Christopher T. Miezio-Teggatz
University of Wisconsin
Dept. African Languages and Literatures
June 27, 2003
Reading for “pastoral” in 20th
century Southern African white writing
Contents
1.0 Introduction: “the question of ‘pastoral’”
1.0 Introduction: “the question of ‘pastoral’”
1.1 Objectives of this research
1.3 Preliminary description of “pastoral”
1.4 Preliminary notes on the historical literary culture
2.2 Previous definitions of “pastoral” and why they fail
2.3 Why motifs cannot be a definitive feature of “pastoral”
2.4 Why any definition of “pastoral” must be historical
2.5 Any utterance of pastoral is a relative expressive display
2.6 Methodological problems in defining “pastoral”
2.7 A catalogue of pastoral motifs
3.0 Text I: Ralph Lauren’s Safari advertising campaign
4.0 Text II: The 1966 pastoral propaganda brochure Rhodesië/Rhodesia
5.1 Cultural context of the farm and the city in pastoral white writing
5.2 Urbanization in South African pastoral
6.1 The cover of the text and the notion of “white writing”
6.3 Disgrace and the “great campaign of redistribution” (176)
6.4 Framing the farm and the city
6.5 Disgrace’s pastoral morphology and South African history
6.7 Disgrace and South African politics in the Transition
Index of
illustrations
Figure 1 Ralph Lauren Safari advertising campaign.............................................................. 41
Figure 2 Ralph Lauren Safari advertising campaign.............................................................. 42
Figure 3 Ralph Lauren Safari advertising campaign.............................................................. 43
Figure 4: Rhodesië/Rhodesia cover.................................................................................... 47
Figure 5: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.2......................................................................................... 48
Figure 6: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.3......................................................................................... 49
Figure 7: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.4......................................................................................... 50
Figure 8: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.5......................................................................................... 51
Figure 9: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 6....................................................................................... 52
Figure 10: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 7...................................................................................... 54
Figure 11: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 8...................................................................................... 55
Figure 12: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 9..................................................................................... 56
Figure 13: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 10.................................................................................... 57
Figure 14: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 11.................................................................................... 58
Figure 15: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.12..................................................................................... 59
Figure 16: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 13.................................................................................... 60
Figure 17: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 14.................................................................................... 61
Figure 18: Front Cover of Disgrace..................................................................................... 82
Figure 19: Back cover of Disgrace...................................................................................... 83
1.0
Introduction: “the question of ‘pastoral’”[1]
"Those same story-hunters have to send
commentaries with their tales; one cannot understand them as one hears and sees
them. But we for our part have not the leisure to seek the gloss…"
---Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (105-6).
“Pastoral” has long been said to be a particular and isolated thing, but nobody could suggest the same of pastoral criticism, which has been long, contentious, and prolific, and in the end has left most genre critics scratching their heads about what “pastoral” really “is.” Its definition is the biggest critical issue among scholars of pastoral. This essay intends to present a critical displacement of current knowledge, reaching for a means to speak of pastoral with some confidence and precision. The South African corpus of “white writing” (as Coetzee named it in his study of the same title) is highly pastoral. Some of the most beautiful texts of 20th century South Africa are pastoral. I would describe the farm novel as pastoral, as does Coetzee, but why is it pastoral? What does pastoral tell us about farm novels? What specific aspects of farm novels are pastoral? What is not pastoral in farm novels? Why are farm novels almost always pastoral? What does pastoral tell us about the historical culture that wrote and read farm novels? Why do people write in pastoral in the first place, and why do people read it? Unfortunately, given contemporary critical knowledge, while we can speculate a bit about these questions, the only honest answer is “We don’t really know.” There are many reasons for this, the biggest being we have precious little critical agreement about anything having to do with pastoral expression. This is particularly the case when we try to say what “it” “is”.
1.1 Objectives of this research
This essay seeks, first, to establish a reliable methodology to speak critically about pastoral, and second, to examine its cultural and historical relationship with 20th century Southern African white writing. I seek to do so theoretically, by which I mean, with some confidence and precision, with replicable patterns that can be measured over time. "Things and solid truth is what we seek after,” said Guillaume Colletet in Discours du poeme bucolique (1657). His thesis is one of the first serious scholarly examinations of the “question of ‘pastoral’”. Colletet calls attention to the serious methodological problem we have had in defining “pastoral,” namely, doing so precisely. This is a problem because pastoral is quite expressively diverse, and takes many forms. For example, farm novels and frontier pulp are both usually pastoral, but take very different forms. Romances can be pastoral. Science fiction can be pastoral (e.g. Frank Herbert’s Dune; the title itself is a pastoralism). Why is it they all have the potential to be “pastoral”? The criticism possesses no tool to explain this phenomenon. In essence, I seek here to construct a “syntax” of pastoral expression.
1.2 Format of this essay
This essay is divided into two main analytical sections, and examines three texts. The first analytical section, “Defining ‘Pastoral’” (2.0), establishes a methodology where we can identify pastoral with precision, and speak of pastoral with mutual understanding. The criticism possesses no such tool at the moment. My main contributions to the criticism are offering a Catalogue of Pastoral Motifs (2.7), and a general morphology of pastoral plot structure (2.8). The second analytical section, “The Farm and the City” (5.0), examines the historical and cultural relationship between 20th century Southern African whites and their strong propensity to create pastoral texts. In particular I attribute significance to the intense urbanization of white society during this time, when whites left their bushveld farms and trekked to the great cities of Southern Africa.
The three example texts are, first, Ralph Lauren’s Safari advertising campaign (3.0), second, the propaganda brochure Rhodesië/Rhodesia (4.0), and third, J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (6.0). All of these texts have salient pastoral features. They were selected partly because I wanted to examine a wide range of pastoral expression. Two of the examples are photography (3.0 and 4.0). One is advertising (3.0), one is propaganda (4.0), and one is a novel (6.0). I conster all three to be “text,” and have no interest in engaging traditionalist notions of what a “proper text” might be; indeed, it is far beyond the scope of this essay, but I would argue that we have an urgent need to broaden our notion of text. Disgrace is interesting particularly as an example of anti-pastoral or what some critics call “hard pastoral,” presenting a decidedly dystopic African landscape that clashes markedly with the first two examples, which portray Africa as a sort of Garden of Eden.
1.3 Preliminary description of “pastoral”
It’s hard, even for a scholar of pastoral, to describe it to somebody who doesn’t already know. This is part of the problem I am trying to solve. Some critics think we cannot meaningfully define pastoral; indeed, in the last thirty years or so, the criticism has been questioning its ability to do so. I think we can define pastoral meaningfully.
In short, (and to be very reductivist for the sake of simplicity,) “pastoral” is stories, or parts of stories, that take place mainly in the country, but are framed by an urban drama. Pastoral is about urban people going to the country, what William Empson describes as putting the complex into the simple. The urbanites are usually on a retreat for mental recuperation, or are escaping some stress in the city. This is typically followed by a return to the city with wisdom. Sometimes the story is reversed, such as the story of a boy who grows up on a farm, goes off to the Big City, and then returns to the farm with wisdom. Pastoral stories are preoccupied with nature and landscape, and so pastoral stories are characterized by extensive ruminations on gardens, descriptions of spans of wilderness, and the serial listing of flowers and animals. Pastoral stories are characterized by the encounter and interaction of two different social groups—urbanites and rustics—and this becomes an extremely important factor in the historical and cultural analysis of pastoral texts. Pastoral is about two social groups—urban and rural—meeting each other, and learning from the experience.
1.4 Preliminary notes on the historical literary
culture
We will examine the 20th century Southern African pastoral novel written by English or Afrikaans-descended whites. This is to group together three distinct cultures: Rhodesians, Afrikaners, and English-descended South Africans. Together they form a larger ethnic, political, and cultural group that also has many commonalities. Ian Smith in The Great Betrayal calls it “white Southern Africa.” Coetzee in White Writing theorizes the notion of a “white tribe.” Afrikaners have a more insular notion of “Afrikanerdom” which includes (to some extent) Afrikaans speaking Coloureds. In my experience we may best think of it simply as “the white community.” The white community of Southern Africa is actually quite diverse ethnically, with large groups of “Portuguese”, as they’re called, from Mozambique and Angola, plus Jews, many Germans in Namibia, and others. The binding principle between these groups is common European ancestry and fair skin.
It is commonly thought that white settlers in Africa held to a European culture. They often liked to think this themselves. Kennedy in his excellent study Islands of White demonstrates that African settlers evolved their own unique culture. He writes: “If we define culture as a set of rules, implicit or explicit, of standardized modes of behavior and thought to which the members of a community conform, it is evident that a distinctive culture appeared among the settler populations” (18).
The white community has many distinct sub-cultures, which sometimes didn’t get along, and are still often quite suspicious of each other today. Emblematic of this is the Great Trek, the Boer War, the Boer Rebellion, and many other conflicts over the course of 350 years. Nevertheless, the white community generally sticks together in the face of larger ethnic conflict. We see this in the Apartheid laws, which placed all whites together at the top of a social pyramid that was, in reality, a social caste system. Apartheid assigned ethnic groups to various social roles and geographic areas in South Africa, and so created an “apartness” (which is what “Apartheid” means in Afrikaans) that is felt to this day.
South Africa began integrating in 1990, when the Apartheid laws were repealed. This represents an enormous and rapid cultural change. The period this essay will examine is 1898-1999. This is a somewhat arbitrary period, as it will inevitably be, but I choose it because Shreiner writes the first English-language farm novel, Story of an African Farm, in 1898, and Coetzee writes Disgrace in 1999. Disgrace will be the primary text this essay examines.
The Transition occurred in 1994, when the Nationalists gave up power to the Government of National Unity, and the country became truly free. Nelson Mandela became president, and the culture shifted almost dramatically overnight, when Mandela introduced a constitution similar to that of United States. I mark 1999 as the end of the Transition, though admittedly this is arbitrary, but I would argue the culture of today is now fundamentally different.
2.0 Defining “Pastoral”
Pastoral is one of the oldest written literary forms, and certainly one of the most studied. Yet in contemporary criticism, it is difficult to say what pastoral "is," what it is not, or what might be typical of pastoral expression. In his influential study, What is Pastoral? (1996), Alpers never pretends to fully answer his title’s question, which is probably why it is phrased in the interrogative. The "confusion which surrounds the whole question of ‘pastoral’" (Williams 14) has been a long debate in literary criticism. Patterson, who takes a new track by refusing to even attempt a definition, suggests that defining pastoral, or conceptualizing it usefully, was "a cause lost as early as the sixteenth century" (7). Because pastoral has never been codified esthetically, we understand it much less clearly than the murder mystery, the Gothic, or the surreal. This has probably been part of the reason for the rich expressive diversity of pastoral. On the other hand, this lack of codification denies us a syntax for interpreting the many versions of pastoral. In this chapter, my goal is to establish a method whereby we can speak about pastoral with precision and mutual understanding.
2.1 My findings in brief
Pastoral is a genre system, and so cannot be discretely defined or encapsulated. Contrary to much misconception in pastoral criticism, pastoral is not a fixed form. Pastoral is highly mutable over time, which means that pastoral cannot be defined by its motifs. For example, we cannot say a text is pastoral simply because it has idyllic motifs. Pastoral is not extinct in the modern age, as many critics would suggest; indeed, I suggest that pastoral is actually all around us, every day. It is simply different in the modern era. Because of the repetition of generic forms and functions over time, we can observe, measure, and describe pastoral. Narratologically, expressively, and in terms of reader response, pastoral is the anticipation of previous versions of pastoral. These previous forms of pastoral can be catalogued meaningfully, allowing us to identify pastoral features of text with some confidence and precision. Further, we can observe and catalogue narratological patterns in pastoral stories. Pastoral has typical plot structures that are consistently repeated over time. In short, while we cannot define pastoral, we can identify and describe it meaningfully, and hopefully settle the endless debate over what “it” “is.”
2.2 Previous definitions of “pastoral” and why they
fail
Often, at one time or another in the history of pastoral criticism, one or another anecdote has been seen to be definitive of pastoral:
Table 1: Examples of
representative anecdotes of pastoral sometimes seen as definitive in the
criticism
1. Renato Poggioli in The Oaten Flute (1975) suggests that pastoral is a "double longing after innocence and happiness" (1).
2. Frank Kermode in English Pastoral Poetry (1972) suggests that pastoral is based on a rhetorical and philosophical antithesis of Art and Nature.
3. Walter W. Greg in Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1970) suggests that the fundamental motivation of pastoral is hostility to urban life.
4. Edward William Tyler in Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (1964) suggests that the "central tenet" of pastoral is the pathetic fallacy (154).
5. Hallett Smith in Elizabethan Poetry (1952) suggests that the fundamental fiction of pastoral is the ideal of otium.
6. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer in The Green Cabinet (1969) suggests that pastoral is based on Epicureanism.
7. Richard Cody in The Landscape of the Mind (1969) suggests that Renaissance pastoral was "the poetic expression par excellence of the cult of esthetic Platonism" (6).
8. John D. Bernard in Ceremonies of Innocence (1989) suggests that pastoral is the poetic expression of the vita contemplativa (10).
All of these definitions contain a certain amount of insight. Each observes a common, typical aspect of pastoral, often focusing on one particular historical version of pastoral.
The problem with such definitions has been that they don’t describe pastoral in a global sense. So, when their scope as a definition is not broad enough, they are forced to assert that works that don’t fit this anecdote are not "properly" or "truly" pastoral. Patterson complains of this critical tendency, writing, "discussion inevitably leads to the narrowing strictures of normative criticism, statements of what constitutes the ‘genuine’ or the ‘true’ to the exclusion of exemplars that the critic regards as ‘perverse’" (7). Turner says this sort of hermeneutic enclosure "is exactly how topographia [his word for “pastoral”] works, [by] creating a world …[that] mak[es] dissent unthinkable" (186). For example, Alpers asserts that Marvell’s "The Mower and the Glowworms" is pastoral, whereas Thomas Stanley’s "The Glowworm" is not (52-3), mainly because Stanley’s poem fails to meet some of Alpers’ expressive notions of pastoral. Nevertheless, it is quite apparent that Stanley’s poem has pastoral motivation. Patterson cites it as pastoral. It takes nature as a figure for, or actor or agent in, the human drama. Certainly it is about some kind of rural life, or experience, or sentiment. In this respect, the title itself is a pastoralism.
2.3 Why motifs cannot be a definitive feature of
“pastoral”
Motifs are a useful tool for understanding pastoral, particularly for understanding its conventions and historical variability. Nevertheless, no single motif, nor even any group of motifs, is definitive of pastoral. We can describe but not define pastoral by its motifs. In part because motifs of pastoral are based on the reality they describe, and reality is constantly changing, the mutability of pastoral motifs, and their textual variability, seems little surprise. It also seems little surprise that no one motif is definitive of pastoral.
