University of Cape Town – ELL2007F

Ryland Engels  

11 April 2015

‘A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman’:
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm as a proto-modernist evocation of inflamed interiority amidst the intellectual desolation of the Karoo

“ [A]n imperfect masterpiece perfect of its kind.”
– Francis Brett Young’s paradoxical-to-say-the-least verdict on the novel in his 1927 introduction, quoted by Cherry Clayton in her own to the present edition (2008, 9).

It would be a terrifyingly unpopular stance to argue today that The Story of an African Farm (1883, henceforth ‘TSAF’)- the debut novel of a twenty-something colonial governess composing from a shack in the isolation of the Eastern Cape (First and Scott, 1989)- is anything but an enduring novel of what, in more (un)fashionable literary times, would have been termed ‘great visionary acuity and sincerity’. However, an equally time-worn counter-judgement- set to be addressed throughout the span of this essay- would dispute whether the immanently digressional ‘suite’ of elliptical texts1 that actually constitute the novel would amount to a gross occasion of mistitling vis-à-vis the word ‘Story’. As Cherry Clayton understatedly summises, “[TSAF] has always been associated with … a mental power larger than, or imperfectly realized in, its actual form.” (8) This is really, as I will seek to make explicit, an undoubtedly unfair conclusion. It rests on the condescending assumption that Olive Schreiner, whether through ignorance or inexperience, had simply aimed and failed to contain the breadth of her insight into the lives and upbringing of a colonial homestead within the safely recognizable conventions of the Victorian Novel circa 1883. Instead, by approaching the text on its own terms of construction, we can interpret a far more historically intriguing reading of TSAF as a self- conscious experiment in the expansion of “the hybrid art of the novel” (9) wherein “[c]onflicting readings of reality are part of the novel’s substance and form” (18, italics mine), subsequently making it an unlikely precursor to the cacophonous perspectivism that forty years after its publication would typify the signature texts of Literary Modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). TSAF is, in almost every sense, a homemade text, and thus it quite conspicuously invents its own superficially chaotic framework for the multitudinous meditations it primarily seeks to encapsulate. Its success shall now be analysed via a reversal of this procedure, charting a descent from the paradoxes of its pure form to the very ‘substance’ of its characters and philosophy, which converge to determine its sui generis identity in the history of World, let alone South African, Literature.

1. Including obscure transcendentalist allegories, abstract first-person plural memoirs of childhood disillusionment, slapstick chapters of the short-lived intercessions of a con man and lengthy epistolary exposition tracts already deep into the novel’s final third.

TSAF is an ‘imperfect’ novel because it quite clearly pays relatively little mind- compared to its reactionary critics- to its own categorization as a self- containable fiction. Olive Schreiner herself, in her ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, attempts to clarify the distinctions she deems necessary for her first-time readers to make between the usual run of Victorian novels that carry “the charm that hangs about the ideal representation of familiar things” (23) (because they are cozily set in un-‘exotic’ places in their country of publication), the colonial ‘Romances’ that previously typified the (South) African landscape as a semi- mythological space of “ravening lions and hair-breadth escapes” (24) and the fiction she had consciously set out to reify via “another [more truthful] method” of depicting “Human life” (23): a form of Psychological Realism that holds nothing back in the portrayal of the unquestioned tedium, ubiquitous mystery and abject suffering that (in Schreiner’s mind at least) comprise the actuality of Existence. What therefore we can see made the novel so immediately, uniquely successful in Britain above and beyond its controversially contrarian ideas for its time (fully-fledged early Feminism, proclamatory Atheism, a general critique of the prevailing equation of Adulthood with Wisdom etc.), superficially ‘inserted’ into its digressional sections, was a revelatory trust in its accurate recording of the colonial condition. A solemn but deliberate young voice, speaking directly from the Cape Colony and from behind the quickly apparent façade of ‘Ralph Iron’, was here ‘talking back to Empire’ (to appropriate a recent critical phrase), showing up its myths through a ‘chaotic’ depiction of the lives and upbringing of an ordinary, uneventful homestead. Thus, Graham Pechey is more on point than he realizes in his own critical preface when he states that “the discontinuities of [TSAF] have been shown to stress the ‘colonial otherness’ of [E]xperience”. (14) That is to say, an ‘otherness’ that does not belong to a narrative framework of linear, quantifiable time but one attached to the cyclical nature of “Times and Seasons” and the only occasional arrival of strangers. Hence, the accuracy of Schreiner’s novel in its stop-start portrayal of glacial-pace change in the lives of Waldo, Lyndall and Em.

