kagablog

III

Looking at the photographed hands on the day I found them, the thing that disturbed my archival complacency, that grabbed my thoughts and would not let go for days and weeks until I started writing about them, was the thought that these photographs in their coagulated state was about communicating something to the future, my present, that was of some deep and not entirely intelligible significance. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur writes with regard to his third category of mimesis, which he calls mimesis3, that aesthetic reception of something cannot take up the problem of communication without also taking up that of reference. ‘What is communicated,’ Ricoeur continues to say, ‘in the final analysis, is, beyond the sense of a work, the world it projects and that constitutes its horizon. In this sense, the listeners or readers receive it according to their own receptive capacity, which itself is defined by a situation that is both limited and open to the world’s horizon.’

A situation both limited and open to the world’s horizon.

I think that this explains to an extent not the ‘what’ or the ‘why’, but the ‘how’ of the emotional appeal these photographs made on me in their prenarrative quality of experience that hints at the existence of music. For all their extreme alienation to the reality of an historical world in which they ‘composed’ and ‘played’ – a world of social engineering, desperate poverty, broken lives and ruined futures – extreme alienation is still a case of intersection. I think that the acontextualism of these hands, firstly with respect to their distance from real performed music and secondly with respect to the space of their Steinway keyboard and its obvious ‘remove’ from society, convey only the particular modality of the intersection with the society where the hands and piano ‘lived’. That which could be construed as indifference toward society is in fact a Romantic – again with a capital ‘R’ – engagement with it. An engagement that set itself apart from the same society validating its existence by espousing all the symptoms of Romanticism: the unimportance of context, the mistrust of language, the aspiration to emulate the truth and elegance of nature, the prizing of the unique person and the diversity implied by this, the ideological scaffolding of a formalist point of view proclaiming the possibility, nay, the imperative of complete meaning in the work of art stripped of its context. Ricoeur speaks of the intersections contained in a work being both limited and open to the world’s horizon, and I think he intends this to be read as intersections that exist synchronically. However, I sense that today, when we speak to a title like ‘Composing ApARTheid’, we are still inhabiting the old world to such an extent that we cannot address the subject as if it were some historical event, or series of events. We – I – have to treat it in the sense that I am now, at this present and in this discourse, composing Apartheid or a version thereof that I can live with. We have to stretch Ricoeur’s meaning to encompass the limited historical context and the ever expanding horizon of time intersecting with it. It is a more complicated view of Apartheid than is allowed for in granting it a beginning and an end, and the narratives we devise to tell our story might not most profitably be confined to ones with happy endings/beginnings at Victor Verster or diachronic listings mostly confined to tracing the Marxist faultlines of social structures and cultural production, however sophisticated we make these perspectives. My wish would be for narratives about Apartheid that recognize both our need to tell, and our humble and honest recognition that we can never tell it all. Fundamentally, it is a wish that depends on Ricoeur’s insight that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence’. Following from his reading of Augustine’s Confessions (Book II), Ricoeur realizes that the conversion of time (‘the past’, for my purpose) into narrative does not solve aporia’s, but only resolves them poetically (and not theoretically). ‘The question of the relationship between time and narrative culminates in this dialectic between an aporetics and a poetics.’ The past is accessible as a modality of the present in which the writer and the reader, anchored in the world of action (the present) interacts with the world poetically mediated by narrative (the past). Central to this transaction is the refiguration that takes place through Ricoeur’s constructed categories of mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3. It exposes a notion of historical complexity that is indispensible to South African stories. ‘This South African word,’ writes Graham Pechey on Apartheid in the context of the migrancy of South African words, ‘has a lot more travelling to do.’

In this spirit I think that these photographed hands indicate an action – the motionlessness should not be confused with a lack of action, of motivation to pose – that points to a place and time other than its own present. A place and time where, of course, it is not and will not be, as it was not then as a prior side to narrative, ethically neutral. But an infinitely extended moment of intersection where the hands signal the sensual – for the fingers, and the pads of the fingers are for pianists sensual endings or extensions of the keys – points of contact between what is inside and what is allowed to flow to the outside. What is referenced as ‘flowing’ in these photographs is of course music. These photographs of Arnold van Wyk’s hands constitute an iconic visual preservation of an articulated gesture of aesthetic transmission in something refusing words and pointing to a meeting of private and public space. It asserts the primacy of its agent and his music intersecting with our world – my world – in a manner that, I maintain, I cannot approximate under a subject potentially assuming so much historically as ‘Composing ApARTheid’; a set of circumstances that assumes conclusions so confidently that it induces paralysis in those whose stories do not coincide with the endings imposed by the historical cut-off dates, or who wish to arrive at different conclusions. There exist things from the past, sometimes incomprehensible and inexplicably significant, that cannot become part of the story this book wishes to tell, and in this, constitute a crucial, discordant part of its plot.

