Plunging into the Depths of Scholarly Critique

This issue of English Academy Review provides both contributors and readers of our internationally acclaimed journal with a rare opportunity to imagine themselves as novice deep-sea divers, not in search of a Tennysonian Leviathan but rather plunging into the depths to view the wonders of one of the world’s surviving coral reefs, a metaphor for the contents of this issue. As we view Nature’s bounty beneath the ocean, we may not be able to identify all the wondrous types of fish, sponges, anemones, plankton, octopi, starfish and other sea creatures, or the seaweed, ferns, rocks, barnacles and carnivorous plant life beneath the seas. In like manner, we may not be familiar with the wide variety of texts explored and interrogated here or the scholarly readings thereof, yet we will still be able to enjoy them and to be intrigued by dipping into them.

I use the somewhat whimsical metaphor of diving down to a coral reef to stimulate our perhaps tired imaginations as the year draws to an end and to suggest a way into the array of intriguing and varied articles, book reviews, and poems to be discovered in this issue. Here we have no fewer than twenty-five contributions that have passed muster with our dedicated reviewers, to whom I express the Academy’s heartfelt gratitude. An anonymous author once wrote that “the act of judging a piece of writing is fraught with critical difficulties, especially in a postcolonial context. The appointment of a judge is equally thorny.”¹ Why, for example, he or she might also ask, is an old white (wo)man, born in a former British colony, being appointed to judge black writing, or a Western-educated person being asked to assess writing from the Global South? And, to extend my opening metaphor: How could a “landlubber” determine the true value of our endangered coral reef ecosystem?

The task of the writer of an editorial is, I believe, to dispense with such questions of legitimacy and to plunge into the depths of scholarly critique with or without a wet suit and breathing apparatus. For, as our anonymous writer insists, “such issues are small. To an academic in the tradition of aesthetics, any type of writing can be sifted, weighed, and assessed without reference to the writer’s biography or the socio-economic or historical conditions under which it was produced.” Taken as a whole, the contents of this issue create an oceanic wonderworld, or underworld, that reflects a flowering seascape of academic output. In its rich variety of ways of reading, polemical debates raised, points of view expressed, philosophical argumentation, and intuitive creativity, EAR 40(2) is a simulacrum for one such coral reef.

As if surfacing from another nebulous zone—that in which Lit. Crit. Studies finds itself—Gareth Cornwell challenges the enterprise of scholarly critique with his “Postcritique, Critique, Precritique: A Personal View”. Deliberately provocative, the article argues for a return to “precritique”—a position created by review of the logical misstep that made possible the application of theory to the practice of literary criticism in the first place. Some may sympathise with this misstep, but central to it is a setting up of Manichean opposites that are rarely as firmly established as they make themselves out to be, as pointed out by one of the peer reviewers.

Diving even deeper, Rajendra Chetty may expose the conservative-minded among us to the risk of the “bends” with his erudite, (inevitably) politically charged synopsis of the life of artist and activist Fatima Meer. Appropriately entitled “Critical Humanism and Academic Activism in Fatima Meer: Choosing to Be Defiant by Rajendra Chetty (2022)”, the article’s socio-historical view on the emerging topic of critical humanism, contextualised within the writings and life of an avowed maverick, is an important and timely reminder of the need to prioritise subaltern struggles against inhumanity in South African academies and in totalitarian societies elsewhere. As Chetty elucidates, “humanism is an activity devoted to detecting and denouncing tendencies of inhumanity and it is linked to critical theory’s aim of revealing and explaining inequalities and hypocrisy in society.”

In contradistinction and surfing the breakers, David Robinson exposes us to refreshing sea breezes with “The Ocean, the Undertaker’s Wind, a Wind Called Hawkins, and Other Natural Phenomena: Representations of Nature in Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die”. Prefiguring the next issue of EAR—41(1) 2024—dedicated to eco-criticism, this article explores representations of natural phenomena in the second novel in the popular James Bond series. Robinson reminds us that several critics have noted the enjoyment Fleming derived from his Jamaican home, adjacent to the ocean, although this novel is firmly in the thriller/spy genre. The fascination with the sea motif is evident in Fleming’s many references to natural phenomena, and particularly to birds, that provide us with points of reflection about humanity and the environment: deep ecology and humankind’s oceanic heritage.

