SOURCE: Coetzee, J. M. “Man's Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma.” In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell, pp. 344-60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Coetzee evaluates La Guma's novels against literary criticism of the late 1960s that questioned the artistic merit of much African literature.]

THE WRITER IN SOUTH AFRICA

By the late 1960s, in reaction against a degree of overestimation of African writing by the literary establishments of East and West, a skeptical reassessment of its achievement was in full swing among African intellectuals. The harshest critics were writers themselves. Thus Wole Soyinka:

The curiosity of the outside world far exceeded their critical faculties, and publishers hovered like benevolent vultures on the still foetus of the African Muse … The average published writer in the first few years of the post-colonial era was the most celebrated skin of inconsequence ever to obscure the true flesh of the African dilemma.¹

And on South Africa in particular, Lewis Nkosi's judgment was:

With the best will in the world it is impossible to detect in the fiction of black South Africans any significant and complex talent which responds with both the vigor of the imagination and sufficient technical resources to the problems posed by conditions in South Africa.²

In the case of South Africa the outcome of the debate is crucial. So much of the intelligentsia is in prison or in exile, so much serious work has been banned by the censors, that the work of black South African writers has become a kind of émigré literature written by outcasts for foreigners. There can thus be no argument, as in independent Africa, that a vital if crude national school of writing will eventually both educate and be educated by its audience, for the work of the South African exile is deprived of its social function and indeed of the locus of its existence in a community of writers and readers. At his desk he must generalize the idea of an audience from a “you” to an indefinite “they.” A criterion of timelessness may come to seem the only one that can justify him, for his work promises to find a place for itself only by transcending the world and the age out of which it grows. If he has been exposed to the universities, then English academic criticism, with the tradition of Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot behind it, may underpin his retreat with a critical ideology. Thus we find Nkosi censuring a writer (Bloke Modisane) for lacking a “power for so re-ordering and for so transmuting the given social facts that we can detect an underlying moral imagination at work.”³ If he cannot live by these consolations, the writer must cultivate stoicism and a literature of witness, seeing himself minimally: as the man who acts, in Sartre's words, “in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and nobody may say that he is innocent of what it's all about”;⁴ with, all the while, an eye on his moral relation to his obsessive story: is he merely fondling his wound?

ALEX LA GUMA

Alex la Guma was born in Cape Town in 1925. For much of his life he has been involved in resistance activities. He was one of the 156 accused in the notorious Treason Trial of the 1950s, and later spent years under house arrest and in detention. He left South Africa in 1966. His first novel, A Walk in the Night (1962), appeared in Nigeria and later in Britain and the United States. And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967) were published in East Berlin. In the Fog of the Seasons' End appeared in London in 1972.⁵

La Guma came to the novel via journalism and slice-of-life story-writing. The obvious influences on his style are American: the popular crime and low-life story, with behind it the naturalism of James Farrell and Richard Wright, and, further back, the protest novel of Upton Sinclair. The naturalistic-deterministic influence is plain in A Walk in the Night, with its large cast of negligible characters driven to their various fates by social forces beyond their understanding. In the next three novels we see protagonists exerting their will more and more to grasp their fate and eventually, we are given to hope, to master it. In this sense the novels become progressively more political. Nevertheless, Zola's ideal of a novel with the certainty, the solidity, and the practical application of a work of science can be discerned, if we look carefully enough, behind all La Guma's work. His novels are recognizably the product of someone who has served an apprenticeship in the short story: they come close to observing the unities of space and time, and their characters are largely from a single milieu, the Colored working class and underworld of Cape Town. Whites appear mainly as police officers and prison guards: The Stone Country specifically develops a metaphor of South Africa as a prison in which prisoner and jailer are bound to each other by Hegelian chains, and for the metaphor a nominal white presence is sufficient.⁶ Until the fourth novel black African characters are few and minor. La Guma does not offer a representative social panorama. For simplicity I therefore call his antagonists Black and White.