Pastoral, like the romantic, is about something much bigger than all its parts. This is why there is a perpetual disjunction between the anecdotes of pastoral and the actual performance (or aesthetic experience) of pastoral, such as Wordsworth’s narrator complains after climbing Mont Blanc in The Prelude. Pastoral sentiment is usually highly meta-pastoral. Yet pastoral can never say directly what it is, and it is always more than it suggests. This means that definitions of pastoral premised on anecdotes always refer elsewhere, never succeed in fully defining pastoral logic, and always return to the forms upon which they depend, but can never define. Definitions premised on the anecdotes of pastoral are, in other words, anecdotal. Motifs are component parts of pastoral, never the sum or total of pastoral as a genre system, nor in any way definitive.
2.4 Why any definition of “pastoral” must be
historical
Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, observes that there is no rule or paradigm for assessing beauty; that beauty will always be “exemplary.” Eagleton remarks that “readers do not... encounter texts in a void: all readers are socially and historically positioned” (72). Further, contemporary genre theory suggests that a given genre can only be robustly conceptualized in historical isolation. This posits a polyphony of versions of pastoral on a dynamic linear axis of literary time, of which the South African pastoral novel is but one. Contemporary genre theory suggests "genres are historically determined, dynamic entities" (Duff 4), and Curtius argues that “in all poetical topoi the style of expression is historically determined” (82). A historically relativist view must also be a culturally relativist one, eventually; de Certeau argues that "however proximate the content may be, its 'ethnological' form remains" (64).
Many critics see pastoral extinct past the Renaissance, their argument rooted in the notion of fixed forms. Alpers suggests that if he has anything new to say, it is that pastoral survives into the modern age (e.g., he cites The English Patient). Pastoral is actually all around us, every day. It is simply different in the modern era, and this is to say that many antique ideas about “pastoral”, as articulated by Theocritus, Virgil, Spencer, and Shakespeare, are no longer typical. We no longer talk about shepherds in the green hills of Sicily, for example, probably because the subject does not interest us any more.
This is little surprise, and makes good common sense, given the world is a very different place nowadays. Contemporary romance, for example, is very different from 16th century English courtly love, for many different and complex reasons, despite both being romantic sentiment. One must assume the same expressive diversity with pastoral sentiment. Furthermore, to see it as a fixed form is to presume pastoral is a hollow rhetorical device, which serves no adaptive function in culture. This is certainly not so. Pastoral is not a fixed form; indeed, there are wide formal differences between the antique pastoral writers themselves. Shakespeare, for example, does not have the same “pastoral” vision as Virgil.
2.5 Any utterance of pastoral is a relative expressive
display
Part of what we have wanted to find in pastoral is a universal or invariant feature. But if pastoral is not a fixed form, then we have been looking for something that likely does not exist. Or, if there is an invariant feature, we simply don’t have enough critical data yet. If the cacophony of pastoral “definitions” suggests anything, it is probably this. Moreover, contemporary criticism has moved away from conceptualizations of objects (literary or otherwise) that are premised on an absolute or essential reality. Vargish and Mook (1999) cite this as one of the primary intellectual trends of the 20th century; a shift "from a presumed external reality, the world, to focus on one’s observation and measurement of the world" (10).
Thus it seems wise to presume from the start that any utterance of pastoral is a relative display, and exists as genre, as mode, primarily in relation to previous versions of pastoral. Narratologically, expressively, and in terms of reader response, pastoral is the anticipation of previous versions of pastoral. On an epistemological level, this is what pastoral "is." For this reason, pastoral as a whole, as a genre system, cannot be discretely defined or encapsulated. Nevertheless, like most statistical phenomena, pastoral text and its expressive display can be observed, measured, and described. This is a phenomenological assessment.
2.6 Methodological problems in defining “pastoral”
Pastoral can be observed, measured, and described. This is because pastoral is characterized by the patterning of conventional features across time. Generic expression is characterized by the repetition of motifs, characters, moods, and plots. These repetitions establish a pastoral narrative contract with the reader, and give continuity to pastoral expression across time. As Alpers remarks, “To assume the continuity of literary forms and expression is, in a sense, to say simply that language and literature are social phenomena, and that verbal activity occurs no de novo but in some institutional context, what Wittgenstein called a ‘language game.’ Literary expression, in this view, is a particularly formalized or institutionalized activity, and continuity between present and past poems therefore would seem to be simply in the nature of poetry” (12).
Genre is cultural discourse[2] over time,[3] structured dynamically[4] by already-known and anticipated[5] textual forms and discursive functions. Without this structuration, we would have no esthetic perception of genre. Without this structuration, we would have no vocabulary for participation in the generic discourse. Genre, in this respect, is a retelling of a story, or the retelling of a type or part of story. Pastoral, then, is less the text itself, and more an expressive display. Pastoral is not the tale (which is already known and anticipated) so much as the telling (the variations of which generate esthetic suspense). Thus, we need a theoretical model for assessing pastoral practice, as de Certeau would call it.
If we want to isolate pastoral, we have two robust variables for observation and descriptive measurement: generic forms and discursive functions. These two variables exist on two axes: history and an isolated literary culture. A great many forms of pastoral are known to the criticism. The functions of pastoral, what pastoral “can do” (as Patterson puts it), its "systems of operation," are grasped less clearly, and are a focus later in this essay. Pastoral display may be isolated, somewhat, by the correlation of textual forms with discursive functions. Correlation is evidence that the group of variables reconstructs its object in a way that indicates its rules of functioning.
Because pastoral, as a cultural discourse, is in many respects a living organism that changes on a daily basis (an organic view of discourse), we can never make a precise, definitive, or universalizing statement about any single aspect of pastoral text. Pastoral criticism has focused almost exclusively on finding textual forms that are definitive of the genre. For algebraic reasons, any definition based on textual form will be rhetorically circular (cf 2.3).
Textual forms can not be a constant of pastoral; they can only be typical, and here, only in certain groups of texts at certain points in time, and even here, our demarcations of historical period will be somewhat arbitrary. For example, a man seeking a woman is not necessarily a definitive anecdote of the romantic in 20th century America, nor was it in antique Greek culture. By itself, form does not present a robust syntax for dealing with pastoral. Derrida’s "Law of Genre" teaches that the textual forms "by which a work inscribes itself within a genre paradoxically do not belong to that genre" (Duff 5).
In What is Pastoral? Alpers borrows the concept of the "representative anecdote," a definition based on a presumed aspect of reality that a given form describes. Kenneth Burke writes in A Grammar of Motives:
Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful
reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are
selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain
circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary
meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In
its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reality become deflection
when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter
which it is designed to calculate. Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed
in the development of a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search
for a "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity
with which the vocabulary is constructed. (59)
Representative anecdotes are, in other words, textual forms glossed as pastoral that correlate with a presumed aspect of reality. Alpers suggests that "our idea of pastoral will be determined by what we take to be its representative anecdote" (21).
I disagree with Alpers’ methodology here. Let’s take the 1930s British murder mystery as an example. Certain anecdotes are readily recognizable, such as lonely country manors on rainy nights (a pastoralism), idle aristocrats (another pastoralism), revolvers and candlesticks, butlers and amateur detectives. The game Clue is a catalogue of clichés from the genre. While often revolvers are fired in lonely English manors on rainy nights, in such fiction, this in itself is not definitive of the genre or the presumed aspect of reality it describes. Certainly these motifs are representative anecdotes, corresponding to aspects of reality. But they are not what a murder mystery “is”. Indeed, in many ways they are clichés that point, in a paradoxical but readily apparent sense, to what the murder mystery is not. The murder mystery is not lone English manors on rainy nights with nefarious houseguests. It can take this form, but clearly this form is not what the murder mystery “is”.
In the same respect, while certain anecdotes are typical of pastoral, such as rustic fools, country maidens, and gardens, and while they clearly correspond with aspects of reality, they are not definitive of pastoral. Over the course of four centuries of serious pastoral criticism, we have seen a wide range of anecdotes that seem clearly to be typical of pastoral. Which of them might be definitive is much less clear. An example is the idyllic. While often taken to be a definitive feature of pastoral, it is easily observable that much of pastoral sentiment is counter-idyllic, georgic, or even realist. Another example is rural people and their lives, which Alpers suggests is a definitive anecdote, or focal mode,[6] of pastoral. But clearly pastoral is also preoccupied, in many different ways, with city people as well, typically dramatized by urbanites who retreat to the rural landscape.
2.7 A catalogue of pastoral
motifs
To say what might be typical (but not definitive) of a given version of pastoral, the only real methodology we possess is cataloguing. We are reduced then, as Brink says in Donkerman, to a naming of parts. This is appropriate, because cataloguing is a particularly pastoral activity. Pastoral narrators are constantly describing the landscape, making lists of flowers, cataloguing the animals they saw yesterday on the Serengeti. In many ways, genre is itself a catalogue of motifs.
The first thing we can do, to answer the larger question of what pastoral "is," is identify pastoral motifs through historical continuity. Because of their repetition across history, we can say with some confidence that certain aspects of text correlate with pastoral expression. When we catalogue pastoral motifs in text, we construct a data set. In a critical sense, a database of pastoral motifs is what pastoral "is."
Below appears a catalogue of pastoral anecdotes in the 20th century pastoral novel, broken roughly into expressive units. For the sake of space and time, I don’t go into detail describing these anecdotes, though I think they are simple to understand, and easy to recognize in text. I seriously doubt that any scholar of pastoral would dispute that these are motifs typical of pastoral. I have tried to make this into a functional and concise table. In my research I have found that this table works extremely well for identifying and describing pastoral text.
Typically in pastoral criticism, the rural characters are described as “shepherds” or “herdsmen,” and I have preserved this convention here.
Table 2:
Motifs
typical of pastoral
1. Conscious attention to art and nature (Alpers 22). Human and natural music are coordinated (Alpers 24).
· E.g. Clark: “Robert was ‘talking’ to the pride of lions...” (165).
2.
Mythos of a Golden
Age (Alpers 16), Lui-Lekker land (Coetzee White Writing 2), Elysium, Earthly Paradise, Happy Valley, "White Man’s
Country". This becomes paired with its rhetorical antithesis, the
“complaint of the times” (Curtius
95), notions of a decaying or
decadent or misguided contemporary era, the “blind leading the blind”.
· E.g., Virgil (Eclogue VIII, 55ff) articulates the reversal of the whole order of nature: “Now may the wolf of his own free will flee the sheep, the oak bear golden apples…”
3.
Innocent love
(Alpers 18). Claims of innocence (Alpers
55). The naïve.
· Empson: pastoral “take[s] a limited life and pretend[s] it is a full and natural one” (Alpers 40).
Rustic’s simplicity as a source of moral
authority (Alpers 50). Rustic
character represents vulnerability (Alpers 30). Consciousness of limitations relative to the world.
· E.g.: “Ghana... was the first country in Black Africa to gain full independence, and this made white Rhodesians nervous...” (Clark 88).
Consciously post-heroic, post-colonial,
colonized. Consciousness of distance from the center (the court, the city, the
imperial metropolis).
·
E.g. Clark: “This dozing imperial backwater...” (66).
4. Withdrawal from the world (Alpers 65).
· E.g. Huxley: If you went long enough you would come to mountains and forests no one had mapped...” (18).
Retreat for reflection and mental recuperation. Exile. Lone poet in empty space (cf British legal dictum of terra nullis).
· Coetzee describes the lone poet in empty space as “one of the topai of South African literature... the veld as the site of wholesale absence” (White Writing 64). And further: “The lone poet in empty space is by no means a peripheral figure in South African writing. In the words he throws out to the landscape, in the echoes he listens for, he is seeking a dialogue with Africa, that will allow him an identity better than that of visitor, stranger, transient” (ibid. 8).
The periphery. This becomes paired with its
rhetorical antithesis: the city, the court, the imperial metropolis.
5. Space set apart for song (Alpers 130). Landscape as an appropriate setting for song (Alpers 27). Poems about man’s place in nature (Alpers 65).
6. Gardens/anti-gardens. Adonis gardens (Alpers 18). The Edenic motif (Alpers 36). Values of the womb: fruitfulness and enclosure. Motifs of violation of the garden: the serpent corrupting Eden, Adonis invading the garden.
· Coetzee observes that the original Cape Colony was planned as “a garden” (White Writing 1), i.e., a provisioning station for Dutch ships on the way to the East Indies.
7. Idyllicism/counter-idyllicism. Utopia/dystopia. The idyll. Concepts of the ideal. The natural. The intuitive. Often: Indigenous Knowledge.
8. Harmonious relation to natural setting (Alpers 23). Sense of benign companionship with nature (Alpers 57).
· E.g., the titles The Sheltering Sky or Cry, the Beloved Country.
· Curtius: “Initially [the invocation of nature] had religious significance [i.e, the Olympians]… Natural powers and natural objects are no longer addressed as divinities in Sophocles but are humanized. They are sympathetic beings” (92).
9. Poetic self-representation as nature (Alpers 59). Characters represented as nature.
10.
Shepherds as lovers
(Alpers 27). Attractive rustic maidens (Alpers 18). The siren. The country vixen. The Coloured servant girl who is
irresistible to white men. The faithless shepherd.
· E.g. Lettice in The Flame Trees of Thika; Bror Blixen in Out of Africa.
Love complaints.
11. Rustic fools. Ignorant peasants. Immoral, thieving, ungrateful farmhands. The "old-style Kaffir" (as South African whites often put it, e.g. Coetzee Disgrace 140), the black fresh out of the bush.
12. Old rustic giving moral counsel (Alpers 27). Older rustic reproves a younger for the follies of love (Alpers 71).
13. The bard, the griot, Merlin, the Malay wizard (Ancestral Voices). Herdsmen as singers or poets (Alpers 22).
· Permutation: archaeologists (Indiana Jones), novelists (Out of Africa), death-bed story tellers (The English Patient).
14. The salmon fisher (Alpers 65). The "white hunter." Hunting parties. The safari. The mounted Kommando. The game drive. The trope of settler masculinity.
15. Motifs of loss, retrospective gaze. Nostalgia.
· E.g., the haunted, echoing opening lines of Out of Africa: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills...” (1).
· Coetzee speaks of the “retrospective gaze of pastoral” (White Writing 4). He remarks of Shreiner’s The Beadle on the “pervasive tone of nostalgia, hinting that the idyll of Harmonie belongs in the past...” (White Writing 67).
· E.g., Clark: “The Okavongo is one of the last great wilderness areas left on earth... When I first went there in 1958, the wildlife was still so prolific that... [etc.]” (11). “But while it lasted I was alive to a degree that few people ever know, and in a way which the new Africa has made impossible to repeat…” (12). “In the days of Rhodesia’s innocence...” (26). “In those days, when the world was still sometimes a little carefree…” (46).
16.
Social encounter of
urbanite and rustic (Alpers 18). Putting
the complex into the simple (Alpers 37). The encounter of urban people with nature. The Empsonian Encounter, the
encounter between people of different social classes, groups, languages, or
cultures. Encounter between settler and Native, settler and Indian, Afrikaner
and English, between the people of the farm and "outsiders".
