Exposing prejudice in Austen's Pride

By Mary Corrigall

If you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have avoided a close study of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice during your school education, undoubtedly you would not have escaped viewing an adaptation of this popular classic on TV or at a cinema.
It's hard to account for its popularity in this age; universal themes may tie us to this period piece but its almost as if we are gripped by a nostalgia for this very unprogressive period of British history where class and gender completely determined someone's fate.
Such limits provide the friction in the fiction. Of course, Austen embedded her social discourse in an understated brand of British prose. Her commentary is so subtle - a snide remark made over a cup |of tea or a look that betrays disappointment.
The characters in this book occupy a coded world governed by conventions and a kind of language that like the layer of petticoats women wore in that era to conceal their bodies, keeps the truth buried beneath a fluff of civility. This is perhaps why the novel makes such a feast for English lit students; every banal exchange or incident requires rigorous decoding.
Not surprisingly, part of our assiduous dissection of this classic novel has also taken the form of revisionist postmodern literary products where authors' reworking of the novel results in a new narrative or is fused with another genre to produce something familiar, though novel.
Such was the case with PD James's Death comes to Pemberley (2011), where the British crime queen sets a whodunnit in the world Austen created in Pride and Prejudice. Other writers have pursued more unlikely genre mash-ups, such as Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009).
Jo Baker's Longbourn (Random Struik House) isn't in this vein; it is not a parody nor is Pride and Prejudice transplanted in genre literature; instead Baker creates a parallel narrative that maps the invisible worlds and characters that might have existed at the periphery of Austen's original.
In this way, she brings the unseen or unexplored territory at the edges into view. In the context of this 19th century class society, the invisible world and characters are the servants and their living conditions. The Bennets' home, therefore, remains the main setting, but instead of Elizabeth and her sisters functioning as the characters upon which the story pivots, Sarah and other servants, such as Mrs Hill, her husband and Polly become the focus.
This is not an upstairs/downstairs drama, in the mould of the uber popular TV series Downton Abbey for we are not fully privy to the world upstairs belonging to the Bennets, the Bingleys and such. We only learn of the events that take place in Austen's novel from a distance; in this way, the narrative focuses on the servant's perspective entirely, rendering Austen's characters as the ghostly "other". As such, Baker reverses the perspective on Austen's story so that she fleshes out Pride in Prejudice in interesting ways that overturn our conceptions of the original. More plainly put: she kills the romance of Pride and Prejudice, forcing us to question this fascination for British period pieces that focused on the landed gentry and the morality of this perspective when such gross exploitation supported this dominant social echelon.
Primarily, Baker sheds light on the overlooked minutiae of the period and the hard work behind the scenes that allowed the upper classes and their relatives to exist. The cleaning, cooking and tedious labour required to keep these large family homes running are the initial focus of the narrative. Baker has obviously relied on research into that period to impart an accurate picture, but it's a work of imagination too as she envisages the psychic cost to the servants, who because of their duties and activities or supporting roles are made to feel as if they are less important than their employers.
For example, when one of the Bennet daughters is prevented from walking into town to purchase ribbons for a dance because of the risk to her health, Sarah is sent instead and indeed catches a cold from making the trip in inclement weather. Her life and health are negligible in comparison to those she serves. Polly, the younger servant, is forced to adopt this name because she couldn't share the name Mary with one of the Bennet girls. At every turn, the servants' status as secondary citizens is affirmed, though in instances they are reminded how fortunate they are to have a place to live - both Sarah and Polly are orphans who have spent time in the poorhouse and the world outside Longbourn or other family homes is presented as being dangerous and difficult to survive in. Domestic service is therefore positioned as offering safety and security, making it that much harder for individuals trapped by it to escape it.

