Response to Annie Gagiano's comments on A history of South African literature

Philip John

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Title: A History of South African Literature Author: Christopher Heywood Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521554853 Publishing Date: 2005 Pages: 310 Format: Hardcover

Although Annie Gagiano's typification of Dr JC Kannemeyer's review of Christopher Heywood's A history of South African literature as "hostile" boggles the mind, it is completely understandable. With this typification Gagiano shows herself to be part of an important strain in the (white) English South African literary critical mainstream and representative of certain, let's call it, "discursive peculiarities" of this tradition.

Kannemeyer's review, albeit critical, is pertinent, well-balanced and knowledgeable. He focuses not only on the "meta-level" of Heywood's history, that is to say the framing narrative Heywood uses, but also on the details, particularly as it pertains to Afrikaans literature. He thus makes it clear that Heywood writes his history mainly as what can be called an (emigrant) Africanist ideologue, not as a literary historian. In Kannemeyer's words, the genological and thematic rubrics that Heywood uses are too schematic for the level and scope of the history he wished to write. It is an approach that distorts and destroys far more than it enables or enlightens. As far as Kannemeyer's detailing of the factual inaccuracies in Heywood's account is concerned, this cannot be seen as anything other than damning, or at least, extremely embarrassing. This is surely not the kind of standard that one expects from any reputable publisher, let alone the renowned Cambridge University Press?

Which leaves one with the question: How does it happen that Annie Gagiano, a literary academic who normally prides herself on her "critical" orientation, baulks when confronted with a well-grounded critical gesture, and makes an effort to "emotionalise" it by misrepresenting it as "hostile"?

The first thing to say is that such a response is to be expected. Gagiano's conduct is "normal" in the sense that it is, as I've said before, that of a typical representative of an important strain in the (white) English South African literary tradition. It is the kind of response that one expects this tradition will repeatedly and reliably "produce" discursively, especially when the tradition is confronted with something such as the Afrikaans tradition. The origin of this knee-jerk response lies with the dominant orientation of the English South African literary critical tradition, namely its privileging of politics over aesthetics.

An important and fateful founding moment of this orientation of the English South African literary tradition was the paper "The Colonizer: A Critique of the English South African Culture Theory", delivered by Mike Kirkwood in 1974 at the Summer School of the University of Cape Town, where he called for "collapsing the division between 'life' and 'art'". This proposal has had far-reaching, and many would say, deleterious, implications for English literature in South Africa. What the proposal resulted in was not only the collapse of the boundary between life and art, but the jettisoning of the idea of art as important, tout court. It is on the basis of this devaluation of art and privileging of politics that two of the most recent English literary histories were written, that of Michael Chapman, and now Christopher Heywood's "lappieskombers".

After the boundaries between life and art disappeared as far as the majority of English critics were concerned, literature became nothing more than a more or less acceptable representation of "life", which is to say, a certain version of triumphalist, centralist Africanist politics. Questions pertaining to aesthetics were unimportant, if not anathema, after this transformation. One effect of this was that the English South African literary tradition at times starting looking like a variant of Soviet and East German politkult.

A few lone voices did remain, crying in the wilderness, trying to remind critics that literature is primarily art - voices such as those of Lionel Abrahams, JM Coetzee, and a few others. But to no avail. The commissars had spoken. Hearteningly, there are presently signs of change in the English tradition, but these are few and far between.

The Afrikaans literary tradition, in the meantime, retained - and developed - a view of literature premised on a shifting equilibrium between life and art, content and form, politics and aesthetics, call it what you will. The Afrikaans tradition can, in this sense, be seen to be heir to a tradition which started with criticisms of Kant's aesthetic philosophy in which the aesthetic was isolated from other spheres of life. This revisionist tradition is formed by a line of thinkers starting with Schelling and continuing to a contemporary thinker such as Habermas. It is a tradition which repeatedly stressed the dangers of sundering art from life, no matter which of the two terms is privileged in the process. The bad news this tradition brings the "politically inclined" critic is, "Form does count."

This is also the tradition in which Kannemeyer operates. A corollary of an approach which doesn't jettison the idea that art (or the aesthetic) is important, is an openness to a large variety of literary critical developments, including those that the typical English South African critic would summarily reject as "formalist". It enables the critic to build up a rich "instrumentarium" with which to confront the literary reality, mitigating the tendency to reduce art to something else, say a mere (political) instrument. It is no wonder that the approaches of critics such as Chapman and Heywood seem impoverished and reductive to Kannemeyer.

Similarly, with this in mind, it is thus not really strange that Gagiano cannot understand Kannemeyer. By and large, the (strain of the) tradition of which she is - comfortably by all accounts - a representative hasn't the means to enable such an understanding, and probably doesn't think it important to acquire this means. The best this strain of the English South African tradition thus has to offer the Afrikaans writer and critic is an emotional knee-jerk, or in the case of Heywood and Chapman, bowdlerised and, finally, destructive misrepresentations. If we are serious about creating another kind of South Africa, it is reasonable to expect more than this from literary critics.

In the case of Kannemeyer's response to Heywood's history, nothing is gained by calling it "hostile". English literary critics owe it to themselves (and to all their fellow South Africans) to try and understand what Kannemeyer is saying, even if it means facing up to uncomfortable prejudices, social and conceptual. At the very least, it behoves them to seriously confront the legacy of the privileging of the political over the aesthetic characteristic of the English South African tradition after the 1970s. They have to ask themselves honestly whether Afrikaans (and English) critics who value the aesthetic dimension of literature don't - just maybe - have a point.

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