Pauline Smith’s Formalism in The Beadle

Abstract

ABSTRACT While critics over the years have paid attention to Smith’s formalism, certain authoritative voices (I think in particular of J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer) focus on ideological aspects of her writing, which minimise or overlook its quality and its own particular character. If we could appreciate that Smith was writing within a modernist sphere of influence— however much filtered by her own sense of her specific abilities (and her compulsion to express those abilities)—it would be easier to read her as we tend to read other modernists. That is, we might once again read her in terms of writerly techniques used, and an aesthetic approach that absorbs into itself the patterns and tensions of existence, and which cannot simply be judged in terms of its colluding in various degrees with the forces of society. My article argues that ideological readings of Smith do her craftsmanship scant justice. As a corrective, I provide an overview of the formalist techniques she uses and the dense structuration involved in her presentation of her themes. Her formalism imbues the writing itself with a sense of its own agency, its own unique power, to the benefit of her fictional constructions.