· E.g. (settler as rustic): “Ahmed makes me uneasy; I can never quite get over the feeling that I ought to be on my knees like a Circassian slave offering him a bowl of rosewater. He’s the only regal character I’ve ever encountered... His manners are so perfect...” (Huxley 111).
17. Common plights and pleasures. Preoccupation with rural community. The patriarchal family. Traveling companions. The expatriate community, die volk, the settler community, the white community, "white Southern Africa” (Smith 123).
· E.g. Huxley: “White men were few in a savage black land and only by standing together... could they hope to survive” (55).
18. Minimization of dynamics of plot. Narratologically, somewhat circular discourse, what Brooks in Reading for the Plot calls an "unreadable report."
19. The Georgic. Rustic person needs to accommodate the realities of his environment, which he can’t control (Aplers 66).
· Coetzee: “Georgic... holds up the garden in bloom against the garden in decay, the garden degenerating into wilderness” (White Writing 4).
20. Return home as the evening falls (Alpers 65).
· E.g.: Huxley 132.
21. Complaints or dialogues are overheard by other rustics, who comment or add their own songs. Rivalry in the performance of song (Alpers 50). Singing contests. Permutations; conversational banter, intellectual competition (cf Curtius chapters 3-4 on intellectual and rhetorical competition as a common pastime in the antique European world). Competitions of sensitivity or manners.
22. An atmosphere of otium (Alpers 22), excessive leisure, the vita contemplativa.
· E.g., Clark 19-20.
Idleness. Boredom. Unchanging-ness, the
eternal.
23. Biblical good shepherd (Alpers 27).
24. Landscape reacting to the human drama. Landscape as an agent or actor in the human drama. Ruskin’s Pathetic Fallacy.
· Coetzee: “In good years the far will respond to [the farmer’s] love by bringing forth bountifully” (White Writing 86). “Landscape is humanized when inscribed by hand and plough; in effect, the genre [of the plaasroman] invokes a myth in which the earth becomes wife to the husband-man” (White Writing 7).
· E.g., in the New Testament, nature reacts to Christ’s death (Mathew 27:51, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:45), and in the Book of Psalms, nature shares in human joy: “Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea roar…[and] all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord” (96:11).
Personification of the landscape.
Personification of animals or flora.
· E.g., Clark: “The starlings are laughing at the moon... I thought you would understand. the Moon, poor fool. She tried to hide from the Sun in daytime. People do that, too...” (48).
25. Serial listing of features of the landscape, the "flower catalogue” (Alpers 102-3, 105)
· Permutations: the animal catalogue, the veld catalogue.
·
E.g. Clark: “The country had an enervated beauty that
was wholly African, full of lapis lazuli shadows. It was autumn and the grass
had ripened to saffron yellow, and was raked and sheeted by mountain winds.
Behind, around, above, towered the granite chain of the Motopos, a unique land
of kopjie and crevice, whale-backed dwala and plunging rocks, vivid with
loose-growing lichen that ran through every shade from aquamarine to scarlet,
peopled by baboons and porcupine and ant-bears and jackals and rock pythons and
poison snakes and dung beetles and wild bees and tiny red velvet spiders that came
out after the first rains” (44).
· Curtius: “The medieval poet does not invoke nature, he enumerates its component parts” (93, following authorization by Psalm 143 and Daniel 3:56-88).
Preoccupation with contemplating, describing, or "singing of" the landscape.
26. Translation of experience into song, poetry, or other display. Shepherds gather for song. “Singing of.” Action gives way to song/story/conversation (Alpers 170).
27. The country house. The stroll about the grounds. The country walk. The rural estate. The feudal fiefdom. The garden-farm.
· E.g. Clark: a flower catalogue of the landscape of her country house: “The political winds of change barely stirred my consciousness as I watched Lamoria grow in beauty. Most of our furniture was antique, garnered from salerooms here and there, and the dressers gleamed with copper, silver, and pewter, red venitian crystal and cream ivory. There were Persian rugs scattered on the polished floors, and some of the rooms were curtained with hyrax fur. The white-tiled kitchen smelled of gingerbread and herbs; the blue-tiled bathroom had a tankfull of tropical fish instead of a window. The house was crammed with curios, guns, books, gramophone records, party guests, children, and a tribe of cocker spaniels...” (88).
28. Anti-pastoral, counter-pastoral, “hard pastoral”. The anti-garden, the counter-utopia.
· “The enclosed world, entire to itself, is more extensive than the Judeo-Christian myth of Eden. In its isolation from the great world, walled in by oceans and an unexplored northern wilderness, the colony of the Cape of Good Hope seemed to be less of the perfection of man in a recovered innocence than of the degeneration of man into brute” (Coetzee White Writing 3).
· “The culture, the habits, the general disposition of the Amerindians whom Europeans first encountered induced observers like Bertolomé de las Casas to speculate that here was man in a state of original innocence, a model to his fallen Old World brethren... The Cape, in contrast, belonged not to the New World but the farthest extremity of the Old: it was a Lapland of the south, peopled by natives whose way of life occasioned curiosity or disgust, but never admiration” (Coetzee White Writing 2).
29.
The pastoral elegy.
30. The pastoral romance. Brownstein’s "marriage plot" in pastoral drama.
· E.g. Maru (Head).
The counter-romance.
· E.g., the beginning sequence of An Instant in the Wind (Brink).
31. Bucolicisms/rusticisms. The rustic. Country style. Country fare (Alpers 18). Notions of the “natural,” the traditional, the essential.
This table is not comprehensive of the genre, but generally typical of both antique pastoral and 20th century South African pastoral. These forms correlate with pastoral expression. When we see these forms, it is a sound hypothesis that the sentiment being dramatized is pastoral, at least in some way.
2.8 Pastoral plot morphology
Pastoral manifests replicable and predictable plot patterns. Typically, plotting is marked by topographical movement between the city and the country, or between a figurative inside and outside (e.g., in motifs of gardens), a figurative center and periphery. Space becomes place through the complex cultural valuations of urban and rural, or the imperial metropolis and the small backwater colonial outpost (e.g., the anti-pastoral Heart of Darkness).
Broadly speaking, the pastoral novel may be seen as a typology of topographical plot movements. Typically, pastoral novels are characterized by the following fiction, or story. An urban character, encountering trouble or stress in her city life, goes to a rural retreat for mental recuperation. In this respect, values of the womb and idyllic motifs become salient in dramatizations of pastoral. Something natural or traditional or essential is to be learned in the rural setting. There, the urbanite encounters rural people, and spends time contemplating the landscape. Often the shepherd, (a rural character,) warns against disturbing tradition or the social status quo. Because of her intrusion into the rural society, the rural community (and often the rural landscape) changes. She, the urbanite, then typically returns to the city with wisdom, and the rural drama teaches a lesson, or gives the reader a moral, about the heroine’s original stresses in the city. Often, the return presents some moral, or kernel of wisdom, which validates the social status quo in the urban society.
Sometimes this story is reversed, where a rural person, encountering stress on the farm (somewhere rural), takes a trip to the Big City (somewhere urban). There he encounters city people and scenarios, and spends some time contemplating the cityscape. Because of these experiences in the city, the rural character changes, or grows as a person, and then returns to the farm with wisdom. The city experience sheds light on the original trouble on the farm. Often, the rural community (or sometimes the landscape) then changes because of the wisdom the hero brings from the city.
The genre of the pastoral novel may be seen as typology of variations on this plot sequence. There are two primary variations of pastoral plotting in the novel. The first is the typical plot:
Table 3: Typical plot
1. Urbanite retreats into a figuratively rural landscape. Empson, in one of the most famous criticisms of pastoral, Some Versions of Pastoral, describes this as the "pastoral process,"the "putting of the complex into the simple" (23).
· Often the motif of retreat takes us back in time in some way.
· Typically the urban drama frames the rural drama.
· Typically there is a meta-pastoral awareness of generic continuity, of narrative in a state of repetition.
2. Urbanite encounters rural people, landscapes, and scenarios. This is the Empsonian Encounter. Empson sees pastoral as developing "from a basic social situation—the encounter of ‘low’ and ‘high’ persons" (Alpers 37).
· Often the urbanites are presented in disguise, and often this disguise is explicitly one of a lower social class.
· Often Empsonian Encounters involve serial listings of the features of the landscape, or serial descriptions of rural people.
· The internal state of characters is often expressed through metaphor with the landscape.
· Often a festival, party, or some notion of carnival is employed to dramatize the Empsonian Encounter. This is often expressed in notions of music, singing, or other expressive display.
· The urban and rural figures are often highly stereotypical, or figured to represent broader groups of people than ostensibly embodied by the urban and the rustic figures themsleves. This seems to draw from feudal thinking, where the lord embodied the state; thus, the lord actually did embody more than his actual character presents. Thus, typically the dialectic of urban/rural figures social class.
· Often, the rural landscape is idealized in some way, and there are idyllic motifs, or values of the womb. Typically values of leisure and enclosure or containment are expressed.
· Often the pastoral hero is idealized in some way.
· There is often the sentiment of time as fleeting and precious.
· In pastoral romances, often there is explicit comparison made between the state (the nation, the farm, the feudal fiefdom, "home") and the lover's heart.
3. The rural landscape and community changes. Often the urbanite changes as a person because of his experiences.
· Typically the figurative shepherd will resist change or will give warnings against the disturbance of the status quo, e.g., the Totems in Maru.
· Change is often expressed in art. In most versions of pastoral, change in the rural landscape frames (or is framed by) change in the urban, the centered space. Often, the fate of the pastoral hero is framed by the change in the rural space. Again, this seems to be a feudal notion; in feudal society, the fate of the lord really was the fate of the realm.
4. Urbanite returns to the city with wisdom. Gifford describes this as "the fundamental pastoral movement," a retreat and return "either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat ‘returned’ some insights relevant to the urban audience" (1).
· Often the moral or conclusion of the story presents some kernel of wisdom which validates the status quo in the urban society.
· Often pastoral plotting is explicitly in repetition, and one return with wisdom sets the stage to another retreat. E.g. Huxley: “Nothing happened—and that’s the way to tell a true story from a made-up one. A made-up story always has a neat and tidy end. But true stories don’t end...” (109).
The typical plot is overwhelmingly characteristic of pastoral expression as a whole. There is one primary variant plot. It is functionally symmetrical to the typical plot, and in this respect we can see the evolutionary layers of genre. Aspects of this plot have been referred to in the criticism as an urban pastoral, and are much more common in the the South African pastoral novel than in pastoral expression as a whole:
Table 4: Variant plot
1. Rural person treks to the figuratively urban landscape, the trek to "the Big City," Johannesburg, eGoli, the City of Gold. This is typically the "innocent abroad" motif, such as Kumalo in Cry, the Beloved Country. Often the motif of the trek to the city takes us forward in time in some way.
2. Rural person encounters urbanites, cityscapes, and scenarios of the urban. This is the Empsonian Encounter in the variant plot. There is often the “baffled knight” motif of antique pastorellas, where the hero is baffled by the new or stressful scenario. The rural person grows as a person, or becomes more savvy of city ways.
3. Rural person returns to the rural with wisdom. This is often the "prodigal son" motif. Speaking of indigenous knowledge systems, Mohommed describes the social phenomenon of “Africans who come back to the village and look down upon the same people they grew up with simply because they acquire a modern education” (13), and we see a similar motif in the end of Martha Quest.
4. The rural landscape and community changes, often as a result of the wisdom the hero brings from the city, but sometimes a value is conveyed that change in the rural is inevitable, or that the rural is changing itself. For example, when Martha returns to the farm, she observes that the bush is reclaiming it in many ways. Sometimes the moral, or kernel of wisdom presented at the end, validates the status quo in the rural society, values of the garden, a walling-in; though more often, values of the city or the figuratively urbane are validated, such as in Cry, the Beloved Country.
Variations on this repertoire of plotting are often dramatized several times in pastoral stories. For example, Disgrace presents two sequences of retreat and return with David, and the valuation of center and periphery becomes problematized when the rapists come to the farm from the reserve; here, the farm becomes figured as the center, and the rapists enact a variant plot sequence. Note that from Lucy’s perspective, several pastoral plots are dramatized and then re-dramatized in the course of story.
2.9 Conclusions
Our notion of what pastoral "is" should be inclusive, accounting at least in some respect for the many versions of pastoral. Alpers seeks to explain why not all texts are pastoral, whereas with this essay’s methodology, we can find pastoral (the dramatization of pastoral anecdotes, or allusions to them, or pastoral motivation, i.e., pastoral as the logic that binds an utterance) in aspects of most modern novels. Clearly, “pastoral” is, or in the very least has become, an extremely protean discourse. Such a view makes good practical sense in terms of generic evolution; we can easily see the romantic and heroic, for example, in most modern discourse. As an ancient written form, pastoral evolved into the modern era to actually become somewhat ubiquitous, much like the romantic or the heroic. While not all stories are heroic, just about every story has a hero. While not all contemporary novels are pastoral, we can find pastoral motivation in most narrative of mood and setting. Most descriptions of space and nature have pastoral motivation. In addition, the encounter between people of different social groups is often pastoral in motivation. We need to be able to account for this, if we are ever to define pastoral, yet the ubiquity of pastoral is part of the reason it has been so difficult to define. This ubiquity also underscores pastoral’s powerful currency in culture, and its tremendous expressive diversity.
Pastoral is considerably more complex, and much more expressively diverse, than has been hitherto recognized. In the novel, pastoral motivation combines and intertwines with other genres and modes. This creates hybrids of pastoral sentiment, such as anti-pastoral, or the farm novel. Pastoral is an old genre, one of the first formal discourses of literary history. Importantly I think, it arose in Africa in a Greek settler culture. Like the fairy tale, it has evolved and mutated into more complex discursive forms, such as the novel. Viktor Schlovsky suggests that in the evolution of genres, "a new form arises not in order to express a new content, but because the old form had exhausted its possibilities" (Duff 7). "Genres modify and combine with one another,” such as pastoral, the novel, and realism, “producing variant forms” such as settler frontier pulp, "which eventually give rise to new genres" such as the farm novel, "in which the different evolutionary layers can still be discerned" (Duff 14).
3.0 Text I: Ralph Lauren’s Safari advertising campaign
Figure 1
Ralph Lauren Safari advertising
campaign
The American fashion designer Ralph Lauren’s Safari cologne advertisements are interesting to read as pastoral frontier romance. It is also tempting to read a sort of expressive idealized text of 1930s-60s “white Southern Africa,” the zenith of white colonization and occupation of Southern Africa, and the collectively remembered point of its slow eclipse and decline. Because of the absence of wild animals, the setting appears to be Southern Africa, rather than Kenya (wild animals ceased to roam free in the early 20th century in Southern Africa).