NATURALISM AND TRAGEDY

A favored mode among white South African writers has been tragedy (though Afrikaans writers have given much attention to the mythographic revision of history). Tragedy is typically the tragedy of interracial love: a white man and a black woman, or vice versa, fall foul of the law against miscegenation, or simply of white prejudice, and are destroyed or driven into exile. The overt content of the fable here is that love conquers evil through tragic suffering when such suffering is borne witness to in art; its covert content is the apolitical doctrine that defeat can turn itself, by the twist of tragedy, into victory.⁷ The tragic hero is the scapegoat who takes our punishment. By his suffering he performs a ritual of expiation, and as we watch in sympathy our emotions are purged, as Aristotle noted, through the operations of pity and terror. We leave the theater or close the book

                    with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation …
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

Religious tragedy reconciles us to the inscrutable dispensation by giving a meaning to suffering and defeat. As tragic art it also confers immortality: Oedipus and Lear may be destroyed by the gods, but we resurrect them ritually on our stage. An annual Shakespeare festival is as ritually appropriate as Easter.

But necessity is blind, says Marx, only insofar as it is not understood. With Zola the novel becomes a laboratory in which man is the subject of the experiments and in which the new Marxian and Darwinian laws of fatality are traced. The laws of heredity and environment that send Clyde Griffiths to the electric chair are unfolded in an experimental novel by Theodore Dreiser called An American Tragedy. Clyde's fall still awakens tragic pity and terror in us, but it also awakens righteous anger and turns it upon society.⁸ To this extent naturalism politicizes tragedy.

There is a second major transformation of tragedy in modern times. In the drama of crime detection the inscrutable order of the gods has become a remote but benign temporal order ruled over by the police, the upstart hero has become the criminal challenger of the law, and the intelligence of the tragedian (the oracle, the Tiresias-figure) has been embodied in the detective investigator who sniffs out the tragic error (clue) and thence unravels the line of the criminal hero's tragic fate. This authoritarian moral inversion (the hero now evil, the gods good) holds our sympathy by an equivocation: the investigator is presented as a private eye or lone agent nominally distinct from the police gods, the criminal is invested with the trappings of diabolical power (minions, infernal machines, an underworld empire).

What religious tragedy, naturalistic tragedy, and the crime story have in common are the idea of a reigning order and the idea of fatality. What religious tragedy and naturalistic tragedy have further in common is the evocation of pity and terror. What is unique to religious tragedy is ritual catharsis. What is unique to naturalistic tragedy is its rebelliousness. What is unique to the crime story is its evocation of not pity and terror but exultation at the fate of the transgressor. The crime story has a reactionary political form; religious tragedy is apolitical or quietistic. The predominant example of religious tragedy in South Africa is Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. A young African comes to the city, falls among bad companions, kills a white, and is hanged. The fathers of the dead men console and learn to respect each other. The hero who bears the blows of fate is here doubled in the persons of the two fathers; we share their suffering as they share each other's suffering, in pity and terror. The gods are secularized as the pitiless justice of the law. Nevertheless, Paton's fable bears the invariant content of religious tragedy: that the dispensation under which man suffers is unshakable, but that our pity for the hero-victim and our terror at his fate can be purged by the ritual of reenactment.⁹

A WALK IN THE NIGHT

A Walk in the Night is a tragic story, but in what way?

A young black, Michael Adonis, is sacked for talking back to his white foreman. Angry, drunk, and barely responsible for the act, he kills a harmless old white. He sneaks away, seen only by a couple of loitering gangsters. A second young black, a smalltime thug named Willieboy, enters the dead man's room, is surprised there, loses his head, and runs away. A sadistic white police officer, Raalt, gets on his trail and guns him down. Adonis is blackmailed into joining the underworld.

The mainspring of the plot is retribution. The death of the old white is literally fatal: his room is a fatal nexus, he who enters is doomed. An offense has been committed against the secular divinity of the law, and the law, through its police agents, will exact its penalty. Who pays does not seem to matter—Adonis or his double Willieboy. Willieboy is the unlucky one, the one who is seen and remembered. The agent who goes after him happens to be in a murderous mood. Reading of Willieboy's death we feel the tragic emotions of pity and terror, pity for his youth and ignorance, terror because we too may be black, unlucky, or both.

