Nonidentity and reciprocity in conceptualising South African literary studies

Abstract

In his essay, The Task of Translator, first published as preface to his translations of Baudelaire's poetry, from French into German, Walter Benjamin stresses what he calls translatability of all literary works. This is possible Benjamin (1992: 73) claims, due to basic reciprocal relationship between He likens this reciprocity to of marked by a distinctive convergence. Writing from a European linguistic context, he states: Languages are not strangers to one another, but are a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to say. All languages, in others words, are vehicles for a range of common articulations. In what seems like a countermove, he stresses specificity of languages. This uniqueness, according to him, marks limits of translation and announce untranslatable aspect of language as manifested in phenomenon of nonequivalence at all linguistic levels: lexical denotation and connotation, semantic, syntactic and contextual. Because languages are distinct, they are marked by difference so that according to Benjamin (1973: 74) it stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily stand for likeness. This nonidentity, understood in sense formulated by Heidegger (1960: 15) with regard to identity, should not be viewed as sameness, expressed as A=A, or self-coincidence or abstract equality, phrased as the jejune emptiness of what, in absence of internal relations, remains in persisting monotony but is also applicable to literary works. In Saussurian parlance, this nonidentity is not something fixed or essential but a nonpositive, relational phenomenon. To be sure, for Benjamin, nonidentity, likewise, implies reciprocality and other way round. What do these two concepts, nonidentity and reciprocity, pertaining to an essay on translation, have to do with South African literary studies? On face of it, apart from translation practices and studies relevant to a multilingual field, very little if not nothing. Such a conclusion, of course, issues from face of matters: face here signifying surface of things. I enlist these two concepts because they are handy here in what is an attempt to chart ways in which field of South African literary studies has been conceptualised over time. 1 South African literary studies, which this special issue of JLS and another to follow are devoted to, has been beset by conceptual exigencies since beginning of twentieth century when reference to South African literature first came into circulation. These difficulties, while arising from many interrelated factors, can largely be attributed to changing ideological perspectives which shaped successive political, cultural, linguistic orders and their inscription in academic practices for almost a century. This produced a society with a cultural order of discursive divisions, fragmentations, shifts and instabilities flowing from linguistic and literary divisions which developed in wake of ethnic division of South Africa well before but especially after 1948. This either precluded an inclusive conceptualisation or marginalised such conceptualisation for much of century. In addition, sway of poststructuralist theory, with its suspicion of grand conceptualisations during last quarter of twentieth century, also played a role in barring approach to object. With its emphasis on heterogeneity and difference and a rejection of anything suggesting homogenisation, particularities of various South African literatures were regarded as mutually exclusive systems beyond capture of theoretical systematisation. Independently and in combination, these factors checked attempts at arriving at even an operational definition which admitted to object of South African literary studies not as sum of its parts but as a field where both reciprocity between languages and their nonidentity could be approached. …