Graham Pechey, In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa. Liverpool University Press, 2022, 256 pp.

Abstract

Most readers in the postcolonial field will know of Graham Pechey from his introduction to Njabulo Ndebele’s South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1994), but Pechey’s ownwriting on South African literature began a decade earlier with a pathbreaking 1983 essay on Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. Shedding the colonial habits of South African textual criticism, it focused on the discontinuities of an iconic colonial text as a way of fathoming its historical resonance and relevance. I remember reading it at the time and finding it inspiring because, apart from its sheer energy and verve, it modeled a formal criticism that reversed the standard polarities between literature and history, finding in the former an authority that both disrupted and revealed the inner dynamics of the latter. Both Pechey’s introduction to the Ndebele volume and his essay on Schreiner are included in this highly valuable collection of his writings on South Africa. Dense and demanding as well as engaging, it is a volume filled with insights and perspectives that will repay the kind of attention that clearly went into them. Pechey, who died in 2016, was something of an anomaly. He never completed his doctorate, yet read both broadly and deeply, liable to insert himself into the intricacies of Dante as much as he does into a miniaturist story of Schreiner’s, where he finds surprisingly large-scale resonances. Himself a colonial product who studied at the University of Natal, Pechey proceeded by way of liberalism to the radical Congress of Democrats, followed by a move to the United Kingdom in 1965. By the mid-1990s, as his daughter Laura Pechey informs us, he had found faith and was confirmed as an Anglican. Were these his own discontinuities, or were there deeper currents underlying them? The volume goes some way to answering the question through his recurrent themes and persistent view that literature has the capacity to deliver the numinous in the everyday, a representational excess that is at one and the same time radical, elusive, and potentially redemptive in both social and (in the broadest sense) spiritual modalities. The book is divided into three parts: “South African Literature in Transition (1990–1998),” “South African Literature Before and After Apartheid,” and “The Languages of South African Poetry.” Each section has its own constituent essays, and through them all one can see Pechey’s abiding preoccupations. At the core of them is something he finds in the work of Ndebele: “nothing less than the (re) composition of the whole social text of South Africa” (142). That idea of the “whole social text” is key because for Pechey South Africa itself is a kind of writing, a living and historicized discourse in response to which literature has an