Michiel Heyns
This review article attempts to discuss the sixty-odd stories in Michael Chapman’s A Century of South African Short Stories
from a unifying perspective. While conceding that Chapman’s emphasis
on the short story as primarily the vehicle of “the fragment, the
irresolute moment” does render the sense of a fragmentary and often
divided society, the essay seeks to establish a dialogue amongst the
stories on the related stresses of land and family. Through a brief
discussion of most of the stories in the collection, the essay seeks to
show how, in a single century, the short story has reflected the
changing priorities, values and political realities of South Africa. In
the process, too, the story itself has changed its nature from something
close to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the story-teller as counsellor
and sage to something more akin to the perplexity Benjamin associates
with the novel as genre.
What
the generous selection in this collection makes possible is a tracing
of the well-known movement from a rural to an urban culture, often in
terms of the impact of that dynamism on the institution of the family.
To best render this process as process, the discussion is
roughly chronological, though a more synchronic approach is necessitated
at times by the varieties of connection and contrast generated by the
eclecticism of the collection.
Though,
of course, a collection like this argues no case and supplies no
answers, the essay argues that it encourages and facilitates new
perspectives on old questions by the unpredictable way in which story
connects to story and all stories relate back to the land and the people
inhabiting it.
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