Thus far the book seems to read like an inversion of the crime story (the hunter is in the wrong), that is, like a second inversion of the original tragic scheme (our sympathies remain with the hero defeated by the now secularized police-gods). If this reading were a complete one, its political meaning would be that man suffers under an inscrutable secular authority, but that the emotional turmoil created by our witnessing his suffering can be purged by the ritual therapy of art. However, the reading is not complete. The core of retributive tragedy is modified by two political criticisms of Adonis/Willieboy visible at the level of the structure of the novel.

1. Modes of life that do not capitulate to authority but are not predatory are portrayed in two peripheral characters. One is Joe, a harmless youth who lives by handouts and by scavenging along the seashore as the aboriginal coast-dwellers of southern Africa had done. Joe stands for an obsolete collectivist, communal ethic; it is he who tries to stop Adonis' drift toward the underworld (74). The second is Franky Lorenzo, a stevedore who lives in the tenement where the killing takes place and who stands up briefly against Raalt's bullying (62-63). Lorenzo's wife falls pregnant annually. He laments this, not realizing, as she obscurely does, that his people's strength lies in numbers and that a new generation may see a new dawn. Lorenzo stands for a proletariat as yet unaware of its powers.

2. Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood. The elements of a political explanation of the situation of Adonis/Willieboy are present in the novel, but the hero is blind to them. There are, for instance, elements of a global political perspective. The novel is set in 1950 or 1951. Adonis meets a man in a bar who refuses to listen to political talk (subject: “Whites act like that because of the capitalis' system”), dismissing it with the catchphrase “Those bastards all come from Russia” (17). This man refuses to admit any connection between white terrorism (a lynching in the U.S. South) and internecine black violence (a knife fight in the Cape Town ghetto). A few hours later Willieboy makes a drunken attack on three American sailors for crossing the sexual color bar, is beaten off, meets the man from the bar in a dark alley, and mugs him. The clues toward a political interpretation of this ironic sequence are there, but only the god's eye of writer or reader can see them.

We can penetrate further into the political meaning of the book if we ask what forces make for stability or instability in La Guma's ghetto.

The action of the book represents a violent disturbance, lasting about twelve hours, of a precariously stable social system. At the end of the action the system returns to an equilibrium perhaps marginally more precarious than before. This equilibrium is, however, of a peculiar kind, a stability only of the ghetto vis-à-vis the rest of the city, and maintained only by shutting the ghetto off from the city. The ghetto itself seethes with internal violence. Raalt's police companion clearly advocates the principle of closure: “I don't like any trouble … Let these hottentots kill each other off” (39).

What detonates the action is the victimization of Adonis by his foreman. He is enraged and takes out his rage on the old white. The killing occurs inside the ghetto, which thus fulfills its stabilizing function of absorbing the consequences of unequal black-white contact. There is an unsettling feature of the killing, however: the old man is a white living in the ghetto, where he should not be, as the normative second police officer again notes (61). He mixes the categories white and ghetto-dweller, thereby drawing Raalt into a confusion of roles: he becomes both godlike avenger of the law (white) and practitioner of street warfare (black). This alarms his orthodox companion, who sees him as a dysfunctional psychotic macho who will “do something violent to one of those black bastards and as a result our superiority will suffer” (39). His fears are well-founded. When Raalt shoots down Willieboy, the watching crowd threatens to unite and attack. To the police this is a moment of anarchy, to the crowd a moment during which the anarchy of the ghetto is overthrown. But the moment passes, the status quo ante returns: “They wavered for a while and then surged forward, then rolled back, muttering before the cold dark muzzle of the pistol” (86). The crowd disperses, the police drive away with the dying Willieboy. The book comes to a close on three night images: a cockroach emerges to lap up the vomit (victory for the predatory ways of the ghetto); the scavenger Joe makes his way to the sea and the “beckoning hands” of the seaweed (end of the old communal fellow-feeling); and Lorenzo's pregnant wife lies waiting for dawn feeling “the knot of life within her” (promise of the future) (96).

