Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  And with this trend taken by the Censorship Directorate in the period preparing us for the advent of a new Chairman, we come to the event itself, and the statements of policy made by Dr Kobus van Rooyen since 1 April.

  He has not said much; and one of his statements has been to the effect that he intends to say even less: he has announced that he will take no part in public debates on censorship. The Star (5/4/1980) editorial pointed out, of public debates: ‘these insights to the workings of a censor’s mind were what helped speed the retirement of his predecessor. They will be missed.’

  Indeed.

  Dr Kobus van Rooyen would be unlikely to present the image that emerged from the public appearances and statements of his predecessor. Nevertheless, Dr van Rooyen does not intend taking any risks. What interests us more is that he does not want openly to proselytise his philosophy of censorship any more than he intends to be open to the influence of counter views. This is an autocratic approach – let us not call it an arrogant one. From it we can understand that here is a man whose view of culture is elitist, someone in whose mind, whether consciously or not, is posited the idea of an official cultural norm. The fact that his version of that norm is likely to differ, here and there, in emphasis, does not mean that it is any less fundamentalist than that defined implicitly, along with the law, in the Censorship Act. The shift in emphasis is a realpolitik adjustment to catch up with the change in the relation of literature to life that has taken place in South Africa, and that a clever man cannot ignore. The concept – that there is a right for a single power group to decide what is culture, remains the grid on which, although – like the most functional of contemporary business premises – all manner of interior open-space arrangements may be made to suit the tenant, the total structure must be accepted. The myth of the South African culture sustains a man who is so convinced of his approach to his job that he is not prepared to discuss it let alone admit any necessity to defend it.

  Roland Barthes points out that traditional myth explains a culture’s origins out of nature’s forces; modern myths justify and enforce a secular power by presenting it as a natural force. Sophisticated officials of this government may be openly sceptical of some of the more ritualistic aspects of our societal myth – the Immorality Act, the awful malediction of four-letter words, etc. – but sophistication must never be taken for enlightenment; acceptance of the concept of a culture based on an elite dispensation to the masses who cannot create anything valid for themselves, acceptance of the role of literature in life according to that culture, are still firmly based on a particular myth of power.

  Only from within that myth could Judge Lammie Snyman have taken the cultural standpoint revealed when he said earlier this month that blacks are ‘inarticulate people, who, I am sure, are not interested’ in censorship (The Star, 8/4/1980). And what a lightning flash lit up a whole official mentality for us when, summing up his entire five years in which it was his responsibility to decide ‘what was likely to corrupt or deprave an immature mind, or whether it was likely to horrify or disgust’ the people of South Africa, he added: ‘Of blacks, I have no knowledge at all.’

  His ‘average ordinary South African’ – whose standards of morality and literary judgement he constantly invoked during his term of office – was not to be found among the majority of the South African population. For this reason, Dr Kobus van Rooyen has abandoned the creature. But not the idea that he has the right to create another of his own, whose imaginary or rather conditioned sensibilities and susceptibilities will be the deciding factor in what shall and shall not be read by all of us. What is regarded as Dr van Rooyen’s most important statement is his announcement that his creature will be the ‘probable reader’. Important it is, but not, I am afraid, for reasons assumed by some.

  The assumption is that sexual explicitness as an integral part of sophisticated literature written in the idiom of educated people will now be passed. That complex works dealing with contentious or radical political characters and events above the level of simple rhetoric will also be passed. And there the effect of the change apparently ends, and so can only be regarded as beneficial; after all if you have not the educational background and trained intellect to follow these works, that is hardly the responsibility of the censors.

  It is not? By putting on the top shelf, out of reach of those masses Lammie Snyman confessed he knew nothing about, imaginative, analytical presentation of the crucial questions that deal with their lives, is one not hampering the healthy cultural development censorship purports to be guarding?

  We should like to be able to put that question to the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, who evidently does know a great deal about those masses. Does he see the justification of that hampering, in a mission to adjust the strategy of the myth of hostile forces he well understands?

  Why may intellectual readers handle inflammables?

  Is it because this readership is predominantly white, and radical initiative by whites has been contained by imprisonment, exile, bannings and the threat of right-wing terrorism while the moderate, let alone the revolutionary initiative for social change has passed overwhelmingly to blacks, and is not contained?

  Why may white writers deal with inflammables?

  Is it because the new censorship dispensation has understood something important to censorship as an arm of repression – while white writings are predominantly critical and protestant in mood, black writings are inspirational, and that is why the government fears them?

  The definition of the ‘probable reader’ can be arrived at by the old pencil-in-the-hair and fingernail tests, believe me. The criterion for reading matter allowed him is not literary worth but his colour.

