A Dance in the Sun by Dan Jacobson
**Overview of "A Dance in the Sun" by Dan Jacobson**
"A Dance in the Sun" is a novel set on a farm near Mirredal, a small village in the arid Karroo region of South Africa. The story follows two university students, an unnamed narrator and his friend Frank, who find themselves stranded overnight at a farm while hitchhiking to Cape Town. The plot revolves around the haunting consequences of a past crime involving their hosts, the Fletchers, and a local African man named Joseph, who seeks answers about his missing sister. Joseph's quest for truth is intertwined with themes of guilt, loss, and the legacy of colonialism. The complexities of race relations and familial pride are explored through the contrasting characters: the racially prejudiced Fletcher couple and the desperate Joseph, who ultimately desires to reclaim his sister’s child while navigating his own sense of agency. Jacobson's writing captures the tension of a society grappling with the realities of apartheid, reflecting both personal and societal struggles. As the story unfolds, it challenges the characters' moral perspectives, leading to a poignant climax that underscores the enduring impact of their historical and social context. The novel ultimately presents a nuanced exploration of identity, responsibility, and the quest for redemption.
A Dance in the Sun by Dan Jacobson
First published: 1956
Type of work: Domestic realism
Time of work: The early 1950’s
Locale: A farm in the Karroo, South Africa
Principal Characters:
The Narrator , unnamed, a university studentFrank , his friend, a medical studentMr. Fletcher , a South African farmerMrs. Fletcher , his wifeIgnatius “Nasie” Louw , Mrs. Fletcher’s brotherJoseph , an African laborer
The Novel
Almost all the action of A Dance in the Sun occurs on a farm near Mirredal, a small, nondescript village in the barren Karroo area of South Africa. Two university students, the unnamed narrator and his friend Frank, are hitchhiking to Cape Town from their hometown of Lyndhurst (probably modeled on Kimberley). Marooned for the night in Mirredal, where a wedding party has filled the only hotel, they are directed to a nearby farm, which in the past has taken guests.
The plot of the novel has to do with the consequences of a crime committed several years before by the Fletchers, their hosts. An old African named Joseph, who is loitering near the farm in the darkness, asks the narrator’s help. He has bribed the black house servants to steal a letter, but he cannot read it; later, he wants the students to tell him what is going on in the house. Finally he tells them his story.
Ironically, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher also want their help. They anticipate trouble—the nature of which they do not specify, though it is clear that it has something to do with Joseph—and they assume that if guests are in the house the trouble can be avoided.
Four years before, Joseph had left Mirredal to find work. When he returned six months later, his sister Mary, who had been working for the Fletchers, had disappeared. The servants told him that she had had to leave because she had borne a “yellow” baby. Joseph could not trace her, and when he went to ask for help from Mrs. Fletcher’s brother, Ignatius Louw (“Nasie”), Mrs. Fletcher flew into a rage and said that her brother had gone. When Joseph realized from her reaction that Nasie was the father of the child, he went to Johannesburg to work and save money so that he could come back to Mirredal to find out what had happened to his sister’s child.
The letter Joseph has stolen is from Nasie, saying that he is returning. He returns that evening, and in the middle of the night he gets into a violent argument with Mr. Fletcher. His rage against Fletcher is clearly the result of his grief and guilt about the black woman whom he permitted the Fletchers to take away from him. Fletcher had paid Mary to leave with her child, and because Nasie had violated the Immorality Act in his affair with her, he had permitted Fletcher to give him some money to run away. Now Nasie has returned to the only place where he feels at home, but his rage against Fletcher is so great and his situation is so frustrating that he can only break up the furniture. He again disappears into the night, and Fletcher orders Joseph off the place. Joseph refuses to go, however, because he knows that he can prove Fletcher’s guilt: He has witnesses.
The rest of the night, the boys plan how to help Joseph. “We were adults now,” the narrator says. The next day, though, Joseph refuses their help. He says that he wants to work for Fletcher, and it appears that he believes he can blackmail him into giving him a good job. Before the boys leave the farm, they see Joseph telling Fletcher that he will work there, and the novel ends with Fletcher, in his rage and humiliation, stamping the ground, “dancing” in the sun.
