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A Study of the Autobiographies of Five South African Authors

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A Study of the Autobiographies of Five South African Authors IDEOLOGY AND FORM IN SOUTH AFRICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: A STUDY OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF FIVE SOUTH AFRICAN AUTHORS by THENGAMlliHLOHAROLDNG~NYA submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY in the subject ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PROMOTER: PROF P D RYAN NOVEMBER 1996 CONTENTS Page TITLE I DECLARATION II DEDICATION Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iv SUMMARY v ~INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER! 31 The Ideology of Liberal Humanism in Peter Abahams's Tell Freedom CHAPTER2 68 Modisane's Blame Me On History: In Search of Purpose and Fulfillment CHAPTER3 98 Conformity and Rebellion in Naboth Mokgatle's The Autobiography of an Unknown South African nrJ?HAPTER 4 I z;~~ ! ! ( ]__ : .~ 142 ~he Liberal-Christian Vision in Alan Paton's Autobiographies CHAPTERS 181 Sindiwe Magana : Autobiography as Counter-hegemonic Discourse ~·CONCLUSION 220 NOTES 227 APPENDIX 258 BIBLIOGRAPHY 261 I declare that Ideology and Form in South African Autobiographial Writing : A Study of the Autobiographies of Five South African Authors is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. Date (ii) Dedicated to my mother and to the memory of my father. (iii) ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to my wife and children for their support and encouragement throughout the duration of this study. I also wish to thank the late Professor Ernest Pereira who was my promoter for three years (1993-1995) and my present promoter Professor P D Ryan. I am also grateful to Mr Dawie Malan ofUNISA library for helping me trace books and articles. Thanks are also due toMs Jaya Chetty for typing the thesis for me. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Human Sciences Research Council in financing the research for this study. (iv) Summary Relying on Lucien Goldmann's theory of genetic structuralism, this study examines the relationship between ideology (world vision) and the autobiographical form in South African writing. The five autobiographers selected for discussion represent different social groups in the South African social formation. The central argument of this thesis is that there is a relationship between autobiographical self-portraiture and the collective interests, values and attitudes of particular social groups in South Africa. Therefore, most South African autobiographies are more concerned with the articulation of collective consciousness than with the celebration of individual talents and achievements. Chapter 1 on Peter Abrahams explores the values underpinning the ideology of liberal humanism and their influence on the process of self-representation within the mode of autobiography. The second chapter examines the apparently contradictory conceptions of self-identity in Bloke Modisane's autobiography. Chapter three focuses on the conflict between Naboth Mokgatle's ethnic loyalty to the Bafokeng tribe and his newly acquired radical working class consciousness. The fourth chapter examines the liberal-Christian ideology in Alan Paton's two volumes of autobiography. The fifth and final chapter explores counter hegemonic modes of self-definition in Sindiwe Magona's two-volumed autobiography. In all the five chapters there is an attempt to link the authors' self-presentation to specific social classes or groups. The thesis argues for a literary-sociological approach to the analysis of autobiography and seeks to challenge the deconstructive theoretical perspectives on autobiography which, by rejecting the validity of humanist assumptions regarding human subjectivity, deny any possibility of meaningful socio-political action. (v) IDEOLOGY AND FORM IN SOUTH AFRICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: A STUDY OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF FIVE SOUTH AFRICAN AUTHORS. Unless criticism springs out of genuine analyses of the real world, and in its turn affects it (and in the word "real" I include the self that lives out and in history as well as writes), then it inhabits the realm offantasy. (Nicole W Jouve,1991:8) Having been relegated to the dubious status of 'the dark continent of literature' as well as 'the Other of literature', 1 autobiographical writing, and its theory and criticism have grown by leaps and bounds since the publication of Georges 2 Gusdorfs seminal essay, 'Conditions and Limits of Autobiography', in 1956 • Contemporary critical debates about autobiography revolve around questions of its generic status as a form of writing, the role of language (discourse) in reconstructing past experience in the light of present awareness, autobiography's epistemological mode as history or literature and the ontological status of the 3 writing self • Robert Folkenflik's comments on these theoretical debates alert us to what seems to be their inherently contentious nature: having described autobiography as 'a battlefield on which competing ideas about literature (and for that matter history) are fought out', he goes on to say: It [autobiography] is a highly problematic form (some would say genre) that encourages the asking of questions about fact and fiction, about the relations of reality and the text, about origins. Is autobiography to be found in referentiality, textuality, or social construction? Is there a self in this text? The subject is radically in question. (1993: 11-2) In addition to these literary-theoretical and philosophical issues theorists are beginning to show an interest in what may be broadly described as the sociological 1 functions and implications of autobiographical writing. Critics such as Stephen Butterfield (1974), Susanna Egan (1987), Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1988) and Shirley Neuman (1992) have shown that conventional theories of autobiography which emphasise the singularity of personal experience and the stability of the 4 writing self (often denoting the "straight white Christian man of property" ) may not necessarily apply to autobiographies written by marginalised social groups such as women and ethnic minorities. Butterfield's comments on the presentation of the self in black American autobiography suggest a communally based concepti oR of selfhood which is absent in Western autobiography: . \1-~- v The "self' of black autobiography ... is not an individual with a ~\f"~ ~ private career, but a soldier in a long, historic march toward Canaan. '· The self is conceived as a member of an oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to the other members. It is a conscious political entity; drawing from the past experience of the group ... .(1974:20) Even critics who normally emphasise the uniqueness of individual experience in autobiographical writing are beginning to appreciate the need to broaden critical perspectives to include the social, political and cultural dimensions of human expenence: Because each autobiography is a cultural artifact celebrating individual consciousness, style, and experience, its readers must learn to adjust critical focus from individual text to social context to appropriate conceptual frameworks - and, I would argue, back to the single text again. For we are chiefly interested in autobiographies in order to find out how people, events, things, institutions, ideas, emotions, relationships have become meaningful to a single mind as it uses language to pattern the past. (Albert E. Stone, 1981:8) (my emphasis) 2 There is therefore a growing awareness among critics of autobiography of the importance of historical as well as social aspects of this form of writing. The present study hopes to contribute to these debates about autobiographies that have been largely shaped by socio-political considerations rather than by the urge to celebrate idiosyncratic personal qualities manifested in individual achievements and talents. While articulating the individual experiences and perceptions of their individual authors, the life histories chosen for this study also illuminate political and social attitudes peculiar to specific historically determined social groups. The autobiographical self (which always assumes the form of the 'displayed self rather than the empirical or 'real' self>) in these autobiographies will emerge as a continuously evolving entity precariously situated between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discursive terrains. The majority of South African autobiographers occupy subject-positions imposed on them by dominant discourses and social institutions and, in the course of reconstructing their past experience, these writers seek to challenge those imposed identities and roles and to replace them with more 'authentic' ones. Thus selfhood in these autobiographical narratives will be shown to be in a constant state of flux which can only be defined with any degree of accuracy by locating the writers within broader social categories to which they belong by virtue of their material circumstances, values, interests and aspirations. In both their form and content the autobiographies selected for this study subvert the hegemonic discursive practices which have earned autobiography the label ofbeing an expression of'bourgeois individualism'(Gray, 1990:101). Susanna Egan's comments on the entry of formerly marginalised groups into the creative process of'life-writing'6 underscore the important sociological dimensions of autobiographical writing which will be explored in this study: 3 The palm has passed from white, middle class men of distinction to the Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust, to women, blacks, homosexuals, convicts, exiles, and the terminally ill, the minorities
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