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The Small-Town Novel in South African English Literature (1910–1948)

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The Small-Town Novel in South African English Literature (1910–1948) The small-town novel in South African English literature (1910–1948) by Magrieta Salomé Snyman A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree DLitt In the Department of English at the UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES SUPERVISOR: Prof. J.A. Wessels April 2009 © University of Pretoria DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of DLitt at the University of Pretoria. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination at any other university. Magrieta Salomé Snyman 15 April 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my appreciation to Prof. Andries Wessels for his support and guidance throughout this project. His willingness to share his time and skills has made it a memorable and enriching experience. I also wish to thank Theo, Paul- Frederik and Salomé for their love and understanding and for allowing me to complete this study. Abstract This study aims to examine a group of South African novels that have received very little critical attention. Part of the problem is that these works have never been grouped or assessed as belonging to a sub-genre, the South African small-town novel. Although individual texts have been treated to cursory commentary, the joint impact and significance of these works with regard to South African literature in English have never been properly assessed. It is suggested that clustering the works together as small-town novels of the Union period raises important issues and provides valuable insights on a significant period in South African (literary) history. The study’s theoretical orientation is based on a model that J.A Kearney proposes in his book Representing Dissension: Riot, Rebellion and Resistance in the South African English Novel (2003). Kearney (xv) suggests that an important criterion in the study of historical novels is the degree to which the writers’ recreation of particular events/historical phases leads them to an awareness of the gap between actual and ideal society. In the introductory chapter a comparative analysis of South African town and farm cultures and their respective representations in literature are used to throw some light on possible reasons for the critical neglect of the novels. A brief historical background is provided with regard to the momentous Union period (1910–1948) which forms the setting for all the novels which are discussed in chronological order in the successive chapters: Stephen Black’s The Dorp (1920), C. Louis Leipoldt’s The Mask, written in the 1930s though only published posthumously as part of his Valley Trilogy in 2001, Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope (1953) and Herman Charles Bosman’s Willemsdorp, written in the early 1950s but also only published posthumously in 1977 in a censored version and in 1998 in full. The authors uniformly use the small-town milieu effectively as a microcosmic setting from which to comment on the larger social and political issues affecting South Africa during this period. They provide a socio-political critique on a period in South African history marked by politically volatility and reactionary ideological developments. Black’s The Dorp satirizes social intrigue in a fictional town ironically yet appropriately called Unionstad. It reveals the ill effects of historical events such as the Boer War and the 1914 Rebellion (specifically the animosity that it created between English and Afrikaner townsmen) but suggests the possibility of reconciliation. In The Mask, Leipoldt reveals a bleak picture of South African town life that is emblematic of the collapse of Leipoldt’s utopian ideal for an egalitarian South African society. In Too Late the Phalarope, Paton dramatizes the devastating personal effects of racially discriminatory laws, which criminalized sexual congress between whites and blacks. Paton’s essentially Christian view exposes hypocrisy and moral corruption in the attitudes of racist townsmen (and by implication the national architects of institutionalized racism), but offers the possibility of restoration by means of personal acts of forgiveness. In Willemsdorp Bosman offers probably the most sophisticated exposé of small-town culture as exemplary of everything that was wrong in the society from which apartheid was emerging. The concluding chapter invokes Bawarshi’s notions on the value of genre classification and briefly focuses on post-1948 novels, confirming the notion that a continuum exists within the small-town novel sub-genre of the South African novel. town; dorp; small-town novel; dorpsroman; plaasroman; sub-genre; liberal-realism; Union period; Immorality Act; satire; allegory Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Theoretical orientation 15 Biographical Information 17 Historical Contextualization 21 Chapter 2: The Dorp (1920) by Stephen Black Stephen Black, South African literary pioneer 32 The dorp, Unionstad: macrocosmic implications of small-town politics and organization 37 The Town Council meeting 