And the lions of our African literature are confronted suddenly, just as other literatures, with another, the latest factor in the threat to debase the written word, this time presented by information technology as, indeed, an advancement in the dissemination of literature. Although it seems something of a gimmick, so far, with one thirty-page novel (Stephen King’s) written ‘for’ and ‘published’ on the internet, and one can hardly imagine Soyinka’s The Interpreters let alone War and Peace republished in this way, there is every likelihood that at a certain broad level there is going to be a public deprived for a lifetime – because it is going to be told by international websites what it needs, what cultural fulfilment is; deprived of the pleasures and intellectual fulfilment I have described and quoted. People are going to ‘read’, not books, but texts passing on a screen, soon to be available like telephone messages to appear on the matchbox screens of mobile phones.
So the mobile phone, Kindle, and other devices become the paperbacks of the future – rivalling, anyway, the printed volume’s portability? And the beguilement (or shall we say the corruption) of the writer to ‘publish’ in this ephemeral way cannot be discounted. Apparently the money is good; better and quicker than royalties. The seduction of the image, away from the printed word, has extended, in one instance already, to the very process of writing becoming an image. An American actor-turned-writer has fitted a tiny special camera to his computer and written his science fiction novel watched by a webcam. The linkage of his study at home to the internet by this means will bring him $2 million as a deal with a software company promoter. The reader as voyeur.
Vast advances in IT communications are an information revolution that has great possibilities for social development if well used, which means made economically available to the millions in the world, the underdeveloped and developing world whose lives will otherwise be bulldozed by the financial oligarchy of globalisation. But in literature, technology cannot ever replace with the image the illumination that comes from the written word, self-contained, self-powered, in print on paper, infinitely accessible for rumination on and return to, between hard or soft covers.
First it was the book of the movie.
Now it is the book of the website.
This is the lion’s problem just as it is that of the rest of the world’s literature.
2006
Source Acknowledgements
Pieces in this collection first appeared in the following publications: A South African Childhood; Cannes Epilogue (The New Yorker); Hassan in America (The Forum); Egypt Revisited (National English Review); Chief Luthuli; New Notes from the Underground (Atlantic Monthly); Apartheid; The Congo; Party of One (Holiday); A Bolter and the Invincible Summer; Taking into Account; Pula! (London Magazine); Censored, Banned, Gagged (Encounter); Great Problems in the Street; Madagascar (The Essential Gesture by Nadine Gordimer, ed. Stephen Clingman); Notes of an Expropriator; The Prison-House of Colonialism (Times Literary Supplement); One Man Living Through It (Magazine of the World Press); Why Did Bram Fischer Choose Jail?; Letter from Johannesburg; The Short Story in South Africa (Kenyon Review); Merci Dieu, It Changes (Atlantic Travel African Development); Pack Up, Black Man; Unchaining Poets; Censorship – The Final Solution; Five Years into Freedom: My New South African Identity; Africa’s Plague, and Everyone’s; Lust and Death (New York Times); The New Black Poets (Dalhousie Review); A Writer’s Freedom; The South African Censor: No Change; Censorship and its Aftermath (Index on Censorship); English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa (Journal of Southern African Studies); Letter from Soweto; Letter from the 153rd State; Mysterious Incest; The Child Is the Man; Living in the Interregnum; The Idea of Gardening; The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader; Joseph Roth (New York Review of Books); What Being a South African Means to Me (South African Outlook); Transkei: A Vision of Two Blood-Red Suns (GEO); Unconfessed History (New Republic); The Essential Gesture (The Age Monthly Review); Huddleston (Trevor Huddleston: Essays on His Life and Work, ed. Deborah Duncan Honor); The African Pot (Die Zeit); A Writer’s Vital Gift to a Free Society; Atlantis (Guardian); Freedom Struggles out of the Chrysalis; Remembering Barney Simon (Independent); Sorting the Images from the Man (Newsweek); Turning the Page (Transition); Beyond Myth; Rising to the Ballot; The Dwelling Place of Words (Washington Post); Personal Proust (Salmagundi); What News on the Rialto? (Los Angeles Times); Edward Said (Sunday Independent (Johannesburg)); Susan Sontag (Sunday Times (South Africa)); Desmond Tutu As I Know Him (Tutu As I Know Him, eds Lavinia Crawford-Browne and Piet Meiring); Experiencing Two Absolutes (The Star (South Africa)). The following pieces were first published as introductions to editions of the works discussed: Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart; Joseph Conrad and Almayer’s Folly; With Them You Never Know; William Plomer and Turbott Wolfe; ‘To You I Can’; Leo Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Naguib Mahfouz’s Three Novels of Ancient Egypt. The following pieces were first delivered as addresses or lectures: Relevance and Commitment; Letter from South Africa; Our Century; The Status of the Writer in the World Today; The Poor Are Always with Us; Octavio Paz; When Art Meets Politics; A Letter to Future Generations; Hemingway’s Expatriates; The Entitlement Approach; Living with A Writer; Home Truths from the Past; Witness: The Inward Testimony; Faith, Reason and War; The Lion in Literature.