Figure 2
Ralph Lauren Safari advertising
campaign
At first glance, one of the most interesting features of pastoral is readily apparent here: it looks like “fluff,” like an expressive display that is not very serious. It looks overly simple and romantic, and seems pervaded by sentimentality. With Ralph Lauren’s Safari, we will simply enumerate the motifs that allow us to call the text “pastoral,” but later in Text II, we will examine the “fluff” aspect of pastoral expression more closely. Pastoral is mere artifice; it only looks that way sometimes. Indeed, on close examination, it seems apparent that these ads are highly stylized and meticulously crafted. Such is typical of pastoral expression. It is almost as if pastoral texts are saying “Don’t take me seriously,” which is interesting, because as we will see with Text II and III, pastoral often discusses very serious topics.
Figure 3
Ralph Lauren Safari advertising
campaign
Many motifs make these ads pastoral. We see the retreat of urbanites into the rural landscape. We have a beautiful young maiden in the rural landscape, a typical trope of pastoral expression. The advertisements are idyllic in many ways, suggesting that this landscape is “natural”; that this is the way things are supposed to be. Yet at the same time, it seems apparent that we can’t afford to take things at face value here. It seems clear from the onset that this vision of Africa is not “real.”
These advertisements are well done in many ways, such as selling a lifestyle; “Lauren’s mantra” is “We sell a way of life.”[7] The 1930s-60s settler pastoral mode as envisioned by Ralph Lauren is, indeed, the thing actually being sold here. A British men’s fashion magazine once described his Safari collection as “seminal,”[8] and it’s interesting to think what precisely is “seminal” about this vision of life on the plains of Africa. Clearly this is an interpretation of African frontier romance. It is a distillation, a reduction based in an idealization, filled with allusions to earlier pastoral texts such as Out of Africa, or The Flame Trees of Thika, and the ads become an ideal distillation of their vision. They are at least in some way about white African culture and history, an idealization of a mythic, frontier existence that hung over Southern Africa during colonization.
This is a time generally valorized in the European consciousness, as we can see clearly in the Ralph Lauren ads; a romanticized view of white fashion, design, lifestyle, and sport in Africa. For example, the two characters live an open-door, sporting lifestyle which is very common among white Southern Africans, or, in the very least, is popularly considered the best way to live. One thing you notice among white Southern Africans is that their houses are built to let in nature, and they typically have extensive gardens and lawns, and often spend as much time as possible outdoors. This is a real contrast to the cloistered city living of America, where these ads presumably find their main market.
Note the notebook in the hand of the young man, and the camera in the hand of the young woman: tropes of recording, remembering. We see an abundance of archetypal pastoral motifs, such as excessive leisure, young lovers, a young maiden, peace and harmony with the natural setting, and harmony with animals (they recline with a baby lion). There is a distinct motif of innocence about the two young lovers. The gear in Fig. 3 is anachronistic, glancing back to the past, say to 1930s “white Southern Africa” (Smith 123). Note that there are only whites (and their pet baby lion) in the African landscape; there are no wild animals. There are no blacks, either, and this is highly anomalous to every-day lived existence in Southern Africa, and was also quite anomalous to the historical experience of a safari (which typically had dozens of black porters, guides, cooks, gun-bearers, etc.). All this suggests that Safari is a fiction, which paradoxically is very successful in portraying its fiction as natural; indeed, these pictures present a very common European mind’s-eye of Africa, in my experience.
As with many idyllic pastoral displays, the young lovers seem to be in a Garden of Eden. Who would ever want to disturb such paradise? The question is unasked, but clearly it would be madness to destroy this Eden, or, maybe part of the sentimental tone comes from our own implicit awareness that this African Eden is gone. We know from the African experience that this is not an accurate depiction of what the continent was like—indeed, it was probably never like this. Huxley in The Flame Trees of Thika, for example, describes intense poverty and deprivation and loneliness on the frontier, and safaris filled with discomfort and danger. So the question arises, then, how did Ralph Lauren’s pastoral fiction arise, and why does it seem so natural, so true to Africa? And what does this tell us?
4.0 Text II: The 1966 pastoral propaganda brochure Rhodesië/Rhodesia
Rhodesië/Rhodesia is 1966 propaganda, published by the Rhodesian Department of Information Services in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), and distributed at the Rand Easter show in Johannesburg, South Africa. Its audience was in part Afrikaners; note that the Afrikaans spelling of “Rhodesia” comes first in the title, even though Rhodesia itself had only a very small Afrikaner community. Zimbabwe is South Africa’s cultural frontier, and in many ways we can read this text as a communication from Zimbabwean “rustics” to the urban audience of Johannesburg.
Rhodesië/Rhodesia is particularly useful for contemplating the “fluff” aspect of pastoral, when we contrast it with Text I. Both texts seem to be trying to paint a picture of a similar pastoral Eden in Africa. In the case of Rhodesië/Rhodesia, however, the historical record shows that this vision of Africa is not mere “fluff”; rather, it is a pastoral depiction of land dispossession that was actually put into direct practice, leaving behind a horrible legacy that Zimbabwe is grappling with to this day. Rhodesië/Rhodesia points quite clearly to the fact that pastoral tries to pass off its ideological constructions as innocent artifice, even when the ideology itself is monstrous in its implications. To be sure, if the student did not have a clear knowledge of colonialism and land dispossession in Rhodesia, this brochure would seem to paint an idyllic portrait.
Just as with Ralph Lauren’s Safari, the question seems to be implicitly asked: Who would ever want to disturb this Eden? This seems to be one of the primary ideological points behind the text, indeed. By painting its ideological constructions as “natural” and Edenic, pastoral reinforces the goals of the status quo regime: namely, to keep things exactly as they are.
4.1 The text
Figure 4:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia cover
The cover of the text with Ian Smith, Prime Minister of UDI-era “Rhodesia”. The UDI-era refers to Smith’s “Unilateral Declaration of Independence” from Britain. Thus the title of the text suggests that whatever “Rhodesië/Rhodesia” might be, it is a political thing. “Rhodesia” is a name for the land currently called “Zimbabwe”, and was also known as “Southern Rhodesia” under British colonial administration. The current land of Zambia was known as “Northern Rhodesia.”
Figure 5:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.2
Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, 1966. His declaration of independence speech stated, "In the lives of most nations there comes a moment when a stand has to be made for principles, whatever the consequences. This moment has come to Rhodesia… I call upon you in this historic hour to support me and my government in the struggle in which we are engaged. I believe that we are a courageous people and history has cast us an heroic role" (Smith 106). The "principles" Smith speaks of are the subject of this propaganda.
Figure 6:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.3
“Good Neighbors” is the subject of the text itself. This propaganda is being distributed only months after UDI, and the audience is clearly South African whites; both Afrikaners and English-speaking whites. This is the “Smuttsian” agenda typical of English-descended white South Africans, named for the South African Prime Minister of the interwar years, which seeks to incorporate two historically antagonistic ethnic groups (Afrikaners and English-descended whites) into one larger political and cultural block: the “white tribe,” “white Southern Africa”. Clearly, such is the objective of this text.
Figure 7:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.4
Figure 8:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.5
Note the title, "Our Heritage." The propaganda here reserves the right to defend "our heritage." Both in the text implicitly, and quite explicitly in the picture narrative which follows, this is a white Rhodesian heritage. It is never directly stated, but it is readily apparent that black Rhodesians have been dispossessed of this heritage; they are physically absent from it. It resembles a certain idea of America in the 1930-50s cinema; a white bourgeois society with the other carefully contained, on the margin. Pictured is Victoria Falls; the visual narrative that follows begins in the sublime, or perhaps the epic.
Figure 9:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 6
On the left we see the tomb of Cecil Rhodes, the "Colossus" of white Southern African politics. On the right we see the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe. Note there are no blacks in either of these pictures, which was quite odd even then, considering we're in the middle of Africa. Also, because the white supremacist state relied on black labor (e.g., Kennedy 3), blacks were actually everywhere, all the time; just carefully monitored, maintained, and muzzled. We see here values of enclosure and containment, typical pastoral conceits. Note the figures are playing the pastoral role of the urbanite enjoying leisure in the rural landscape. Indeed, the entire picture narrative is highly pastoral in mode, which is interesting given it’s propaganda. Thus, it seems reasonable to surmise that this text will tell us something about what pastoral "does" as narrative, as an ideological system. In the very least, the text should provide us with an anecdote of what pastoral "can do," as Patterson puts it; what pastoral "can do" as a way of telling stories, as a way of framing rural land. First, and most markedly, there is a trope of dispossession; Rhodes quite explicitly claimed this land for Britain, took it in the Pioneer Column and in the subsequent Matabele War and First Chimurenga, and now lies enshrined in the beautiful hills of Motopos. In the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe, we also see story-telling tropes of containment. Perhaps the most obvious example is the walls themselves. This was the civilization Rhodes built upon, the text seems to be saying; and now it is ours, "our heritage."
The fact remains, however, that this is clearly not so. We know, and the 1966 white Southern African audience knew all to well (otherwise this propaganda brochure wouldn’t have been necessary to begin with) that the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe are not white Rhodesian heritage. In this respect, we see an Empsonian Encounter of cultures here, between white urbanites (Rhodesians) and the ruins of a rural black (Zimbabwean) culture.
Figure
10: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 7
Here again we see typical pastoral motifs: the fisherman (the salmon fisher, the white hunter), leisure, harmony with nature. Note the tourists in the game park make the tour in vehicles: perhaps a root, or a symptom, or at least evidence, of a cultural value for containment and enclosure. We certainly can see this expressed directly on the landscape itself, with the Kariba Dam.
Figure 11:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 8
This document was directed to whites in Johannesburg, at the Rand Easter show. It's important to realize how much bigger Johannesburg is, in comparison to Salisbury (now Harare) and Bulawayo. In a way, this is a glimpse of what the "Rhodies" are doing "up there" on the cultural frontier. Thus, the reader is taken back in time in many ways, to a time when South Africa was less an urban society, when there was free green space in the inner cities. The text invites the reader to take a retreat up north into the bushveld, to these two nice little dorpkies (Afrikaans: often pejorative, "little towns"; the equivalent of the American expression “cow-town” or “one-horse town”). In many respects this takes the white South African reader back in time; back to a time before white South Africa became a predominantly urban society.
Figure 12:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 9
On the top right, note the tobacco floors: agriculture, and most particularly tobacco, is the principle engine of the Zimbabwean economy.
Figure
13: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 10
Once again we see values of enclosure and containment; note
the tourists on the left view the lions from their car. There is a typically
pastoral value of harmony between humans and nature, but here, this harmony
seems actualized by containment. On the right, we see typically pastoral values
of community, celebration, the "Sundowner" or evening drinks. Leisure
is also an emotive value, and a typical conceit of pastoral; in antique
pastoral expression, shepherds had excessive leisure while they watched their
flocks. In modern pastoral, new premises for excessive leisure must be invented
or constructed. We gain some clue of the source of excessive leisure in the
right-hand photograph, where behind the bar we can see the first black figure
in the text: the bartender. Below, we see excessive leisure once again, tropes
of abundance. Note we also see the only other black person of the text: the
golf caddy. Clearly, this leisure and abundance are not for blacks. Clearly as
well, this rural land of plenty is "white man's country". Indeed,
this seems to be a key aspect of what makes Rhodesië/Rhodesia a Garden of Eden.
Figure 14:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 11
Figure 15:
Rhodesië/Rhodesia p.12
Figure
16: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 13
4.2
Utopian sentiment
The final page of Rhodesië/Rhodesia, fig. 17, presents a caption entitled “Rus en vrede/Peace and tranquility,” which are typical idyllic sentiments. Indeed, the entire pastoral picture narrative seems to be attempting to construct a fictional pastoral Eden in Rhodesia.
The idealized landscape can be read as a metaphor for the idealized state. Turner writes, "The hyperbolic landscape is both domestic and political; topography [his word for “pastoral”] provides an attractive and flexible means of idealizing society and absolving ones self from its problems. It embodies the desire to invest the state with the qualities of nature, innocent, self-renewing and inviolable" (101). Turner also observes, "Topographia is… well suited to the emotive politics of the ancien régime, for it allows the old order to seem permanent, orderly and universally agreeable" (106).
Figure
17: Rhodesië/Rhodesia p. 14
The fiction of Rhodesië/Rhodesia is a kind of semi-real utopia: a blossoming land free of the “black menace.” Here we see a utopian vision of Ian Smith's “white Southern Africa.” It is a land fertile and bountiful, with everyone in harmony; everything is well ordered and symmetrical. This “utopia” called “Rhodesia” was a false one, however; or more accurately, like all utopian endeavors, it has a dark side which is unspoken here, yet always present. One former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Godfrey Huggins described the whites’ cultural vantage well when he said, “the European in this country may be likened to that of an island of white in a sea of black” (Kennedy inside cover flap). This utopia called "Rhodesië/Rhodesia" in point of fact never truly existed; like all utopian ideological sentiment, this text presents a fiction, and seeks to validate it, to incorporate people into the discourse, to make them Rhodesian sympathizers. This was partly because, in the historical context, the dogs of war were howling. Though “Rhodesia” never truly existed, as it is portrayed here, it remains historical fact that many young white Rhodesians were willing to die in its defense, during the Bush War (Rhodesian term) or Second Chimurenga. Perhaps ultimately, on both sides of the conflict, they were either fighting for or against this highly singular idea of Africa, of which Rhodesië/Rhodesia is emblematic.
One of the first things to notice in Rhodesië/Rhodesia is a highly particular “idea of Africa”. In The Idea of Africa, Mudimbe discusses how the intellectual concept of “Africa” is highly variable and mutable, both over time, and between persons, and between historical societies in their specific conceptions of “Africa”. Rhodesië/Rhodesia certainly presents us an “idea of Africa”; this idea is described in the pamphlet as “our heritage,” and it is this idea of Africa that the propaganda reserves the right to defend. It is also this idea, called Rhodesië/Rhodesia, that the propaganda seeks to endorse. As propaganda, it explicitly attempts to assimilate South African whites into a way of talking and thinking about Rhodesia.
4.3 Rural land dispossession
The discursive function of the propaganda itself
is to validate land dispossession in Rhodesia, primarily by presenting a
fertile and bountiful landscape with blacks noticeably absent, or carefully
contained. The 1966 white audience in South Africa was a highly sympathetic
one.
In the 20th century, the conflict between whites (as a political/economic/cultural group) and other ethnic groups over land in South Africa grew increasingly intense and hostile. The conflict became institutionalized through the creation of an explicitly white-supremacist police state. Land dispossession was made explicit in draconian laws. The Natives Land Act of 1913 made the right to own, rent, or sharecrop land dependant on a person’s racial categorization. 8.5% of the land was allocated to blacks by the Black Land Act of the same year. These areas became known as Native Reserves. In contrast, 87% of the land was allocated to white occupation. The culmination came under the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party: between 1960 and 1980, 3.5 million blacks were forcibly displaced from their land. This remains the one of the most enormous examples of social engineering in history, both in its scope, and in the amount of poverty and suffering that ultimately resulted. This horrible legacy is one that Southern Africa is still struggling with today. Rhodesië/Rhodesia , for its part, imagines the idyllic fruits of a similar labor, and seeks to validate it as a political agenda. Simultaneously, the text seeks to engage in an ideological act of self-conscious forgetting: if “Rhodesia” is indeed white man’s country, then the black hands that labor for the state, the actual hands working the soil, had better not be seen. Coetzee remarks, “Silence about the place of black labour is common not only to Shreiner and Smith but, by and large, to the African plaasroman, and represents a failure of the imagination before the problem of how to integrate the dispossessed black man into the idyll... of African pastoralism” (White Writing 71).