There is nothing tragic in the system of punishments we see here: it is simply oppression. Only when we get down to the level of individual lives does the question of fate reappear: why does an innocent man have to open a door on a corpse and then run into a cop with a grudge? Is there not an arbitrariness in the sequence that must either seem incredible to us or lead us back to the sources of a tragic view of life?

The old man dies because Adonis is sacked. Adonis is sacked with impunity because he is black and may not belong to a trade union. Willieboy dies because a black must die because Raalt's unfaithful wife cannot be punished with impunity because she is white. These are two of the causal chains we find in the book. A notable feature of such chains is asymmetry: a chain of violence may begin in the white city or the black ghetto, but it must end in the ghetto and its last victim must be black. Thus when a black woman is unfaithful, a black man kills a black man (the anecdote on 17-19); when a white woman is unfaithful, a white man takes out his gun and kills a black man (Raalt and Willieboy). Causal chains like these are visible to writer and reader but not to the ghetto. When two chains of causes converge on Willieboy and claim him as their double victim, what looks to the reader like a specific case of bad luck (the improbable but clearly definable convergence) looks to the crowd and to Willieboy himself like inscrutable bad luck, the way things are in the ghetto. That is, whereas the ghetto is still at a prepolitical stage in its conception of fate, writer and reader can see laws of fatality at work, can conceive of fate naturalistically. As to the question of the arbitrariness of the convergence, we should recognize that by calling a plot arbitrary we mean that it is conceived in the interests of neatness, imposing on the subject an aesthetic shape that does not fit. (If by calling a plot arbitrary we mean simply that it has a low statistical probability of occurring in “real life,” we stand for a degraded standard of the real.) But the plot of Willieboy's doom, action as meaning, follows only too closely the contours of political reality. The plot is not arbitrary but, in Georg Lukács' term, “extreme.” To Lukács the great achievement of nineteenth-century Russian realism was the discovery of

that extreme expression of clearly revealed social determinants which makes possible a true typicality, far beyond the mere average … The primary, essential means of transcending the average is to create extreme situations in the midst of humdrum reality, situations which yet do not burst through the narrow framework of this reality as far as social content is concerned, and which, by their extreme character, sharpen rather than dull the edge of social contradictions.¹⁰

What distinguishes the realism of A Walk in the Night from the “critical realism” of Lukács' great tradition (Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann) is that at the end of the book we are back nearly where we started. The realist assumes “change and development to be the proper subject of literature,” whereas a “basically static approach to reality” belongs to the naturalistic novel.¹¹ This useful distinction allows us to pinpoint the major technical difficulty La Guma must have faced composing his novel, one which, it seems to me, he resolved inadequately. On the one hand, the urban Colored population of South Africa in the early 1950s, a time of rampant reaction, was politically fragmented, cancered with crime, and lacking in consciousness of the mechanisms of oppression operating against it. Any fictional account of the ghetto closing ranks against the police would have been a falsification of reality. On the other hand, the chaos of Willieboy's last day on earth rendered unmediated through Willieboy's eyes would have missed Lukács' “change and development” and issued in little more than the diffuse pathos of low tragedy. La Guma's solution, technical and epistemological, is to locate change and development not in the world of his characters but in his reader's synthesizing intelligence, as it puts together the elements of a pattern too scattered for the characters to perceive: the characters call it bad luck; the reader sees not fate but oppression.

