Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

Book Reviews
States of Eniergency is also interesting, although her desire to read black South Afric
'people's culture' as an expression of a 'poor' literature intent on 'remaking' the
sits uneasily with her realisation that elements of such expression held the pot
even under apartheid, to transform themselves into just another hierarchical disco
Playing the Postmodern Game
of power. At the same time Maponya's and Mda's positio~l papers, although brief, r
questions relating to 'more mundane issues of the fortune and survival tactics of 10
arts practitioners' (252-3) and appropriate forms of theatrical PI-actice in a n
dispensation in a compelling way: Mda's criticism of the weakness of a 'theatre
king: A T/erse Novella
Michael Ca~vood Green
andton: Penguin, 1997, 164pp.
ISBN 014056790
resistance' in creating a critical audience consciousness, and his discussion of
alternative 'theatre for development', will prove interesting to many rea
Macaskill's examination of the overlapping of 'lyrical feeling' with mater
traditions and socialist impulse in Jeremy Cronin's poetry inakes a few us
eviewed by Damian Garside
epartment of English
niversity of Durban-Westville
additional points to previousLscrutiny of this poet, althouih it is noticeable that he te
towards perceiving an absolute split between poetics and politics-an ulti
conservative move depressingly familiar to all who have followed debates about
in this country over the last quarter of a century. It is instructive to point out, as he
that Cronin's poems allow hiin to 'stage a passion' unavailable to him in the discou
of his critical essavs. but one feels that Cronin's essays about literature could have d
... the text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological'
meaning ... but a ~nultidi~nensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innulnerable centyes of
culture (Barthes. 'Death of an Author', quoted in Sinking45).
with greater discussion and it is a pity that his c~iti'~ue of Campbell's 'Rouiidi~i
Cape' in a 1984 English in Africa is not considered. It is also noticeable that poems
Inside which fit less easily into Macaskill's hypothesis, such as 'Death Row
'Motho ke no tho', get short shift.
Yet, wken all is said and done, the teleological vision underlyi~lg
omnipresent discourse of an obvious progression from the (for~nally and politic
bad) past to the (formally and conceptually more promising) future belies the gest
of openlless made. There is an overall sense that the terrain of South African 1
studies is being limited to certain issues and certain questions: wliich, as it is trans
to less adept critics, will result in the reiteration of a new set of stultifying cliches a
cuit~~ral production in this count~y. At worst, one gets a feeling that the present '
colonial' imperatives of inetropolita~i theory are being utilised without suffi
musing on what their strengths and weaknesses in a local context might be; in ~arti
one comes away with the uneasy feeling that the present psychological and lingu
imperatives of a guilty Europe are simply being transmitted by (predominant1
critics who can identify with this guilt. This is coupled with a distaste for any di
and practices of politics ('history') which appear to invade their subjectivity, sen
the future, or artistic and social interests. As a result of this, only those who have s
kllowledge of the period will find beneficial aspects to this collection. For those
only a passing knowledge of .the debates, discussions and controversies that
influenced and characterised South African literature since 1970 this book wil
clar~fy andstnnulate as much as puzzle
text to review, to say the least: from the seemingly llovel for~n that the
Id appear to be that Cawood Green has been nothing if not brave and
at we have with Sinking is a text that describes itself as a 'verse
anddeals with the nature ofwritten text as historical record, and which not only
board but also seems to assert the primacy of poststructuralist theory artd
aiy and cultural analysis. Cawood Green is described in the text itself as
historiography and the petty thief of poetry' (109). In reviews in the
mes and the Mail and Gzravd~un' its postmodernist preteilsions have been
on unfavourably, the suggestion being that they 'spoil' the poetry. Lionel
sees this text as indicative of the literary critics taking over the production of
-hence the 'self-swallowing' quality to the text, as it pre-empts critical
tary by itself covering all its critical bases-saying that there is nothing in the
has not been taken care of, there is nothing that is not under control. Indeed,
does at times play a self-indulgent and tiresome 'game' between the tlarrator
real identity of the author's 'dual' identity as both academic literary critic and
his text) literarylcreative writer.
My own feeling is that there is nothing wrong with postinodemismper se, far
but that Sinking fails the test of its own postmodernism. Part of the text's
ernist strategy is to present itself as a modernist text. What it does not do is
a sense of the South African modernist 'big picture': that apartheid was South
ew by Lourens Ackerinann 1097 A Postmociern Way of Ru~ning
5ome Ilalf-De~ent Poetry
nzes October 19, revfew by Lionel Abraham7 1997 \unk by Theoletlcal Games Moil and