Tradition and revolt in South African fiction: the novels of Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

Coetzee's statement might not receive unanimous approval from critics of South African literature, but it does pinpoint a central area of concern with which all white writers at least have had to come to terms. This is the legacy of a colonial ideology which has permeated South African white society and indeed became tightened throughout the era of industrialisation. As recent historiography has shown, the hegemony of white racial ideology, whether expressed in the form of some variant of segregation, trusteeship, baaskap, apartheid or multinational development is not merely some atavistic legacy from a preindustrial frontier era. In a complex and multivariant manner, white racial ideology in South Africa had represented a pragmatic form of modernisation of an essentially Victorian colonial ethic imported through both the mercantile and trading links with theimid'nineteenth century Cape and later through the impact of mining in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. Thus, while accommodating this ethic to the needs of an expanding capitalist economy and adjusting it to the continual processes of urbanisation and proletarianisation, white power in South Africa can also be said to have fostered a continuing link with the Victorian colonial tradition which has retained at its core an essentially anti-industrial and agrarian view of a rural golden age. It is in this sense that the essential South African experience can be said, following Coetzee, to be still colonial in essence. It is proposed, therefore, in this paper to look at this tradition through three important contemporary South African novelists, concentrating in particular on a single work by each. In Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), Andre Brink's Rumours of Rain (1978) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1976, English ed. 1977) many of the essential tensions and contradictions latent in the South African colonial experience can be unravelled. If much South African literature has, via such works as The Story

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