Male power in Rooke’s world is not exercised at a remove, through money, for instance: women who look to men for love are as likely as not to meet violence and oppression instead. This is the disillusioning truth Mittee discovers when she marries Paul. It is a truth Selina has already learned, though it does not stop her from returning to Paul again and again.
What draws the half-caste woman and the sadistic man so obsessively together? To explain Paul’s craving, Rooke seems to hark back to the folklore of the luxe et volupté of the mixed-blood mistress, combining savage abandon with European refinement of pleasure. Selina’s own motivation is harder to understand or accept. Is she simply continuing to compete sexually with Mittee; is Paul to be understood as one of those dark, forceful men whom, in the world of romance, women find irresistible; or is Selina, as a creature of romance too, seeking in Paul’s embrace her own romantic doom? The retrospective first-person narrative mode makes deeper motives such as these difficult (though not impossible) to explore. As is often the case when she is in a fix, however, Rooke dodges the problem by shifting into a higher rhetorical gear: ‘Would I live again those nights of terror and passion? Each time I said to him, I will never come here again. But when the moon was high and nothing stirred on the veld but the night wind, I would leave my mat in Aunt Lena’s house and run down the path to the great wild fig tree.’ (pp. 116–17)
The somewhat asexual Mittee is not typical of Rooke’s heroines. For the most part they are frankly physical beings, in quest not only of love but of glamour and of sexual experience too. Set in the context of the high-minded but rather prim South African liberal novel, Rooke’s world of pissing and farting, of menstruation and masturbation and orgasm (for which her code-word is ‘his/her moment’) is a welcome relief. It is a world seen through the eyes of children: not of the presexual children of Schreiner’s African Farm but of vigorous late teenagers, typified by Andrina in Mittee, who stalks about in a sexual fever-heat, laughs ‘low and sweet’ in the bushes, allows ‘a long, slender leg, bent in ecstasy’ to stick out – desiring beings not yet trapped in the net of proprieties and obligations which has turned their parents into such hypocrites. (p. 60) In this respect Rooke brings together two commonplaces of Romantic primitivism: that savages and children are Man in unfallen state, and that civilisation is the great enemy. (In an interview as late as 1956 she spoke of her fear that the Zulus would be spoiled by civilisation; Wizards’ Country, over which she laboured for three years, is a lament for the passing of the old Zulu world.)
In fact, it can be argued that for Rooke the fundamental conflict is not between black and white, not between man and woman, but between young and old. The narrator-heroes and heroines of her books are all young. Even when they are looking back on their youth from a distance (as in Mittee), this distancing device is purely nominal: the narrating, experiencing sensibility is young, indeed juvenile. Boy on the Mountain breaks down the book-trade distinction between juvenile and adult fiction in a disturbing way, weaving a trail of drug addiction, violence, sex and death through a story of public schools and masculine sports, of youthful camaraderie and gauche courtship. The crude comedy of Mittee (circus animals lifting their tails and spraying the well-dressed public, old men swallowing lizards’ eggs thinking they are pills, runaway carriages that upset their drivers into patches of thorns) appeals to a child’s sense of humour. Selina’s consciousness may be intended to be a divided consciousness, a bastard consciousness, or something even more complicated, but it is above all a juvenile consciousness, unrefined, unsocialised, crude, eager.
Crude and eager too are the young Afrikaner men who surround Mittee: great laughers and jokers and pinchers of bottoms and players of pranks. With a difference, however: Rooke has an eagle eye for the sadism indulged by a male culture of pranks, and for the sinister latitude allowed to prank-players in a country where a white skin assured invulnerability (the prank-players set an Arab’s beard on fire and pass on, laughing at his anguish). In a telling comment on these same young men, now become fighters in a war against the British, she writes, ‘Their eyes had grown watchful. Sometimes they spoke of the War; of the stealthy rides across the veld, of the blowing up of trains, as exciting as a vicious practical joke.’ (p. 163) Practical jokes and sabotage: two sides of the same coin, the first a training ground for the second, turning boisterous boys into hard men.
IV
One of Rooke’s more engaging features is a robust familiarity – or at least the appearance of such – with the wider world. She crashes boldly into such preserves of the male writer as public-school life, warfare, sport (even boxing!) and casual philandering. She seems to know all about the economics of sugar farming, the workings of land tenure, the tricks that traders use to cheat rural blacks. She handles colloquial Afrikaans, which she imitates in English to give the dialogue of books like Mittee a stylistic colouring, with a sure hand. (This practice explains such exclamations as ‘All the world!’ or ‘Almighty!’ which pepper the dialogue, as well as Mittee’s odd-sounding and vulgar warning to Selina, ‘Watch your mouth, you thunder, you lightning!’ [p. 146] When Selina is spoken of, in her presence, as a ‘creature’, more of a racist jibe is intended than may be apparent: in Rooke’s day skepsel, which ‘creature’ translates, was a common term of disparagement for a person of colour.) (p. 50)
On the other hand, Rooke’s novels are no models of fictional composition. All too often she loses her narrative line in a welter of detail, in recountings of tangential events, parades of ephemeral characters with confusing names; she writes with her nose so close to the page that she loses sight of the larger picture.
