's

spinster

is

totally enveloped by

it in

a state

of

sterile

inertia. The

actual location

of

the farm

is

somewhere

in

the

Cape,

though time, place

and

distances have no real meaning in the novel. The surrounding landscape is an

effectual prison

from

which the

spinster

cannot

really escape and

it is

only

the

coloured

oppressed,

Hendrik

and

Klein

Anna,

who

finally

make

their

get-

away. Having

failed

to

establish

any

relationship

with the

former

servants,

especially

Klein

Anna, beyond simple paternalistic

ones

('I

lean

over

here,

I

caress

her

arms,

I

hold her

limp

hands

in

mine. That

is what

she

gets

from

me,

colonial

philosophy,

words with

no

history

behind

them, homespun,

when she

wants stories"

48)

the

spinster

is

finally

left

completely

alone.

An

apparent

madness takes

over

as, deprived

of

any other

means

of

expression

and

denied a

folk

memory,

the

spinster dreams

of

words

in

Spanish

to

invoke

imaginary

sky-gods. Perhaps

this is

Coetzee's

own

homage

to

Borges, though

the

resort

to

it

is through an

absence

of

any other

meaningful language:

45

Ibid., p. 30.

46

Ibid.,

p.

32.

4

The Conservationist,

p.

200.

48

In

the Heart

of the

Country,

p.

114.








72 Journal of Southern

African Studies

Why will

no

one speak

to

me

in

the

true language

of

the heart? The medium the

median

-

that is what

I want

to

be Neither master

nor

slave, neither parent

nor

child,

but a

bridge between,

so that in me the contraries should be

reconciled.49

But the message painted

in

white on the stones

to

the sky-gods provoke

no

reply and ultimately there is no escape for Magda. ". .

.To

deny temporal

succession,

to

deny

the

self,

to

deny

the astronomical

universe",

writes

Borges:

are measures

of

apparent

despair

and of secret consolation. Our

destiny.

. .is not

frightful because it is unreal;

it

is frightful because

it

is irreversable and ironbound.

Time

is the

substance

of

which I am

made.

Time is a river which

sweeps

me along, but

I

am the

river;

it is a

tiger

which

mangles me, but

I

am the tiger;

it

is a fire which

consumes

me,

but

I

am

the

fire.

The

world,

unfortunately,

is

real;

I

unfortunately, am

Borges.

50

The

world the

spinster

finds

herself

in is

also a colonial

one,

male-

dominated and pastoral

and there is

no

escape

beyond

the

gradual

inculcation

of new values

derived from the city. Short

of this, Coetzee seems to be

concluding,

there

will

be

no

longer

term transformation:

It takes generations

of

life

in

the cities

to

drive that

nostalgia for country ways

from the

heart. I will never live it

down, nor do I want to. I am corrupted to the bone

with the

beauty

of

this forsaken world.

If the

truth be

told,

I

never wanted to

fly away

with the

sky gods. My hope

was always that they would descend and live with me

here in

paradise, making up with their ambrosial breath for all that I lost when the ghostly

brown

figures

of the last

people

I knew

crept away

from me

in

the night.

I

have

always

felt

myself

to

be

another

man's creature. . . .

5

A

post-modernist South African

novel?

Stripping away layer

upon layer

of

the mythology that has overlain

the

consciousness

of

white settler

society

in

South Africa, Coetzee has sought

to

reveal an inner existential

dilemma confronting

the inheritors of a European

colonial culture that stands without roots

or

history. At one level, this

achievement can

be

seen

to

mark a

profound

break

with

the previous liberal

individualism that has underpinned the South

African novel, and pursues

to a

far

deeper

level the

cultural

rootlessness

that

Gordimer first depicts in the

figure

of

Mehring

and then abandons

in

order

to dwell upon the landscape of

the African inheritors

of the doomed white

South African society. However,

having pursued

this theme at the level of interior

aesthetics there is another

level where Coetzee's achievement

is

more problematic.

Elsewhere in

this issue

Michael

Vaughan

discusses

Coetzee's

failure

in

terms

of

external

social

relations and the inadequacy of the post modernist successor to the liberal

novel

form to

grasp

the nature of class relationships in contemporary

South

Africa.

52

In

a

sense the "failure"

of

literary

post-modernism

in

South Africa

49 Ibid.,

p. 133.

50

Jorge

Luis Borges, A Personal

Anthology, London, Picador Books, 1972, p. 49.

51

In

The

Heart of the Country, p.

138.

52

See

Michael Vaughan, "Literature and Politics: Currents in South

African writing

in

the

70s"

in

this

issue.








Tradition and Revolt

in South African Fiction 73

to do this reflects the nature of the form itself

which ultimately only advances

some

of the

premises

of

the western artistic

tradition from the time

of

the

romantics.

"Postmodernist

anti-art", Gerald

Graaf has

written, "was

inherent

in

the logic of the modernist aesthetic,

which in turn derived from the

romantic attempts

to substitute art for

religion."

I

Thus

too

much can

be made

of

both the scope

and scale

of

post-modernist

literary writing in the context of the contemporary

political and ideological

crisis

in

South

African

society.

As

an art form,

it is

probably

destined

to

remain the vehicle for expressing the cultural and political dilemmas of a

privileged class of white artists and intellectuals and at best it is likely to lead

to

a more

general loosening

of

contemporary

South African writing away from a

slavish imitation

of the

English

liberal

novel-writing

tradition. However, given

the tenacity of the pastoral tradition in twentieth century South African

literature, this may mark some positive achievement both in the overseas

context as well as

in

South

Africa

itself. Since such a large bulk

of

the reading

market for such authors as Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee comres rom

outside South Africa

in

Britain and the U.S.A.,

this can also be seen to be an

important contribution

to

the swing away

from the conventional novel form

which

has held such a dominant place

in

the English literary world

in

contrast

to

the more radical literary experimentation

in Europe since the modernist

upsurge

in

the

late nineteenth

and

early

twentieth centuries.

54

5

Gerald Graaf,

"The Myth of the

Postmodernist Breakthrough" in Malcolm

Bradbury

(ed),

The Novel Today,

Manchester

University Press, 1977, p.

221.

54 For this phase

in literaryexperimentation see Malcolm

Bradbury and James

McFarlane

(eds)

Modernism,

1890-1930, Penguin Books,

1976.

tradition and revolt in south african fiction

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