At the time of writing “Of New Axioms from Alternate Time Zones: Exploring Notions of Another Time in Ben Okri’s Novels The Famished Road, Astonishing the Gods, and The Age of Magic”, the late Fetson Kalua, a brilliant proponent of the theory and praxis of intermediality, signifying tolerance of difference, was floating on a life raft to escape rampant xenophobia in academia and South African society at large. In his attempt to find a new path to the future, Kalua explores Okri’s embrace of magical realism as a genre that allows him to evoke a vision of the world in which the notion of time, rather than being seen as linear, is subject to multiple disruptions. The core argument here is that, in these three novels, Okri locates historical time or temporality in a liminal zone where it combines with space to yield identities that are indeterminate, a correlative of the notions of intermediality and interdisciplinarity. This disruption of Western monadic time, Kalua surmises, helps to move Okri’s readers into realms of alternative temporalities—in this case into mystical time—where notions of spatialising time can be interrogated. For Okri, he concludes, time is not an objective phenomenon; this reveals the extent to which there is always “another” time, perhaps one closer to humanism. In the context of “the postcolonial muse that haunts African writing,” Gayatri Spivak was to write that “most if not all African literary texts in English are already determined by an absence: a lost origin which the text seeks to restore even while recognizing the impossibility of such restoration” (2022, 198). Spivak’s observation seemingly echoes Wole Soyinka’s explication of the myth of the Sango cult and the god’s identification with the source of lightning and traditional African thought, which operates not on “a linear conception of time but [in] a cyclic reality” (1995, 10).

Excavating another, also mythological, time zone, Julie Pridmore dives back into time in “J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur: A Timeless Journey?” The article aims to show how this very early unfinished poem—published posthumously by J. R. R.’s son, Christopher, in 2013—had an influence on and was perhaps a catalyst for the The Lord of the Rings, first published in 1954 to 1955, timelessness being the central theme of both texts. Both are archetypal narratives of life’s cyclical progression, and The Lord of the Rings was soon extended to a trilogy. On being introduced to Tolkien’s famed novel, the likewise justly renowned novelist Salman Rushdie writes in his memoir, entitled Home, that it “entered his consciousness like a disease, an infection he never managed to shake off” (2017, 2). Literary theorist Giorgi Lukács states, pertinently, that “the great mission of true literature is to awaken men [sic] to consciousness of themselves” (1964, 218). Douglas Livingstone, a celebrated marine bacteriologist and, as with our very own J. R. R., an acclaimed South African writer (of poetry), once explained his own penchant for seemingly disparate disciplines by saying: “Science is man’s search for truth; art is the interpretation of it. Poetry probably combines the two” (in Philip 1996, 19).

Reminiscent of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, Grace Danquah’s “Embodying Identity: Exploring the Space and Place of the Émigré in Testimonies of Exile” skates on the thin ice of themes of rootlessness, loss of identity, displacement, and lack of belonging. Here she explores Abena Busia’s poetry anthology, which she argues is a prototype of exile literature. In her reading of these poems, Danquah argues that the place and space of the immigrant are not only secondary and bordering on the peripherals of foreign culture, but, reflecting feminist issues of self-acclamation, also seen as contemptible—a wound that might never heal.

The article by A. Vijayashanthi and co-authors, titled “The Quest for Identity in a Male-Dominated Society: Representations of Women in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters”, extends the theme of identity, adopting a feminist perspective, a prominent focus in recent writing by Indian women. In contrast to the more conventional portrayal of marital bliss and dutiful, home-bound women, the article highlights the inner lives and delicate relationships of this novel’s female characters, alluding also to Kapur’s second and third novels that, likewise, foreground women’s struggles for independence and self-realisation. It invokes Virginia Woolf’s somewhat obvious observations about the difference between male- and female-authored texts: “It is probable … that both in life and in art, the values of women are not the values of a man” (2009, 81). As an example of “precritique”, despite enticing one with a passing reference to Michel Foucault’s statement that “truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power” (1980, 131), the article lacks the kind of theoretical rigour displayed in exemplary articles by the likes of Chetty or in the next article, a type of rigour that academic scholarship has come to expect.

Picking up on the notion of Foucault’s “truth”, Fiona Taylor invites us to take a ride in a glass-bottomed boat to explore the mysteries of the coral reef from a position of safety in “The Master of the Unsayable: Elena Ferrante’s Representations of the Complexities of Female Friendship as a Form of ‘Truth-Telling’”. Elaborating on the expectations of current analytical critique, one of the peer reviewers wrote:

The article is well written, stylistically balanced, and well structured and original in focus, with pragmatic examples and impeccable up-to-the-point citations. It denotes scholarly potentials to further the theme of Italian literature in English translations and consequent marketing success.

