‘STYLE IS THE GREAT BETRAYER’: SOCIALIST REALISM IN LA GUMA'S A WALK IN THE NIGHT

Abstract

Readers have frequently remarked and commended the ‘gritty realism’ of Alex La Guma's evocation of District Six and other Cape ‘slumscapes’. But in1974 J.M. Coetzee published an important dissenting essay (‘Man's Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma’) in which he described La Guma as ‘the inheritor of the worst excesses of realism’. The overall effect of the meticulously detailed representation of setting was not verisimilitude but ‘literariness itself’. Thus ‘La Guma's world, so overflowing with things, is... not an objective world, for the things themselves are overflowing with the writer's subjectivity’. This essay engages with this critical judgment, focusing on La Guma's novella, A Walk in the Night, and arguing that La Guma's descriptive style is justifiable in terms of a‘Socialist Realist’ aesthetic that gives vital expression to the materialist premise informing his Marxist view of the human condition.