4.4 White man’s country
Rhodesië/Rhodesia presents a utopian fiction. As with all notions of utopia, it must ultimately be a fiction; "utopia" can never be entirely "real." Alpers remarks that the Edenic motif of pastoral would be “acceptable if we were capable of total acts that produce total transformations. In reality, we are capable of but partial acts, acts that but partially represent us and that produce but partial transformations” (15). So, we might call Rhodesië/Rhodesia a “partial utopia.” The text seeks to construct a land of leisure and peace and plenty, with the black man gone from the landscape, or carefully isolated and contained. The land, and the fruits of the land, confers upon whites leisure and wealth. The text is particularly effective as propaganda because pastoral is so subtle in its validation of the status quo; pastoral expression seeks to assemble its ideological constructs as natural, where dissent is unthinkable or literally unimaginable; it would be going against the natural order of things. In the text, it is almost impossible to suggest Rhodesia might not be white man's country, because there are no blacks in the fictional world that would, or could, say otherwise. This pastoral world, it seems, is a reflection of a natural order; everything is in peace and tranquility. Why would anybody want to disturb such a Garden of Eden?
Of, course, we know from history that somebody did: "Rhodesia" no longer exists. The question arises today how to deal with this pastoral vision of Africa when it is a fact of historical experience. Rhodesië/Rhodesia is not just abstract pastoral artifice; this idyllic vision of land dispossession was directly put into practice, with varying degrees of success. Until 1980 in Zimbabwe, and 1994 in South Africa, it really was white man's country. To some extent, because of the historical legacy of white supremacism, Southern Africa still is "white man's country." To this day, white farmers still own the majority of rural land in Southern Africa, and there are still parts of Southern Africa that look like Rhodesië/Rhodesia. As a visiting scholar at an Afrikaans university in 2001, I lived in one of these strange little Edens.
In
his “Foreword” to The Struggle for
Zimbabwe (1981), one year after he came to power, Robert Mugabe describes
the Second Chimurenga[9] as a struggle “between land-hungry peasantry
and the settler bourgeois land-mongers.” The “chief… grievance” of the
peasantry was “land-hunger” (v). This highlights the importance of land
distribution in Southern Africa, and seems in many ways a direct response to
the text Rhodesië/Rhodesia.
Mugabe’s
comment foreshadows the current crisis in Zimbabwe. Because land rights were
maintained after emancipation, by year 2000, which was 20 years after the
resumption of black rule, 70% of the country’s prime farmland remained in the
hands of approximately 4500 whites, “leaving the majority of blacks landless.”[10] In
February 2000, large groups of self-styled war veterans[11] began invading white farms and parceling out
the land. In many cases, land invasions turned violent. The “so-called war
veterans” were coordinated openly by government officials. Jerry Grant, Deputy
Director of the Commercial Farmer’s Union, told the Harare Financial Gazette that “Officials from the Ministry of Lands,
Agriculture and Resettlement are willy-nilly pegging pieces of land on occupied
farms to resettle people. This has created chaos in the commercial farming
sector as farmers cannot prepare land to plant crops for the coming season.”[12] Mugabe’s government began a controversial
“fast track” scheme for resettling landless blacks on 12 million hectares of
land, comprising over 50% of land owned by white commercial farmers.[13] The seizures were done without compensation.
They were illegal under Zimbabwean law, and the farmers challenged them in court.
Their challenge was upheld and in early January 2001, and the High Court of
Zimbabwe ordered the government to halt. This order was ignored, the (largely
black) judiciary was systematically intimidated and replaced by more compliant
judges, and the government ordered the Zimbabwean police to ignore illegal resettlement
activities. The Commercial Farmer’s Union challenged in court the temporary
presidential powers used to seize the farms. The land seizures disrupted the
agricultural sector that drives the Zimbabwean economy. By 2001, the Zimbabwean
treasury was depleted of hard currency, unemployment was at record highs, food
prices were soaring and riots had broken out,[14] and the country was facing the possibility
of famine in 2002.[15] By July 2001, the Zimbabwean government
claimed to have settled 104,000 families on 3.5 million hectares of land.[16]
It seems clear enough that land needs to be redistributed in Southern Africa. Rhodesië/Rhodesia articulates this eloquently enough, in its own way. Perhaps Mugabe wants to leave, as his final legacy, the redistribution of land in Zimbabwe. A primary pattern in 20th century Southern Africa was violent ethnic conflict. In a way, land dispossession is also a continuation of the old Southern African cattle-raiding tradition. Farming being the principle engine of the Zimbabwean economy, we see a low-level ethnic war over the principle asset of the state. Rhodesië/Rhodesia tells us how this tension began to be constructed. Rhodesië/Rhodesia tells the story of Zimbabwe’s current discontents, and the problems facing Ian Smith’s political heir. Steele writes, "Zimbabwe's problems after independence in 1980 were not the product of a disintegrating or failed state… Rather, they were the consequence of an excessively strong state inherited from colonial Rhodesia" (22).
The images of ethnic violence we see from Africa have become mundane to the ridiculous. It often seems in Southern Africa that the ethnic conflicts are inherited, passed from father to son, all so that one particular identity can be stamped onto the red earth. This phenomenon is by no means isolated to Southern Africa; the world is rife with similar ethnic conflicts, such as Catholics versus Protestants in Belfast, Indians versus Pakistanis in Kashmir, or Jews versus Palestinians in the Near East. But nowhere is the conflict more out-in-the-open than in Zimbabwe, where ethnic violence seems entrenched as a way of life, a way of thinking: blacks versus whites. What seems to keep all these fights going is “an idealized vision of an elusive past—a bucolic Palestine before Israel was created, a golden age of Irish unity before the British meddled[,] or a pastoral, harmonious Africa predating colonialism.”[17] Or a peaceful, fruitful, well-ordered Garden of Eden in Africa, rid of the Black Menace; white man’s country.
In the final analysis, it seems hard to see much difference between Rhodesië/Rhodesia and Mugabe’s land siezures; the only real difference is that the ethnic group holding the guns has changed. Rhodesië/Rhodesia seeks to construct white man’s country, and Mugabe seeks to construct black man’s country. What both of these political agendas conspicuously fail to take into account is that Zimbabwe is a polyethnic society, and, for over a hundred years, has (theoretically) been a pluralist democracy.
Rhodesië/Rhodesia’s picture narrative is an object lesson in the ideological implications of pastoral. Pastoral seeks to portray its ideological constructions as innocent and natural, subtly reinforcing the agenda of the status quo. Part of its effectiveness as propaganda is that the picture narrative doesn’t overtly look like propaganda; indeed, it almost looks like a travel brochure. The ideological statements it makes are generally unsaid; nowhere does the text say “Let’s kick these kaffirs off the land,” though it is quite obvious and implicit that such is Rhodesië/Rhodesia’s objective. By constructing such subtle and unspoken ideological frames, pastoral makes Rhodesië/Rhodesia’s political agenda seem natural. And of course, pastoral implies, only a fool would want to go against nature. Pastoral tends to look like “fluff,” like mere artifice, even while proposing one of the most horrible political agendas in Zimbabwean history. This makes pastoral’s ideological constructs particularly insidious; for example, it is quite apparent that Mugabe lacked the wisdom to lead his people away from the horrible, insidious ideology of Rhodesië/Rhodesia. By presenting its ideological constructs as “fluff,” pastoral plants them in the subconscious, where actual debate is extremely difficult, and where political change becomes nearly impossible. By constructing an Eden where land dispossession is “natural,” Rhodesië/Rhodesia ensures that today’s generation will suffer as well. The only thing Rhodesië/Rhodesia fails to anticipate is that the very ideology it proposes would turn Zimbabwe into black man’s country by 2002.
5.0 The Farm and the
City
In his influential study, What is Pastoral?, Alpers advances the argument that pastoral is about rural people and their lives. This seems to me to be clearly not so, mainly because pastoral is keenly concerned with urban characters as well. There is no dramatization of pastoral that doesn’t depend on the plot movement of the urbanite’s retreat into the rural landscape. Further, pastoral stories are almost always framed by a brief urban drama. Often the urban interloper is figured as the reader or author herself. Moreover, pastoral typically returns some moral, or kernel of wisdom, which betrays the initial urban drama as the ultimate object of textual interrogation. The rural drama that preoccupies pastoral story is a framed drama, and the urban interlopers basically bring their problems from the city into the country, in a search for answers or wisdom. The country provides a fresh perspective.
On the question of defining pastoral, it seems much more accurate to say that pastoral is about urbanites who retreat into a rural landscape and encounter rustics, and then return to the city with wisdom. The city and the country are not discrete social units, but rather, compose complimentary social groups. Pastoral story is about the interaction between urbanites and rustics. This view of pastoral is robust partly because it helps explain why people read and write pastoral to begin with.
Pastoral enjoyed tremendous vogue in the 20th century South African novel. "Farm," and its rhetorical antithesis, the "city," were powerful words in the context of "white southern Africa" (Smith 123), evoking a wide range of cultural and ideological values. In Book II of her Children of Violence series, A Perfect Marriage, Doris Lessing begins to articulate the power of these cultural values:
Martha felt a sadness which she understood was
shared by her father... Martha felt an exile [in the city], as he did. She did
not know how much it had meant that her parents, at least, had been on the
land. Some balance had been upset in her. The fatal dichotomy, soil, city, had
been at least held even by thinking of her father working his land. Now she
felt altogether cut off from her roots, even more so because she disliked the
idea of actually living on a farm so much. (###)
What is particularly interesting here for our purposes is the “fatal dichotomy” of soil and city. Clearly, there are some powerful cultural values at play.
These values inform upon the cultural and historical context of 20th century South African pastoral text, and tell us much about why pastoral enjoyed vogue with this literary culture. White South African society was intensively urbanizing during the era, and it became important to contemplate this massive force for social change. At the same time, white society was encountering increasing political resistance from blacks. The perpetual social dilemma of white culture (the “Black Menace”) came to be articulated in pastoral text as the Empsonian Encounter, the encounter between urbanites and rustics. In this respect, pastoral became a useful tool for examining social change in South Africa. This becomes quite explicit when we examine J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
A common misconception is that blacks and whites were mutually distinct social groups in 20th century Southern Africa. This was a fiction that served various cultural and ideological purposes, but it was a fiction nonetheless. The Nationalists wouldn’t have felt the need to create Apartheid (“Apartness”) if the two social groups were already apart. Indeed, black and white society were mutually-interdependent. Examples of this abound, such as the Coloured people (as I will discuss below), or the Afrikaans language itself. Afrikaans emerged as a komboistaal or Kitchen Language,[18] initially spoken by the black and Coloured slaves of the first High Dutch-speaking settlers of the Cape. In other words, the “white language” of Africa was actually invented by blacks, and there is no debate about this among Afrikaner intellectuals. What this indicates is that black and white society were mutually inter-dependent, and as we shall see with Disgrace, they still are.
5.1 Cultural context of the farm and the city in
pastoral white writing
In South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, the new boomtown of Johannesburg arose, and South Africa began shifting from a rural, farm-based economy to an urban, mining and industrial economy. Afrikaners typically refer to this time of change as the “Second Trek,” the time of trekking from the bushveld farms into the great cities of Southern Africa.[19] At the same time, the values associated with the farm and the city grew more complex and problematic. Afrikaners viewed the farm as a cultural icon, as a bastion of trusted feudal values. On the other hand, Afrikaners were increasingly moving to the cities, where English was replacing the mother tongue (die taal) as the prestige language. Worst yet from the perspective of a self-consciously agrarian society, today, at the dawn of the 21st century, Oom Paul’s[20] worst nightmare is almost a reality, as most of the green space between Pretoria and Johannesburg grows engulfed in urban sprawl. It has been difficult for the Afrikaner nation to let go of the self-image of boer, or farmer.
The powerful emotions associated with the farm and the city are little surprise when we consider they represent fundamentally different ways of life. Rhetorically, we tend to group society into "country people" and "city people"; for example, in America we have the term “redneck,” which is basically the same as pampoenboer or “pumpkin farmer” in South Africa. We also tend to think about a country way of life that is fundamentally different from an urban way of life. For example, there is a sizable dialogue about Indigenous Knowledge, looking at the “cognitive framework within which rural societies operate” (Mohommed 2002), and the presumption, though unspoken sometimes, is that rural knowledge is different from urban or “Western” knowledge.
Afrikaner society was traditionally a farming culture, not only
historically, but also in their very name for themselves: Boers (“farmers”). This is augmented by a frontier mythos of voortrekkers, mounted Kommandos, and
lone women defending the kraals. Similar to the Wild West mythos of America,
both mythoi were spawned at the same time, largely as the result of
expansionism and the “taming” (as van Heerden puts it in Ancestral Voices) of a frontier. The bushveld is a powerful symbol among Afrikaners, much as the Wild
West is for Americans, or the desert for Bedouins. Farm novels are about the
farm, the bush: the mythic past of the Afrikaner nation, and the childhood past
of many of today’s urban Afrikaners.
Plots of movement between the city and the farm typically structure South African farm novels. Salient become dramatizations of social change in the encounter of urban and rural people, and the values they represent. The rural comes to be figured as a repository of traditional values, and change in the rural becomes commentary on the status quo in a white society feeling increasingly post-colonial. Farm novels are characterized by a distinct rhetorical preoccupation with social encounters and social movement, and this is typical of pastoral historically. The farm novel dramatizes social change as the encounter between urban and rural figures, and so doing, dramatizes the tensions of a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing white society. A society which, rather troublesomely, was founded on a patriarchal, agrarian social caste system, and an anachronistic feudal economy (e.g., Coetzee speaks of the “black serf,” White Writing 5).
In Brink’s Donkerman (2000), an old man reminisces about his boyhood farmlife in the karoo:
I don’t mean it was ugly. There was something
utterly and terribly beautiful about it. Everything was so endless, everything
was so essential, nothing redundant at all. Every stone, every brittle stalk of
grass, every tortoise, every thorn tree reduced to what was strictly necessary.
It’s just that we were too ill-equipped to deal with it. We didn’t belong
there. (105)
The bush is a beautiful place, but in some ways a hard place. It is also an alien place, despite the speaker having been born there. The farm is a type of emotional icon, a place where one may find one’s true measure, a place of beauty and unchanging-ness, yet also rhetorically juxtaposed with Cape Town, where the speaker now lives and speaks these words, where he "belongs." This rhetorical tension between urban and rural figures strikes me as a key fiction of pastoral, and it tells us much about the larger question of what pastoral “is,” and why people want to read pastoral stories in the first place.
