Abstract
In this chapter I track the story of a literary text, the first novel written by a black woman in South Africa. This novel by Miriam Tlali was published in 1975 under the title Muriel at Metropolitan.1 Written by Tlali on a typewriter and now lodged in the archive of the National English Literary Museum (NELM) collection in Grahamstown, South Africa, the manuscript gives the original title of the book: I Am Nothing. The difference between the two titles is immediately striking: the new title does not reflect the spirit of the original title in any way. It is the sense of extremity that is lost, the notion of not being worth anything that is absent in the much more placid Muriel at Metropolitan.2 This difference, reflected in the two titles, marks the two texts throughout. How did I Am Nothing come to be Muriel at Metropolitan ? In the first part of this essay I discuss the two texts, one unpublished and yellowing in a makeshift folder and the other a now out-of-print but well-known novel, looking at what was left out and what was put in, and why that might have been. I focus on excision — the multiple excisions that mark the biography of Muriel at Metropolitan. I then move to a discussion of the questions for literature and for the archive that these and other texts raise. I argue that South African literature and the literary archive have been badly served by the mixture of belles-lettristic and New Critical formative pedagogical influences that paid little attention to the materiality and context of texts. In the third section, I move from the notion of excision to the notion of excess. I argue that the archive constantly moves between these two orders — excision and excess: between that which limits and that which is limitless. Finally, I consider how we can use the fecundity, the instability, of literary texts to rethink our notion of the archive itself: how we can project the dynamism of the literary project back onto the archive so that the border between the literary text and the archive begins to shift and refigure.
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References
Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1975).
Muriel says: ‘I am not an authority in the study of human behaviour. I do not profess great knowledge. I am not a writer. But I do not have to be any of these in order to know about the Africans, their feelings, hopes, desires and aspirations.’ M. Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 4.
Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 29.
The letter explains her child’s sudden illness, the fact that the child has to be taken to the local clinic for daily injections and has to be kept under quarantine at home for two weeks. The letter reveals Muriel’s acute sense of responsibility and etiquette. (Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 72.)
Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 21.
See, for instance, Dorothy Driver, ‘M’a-Ngoana o tsoare thipa ka bohaleng — The child’s mother grabs the sharp end of the knife: Women as mothers, women as writers’ in Martin Trump, ed., Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), p. 236.
Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 24.
Ibid., p. 209.
Tlali, I Am Nothing, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 49.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 54.
Miriam Tlali, interviewed by Cecily Lockett in C. MacKenzie and C. Clayton, eds., Between the Lines: Interviews with Bessie Head, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali (Grahamstown: NELM [National English Literary Museum], 1989), p. 71.
Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (London: Longman Drumbeat, 1979).
Peter Randall, The beginnings of Ravan Press: a memoir’ in G. E. de Villiers, ed., Ravan: Twenty Five Years 1972–1997 (Randburg: Ravan Press, 1997), p. 9.
Miriam Tlali, interviewed by Cecily Lockett in Between the Lines, p. 76.
See W. Hartmann, J. Silvester and P. Hayes, The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, Windhoek and Athens OH: University of Cape Town Press, Out of Africa and Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 6.
Interview on 27 October 1998 with Karel Schoeman, novelist, archivist at the South African Library, Cape Town, and author of The Face of the Country: A South African Family Album 1860–1910 (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1996). See also Hartmann et al. in The Colonising Camera, who show how infrequently photography has been taken seriously as archival material. Most researchers of Africa’s social history have had limited interaction with photographs since visuality is subordinated to textuality which itself is grounded and empirically validated by reference to documents and sources from the privileged site of the archive’ (p. 2).