In this article, which focuses on the method and methodologies used to define and describe female friendships and truthfulness, the writer expands on contemporary studies on Ferrante’s literary production, offering a comparative analysis of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults.

Snorkelling above our coral reef, and in a subtle twist on Danquah’s article on the émigré, Josephine Olufunmilayo Alexander examines one of the major themes of African literature, and a central preoccupation of African diasporic fiction on migration, in “Displacement in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names”. This article addresses the adverse criticism of the novel as “poverty porn”, exploring not one but three intertwined facets of displacement: the internal displacement suffered by Zimbabweans in the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina of 2005, purportedly intended to cleanse urban cities of rubbish; the displacement that results from the emigration of Zimbabweans to other southern African countries to escape poverty; and displacement as a result of the illegal emigration of the protagonist, Darling, to the United States. Alexander situates her argument in Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the Abject, in terms of abjection as induced by political, economic, and social disintegration. The analysis explores why the characters in We Need New Names do not manage to attain the Afropolitan identity of the characters in the works of diaspora authors such as Taiye Selasi and Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie.

In Anupama Bandopadhyay’s “Nation, Nationalism, and Womanhood in Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir”, the author sustains the themes of ethnic identity and trauma within the sociopolitical context of nationalism, extending readings of female life in the patriarchy of India as if spotting the missing tentacle of an ailing octopus. Drawing on Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), the article begins by defining nationalism as a concept that “gives rise to dogmatic notions of loyalty and allegiance to one’s nation”, linking this to the idea of nation-states. As if in a subtle twist of Woolf’s truism, the writer asserts that the issue of allegiance to the idea of nation has “played out differently for men and women”, in terms of the warrior versus the home-maker. The article concludes that Bashir’s autobiography documents the territorial and political trauma that women in a war zone are exposed to, so that even the familiar aroma of curry and freshly baked bread exacerbates female trauma.

Throwing the fisherman’s net wide, the eleventh and final article in this bumper issue of EAR, “The Reader, the Rodent, and the Viral Regeneration of Fear: Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ as a Covid-19 Allegory” by Mohammed Hamdan, places trauma within the recent global historical moment, approaching Franz Kafka’s story “The Burrow” as an uncanny allegory for the social panic and claustrophobia induced by the Covid-19 pandemic. Written in lucid prose and demonstrating familiarity with Kafka’s oeuvre and relevant scholarship, the article brings together several of the themes and motifs covered in the issue, as evidenced by Hamdan’s conclusion that Kafka’s “The Burrow” can be employed to reflect on the meaning(s) of space, subjective identity, and social relations in the time of Covid-19. On the one hand the delirium-like actions of Kafka’s rodent in its underground place reflect the problematic definition of space in a time of crisis. The ambivalent relationship between internal and external spaces demonstrates a dilemma of spatial fragmentation that is difficult to escape. The rodent’s failure to create healthy connections between inside and outside transforms its home into a place with a fragmented spatial identity. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the impossibility of arriving at a concrete understanding of public or outside spaces becomes a metaphor that implies the recurrent possibility of exclusion. On the other hand, the article shows how the politics of exclusion, which is embodied in the rodent’s frequent retreats into the inner space of the Castle Keep, defines the crisis of social relations in a world that is rife with fear, tension, and suspension. The rodent’s fear of other creatures bespeaks the internal fear experienced by individuals during the Covid-19 pandemic, incapable of self-knowledge due to the absence of social dialogues and the fear of others.

Just as coral reefs provide a fragile habitat for bio-diverse marine life, so too does our flagship journal, under the auspices of Taylor & Francis and Unisa Press, provide a platform for international research, diverse aesthetic debate, and intellectual deliberation. This issue represents diverse facets of the modes of knowledge production, such as pure and applied research, prestigious lectures, book reviews, and creative writing. What then are the key sources of knowledge production in research? Four of these are intuition, authority, rational induction, and scientific empiricism. And I would add a fifth and a sixth: genuine scholarship, and the operations of the imaginatio creatix. All of the abovementioned are showcased in this issue.

Notes

1 Taken from a generically titled “report” which is in my possession, written by an unknown author.