The Life and Works of Bessie Head (review)

In the conclusion to the introductory comments about his book-length study, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), critic F. R. Leavis observes:

My aim, I repeat, is to win clear recognition for the nature of Lawrence’s greatness. Any great creative writer who has not had his due is a power for life wasted. But the insight, the wisdom, the revived and re-educated feeling for health that Lawrence brings are what, as our civilization goes, we desperately need. . . . And . . . when I think of the career that started in the ugly mining-village in the spoilt Midlands, amid all those apparent disadvantages, it seems to me that, even in these days, it should give us faith in the creative human spirit and its power to ensure fulness of life.

(xiii–xiv)

Throughout the volume, Leavis emphatically insists: “What needs to be said is this: “Lawrence is, before all else, a great novelist, one of the very greatest, and it is as one of the major novelists of the English tradition that he will, above all, live” (4). In the context of that “great tradition” stretching from Jane Austen to Lawrence, Leavis declaims, “Lawrence is incomparably the greatest creative writer in English of our time . . . he is one of the greatest English writers of any time . . .” (5).

The reference to the English critic’s work is particularly apt for contextualizing a study of Bessie Head which self-consciously describes itself as a Leavisite project and an extension of “the theory of humanistic formalism advanced by Daniel Schwarz” (80). With a gently teasing apologia, Ola opens her analysis by describing her project as an “almost quaint, ultra-conservative, even recalcitrant” project which chooses “to base the assessment of a body of literary works on the now almost forgotten and-no-longer-so-fashionable romantic approach which considers the writer’s mind and life of vital importance . . .” (1). Affirming the “lofty ideas propounded by Leavis” in contradistinction to critical modes which, she suggests, eclipse the text by foregrounding “the process of decoding and deconstructing the text” (1), Ola attempts to carve out, in this volume, a case for a critical ecumenism which can respect works, such as hers, which do not “shy away from extricating . . . meaning from a mire of intellectual and critical postures which threaten to sacrifice it [such a critical approach] to the act of its own creation and deny its validity, centrality and authenticity” (1–2).

This very terse monograph is much less a study of Head’s oeuvre than an exploration of ways of engaging the conversation about Head. Its tautness, however, does not afford the space necessary for such a complex discussion; moreover, there is a problematic anachronism in an analysis which relies, almost exclusively, on a small sampling of critical works almost two decades old. The major voices cited here most often are those of Arthur Ravenscroft (1976), Lloyd Brown (1981), Lewis Nkosi (1981), and Cecil Abrahams (1990). Given the fecund outpouring of Head criticism, this overlooks a substantive and intense on-going conversation about the multi-styled discourses in Head’s narratives. Head’s works are now available, in translation, in many metropolitan languages, including Japanese; international scholars have been making extensive use of the Bessie Head archives at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe.

Secondly, the discussion of competitive critical and theoretical approaches to Head, which heats up significantly at the end of the monograph, uses encyclopedic glossaries in order to frame the differences among critical lenses. (One such pivotal reference, according to the footnotes and bibliography, is the 1958 edition of Raman Selden’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory.) There is a lacuna of focused response to specific essays employing the critical modes alluded to in this provocative assertion at the beginning of chapter 6, “A Niche for Bessie Head”:

Literary critics are familiar with these endless compartments, categories and neatly formulated theories in jealously guarded critical spaces, and the structures...