Introduction: South African and African Modernism – Beyond a Century, Beyond the Provisional

Abstract

On 16 June, 1926, the Johannesburg newspaper Rand Daily Mail carried a gloved dismantling of a new literary magazine called Voorslag. In name and in content, this half-crown monthly promised to be at the sharp end of a rising South African avant-garde, all the while keeping touch with the best art abroad. Splendid ideals, a timely intervention – but was Voorslag quite ‘what it should be’ (Millin 43)? The reviewer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, had her doubts. Despite its claims to radical newness, she saw in Voorslag something oddly familiar, derivative even. Its focus was too ‘narrow’. Its philosophy resembled too closely that of certain Anglo-American little magazines. And its editors – Roy Campbell, William Plomer and Laurens van der Post – seemed to endorse a predictable cast of European ‘prophets’ and ‘gods’ (44): the Sitwells, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and others. There is neat irony in the fact that Millin’s piece appeared on 16 June, otherwise known as ‘Bloomsday’. Only four years had passed since modernism’s ‘annus mirabilis’ – the year that saw the publication of Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Jacob’s Room, the year that supposedly ‘[broke] the world... in two’ (Cather v) – and already its tenets, methods and proponents were being treated as a known quantity. ‘The fact of the matter,’Millin lamented, ‘is that Voorslag, for all its South African flavour, is a branch of a well-defined overseas group’ (44). An uncharitable reader might be tempted to say the review betrays that ‘grocer’s mentality’ (Gardner and Chapman 4) which Voorslag sought to trouble. It is difficult not to regard Millin’s quibbles as both slight and slighting. It is difficult, too, crediting the idea that modernism was as ‘well-defined’ as her tone of polite boredom would suggest. But despite some hasty dismissals, the novelist’s tacit scepticism about a ‘South African modernism’ is itself not easily dismissed. Could such a movement ever amount to more than a provincial version of its metropolitan model? Could it add anything other than local ‘flavour’ to an apparently European project? Would ‘South African modernism’ ever shake the pincers of the provisional?