BibBliography

‘A bomb thrown at S.A. culture’. 1959. Somerset Budget, 29 July.Hönigsberg, David. 1999. ‘Chamber Symphony 1998’. Current Musicology, 67-68, pp. 139-56.Muller, Stephanus. 2000. ‘Sounding Margins: Musical Representations of White South Africa’. D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford._. 2002. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Current Musicology, 74, pp. 250-54.Meyer, Leonard B. 1989. ‘Toward a Theory of Style’. In Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, pp. 3-37.Pechey, Graham. 2004. ‘On Trek’. The Times Literary Supplement, 30 April, p. 15.Ricoeur, Paul. 1990 [1983]. Time and Narrative (trans. Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Said, Edward. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta.
comAp book.indd 311 13/9/07 10:44:39
3 12 C o mM p osS i ng Aa p artheidSebald, WG. 2002. Austerlitz (trans. Anthea Bell). New York: Modern Library.Walton, Chris. 2004. ‘Bond of Brothers: Anton Hartman and Music in an Apartheid State’. Musical Times, 145(1887), pp. 63-74.EendnotesSa � IammuchindebtedtoSebald’swritinginconstructinganarrativevoiceforthisI am much indebted to Sebald’s writing in constructing a narrative voice for this article, including his evocative use of photographs.

b TherestofthisparagraphalsomakesuseofMeyer’sconceptualframework.The rest of this paragraph also makes use of Meyer’s conceptual framework.c DiscussingtheproseofNaguibMahfouz,EdwardSaidcontrastsittoprosebyDiscussing the prose of Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said contrasts it to prose by Palestinian novelists Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi (within the collective of ‘Arab writing’) by drawing parallels between the differences in geographical and political instability in Egypt on the one hand and Palestine and Lebanon on the other. The point that the subjects in the latter two countries are ‘urgently political and its concerns radically existential’ compared to that of Mahfouz has something to do with the different relationality of prose production in the three situations (2001: 317-26). I think that a similar understanding needs to be cultivated in heuristic constructions of South African culture, where the ‘one nation’ idea is an anachronistic and political imposition on the divided realities of South African cultural production and differentiated relationality to politics and ideology. I suspect, for instance, that Afrikaner cultural production is now, for the first time since the early decades of the twentieth century, again becoming more and more existentially explorative.d VanWyk’sliteraryestatewasonlyofficiallydonatedtotheUniversityofVan Wyk’s literary estate was only officially donated to the University of Stellenbosch by his executors (Jan du Toit and James May) on 16 September 2002. Substantial documentary material from Van Wyk’s estate (including letters, diaries, photographs, and lectures) was held by NALN in Bloemfontein. As part of a permanent loan agreement between the two institutions it was transferred to the University of Stellenbosch in March 2004 to be integrated with the rest of the Van Wyk collection.

e VanWykleftforPretoriaon28December1953.Hetravelled,ashefrequentlyVan Wyk left for Pretoria on 28 December 1953. He travelled, as he frequently did, on the famous Blue Train. Van Wyk stayed with the Barons for six weeks, only travelling back to Cape Town on 11 February, after having received the news on 18 January that his song cycle Van Liefde en Verlatenheid had been selected for performance at that year’s International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Haifa, Israel.

f Unlessstatedotherwise,allletters,photographs, andotherdocumentaryUnless stated otherwise, all letters, and other documentary material used in this article are held in the Arnold van Wyk collection (no 320) in the Special Collections section of the JS Gericke Library at the University of Stellenbosch. These documents have not yet been catalogued and therefore do not possess reference numbers. All material is published with permission.

g � TheactualsizeofVanWyk’slefthandisillustratedinalettertohissister,MinnieThe actual size of Van Wyk’s left hand is illustrated in a letter to his sister, Minnie Hahn (nicknamed ‘Mintel’), dated 29 August 1939. On the first page of this letter Van Wyk traces the outline of his left hand, revealing not only a large hand but also a wider than average stretch between the fingers.

h TheperformancewasarecordingofMozart’sK.449pianoconcertowiththeThe performance was a recording of Mozart’s K. 449 piano concerto with the SABC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Anton Hartman. The recording was made on 18 January 1954.

i Thereisanironyhere.Asearlyas1939,VanWykhadwrittento‘Oom’CharlieThere is an irony here. As early as 1939, Van Wyk had written to ‘Oom’ Charlie Weich about a planned concert of South African music in South Africa House in London, ending his plans with the sentence: ‘Ons moet die Rooinekke wys dat ons die “Vat-jou-goed-en-trek-Fereira”-stadium al verby is’. (‘We have to show the Rednecks that we have progressed beyond the “Vat-jou-goed-en-trek-Fereira” [a popular Afrikaans folk tune] stage.’); see letter to Charles Weich, 27 February 1939, Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), Music Library, University of Stellenbosch.j LettertoFredaBaron,18October1940.TheBaronsleftDeRustfortheirLetter to Freda Baron, 18 October 1940. The Barons left De Rust for their new address in Baileys Muckleneuk, Pretoria, in 1941. This is the address (38 Charles Street) to which the photographs of Van Wyk’s hands were sent. The reason for the relocation was local Afrikaner anti-semitism; this was confirmed to me in a conversation with Charlotte Perold, Freda Baron’s daughter. In a letter of 6 June 1941, Freda Baron wrote to Van Wyk in London: ‘Yes, dear, at last the incredible has happened, and we are going to live in Pretoria. We are actually going to leave De Rust – a place I am vaguely attached to for I have spent many happy years here but the memory of these was often wiped out by the last few years of hell. I wonder whether I’ll be able to forget it or even whether my soul will ever straighten out again completely.’ Van Wyk replied in a letter of 20 July 1940: ‘… did not the greatest thing in my life – meeting you and Mr. Baron – happen there?’.k FormoreonHartman,seeWalton(2004).
For more on Hartman, see Walton (comAp book.indd 313 13/9/07 10:44:39

this paper was first published in composing apartheid, music for and against apartheid, edited by grant olwage and published by wits university press. the article is posted here with kind permission of the author and publisher.