The Story of an African Farm (1883)

Olive Schreiner. The Story of an African Farm. Pub. 1883. New York: Penguin, repr. 2005.

General notes

• 29 (Preface) Methods of representation

 Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method - the method of the life we lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. (ff.)

• 36-8: The overseer's silver hunting watch, the way it invokes religion fate and history for the boy. Time and apocalypse -- cf. McClintock 1995
• Time reinvoked on 137 at start of part 2
• Kaffir: black South Africans (derogatory now)
• Kraal: enclosure outbuilding for livestock
• Kopje: small hill
• 40 Waldo's sacrifice
• 45-6 as in The Mill on the Floss (1860) the opposition between education and agrarian work even in childrens' understanding
• 66 Waldo reading bible -- cf McClintock 1995 for Waldo and books
• Ch 5 strange/interesting structure
• 76 lyndall's books/bonaparte's phony teaching
• 93 Em swearing she will help the weak against the strong
• 102 Waldo's rejection of god and the mutual incomphrehensibility of experience/ feeling
• 103 Ghosts and guilt like hamlet or lady m then Macb at chapter end
• 109 Waldo reading abt property rights
• 114 Tant throws book at Waldo like John reed in jane eyre
• 119-20 deep time
• 130 a more visceral meditation on the wounds of childhood but reminiscent of Mill on the Floss
• 137 time and internal seasons - there aer 7 stages just as there are 7 in Shakespeare's Ages of Man (though they don't match)
• Also a metafictive moment indicating how the narrative is structured like in ch 5
• why recapitulating bildung that has already happened?
• 139 anticipating lacan mirror stage/self awareness: what were Victorian understandings of this part of childhood dev?
• 140-1 religious print culture: Bible, Jeremy Taylor, Wesley
• 143 book flinging again
• 150 almost a climate change metaphor
• 153 Darwinian faith
• 160 Macbeth again
• 169 art after stranger's fable
• 170 another recursion into Waldo's past, this time diegetic
• 174 Illustrated London News on Gregory's wall
• 186-7 gender (and Robbin island, later mandelams prison)
• 191 Goethe
• 216-17 books/evolution/deep time
• 252 again Waldo's experienced narrated in retrospect through vehicle of letter (though not diegetically offset like Gregory's)
• 253 clerk lighting his pipe with book paper
• 276 Book throwing again, then Shakespeare
• 290 universal unity of souls