"In many ways, A library to flee – and its Afrikaans original – is an extremely courageous work." – David Attwell
Photo of David Attwell: Johan Kotzé
Listen to a podcast of the discussion, see photos of the launch and read the text of David Attwell’s introduction at the Exclusive Books launch of A library to flee at the Cape Town Waterfront on 9 November 2022:
Contents
David Attwell: A relentless sense of urgency
Who can forget the following words?
The crudity of life in South Africa, the naked force of its appeals, not only at the physical level but at the moral level too, its callousness and its brutalities, its hungers and its rages, its greed and its lies, make it as irresistible as it is unlovable. ... Nietzsche said we have art so that we shall not die of the truth. In South Africa there is now too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination. (Doubling the point, Harvard UP, 1992, p 99)
For truth is here read reality, social reality, which can overwhelm fiction. Or in another colloquialism that comes up at the dinner tables: “You could not make this shit up.”
The words are JM Coetzee’s, slightly adapted – you might recognise them – the writer who is described in Etienne van Heerden’s new novel as the diamond who lives in Australia. He could have been describing the South Africa of today, let alone the 1980s when the remarks were made.
There are few places of the literary imagination in South Africa where Coetzee has not been, and his many aphoristic statements remain useful signposts. How many times have we read, in different versions, that all writing is autobiography, and all autobiography is fiction? So quotable because so true. These are true for Etienne’s latest book, too. In his afterword, he says his characters are fictional but acknowledges that the author is made by the book, not the other way round. Coetzee was there.
I would add that as a reader, I found myself being written, often, in A library to flee, as if Etienne had found me out. I’m sure many South African readers will feel that.
The remark about there being too much truth for art to hold in South Africa was made in Coetzee’s acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which he won after the publication of Life & times of Michael K, a book that won the Booker Prize in 1983 (the last time a South African won it before Damon Galgut).
In that novel, Coetzee had worked out a solution to the problem he posed in the later speech in Jerusalem. The solution was to make a novel in which the main character, a simpleton, is actually much smarter than everyone else, and no one in the book, not even the most informed and sympathetic of observers, is able to say exactly what K’s life means. So, it turns out that South Africa is resistible after all, resistible through metafictional play, and K comes to embody a principle of heroic, unstoppable freedom.
As we know from his academic writing as well as his fiction, like Coetzee’s and others’, Etienne’s work is steeped in theories of language and representation. There are theoretical seams running through the stitching. In particular, there is a hyper-awareness of the medium, as well as a strong sense of the history in which the novels are written, the history that writes them and is written by them.
"I found myself being written, often, in A library to flee, as if Etienne had found me out. I’m sure many South African readers will feel that."
It is no accident, then, that Etienne is interested in the problem that Coetzee poses: how to write fiction that is resilient, autonomous in its powers, that rises to the challenge.
But Etienne’s answer to the problem is his own. While Coetzee’s playbook is a kind of trenchant minimalism, Etienne revels in the excess. His novels fold themselves into it, revealing the light and the shade. On every page, in every sentence, there is some illuminating detail, something startling and rewarding. Often something ironic, disarming and human, too – the extraordinary that lies half-buried in the ordinary, if you care to look.
In many ways, A library to flee – and its Afrikaans original – is an extremely courageous work. The first sense in which this is true lies in its scale. As if the chaos of our public discourse can be approximated only by something of epic proportions. Etienne answers like for like.
Incidentally, there is another African novelist who has done something similar recently, that is, written an enormous, parodic account of the moral crisis of his society: Wole Soyinka in Chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth. Etienne’s book is comparable in terms of scale and in terms of genre, because both books combine the satirical with the carnivalesque.
Oddly, perhaps, it still seems possible to speak of “society” in the case of Soyinka’s Nigeria, even though they are having a civil war. Soyinka’s book implies a unified conception, a single target, even if, by his novel’s account, his country is in a bad way. There is no such “society” in the South Africa of A library to flee. As the character Ian Brand puts it: “South Africa is no longer a home. It’s an argument.”
In his afterword, Etienne uses the interesting term chronolect. It has a Bakhtinian ring, suggesting the speech of the times. Sean de Waal picks up the term in his excellent review in The Mail and Guardian. Fine, as long as we agree that a chronolect can contain many dissenting voices – multiple chronolects colliding – without any symphonic unity.
Because everyone in this novel is destabilised. Even the Fallists who make the strongest claims to belonging, rootedness, ownership. Their spokesperson is Thuli Khumalo, but she is destabilised by her father, a returned exile and member of the ANC aristocracy who turns out to be corrupt. He is even prepared to infiltrate Thuli’s movement to sow chaos, so that he can buy time for his tender to mature.