Like other novelists of her era, she thought of the last decades of the nineteenth century – the scramble for diamonds and gold, the Zulu Wars, the Anglo-Boer War – as the high point of South African history, a time when adventure and excitement at last broke into the country’s long provincial slumber. These decades supply the materials for her historical romances. For current tastes, there is a more sobering historical interest in Ratoons, set in her own day, a novel that traces the ramifying tensions in the micro-environment of a white farming community as it loses land to more enterprising Indian competitors and begins to clamour for protective legislation (‘Group Areas’).
Rooke’s position on black–white conflict is broadly liberal. In Mittee she sides with the missionaries as protectors of black interests against the rapacity of white farmers. In Wizards’ Country she records the less known aftermath of the pitched battles fought and lost by the Zulus against British armies: organised destruction of their homes and decimation of their herds by gangs of settlers. If her novels in general give a voice to the woman as underdog, and the child as double underdog, then Mittee in particular gives voice to the black woman child, trebly oppressed. (To cap it all, Selina is shunned by the Shangaans, her mother’s people.)
Rooke’s treatment of settler society – the society in which she grew up in Natal – varies between the genially satiric and the savagely accusatory. Some of the malicious exchanges of gossip in Ratoons are worthy of Patrick White’s Sydney suburbs. If she avoids adult protagonists, it is perhaps because she cannot imagine an older person who has not been deformed by the boredom, moralism, philistinism and prejudice of colonial life.
Parents in Rooke’s world are capable of the vilest oppressions. They extort emotional and sexual consolations from their children, they tell them the most fantastic lies (that they are feeble-minded, that they bear hereditary taints, that they are products of incestuous unions) and hint at the most fearful punishments (castration, sterilisation) to keep them at home and prevent them from knowing love. Mittee has had the good fortune to lose both parents at the age of two. She promptly discards the name they gave her (Maria) and becomes her own person, Mittee – a baby-name, as Castledene observes, and one she has difficulty outgrowing.
The generative energy for Rooke’s fictional project comes from a shadowy family ur-romance whose outline is only
dimly discernible at the surface level. It includes siblings locked in murderous rivalries, revered but treacherous fathers, engulfing, devouring mothers. The family in Rooke’s imagination is the site of a war of all against all; those who escape alive refrain, perhaps wisely, from reproducing it.
23 Gordimer and Turgenev
I
IN AN ADDRESS given in 1975 Nadine Gordimer spoke about the pressures and demands upon South African writers created by racial polarisation, pressures and demands felt particularly keenly by black writers. On the one hand, she said, the black writer needed to preserve his freedom to express ‘a deep, intense, private view’, ‘the truth as he [saw] it’ (the masculine pronoun is Gordimer’s). On the other hand, the people whose lot he shared, and who regarded him as their spokesman, expected him to subordinate his individual talent to political imperatives and write in ‘the jargon of struggle’.1
Although the particular urgency of Gordimer’s speech came, I believe, out of a feeling that she herself was being pulled in exactly these two directions, she chose to concentrate on the dilemma of the black writer. She urges him to maintain his freedom: only from a position of freedom, she says, will he be able to make his unique ‘gift’ to the liberation struggle. She invokes Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘The writer is someone who is faithful to a political and social body but never stops contesting it.’2
As her prime example of a writer who throughout his life was faithful to the cause of social reform, yet continually criticised and contested the strategies of fellow progressives, Gordimer points to the Russian Ivan Turgenev and to his novel Fathers and Sons (1862). As a consequence of presenting his hero, Bazarov, in his full, all-too-human complexity, Turgenev had to face the anger and contempt of the young Russian radicals, who had hitherto considered him their champion but now felt he had stabbed them in the back. Though disappointed by their response, Turgenev did not budge. As an artist, he said, he had to follow the truth. ‘In the given case, life, according to my ideas, happened to be like that, and what I wanted above all was to be sincere and truthful.’ And elsewhere: ‘Only those who can do no better submit to a given [i.e. laid-down] theme or carry out a programme.’3
The 1975 speech was the last occasion when Gordimer explicitly held up a European writer as a model to black writers. Four years later she would entirely revise her position. In South Africa there were two cultures, she would now say, a white culture and a black culture. The time was past when white culture could impose its standards as universal. ‘For the black artist at this stage of his development relevance is the supreme criterion. It is that by which his work will be judged by his own people, and they are the supreme authority.’ No matter how well intentioned the white writer may be, ‘the order of his experience as a white [differs] completely from the order of black experience.’ He – and here she clearly included herself — is therefore in no position to offer advice or proffer models.4
Although Gordimer did not persist for long in this mode of radical cultural hermeticism, her reservations about imposing or even offering European models remained. ‘Whites must learn to listen,’ she writes in 1982, in words she has heard from the poet Mongane Serote.5 There are many senses in which Gordimer from 1976 onward spends her time listening or listening to. One sense is that she scrupulously no longer tells black writers whom to read and imitate.
