Kris Van der Bijl

For a book to be about place, an agent central to the narrative must journey to a place. In Place: South African Literary Journeys, Justin Fox makes the journey himself. His text explores South African written landscapes and recasts them through his authorial eyes. It is writing about writers who wrote about specific places. History, then, is central to the text, as Fox goes out to get a sense of how places currently appear. Loss becomes inevitable, for no world is like it is written. 

He chooses nine South African writers and their literary topographies. Fox admits that his choice is “personal, reflecting [his] own literary and literal geographies” (10). Some obvious choices include Olive Schreiner’s Karoo, Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico, JM Coetzee’s Moordenaars Karoo, and Dalene Matthee’s Knysna Forest. Fox includes some older – somewhat dated – choices: Sir Percy FitzPatrick’s Lowveld, Deneys Reitz Kommando travels, and Eugéne Marais’s Waterberg. Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast and Stephen Watson’s Cederberg are the two most contemporary. Fox’s journey has him visit the actual sites referenced by the author (Knysna Forest), significant sites for the author (Schreiner’s grave on Buffelskop), possible inspiration for their texts, or – as with Watson – the locale where their literary spirit seems placed. 

There’s a diversity-shaped hole in the chosen texts for a critic to stick their finger through. He clarifies that his travel choices are tied to his own literary past as an older white. Although guides often join Fox, it is telling that he spends most nights of his travels alone. He is sometimes eccentric enough to braai boerewors and sosaties and drink Cab Sauv before returning to bed. Reading this book is viewing the world through Fox’s particular gaze. Even when he quotes from his primary sources, recalls conversations, and offers standard arguments about the text (Schreiner’s African Farm is allegorical, for example), the text remains a construct of the mind of his own character. We see the landscapes through his journey. This is essential to the functioning of the text.

Visiting Olive Schreiner’s Karoo is an apt starting point. Fox mentions her position as a foundational author in the South African English literary canon. He visits her old house, now a museum, in Cradock. Local guides take him to the ruins of the old houses where she worked as a governess. Throughout the chapter – and all later chapters – Fox engages in a light but thorough analysis of each text. For Schreiner, it was how her characters sought to find their place somewhere as inhospitable and life-giving as the Karoo. The chapter culminates in Fox’s visit to her dome-like grave on Buffelskop. He speaks of a white bird flying over the peak, an allusion to Schreiner’s allegorical ‘white bird of truth.’

Fox bookends his FitzPatrick’s chapter with a memory of his childhood dog. This reminds the reader that Jock of the Bushveld, however dated, has certain timeless resonances. Fox notes how a good deal of the original text contains elements of animal cruelty, racial stereotypes, and other acts of violence once rarely questioned. Jock of the Bushveld lacks the literary relevance of some other texts. This might explain why the chapter has more to do with Fox rediscovering the old wagon trading routes than exploring the text beyond its events. It’s cool to hear about the enthusiasts who placed small Jock-themed road signs for other fans to follow. It’s probably sad that most go unnoticed, but it’s not unsurprising. Fox explores how some new farm owners appear uninterested in their land’s relation to FitzPatrick’s text. His guide, Kobus, relates this loss of literary history to the land claims in the area (53). Similar sentiments return in the chapter on Eugène Marais’s Waterberg. Fox describes a man called Boet, who “lay in his bed, behind electric fences, surrounded by rifles and old South African flags, while antagonistic farm labourers camped on the land, awaiting their day.” (112). Note how one side is labelled the enemy, with the other side waiting for their own loss.

The politics of loss troubles the traveling Fox. It becomes beautiful in the exploration of Deneys Reitz Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War. Reitz’s text recounts his own travels during the Boer War as a soldier against the British Empire. Here, it is clear how Fox’s text is always writing on writing of somewhere exterior to both texts. He invokes the strange hauntings certain old towns caught in the middle of the war still possess. This haunting loss becomes a kind of beauty that feels at home. Fox is shown a church still unpatched from bullet holes. He meets Afrikaners whose families can recall their grandparents (always) personal connection to Jan Smuts. He visits a blockhouse, once used by British soldiers against Boer commandos, and contemplates its near invisibility alongside the N1. When he enters it, he describes the graffiti placed by its new inhabitants. This casts new light on the kind of loss Fox seems to invoke.

