Eighteenth-century novels are full of lies and jokes. They bear false imprints and attributions; authors masquerade as editors; satires are veiled as documents; typographical signals, poems, songs, anecdotes, parables, sermons, philosophical commentary, pictorial vignettes, and unfinished tales interrupt the narrative. These appear not only within the text, but before, after, above, and below it in a riot of frontispieces, epigraphs, prefaces, tables of contents, dedicatory and admiring letters, interpolated tales, documents and reports, footnotes, glosses, chapter headings, songs, poems, inset tales, printers' ornaments and illustrations, and indexes. These paratexts divert readers' attention from the narrative to the text's documentary status: its authenticity and authority. Paratexts challenge the very possibility of representation by making textual transmission and the experience of fragmentation part of the process of reading the novel. Form qualifies content.

Editorial defense: Defoe and narrative authenticity

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) establishes authenticity by purporting to be an autobiography. Like memoirs and eyewitness accounts, autobiographies claim to be literal truth, but a narrative's authenticity does not guarantee its morality. Moll Flanders meets the con.icting needs of didacticism and credibility with an elaborate preface that negotiates the rival claims of authenticity and morality, accuracy and art. The novel appears to be a transcription of Moll's own account of her life.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, And during a Life of continu'd Variety, for Threescore Years, besides her childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, lived Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.

The start of the twentieth century witnessed the first explorations of the novel form by black South African writers. Between 1907 and 1948 many important novels were published that despite their various themes seemed predicated on some degree of engagement with aspects of South Africa's complex and contested history. Amongst many other concerns, three historical developments informed the dominant concerns of the novelists. The first was the large-scale social upheaval, migration and dislocation that occurred across southern Africa in the early decades of the nineteenth century and that is referred to as the mfecane. The second was the final defeat of the last independent African polities in the decades before the end of the nineteenth century and their replacement with neotraditional forms of authority under the patronage of colonialism. Then there was the formation of Union in 1910 with the unification of the four colonial provinces into a unitary state. Union consolidated the development of South Africa as a society structured on racial dominance and exploitation and typified by various forms of dispossession and disenfranchisement that afflicted Africans in the twentieth century. It is not surprising, then, that parts of the thematic subtexts of many of the novels reflect on the ways in which the African elite should construct its senses of group and class identity and aspirations, especially in relation to the chiefly classes and colonial administrators.

A new urge to understand the local vis-à-vis the global has materialized in commercial strategies – such as, for example, the leading role of powerful literary agents, publishing houses’ promotion campaigns, international literary prizes, media coverage, internet sites – which all allow for the successful marketing of postcolonial writers to an international readership. This chapter addresses the relationship between postcolonial literature and the publishing industry, and focuses in particular on how institutions such as literary prizes have contributed towards shaping the field and have influenced the level of production, consumption and distribution.

Over the last three decades, in fact, unprecedented numbers of postcolonial authors have successfully managed to acquire visibility, celebrity and a lasting place in the canon by being awarded important literary prizes, such as the Nobel, Commonwealth, Pulitzer, Neustadt, Booker, Orange and many others, paving the way for a new, young generation of postcolonial literary jet-setters. Besides presenting an overview of the major authors who have entered the literary pantheon of the Nobel (Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee), of the Booker (Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme, Michael Ondaatje, Chinua Achebe), of the Commonwealth (Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy) or of the Neustadt (Nuruddin Farah, Patricia Grace), to name but a few laureates, this chapter also focuses on minor literary prizes that struggle to promote postcolonial literature in the vernacular languages, such as the African Noma literary prize or the Indian Sahitya Akademi award, or prizes that concentrate on specific geographical areas such as the Macmillan literary prize and the Caine Prize, both for Africa.

In the most often cited passage from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), the hero, Egremont, encounters two strangers in the ruins of an abbey. The younger of the two describes the lamentable state of England, in which men live in isolation and mere “contiguity” rather than community and cooperation. When Egremont demurs that they inhabit “the greatest nation that ever existed,” the stranger inquires which of two different nations he means:

Though the two nations the stranger evokes are “THE RICH AND THE POOR,” his description of the tenuous connection between them might apply to numerous social divisions within England or to the relationship between the typical novel-reader – English, middle or upper class, situated in the south of England and especially London – and the many “others” who populate the British Isles.