Yet in the 1984 essay ‘The Essential Gesture’ Gordimer returns to nineteenth-century Russia. Is there some way, she asks, in which the black South African writer can reconcile the demands of his community with the demands of artistic truth? In answer she calls upon Vissarion Belinsky: ‘Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works . . . will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.’6
In itself this advice is vapid, as Gordimer must have recognised. Why then quote it? The clue seems to me to lie in the endorsement Gordimer attaches to it: its author, Belinsky, was ‘the great mentor of Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century’.7
Gordimer is right, or almost right. Belinsky was a critic and editor who by clarity of intelligence, integrity of purpose and a certain fearlessness of utterance, left a mark on two generations of Russian writers: the generation of Herzen (born 1812) and Turgenev (born 1818), and the generation of Chernyshevsky (born 1828) and Dobrolyubov (born 1836).
On Turgenev, Belinsky’s influence ran particularly deep. Turgenev met Belinsky in 1843, when he was twenty-five and Belinsky thirty-two; Belinsky became a respected friend – some would say a father figure.8 Gordimer’s word ‘mentor’ is not inaccurate. Under Belinsky’s influence, in such early works as ‘The Landowner’ and A Sportsman’s Sketches, Turgenev launched a scathing attack on the landowning class, balancing it with an affectionate and even sentimental account of the peasantry. Fathers and Sons was dedicated to Belinsky’s memory. In his Literary Reminiscences, published in 1868, twenty years after Belinsky’s death, Turgenev was still concerned enough with the balance of power between the two of them to attempt to align Belinsky with him (as a moderate, Westernising liberal), whereas earlier in his career he had been the one to be aligned with Belinsky (as a radical).9
Yet finally Gordimer’s characterisation of Belinksy creates a false impression. Herzen and Turgenev are not revolutionary writers; Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov may have expressed revolutionary, or at least radical, views, but as writers they are mediocre. To put the point in another way: it is more to Belinsky’s credit that his political-aesthetic credo of social responsibility plus social realism was respected by Turgenev than that it was carried into practice by Chernyshevsky. As an historical figure, Turgenev is a bigger fish than Chernyshevsky, indeed than Belinsky. If Gordimer chooses in 1984 to hold up the name of Belinsky rather than of Turgenev, it is, I think, because Belinsky can plausibly be presented as a proto-revolutionary, while Turgenev cannot.10 The move from Turgenev – or what Turgenev stood for – to Belinsky and what Belinsky stood for was the adjustment, the concession she felt she needed to make before she could return to nineteenth-century Russian literature and plead its relevance to South Africa under late apartheid.11
One of the paradoxes of the four critical forays by Gordimer I have referred to, coming from the years when African writers were beginning to turn their backs on Western models, is that she continually returns for guidance, for signposting, to Europe: to those influential left-wing critics who helped to orient her when she was still finding her way as a writer-intellectual; and to nineteenth-century Russia, where writers – not always of their own volition – found themselves in the vanguard of social change, suffering censorship, imprisonment and exile for what they wrote (here we should remember that even the patrician Turgenev, after his 1852 obituary on Gogol, was arrested and sentenced to internal exile on his estate).
Writing is a lonely business, writing in opposition to the community one is born into even lonelier. It is understandable that Gordimer, as an oppositional South African writer, should have sought for and annexed historical precedents and antecedents wherever she could find them.
As for why she should have worked herself into a position of on the one hand listening to, accepting, even approving the repudiation of Europe by black fellow-writers (thesis), while on the other hand asserting her own allegiance to a powerful European literary-political tradition (antithesis), and yet (synthesis) claiming an overriding commonality of purpose with her black colleagues, all one can say is that the reasons are complicated. They have a great deal to do, one suspects, with the two halves of the imaginary audience to whom Gordimer, at least at that time, was addressing herself: inside South Africa, to a radical intelligentsia, mainly black; outside South Africa, to a liberal intelligentsia, mainly white; each (as she was acutely aware) listening with one ear to what she was saying to them, with the other ear to what she was saying to the other half.
How Gordimer manages her split audience is a fascinating subject in its own right, but is not my concern here. Instead I return
to Turgenev: to the real Turgenev and to Gordimer’s Turgenev, to Turgenev’s Russia and Gordimer’s South Africa. What does it mean to map Turgenev’s Russia on to Gordimer’s South Africa? Does it illuminate the South Africa of the embattled years of apartheid if we map the failure of the last czars, from Alexander II to Nicholas II, to phase out feudalism and Westernise the country, while at the same time holding revolution at bay, on to the failed efforts of the Vorster and Botha administrations to deracialise politics, modernise the economy and bring a black middle class into the electorate, while at the same time holding revolution at bay? Does either 1905 or 1917 (depending on one’s vision of the future) correspond usefully to the South African settlement of 1990? In contemplating these questions, one might prudently bear it in mind that what people outside Russia know about nineteenth-century Russia comes largely from Russian novelists (Turgenev prominent among them), just as much of what people outside South Africa know about modern South Africa comes from South African writers, Gordimer prominent among them.
II
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 26