5.2 Urbanization in South African pastoral
The farm novel became the most
popular genre of the novel in Afrikaans in the 1920-30s, and remains popular to
this day. The entire 20th century saw a radical restructuring of the South
African economy, from a rural farm-based economy to an urban industrial
economy, and the rapid transformation from a subsistence economy to a market
economy. This arose from the discovery of gold on the reef in 1886, the immense
wealth it brought, and the consolidation of the economy in the new boomtown of
Johannesburg. At the same time,
"fearing the end of a boere-nasie
(nation of farmers), as Afrikaners left the land and were swallowed up by the
cities, Afrikaans novelists elaborated models of the garden-farm as a bastion
of trusted feudal values" (Coetzee 4). Blackburn’s A Burgher
Quixote (1903), for example, betrays a tension between a "pastoral
past" (Chapman 137) and a changing rural reality; "Blackburn was
writing, on the spot, as the Transvaal changed from rural to an urban
place" (ibid.). Later plaasroman
novelists such as Malherbe, van Bruggen, van Melle, and van den Heever write
amid "the crisis in the platteland
in which capitalist modes of farming, initiated by moneyed townspeople, were
threatening older feudal arrangements" (ibid. 192).
Urbanization is a well-documented phenomenon in Southern
Africa, having spawned fields in their own right, such as Rural Development and
Indigenous Knowledge. Mohommed (2002) discusses how “outsiders’ knowledge is
programmed to override and bury [rural]… paradigms” (12), in part because rural
knowledge systems are viewed as traditional, anti-Western, backward,
inefficient, or resistant to change. Urbanization continues today as a
tremendous force of social change in Southern Africa. The corrugated iron
shanties that surround urban areas are evidence of this. Southern African
development typically fosters “rapid modernization and cultural homogenization”
(Mohommed 13).
Whites were particularly averse to black inhabitance of
their cities, “an aversion induced by an appreciation of the corrosively
detribalizing, politicizing effects of urban life on indigenous peoples”
(Kennedy 150). Apartheid in South Africa was a political movement motivated in
part by a desire to prevent further movement to urban centers by blacks. In
1950, rural inhabitants constituted the vast majority of the black population.
Seidman writes:
The 1950 Group Areas Act designates specific areas in
white-designated South Africa for residence by different racial groups;
throughout the 1950s, the effort to redesign existing cities along racial
lines... [lead to the creation of] new black townships... on the edges of even
small South African cities: whites lived near the city center, blacks lived
near the edges... [This all was] designed to prevent rapid African urbanization.
(235)
Kennedy
observes that whites “valued most highly those Africans who remained most
resistant to Western cultural influences,” such as the Somalis and the Masai,
who we generally see described in glowing terms in white writing. “Racial antagonism
drew its head from familiarity, not distance. Europeans reserved their harshest
scornn for those Africans whose traditional lives and customs transformed most
fully under colonialism’ (160-1). Thus the concept of urbanization had enormous
implications for white culture in Africa, with enormous implications. While I’m
not sure we can say that pastoral is “about” urbanization, I think it
significant that it often is in a South African context.
5.3 The rural landscape as a kind of “communal membrane, that simultaneously incorporates and
excludes"
de
Certeau writes, "To practice space is…
to be other, to move toward the other" (110). Pastoral presents a
fiction of a character at the center retreating into the periphery, to see and
know the other (the rural), as a way of ultimately knowing one's self (the
city, the urban) better and more completely. In essence, pastoral presents a
stage (the rural), which offers parameters for these two different worlds to
meet, if only fleetingly and misunderstandingly. This tells us much about why
people want to write and read pastoral.
In the17th century, pastoral landscape art became the most
popular genre of painting in Holland. At the same time, the country house poem
enjoyed vogue. It is "undoubtedly significant that this art arose in a
period of unprecedented… urban growth in the Netherlands… [and] with the vast
inland communication and transportation system provided by a new network of
canals," which were financed by urban investors, "the city and the
country in fact were brought closer together," and "rich men also
made a fashion of building country houses, preferably along the Amstel or Vecht
rivers" (ibid.). Historically, with both the farm novel and Dutch
17th century landscape art, pastoral expression correlates with the problematization
of class distinctions between urban and rural. Pastoral expression blurs
distinctions between urban and rural while at the same time exposing and
interrogating these differences. For example, 17th century Dutch landscape art
often portrays
the
more quotidian forms of leisure, above all fishing, skating, and rabbit
hunting. Where ‘low-life’ festive scenes by definition increased the difference
between urban beholder (sometimes shown in the painting as a spectator) and
rustic participant, the demotion of feast to pastime brought together the
different social groups, all of whom could enjoy the same sort of recreation.
It was difficult to assert patrician superiority on skates. (Schama 75)
From this perspective, pastoral dramatizes a "rural world where boundaries, both social and topographical, [are] made deliberately indistinct" (ibid.). The rural becomes a kind of “communal membrane, that simultaneously incorporates and excludes" (ibid. 76). This observation is particularly applicable to 20th century Southern Africa, as we shall discuss in the following chapter.
6.0 Text III: Being “African”
J.M. Coetzee’s anti-pastoral
Disgrace and the politics of integration in the New South Africa
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is a farm novel, and a dark anti-pastoral. It is interesting for our study because it is not what many critics would typically describe as “pastoral.” Nevertheless, we see the repetition of pastoral tropes; salient structural features, such as the urbanite’s retreat to the rural for mental recuperation, and the Empsonian Encounter, mark Disgrace as pastoral. Here, in the final text of this essay, I would like to focus on Schama’s notion of pastoral landscape as a kind of “communal membrane, that simultaneously incorporates and excludes" (76). Disgrace becomes a deep philosophical rumination on integration and cultural hybridization in the New South Africa, dramatized through a Cape Town professor’s retreat to his daughter’s farm in the bush.
Published in 1999, Disgrace comes as one of the first major commentaries on the political transition by a prominent Afrikaner intellectual. Disgrace is a farm novel, a typically white genre, and this becomes ideological display; indeed, Disgrace self-consciously represents a denouement of the literary tradition of "white writing," which Coetzee himself named eleven years earlier. In ruminations on the "inappropriateness" of English to describe the African landscape and the experience of Africa, both in White Writing and Disgrace, Coetzee presents a vision of the merging and melding of white culture. For example, in White Writing he remarks, “It is no oversimplification to say that landscape art and landscape writing in South Africa from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth revolve around the question of finding a language to fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African... Is there a language in which people of European identity, or if not of European identity then a highy problematical South African-colonial identity, can speak to Africa and be spoken to by Africa?” (7-8).
Rural Africa in Disgrace becomes space set apart for song, particularly toward the end of the novel, when David begins composing. Africa is a problematic setting for song, however. David begins to question the effectiveness or appropriateness of English for describing the African experience (“More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa” [117]). There is some irony to be seen here, given the eloquence of Coetzee’s prose; whatever is Africa or African in Disgrace, the English language seems to express it quite well. I am inclined to think Coetzee, who is always so self-consciously contemplating whites and “whiteness,” two very common and emotionally-charged notions in South Africa, presents a vision of the “browning” of South African culture, that white culture must and will change, of necessity, as the nation integrates. The rural African landscape becomes an Empsonian Encounter of cultures. The uplands of the Eastern Cape become a kind of communal South African membrane, where two antagonistic social groups—whites and blacks, urbanites and rustics—encounter each other, and try to learn from the experience. The text is remarkable, historically, because it seems to be reaching for a new identity for the white tribe; the text reaches out to the Rainbow Nation and admits that a painful and traumatic process of integration and hybridization is not only essential for the continued survival of the white tribe, but also the correct moral course, if the white tribe is to overcome a certain historical disgrace.
This is a difficult thing to say to the white nation. Nevertheless Coetzee himself is emblematic of change in Afrikaner culture. While typical of Afrikaners, insofar as his real interest is the Afrikaner experience, he writes in English, and contemplates English-speaking whites as much as Afrikaans-speakers. His discussion is addressed to a notoriously insular society with a historical predisposition to resist cultural integration with anyone. The notion is charged with so many emotions in Afrikaner society that it is literally the unmentionable, the unspoken. Integration is that which is not there, yet readily apparent everywhere. Fundamental change on a cultural level is a scary and difficult thing, however; the American experience of desegregation is emblematic of this. Indeed, over the course of a year at an Afrikaans university, I asked my colleagues “what they thought” about Disgrace. Every single white Afrikaner I spoke with, to the last, expressed a vehement, emotionally-charged reader response. One colleague, a middle-aged white female, a professor of Afrikaans, said, “Never has a book shocked and disturbed me more, right to the core of my being.”
6.1 The cover of the text and the notion of “white
writing”
Figure 18: Front Cover of Disgrace
Figure 19:
Back cover of Disgrace
The cover of the original 1999 hardcover edition is pure white, with 12-point font “Disgrace” in Geneva typeface printed in the center. In the header presents the text “J. M. Coetzee” printed in blue 36-point font. Surely, being J. M. Coetzee is part of what makes this text interesting or significant, and Viking Press has marketed the cover with this in mind. The cover is reminiscent of the Beatles’ White Album, which in many ways was definitive or superlative of rock-n-roll at that time. Does the cover of Disgrace suggest the same? Certainly so, if we consider the critical praise on the back. The cover of the White Album suggests that the authors are what is important, rather than any notion of theme or marketing. The cover of Disgrace suggests the same. Also, Afrikaner culture is highly patriarchal, and characterized by respect for elders. Coetzee rhetorically positions himself as a speaker with authority, a typical conceit of the African bard, and an effective rhetorical strategy for addressing the white tribe.
In a South African context, the colors white, brown, and black are ideologically and emotionally charged.[21] The cover is pure white, automatically suggesting the text is about whites or whiteness, much in the way we know Serote’s “it is a dry white season” is not actually about the bushveld. Disgrace is about whites, and self-consciously contemplates “settler[s]” (61), their history, and their current position in society. In many ways, starting with the cover, the author rhetorically positions himself as a spokesman for the white tribe, and as a teller of stories to the white tribe.
Yet this becomes self-consciously ironic in Disgrace, as the New South Africa integrates into a functioning poly-ethnic body politic, and the notion of white culture grows less prominent, and the daily reality of a pluralist South African society grows stronger. It is a society overwhelmingly black, the Rainbow Nation, focusing on an “African Renaissance,” and a society that widely anticipates a “browning” of South Africa.[22] We might look at Disgrace as one of the last breaths of “white writing,” and everything after it becomes what it always was in the first place, namely, South African writing. This, indeed, seems to be part of the lesson or moral we are meant to draw from the story, as Lucy determines to stay on the farm, and become Petrus’ third wife, promising to bear and love a brown child of rape.
In 1988, under Apartheid, Coetzee theorized "white writing." For him, this was the literature of a people no longer European, not yet African (cf White Writing 11). Thus Coetzee posits white writing, from the start, as a dynamic, changing entity. It's the "white" part that seems to be changing now, and in Disgrace, Coetzee seems to be theorizing what this means to his culture. Coetzee positions himself as a bard, speaking to the people. Without a doubt, Disgrace shook right through the white reading public; it is already being taught as a classic in South African universities. Disgrace is one of the most important books in today's South Africa, if only in terms of how widely it has been read, in such a short time.
6.2 The title of the text
The title Disgrace raises several questions. What disgrace? Whose disgrace? From the contemporary South African reader’s perspective, an overwhelmingly urban and white readership, and from the perspective of one seeking (perhaps) entertainment or diversion, the title holds hint of a sexual drama, which the text delivers. But this is no Hollywood title; it is not a title to attract or entice. Rather, it has dark connotations, pointing to the text’s heavy, oppressive air. "Disgrace," the first word of the story, establishes a narrative contract of something bad, or wrong. This is quickly delivered in the second sequence, as the text turns counter-utopian and darkly anti-pastoral. Indeed, the entire text is characterized by a heavy, oppressive, stifling mood.
While David’s urban sexual escapades are portrayed
as disgraceful, and act as a parallel narrative, certainly the primary disgrace
is historical and cultural. Disgrace
is constantly concerned with the legacy of Apartheid, racism, and land dispossession:
"a history of wrong... [come] down from the ancestors" (156). The
contemporary events are framed by a constant awareness of the "old
days" (4, 62, 116) and "the wrongs of the past" (133). It is
safe to say that the Afrikaner nation is now, in the New South Africa,
collectively digesting an enormous amount of historical guilt. Toward the end
of the novel, David goes to Issak’s house, to ask his forgiveness. David feels
the need to apologize, or make peace or amends. Issak’s response is, at the
same time, a commentary on the “disgraceful” history of the white tribe, as
indicated in part by the use of "we" (whites) as opposed to
"you" (David): "The question is not, are we sorry? The question
is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now
that we are sorry?" (172).[23] Indeed, the answer to this question
seems to be part of what David and Lucy are waiting for, at the conclusion of
the story.
The
notion of disgrace is a salient one in the story. We see the multiple
re-enactment of disgrace; we see David, Lucy, and the entire rural community
trying to deal with various disgraces, such as the horrible suffering of rural
animals, Bev's infidelity, Lucy's rape, Lucy's apparent lesbian lifestyle,
David getting fired from his job (a good job is very hard to get in South
Africa), and his sexual disgraces in Cape Town. A drama of disgraces, we might
call it; a larger plot of disgrace is
being dramatized, over and over, in the text. The text certainly seems to reach
for redemption, though redemption is always just slightly out of grasp.
Disgrace is emblematic of a peculiar
problem that white South Africans are currently experiencing. They feel like
they’ve lost their home, that they don’t belong, and a big part of this
cultural malaise stems from a deep-seeded feeling of disgrace. While my
research has lead me to conclude that there was always a white resistance to
Apartheid (the rocker Koos Kombois is a good example), nevertheless, almost
every white South African rightly bears a true and painful burden of disgrace.
Added to this is a prevailing sense of a fundamental rift, a de-centering, a
cultural dislocation vis-à-vis history. Living among Afrikaner intellectuals, I
felt this cultural malaise in many different ways. One colleague in the
Afrikaans Department introduced himself by way of strolling into my office,
sitting on my desk, and saying, "As an Afrikaner man, I feel very guilty
all the time, you know… and I feel very guilty for not having come to meet you
sooner…," and while I think he was trying to be witty, my sociologist’s
ears certainly perked up.
6.3 Disgrace
and the “great campaign of redistribution” (176)
Disgrace takes place (ostensibly) in the early transition of the New
South Africa; the text was presumably written in 1996 or 1997. It is an era
when white farmers feel increasingly besieged by attackers. Disgrace is a dramatization of this
feeling, concluding with the blending or modulating of the status quo in the
rural community, as Lucy prepares to marry Petrus, and become incorporated into
his household. This, because “everything is dangerous today” (64). Statistically, "white farmers are
four times more likely to be murdered than their fellow South Africans"
(Wenzel 91). I was present in Potchefstroom in September 2001, when a Boer political
protest about farm murders was staged. Furthermore, the political pressure to
redistribute rural land is increasingly intense.
