“That Man Patton”: The Personal History of a Book

Abstract

Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation (1984 [1948]), appeared around 70 years ago, and has been the subject of widely discrepant responses ever since its initial publication. It has sold millions of copies across the globe, appeared in multiple forms – abridged versions, translations, stage productions, as set work on school and university syllabi – becoming, in the process, arguably South Africa’s most canonical, transnational, novel. This article reflects on my own personal, family and academic history of engagement with the novel over almost four decades, and the differing readings and responses which it has elicited. In so doing, the article tries to shed light not just on Paton’s novel, but on questions of use, value and meaning in our encounters with literary texts which seem, insistently, to demand our renewed attention.

Keywords:

• Alan Paton
• liberalism
• Christianity
• narrative
• reception
• South African literature

Notes on Contributor

Duncan Brown is Dean of the Arts Faculty and Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. He has published widely in the field of South African literary and cultural studies, and his books include Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance, Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa, To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond, Religion and Spirituality in South Africa: New Perspectives, Are Trout South African? Stories of Fish, People and Places, and Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments. He is also a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and Principal Investigator of the AW Mellon-funded project on “Rethinking South African Literature(s).”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Dia!kwain said that the song was composed by a sorcerer named !nuin|kuiten, while “walking about in the form of a lion” having killed an ox (Bleek and Lucy Lloyd 1911: 237).

2. The National Union of South African Students, the End Conscription Campaign and the United Democratic Front – all anti-apartheid organisations.

3. After a merger with the University of Durban-Westville, now renamed the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

4. See, for example, Chisholm, who argues that despite Paton’s attempts to create a morally humane system of rehabilitation at Diepkloof, the institution still centred on the Main Block in which the majority of the offenders were incarcerated in prison-like conditions, and which administered corporal punishment, despite Paton’s public denouncement of this practice. She notes that in 1937 alone, 2000 strokes were administered to inmates (1991: 29, f.n. 23).

5. The phrase is Douglas Livingstone’s. He said he would wish to be remembered as a poet only had he managed to write one or two poems that could “quietly unshackle one human heart” (Chapman 2016: xiii).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by funding from the A W Mellon Foundation, the National Research Foundation, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of the Western Cape.