And the effect of extreme differences in material conditions between writer and reader remains decisive. Such differences affect profoundly the imagery, the relativity of values, the referential interpretation of events between the cultural givens of most writers and, for example, the new class of industrial workers, emancipated by the surplus value of leisure earned first by mechanisation and then computerisation. Writers, longing to be ‘read’ by anyone who reads them, from time to time attempt to overcome this in various and curious ways. John Berger has experimented by going to live among peasants, trying to enter into their life-view as formed by their experience. He writes about their lives in a mode that signifies for us, who are not French peasants; we ‘read’ him with all our experience we share with him of literary exoticism, of life-as-literature providing the necessary layers of references. He doesn’t say whether the peasants read what he writes; but remarks that they are aware that he has access to something they don’t have, ‘another body of knowledge, a knowledge of the surrounding but distant world’. A recent review of one of Bobbie Ann Mason’s books sums up the general problem: ‘She writes the kind of fiction her characters would never read.’
In South Africa there has been demonstrated recently an ostensibly wider potential readership for writers within our population of 29 million, only five million of whom are white. Politically motivated, in the recognition that the encouragement of literature is part of liberation, trade unions and community groups among the black population have set up makeshift libraries and cultural debate. Now, I do not believe that one should ever underestimate the powers of comprehension of anyone who is literate. I don’t believe anyone should be written down to. (Had I been confined in this way I certainly never would have become a writer.) Once the love of literature ignites, it can consume many obstacles to understanding. The vocabulary grows in proportion to the skills of the writer in providing imaginative leaps. But these must land somewhere recognizable; and most writers share no givens with the kind of potential readership I have just described.
In Africa and many places elsewhere, John Updike’s beautifully-written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off no referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have no referents in the professional class of suburban North America. The domestic traumas of black South Africans are children imprisoned in detention, lovers fleeing the country from security police, plastic shelters demolished by the authorities and patched together again by husband and wife. The novels of Gabriel García Márquez, himself a socialist, presuppose an answering delight in the larger-than-life that can find little response in those whose own real experience outdoes all extremes, the solitudes of apartheid surpassing any hundred years of solitude. The marvellous fantasies of an Italo Calvino require givens between writer and reader that are not merely a matter of sophistication.
Life is not like that for this readership. Books are not (Barthes) made of other books, for them. Furthermore, the imaginative projection of what life might be like is not like that. These texts cannot be ‘read’ even in terms of aspirations. Surely this is true of serious writers in and from most countries where material conditions do not remotely correspond with those of the reader.
It is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an over-privileged minority, are worlds away from those of a migratory miner living in a single-sex hostel, a black schoolteacher grappling with pupils who risk their lives as revolutionaries, black journalists, doctors, clerks, harassed by the police and vigilantes round their homes. The gap sometimes seems too great to reach across for even the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection. I am not saying, nor do I believe, that whites cannot write about blacks, or blacks about whites. Even black writers, who share with these readers disaffection and humiliation under racist laws, generally acquire middle-class or privileged unconventional styles of living and working concommitant with middle-class signifiers, as they make their way as writers. Often it is only by a self-conscious effort of memory — using the signifiers of childhood, before they joined the elite of letters, or drawing on the collective memory of an oral tradition — that they can be sure they will be ‘read’ by these readers. Freedom of movement — week-end trips, stays in hotels, choice of occupation — which punctuates the lives of many fictional characters, signifies nothing to the migratory worker whose contract does not allow him to stay on in town if he changes jobs, and whose ‘holiday’ at the end of eighteen months down a mine is the return home to plough and sow. The cosseted white adolescent who rebels against the materialism of parents signifies nothing to the child revolutionaries, often precociously intelligent, an increasing phenomenon in Latin America as well as South Africa, who have abandoned parents, never known home comforts, and taken on life-and-death decisions for themselves. Even among white-collar readers of this milieu, existential anguish — Sartre’s nausea or Freud’s discontents — finds no answering association where there is a total preoccupation with the business of survival. The Spoils of Poynton cannot be read as the apotheosis of the cult of possession by someone who has never seen such objects to covet, someone whose needs would not correspond to any attraction they are presupposed to have — that ‘given’ attraction taken as read, by the writer.
You might well object: Who expects a poorly-educated clerk or teacher to read Henry James? But, as I have tried to illustrate, many signifiers that are commonplace, assumed, in the cultural code of the writer find no referents in that of the potential wider readership.
What can the writer count on if she/he obstinately persists that one can write for anyone who picks up one’s book? Even the basic emotions, love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, often find expression in a manner that has no correspondence between one code of culture and another. The writer may count on the mythic, perhaps. On a personification of fears, for example, recognizable and surviving from the common past of the subcon scious, when we were all in the cave together, there were as yet no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid differences in colour. The prince who has turned into a frog and the beetle Gregory who wakes up to find himself transformed into are avatars of the fear of being changed into something monstrous, whether by the evil magic of a shaman or by psychological loss of self, that signify across all barriers, including that of time. They can be ‘read’ by anyone, everyone. But how few of us, the writers, can hope ever to create the crystal ball in which meaning can be read, pure and absolute; it is the vessel of genius, which alone, now and then, attains universality in art.
For the rest of us, there is no meta-culture. We ought to be modest in our claims. There is no generic reader, out there.
The kiss of the millennium when art shall be universal understanding shows no sign of being about to release us from our limitations.
— 1989