OLIVE SCHREINER

In a review of The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1924) in the New Republic (March 18, 1925), Virginia Woolf wrote in part the following about Olive Schreiner: “It would be frivolous to dismiss her as a mere crank, a piece of wreckage used and then thrown aside as the cause triumphed onwards. She remains . . . too uncompromising a figure to be disposed of . . . “ As though continuing on this observation across the twentieth century, Nadine Gordimer, reviewing Ruth First and Ann Scott's biography Olive Schreiner (1980) in The Times Literary Supplement (August 15, 1980), wrote the following words, which in effect is one of the best conceptual biographies we possess: “Who is qualified to write about whom? Subjects very often do not get the biographers their works and lives demand; they are transformed, after death, into what they were not. There must be a lot of fuming, beyond the grave. . . Olive Schreiner, like other South African writers William Plomer, Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post) up until after the Second World War, when writers both black and white became political exiles, looked to Europe and went t Europe. Some went permanently, after the intial success of work born specifically of their South African consciousness. Some went ostensibly because they had been reviled for exposing the ‘traditional' South African way of life for what it is (Plomer, Turbott Wolfe ). But the motive generally was a deep sense of deprivation, that living in South Africa they were v cut off from the world of ideas; and underlying this incontestable fact (particularly for Schreiner, in her time) was another reason which some had a restless inkling was the real source of their alienation, although they could express it only negatively: that the act of taking the Union Castle mailship to what was the only cultural ‘home' they could conceive of, much as they all repudiated jingoism, was itself part of the philistinism they wanted to put at an ocean's distance from them. Even Sol Plaatje, one of the first black writers, had this instinct, since he was using Western modes---journalism, the diary, the novel---to express black consciousness. They went because the culture in which their writings could take root was not being created; a culture whose base would be the indigenous black culture interpenetrating with imported European colonial forms, of which literature was one: and, because the works they had written---or would have found it imperative to attempt, if they were to express the life around them---were solitary contradictions of the way in which that life was being conceptualized, politically, socially and morally. . . For myself, I am led to take up the question of Olive Schreiner's achievement exclusively as an imaginative writer, in relation to the conceptual determinants within which she lived, even while warring against them. First and Scott quote the argument---and I think they see her wronged by it---that after African Farm her creativity ‘disappeared into the sands of liberal pamphleteering'. The observation was originally mine. Their book confirms for me, that whatever else she may have achieved, Schreiner dissipated her creativity in writing tracts and pamphlets rather than fiction. This is not to discount her social and political mission; neither is it to attempt to nail her to the apartheid Tendenzroman . It is to assert that by abandoning the search for a form of fiction adequate to contain the South African experience, after her abortive experiments with a ‘distancing' allegory, she was unable in the end to put the best she had---the power of her creative imagination---to the service of her fierce and profound convictions, and her political and human insight.It is true that,as First and Scott claim, ‘almost alone, she perceived the race conflicts during South Africa's industrial revolution in terms of a world-wide struggle between capital and labour'. But she wrote about these insights instead of transforn ming them through the creation of living characters into an expression of the lives they shaped and distorted. This could have achieved the only real synthesis of life and work, of ideology and praxis, for Olive Schreiner, raising the consciousness of the oppressed from out of the colonial nightmare, and that of the oppressor from out of the colonial dream, and telling the world what she, uniquely, knew about the quality of human life deformed by those experiences.” Without necessarily agreeing with all the arguments Nadine Gordimer makes in this long passage, it is clear that this exposition is a classic example of what a miniature conceptual intellectual sketch should strive to achieve. The exemplary nature of y this great woman is boundless.