Thuli Khumalo, cut adrift in China by a political inheritance that has turned venal, writing an exposé of her father’s machinations, is perhaps the most poignant story of the novel. It bears comparison with that of Rosa, in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s daughter.
Let me touch on two other formal achievements in A library to flee. The first is the treatment of voice. The book is polyphonic. It resides in, and consists only of, its many voices. There is no omniscient narrator, not even a subtle kind of free indirect discourse that might enable an omniscient narrator to stray into the consciousness of the characters. It is fiction by ventriloquism.
How could it be otherwise? The situation is the rampant rhetorical violence of 2015-2019, which we’re not out of yet. There is no room here for a controlling narrator. Such a narrator implies the presence, or the possibility, of a social contract. That has disappeared along with the rainbow nation.
"Thuli Khumalo, cut adrift in China by a political inheritance that has turned venal, writing an exposé of her father’s machinations, is perhaps the most poignant story of the novel."
Ian Brand is forced into a kind of social death through an injudicious tweet. He becomes the derided and despised Tweetboer, so much so that he is driven to undergo radical cosmetic surgery to make himself unrecognisable. As he loses his professional status as a lawyer, despite a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and a subsequent legal degree from Cambridge, he becomes increasingly haunted by events that date back to his military service in the so-called Border War. As his status declines, he becomes increasingly blunt with everyone, especially with Thuli. They struggle to get along in a UCT MA class in translation under the polite Professor Stephen Eliot, a class which becomes a laboratory, or Petri dish, in which all the conflicts around race and identity come under the microscope.
The voicing of the novel is played out entirely in the present tense. The result is a relentless sense of urgency and confusion, with no distance or time for reflection. The belligerence and visceral immediacy are a mimesis of social media’s effects on subjectivity. Sections of the text are marked by hashtags. The cumulative effect is certainly parodic, although it feels like the real thing.
The second formal property that gives the book its power is, of course, the plot. There might be no omniscient narrator, but the narrative unfolds with a certain inevitability. It begins with Thuli floating down the strait that separates the Bund from the mainland in Shanghai, with an arrow in her back. It takes the book’s 600-plus pages to find out what happened. I won’t try to summarise the story, but, in short, it has a Dickensian kind of complexity and closure to it. It is intricate, clever and satisfying, as satisfying as any thriller. There is a cast of minor characters, each of whom is an important link in the chain.
The narrative implies an argument, which is this: insofar as South Africa has become consumed with aggressive forms of identity politics, we have missed not just a trick, but everything; in fact, we have missed the entire circus. This is because identity, in a different sense, has become the holy grail of surveillance capitalism on a global scale.
Two powerful networks – one in the ANC led by Cat Khumalo, securely in the patronage system of No 1 (Jacob Zuma), the other a group of speculative investors with links to Stellenbosch wealth – are simultaneously pursuing the Chinese developers of the latest in surveillance software.
This software mutates from facial recognition to knee pit recognition (identification of the popliteal fossa) to recognition of the gait, the way everyone carries one’s body. Cat Khumalo wants the software so that he can put in his eye-watering tender. Ian Brand’s team, before he is sacked for his tweet, wants the same software to install security cameras in every street, business, university and housing estate. Shed loads of money are up for grabs.
Identity, then, but as a tool of capitalism. The emptying out of subjectivity, which feeds the algorithms with information that is sold on to advertisers, communication specialists, property developers, political parties and, ultimately, the state. It will happen as surely and as deliberately as the national fiscus is drained by corruption.
The great databank stored in the cloud is the library to flee, although it also applies to the Fallists’ response to Ian Brand’s poignant efforts to preserve the archive of the Karoo, as well as the archive of every image and statement rendered taboo by the new regime of censorship.
Laat mens dink.
Etienne, congratulations. As readers of South African literature, and as citizens of the beloved country, we owe you a huge debt of gratitude.
David Attwell
Podcast of the discussion between translator Henrietta Rose-Innes, David Attwell and Etienne van Heerden:
The same podcast is also available as an audio file on LitNet’s YouTube channel:
Gallery:
Etienne van Heerden en Michael Mei
Alfred Schaffer
Etienne Bloemhof en Helené Prinsloo
Marga Stoffer
Marga Stoffer, David Attwell en Annari van der Merwe
Elmarie Waltman, Chantel Pienaar en Etienne van Heerden
David Attwell, Henrietta Rose-Innes en Annari van der Merwe
Chantel Pienaar en Etienne van Heerden
Karen Barnard
Izabel de Villiers
> Photographs: Johan Kotzé
Also read:
Kaleidoscopic: Shaun de Waal reviews A library to flee by Etienne van Heerden
Kommentaar
Very good piece, this, but my review was in LitNet itself.