Disraeli refers to the estranged groups as “nations,” a word that captures the cultural, linguistic, and sometimes geographical differences between them. The unknown others are both external and internal to England.

As a body of work, South African prison literature intersects strongly, but not completely, with the languages of political activism in this country. At least since 1948, with the Nationalist Party's ascension to government, the prison was fundamental to the coercive power of the state. Leaders of resistance movements, artists, writers, intellectuals and rights campaigners were routinely imprisoned, often under the flimsiest of pretexts. Between 1960 and 1990 approximately 80,000 people were detained without trial, in addition to the large number of charged and sentenced political prisoners (Gready, Writing as Resistance, p. 1). When the first democratic cabinet was announced under Nelson Mandela's presidency in 1994, nine of its thirty members had spent time in prison and most had lived in exile at some point to avoid imprisonment.

South Africa's prisons were inescapably part of the national imagination, representing and performing the disproportionate and capricious authority of the government over many aspects of its citizens' public and private lives. In 1996 the South African Constitutional Court moved its headquarters to the old Johannesburg Fort, one of apartheid's most notorious prisons, shrewdly symbolising the displacement of a coercive, brutal state power by a different, more democratic ideal of governance and also underscoring the massive importance of the penal system to the maintenance of apartheid rule. In prison, successive generations of activists defined the nature and form of resistance against apartheid policies, laid down some of the basic coordinates of a democratic nation, interrogated and redefined the nature of citizenry, defined a particular notion of politicised collectivity and raised the complex question of an emergent democratic national identity.

Coordinates

A literary history of ‘postcolonial’ Australia and New Zealand is immediately confounded by the question of periodization, since although both ex-colonies long ago achieved formal independence from the British Empire, via Australian Federation in 1901, and New Zealand ‘dominion’ status in 1907, in 2009 the Queen remains the head of both states, and it was only relatively recently that anything like a postcolonial sensibility took root in the literary intelligentsia. As settler societies, whose dominant populations were those of British descent and whose nationalist values were deeply informed by many years of imperial rule, in the decades following their constitutional breaks from empire, both Australia and New Zealand generated literary cultures more properly described as neo-colonial or ‘late’ imperial. That is to say, these literary cultures pursued their objectives within the general structures already determined by British cultural gatekeepers, for the simple reasons that a viable local publishing industry was impossible in Australia until the 1970s and deeply fraught in New Zealand (always the more literate nation) until the 1950s, and that the great mass of published material available in either country was British. There can be little dispute that in the collective effort to establish a national literature, written in the English language but attuned to local realities and rising patriotic passions, each country had already begun, even prior to the politically decolonizing moves of the early twentieth century, to ‘decolonize’ its cultural matrix, to prepare a workable set of discourses, myths, genres and characters adequate to the postcolonial moment and capable of steering a new nation into conscious self-affirmation.

In his 1966 study, Neo-African Literature, Janheinz Jahn refers to ‘the tragedy of Southern Bantu literature’ (p. 100), a linguistic category that comprises nine of the country's eleven official languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, siSwati and isiNdebele. Can it be said that this ‘tragedy’ persists today? If it does, is it because the development of at least five of the literatures came about through the initiatives of missionaries who had actually come to southern Africa to spread the Gospel – an act that lured Africans away from their traditional religious roots? Did the ‘tragedy’ persist and deepen after 1948, when the National Party seized power and the literatures ran into the repressive powers of the apartheid system which held them captive for the greater part of the following five decades, both sponsoring and censoring them into insignificance? And is the ‘tragedy’ continuing in the present under the African National Congress's democratic dispensation, whose brave constitutional acknowledgement of eleven official languages, in current practice, is amounting to little more than the selection of one language of record, thereby inhibiting development in the others?

In Jahn's view, the literatures must by 1948 already have suffered from the ‘pettiness of that simple pious world’ under the missionaries. However, it was the National Party's Bantu Education Act No. 47 of 1953 ‘that swept away the mission schools and with them the sparse remains of a semi-free literature.