40 The General Dealer’s store: the stage where political differences are played out 43 History touches the dorp: “The miserable business of the Rebellion” 47 The small town as the cradle of mythmaking: nationalism and religious ideology 49 The role of the predikant in the dorp 51 Conclusion: The Ideal 53 Chapter 3: The Mask (1930) by C. Louis Leipoldt Historical Contextualization 56 Introduction 58 The unmasking of small-town culture 66 Conclusion 75 Chapter 4: Too Late the Phalarope (1953) by Alan Paton Historical Contextualization 77 Introduction 81 The small town – the stage of tragedy 88 Town, location and Paton’s frame narrative 95 Pieter van Vlaanderen, a tragic hero 97 Conclusion: Paton’s vision for forgiveness 107 Chapter 5: Willemsdorp (1998), Herman Charles Bosman’s dorp satire Introduction 115 Willemsdorp as a mirror of society 126 Conclusion 149 Chapter 6: Conclusion 152 Notes 165 Biblography 171 For the manner of compiling such a history, I particularly advise that the manner and provision of it be not drawn from histories and commentaries alone, but that the principal books written in each century, or perhaps in shorter periods, proceeding in regular order from the earliest ages, be themselves taken into consideration, that so (I do not say by a complete perusal, for that would be an endless labour, but) by tasting them here and there and observing their argument, style and method, the Literary Spirit [genius literarius] of each age may be charmed as it were from the dead. (Bacon, Francis. 1623. The Advancement of Learning in Payne, M. 2005. The Greenblatt Reader (42)) Chapter 1: Introduction There are a number of prose works that form part of the larger body of early South African English literature (the Union period, 1910–1948) that have received very little critical attention. These works are set in the geographically specific location of the South African dorp (village or small town). The existence of this body of works came to the attention of the public via the publication of Herman Charles Bosman’s novels, Jacaranda in the Night and Willemsdorp (the latter is a reworking of the former) in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Willemsdorp had been subjected to censorship at the time of first publication because of the writer’s response to the mechanisms of prevailing racist ideology such as the Immorality Act, which resulted in police sadism towards people participating in interracial sexual acts. In these novels there is evidence that Bosman availed himself of the opportunity to use the dorp/small-town milieu to deliver satirical commentary on critical aspects of South African society at large. In other words, he used the small town as a microcosm of South African society as a whole. It appears that Bosman regarded South African town culture as an accurate barometer of broader cultural and political trends. He passed up no opportunity to lampoon the snobbery, pretence, hypocrisy, and racial injustice that were symptomatic of the ideologically repressed national mindset. In Jacaranda in the Night and Willemsdorp he demonstrates how the socio- political ills associated with the post-Boer War rise of Afrikaner nationalism are 1 conveniently contained in a single space (the small town /dorp milieu) where they can be dissected at will. At around the time when Bosman was preparing to write his town novels, Jacaranda in the Night and Willemsdorp, he wrote an article titled “Dorps of South Africa” for the July 1945 edition of the Johannesburg monthly journal The South African Opinion. This insightful exposé of Union period South African dorp culture stems from his close acquaintance with Pietersburg, a small but significant town in the former Transvaal Province of the Union of South Africa, where he worked as a journalist from March to October 1943. Earlier, during his sojourn in the Marico region of the Western Transvaal, where he briefly worked as a schoolteacher (January to June 1926), he frequented small towns in the region.1 Bosman’s keen eye for and deep interest in the people who inhabited these towns provided material that he could draw upon in later years when he constructed the fictional towns of Kalvyn (in Jacaranda in the Night) and Willemsdorp (in Willemsdorp). Although the alternative names that Bosman used for Pietersburg foregrounds the allegorical-referential aspect of his novelistic project, he illuminates the South African small-town milieu of the Union era in a historically accurate and realistic manner. Bosman’s acute analysis of South African platteland society in his novels and short stories prompted Belinda Bozzoli, in her introduction to the volume of essays “Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response”, to comment: “Herman Charles Bosman’s wry portrayals of small-town rural culture make academic ruminations on the subject appear ponderous” (1983: 36). This is an interesting observation given that Bozzoli’s was a scientific-demographic study that (as she states) sought “to understand what is unique and what is not unique about small communities; to compare and contrast the class experience of the largest classes with those of the smallest” (35).
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