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The Limitations of South African English Poetry Post-19478

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The Limitations of South African English Poetry Post-19478 "BITTEN-OFF THINGS PROTRUDING": THE LIMITATIONS OF SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH POETRY POST-1948 by STEPHEN WATSON Town Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degreeCape of of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH at the UniversityUNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN SUPERVISOR: ASSOC. PROFESSOR I.E. GLENN MARCH, 1993. The University of Cape Town has been g!ven the right to reproduve this :hesis in whole or in part. Copyrighi is held by the author. -~~- I The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University ·'\, 1 2 ~ Jr~JlA ~\I 1005.-..)·~. _I ABSTRACT In this thesis, the discussion of South African English poetry is undertaken in terms of critical questions to which the body of work, to date, has not been subjected. In the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, several anthologies of South African English poetry were published which, despite their differing foci, attested to the strength, innovation, and international stature of the work. Their editors made claims which emphasised both the importance of Sowetan poetry and the emancipation of white poetry, particularly in the las~ three decades, from the legacy of a stultifying colonial past. This thesis sets out to examine the validity of these critical evaluations. The impetus for such an examination is threefold. Firstly, in comparison with a world literature, South African English poetry has had little impact on the kinds of aesthetic questions which have led to the radical work of international figures like Milosz, Walcott, Neruda. Secondly, South African English poetry tends to be bifurcated by critical analysis, both locally and internationally, into the work of black poets and the work of white poets. Despite the realities of social history which have indeed dichotomised the human experience of South Africa in racial terms, this dichotomy does not seem the most fertile assumption from which to approach the achievement of a nation's poetry. Thirdly, as a poet himself, the writer of this thesis embarked upon the scholarly analysis of a poetic ancestry to which his own work looked ,in vain for location. The re-examination of the roots and value of South African English poetry begins in the thesis with the dilemmas posed by a legacy of romanticism in its displaced relation to a British colony. From this point the discussion argues that this legacy is visible in the unsatisfactory work of liberal poets in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and argues that such choices cannot be nourishing to a South African cultural originality. Turning to the work most forcefully emphasised as culturally original -- i.e. the work of the Soweto poets in the nineteen-seventies and after -- the thesis explores this poetry's claims to stylistic and conceptual innovation. The poetry of the late eighties is then examined in relation to its desire to support, and even to drive, anti-apartheid philosophy and practice. The conclusions of the final chapter, presaged throughout the entire argument, suggest that earlier critical estimations of South African English poetry igno~e crucial aspects of what has usually been meant by a fully achieved poetic tradition and that such neglect amounts to the betrayal of the very meaning of the term "poem". "BITTEN-OFF THINGS PROTRUDING": THE LIMITATIONS OF SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH POETRY POST-1948 by STEPHEN WATSON Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN SUPERVISOR: ASSOC. PROFESSOR I.E. GLENN MARCH, 1993. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 ...... south African English Poetry: The Origins of a Probiem 24 Chapter 2 ...... The Problem Unsolved: White South African English Poets of the Seventies 87 Chapter 3 ...... The Search for a Solution: The Myths of South African English Poetry 130 Chapter 4 ...... The Search for a Solution II: The Soweto Poets and After 177 Chapter 5 ...... The Legacy of a Struggle: Violence in South African English Poetry 223 Chapter 6 ...... The Problem Reconsidered: The Lost Transcendence 264 Conclusion 339 Bibliography 362 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to thank Ian Glenn for his supervision and support throughout this project. Reggie Heuschneider did all the typing and Jane Bennett much invaluable editing. To both of them I owe a debt of gratitude. What was his business, the business of a writer? Was there any such business in this century? Was there anyone, for example, whose deeds and sufferings cried out not only to be recorded, catalogued, and publicized in history books but also to be handed down in the form of an epic or perhaps only a little song? To what god was it still possible to intone a hymn of praise? (And who could still summon up the strength to lament the absence of a god?) .... What mass murderers of this century, instead of rising from the pit with each new justification, might be sent back to their hell forever with a single tercet? And how, on the other hand, since the end of the world is no mere fancy but a distinct possibility at any moment, can one just praise the beloved objects of this planet with a stanza or a paragraph about a tree, a country-side, a season? Where, today, was one to look for the ''aspect of eternity"? And in view of all this, who could claim to be an artist and to have made a place for himself in the world? - Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer (1989) 1 INTRODUCTION 2 In 1980 I completed an MA thesis entitled "The Liberal Ideology and Some English South Af~ican novelists.'' In its pages I argued that the poverty evident in much South African English-language literature could be understood as a direct consequence of the poverty of an ideology, specifically the South African version of liberalism which informed a great deal of it. I concluded the study by holding to the belief that a more radicalised literature, one in which the liberal tradition was supplanted by one or other version of Marxism, was the only way out of the series of impasses, stylistic and thematic, which this literature seemed unable to avoid. The superficiality of this belief (that a writer's political persuasion can make the difference between poor and rich art), can perhaps be explained by the historical moment in which that thesis was written. The outset of the last and perhaps most terrible of the apartheid decades in South Africa's history prompted many a writer and critic to embrace ideas which were either desperate or superficial. By now all that survives of that unwieldy thesis of mine is my initial suspicion that something or other was radically deficient in almost all the South African English-language literature which I had encountered. I believe that I was neither blind nor hallucinating in discerning a poverty in most of it; nor has my initial dismay at its failure to show a genuine rawness of spirit or fullness of life lessened with time. This thesis, while focussing solely on several aspects of South African English poetry, is in many ways a further exploration of this initial impression of poverty and failure. 3 But the terms of my discussion have changed, indeed broadened, considerably. In time it has become and more apparent to me that the problem of the poet in the modern world, and specifically in South Africa, goes way beyond those political conundrums (those questions of commitment, for instance) which have been mentioned time and again in almost all recent critical discussion of South African literature. 1 It seemed to me that the obsession with political life widespread in South Africa, and the overwhelming dominance of the kind of 'mindset' which such obsession tends to create in both life and letters, had mostly served to obscure many another problem no less significant. The real alienation of south African writers, I became more and more convinced, lay not just in their exclusion from political power in a country in which for many decades the Nationalist Party had made the parliamentary game unwinnable for its opponents, but in other areas as well; if these less obvious sources of paralysis were not given greater recognition both poets and their critics would remain creatures of the void, as it were, without knowing it. Even less could the character of South African English poetry be understood. It was something like this that I was trying to suggest, albeit in a a fairly schematic way, in an earlier essay of mine, "Poetry and Politicisation", first published in 1986 and reprinted in my Selected Essays 1980-1990 {1990). There I was concerned to argue that in an age of politicisation such as south Africa had experienced in recent decades as a result of both the technology of apartheid and the struggles against it, there had been a tendency to forget that there could be terms other than ' the political in which people could make meaning in their lives. 4 This.applied to the art of poetry not least. If I have further emphasised these other terms -- broadly speaking, all that can be designated by the word "metaphysical" -- it is not because this thesis has a hidden (or not so hidden) religious agenda. Rather, it is to draw attention to the fact that in a time in which, as has been pointed out in numerous ways, 2 people are ever more inclined to see any possibility of transcendence in their lives in terms of political triumph, there has been a tendency to forget certain things.
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