The University of the Western Cape as Apartheid Institution: Zoë Wicomb and Arthur Nortje

The transitional text on which this foray will hinge is Zoë Wicomb’s story “A Clearing in the Bush”Footnote ⁹ (1987), and, dimly glimpsed through it, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’urbervilles Footnote ¹⁰ (1891). Tess I read as a teenager in the early 1990s in a suburban Cape Town that was so White and strictured it felt Victorian itself. The novel made little sense to me but left an impression—chiefly of confusion, of something beyond the bland sunlit living room of my family home in Rondebosch, where I remember reading it. Though there was confusion, there was also some dim stirring of recognition. The story stayed with me. Wicomb’s story, which is set in the Cape Flats, on the (violent) outskirts of the comfortable Cape Town that homed me, I have clung to since I discovered it while teaching at the University of the Western Cape, where the story is set and where I have repeatedly found myself asking what quite I am trying to do teaching English literature (rather than literature more contingently in English) to a largely Black, largely second-language English student body in what seems to be a not quite postcolonial country.Footnote ¹¹

UWC, or the University College of the Western Cape, as it was then known, was founded in 1960, in Bellville, and, with depressing aptness given the apartheid government’s views on education for “Coloured” people, in a disused primary school—Goedehoop, or “good hope.”Footnote ¹² It was founded under the Extension of Universities Act, which saw the apartheid government embark on a bizarre and quixotic attempt to restrict university access according to “ethnicity.” The government did not see fit to provide “Coloured” people with an aesthetic education, but one designed rather “to offer low-level clerical or support labour to whites.”Footnote ¹³ But it did have a Department of English Literature, among whose students in its early years was the poet Arthur Nortje, who graduated with a BA in English and psychology in 1963. Nortje has been a significant influence on Wicomb, who was born in 1948, when the National Party took power, and who studied at UWC a few years after him, later teaching at the institution too. In their writings, both Nortje and Wicomb lament the institution’s bland functionalism, the lack of imagination and beauty, as reflected in both its architecture and pedagogy. Wicomb has her protagonist, Frieda, think of her English lecturer, the dull Retief, parroting preformulated lecture notes to his students and seated in a “functional cubicle of new uncluttered design.”Footnote ¹⁴ For Nortje the institution was immeasurably depressing, a “dead end.” In a letter written as an undergraduate student, he laments: “Unfortunately, and now I quote GB Shaw in Doctor’s Dilemma: ‘My plans for the season are simple; I am going to die.’ Well, not literally, but one can call Bellville Coloured bush college a sort of educational dead-end—and that’s putting it mildly.”Footnote ¹⁵ He commented also on the implicit racism that haunted the instruction on offer: “The pattern of lecturing seems to be something in the nature of high school teaching,” adding that “the reason for this can only be attributed to the every so often expressed idea that the intelligence of a non-white student is lower than that of a white student.”Footnote ¹⁶ This pattern of teaching, I would argue, to some degree persists, at least in the overly prescriptive ways (detailed further toward the end of this article) in which the faculty sometimes “teach down” to our students as it were, rather than participating in a more collaborative act of meaning-making. Elsewhere, Nortje would write: “The more I think about it, the more I consider that the miserable world needs every living and deceased man or woman who has something poetic to contribute… something from the spirit.”Footnote ¹⁷ He continues “by POETIC I mean the Greek sense of—able to produce something from the spirit.”Footnote ¹⁸ Something of this he gleaned from literature it seems, even while the institution itself appeared to militate against it, offering instead a “dead end.”

A similar sense of the act of reading literary texts as poetic—an act of making, of creation and poesis, as life-giving, recalling the dynamism of Winnicott’s “potential space”—yet as circumscribed by institutional context emerges in Wicomb’s short story. Her protagonist, Frieda, is an English literature student writing an essay on Tess of the D’urbervilles. The text compels Frieda in ways that she cannot quite grasp, though she “essays” to do so in the essay she has to write for assessment purposes. In the end, she reproduces the reading of the text Retief has already offered in the lectures, in a performative act of dutiful compliance with what is expected of her. Notably, she does this under coercive conditions—being compelled to echo Retief in order to pass. There is little room here for the pursuit of a more “playful” exploration of the text that would engage Frieda’s own curiosity. The coercive power of the university to pass/fail students, together with Retief’s fixed interpretation of the text, prohibits this. As Adam Phillips writes in his study of Winnicott, “the opposite of play is not work but coercion.”Footnote ¹⁹

