In response to Barbara Adair

Shaun de Waal

I'd like to make a small comment on Barbara Adair's excellent but too-short piece on the Watson/Krog debate, "Speaking through the mask of culture". She says that I touched on the issue of the postmodernist take on originality and individuality, but "with gritted teeth". She (in good postmodernist style!) then ventriloquizes, on my behalf, an imagined De Waal mutter to his editor: "Do I have to put this in? I am a romantic, I believe in the inspirational power of genius."

Well, Adair is right about the gritted teeth, in one way, but not in another; I wrote the whole piece on the Watson/Krog business through gritted teeth, or at least, as one says in Afrikaans, "met lang tande". I was not exactly keen to weigh in on a debate (to use the current euphemism) that seemed to me highly unpleasant, but managed only for a week to evade that commission. I did feel that few people at that point seemed to have investigated Watson's original piece and read it carefully.

My "lang tande" were also to do with the fact that suspected that the space provided to me would not be sufficient (and indeed my piece was cut further once it was written). I felt I was not able fully to explain my thoughts on the modernism/postmodernism split or "epistemological break", but I did want to mention it because I think it hangs in the air over this debate without always being seriously considered. I worried that there would be misunderstanding of my comment, as indeed there was: a week or two later, Sarah Ruden wrote to the M&G to say I'd reduced the debate to calling Watson a modernist and Krog a postmodernist, which I did not do. I was trying simply to point out different, conflicting tendencies in the ways we write and read.

Which brings me to Adair's characterization of me as a romantic. I'm not sure where she gets that from, though perhaps some element of the old romantic notions of writing and reading (or any artistic enterprise) as "individual" or "original" seeps through in my critical work. (I certainly do not accuse writers or any other artists of being geniuses; I can't think of one I've so named in the past.) I think we all present a mixture of historical attitudes in our reading, writing and interpretation - I don't think anyone is a "pure" classicist, romantic, modernist or postmodernist. Perhaps that is in itself a postmodernist position.

I myself feel pulled between the modernist and postmodernist aesthetic positions. I agree with pretty much everything Adair says on the subject, but one is still able to discern degrees of "originality" in aesthetic objects, even ones going as postmodern, or in works consciously built on levels of pastiche. (I see it in Adair's own fiction, but there perhaps she's not so postmodern? Is it possible to be part-postmodern?) In fact, I'd prefer to say "newness" instead of originality - but then that's a modernist criterion of excellence, isn't it?

This still puzzles me. We know all writing is rewriting, and that the author-as-origin is dead, but we still want newness, don't we? Is it a kind of nostalgia for romantic originality, for modernist newness? Is it a reflex action in the business of criticism, perhaps a limitation in our critical language? Or is criticism redundant in a world without the modernist striving for newness?



LitNet: 20 March 2006

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