The imagination of freedom.

Lenta, Margaret

Andrew Foley. 2009. The Imagination of Freedom. Johannesburg: Wits UP.

The Imagination of Freedom is concerned with liberalism, which Andrew Foley explains remains an important influence: "Political history in modern times can be characterised essentially as the struggle for freedom" (1). He quotes J S Mill: "'The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it'" (10). He cites Kant in order to claim that "'the rights of individuals are morally prior to those of society'" (11), an all-important insight in the works he has chosen.

Arguments concerning the moral priority of the individual have been denied by societies which accommodate institutions such as slavery, the subjection of women and class privilege. Foley quotes Hans Berten's observation that "our most fundamental social institutions 'expect us to be reasonable and reasonably free.' The very nature of law is to hold competent individuals responsible for their actions" (13). Yet in almost every society before the twentieth century individuals whose equal reasonableness was denied were nevertheless accountable for their actions before the law--and savagely punished for misdeeds.

The difficulty for many who wish to understand liberalism is that though it has essential beliefs, it has not, in the sense that Marxism has, a single political programme. Foley distinguishes between classical liberalism, which emphasises individual freedom, tending at times towards libertarianism, and modern liberalism, which places more emphasis on equality. Tolerance of diversity is another key quality of modern liberalism: he quotes Nozick: "'Utopia will consist of utopias in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions..."' (17). There is a problem here: some groups are in their nature coercive, and though the individual's choice to join such a group, or remain in it, may render that coercion tolerable to liberals, this is not always so.

The ten post-World War II works which Foley discusses vary in the nature and degree of their concern for freedom and equality. Constraints of space oblige me to be selective.

Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country is the subject of Chapter 2, and Foley defends Paton's advocacy, through his characters, of love as the remedy for inter-racial strife. He does not define this term in context, though misunderstanding has caused scholarly condemnation of Paton's alleged sentimentality. 'Love' in Paton's sense means active good will to others, the equivalent of that which we bear ourselves, and is the opposite of the wilful ignorance and will to punish that Paton sees as informing the attitudes of South African whites towards black people.

Foley's arguments against the attacks on Paton by Paul Rich and Stephen Watson, and to an extent Tony Morphet, take little account of conditions in the early 1980s, when militancy, the antithesis of 'love', seemed obligatory. Rich's claim that "'the novel completely bypasses the emerging black culture of the township and slums'" has truth in it: in terms of the 'Jim Comes to Jo'burg' form he has chosen for his novel, Paton feels that the city is almost necessarily corrupting to black people.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in Chapter 3 deals with the collision between Ibo village culture and British colonial administration in Nigeria. Though he is not impartial, and as Foley says, "on one level [his book is] an indictment of the many destructive aspects of the colonial enterprise and ... a celebration of a particular African culture" (77) he shows that village culture can mislead its adherents. Okonkwo, the adherent to traditional ways, and Nwoye, his son who becomes a Christian, spend their lives within rigid systems. Achebe, however, writes from outside these rigidities, and his liberalism allows him to identify the will to power over the individual which exists in both.

Chapter 4, in which Foley discusses Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, is a lively discussion of an intriguing novel. Kesey's psychiatric ward, in which the Big (female) Nurse tyrannises over terrified (male) patients, equipping them, not to leave the hospital, but to become docile within it, convincingly represents institutional abuses of power. The psychiatric ward seems an allegorical representation of America in the period, though this interpretation means that the work begins to appear misogynist. The Big Nurse, who controls males in authority as well as inmates within the hospital, is detestable. McMurphy, who teaches the inmates to rebel, is attractive because the system he defies is evil. Such a hell-raiser, who valiantly defies powerful women, now appears a dated figure.

Chapter 5, the best section of the volume, focuses on Seamus Heaney's poems of the seventies, in which his wish is "To lure the tribal shoals to epigram/ And order" (1971: 59). Foley quotes Ian Paisley's description of him as "'the well-known papish propagandist'" (122), now a comic revelation of prejudice, and insists that "[f]or Heaney ... the primary purpose of political poetry, and perhaps especially liberal poetry, is not necessarily to provide straightforward assessments of topical events, but . to offer us a new perspective, a deeper understanding of our situation and of ourselves as individual human beings" (139). Foley discusses Heaney's poetic route to the 'bog poems' of Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), and then contrasts the metaphoric treatment of the conflict and its victims in these poems with the more literal account of what it was to be a Catholic in the North in poems such as "Singing School" (1975: 62-73) and "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" (1975: 57).

There is not space here to give detailed attention to the chapters on Fay Weldon, Athol Fugard, Mario Vargas Llosa, Richard Rorty and his ironists, and Ian McEwan's Saturday, though Foley's discussion in these chapters is interesting and adds evidence to his claim concerning the near-global preoccupation of writers with individual freedom. The book as a whole supports the assertion made in the last decade, specifically by Leon de Kock, that South African literature is no longer a thing apart in its ideology and subject matter, but has taken its place alongside the other postcolonial literatures. I regret that it was not possible for Foley to include South African poetry or fiction of the present--Zoe Wicomb's David's Story might have been a good choice--but all enterprises are finite and publishers' word counts are final. What we need now are the thematic, not national, courses of study which would focus on world literature--South African together with the rest--to which Foley's book would be relevant.