An alternative La Guma may have contemplated would have been to develop Lorenzo, the man who tries to unify the tenement against the police and whose unborn child is linked with the dawn, as a central intelligence within the novel. For reasons of his own he did not. He chose a narrative point of view above the world of his characters, the point of view of a spectator watching people act out their lives (“I am my father's spirit, doomed for a certain time to walk the night,” recites the old man, an actor, to Adonis before he dies) (28) and savoring the bitter ironies of crime and punishment in a state in which Law and Crime overlap. For irony is all he can inject to compensate for the dullness of a world without consciousness, aptly imaged in the roach eating vomit in the dead of night. Toward his world La Guma feels much like the Flaubert who wrote, “I execrate ordinary life. I have always withdrawn from it as much as I could. But aesthetically I wanted … to get hold of it to the very bottom.”¹² Paragraphs of A Walk in the Night are given over to fascinated catalogues of “ordinary life”—“massed smells of stagnant water, cooking, rotting vegetables, oil, fish, damp plaster and timber, unwashed curtains, bodies and stairways, cheap perfume and incense, spices and half-washed kitchenware, urine, animals and dusty corners” (48)—as though by inventorizing the world he could dispose of it. La Guma's first novel, despite its insight into the dynamics of power and its concern to unmask fate, displays a fastidiousness toward the material world that accords with the gulf it establishes between life and the intelligence that makes order of life. “A class can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within and without at the same time,” says Sartre, writing about the relation between the writer and his class of origin.¹³ In his second novel La Guma confronts the task of apprehending life from the inside.

AND A THREEFOLD CORD

In And a Threefold Cord the Lorenzo figure is developed into the central character. He is named Charlie Pauls, a casual laborer with parents and brothers to support in a desolate shantytown on the outskirts of Cape Town. In the course of a few days Pauls takes three heavy blows: his father dies, his teenage brother kills a girl, and the children of the young widow he loves are burned alive. As he tries to make sense of his fate, his mind keeps turning to the words of the fellow worker who gave him his first political lesson: “If all the stuff in the world was shared out among everybody, all would have enough to live nice … People got to stick together and get this stuff.” Pauls's frightened auditor responds with the lesson of the master: “Sound almost like a sin, that. Bible says you mustn't covet other people's things … That's communis' things. Talking against the government” (83). But Pauls is now well on his way out of the dead end of every-man-for-himself, and the act of knocking down a white police officer is a further great step in his psychic liberation, setting free a humiliated rage that in the normal course of events would have been turned upon himself and the black community. The police wage the psychological warfare of the double bind; the black man must either stand silent while his woman is insulted or stand up for himself and be punished. Pauls cuts the knot by hitting the officer and escaping in the dark. His brother, on the other hand, is still caught in the labyrinth of introverted violence. Believing that his girlfriend has broken the taboo and slept with a white man, he kills her.

The white man in question is named Mostert, and as Pauls is a development of Lorenzo, he is a development of the murdered old actor. He runs a service station and junkyard across the highway from the shantytown—most of the shanties are in fact built with junk from his yard. He spends lonely days staring toward the shanties “past the petrol pumps which gazed like petrified sentries across the concrete no-man's-land of the road,” but remains “trapped in his glass office by his own loneliness and a wretched pride in a false racial superiority” (67). Pauls suggests that he come over one evening, hinting that he can find him a girl. He wavers, makes tangential contact on the outskirts of the shanty-town with the girl who is killed, and retreats.

Both boundary-crossings—by the actor in A Walk in the Night and by Mostert here—eventuate in crime and punishment. In neither case does the white cause the crime; but, willy-nilly, his alien presence precipitates the release of destructive rages that are part of the emotional structure of oppression. Both set in disequilibrium the finely balanced system of oppression and introverted black violence, and balance is restored only when Justice follows the chains of causes to their ends and executes Willieboy and Ronnie Pauls.

Throughout the novel it rains. Rain dominates the lives of the characters. Pauls visits Mostert to beg scrap to patch a leaky roof; his visit eventuates in his brother's death. The children are incinerated when they upset a stove that burns all day to dry out their shanty. Rain, and rain falling on dereliction, are the structural equivalent in this novel to the squalor of A Walk in the Night. The rain is a condition of life that exerts its oppressive weight equally on all the poor. It is a condition which has not lifted by the time the book ends but which, in the natural course of things, will. This allows the image of hope with which the book closes: “Charlie Pauls stood there and looked into the driving rain … He saw, to his surprise, a bird dart suddenly from among the patchwork roofs of the shanties and head straight, straight into the sky” (169).