  As a cultural and not merely a politically manipulable prototype, the ‘probable reader’ is a creature of class-and-colour hierarchy. He cannot be visualised, in our society, by those of us sufficiently free-minded to see that culture in South Africa is something still to be made, something that could not be brought along with mining machinery in the hold of a ship, nor has been attained by the genuinely remarkable achievement of creating an indigenous language out of European ones. He cannot be visualised by anyone who understands culture not as an embellishment of leisure for the middle classes, but as the vital force generated by the skills, crafts, legends, songs, dances, languages, sub-literature as well as literature – the living expression of self-realisation – in the life of the people as a whole.

  Behind the ‘probable reader’ is surely the unexpressed concept of the ‘probable writer’. The new Chairman of the Appeal Board has assured him that ‘satirical writing will be allowed to develop’. To most of us this is an elitist concession. Of course, nobody stops anyone from writing satire, whatever his colour. But in the relation of literature to life at present, satire is unlikely to appeal to black writers. It requires a distancing from the subject which black writers, living their lives close within their material, are not likely to manage; it requires a licence for self-criticism that loyalty to the black struggle for a spiritual identity does not grant at present. So effective weapon though satire may be, as a social probe in certain historical circumstances or stages, it will not, so far as it is a concession by this government to freedom of expression, fall into the hands of the ‘wrong’ probable writer …

  Similarly, the new directive that the general public (probable reader distinction again) ‘does not have to accept literary works and that a writer is a critic of his society and therefore often in conflict with the accepted moral, religious and political values’ will benefit – if anyone, since we still have to prove ourselves unharmful and inoffensive to whichever probable reader our work is allotted, in the censors’ consideration – will benefit writers of work in the critical and analytical mode but lift no barriers for the inspirational. Yet there is no ignoring the fact that the inspirational is a dynamic of our literature at present. Franz Kafka’s standard, that ‘A book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea inside us’, is
not the censors’. Neither is there any sign of acceptance that in South Africa we writers, white and black, are the only recorders of what the poet Eugenio Montale calls ‘unconfessed history’.

  That has been made, and is being made every day, deep below the reports of commissions and the SABC news; it is the decisive common force carrying us all, bearing away the protective clothing of ‘probable readers’ as paper carnival costumes melt in the rain.

  In the final analysis, censorship’s new deal is the pragmatic manifestation of an old, time-honoured view of culture, already dead, serving repression instead of the arts, and its belated recognition of literary standards is its chief strategy. This recognition is shrewd enough to see what Lammie Snyman did not – that the objective validity of literary standards as a concept (there are works of genuine creation, there is trash) could be invoked for a purpose in which, in fact, they have no place and no authority. The criteria by which the quality of literature can be assessed have nothing whatever to do with calculation of its possible effect on the reader, probable or improbable. The literary experts who are instructed to take this factor into account, and do so, are not exercising any valid function as judges of literature.

  And in affirmation of freedom of expression, which is the single uncompromised basis of opposition to censorship, the literary worth or otherwise of a work is not a factor – what is at stake each time a book falls into the censors’ hands is the right of that book to be read. Literary worth has nothing to do with that principle.

  We must not fudge this truth. The poor piece of work has as much right to be read – and duly judged as such – as the work of genius. Literary worth may be assessed only by critics and readers free to read the book; it is a disinterested, complex and difficult judgement that sometimes takes generations. There is a promise that future judgements by the censors will ‘more readily reflect the opinions of literary experts appointed’. The invocation of literary standards by censors as a sign of enlightenment and relaxation of strictures on the freedom of the work; above all, the reception by the public of this respected and scholarly concept as one that could be enthroned among censors – both are invalid. Let us never forget – and let us not let the South African public remain in ignorance of what we know: censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

  1981

  Unconfessed History

  Alan Paton’s Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful

  Alan Paton’s last novel, Too Late The Phalarope, was published almost thirty years ago. The events central to his new one are an oblique explanation for the gap: the political activism of the man prevented the writer from exercising what Harry Levin calls ‘that special concentration of the ego’ which enables a writer to ‘discover the power within himself’. In honourable retirement from politics, Paton has freed the power within himself; and it is inevitable that it should find its expression in what Czeslaw Milosz has called ‘unconfessed history’: the personal dimension of events that can be perceived only through their recreation in imaginative works.