In Zimbabwe in early 2000, a year after Disgrace was published, government-lead
groups of rural blacks, called “war veterans,” began invading white farmland.
The farm invasions were often violent, with some rapes of white women, and
extensive looting that was widely documented in the media. This resulted in the
mass exodus of most whites from the countryside, either into Harare, or out of
Zimbabwe altogether (the phenomenon of “white flight”). This series of events
was profoundly shocking to whites in South Africa. Without a doubt, this is the
general collective nightmare of today’s white South Africans. Disgrace is a dramatization of this
widely-imagined and widely-feared scenario, though Disgrace searches for solutions that the Rhodesians (i.e., white
Zimbabweans) never managed to find. Zimbabwe is South Africa’s cultural
frontier and shares "strong mutual historical ties" (Smith 126).
While the events in Zimbabwe postdate the novel, the land crisis was coming to
a head in Zimbabwe as Coetzee put pen to paper. Disgrace in some ways predicts the crisis, and historically, Disgrace is a part of the historical
tension that lead to the crisis.
The issue of land
reform has been at South Africa’s political forefront since 1997, in the very
least, when the government released its White
Paper on Land Policy. Derek Hanekom, a former freedom fighter and Mandela’s
Minister of Land Affairs, writes, "The history of land dispossession is
the history of this county… it is the root of much… conflict." The
conflict arises primarily because "white Afrikaner farmers… [own] 84
percent of the agricultural land in South Africa" (Wenzel 110). Disgrace is, in part, a dramatization and
interrogation of this conflict, as land reform proceeds in the uplands of the
Eastern Cape, and the “great campaign of redistribution” (176) begins to be
waged in earnest.
In Disgrace we
see dispossession as a key tension. First, in the extensive ruminations of the
“history of wrong… come down from the ancestors” (156), and second, in the two
robberies, and third, the implications of the two rapes, as the dispossession
of a woman’s dignity and mental stability, as an expression of power or
control. Fourth, there is the drama of Lucy’s effective dispossession of her
farm. Finally, David is dispossessed of his career, effectively in the
beginning, and in point of fact soon thereafter.
The drama in the city, first of stalking Soraya, and then
of stalking and eventually raping Melanie, begins a textual motif,
dramatizations of possessing, or attempts
at possessing. With David, his only real interest initially being “the problem
of sex," we see a drama of possession enacted thrice in Cape Town: first
with Soraya, second with Melanie, and third at the university committee, when
David’s defense rests on him having a certain ill-articulated “right of
desire.”[24] The values
conveyed here are that David has a right to desire Melanie. This is contrasted,
then, with the right of the robbers to covet Lucy’s possessions, and that of
Petrus to covet her farmland. Sexual possession then becomes problematized with
Bev, a married woman who he doesn’t initially find attractive, can never truly
possess, and whom he is not sure he even wants
to posses. Disgrace is in many ways
an examination of “mixing power relations with sexual relations” (53).
This is paralleled with Petrus gaining his own farmland, first through land reform, and then through marrying Lucy. Initially, as Petrus “is busy establishing his own lands” (76), Lucy suggests that David help him, and he remarks sarcastically, “Give Petrus a hand. i like that. I like the historical piquancy” (77). The history of land dispossession is a long and emotive one in Southern Africa. The former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, arguably the most reviled white in Zimbabwe today for his white-supremacist government, is still admired by many Southern African whites, and has recently been commenting openly to the press, in wake of the land crisis in Zimbabwe, that he wishes he had never ceded power to the blacks. In his book The Great Betrayal, Smith speaks a bit about the history of land dispossession. Smith argues a rhetorical dichotomy between whites and blacks, based on technological level, subtly justifying and "naturalizing" the appropriation of farmland by the Pioneer Column: "Land was plentiful, so there was no problem over crop growing… Moreover, because of the primitive agricultural implements used by black people, which were wooden as opposed to the iron used by the white man, they were concentrated on the light sandy or loamy soils, which they found easier to work. The white man, on the other hand, preferred the heavier soils" (2).
Disgrace, for its part, also looks for "natural" reasons behind narrative plotting; Disgrace looks to get to the core of the struggle over Lucy’s farm. There are natural reasons why the "great campaign of redistribution" (176) is waging in the uplands of the Eastern Cape, and one of them is a historical disgrace. It becomes natural that Lucy should stay on the farm, refuse to accept being “defeated” (161). Disgrace is a dramatization of that most common of bourgeois fears, the fear of being dispossessed. We see this theme dramatized in The God of Small Things, as another example, and it is an easy fear to understand. It becomes more complicated in the New South Africa because of racial ideology, and the historical legacy that the new society inherited.
6.4 Framing the farm and the city
Typical of both the farm novel and pastoral expression historically, Disgrace is a framed tale. The rural drama is framed by the urban drama which begins the story, and which on many levels is the ultimate object of textual interrogation. For example, the urban and rural dramas of Disgrace show two different responses to crisis: one arrogant and inflexible (David in the university inquiry), and one humble and compromising (Lucy on the farm). The urban and rural dramas each have a rape as a fundamental tension. Each drama concludes with David letting something go. This parallelism is typical of pastoral expression; for example, it is commonly observed that the play-within-the-play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a framed narrative, commenting on the larger drama. We see a similar framed drama in the initial urban sequence of Disgrace: “A comedy of the new South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. On stage a hairdresser... attends to two clients, one black, one white... Catharsis seems to be the presiding principle: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter” (23).
In Disgrace, the rural drama which preoccupies the story is framed by a brief urban drama, which on many levels is the ultimate object of inquiry:
·
“He has always been a man of the city” (6).
·
"You load the sins of the city on the
goat‘s back, and the city was cleansed" (91).
·
"If the country can pass judgment on the
city, then the city can pass judgment on the country" (125).
·
“Cape Town is far away, almost another
country" (141).
·
"Inexorably, he thinks, the country is
coming to the city" (175).
Initially the rural is figured as the Other, but then the value becomes problematized in the last chapters, when David retreats a second time into the rural landscape (“Reversals: the stuff of bourgeois comedy,” David thinks sarcastically on p. 14). But in the beginning, David spends considerable time observing "country ways" (65) and the rural landscape, which is for him an "other, unfamiliar world" (71); “It’s a subculture of its own” (73), David remarks. He needs to “adjust to the pace of country life” (76).
We see a pattern of retreat from Cape Town to a rural farming community in the Eastern Cape. The opening sentences describe David driving into a suburb of Cape Town to meet Soyraya, establishing retreat/return as a primary textual theme. This is an extremely common pattern throughout the entire history of pastoral expression. Looking for the roots of this motif in White Writing, Coetzee compares it with Christ’s retreat in the desert. This is the journey to "the wilderness as a place of safe retreat into contemplation and purification, a place where the true ground of one’s being could be rediscovered, even as a place yet incorrupt in a fallen world" (49).
6.5 Disgrace’s pastoral morphology and South African history
Cape Town was the first Dutch city in Southern Africa, and the Eastern Cape was the first region colonized by the Dutch. The retreat motif in Disgrace has a powerful historical parallel, alluding to the mythic past of Afrikaners and their eventual resistance to the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town. From a contemporary point of view, the retreat motif is also significant. Cape Town was the center of Democratic Party power, i.e. until mid-2001, of Coloured and white Afrikaner political power (i.e., Afrikaans-speakers as a political and cultural group).
David retreats from Cape Town to his daughter’s farm in the Eastern Cape. Much of the current South African leadership comes from the Eastern Cape, which is Xhosaland, and the ruling ANC is a Xhosa-dominated party. The Eastern Cape "has long prided itself on its political reputation as the region that formed generations of fighters—from Makana and Maqoma, 19th-century Xhosa chiefs jailed on Robben Island for resisting British troops, to black consciousness leader Steve Biko, President Nelson Mandela" (Niekerk & Ludman 58), and the current president, Thabo Mbeki. There is an agreement between the ANC and the Zulu-dominated IFP, that the president of South Africa will be a Xhosa, and the vice-president a Zulu.
In many respects, the Eastern Cape is the political heartland of the New South Africa. Nevertheless, the province is also one of the poorest. "Today the Eastern Cape stands as a stark reminder of ‘bantustanism’. More than half the Eastern Cape population lives in rural villages or peri-urban shack settlements" (ibid. 59). The plot of Disgrace takes us from Cape Town, the Mother City, moving "back" to a stark reminder of bantustanism, to a different way of life. In this respect, Disgrace takes us back in time. Often the pastoral motif of retreat portrays a Golden Age, an Eden, a locus amoenus, a garden or earthly paradise. In Afrikaans, South Africa is often referred to as lui-lekker land, the “land of ease and plenty.” In the beginning of David’s time of the farm, there are strong idyllic motifs, values of retreat and the womb, of the farm as a “refuge” (65). This quickly becomes reversed when Lucy is raped, and the rural community changes.
Raymond Williams in The City and the Country discusses how pastoral texts tend to celebrate an only-just-vanished period in the rural landscape, which is portrayed as happier and simpler than the contemporary urban drama. Disgrace figures the rural Eastern Cape to represent an only-just-vanished period, a simpler place than today’s Cape Town in the New South Africa. Williams writes, “An ordered and happier past [is] set against the disturbance and disorder of the present. An idealization, based on a temporary situation and a deep desire for stability, served to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time” (60). A peaceful bucolic farm life is under explicit contemplation at the beginning of Disgrace. This sets the stage for the next movement in plot, when this becomes problematized and then reversed. Disgrace comes to contemplate “white flight,” for example p. 157, and it becomes clearly suggested that a peaceful, bucolic farm-life is ending for whites (e.g., David’s ruminations on "darkest Africa" [121]; Ettinger is “the only one left in Africa” [100] of his family.
6.6 Being “African”: the cultural politics of
hybridity and integration from the perspective of white South Africa
What does it mean to "be"
an African? It's a problematic notion, and nowhere does it become more
complicated than in white Southern Africa. Here, because whites actually have
real claim to being Africans, a claim they have historically been very
uncomfortable with. It's a very emotional idea. A fundamental aspect of this is
the relation of whites to blacks, of whites (sometimes called “Europeans”) to
"Africans." A well-known dramatization of this is Gordimer's July's People. Written during Apartheid, the story presents a white
family hiding from a fictive civil war in South Africa. They are hiding in
their domestic worker's village in the bush, and as the title suggests, July
grows to have all the power in this relationship. The key question becomes how
the whites will adapt. We see the rapid integration of the white children, a
dramatization of Africanization. We also see the husband's rapid decline into
powerlessness and liquor, and the heroine's
To this very day, the idea of a white as an African is somehow startling, somehow upsetting. This, despite there being millions of whites walking around on the southern tip of the continent. This in itself might be why the "question of race" plays so prominently in the white South African collective imagination. Culturally, in the 20th century, "going native," or being a "kaffir lover" or a "liberal bleeding heart," was a big problem for a white. It was forced to become a choice of loyalty and identity, which is not an easy choice for anybody; it became a choice between one's culture and the unknown. To this day, we still aren't too sure what a "white African" might be, or how we should deal with such a thing. This is why whites were so concerned historically with the aarmblanken or "poor white" "problem" in South Africa, out of fears of "degeneration," of being swallowed by the bush, of becoming a white African. Why this would become such an alarming notion to early 20th century white settlers is easy to surmise, particularly given the many racial predispositions of European culture at the time. We have evidence, everywhere in the cannon, that this has been a long historical problem for white culture in South Africa.
The Coloured people traditionally attached to the Afrikaner household are emblematic of the symbiotic relationship of the white social system with larger social groups in the African environment during the 20th century. Today, Coloured voting support for white-dominated parties in the Cape is an extremely important political issue. The shake-up in the Democratic Alliance in the Cape, in 2001, is emblematic of this; it wouldn't have been so important if the Kapie vote wasn't at stake. So race is terribly important, still somehow today, yet it is also not politically correct for a white to speak of race in the New South Africa. This leaves many South African whites in the Transition feeling disturbingly de-centered, in a culturally ambiguous and stressful position, and this is one of the subjects of Disgrace. It is a stress linked fundamentally with race, and with the emotionally charged notion of being African. Disgrace asks, "If this is a Rainbow Nation, then where do whites fit in, and how can we deal with the legacy of the past?" Not an easy question, and Disgrace offers no easy answers.
Disgrace is, in many ways, a status quo
text ideologically, as it is positioned vis-à-vis the contemporary reading audience.
Integration is a very problematic notion when viewed in the context of white
South African history, but how else can the Rainbow Nation become real? Disgrace is a status quo text
ideologically, because it searches for the means to preserve the new society
currently under construction. But while a status quo text, Disgrace is revolutionary in recommending to the white tribe a new,
African identity, and everything that comes with it, such as Coloured relatives
and black neighbors. This, indeed, is the crux of the many problems in Disgrace.
In the end, Lucy will bear the brown child of rape. There was a time in white South African society when this would have been thought the worst thing imaginable for a white woman (e.g., Kennedy 128 on the pervasive paranoia of rape of white women). Disgrace is remarkable for seeking a context where it might become acceptable, where it might even lead to some kind of grace. Disgrace also dramatizes an old historical pattern, from the Dutch colonial times, of white men raping their black and Coloured slaves. Disgrace presents a dramatization, and then an inversion, of history in this regard; Lucy's Coloured child presents an interesting reversal of ethnic rape, in particular, when we contrast it with the initial urban drama of David stalking Soraya.
It has always struck me how the Coloured people are such an animated subject in a South African context. Millin's God's Step-children is a racist tract, and an interesting example of a long-running cultural dialogue about Coloured people. It is as though white South Africans are whispering: "Who are all these pale brown people here, that one my distant relative a generation removed but let's not think of that (e.g., van den Heever's Ancestral Voices), and what do these Coloured people mean to us in the end, where is this going, what does this all mean?" Interestingly, the Coloreds are an emotional topic on the other side of the ethnic spectrum as well. The old appendage "so-called," as in the "so-called Coloureds," was an ideological mechanism of the liberation movement. During the struggle, it made Coloureds less white and more black, in an ideological sense.
It was a remarkably successful strategy; both Coloured people and Indians in South Africa are quick to describe themselves as "Black," if the conversation runs to things ideological. Otherwise, they seem to be more interested in thinking of themselves as Coloured or Indian. A little phrase like "the so-called Coloureds" can become a huge thing in historical culture. It was a political phrase designed to alienate the Afrikaners from the Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds traditionally attached to the Afrikaner household, and living in an unequal symbiotic relationship with each other. The phrase was meant to alienate the whites from their Coloured lapdogs, to put it bluntly, and in this, it was remarkably successful. But in some respects it was not ultimately successful; "white" parties held the Cape until 2001, primarily because of the Cape Coloured vote. For our purposes here, the phrase is also interesting as a problem of figuration: "the so-called Colouoreds." Whatever these people "are," it is obviously under dispute, and cannot be directly named.
