徐蕾，文学博士，南京大学外国语学院英语系教授、副系主任、当代外国文学与文化研究中心副主任。主要从事现实主义文学史、当代英语文学、新维多利亚文学等方面研究。主持在研国家社科项目1项、国家社科重大项目子课题1项，主持完成国家社科和教育部人文社科项目各1项，近期发表论文《重拾欧班夫人的晴雨表：“真实效应”与现实主义细节批判话语》（2022）、《现实主义概念的雅努斯时刻——文学批评史上的韦勒克与格林伍德之争》（2020）、合编文集《表征与重构：跨越边界的现实主义文学》（2019）。
“A Joyful Masterclass in Modernism”? Meeting Victorian Realism Halfway in Damon Galgut’s The Promise
As a shaping force of the literary identity of South African English literature in the twentieth century, literary realism enjoyed at best a troubled relationship with English South African writers in the post-WWII era due to its origin from European culture in general and entanglement with British imperialism in particular. The unease did not see much improvement even when anti-apartheid imperative fostered a main strand of politically engaged realism among writers like Nadine Gordimer who felt it their obligation to fight racism and social injustice through an analytico-referential writing mode, while J. M. Coetzee found it stultifying for every act of the imagination to hold onto the overwhelming truth in South Africa by the bucketful. When the termination of white minority rule in 1994 was expected to play down “protest-style writing, literary realism, moral earnestness, the dominance of race, predictability”—the hallmarks of apartheid literature, realism somehow has retained its purchase on contemporary English writing in the country that stays committed to the expose of unresolved and emerging social problems. And yet moving beyond “rhetoric of urgency”(Louise Bethlehem) furnishing “literature in bondage”(Coetzee), the realist imperative in the current context of English South African writings may be redefined as “a textually inscribed intentionality in the phenomenological sense, a tendency in style and narration that can be more or less pronounced in any given work” (Stephan Helgesson). Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning novel Promise (2021), though viewed by some critics as evocations of Woolfian or Faulknerian modernism, “a joyful masterclass in modernism”, intentionally employs an omniscient narrator, “the determining principle of the Victorian novel”(J. Hillis Miller), in concert with free indirect discourse (brought to sophistication in high modernism) to create a shifting perspective poised between a mouthpiece for a collective mind and polyphony of multiple voices. Lauded by many for its innovatively fluid point of view, the novel’s narrative style, I argue, is primarily anchored in an omniscient third-person framework, comparable to those in classic Victorian realist texts. Invested with narrative authority, the narrator’s perspective negotiates with the inhabitable characters’ interiority to tease out a fusion of horizons which doubly refracts the values of South Africa’s white middle classes to a tragicomic effect. Meanwhile by treating black characters as “a loud absence”, the novel quietly undermines the ethical foundation of the omniscient mode which has enabled the Victorian realists as well as the present white narrator to map the reality as it is.