The Public, the Private and the Power of Love: Decisive Tensions in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day

Abstract

In 1939, as Europe lay shadowed by the frightening reality of a militant Fascist totalitarianism and was about to enter a cataclysmic struggle for the survival of individual freedom, E. M. Forster published his famous essay “What I Believe,” which opened with the significantly paradoxical statement: “I do not believe in Belief” (Forster 77). While, as David Medalie (38) has pointed out, Forster has often been hailed as a spokesman and defender of (the ideology of) liberal humanism, this striking opening statement in fact introduces not a defence of one ideology against another, but a scepticism towards ideology, a stand against any universalized public claim to social wisdom. Instead,