If subsequent history has proven Clayton’s claim that “in South Africa literary judgements are political judgements” (13) we should further praise the novel for its apparent transcendence of the particulars of the South African colonial life- world, joining in agreement with Nadine Gordimer’s 1973 verdict that TSAF’s significance lies in its “movement beyond the question ‘What does a man make of life in South Africa?’ to the ‘eternal question: “What is the life of man?”’” (ibid.) By achieving this, Schreiner effectively broke the monopoly that European and American texts had up to that point held over the potential for metaphysical discourse within the mode of the English-language novel. Though of course the novel’s focus and effect on political issues is not lessened by its personalized theological and metaphysical concerns, they are essentially subsumed beneath the weight of these manifold ‘distractions’ from the eponymous ‘Story’ that Schreiner pursues at the expense of comfortable generic confinement. It is seldom clear in TSAF whether Schreiner purposefully means to stray into the general conventions of other genres- from abstracted memoir to didactic political tract- or whether she simply deems the novelistic form quite suitable to house all such excursions from strict narrative under its wide-sheltering wing. What we should recall is that such ‘postmodern’ experimentation actually has a long canonical lineage. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in the concluding essay of his enlightening collection of craft-vignettes The Art of the Novel, isolates this history as a line of ‘digressional play’ running through such disparate texts as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Melville’s Moby Dick. (Kundera, 2003) What all these novels, and TSAF, share is a near-anarchistic attitude towards the demands of traditional storytelling. Instead of remaining loyal to any diegesis of causality each employs the grandest framework of the lives and deaths of unique individuals to ‘sneak in’ a wealth of conversations, commentary and needless narration to overflow its expected constraints. It is an ‘openness’, Kundera claims, that only the novel can exemplify and which, we can claim, Schreiner’s novel clearly accedes to, and thus it, like the aforementioned examples, “outlasted the fluctuations of taste and ideology which have determined the frameworks within which it has been praised or damned by succeeding generations.” (7)

However, to return out of necessity to the ‘Story’ itself, it should be argued that even without such references to literary history, the very content of the novel- in its defining over-proximity to Schreiner’s own intellectual and emotional biography- would necessarily engender such an ‘overflow’ of self-reflection and extra-novelistic digression. As Gordimer again precisely comments in her foreword to Ruth First and Ann Scott’s biography of the author, the key to a holistic understanding of Schreiner’s “work and life” lies in her “missionary sense of their oneness” (1989: 4): the inseparability of her existence and her sense of self-appointed purpose. It has been oft repeated by critics that Schreiner finds for herself a dual fictional avatar for her maturing intellect in the characters of Lyndall and Waldo. The former representing her ambivalent views on love and sexuality and unambiguous early views on the societal place of Women, the latter revealing her masochistic introversion and self-taught relationship with the absence of God and the presence of Nature. “We try to look in upon ourself, and our self beats back upon ourself” (137), the Waldo/Shriver composite reflects in the ‘Times and Seasons’ section, and in this aphorism we can detect the strict overlap that exists between both the fictional and non-fictional selves of Waldo and Shriver respectively as well as the usages of Fiction and Non-fiction within TSAF. It’s not merely that the first person plural effectively ‘short-circuits’ the formative experiences of author and character here, but also that the section itself appears as an interruptive series of meditations in the course of life on Tant Sannie’s farm as if Waldo himself (along with Schreiner) were temporarily commandeering the text to provide a universalised reflection on interiority, selfhood and the memories that comprise them. It is a ‘We’ that is writing the Story, not Schreiner alone. This one-to-one Venn diagram of character/author can also be seen as an intriguing symptom of Schreiner’s progressing maturity during the course of her novel’s construction, as she “began An African Farmwhen [she] was almost a child, but left it for some years before [she] finished it”, (16) indicating that the book functioned almost as a personal record for the processes depicted in ‘Times and Seasons’ composed both while undergoing them and in a revisionist retrospect. Thus, the novel can both contain the intense psychological intimacy that accompanies the many years of intellectual puberty and employ the writerly skill required to depict it without indulging in the pathos and naiveté that typify adolescent confessions. Having said that, what Schreiner does allow herself indulgence for, in the name of truthful intellectual depiction of her avatars, are the digressions of meditation, allegorization and poeticization that mark out TSAF from the majority of colonial literature.