What we call the interiority of a fictional character is a cognitive-historical construct. That is, it emerges out of the interaction between our theory of mind – our evolved cognitive adaptation for explaining people's behavior in terms of their mental states, such as thoughts, desires, feelings, and intentions – and historically contingent ways of describing and interpreting behavior and mental states. At no point can the cognitive be separated from the historical, although various interpretive systems have considered and continue to consider them in isolation. Thus traditional literary analysis has been mostly unaware of the cognitive aspect of fictional interiority, while some overzealous evolutionary literary critics pointedly ignore the role of history in literary endeavor. My goal here is to posit an interpretive model that is grounded in the workings of our cognitive adaptation for reading mental states into behavior and that is sensitive to particular cultural preoccupations of a given historical period. Specifically, I show how the eighteenth century's uneasy fascination with hypocrisy and madness informed the writers' intuitive reliance on their readers' cognitive predispositions as they worked to create an illusion of interiority of their socially troubling and personally troubled characters.

The cognitive and the historical

As an introductory illustration of the ongoing interplay between the cognitive and historical, consider a conversation that takes place in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), when Walter Shandy, Shandy, Uncle Toby, Yorick, and Corporal Trim gather one evening around the fire in Shandy-hall.

Spy and detective novels have a common goal: to thrill. In murder mysteries or shilling shockers, the thrill depends on criminal culpability and the investigation of wrongdoing. Once the thriller raises suspicion, evidence establishes guilt or innocence. Having proven guilt, the thriller arbitrates the punishment of crimes. The classic British detective novel, as written by Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie, begins with a murder and ends with the explanation of motive and method of the crime. The classic British spy story, as written by John Buchan and John le Carré, begins with the recruitment of an ordinary fellow into a conspiracy that endangers the life of the protagonist. Both spy and detective novels are compelled by human curiosity, a will to know, even if knowledge entails physical jeopardy. The detective assembles clues until a coherent story emerges; the secret agent construes codes to verify that a conspiracy exists. In all instances, the thriller adopts a stance toward citizenship, social responsibility, and justice.

Both detective and spy novels originate in nineteenth-century fiction. Charles Dickens shadowed the London police and wrote about his experiences in Household Words. In Bleak House (1853) Dickens documents constabulary techniques in the figure of Inspector Bucket. In Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) Sergeant Cuff investigates the theft of a diamond stolen from a shrine in India. These characters institutionalize curiosity and its thrills within police procedure.

The initial impetus for exile by a South African writer was provided Peter Abrahams's decision in 1939 to skip the country in order to live a more ful-filling life in Britain. Abrahams's poignant ending of his memoir, Tell Freedom (1954), at a time when he is barely 21, touches on the core reasons why autobiographical writing seems to be especially made for the South African situation: alienation. Well before apartheid became state policy in May of 1948, the alienating effects of living in a racialising world touched on people such as Abrahams, presenting physical exile as a better option. He writes: ‘I needed, not friends, not gestures, but my manhood. And the need was desperate … Also, there was a need to write, to tell freedom, and for this I needed to be personally free’ (Tell Freedom, p. 311, emphasis added). The reader is drawn to a sense of emasculation that the alienated youth feels, as much as to the sense of a quest to be free by any means possible in order to be able to speak truth to power. He was actually shunned for being ‘a dangerous radical’ by newspapers such as Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu and, as he narrates, he was at one point ‘homeless and near starvation’ (Return to Goli, p. 14). In a sense, Abrahams's needs for exile provide the template within which to view much writing from the exilic condition: a repressed personality suffering from insistent infantilisation through racism and a sense of personhood.

Following an overwhelming victory in the general election of 1906, the Liberal Party with the support of the newly founded Labour Party passed legislation that paved the way for the construction of the welfare state in the middle of the century. The legislation laid the groundwork for health and unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and minimum wage standards. When the House of Lords attempted to block the initial reforms, the Commons passed the Parliament Act of 1911, curbing the upper chamber's powers. Liberalism according to George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England meant tolerance and progressivism. Its death was “strange” because, of the three outbreaks of illiberalism in the prewar era – that of the suffragists, the striking unionists, and the Ulster Unionists – only the last was not progressive or radical. Thus the prewar years can be described as the beginning of what Ralph Dahrendorf calls the “social democratic century” in Britain, one which he argues does not end until the 1970s and 1980s.

Social democracy, according to Dahrendorf, emphasizes benevolent democracy guided by collective obligations; a market-oriented economy that nevertheless is planned and managed by the state; liberal conditions counterbalanced by social and economic entitlements (rather than merely voting rights) for all. In 1942 Sir William Beveridge's Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report) provided a blueprint for welfare in England, and became a bestseller.