The Problem with Being Zimbabwean

NoViolet Bulawayo at the Open Book Festival 2013 in Cape Town

By Mary Corrigall

Noviolet Bulawayo  looks as if she is preparing to attend a funeral. In a black dress and jacket and wearing a grave expression, she strides along the pool outside a Rosebank B&B to meet me on the veranda.
Her demeanour matches the bleak heaviness that pervades her first novel, We Need New Names, which deals with Zimbabwe in a state of "falling apart" and the pains and struggles of living in exile in the US. To say it has been well-received is an understatement; it's the first Zimbabwean novel to crack the Man Booker short-list, making her the first black African woman to have received this accolade.
"For a fresh face it gives you courage. Writing is a very difficult career. You don't know what is going to happen; you write because you must write," she says, before adding the ubiquitous, "it has been very humbling."
Ironically, part of the novel's acclaim is linked to the humour that undercuts her dark subject-matter - the back of the book's cover carries an excerpt where the word "laughing" is reiterated. Her humorous side is well disguised during the interview. She's prickly, only smiles once and in response to comments or questions she often nods her head and offers a brusque response: "yup, yup".
At first I put this down to a reticence to being interviewed - writers tend to shy away from such encounters - but later decide it could be a consequence of her immigrant status in the US, which has made her sharply self-conscious and aloof. Another consequence is her attachment to her identity as a Zimbabwean and African.
"The States is one country that sharpens your identity, for me because I am not an American and it is a space that boxes people. It never occurred to me that I was black and African until I got to the States and those categories mattered. I grew up in a township and went to schools were everyone was like me. I never experienced life in racialised degrees. When I got to the States I realised I am black but not part of black America and that consolidated my identity as an African."
It is not easy holding on to that identity after living in the US for over a decade, Michigan at first and then spells at Cornell (Ithica, New York) and Stanford (Stanford, California) universities. Yet she doesn't speak with an American twang.
This is a surprise - Lauren Beukes, the celebrated local author, still proudly sports one after living in that country for a few months 10 years ago.
"I didn't want it," she asserts, as if adopting an accent is a choice. Claiming or holding on to her identity isn't incidental to the novel; it is her way of maintaining a link with her homeland, coming to terms with what it has become in her absence and, as the title implies, it speaks of the nature of redefining oneself elsewhere, a condition that has, in the wake of the mass exodus of its citizens, become a characteristic of being Zimbabwean.
In one of the final chapters where Bulawayo slips into a diatribe about an immigrant's existence and reflecting on the psychological cost of being "illegal", she writes: "We did not want their attention. We did not meet their stares and we avoided gazes. We hid our real names and gave false ones. We built mountains between us and them, we dug rivers, we planted thorns."
Perhaps it was too much to expect her to operate like the narrator, Darling, a sassy and sarcastic character who shoots from the hip and is able to detect when something is "kaka". Significantly, Darling loses this fiery spirit when she immigrates to the US, shifting the narrative voice into a different gear, where she seems more of an observer, working in low-level jobs as a cleaner or at a recycling centre, where she sifts through |the detritus of this consumerist society. Bulawayo says she didn't consciously plan this change in the narrative voice.
"It's not her, it is the space, voice is tied to geographic space. I spent my first year in silence in the US. People thought I was quiet and shy. In reality at home I was one of the noisiest rowdy kids. When I got there I died down. Every time you encounter Darling in Zim she is with friends. In the US she is behind closed doors, looking at the snow. It is the space that stifles the individual and for immigrants, just not being able to express yourself in your language makes you a different person. I am one person when I am speaking Ndebele, but I am also a different person. That is what is happening to Darling. She is a changed person because the space changes her."
Bulawayo frequently switches between talking about herself and Darling. It's as if they are one and the same. It's easy to draw parallels between Bulawayo and Darling; their lives are mirror images of each other. Well, to a point. Both women are born-frees in that they arrived in the world after Zimbabwe gained independence and both eventually settled in the US and struggled with adapting to life in that country and with their voluntary form of exile.
Where their lives differ is quite significant and has an impact on the book's credibility to some degree. While Bulawayo's childhood in Zimbabwe was "beautiful and normal", Darling's is marred by extreme poverty, violence, instability and the sorts of horrors no child should be exposed to. She is rooted in a society that seems to have collapsed; there isn't enough food, none of the children attend schools or live in regular homes. This community has become so twisted that even a preacher humiliates and abuses a woman in front of his parishioners under the guise of ridding it of sinful behaviour. This isn't just a community that has lost its moral compass, it seems to have lost its humanity.