THE STONE COUNTRY

In The Stone Country the Lorenzo-Pauls figure is further developed. His name is now George Adams, he is politically active, and he has just been picked up in a Security Police trap. We follow him through his first few days in the “stone country” of jail awaiting trial. Here he rediscovers the law of the jungle, which he hates because it reminds him of his slum childhood, and which he fights because of the anarchic individualism it fosters. By standing up to the prison guards and by sharing his food and cigarettes he manages to pierce the defensive cynicism of the prisoners, one of whom defends him against the prison bully, another of whom, a teenage killer, is moved from inhuman fatalism to the first stirrings of affection. Thus in his quiet way Adams introduces fellow feeling among this forgotten criminal population. Where La Guma's earlier protagonists were still learning, Adams is teaching.

Adams has two kinds of enemies: the thugs who run the network of terror in the prison, and the guards. The guards, though sadistic by temperament (124), remain aloof from the prisoners in day-to-day contacts. Only in the excitement of recapturing an escapee do they let themselves go in an orgy of violence. Custodial violence erupts at the borders of the stone country, where prisoners try to cross into freedom. As long as the borders are protected, the prisoners' introverted violence will do the guards' work for them. Thus the guards wink at the activities of the prison bullies but mark down Adams, who tries to channel the prisoners' emotion in an outward direction, as a troublemaker. Toward violence Adams' attitude is ambivalent. When he arrives the prisoners invest him with the spurious glamor of the saboteur and promote him to the prison aristocracy as “an equal, an expert from the upper echelons of crime” (39). But in his own eyes he is only an organizer, someone who has read and thought and gone to meetings and now “did what you decided was the right thing” (74). He is grateful to the prisoner who fights on his behalf, but also saddened: “What a waste; here they got us fighting each other like dogs” (74).

While Adams tries to bring unity, three prisoners in an isolation cell are sawing through their window bars. During the night they climb onto the roof. Here their precarious treaty breaks down and each makes his individual break for freedom. Two succumb to panic and vertigo and are retaken; the runt of the group escapes. “A threefold cord is not quickly broken,” runs the epigraph to La Guma's second novel.

IN THE FOG OF THE SEASONS' END

The theme of La Guma's oeuvre clarifies itself further: the growth of resistance from the aimless revolt of individuals without allies or ideology (anarchy, crime) to the fraternal revolt of men who understand and combat oppression, psychological and physical. And a Threefold Cord reflected the dawn of a man's conception of himself as a political creature; in The Stone Country the first cracks in the chaotic, defensive individualism of the oppressed appeared and alliances began to sprout; In the Fog of the Seasons' End presents both the political conception of man's fate and the fraternal alliance as accomplished facts. The alliance is a proletarian one, though it has sympathizers among the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia; its ideology is an eclectic Marxism. Thus, although the novel has a main character who is continuous with figures from the earlier novels, it is, at the level of structure at which ideas and their embodiments enter into conflict, more appropriate to speak of a nascent collective resistance as the new protagonist.

Beukes is the name of the new Lorenzo-Pauls-Adams figure. He is a cell leader in the underground of the late 1960s, but old enough to have had experience of trade unionism and passive resistance. The novel follows him through a long day during which he distributes illegal strike leaflets. The following day, at a rendezvous with his immediate superior, Elias Tekwane, he is betrayed by an unknown informer. He escapes, wounded; Tekwane is captured and dies under police torture. Some days later we find Beukes engaged in organizing transport for guerrilla recruits. One of the volunteers, he discovers happily, is Isaac, a young man from his cell, also betrayed and also on the run.