See S. Ndlovu, ‘“He did what any other person in his position would have done to fight the forces of invasion and disruption”: Africans, the land and contending images of King Dingane (“the Patriot”) in the twentieth century, 1916–1950s’, South African Historical Journal 38 (May 1998), pp. 99–143. Petros Lamula, for instance, decided to print, publish and market his 1922 history text uZulu kaMalandela on his own, to avoid such pitfalls. The only copy remaining within the country is held by the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Ndlovu, citing other examples, suspects that there are many texts like Lamula’s that it will be difficult to trace, catalogue and archive because writers kept the original manuscripts, which have often not been found. Ndlovu is beginning to reflect in his current work on how the state, language boards, school inspectors and publishers influenced and affected the quality of literature published by African authors — and how this in turn influenced literary criticism on African literature in South Africa. (E-mail correspondence with S. Ndlovu, researcher in Zulu history, 30 September 1999.) See also Chapter 2 of Ndlovu’s forthcoming Ph.D. thesis, ‘The image of King Dingane and Zulu nationalist politics’.
Ian Glenn, ‘The future of the past in English South African literary history’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 51,1 (1996).
Quoted in Susan Gardner, ‘“Don’t ask for the true story”: a memoir of Bessie Head’, Hecate 12,1–2 (1986), p. 114.
Gardner, ‘“Don’t ask for the true story.”’
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., p. 113.
Ibid., p. 125.
Teresa Dovey, ‘A question of power: Susan Gardner’s biography versus Bessie Head’s autobiography’, English in Africa 16,1 (May 1989).
Bessie Head, ‘Notes from a quiet backwater’ in Craig MacKenzie, ed., Bessie Head — A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990).
Dovey, ‘A question of power’, p. 34.
Ibid., pp. 34–35.
Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 111.
Randolph Vigne, ed., A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head 1965–1979 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991). Others are housed in the collection at Serowe; most remain in private collections, ‘too contentious’, it is said, to publish.
Thomas Richards in The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993) writes about the imperial archive as a fantasy of knowledge, ‘a myth of control’, built on an allied belief in comprehensive knowledge. In fact, he shows it was a miscellany, fragmentary and full of gaps. The assumption of the whole’, he writes, ‘ended as a myth of imperial knowledge.’
Roberto Echevarria, Myth and the Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 37.
M. Nicol, The Invisible Line: The Life and Photography of Ken Oosterbroek (Cape Town: Kwela Books, in association with Random House, 1998).
See, for instance, Maureen Isaacson’s review of the book, ‘The tender vision and tragic death of Ken Oosterbroek’, Sunday Independent, 27 September, 1998. Over and over again, interestingly, reader responses to, and reviews of, this text argue that it is in the photographs that they find the dramatic vitality and a fuller complexity of the biographical subject that the text can render (see, for instance, James Mitchell, ‘Man and moment’, Star, 12 October 1998 or Bronwyn Wilkinson, ‘The invisible line and not returning’, Cape Times, 25 September 1998).
To turn to the notion of excess, as a figuring of the imagination, is to turn to a sense of fecundity. I have argued above for the fecundity of the archive itself. But how, also, can we project the fecundity of a text onto the archive, to refigure it? To ask this question is to ask, ‘In what sense are such books not archives: in what sense, that is, do they contain an excess of meaning which eludes the archive?’ In her novel Manly Pursuits, South African writer Ann Harries uses the elusive concept of sound to disturb the rigid narratives of colonial history. She explores Rhodes’ obsession with hearing British birdsong on the slopes of Table Mountain and reanimates the lives of Milner, Kipling, Wilde, Dodgson, Schreiner and others in a narrative that Shuttles between England and South Africa. It is her work with the multiple ambiguous registers of sound which destabilises conventional readings of colonial history. Harries’s work, a written, literary text, nevertheless lets us ask — what is sound? How could we archive sound? How may we consider, in the histories of time and place, the relationship between listening and the imagination, between sound and word? How does sound offer us new ways of reading cultures of the past, and of the present? Why is it that writing produces history — produces the archive? Harries takes us beyond the question only of the spoken, the verb, the word-of-mouth, orality, to the larger question of sound itself: what could sound be for an archive that is at once capacious and incomplete? A. Harries, Manly Pursuits (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).
As Echevarria puts it, ‘The Archive [also] stands for loss, emptiness, frequently hypostatized as... death.’ Roberto Echevarria, Myth and the Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 177.
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Nuttall, S. (2002). Literature and the Archive: The Biography of Texts. In: Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_16
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