It’s worth unpacking the difference between Fox, the author, and Fox, the travelling speaker. The chapters Bosman and Coetzee deals with authorial voice in distinct ways. His travels into the Marico introduce him to local enthusiasts. Not only do they show Fox some significant sites, but they also appear to do the talking. Both indirect and direct speech are used throughout the text, but this chapter forefronts vocality by being subtitled “Englikaans.” Fox uses this term to refer to Bosman’s ability to write English narrators who speak from an Afrikaans-sounding place. It is a form of English that captures both languages and reflects their dual place in the Marico. This, with the writing on writing of travels, gives a polyvocal take on how some relate to literary places. Numerous voices are at play, even if the text’s authority comes from Fox.

The collection would not be complete without some reference to JM Coetzee. Fox follows the journey taken by Michael K, one of Coetzee’s most ethereal creations. Fox’s journey to Prince Albert leads him to the Coetzee family farm, Vogelfontein. Fox begins constructing tentative connections between K and Coetzee on the farm. He even quotes from Coetzee’s autobiographical writings. The author and character remain separate in a well-behaved literary fashion. Whether Fox wants us to view the author and the narrator as discrete remains elusive, but it would be a waste not to wonder how he feels about his role as author, narrator, and protagonist. It is crucial in non-fictional texts to discern the characteristics of the narrator. In Fox’s Place, the narrator is a travelling character. He is a protagonist, like Michael K, on a journey, even when he is simultaneously Fox the writer, at home in his library, finding quotes from Coetzee’s autobiographies.

The real world does merge with the world of the text in Dalene Matthee’s Knysna Forest. Circles in the Forest is Matthee’s most exemplary novel about it. This does not suggest that the text equals reality but that names and places align. The chapter’s focus remains on how Matthee captured something of the forest’s spirit. Written in the mid-1980s, the novel looks at a past when the forest was becoming a place of commerce and conquest. It has been under threat since colonial forces took hold in the mid-nineteenth century. The elephants are all but gone. A local guide talks about the lone female elephant still rumoured to evade humans. The guide hints that there is more than one, suggesting that we don’t know everything. One can extend this to the act of knowing itself. An author can’t know everything about any place, a fact which results in their writing’s inability to be a complete representation of a place. Yet they still have authority by virtue of some strange force. Here, a gap is used to express an impossibility. Self-awareness covers the gap between writing and the real world. Writing is created by the writer. Their own biases and personality will always affect their written worlds.

Fox mentions his personal history through the text. It is central to chapter nine. Fox travels to Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast here and mentions first visiting the region as a child in the 1970s. He places his re-entry alongside Mda’s historical writing of the area in his novel The Heart of Redness. The novel examines how the cattle killings of 1856 still influences the cultural life of the Xhosa people. Prophetess Nongqawuse instigated these killings. She predicted that culling livestock and burning crops would allow the spirit of the ancestors to return. This would drive the British back into the sea. Fox does well to unpack the complex and multigenerational text. He mentions the Wild Coast later, noting that its story “has been darker with unscrupulous miners bent on destroying the land” (267). The past is an idyll for Fox.

In his final journey, Fox travels to the Cederberg with a selection of writings by Stephen Watson. He speaks of his childhood hikes with his father around the area. While he manages to locate Watson’s favourite cottage, he appears disillusioned with the area’s renovations. Unlike the other places he visits, the exact location is not wholly defined, for Watson’s writing about the Cederberg is far more in spirit than in a definite area. His return to Cape Town references his childhood journey to Greece, an anecdote with which he begins the text. 

Fox rounds off the text with a larger discussion of place, to him, in South Africa. This proves challenging to assess appropriately. His small selection stunts his ability to evaluate South African literature at large. Take, for instance, “Prior to the end of apartheid, there was little black writing about landscape, other than in relation to dispossession.” (262). The size of the world that he has set up does not appear capable of taking him far. This, in turn, illustrates a hinderance to his authority as the writer. He does prove his own literary prowess, but statements like this result from the limitations of his chosen texts.

A love of South African places holds the connection together. Fox illustrates his knowledge and affection. He does well to fill his text with passion. Place is a text that glances at historical constructions of place and travels to note their differences now. Despite its narrowness, it has merit. It also presents a reminder of how to read. All texts should be read by what they are and not what they should be. Even if issues of needing to inhabit another traveller to understand their journeys, one should remember that it is their journey. We are visitors, viewers, of his travels, and his travels always begin with an entry of his own.

Publishing details:

Book Title:                              Place: South African Literary Journeys

Author:                                    Justin Fox

Publisher:                               Penguin Random House South Africa

Place of Publication:              Cape Town, South Africa

Year of Publication:               2023

Pages:                                     281

ISBN:                                      978-1-4152-1106-9

Publisher Website:                 www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za