“Separate families, separate worlds, the same native space”: aspects of the South African short story

Abstract

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 wellknown 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.