Phillips is discussing the psychoanalytic encounter and the need for the therapist to be “playful”—able to work with the patient’s interpretations rather than imposing his or her own. For such imposition is “indoctrination and produces compliance.”Footnote ²⁰ The pedagogic encounter—in which there is a similar asymmetry of power between teacher and student(s) as between therapist and patient—is analogous in its potential production of either compliance or illumination. In the literature classroom, as in the psychoanalytic encounter, collaborative interpretative work is at play, so to speak. Both (or all) parties need to be “playful,” open to other and changing interpretations rather than attached to a fixed narrative. Phillips writes that “[p]laying stops when one of the participants becomes dogmatic.” Footnote ²¹ For Phillips, a “good interpretation” is not the interpretation, to be dutifully reproduced, but “something the patient can entertain is his mind.”Footnote ²² It is emphatically “not a password.”Footnote ²³ Rather, it can be “used”/entertained/played with in the manner of a “transitional object,” its “destination unknowable.”Footnote ²⁴ Again, this seems to me a useful way of thinking of a literary pedagogy that would seek to engage the student in her own journey of self-transformation, or bildung: this would be a pedagogy in the service of an “aesthetic education.” Significantly, for both Schiller—who most famously argued for the value of such education (On the Aesthetic Education of Man)—and Spivak (Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalisation), in her reformulation of him, play is essential to such education. For Schiller, the notion of a spieltrieb, or “play drive,” was fundamental to his idea of aesthetic educationFootnote ²⁵. For Spivak, who draws also on Gregory Bateson’s work on play, “aesthetic education” is “a training of the imagination that can teach a subject to play.”Footnote ²⁶

For my purposes here, Winnicott’s work on play is particularly useful for its concept of play as occupying a particular type of “space.” Space is foregrounded in Wicomb’s story, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere, arguing that Wicomb overlays the “space” of UWC, described as a “clearing in the bush” with that of the “Chase,” the center of violation in Hardy’s novel, so that the scene of education comes to be figured as a type of intimate violationFootnote ²⁷. Aesthetic education, I argued, can act as a particularly insidious vehicle of disciplinary power, even while it is potentially disruptive of it. But my sketching of “place”—that which we render imaginatively from space—was somewhat vague, and I did not know then about Winnicott’s theory of potential space. This is a space from which one might, even if fleetingly, grasp a sense of “place,” of being at home—of a more positive intimate relation, or “closeness.” Here I want to propose “potential space” not only as useful for understanding the experience of reading, but as a useful concept for thinking about what space we create in the literature classroom, about what has been shut out of it, and about how we refigure and open that “space”—itself perhaps “transitional” in the remaking of a more just social dispensation.

It is notable here that the Rhodes Must Fall protests were sparked by an act that foregrounded and upended the University of Cape Town’s spatial politics (Chumani Maxwele’s throwing of feces, brought from the Cape Flats townships, onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, which stood at the helm of UCT’s upper campus). Moreover, during the protests that followed, students called again and again for “safe spaces” and invoked the idea of—or desire for—the university as “home,” a place of belonging and relation. They demanded also the “decolonization” and radical reimagining of universities understood to be stuck in a past that would deny most South African students their humanity, even two decades after the formal end of apartheid.

As noted, Winnicott’s potential space is a space of play, where, in his words, “paradox is to be accepted and tolerated and respected and not to be resolved.” Carol Long’s discussion, cited in the epigraph, of play and its occlusion, suppression, marginalization, and distortion—perversion, perhaps—under apartheid is apposite here. As Long notes in her essay “Transitioning Racialised Spaces,” both apartheid thinking and the physical structures of the era were marked by rigidity: “Apartheid structures offered no creative tension between differences; rather, they proclaimed untranscendable divisions between me and you; black and white; my space and your space.”Footnote ²⁸ UWC’s own rather cheerless architecture reflects something of this—and is something that Wicomb points us to in her story, not only through the reference to the little cubicle that houses Retief, but through the idea, articulated by the character Charlie, that “Verwoerd is the architect of this place.”Footnote ²⁹ Verwoerd was known metaphorically as the “architect of apartheid,” and clearly Charlie has overheard and misunderstood this, presuming him to be the literal architect of the new buildings. But the joke encourages us to consider how the physical structures symbolize and manifest apartheid thinking. In the world of the story, the university is a site of enclosure, rather than transition; like a laager,Footnote ³⁰ it is inward looking, its back to its environment, the menacing “bush,” beyond which the supposedly dangerous “skollies” idle. On the university’s outskirts, the blue gum trees are “raggle-taggle sentinels,”Footnote ³¹ soldiers guarding the “clearing.”