Footnotes
Censored, Banned, Gagged
1 My latest novel, Occasion for Loving (London: Gollancz; New York: Viking, 1963), was held under embargo for a while, but has now been released; its fate, once it is published in a cheaper edition, probably will be the same as that of the earlier novel. [In fact Occasion for Loving was not ultimately banned; possibly because, amongst other things, it dealt with the failure of an inter-racial love affair.]
2 Some of the younger Afrikaans writers are beginning to feel stifled by a literary tradition that ignores the glaring realities of our country’s life. If they are moved to write books that do not conform to the tradition of Afrikaans writing, who is to publish them? Afrikaans is not spoken outside South Africa, the European Protectorates, and the Rhodesias.
3 An imprecise definition in South Africa, at the best of times. Randolph Vigne and Peter Hjul are members of the Liberal Party who were running a liberal fortnightly, as was its founder, Patrick Duncan, at the time he was put under ban – subsequently he went into exile in Basutoland, left the Liberal Party and aligned himself with the anti-Communist, militantly black nationalist Pan-Africanist Congress.
A Writer’s Freedom
4 The Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach returned to South Africa under a false name in August 1975 after years of self-imposed exile in Paris. Arrested shortly after his arrival he was sentenced on 26 November to nine years’ imprisonment, having pleaded guilty to twenty-two charges under the Terrorism and Suppression of Communism Acts.
5 Chatsworth and Soweto are respectively Indian and African ghettos. Dimbaza is the notorious ‘resettlement area’ for Africans which is the subject of the film Last Grave at Dimbaza.
Letter from Soweto
6 The South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg released on 8 November the following analysis gleaned from cases reported in the national press between 16 June and 31 October: 1,200 people have already stood trial. Three thousand are facing trials not yet completed. Of the 926 juveniles tried and convicted, 528 have been given corporal punishment, 397 have received suspended sentences or fines, and one has been jailed.
Transkei
7 Where I have used ‘Transkei’ – the term for the so-called ‘independent homeland’ – instead of ‘the Transkei’ – denoting the region – it does not imply any recognition on my part of this integral area of South Africa as a separate country.
Relevance and Commitment
8 In 2010, 49,320,500. Unusual increase due not to birth rate but influx of refugees, principally from Zimbabwe.
The Prison-House of Colonialism
9 Ruth First was assassinated by the apartheid regime in Augu
st 1982. An apparently ordinary parcel sent to her in Mozambique exploded – it contained a bomb – as she opened it, killing her. 2010: she is one of the revered heroes of the South African freedom struggle.
Letter from the 153rd State
10 Now Harare.
11 2010: now become a dictator, Mugabe has brought his country to suffering and disaster..
The South African Censor: No Change
12 Published and banned that year …
13 Etienne le Roux’s novel.
Living in the Interregnum
14 Total population 1980, 20 million, of which 4.5 million are white. Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1981, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1981.
15 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Ein Frauenschicksal’ (A Woman’s Fate), in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by C. F. MacIntyre, University of California Press, Berkeley 1941.
16 Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
17 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Frontline, no. 5, vol. 12, April 1982.
18 Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Accuser’, in Bells in Winter, Ecco, New York, 1978.
19 Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’ Illuminations, Schocken, New York, 1969.
20 Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 3. Paraphrased from the quotation in the English translation by Tibor Szamuely, ‘The Highroad of History Is Not the Sidewalk of the Nevsky Prospekt’, The Russian Tradition, edited by Robert Conquest, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1975.
21 Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’
22 The Star, Johannesburg, 4 August 1982.
23 The US has a 20 per cent slice under the weighted voting system of the IMF and so outvoted all loan opponents combined. The US consequently surely has a corresponding responsibility for how the money South Africa receives is being spent. Is there any evidence that this responsibility is being taken up?
The Idea of Gardening
24 ‘But wait till you can see HORROR,/my child, written on the sun.’ Friston, the missionary, in South Africa, in William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, The Hogarth Press, London, 1965.
New Notes from Underground
25 Terrace, verandah.
The Essential Gesture
26 From Writing Degree Zero, in Barthes, Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Susan Sontag, Fontana, London, 1983, p. 31.
27 Albert Camus, Carnets 1942–51.
28 Ingoapele Madingoane, Africa My Beginning, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1979; Rex Collings, London, 1980.
29 Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, translated by Anna Bostock, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 47.
30 See H.I.E. Dhlomo, ‘Valley of a Thousand Hills’, reprinted in his Collected Works, edited by N. Visser and T. Couzens, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1985; Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi, edited by Stephen Gray, introduction by Tim Couzens, Heinemann, London; Three Continents Press, Washington DC, 1978; Native Life in South Africa, Longman, London, 1987; and The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje, edited by J. L. Comaroff, Macmillan, Johannesburg, 1973; Thomas Mofolo, Chaka: An Historical Romance, new translation by Daniel P. Kunene, Heinemann, London, 1981.
