White writings : colonialism and modernism in South African literature since 1970

Currie, Iain

White writings : colonialism and modernism in South African literature since 1970

Master Thesis

1992

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This dissertation develops from the contention that a significant body of the literary activity of white South Africans since the 1970s can be characterised as a form of modernism. This characterisation devolves less upon the formal attributes of a body of literary writing than upon the particular position it occupies In the cultural sphere during this period . That position is one of political and cultural marginality. White writing is distanced from both the official culture of the state and an emergent populist culture associated with the urban social collectivities that begin to play an increasingly important role in the political life of South African society during the 1970s. In an introductory section, a comparison is drawn between the responses to social marginality within South African white writing and the reconsiderations of the political mission of literature by Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, formulated in post - War France. The first chapter sets out a brief description of the cri sis that besets the South African social formation during the 1970s. The racial logic upon which the South African economy and social order is subtended comes under attack from two related sources. The first is the growing economic and political instability of the racial-capitalist system, while the second is renewed resistance to the manifest racially-ordered inequalities sponsored by that system. As discussed in the second chapter, this gathering crisis of their society impells white writers and intellectuals to question and revise long-held paradigms of thought and practices of representation, drawing on the resources of comparable revisions of established paradigms taking place in western thought. Equally, these writers and intellectuals become concerned with the critical re-examination of established accounts of the ethical vocation and social function of intellectual and literary work. But white writers and intellectuals were, in the polarised political conditions of the 1970s, unable to find a home in emergent internal opposition organisations predicated, for the most part, on versions of an anti- colonial nationalism. In the third chapter, consideration is given to the critique that begins to circulate in the period, of the associations of the South African literary and literary-critical establishment with the interests of white hegemony. This critique leads white writers such as Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee to reject a literary tradition found to be rooted in a colonial past and embodying colonial assumptions that are no longer tenable. This rejection of their cultural patrimony leads white writers to seek new ways of imagining the relationship between their writing and their society, as well as new forms capable of representing that altered relationship. At the same time however, this critical reflection upon the coloniality of established literary practices and forms, distances white writing from the populist and realist concerns of writers associated with emergent oppositional cultural formations . Developments during the 1970s serve to make the cultural sphere an important zone of political contestation. In the fourth chapter some of the tactics and manoeuvres in this contest are disc us sed. White writers adopt a modernist defence of their relative isolation from political actuality and their failure to conform to the requirements of a socially-committed literature. The development of a body of committed literature by black writers is discussed. However, the formal inconsistency of this literature ' s relationship to " realism" indicates that in the South African situation, "realism" and "modernism" are less a matter of the formal characteristics of a given body of literary work than a description of the differentiations in the audience, social function and ambitions of white and black writing. The dissertation is therefore aimed at pro vi ding an account of the historical ground that gives rise to this racial division of literature and literary activity in South Africa. Such an account serves to historicise and contextualise the various positions on commitment, artistic responsibility, the politicisation of art and the question of the capacity of cultural organisations to prescribe the form or content of artistic production, which are the subject of controversy in present-day South Africa.

Keywords

English Language and Literature

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