Close(d) Readings

Such defensive, hermetic inwardness is paralleled in a fetishization of the purely “literary”—as autonomous, self-enclosed, mystical—and of “close,” or rather what I would distinguish from it as “closed,” reading that in ways recalls American new criticism, but seems to have perversely marked literary debates in South Africa to a quite extraordinary degree. We see this registered particularly in debates about the literary and what can be defined as such, and ergo what should be included in the curriculum. Witness for instance the fantasist rantings of C. J. D. Harvey, a professor of English literature at the University of Stellenbosch (1962–1984) and also an apartheid censor;Footnote ³² these are worth quoting at length to get a sense of the strength of feeling animating them:

Notable here is Harvey’s urge to fix, define, and delimit the “literary,” which he does negatively and tautologically, in relationship to the “non-literary,” cursorily adumbrated as “politics or anthropology or what have you.” The “literary” and the “political” are cast here as oppositional, with little room for interrelation, and no sense of what Derek Attridge, following Derrida, describes as the institutional nature of literature, that it is “brought into being by processes that are social, legal, and political, and that can be mapped historically and geographically.”Footnote ³⁴ For Harvey, “language skill of the highest order” can be adjudged as if it occurred in a vacuum, ignoring language’s messy materiality and referentiality, factors that ensure, in Attridge’s words, that “a verbal artifact can never close upon itself.”Footnote ³⁵ But for Harvey the “literary” and the “political” are emphatically discrete. Users of the word committed (presumably commending “committed literature”), Harvey wishes, significantly, to consign to “purgatory”—itself arguably a type of “potential space,” but figured here as hellish, intolerable. For Harvey, one suspects, difference and paradox are not to be tolerated: his is a purist view. Here the relationship of play to definition warrants attention. As Stephen Nachmanovitch notes, following Bateson, play eludes definition because of its “meta” nature: it is about definition, always complicating and shifting the definitions of things.Footnote ³⁶ Harvey, mired in impossible debates concerned to fix and define the objects of the “literary,” retreats into dogmatism, unable or unwilling to reflect on—adopt a “meta” relationship to—the contradictions of his own position.

A very different approach to the study of literature to Harvey’s, one that rejects the “category of pure aesthetic cultural objects,” was taken by Jakes Gerwel, a professor of Afrikaans and Dutch literature, and the esteemed former vice chancellor of UWC who led its transition away from apartheid institution to what he proclaimed to be “the intellectual home of the left” (my emphasis—the word is resonant given the call of recent student protestors for a university as such). In his 1983 inaugural address, Gerwel rejected the idea of a “transhistorical or universal function of criticism,” arguing instead that “a particular mode of literary criticism comes about under specific historical conditions and for specific historical ends.”Footnote ³⁷ He noted how Afrikaans literary criticism had become increasingly formalistic and saw this, ironically, as symptomatic of its political moment, writing that “apartheid with its total disregard for people and for human content, with its subjection of human beings to principles, is quintessentially formalistic.”Footnote ³⁸ His account of the empty, fetishized formalism of apartheid accords with Long’s account of its po-faced rigidity, an inability to tolerate difference.

Under apartheid, the dominant approach to literature in South African English Departments was “practical criticism,” which held sway well into the 1970s. As Christo Doherty has noted in his genealogical account of English literature as discipline in South Africa, the appeal of practical criticism was partly because it helped to provide the rather amorphous subject of English literature with a disciplinary identity, cohering as it did around a practice—that of “close reading”—rather than simply a body of knowledge.Footnote ³⁹ This practice also circumscribed what could be admitted as a valid disciplinary “object,” excluding texts that did not meet formalist criteria. Practical criticism is mostly closely associated with I. A. Richards, who gave it that name and whose work Doherty revisits. As Doherty notes, Richards, who came to English literature with a background in psychology, experimented with giving students decontextualized literary texts, ostensibly stripped of their historical referents, which operated to test, and correct, and thus “order” (his term) the student’s taste and mind. The student was placed in the position of disciple, as it were, before the literary work and teacher, with Richards holding that the student could be guided to the “correct” or “accurate” reading of the work. Similar thinking is illustrated in a set of essay-writing guidelines included among J. M. Coetzee’s lecture materials from his time teaching in the University of Cape Town’s English Department, from 1972 to 1999.Footnote ⁴⁰ The guidelines are not reflective of Coetzee’s own approach (he was very much at odds with the department) but were given to him to dispense to students.Footnote ⁴¹ They read:

Compare Richards, for whom “the experience communicated by a poem may be experienced by many different minds with only slight variations” and an accurate reading “must preserve it [the experience encoded in the poem] from contamination, from the irruptions of personal particularities.”Footnote ⁴³ The personal here is seen as out of place, a type of “contamination” and “irruption” to be quelled in favor of preserving the purity of the text. This language of purity echoes apartheid discourse; here the self is to be disciplined, even effaced, or rendered what Coetzee describes elsewhere as an undesiring subject,Footnote ⁴⁴ “deprived of desire.”Footnote ⁴⁵

In his study of English literature as a discipline in South Africa, Doherty links practical criticism with the practice of “confession” as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality: “one of the most important devices by which institutions like the church bring the private inner life under the public scrutiny of ‘experts.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ Doherty observes that “Practical criticism was like an examination in that students were ranked according to their responses to texts; whereas it mimicked the form of the confession in that the students’ souls were subject to detailed inspection.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In this context, practical criticism, with its insistence on “ordering” the student’s mind and treating the text, or “work” rather, in isolation from its historical and political context, comes to be seen, ironically, as complicit with its historical moment, a means of disciplinary power.

My point here is not to discount “close” and immersive reading, but to show how “close reading,” when tied to “practical criticism” and the “literary” as unexamined articles of faith, threatens to become closed and enclosing, a type of stifling or claustrophobic reading that prohibits (or seeks to prohibit) that with which the student/self might engage. It seems pertinent here that in fact what is often parroted in our department at UWC as at the core of what we do and teach is not close “reading,” but close “analysis,” suggesting a particular, dichotomized relationship between reader (subject) and text (object) that Winnicott’s account of cultural experience complicates. For Winnicott such experience is synthetic and creative as well as analytic and “objective.” The idea of the experience of reading as opening “potential space,” following Winnicott, allows for a different model of “close” reading that is less closed and restrictive, while still immersive and attentive. Here what a reader might bring to a text is not foreclosed as “inappropriate” as in Harvey’s worldview (and classroom, one imagines).

What I am describing as “closed” reading, or rather a classroom that enjoins such reading, runs the risk, in Winnicott’s terms, of eliciting from the student a defensive “false” self within or beneath which a more authentic self is not recognized and must be hidden. In Wicomb’s story we see Frieda’s awareness of her potential misrecognition by Retief and that the reading of Tess that she is required to produce for him in her essay is merely a reflection of his own notes. Perhaps suitably, she initially wishes to “capture” his “likeness” on the page of notes she is trying to put together toward an essay, writing an essay in his image as it were and reconstituting him as an addressee to whom she might “address the wormy tangle of questions that wriggle out of reach each time I pick up my pen.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Having “no talent for likenesses,” though, she draws instead “triangles and parallelograms, clean geometrical lines.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In lieu of an interlocutor/addressee to whom she might address her tangle of questions, she has rigid geometric shapes. Later, she will doodle “an infantile line of train carriages”Footnote ⁵⁰ along the margins, marking a desire to escape from the strictures imposed on the space of the page by Retief’s schematic and reductive account of the book.Footnote ⁵¹ Frieda, wondering whether to present Retief with an excuse for the late submission of her assignment, reflects: “I could say anything to him and it is a relief to know that it does not matter in the slightest how I deliver my lie, for he does not know me, does not know any of us, and will not recognise me the next day.”Footnote ⁵² Luckily for her, Frieda has the confidence to be clear that what she eventually “submits” to Retief, namely what “he wants, a reworking of his notes”Footnote ⁵³ (themselves copied from elsewhere), does not represent her true engagement with the text, but rather “betrays”Footnote ⁵⁴ Tess (and implicitly, herself). Frieda has the self-awareness not to be “seduced” (a figure the story foregrounds) by the education on offer to her. One might even say that she has what the pious, working-class Tamieta is so often deprived of, “the unknown luxury of irreverence,”Footnote ⁵⁵ the luxury that is, of playfulness in the face of authority.