Often white people don't like discussing the Coloureds in South Africa, and this reflects a larger general system, something the culture does ideologically. Coloureds are certainly one of the most marginalized segments of the society as a whole. They are particularly marginalized in white society. Coloureds have been repeatedly marginalized and exploited in history, and used as a pawn between more powerful social groups. The phrase, "the so-called Coloureds," is emblematic of this. What I want to ask here is, what makes people with certain pigmentation, the Coloureds, or maybe more to the point, the very idea of Coloureds; what makes it such an emotive topic? Why do people care?
It's because the Coloureds point to something that white South African culture is only just now coming to grips with. Namely, black and white have been slowly "browning" together for 350 years now. I had a lot of Coloured friends in South Africa, and I knew their families. One comment I always heard was, "Those Afrikaners… every single one of them has black blood somewhere…" This subject is dramatized in Brink's Devil's Valley, among others. It is a very old accusation from history, dating back to the days when Afrikaans emerged as a komboistaal. I would be reluctant to suggest it to an Afrikaner colleague in South Africa. It’s difficult to have a reasonable conversation about such a notion. How can you say politely to a white Afrikaner: "… every single one of you has black blood somewhere…"? This would be very impolite. But clearly, something we want to not notice in this notion of decorum, something we want to selectively forget, is that the millions of Coloured people themselves are evidence of it. They came from somewhere, after all.
Blacks and whites have been "knowing" each other for 350 years in South Africa, yet we don't want to see the evidence of this walking before our very eyes. The Coloured people are obviously best left unsaid. The Coloured people represent something too difficult to deal with, something too-close-to-home. In the final analysis, I would suggest this is a bad move, ideologically, for white South Africans, because the Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds, the millions of them, are the best claim the white tribe has to being African. Disgrace seems to be making the same suggestion, as the novel concludes, and we await a brown baby that just might lead David and Lucy into some semblance of grace.
6.7 Disgrace and
South African politics in the Transition
Southern Africa
is a highly politicized part of the world, and Disgrace is a highly politicized novel, not only in what the text
"says," but also because of the way it interacts with reader and
history. The fact that Disgrace is a
farm novel about race and land reform (among other things), written by an
Afrikaner in the English language, makes the text a political statement in
Southern Africa, of a Smuttsian agenda. This, if only because one of the
primary ideological tensions in late 20th century South Africa was the
endless maneuvering between black and Afrikaner interests. One of the text’s
primary tensions revolves around Lucy’s land: How can she find a way to keep
her land? How can she be safe? How can she find a way to get along with her
neighbors? How can she build a future on a small, besieged farm? And even if
she succeeds in all this, what guarantee does she have that the farm will not
be taken from her in the future? While these questions are a major preoccupation
in text, and quite typical of emotive sentiment in the farm novel, they are
never actually answered in the conclusion of Disgrace, probably because there is no easy answer in today’s South
Africa.
The novel ends with both Lucy and David waiting. Waiting for the barbarians, it
seems, given the course of events. White rural landowners such as Lucy are
disgraced in a fundamental way. The moral lesson of the story, as we see dramatized
by Lucy’s decision to remain on her farm, is how a white must adapt, what she
must do, and how she must think, if she is to survive in the New South Africa.
This involves ceding her property rights to Petrus, becoming his third wife,
and bearing the brown child of one of Petrus’s relatives (from the rape). This
is contrasted with the urban rape, and Melanie’s drama after the event. In many
compelling ways, Disgrace is a drama
of survival. Note that this is paralleled by the urban drama of David's
resistance to change (“His temperament is not going to change, he is too old
for that” [2]), and is eventual acknowledgement in the country that he must
change: “Do I have to change, he thinks?” (126).
I find Coetzee’s picture of the New South Africa a bit dark
and reactionary. South Africa is finding ways to integrate with love and
compassion, but integration will take time and cool heads. Arguing against this
course is sheer folly, of which the Zimbabwe land crisis is evidence. This was
Madiba’s course (Xhosa, “grandfather,” i.e., Nelson Mandela). Having lived for
a year in a rural Afrikaner community, I do not think rural crime is an
organized “great campaign of redistribution” (176) in South Africa, though some
political interests, such as the PAC and LDC and Mugabe, would like to see one.
This strikes me frankly as a manifestation of a historical cultural paranoia
among whites, the fear of a “Black Menace,” the notion that blacks are waiting
in the bush for the right moment to kill whites and disposes them. This
paranoia draws evidence from the Mau Mau in Kenya, and the slaughter of whites
in the Congo. Most rural white farmers have formed Kommandos, to be armed and
mobilized at a moment’s notice. It is a deeply ingrained paranoia among
Afrikaners, and I think current problems, such as rampant violent crime in
South Africa, and instability in Zimbabwe, exacerbates the paranoia.
In some ways, it is not necessarily just paranoia, and this
does not help matters. Farm murders are a genuine concern of many whites, and a
real problem in rural South Africa. Some Afrikaans newspapers keep a daily farm
murder count. Rural crime, in the sense of redistributing wealth, is the result
of gross economic differences between rich and poor in a capitalist society,
and poverty breeds crime. We know this only too well in the United States, with
the highest prison population in the world, a large proportion of whom are
non-whites from impoverished social classes. It is no coincidence in the New
South Africa that whites are victims of crime, nor was it any coincidence in
the past; a thief is going to try to steal from people who have things worth
stealing. Nor, for that matter, is crime victimization restricted to whites; it
is commonly acknowledged today that violent crime is completely out of control,
the worst it has ever been. Statistically, the vast majority of violent crime
victims in South Africa are black.
In land reform, however, it is easy to see a “great
campaign of redistribution” (176), because that is exactly what it is. Land
reform is, at the close of 2001, the most important ideological tension in
Zimbabwe, and one of utmost concern in South Africa. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe has
been conducting a series of planned invasions onto white-owned land. In South
Africa itself, land reform is proceeding very slowly, and this is causing some
tensions, though it is significant that most South African blacks are currently
satisfied with the status quo. The slowness is due, in an ultimate sense, to
the inability of the government to finance its own land reform program. This
means land reform, as a political issue in South Africa, will be long and
contentious, and I think this is part of the wisdom to be gleaned at the end of
the story, with Lucy and David waiting.
The conclusion, or perhaps the lesson of the story, is
extremely unclear. The one thing we know about the future is that Lucy will
marry a black man in order to gain protection, and integration in a loose
sense, with the black community that now has power over her. This “lesson” is
being directed to a culture that, to this very day, largely finds racial
integration repugnant, a violation of the old Colour Bar. My experience is that
the Colour Bar is very much alive in the New South Africa. We must always bear
in mind that this was an institutionally racist society until 1994, and the
Rainbow Nation was a radical shift in cultural values. Old values still
persist, but are under intense interrogation, as Disgrace is evidence. Interestingly, an Afrikaner colleague, a man
whom I know reads texts closely, had not even noticed, or did not remember,
that marriage was Lucy's decision. This, I think, because a white woman in a
black household is the unthinkable, the undiscussable (note that Lucy will
retain her house, and Petrus may not enter it without her permission), yet,
given the New South Africa, also the inevitable, as racist cultural values
become progressively de-centered.
The fear here, the values under tension, are so complex and
emotionally-chareged that a reasonable conversation about them is extremely
difficult in today’s South Africa. African settlers saw themselves as “islands
of white in a sea of black," and this way of looking at the world will
take more than a couple of years, the TRC, and the Government of National Unity
to erase. Some Afrikaners, what clearly is a small extremist fringe, actively
resist integration. Indeed, the very concept of “integration” is highly
problematized. The important thing to consider in the Transition is that the
ethnic groups of South Africa are only now, for the first time, interacting
freely as equals. South Africans of every race are confronting new situations
every day, situations they never thought they would see. This, indeed, is
probably why we call this time “the Transition.” The fact that Lucy can find a
peaceful solution to her problems is actually quite remarkable.
Marrying Petrus becomes a way of preserving the
garden-farm. Petrus becomes a kind of communal wall, enclosing and containing
the farm against the outside. The values conveyed here are that the land,
possessing it and living on it, is what is important now; and that old values,
such as the Colour Bar, are no longer important. Certainly the Colour Bar is at
issue in contemporary Afrikaner society, and we see this dramatized on the
third page, when David self-consciously observes that he is sleeping with a
Malay, and then remarks, “All things are possible these days.” We also see it
dramatized in the many complex emotions David expresses about the marriage, and
in his decision to wait, and see what becomes of his daughter. In the end, Disgrace is a narrative of survival that
seems to name, or to point its audience toward, an ethical movement from historical
disgrace into some hope for redeeming grace in the New South Africa. In many
respects ideologically, the text is trying to theorize a functioning Rainbow
Nation.
Kennedy suggests that one of the hallmarks of settler culture was an obsession with "boundary maintenance", i.e., the maintenance of white class supremacy. The obsession went to such an extent that armblanken or "poor whites" were often refused visas to immigrate to the colonies, because of fears of "degeneration" and "going native... becoming, in effect, a white African in European eyes" (173). The draconian pass-law legislation in Rhodesia (1901-2), Kenya (1915), and in South Africa with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, is a direct topographical expression of boundary maintenance. Michel de Certeau would have called the pass laws a "spatial practice." Yet these class divisions were always fluid and under interrogation, in part because "Culture is a negotiated, made process." Kennedy argues, "For a complex poly-ethnic system such as a settler colony, the prominence and pervasiveness of mechanisms of boundary maintenance made them an independent variable of great importance in the shaping of cultural norms. In other words, the very boundaries that shield an ethnic group against alien infiltration themselves serve to alter its character" (104).
The pastoral
landscape in the farm novel is generally a sort of communal membrane, which
simultaneously incorporates and excludes outside groups. Just as “It was
difficult to assert patrician superiority on skates” (Schama 75) in 17th
century Dutch landscape art, so too, in the New South Africa, is it difficult
to maintain the Colour Bar when you’re Lucy, reduced to being a “peasant”
(217), an aarmblank (“poor white”)
with a Coloured baby, a landowner reduced to a tenant (204). Disgrace simultaneously exposes and
blurs racial boundaries as the rural community changes, painting a picture of
the painful growth process the Rainbow Nation needs to complete, if it is to
throw off the “history of disgrace... come down from the ancestors.” Disgrace is an Empsonian Encounter of
cultures that, in meeting together in rural Africa, slowly start realizing that
they’re not so different after all. This strikes me as the kernel of wisdom Disgrace returns to its urban reading
audience: a validation of the political status quo in the New South Africa,
coupled with a recognition that none of this is going to be easy or painless.
The white tribe’s historical disgrace is part of the reason the pain is
“natural,” why Lucy’s struggle and pain is the way things must be.
7.0 Conclusions
Pastoral is a genre system, and so cannot be discretely defined or encapsulated. Contrary to much of the criticism’s efforts, pastoral is not a fixed form, and is highly mutable over time. Also contrary to much of the criticism’s efforts, pastoral cannot be defined by its motifs. Nevertheless, because of the repetition of generic forms and functions over time, we can observe, measure, and describe it. Narratologically, expressively, and in terms of reader response, pastoral is the anticipation of previous versions of pastoral. These previous forms of pastoral can be catalogued meaningfully. In particular we can observe narratological patterns with pastoral form. Pastoral has typical plot structures that are consistently repeated over time. In short, while we cannot define pastoral, we can describe it meaningfully, and with some precision, based on cataloguing the replication of pastoral motifs over time.
Broadly speaking, the pastoral novel may be seen as a typology of topographical plot movements. Typically, pastoral novels are characterized by the following fiction, or story. An urban character, encountering trouble or stress in her city life, goes to a rural retreat for mental recuperation. In this respect, values of the womb and idyllic motifs become salient in dramatizations of pastoral. Something natural or traditional or essential is to be learned in the rural setting. There, the urbanite encounters rural people, and spends time contemplating the landscape. Often the shepherd, a rural character, warns against disturbing tradition or the social status quo. Because of her intrusion into the rural society, the rural community and often the rural landscape changes. She, the urbanite, then typically returns to the city with wisdom, and the rural drama teaches a lesson, or gives the reader a moral about the heroine’s original stresses in the city. Often, the return presents some moral, or kernel of wisdom, which validates the social status quo in the urban society.
Sometimes this story is reversed, where a rural person, encountering stress on the farm (somewhere rural), takes a trip to the Big City (somewhere urban). There he encounters city people and scenarios, and spends some time contemplating the cityscape. Because of these experiences in the city, the rural character changes, or grows as a person, and then returns to the farm with wisdom. The city experience sheds light on the original trouble on the farm. Often, the rural community (or sometimes the landscape) then changes because of the wisdom the hero brings from the city.
Our notion of what pastoral "is" should be inclusive, accounting at least in some respect for the many versions of pastoral. Alpers seeks to explain why not all texts are pastoral, whereas with this essay’s methodology, we can find pastoral (the dramatization of pastoral anecdotes, or allusions to them, or pastoral motivation, i.e., pastoral as the logic that binds an utterance) in aspects of most modern novels. Clearly, “pastoral” is, or in the very least has become, an extremely protean discourse. Such a view makes good practical sense in terms of generic evolution; we can easily see the romantic and heroic, for example, in most modern discourse. As an ancient written form, pastoral evolved into the modern era to actually become somewhat ubiquitous, much like the romantic or the heroic. While not all stories are heroic, just about every story has a hero. While not all contemporary novels are pastoral, we can find pastoral motivation in most narrative of mood and setting. Most descriptions of space and nature have pastoral motivation. In addition, the encounter between people of different social groups is often pastoral in motivation. We need to be able to account for this, if we are ever to define pastoral, yet the ubiquity of pastoral is part of the reason it has been so difficult to define. This ubiquity also underscores pastoral’s powerful currency in culture, and its tremendous expressive diversity.
South African pastoral novels are characterized by a distinct rhetorical preoccupation with social encounters and social movement, and this is typical of pastoral expression historically. The pastoral novel dramatizes social change as the encounter between urban and rural figures, and so doing, dramatizes the tensions of a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing white society. A society which, rather paradoxically or in the very least troublesomely, was founded on a patriarchal, agrarian social caste system, and an anachronistic feudal economy. Further, this rhetorical tension between urban and rural figures strikes me as a key fiction of pastoral, and it tells us much about the larger question of what pastoral expression “is,” and why people want to read pastoral stories in the first place.
Pastoral is considerably more complex, and much more expressively diverse, than has been hitherto recognized. In the novel, pastoral motivation combines and intertwines with other genres and modes. This creates hybrids of pastoral sentiment, such as anti-pastoral, or the farm novel. Pastoral is an old genre, one of the first formal discourses of literary history. Importantly I think, it arose in Africa in a Greek settler culture. Like the fairy tale, it has evolved and mutated into more complex discursive forms, such as the novel. Viktor Schlovsky suggests that in the evolution of genres, "a new form arises not in order to express a new content, but because the old form had exhausted its possibilities" (Duff 7). "Genres modify and combine with one another,” such as pastoral, the novel, and realism, “producing variant forms” such as settler frontier pulp, "which eventually give rise to new genres" such as the farm novel, "in which the different evolutionary layers can still be discerned" (Duff 14).
8.0
Works Cited
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