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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | 'Such wanton innocence': representing South African boyhoods |
| Author: | Medalie, David |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa |
| Volume: | 12 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 41-61 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | literature novels |
| About persons: | Mark Behr (1963-2015) John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-) Marguerite Poland (1950-) |
| Abstract: | This essay compares three South African novels - Mark Behr's 'The smell of apples' (1995; originally published as 'Die reuk van appels' in 1993), J.M. Coetzee's 'Boyhood: scenes from provincial life' (1997), and Marguerite Poland's 'Iron love' (1999). All three are concerned, in different ways, with the representation of South African boyhoods. They are works of recollection, restitution and, particularly in the case of Behr, rectification: they are preoccupied with the need to capture the past, either to render nostalgically its passing or to set it right. To consider the three works together is to move along a continuum, both historically and ideologically. Historically, they range from the Georgian boyhood represented by Poland, which focuses on the years immediately preceding the Great War (1914-1918) and the War itself, to Coetzee's representation of a boyhood in the 1940s and early 1950s, to the work of Behr, which deals with the mid-1970s. Ideologically, in terms of the perspective adopted by the present in relation to the past, they range from what may be termed the 'assenting' boyhood represented by Poland, to the 'agnostic' boyhood of Coetzee, to the 'atheistic' boyhood of Behr. In all three novels, the question of belief is foregrounded and, linked to that, the problem of belonging. All these considerations bear explicitly or implicitly upon the issue of masculinity and upon the ways in which men respond to the modes of masculinity which are offered to them at a formative stage in their lives. Bibliogr. |