Toying with an immovable history: HHhH

By Mary Corrigall

I'm expecting to meet a self-deprecating man. In HHhH, Laurent Binet explicitly rejects elements of the novel, certain chapters even, and allows the failures or shortcomings in the work to be transparent.
"It's clever, isn't it?" he says laughing, when I suggest that in pre-empting criticism of his book, he automatically undercuts arguments against it.
One of the main misgivings he expresses in HHhH (Random House Struik) is the fact that while it is intended to chart the heroic actions of a group of Czechoslovakian parachutists who assassinate a high-ranking Nazi officer, Reinhard Heydrich, he indulges in a quasi biography of this infamous SS officer dubbed the Butcher of Prague, among many other equally pejorative sobriquets to suit the barbaric acts he sanctioned. The curious title, HHhH, refers to a saying popular among the SS: Himmlers Hirn heist Heydrich - Himmler's brain is called Heydrich, and confirms the focus of the novel, though Binet cunningly avoids naming him. It reads like a stutter, as if Heydrich's name is caught in the throat.
In detailing Heydrich's life story, however, and the pivotal role he played in arriving at the chilling "final solution" for the "problem" with the Jews in Europe, Binet draws attention to the necessity for or the sense of justice that Heydrich's assasination would present.
Similarly, in the frank and self-conscious manner in which Binet narrates history, he also generously points to some of the practicalities underpinning this seemingly incongruent bias; there simply isn't sufficient information about the parachutists to fill a book, while in contrast much is known about Heydrich. This, of course, points to a failing in how history is written; inevitably the focus tends to be on evil oppressor, rather than an in-depth look at the identities of the liberators or victims. Perhaps we are more curious about inexplicable malevolence. This might explain the inordinate amount of material pertaining to the Nazis on the History Channel - in his novel Binet admits to a weakness for this channel. His preoccupation with World War II is certainly rooted in its representation in popular culture; the constant revision or recycling of historical events.
Of course, as a novelist Binet could have invented the histories, motivations and characters of the Czech heroes, but it would have been in contravention of the ethical code that guides his novel: to remain faithful to the facts.
"Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I've discussed all this, 'It's like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence,' " proposes Binet in HHhH.
It's rare to meet a novelist so bound to the truth. This noble gesture, however, seems not only impossible in relaying history - can it ever be faithfully rendered? - but also seems in contravention of the spirit of novel writing altogether; certainly it presents an extraordinary limit for a novelist.

Caught in the Underbelly

By Mary Corrigall

Eberard Februarie never wakes up in the morning feeling refreshed. His skin is dry and taut, his muscles ache and he typically surveys the dystopian world he inhabits with pounding in his head, a consequence of his penchant for night-time booze-ups.
This sense of physical degradation doesn't simply mirror the debased crime-ridden society he encounters as a member of SAPS but is an external manifestation of the inner impact of his profession.
He can't lift the lid on the agony that haunts the deep recesses of his consciousness; if he did, he would fall apart and would no longer be able to survive or weather the abysmal realities that his job puts him in contact with daily. As he wades through the dark trenches of the world of crime, his corporeal character is weighed down by the truths he cannot face and the toll of a lifestyle, which ironically is supposed to counter it.
As a cop tasked with solving violent crime, he is the buffer between society and its undesirable underbelly, but in a morally corrupt society, where the boundary between right and wrong keeps shifting, Februarie has lost his way. He seems more at home among the debased.

Meet the Author: Andrew Brown

What was the main challenge in writing Solace?The biggest challenge was venturing into the arena of religious differences and fundamentalism, setting the novel within this contentious environment without being offensive or overly insensitive to other people's beliefs and cultural practices. Some religions are more sensitive to criticism or debate than others and all three mainstream religions come under scrutiny in the book. I think that I may have annoyed a few people on the extremes, but the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive.
Are you satisfied with the end-product; do you have any reservations about it, would you do anything differently? I had reservations when writing Solace about repeating a character, in this case Detective Inspector Eberard Februarie from Coldsleep Lullaby. I don't want to be a series writer or to fall into the trap of formulaic writing, so I was extremely ambivalent about dusting the mothballs off him and putting him back into action. On the other hand, he is a character that I like and he fitted the bill perfectly for the main protagonist in Solace. It also allowed me to develop him further as a character (in this case, taking the poor man to even lower emotional depths). On reflection, I think it was the right thing to do for the book, but I am reluctant to make Eberard a regular feature.