When in 1961 Alan McLeod expressed his confidence that the new Commonwealth writing would be ‘the particular interest of English scholars in the next fifty years’, he was expressing a view shared by only a handful of people, among them Norman Jeffares at Leeds University and Bruce Sutherland at Pennsylvania State College (later University) where, with their respective colleagues, they set up the first courses in Commonwealth literature on either side of the Atlantic (Bahri and Raja, The Cambridge History). Even though McLeod’s sentiment has been more than confirmed in the decades since his introduction to The Commonwealth Pen, there is much that has changed in the field of the then Commonwealth literature, not least of which has been the shift of nomenclature from that to the now more widely used postcolonial literature. Yet to view the undoubted ascendancy of postcolonial literature as merely the evolutionary consolidation of an ecumenical literary sensibility that dates from the era of the attainment of independence of formerly colonized countries is to ignore the fact that many of the tendencies and concerns central to the field today can be traced back to at least the mid nineteenth century, if not much earlier. With the consolidation of the field of postcolonial literary studies in the past forty years and its continuing interdisciplinary intersections with other interests, the need to establish the terms by which we might understand the sources of postcolonial literary history is more urgent now than ever before.

Versions of “imperial romance”: Walter Scott and Edward Said

The idea that the history of the English novel includes a Victorian and Edwardian sub-genre called “imperial romance” has emerged forcibly in literary studies since the 1980s. “In romance,” Wendy Katz writes, in contrast to the “realist and naturalist fiction of the period,” there is “a logical congeniality with messianic interpretations of Empire[,] … ruling class stability,” and racism. Patrick Brantlinger, designating the temporal span of the sub-genre between Captain Marryat's novels and Conrad's, argues that the “impressionism of Conrad's novels and their romance features are identical … and … both threaten to submerge or ‘derealize’ the critique of empire.” Indeed, because “the romance conventions that Conrad reshapes carry with them the polarizations of racial thought” (265) characteristic of imperialism, his fiction “suggests the moral bankruptcy of his own literary project” (275).

But is imperial romance a sub-genre, or the novel itself? Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) diagnoses a “tragic limitation” in Conrad: “though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end.” Conrad's tragedy inheres in his medium. For, according to Said, the novel, whether realistic or romantic, amounts to a perpetual imperial romance. “Without empire,” Said writes, “there is no European novel … [I]f we study the impulses giving rise to it, we shall see the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel … and … a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism” (69–70).

From a European perspective southern Africa was invented before it was discovered. As the giant spectre of Adamastor declaims to Vasco da Gama in William Atkinson's 1952 translation of Luis Vaz de Camões's Lusiads: ‘I am that mighty hidden cape, called by you Portuguese the Cape of Storms, that neither Ptolemy, Pomponius, Strabo, Pliny nor any other of past times ever had knowledge of’ (v, 50). Yet almost two thousand years earlier in the Meteorologica Aristotle had speculated that the northern temperate world of the Mediterranean had to be matched by a similar region south of the ‘uninhabitable’ equatorial wilderness of Africa. That this domain and its inhabitants might be the opposite, in every sense of the word, of the known ancient oecumene remained a subject of speculation throughout the Christian Middle Ages and beyond until Dias and da Gama at last stood face to face with the Khoikhoi.

By then a virtual consensus had been reached in patristic discourse that these southerners, whowalk ‘with feet opposite to ours’ (hence Antipodeans)would be anti- or pseudo-human caricatures of northern humanity. The baneful effect that such thinking would have on the earliest European encounters with sub- Saharan Africans and notably with the Khoikhoi cannot be pursued here (see Van Wyk Smith, ‘“Most wretched of the human race”’), but the conceit of a southern anti-human world, intrinsically hostile to Mediterranean civilisation and its harbingers, is fundamental to the trope of Adamastor as deployed by Camões and as variously echoed, refurbished or contested in the work of numerous southern African writers of the twentieth century.

Roy Campbell (1901–57), Herbert Dhlomo (1903–56) and N. P. van Wyk Louw (1906–70) are the three most eminent South African early twentieth-century writers in English and Afrikaans: Campbell the expatriate settler, the first South African writer since Olive Schreiner to achieve an international reputation; Dhlomo the black Zulu-speaking African nationalist, who chose English as the medium of his work in drama, poetry, narrative and criticism; and Van Wyk Louw the Afrikaner, who remained at the forefront of his people's spiritual life from his leadership of the Digters van Dertig (Poets of the Thirties) until his death (see Chapter 15).