The structure of oppositions among the three personages within the collective protagonist is complex. Tekwane has his faith put to the ultimate test; Beukes escapes, preserves his anonymity, but is threatened by loss of faith in himself and the movement. Tekwane dies, Isaac takes up the struggle. Isaac looks forward to armed resistance, Beukes backward to the old politics of rallies and speeches. But in their collectivity they have found a response to the humiliations of their personal life stories. Introverted rage and violence have been transformed into organized struggle. The street warfare of the ghetto exists only mutedly in the image of children holding up passersby with toy guns (61). The white enemy, on the other hand, has grown to live vicariously on the violence of news reports and gossip, and these reveal in particular the murderous contradictions of the introverted nuclear family. While the whites feed on fantasy, Beukes, up against the police, undergoes a reverse movement: “The torture chambers and the third degree [are] transferred from celluloid strips in segregated cinemas to the real world” (25). His very worst fantasies are realized; the fairy-godmother fantasy of the triumph of the weak and oppressed through the force of their faith has to be discarded. Chief among the virtues demanded of the revolutionary, he discovers, is the “granite” of the life and death of Tekwane. “These days one could not depend only on faith: the apparatus of the Security Police scraped away faith like strata of soil until they came to what was below. If they reached crumbly sandstone, it was splendid for them. It was the hard granite on which they foundered” (131).

The action of the novel catches Beukes, Tekwane, and Isaac at a time when danger forces them to confront their own fears. Thus Beukes, into whose soul the iron has not yet entered, undergoes nightmares of defeat in which his pregnant wife is disemboweled (children in La Guma stand for the future: the novel closes on an image of children in the sunlight). But the nature of the collective is to bring out the best in the weak. Beukes is fortified by his relation with the granite of Tekwane. Isaac suffers a whim of chance—his betrayal—but finds an avenue that enables him to turn it to positive action. Tekwane is taken to the limits of resistance under torture but there finds fortitude in hallucinated visions of the long history of African resistance. (And Beukes, passing a cast of a Bushman in an ethnographic museum, also recognizes an ancestor, “the first to fight” [14].)

Beneath this new optimistic writing the old fatal pattern can still be made out on the palimpsest. The young Tekwane comes out of Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and Doris Lessing's “Hunger,” and is thereby saddled with a freight of tragic connotation, religious and naturalistic. The disaster of the collective sprouts from a mysterious canker, the traitor in its body. Beukes is saved from capture by luck (a stranger with a wound much like his is picked up). Nevertheless, Tekwane is finally not the tennis ball of the stars but a hero who engages his death in full consciousness of its meaning, and his killers are agents not of an inscrutable order but of a desperate regime whose end he sees: “You are reaching the end of the road and going downhill towards a great darkness, so you must take a lot of people with you” (6), he tells his torturers. Tekwane's suffering and death are unrolled in chapters that form a high point in La Guma's writing and whose achievement it is to demystify the torture chamber, inner sanctum of the terroristic state.

ACHIEVEMENT

La Guma's achievement is to present a particularly lucid description of the resultants of white oppression in self-destructive black violence and to embody his novels a growing political understanding of the process in the consciousness of a developing protagonist. His four novels do not cohere closely enough to form a tetralogy, but read in sequence their political meaning is quite plain. They portray a Colored working class that initially has little consciousness of how its energies are redirected against it by its rulers as the anarchic force of crime. The representative of its best qualities grows from a puzzled stevedore to a laborer who has begun his psychic liberation, to a declassed activist, at first cautious, then freed for armed struggle by a heroic African example. Plotting and characterization are deliberate enough to leave the uncommitted reader perhaps resentful of La Guma's palpable design, but as social taxonomy the characterization must be acknowledged to be rich in insight.

However, style is the great betrayer. La Guma is the inheritor of the worst excesses of realism. In a paragraph like the following from A Walk in the Night—and hardly a page of this book passes without indulgence in the like—we see him straining after an effect no other than literariness itself.

The room was as hot and airless as a newly opened tomb, and there was an old iron bed against one wall, covered with unwashed bedding, and next to it a backless chair that served as a table on which stood a chipped ashtray full of cigarette butts and burnt matches, and a thick tumbler, sticky with the dregs of heavy red wine. A battered cupboard stood in a corner with a cracked, flyspotted mirror over it, and a small stack of dog-eared books gathering dust. In another corner an accumulation of empty wine bottles stood like packed skittles.

