10 Jan – 17 Jan 2015
Cape Town
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Where is she? Dream Life and Real Life
Where is she?
An Olive Schreiner question but one with universal applicability for archival research: In what do we find knowledge of people and events from the past? This has been prompted by a brief visit to Matjiesfontein, a tiny stopping place on the railway line from Cape Town to Kimberley and Johannesburg where Schreiner lived for a number of periods of time. I’ve been here on a number of occasions because, just off the N1 road, it is now a very convenient car stopping point for the traveller. Over the years, various friends have spoken of how the place is important to understanding Schreiner’s character and what she was like. Indeed, I’ve been told with certainty that Matjiesfontein and also the village of Hanover, elsewhere in the Karoo, still hold something of Schreiner that can be sensed, is palpable. With respect, I have trouble with this way of thinking. The past is over, gone, and the pens, clothes and so on hold nothing much, and place is equally susceptible to the ravages of time.
What turns me on about the past and its detritus is not any hint of Olive Schreiner peering through the door, but the battered jigsaw-puzzle of its remaining remnants – not many edges, no picture as a clue, and no certainty that all the pieces belong together. Where is ‘she’? Good and gone, good and gone. What remains? An incomplete, oddly configured lot of stuff that doesn’t fit together very well, the remains of the representational products of the small but significant part of the past that involved Olive Schreiner in writing her allegories, stories, novels, political essays, and many thousands of letters to friends, enemies, family, political allies and opponents, newspapers, lodginghouse keepers. It is the patchy often misleading sometimes illuminating always thought provoking character of the representational detritus of the past and its many puzzles that is the turn on.
Dream Life and Real Life
This is the title of a short book, composed by a number of longer allegories, by Olive Schreiner. The title allegory is particularly tricky to interpret in ethical terms (which is what, at basis, all her allegories are concerned with). Among other things, it raises the hazy shifting line that exists between mind, imagination and consciousness, and the world of materiality and things. Sometimes they slide over each other, sometimes violently collide, sometimes run in parallel, sometimes shade into each other.
The title phrase is also for me an apposite way of characterising the relationship, rather odd and provoking, that exists between that concentrated focused life of the mind during periods of intensive archive research, and the world of things and people, streets, cars and so on that one steps out into after each day’s dusty graft in this archive collection or that. In earlier research starting in 1994 on Olive Schreiner’s letters, how disconcerting it was to read her corruscating words written in the 1890s and 1900s about where South Africa was heading, and then step outside at 4.30 each day blinking like a mole into the harsh sunlight of Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, where what she had written had come to pass. Here dream life and real life did all of the above colliding, shading and running in parallel, at one and the same time. Something similar happens now, in researching how white people have represented the ethnic and ‘race’ aspects of people and life around them from the 1770s on. Andin large part what the mind-mole tunnels away at are the complexities of the relationship between representation and life, that this is not just paper and its proxies but involves people who lived, laughed, loved, were sad, angry and so on, and who wrote about this and more and did so in a myriad of ways.
Last updated: 18 January 2015