31 Among the most recent examples: Njabulo Ndebele, Fools, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1983; Longman, London, 1986; Ahmed Essop, The Emperor, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984; and Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984.
32 George Steiner, review of E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, The New Yorker, 16 April 1984, p. 156.
33 Vissarion Belinsky, 1810–48. The quote is from my notebook: unable to locate source.
34 Octavio Paz, ‘Development and other mirages’, from The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, translated by Lysander Kemp, Grove Press, New York, 1972, p. 48.
35 The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857–1880, selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1982.
36 Susan Sontag, ‘Approaching Artaud’, in Under the Sign of Saturn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980, p. 15: ‘… authors … recognised by their effort to disestablish themselves, by their will not to be morally useful to the community, by their inclination to present themselves not as social critics but as seers, spiritual adventurers, and social pariahs’.
37 Letter to Max Brod, quoted in Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1981, p. 237.
38 Michel Tournier, Gemini, translated by Anne Carter, London: Collins; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981.
39 John Bayley, review of Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage by Amanda Haight, Observer, 31 October 1976, p. 29.
40 From Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, The Hogarth Press, London, 1978, p. 303.
41 ‘The Story-Teller’, in Illuminations, pp. 108–9.
Letter from Johannesburg
42 A ‘State of Emergency’ in South Africa was declared by government in 1960, lifted, redeclared, extended, through the years to 1986, on and off.
Huddleston: A Sign
43 ‘… prayer consists of attention … Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance … The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle … Warmth of heart … pity, are not enough.’ Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Routledge, London, 1951, pp. 51, 58.
The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader
44 Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller, preface by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1974, p. 5.
45 Richard Howard, ‘A Note on S/Z’, preface to S/Z by Roland Barthes, p. xi.
46 Harry Levin, ‘From Obsession to Imagination: The Psychology of the Writer’, Michigan Quarterly Review, no. 3, vol. 12, summer 1974, p. 190.
47 Roland Barthes, S/Z, p. 21.
48 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Congress’, The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Penguin, 1979, p. 33.
49 Italo Calvino, ‘Whom Do We Write For?’, The Literature Machine, translated by Patrick Creagh, Secker and Warburg, London, 1987, p. 86.
50 John Berger, ‘An Explanation’, Pig Earth, Pantheon, New York, 1979, p. 9.
51 Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review, 3 December 1989, review of Love Life by Bobbie Ann Mason, Harper and Row, New York, 1989.
Censorship – The Final Solution
52 Three of Nadine Gordimer’s novels were banned successively in South Africa: A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World and Burger’s Daughter.
53 I had gathered this information by questioning some reaction, from all those violently opposed to Rushdie’s visit, to obvious points in the narrative any reader would recognise. Blank response. I was a member of a group of writers and journalists who met with the Muslim religious leader and his followers who declared to us that if Rushdie set foot on South African soil he would be killed.
Censorship and its Aftermath
54 Gilbert Marcus, ‘The New Enlightenment’, Centre For Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 1990.
55 ACAG UPDATE, March 1990.
56 The Star, 19 March 1990.
57 ACAG UPDATE, March 1990.
58 The Weekly Mail, 5–11 April 1990.
59 Ibid.
60 Gilbert Marcus, ‘The New Enlightenment’.
61 John le Carré, Guardian, 15 January 1990.
62 Albie Sachs, ‘The Gentle Revenge at the End of Apartheid’, Index on Censorship, April 1990.
63 Albie Sachs, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, ANC In-house Seminar on Culture, 1990.
64 Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, Belknap Press, Harvard, 1980, p. 224.
65 Barbara Masakela, ‘Possible Strategies for Culture in a Post-Apartheid South Africa’, paper given at UNESCO Working Group on Apartheid, Dakar, Senegal, November 1989.
Joseph Roth
66 In a letter to his translator, Blanche Gidon, quoted by Beatrice Musgrave in her introduction to Weights And Measures, Dent, London, 1983, p. 9. Roth lived in Paris for some years and two of his novels, Le Triomphe de la beauté and Le Buste de L’Empereur, were published first in French. Le Triomphe de la beauté probably was written in French; it appears not to have been published in German.
67 I have been told that the standard German biography, David Bronsen’s Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie, Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne, 1974, is now in the process of translation for Roth’s English publisher, Chatto and Windus. Another biography by Nat Cohen of Toronto is planned for publication by the Overlook Press.
68 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, Secker and Warburg, London, 1961, p. 64, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Musil was born in 1880, and though long neglected as a writer outside German-speaking culture, was not forgotten as long as Roth. Musil became a figure in world literature in the fifties; Roth’s work had to wait another twenty years before it was reissued in Germany, let alone in translation.
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