1. INTRODUCTORY
1.1
Print, Text and Books in South Africa
ANDREW VAN DER VLIES
I
In a late chapter in Boyhood (1998 [1997]), the first of J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalised—or autre-biographical1—memoirs, the child protagonist, John (who is based on Coetzee, although not entirely congruent with him), has suggestive encounters with two machines. With his mother and brother, John visits his great-aunt Annie in the Volkshospitaal in Cape Town and stays briefly in the old woman’s flat in the southern suburbs. Here, in her storeroom, he comes across “the book press”. Persuading his younger brother “to lay his arms in the bed of the press”, John turns the screw so that his brother’s “arms are pinned and he cannot escape”, then they reverse roles and, his own arms pinned, John ponders: “One or two more turns … and the bones will be crushed. What is it that makes them forbear, both of them?” (Coetzee 1998, 118–19). Immediately after this episode, John remembers visiting a farm near Worcester some years previously, where the brothers had stumbled on a machine for grinding maize. He recalls that he had coaxed his brother similarly into placing his hand “down the funnel where the mealie-pits were thrown in”, had “turned the handle”, and, momentarily, “before he stopped … could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed” (Coetzee 1998, 119).
Coetzee’s suggestive linking of the press and the grinder associates technologies of temporal and spiritual sustenance: the grinder produces food; the book press had been used to print multiple copies of a “squat book in a red binding” by his great-grandfather, Annie’s father (translated from German into Afrikaans by her), with a portentously spiritual title, “Deur ’n gevaarlike krankheid tot ewige genesing, Through a Dangerous Malady to Eternal Healing” (Coetzee 1998, 117). The association forged between machines raises the spectre of treachery and cruelty, linking the machinery of the press with an altogether different machine, capable of doing physical harm. (One cannot help but wonder whether Coetzee had Kafka’s suggestive story about authority, writing, punishment and complicity, “In the penal colony”, at the back of his mind.) This is richly suggestive for any study of print cultures in Southern Africa, a region in which (as with other colonial contexts) the arrival of the printing press is linked inextricably with processes that forced autochthonous peoples into difficult encounters with modernity—encounters that may have precipitated “progress”, but that also involved a great deal of psychological and cultural harm. The development of orthographies for regional vernaculars, most often by missionaries intent on conversion, wrought immense changes in the lives of black South Africans. Leon de Kock points out in his essay in this collection how “printing and piercing, literacy and lubricity, disinterested information and deadly inculcation” are often co-implicated in representations of these processes (52). The passages from Boyhood above reflect on the costs or the potential misuse of such technologies, and also on the implications—and implicatedness—of writing within discourses of power and authority more broadly.
These are themes that recur in Coetzee’s oeuvre too. For example, in Youth (2002), the second of his autre-biographical “Scenes from Provincial Life”, John is a disaffected computer programmer in London in the 1960s. He also spends time in the British Museum’s reading room, undertaking research for his thesis supervisor in Cape Town and occasionally allowing
himself the luxury of dipping into books about the South Africa of the old days, books to be found only in great libraries, memoirs of visitors to the Cape like Dapper and Kolbe and Sparrman and Barrow and Burchell, published in Holland or Germany or England two centuries ago (Coetzee 2002, 136–37).
John dreams of writing a book about the early years of the Cape, in the vein of Burchell’s Travels, and ponders how he might “give to the whole the aura that will get it onto the shelves and thus into the history of the world: the aura of truth” (Coetzee 2002, 138). Is it these encounters, the reader is invited to wonder, that will prompt John—if indeed he is Coetzee—to write Dusklands a decade later?
It should not surprise us that Coetzee so movingly renders characters, existing in some complex relationship to his own younger self, who respond so strongly to the materiality of books—in Boyhood, John displays close attention to the material appearance of Ewige genesing, noting that it is “printed on the thick, coarse paper used for Afrikaans books that looks like blotting-paper with flecks of chaff and fly-dirt trapped in it” (Coetzee 1998, 117)—and who register the power of print in propagating influential discursive constructions of place (particularly colonial space). Of all South African-born writers and intellectuals of the past half century, Coetzee has been the most astutely and rigorously concerned with the intimate relations between language and power, and in the predicaments of writing—in both senses of the word: the stresses under which the literary is placed in periods of political emergency (Coetzee 1988; McDonald 2004) and the implications of those institutions claiming the right to control knowledge, interpretation or expression. Both inevitably involve a concern with the politics of print cultures in South Africa—a subject that Coetzee himself tried to teach, albeit briefly, at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In his prospectus for a module entitled “The Book in Africa”, proposed for 1980, he suggested that students on the course might investigate a number of topics, among them issues specific to local and national book production and consumption (“the location of bookstores in the Cape Peninsula and the types of clientele they serve”; “library services in the black residential areas of the Cape Peninsula”; “the histories” and “editorial policies” of a selection of South African literary magazines; the publication of children’s books in English, Afrikaans, and African languages in the country—“to what extent [are they] South African in conception, authorship, and production[?]”, Coetzee asked). However, there were also topics with a pan-African and global focus, for example the role of “expatriate or multinational publishing houses in Africa” or comparisons between mass reading in Britain in the early nineteenth century and among black South Africans in the mid-twentieth century (Coetzee 1980/81). Students would be encouraged to contemplate the seminal changes brought to Africa by the printing press. “If we accept (following [Walter] Ong, [Marshall] McLuhan, [Jack] Goody) that print changes modes of thought”, Coetzee (1980/81) wrote, “then printing can be seen as the agent whereby the world is modernized. The print industry and the print habit become the most important modernizing agents.”
This, notes Peter McDonald (2012, 801), sounds very like the theses of a number of histories of the effects of the advent of print in Europe published in the 1970s—like Elizabeth Eisenstein’s influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), which advanced grand claims for the influence of print on the spread of Enlightenment