The Characters
The Fletchers represent the two main elements in the white population of South Africa. She is Afrikaner, the daughter of a Boer pioneer who was a powerful man of considerable distinction; in marrying a British South African, she clearly believes that she has married beneath her station. Her crime against Joseph’s sister—the baby has been abandoned and perhaps even murdered—derived from family pride: her sense that she had to save her brother from public shame. Yet she is more quietly racist than her husband. His speeches to his two young guests are a wild mix of spurious racist doctrine, insane misinterpretations of history, and apocalyptic predictions about nuclear warfare and the end of civilization. In his paranoia, he raves about how dark-skinned people threaten the integrity of the white race and how “we” must stick together against “them.” The Fletchers remain together in their racist fortress, but they obviously do so only in spite of their corrosive resentment of each other.
If they have made a purgatory of their lives, Ignatius Louw is in a kind of hell. He has let himself be “saved” by his sister, who cared less for his happiness than for his reputation as a member of their family. He seems to be tormented by guilt for what he has permitted the Fletchers to do, and he says that he desired his black mistress as he had never desired anything in his life. It is also possible, however, that he committed miscegenation as an act of defiance against his society, his family, and his father, whose picture, glaring down from the wall, he smashes in his rage.
The narrator and Frank are decent young men who really are what Fletcher tells them they are—the hope of South Africa. When they arrive at the farm they are still innocents, and when they leave they have grown up. Listening to Joseph tell them his story, the narrator feels as if he is again a child at home, listening to one of the black servants tell him stories. Joseph’s story, however, is not make-believe; it actually happened, and the narrator realizes as he listens to it that it requires a moral response.
Joseph is the most fully rounded character in the novel, the one most capable of surprising the reader. On the one hand, he balances Mrs. Fletcher in his concern for his family. He is certain that he will never see his sister again, and he wants desperately to find her child, who is his family’s only link to the future. On the other hand, he also wants to use the situation to his own advantage. Realizing that he is doomed to a life on the Fletcher farm, he is determined to make the most of it. At the end of the novel, Fletcher, the paranoiac racist, and his African victim are comically chained together, with Fletcher “dancing” to Joseph’s words.
Critical Context
Early in his career, Jacobson wrote some distinguished short stories, and A Dance in the Sun, his second novel, like his first (The Trap, 1955), may be read as an extended short story. Its plot is composed of a single line, which resembles that of a mystery novel. (Why are the Fletchers afraid of Joseph? What is Joseph up to? What happened to Mary?) As in his short stories, Jacobson uses the physical setting—the hauntingly beautiful veldt and the prisonlike house filled with the relics and reminders of a past which is no longer relevant to the moral and social complexities of the country—to enhance the reader’s perception of the mental and emotional states of the characters.
After establishing himself as a distinguished writer of short stories and novels with South African settings, Jacobson wrote The Beginners (1966), a big, complicated family chronicle that summed up not only his own experience as a South African Jew but also that of South African Jewry in general. By that time, he had been living in England for more than a decade, convinced that the political and social problems of South Africa were beyond solution. Yet, though A Dance in the Sun could only have been written in South Africa and though its moral concerns are rooted in the reality of that country, Jacobson was more concerned with his characters than with South Africa’s social problems. Early in his career, when he wrote the novel, apartheid was in place in South Africa, but it was still not clear how permanent it would be. The tensions in the novel that give it much of its power are probably attributable to that sense of uncertainty in Jacobson’s mind when he wrote it.
Bibliography
Lardner, Rex. Review in The New York Times. July 1, 1956, p. 6.
The New Yorker. Review. XXXII (June 30, 1956), p. 81.
Parker, Kenneth. “Introduction,” in The South African Novel in English: Essays in Criticism and Society, 1978.
Roberts, Sheila. Dan Jacobson, 1984.
Time. Review. LXVII (June 25, 1956), p. 90.
Wyllie, J. C. Review in Saturday Review. XXIX (June 23, 1956), p. 16.