  The new novel, intended to be the first of a trilogy, begins roughly in the period of South African history in which the previous novel was set. Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful strides vigorously through the years from the first Nationalist Afrikaner government to its ideological apogee, the accession in 1958 of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who, assuming the godhead of the chosen white Volk, promised a creation of ‘separate freedoms’ for black and white that would be achieved, not in six days, but by 1976. Some of the issues occurring within the book’s span (six years during the 1950s) were: the Bantu Education Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the consolidation of the black ‘homelands’ (yes, 13 per cent of the land, and the loss of South African citizenship for the black majority), and the removal of ‘coloured’ voters of the Cape from the common roll. The 1950s also witnessed the formation of the Liberal Party (the only legal non-racial party, once the Communist Party was banned); the establishment of the secret society Broederbond’s control of government; the alliance of black, Indian, and coloured mass movements and white leftist movements in the Congress of the People, at which the Freedom Charter (similar to the United Nations Charter, and now banned) was adopted; the beginning of the boycott movement against racialism in South African sport, and of the opposition of church to state on the question of ‘mixed’ worship. It was the era of the great mass movements of black (sprinkled with white) passive resistance to unjust laws. It saw the beginning of white right-wing urban terrorism, many years before the suppressed and outlawed black liberation movements turned in tragic desperation to the sporadic urban terrorism that frightens South Africans today.

  In Paton’s novels one hears voices. That is his method. It derives perhaps – fascinatingly – from the secret level at which the suprarational of creative imagination and the supra-rational of religious belief well up together in him. In Phalarope a voice bore witness to the undoing of a young man by racist laws that made a criminal act out of a passing sexual infidelity. A loving relative watched what she was powerless to prevent; hers was the voice of compassion. In Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, watcher has turned spy. Characters’ actions are seen now by hostile, distorting eyes and recorded in the evil cadences of poison-pen letters. Paton’s technique remains the same, but his viewpoint has changed from sorrowful compassion to irony. Compare the hushed shock with which Paton described Pieter van Vlaanderen’s ‘fall’ (he has made love to a black girl) from the love of wife and family, honour and self-respect in Phalarope, with the prurient cackle of Proud White Christian Woman when she writes anonymously to Robert Mansfield, a leader of the Liberal Party: ‘How are your black dolly girls? … Does your wife like to be poked by the same stick that has been poking the black dolly girls?’

  The phalarope, rare bird of understanding that came too late between father and son in the earlier novel, is recognised between the generations in the proud acceptance by the wealthy Indian family, the Bodasinghs, of their daughter’s involvement in the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws. And, much later in the narrative, the bird figures again in the rise of internal moral conflicts and their liberal resolution within formerly self-righteous racists, like Van Onselen, a civil servant and one of the ‘voices’, and his Aunt Trina, to whom his running commentary on central events and protagonists in the book is addressed. This type of happy-end conversion is sometimes difficult to believe and slightly embarrassing to read. Perhaps it is best taken as another symbol: that of Alan Paton the man’s continued faith in the power of seeing the light, which is in tension with the writer’s ironic doubt that its beam goes all the way to a change in power structure. Proud White Christian Woman’s ‘conversion’, on the other hand, is brought about by brutal circumstance that, alas, seems closer to the actualities of change in South Africa: the threat of her own death. She is dying of cancer, as there are signs that white society is beginning to know it can die of apartheid.

  * * *

  Yet, with few exceptions, the writer wins out over the man. The most dangerous episode in the book, from the point of view of those who see Paton’s assertions of faith as lapses into sentiment, is steely and silencing. An Afrikaner judge, in line for the highest legal honour in the land, disqualifies himself by ceremonially washing and kissing, in a black church, the feet of his old servant, to restore a breach of faith between the whites who administer a black ghetto and the blacks who live in it. The strangeness and awkward solemnity is somehow enhanced by devices of irony that also expose the incident’s South African craziness. Comments within the book take the form of snippets of supposed newspaper reports wryly and slyly aping the attitudes and vocabularies of left and right. Criticism from the left is pre-empted:

  The episode is totally meaningless and irrelevant, and it shows once more how unrelated to our realities are the bourgeois values of goodwill and sporadic benevolence in our South African situation … an example of white condescension at its very
worst … The wages that she earns probably amount to three or four per cent of the judge’s salary. Such gross inequalities are not removed by any amount of washing or kissing.

  Every word is true, and Paton knows it; but for him that truth lies alongside the other, his faith.

  He probably will be accused, now, of Manichaeanism. The trouble with being a public, political figure as he has been is that the writer will always be judged in relation to that figure. But Paton ought, with this work, to be granted the writer’s freedom and, indeed, obligation to show the Manichaean elements in the society that is his material. Since he is a fervently personal writer, his own convictions may dominate, but he fulfils a writer’s vision by seeing everything that is there. He does not let himself shirk much. He is aware that if the 1950s were the high years of white liberalism, they saw more importantly the beginning of the revolutionary period for blacks. Chief Luthuli, talking to the fictional Robert Mansfield, Liberal Party leader, about the African National Congress alliance with the Communist Party, says: ‘When my house is burning down and we are all running to the fire, I don’t say to the man next to me, Tell me first, where did you get your bucket, where did you draw your water?’ From the mouth of another of the real personages who converse with fictional ones, Dr Monty Naicker, comes: ‘This is going to be our life from now on. Some of us have to be destroyed now so that freedom can come to others later.’