BOOK REVIEW : Bound, Gagged by Scholarship : THE LITTLE KAROO,<i> by Pauline Smith</i> . St. Martin’s Press. $15.95, 172 pages

The short stories in Pauline Smith’s “The Little Karoo” more than anything else remind the tired reader of John Updike’s “Bech: A Book.”

Many critics these days have come to dispute Updike’s knowledge of the Larger World, but no one can deny that he knows the book business. In “Bech: A Book,” Updike creates a hapless, non-prolific author who is baffled and harassed but somehow buttressed by all the intricate paraphernalia of the literary world until he becomes a personage in spite of himself.

Here, in this appealing collection of stories--which was first published in 1925--we see the same mechanisms at work. Smith was born in England and went to South Africa when she was 3. She grew up in the region of veldt and mountain to the north of South African coastlands called the Little Karoo.

This region had been settled mostly by the Afrikaners (a combination of Dutch and Hugenots who came to this far outpost to isolate themselves and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams). The land was harsh, the religion even harsher. Smith, the daughter of an English doctor--and therefore writing partly as an outsider--produced some stories about these dour folk.

These 10 short, interesting stories are accompanied here by not one, not two, not three, but four separate introductions: one by Arnold Bennett (what a windbag!) from 1925; one by William Plomer (who reproaches Smith for her long silences) from 1949; one by Guy Butler (who writes: “Her method of characterization is by ontological predicament, rather than by class dynamics or psychological determinism”) from 1981.

And finally, Carolyn Slaughter’s 1990 piece, which seems to be saying that we should read about these Afrikaans people because of this phenomenon of apartheid, even though one “Kaffir” appears in these stories to be converted--unbelievably--to Christianity, and also because, since the Afrikaans people are dying out now, we should read about them while they’re still with us on the planet.

After all this, we are treated to a “note on the text” that reads like parody, explaining why this or that hyphen was deleted, this or that comma stuck in.

We are told that Arnold Bennett had an epiphany when he figured out what was “wrong” with these stories: He realized that Pauline Smith hadn’t put in enough regional description of the “Little Karoo” itself. We’re told that John Middleton Murry, surely one of the sleaziest specimens in all of Modern British Lit, would only publish a Smith story if she took some of the “Dutch words” out. Bleak, bleak.

The stories? They’re interesting. “The Pain” is the dullest one. (We’re told several times that “The Pain” is Smith’s “masterpiece.”) The others are told in twisted, pseudo-Biblical language, and they’re violent, morbid, good. The men are mostly beasts here, selling their daughters for land, blinding mules in fits of temper--that sort of thing.

The land itself is beautiful and cruel. Drought plays a heavy part in these tales. People are parched emotionally. The grudge-holding stories are the best: weird tales of farmers mad at God and vice versa.

But the stories are soon over and the weird scholarship kicks in again: Smith is the best writer about this region since Olive Schreiner, we’re told. Except that Schreiner’s “The Story of an African Farm” is far better than Smith’s work and is completely different besides. What Schreiner and Smith had in common was a gender (female) and a continent (Africa). That’s it .

A nagging question keeps coming up here: Who the heck is Pauline Smith? Why didn’t she write more? How and why did she fall in with Arnold Bennett? I know historical criticism is out of style, but I’m talking about a meaningful context for this writer, something beyond comma-shifting and her “ontological predicament.”

But Smith has just been bound and gagged by scholarship, allowed her “masterpiece,” and stuck in her place.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Mummies of the Pharaohs” by Maurice Bucaille (St. Martin’s) .