(25-26)

This is not only the interior of a certain room but an interior with the fingerprints of Literature all over it, an interior heavy with affect. The slums of A Walk in the Night, the shanties of And a Threefold Cord, the cells of The Stone Country, the depressed suburbs of In the Fog of the Seasons' End, are all rendered in this style. The style has a double signification. First, it is La Guma's Writer's Union card.¹⁴ But also, more specifically, it is a style in which a single emphatic gesture is repeated over and over; “… an old iron bed … unwashed bedding … a backless chair … a chipped ashtray … cigarette butts … burnt matches …”—everything named is named with its own gesture of repudiation. The signification of the passage is not a room and its details, but rather a room plus horror of the room. Similarly for the slums, the shanties, the cells, the suburbs. La Guma's world, so overflowing with things, is nonetheless not an objective world, for the things themselves are overflowing with the writer's subjectivity.

The same holds true for people. Four of the prison officials in The Stone Country are described in individual detail. Here are extracts from the descriptions. “His pink face was thin and hard as the edge of a pot-lid, and the eyes revealed no expression” (18). “He had … a puckered mouth that was merely a pink orifice, and little blue eyes, flat as pieces of glass” (22). “He had a plump, smooth, healthy pink face … the eyes were pale and washed-out and silvery, much like imitation pearls, and cold as quicksilver” (61). “He had a dry, brittle face like crumpled pink tissue-paper with holes torn in it for eyes” (68). Such repetition gives the guards away as not four distinct alien men but a single threatening figure. The threat is not in the figure, for the figure is threat. In the same way the slum, the shanties, the cells, the suburbs are La Guma's horror of them. Here there is no evolutionary development in La Guma. Each of his novels exposes us to a long-sustained shudder of revulsion—a revulsion that must confess in places to being merely fastidious. It is this posture of rejection, emblematized at the moment when George Adams pushes aside his prison food (56), that brings La Guma closest to the Flaubert who confessed his execration of “ordinary life.” The less interesting side of this posture is its expression of alienation from the material world. The more interesting side is a repetitiousness that becomes excessive and even obsessive, the testament of one man's horror of a degraded world.

Notes

1. Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in the African State,” Transition, no. 31 (1967), 12.

2. Lewis Nkosi, “Fiction by Black South Africans,” in Introduction to African Literature, ed. Ulli Beier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 211.

3. Ibid., p. 212.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 14.

5. The editions used in this essay are: A Walk in the Night (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967); And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1964); The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1967); In the Fog of the Seasons' End (London: Heinemann, 1972). La Guma published one more novel before his death in 1985: Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979).

6. Lewis Nkosi develops the same metaphor in the story “The Prisoner,” reprinted in African Writing Today, ed. Ezekiel Mphahlele (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Comparing the two treatments, one can see that La Guma's allegiance belongs to an earlier literary generation than Nkosi's does.

7. See Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy,” in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 49-75. Robbe-Grillet's epigraph is from Roland Barthes: “Nothing is more insidious than tragedy.”

8. “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause”; Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pt. 5.

9. The doubling of the hero complicates the structure. Each of the hero-victims acts as audience to the other, each is purged in and by the process of the other's suffering, and the reading audience is disenfranchised by having its catharsis embodied in the drama. This development is at least consistent with the nonparticipatory nature of book-reading.

10. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (London: Hillway, 1950), pp. 170, 171.

11. Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John & Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1962), pp. 34, 35.

12. Gustave Flaubert, letter of October 2, 1856. Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), II, 635.

13. Sartre, What Is Literature? p. 75.

14. Roland Barthes describes how the style of nineteenth-century French realism, with its “spectacular signs of fabrication,” came to be adopted first by the petit bourgeoisie as a favored style for their reading matter and later by socialist realist writers. See “Writing and Revolution,” in Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), pp. 67-73.