At the level of plotting though, what truly necessitates these indulgences is a quite apparent lack of agency, of plot-shifting urgency, in all of the child protagonists. ‘Stories’ require incessant inherent motivations on the behalf of conflicting characters, yet Waldo and Lyndall are both too passively tied to their positions of secure meditation to raise themselves out of their respective discomfort zones. Their thoughts essentially are their forms of action, and thus they do not affect the world around them, only the ways they themselves envision it (as evidenced in the shifts in theological subjectivity throughout ‘Times and Seasons’). “Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let it be as it would.” (122) reflects Waldo at what should be the exact moment for his fury to be incited, after enduring Bonaparte’s needless whippings. TSAF, we can say, is therefore essentially ‘plotless’ because it aims for an almost too truthful depiction of childhood in a pastoral setting, a period in which almost nothing necessarily happens in the form of external action, only through continual shifts in interior consciousness. “The child, knowing the adult world makes decisions about individual behavior [as opposed to universal concerns], responds by walking away, aware of its impotence.” (98) However, still requiring at least some external events to justify the ‘Story’s existence, Schreiner only solves this dichotomy of ineffectual children and unimportant adults via the insertion of successive ‘strangers’- Bonaparte Blenkins, Waldo’s, Gregory Rose and Lyndall’s- into the farm setting. These characters are either vaguely depicted, as unapproachable mysteries, or else are so motivationally shallow, tripping over themselves for Money and Love respectively, that they appear conspicuously flat in contrast with the rounded psyches of Waldo, Lyndall and even Em, and each of their appearances are also relatively short-lived and soon passed on from. Yet it is their arrivals and decisions, for more than the first two-thirds of the novel, that actually set the strictly narrational plot in motion, suggesting either Schreiner did not have the skill to combine the character aspects of interiority and effectiveness within one figure or else she purposefully creates this open contrast between the children who ‘lack all conviction’, and the adults who are full of ‘passionate intensity’, to appropriate a popular line from W.B. Yeats. The truth of the latter verdict can be evidenced through Lyndall’s ‘comforting’ words to Waldo, the morning after his arbitrary persecution at the end of Part 1: “[W]e will not be children always; we shall have the power too, some day.” In these lines we most explicitly see the children’s mutual self-consciousness of their own stoicism; that while the adult world may hurry itself to the point of madness, like the chickens Uncle Otto keeps enclosed, the children will necessarily be the ones to inherit the responsibilities of the farm and the mobility required to determine their own stories. And, of course, these they acquire in the novel’s final third, where Em quietly maintains the homestead and Lyndall and Waldo make their respective escapes to experience life beyond its horizons. But the novel focuses itself on the children’s ‘seasons’ of powerlessness because Schreiner, in her intimate knowledge of oppression and subjugation, knew how to tell the ‘Story’ of Waldo’s, Lyndall’s and her own intellectual maturation better than any other.

Thus, after such a multi-faceted analysis, we can see that Olive Schreiner’s achievement in writing TSAF comes, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, from its unassuming ability to ‘make [the novel] new.’ The text is comprised of so many digressions, notions and longings that it appears to strain against the novelistic form itself for all its overspilling of youthful intellect. And while, as we have seen, this can be accredited to Schreiner’s inability to distance herself from her fictions, as well as her characters’ propensity for stoic meditation, we should take nothing away from Schreiner in her flawed but brilliant attempt to invent a new container for her consciousness. TSAF is therefore, to return to Francis Brett Young’s judgement, simultaneously ‘imperfect’ and ‘perfect of its kind’ because it excels within the bounds of a literary form it creates (a kind of bildungsroman of pastoral souls) by betraying an older, more respectable conception of the novel. It would take more than a generation of Victorian writers for the rest of Anglophone literature to catch up with Schreiner’s innovations.

Reference List:

First, Ruth and Scott, Ann. 1989. Olive Schreiner. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Kundera, Milan. 2003. The Art of the Novel. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: New York. (Reprint Edition)

Schreiner, Olive. 2008. The Story of an African Farm. Ad Donker Ltd.: Johannesburg & Cape Town. (Based on the 1975 Hardcover Edition)