If modernism is European and Anglo-American in origin, and parades from Prufrock in 1917 to the complete Cantos of 1970, then its synchronous and historical refraction as it reaches South Africa complicates our reading of writers of this period, from the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 through the initiation of the armed struggle to the eve of the collapse of apartheid; through industrialisation and two world wars to the first hopes of a post-apartheid state. Given the medium of refraction, colonial (or dominion) modernism would never be mere imitation: neither Campbell nor Dhlomo nor Van Wyk Louw committed themselves unequivocally to the conventional formal devices of modernism – free verse, discontinuity, the epiphany. Van Wyk Louw mastered canonical verse forms early in his career, but in his last volume explored a prosody that recalls Mallarmé. Dhlomo fashioned his verse style from post-Romantic poetic diction and from African American writers of the early twentieth century, and Campbell his from Tennyson, the Symbolistes and Robert Service.

The emergence of popular literature

In 1915, the Gold Coast Nation in colonial Ghana offered the following advice to local readers who wished to see their writing published in the newspaper: ‘A small item about a small man in a small village is not of general interest, whilst scandal, even if it be about the highest in the land, serves no useful purpose and so should not be considered fit for publication.’ The Nation clearly wished to keep its columns free from the textual clutter produced by and about the ‘small man’. Nevertheless, this type of material continued to arrive on the editor’s desk, signalling the existence of ambitious amateur writers and a thriving popular discourse about ordinary people, morals, manners and scandals. For more than a century since then, local authors have produced similar stories, almost always with a problem-solving approach. In much of this literature, writers aim to teach readers – through story, anecdote, advice and confessional – how to interpret other people’s intentions and how to imagine new futures for themselves.

Not all journalists in the early twentieth century were as censorious or prescriptive as the staff of the Gold Coast Nation. In 1903, the editor of the Gold Coast Leader – a newspaper aimed specifically at ‘youth’ in colonial Ghana – tried to stimulate the production of new writing by reassuring shy authors who felt like literary ‘nobodies’.

All societies possess narrative traditions, myths, and legends about gods and heroes, often in verse. In literate as opposed to oral societies, prose narrative also seems to be an inevitable development, and in Western culture from Greek antiquity onwards there is a rich tradition of prose fictions that are called “novels” by some literary historians. But literary historians have also insisted that long prose narratives beginning in the early to mid-seventeenth century in Europe are radically distinct from their predecessors, and that they inaugurate a type of fiction peculiar to Western modernity that is by custom referred to as “the novel,” the form that expresses the special qualities of modern Western experience.

The most influential account of the modern novel is Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1920). “The Novel,” he says, “is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” The novel reveals “that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that without meaning reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality.” For Lukács ancient epic and novel are polar opposites, with the novel dramatizing the distinctive nature of modern experience at its most problematic, especially when set against the epic that gave “form to a totality of life that is rounded from within” (60). Whereas the epic assumes that the world has form and significance, the novel is about a frustrated seeking for the meaningful coherence that epic takes for granted.

This chapter will consider what J. M. Coetzee has called ‘the experimental line’ within the works of black and white writers in English and Afrikaans, showing how, during the apartheid years, its playfulness and experimentalism was often passed over in critical accounts intent on identifying a literature of witness and solidarity. It will also trace the continuing ‘line’ of experimentation in post-apartheid literature.

‘What value does the experimental line in modern Western literature hold for Africa?’, asks Coetzee in ‘Alex La Guma and the Responsibilities of the South African Writer’ (p. 117), an essay first published in 1971. The question is prompted by Lewis Nkosi's 1966 essay, ‘Fiction by Black South Africans’, in which he argues that, ‘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 vigour of the imagination and sufficient technical resources to the problems posed by conditions in South Africa.’ ‘If black South African writers have read modern works of literature’, Nkosi states, name-checking Dostoevsky, Burroughs, Kafka and Joyce, ‘they seem to be totally unaware of its most compelling innovations’. ‘What we get most frequently,’ he argues, ‘is the journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature’ (p. 246).