Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
a project might be said to be book-historical that is interested in considering the influences of historical, material, social, political, cultural and economic variables on the manifestations of texts of all kinds (whether script or print) as physical objects, and in the implication of these texts—in their material embodiments—for circuits of circulation and use, and fields of cultural validation and contestation through which their meanings are made and remade. The ambition of such a field is impressive, if a little daunting. Scholars in a number of disciplines have in recent years contributed to the field studies of dizzying variety, considering also the imbrication of print and manuscript cultures, the history of printing and bookselling, the emergence of institutions affecting (enabling, but also limiting) publication and reception, and studies of what was actually read by particular classes or communities.3
Hackel (2005, 4) observes that book history as a discipline first developed a critical mass of scholarship in the study of three particular areas: ancien régime France, the United States in the nineteenth century and early modern Britain; it arose in these periods, she suggested, “because they were critical and transitional moments in the means of production, circulation, and consumption of texts”. These texts, or those that survive in largest number, were printed ones. As South African scholars Isabel Hofmeyr and Lize Kriel (2006, 14) note, northern-hemisphere book history developed “in a context in which the idea of the book has become naturalized. Much of the scholarship hence operates from an unstated and generally commonsensical idea of what a book is”. Let us simply note this definitional problem, and also that tensions about the expansiveness of the term “book” are well recognised within the discipline—or aggregation of disciplines: “the history of the book must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method”, Darnton (2002, 22) averred in the early 1980s. Hofmeyr (2001) herself has written insightfully on “metaphorical” books in an African context. Karin Barber (2001, 13) reminds us that a “book” produced locally in Africa—“in Onitsha, Accra, Ìbàdàn, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam”—might bear little resemblance to books that a Westerner might recognise: “They merge into booklets and booklets merge into pamphlets” and their means of distribution are often like that of other ephemera, printed or otherwise. She has suggested that a useful way to think about book history in Africa is via the concept of printing culture rather than the term print culture, which implies vast and reasonably homogeneous publics interpellated by print commodities. In Africa, printed matter often emerges from small-scale jobbing printers with a limited and variegated reach. While the majority of book-historical work in the modern period—the moment of African colonialism and after—has been concerned de facto with print, we shall see in due course that several contributors to this volume are keenly attuned to the difficulty of excluding oral traditions and orature from the field.
What, then, about the task of following the journeys taken by books, however loosely defined, and about their effects? Darnton’s (2002, 11) suggestion was that we might consider what he called those “circuits of communication” through which printed artefacts typically travel, via multiple agents involved in an extended life cycle that includes authors, publishers, printers (at various times before our current era these might have included compositors, pressmen and warehousemen, but also, for Darnton, suppliers of paper, ink and type), distributors (including agents and representatives), booksellers (including informal traders—now we might include online sales of physical books as well as digital downloads of electronic ones) and readers (whether intended or not, and whether those choosing to purchase a text or who come by it in another manner). (We might think about how, in Boyhood, John’s great-aunt Annie had her father’s book printed and bound at her own expense, and how she tried unsuccessfully to place it in “the bookshops of Cape Town” before hawking it “door to door” [Coetzee 1998, 118]).
Darnton’s influential model was an attempt at providing a structure for what was becoming a crowded interdisciplinary field, drawing together the discrete case study models advanced by textual scholars like McGann and printing historians and erstwhile bibliographers like McKenzie in a capacious framework that ostensibly allowed scholars to locate the objects of their study at different points in an encompassing whole.4 But Peter McDonald and others have suggested that Darnton’s model privileges different actors’ functions over their relative status. In 1997 McDonald (111) noted that, just as different publishers are more or less prestigious, each actor in the circuit “has a changeable and, indeed, often precarious status relative to his or her immediate competitors and to the field of production as a whole”. Here French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the “field of cultural production” proved highly useful for McDonald and a number of other theorists and historians of the book.5 The literary field, Bourdieu (1993, 42) suggests, is a “site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer”. In other words, a series of interconnected cultural and social systems, each with its own hierarchies and overlapping structures of authority and prestige, additionally affect authors and their books in various struggles to determine their works’ relative cultural status, their cultural capital. Any study of the literary field consequently requires an attempt to reconstruct “the space of positions and the space of the position-takings … in which they are expressed”, Bourdieu argues (1993, 29–30).
Reconstructing these spaces seemed to many in the field of literary studies to be merely ancillary to the tasks of literary scholarship. One response was to emphasise, as Rose does, a tension between empiricism, on the one hand, and theoretical approaches to text, on the other, and then valorising one or the other. Rose (1994, 462) argues, for example, that while book historians are interested in many of the issues of general literary theoretical concern (including authorship, the canon, readers and reading), they “find that the work of [theorists] is based on shaky assumptions, reckless generalizations, and guesswork”. Less confrontationally, especially if attuned to the history of the opposition of “theory” and “history” in late- and post-colonial contexts like South Africa’s, one might observe instead that while literary criticism has always been concerned with the meanings of texts, book history is concerned with how these meanings are influenced by factors often beyond the control of authors themselves, with how they are intimately connected with (among other pressures) those exercised by the publishing industry, agents and editors; the ruling discourses of reviewing and the economics of bookselling and advertising; censorship or other kinds of state control or public moral or political pressure; the exigencies of popular reception, serialisation or abridgement (and also educational institutionalisation); the valorising economics of literary prize cultures; and, indeed, academic study.
If what is at issue is an imperative to chart and trace the predicaments of text and of the textual (print or otherwise), then, as McDonald (1997, 120–21) suggests, rather than asking what book history can contribute to literary criticism, one might well turn the question on its head and ask what might be the “relevance of literary interpretation to book history”. Book-historical studies, studies in the cultures of script and print, studies of the institutions of text or of the literary might then be all regarded as offering the prospect of “nuanced, responsible” accounts of the vagaries of meaning and the contingency of validating categories (including “literariness”), an account that “refuses to accept the assurances of traditional historicism, or to define itself against reading, criticism” and, crucially for McDonald (2003, 241), “theory”. McDonald (2003, 231) observes that theory and book history both seek in effect to focus on “the problematics of dissemination and its implications for classical ideas of close reading”: theorists interested in text (implicitly influenced, McDonald suggests, by post-structuralism—he labels them “ahistorical textualists”) seemed to have squared up, in one understanding of what might be thought of as a literary culture war in the 1980s and 1990s, against bibliographers and literary sociologists (“historical documentalists”) without acknowledging their shared concerns. “The point”, McDonald (2003, 232) concludes, is to recognise that an interest in the literary need not exclude a concern with the material, and vice versa. The point is, in his words,
not to celebrate the document at the expense of writing—in Derrida’s sense of the term—but to study its attempts to contain the disruptive forces of dissemination, and, in so doing, to make publishing history the foundation of a larger history of reading (McDonald