Title: A library to flee
Author: Etienne van Heerden
Publisher: Tafelberg
ISBN: 9780624091059
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I called this novel panoramic, but it is also kaleidoscopic, so pregnant is it with fractured reflections that reconfigure themselves at each quick shake.
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Etienne van Heerden’s novel A library to flee – the English translation of Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld – is a novel of ideas. That is to say, it is a novel like, say, Aldous Huxley’s Point counter point, in which the characters debate the big issues of the day, or what they see as the big issues – their conversations are arguments, with each character standing for one side of the debate, and each becoming a mouthpiece for the discourse swirling around them in the world they inhabit.
Huxley’s characters, however, have (had?) the leisure to sit around in well-appointed drawing rooms having their discussions in well-spoken English. They are, at least, supremely civilised, and their belief in the efficacy of reasoned discourse is unquestioned. Moreover, the issues at play are abstracted, to do with passion versus reason and the like – one character stands in for DH Lawrence, for instance, taking positions close to his arguments for answering to the body’s instinctive needs, while another is nearer Huxley’s own views on the supremacy of mind and its capacity for rational thought.
Van Heerden’s characters, by contrast, are having their arguments on the run, as it were – amid the turmoil of the Fees Must Fall movement as it swept through South African universities in 2015 and 2016. Their disagreements may emerge in a University of Cape Town translation class, but they continue mentally as the characters travel to places such as Budapest and Shanghai. They have internalised the debate, and so it keeps going round in their heads even when they are alone, in ways not unlike what psychologists call rumination, but perhaps better named brooding – a kind of argument with an absent interlocutor, a stunted dialogue.
Beneath the layer of ideas, the level at which these arguments are taking place, lies the narrative layer. This is, after all, a novel, and the characters have to be moved through space, have to have a more or less convincing environment and context, have to interact with one another physically as well as intellectually; that is, they have to have lives. They cannot simply be talking heads, or brains in a vat. The ideas discussed (the ideological war) and the narrative have to reflect each other in ways that make the characters live long enough to make storytelling possible.
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As with his 1991 novel Casspirs en Campari’s, which A library to flee resembles in its panoramic ambition, it feels as though alternative realities are being placed against one another, and are to some degree undermining the other.
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Novels with big, obvious themes (what used to be called “serious” novels), and particularly novels with some social breadth, never mind a political unconscious, make their characters emblematic. Thus their acts and destinies are emblematic too. But Van Heerden troubles the coherence of that layer too, because only some of what happens in the novel appears to be realistically constructed and much of it seems to cross into the territory of surrealism. Thus the narrative ground beneath the reader’s feet keeps shifting, just as the ideological issues morph. As with his 1991 novel Casspirs en Campari’s, which A library to flee resembles in its panoramic ambition, it feels as though alternative realities are being placed against one another, and are to some degree undermining the other. What is credible and what isn’t? What’s “meta” and what’s not? As one character reflects, in relation to South African society and its doings generally, “Some of these incidents seem arbitrary, others highly symbolic.” In A library to flee, often what feels arbitrary may be the most symbolic – consider the crossbow killer who stalks the text.
The two characters I would see as the primary figures, Thuli Khumalo and Ian Brand, meet in a translation class at UCT (not that we see them doing any actual translation). It is in this class that the debates about Fallism, wokeness and so on initially arise. A character I would deem secondary is Jerome Maarman with his Dickensian surname, and so, too, Elizabeth, Ian’s difficult and mysterious lover (and a publisher, ironically enough; she employs Thuli as a “sensitivity reader”). Tertiary characters include the leader of the translation class, significantly named Dr Eliot, a plastic surgeon who comes across as quite insane, an apparently trans person who remains enigmatic, and Ian and Thuli’s parents. The latter may, on a closer look, be secondary; or Thuli’s father, Cat Khumalo, could be seen as secondary, so large does he loom in Thuli’s consciousness. Yet this kind of hierarchisation of the dramatis personae is merely an attempt to sort the elements of the novel into some kind of manageable schema, yet this is the kind of novel that resists such attempts.
Still, we need to see how the characters represent their different viewpoints, and how they become emblematic of those viewpoints, or the narrative itself cannot be satisfactorily decoded. So Thuli, the young black woman from a family that represents the formerly exiled struggle elite, is a Fallist with a lot to say about whiteness, white privilege and the form of social transformation now referred to as decolonisation. Ian – not Jan? – is an Afrikaner with a history in (and terrifying flashbacks to) the Border War of the 1980s, a lawyer involved in developing surveillance schemes, but also someone with a kind of literary sensibility trying to hold a space, as it were, for Afrikaans as the language that provides him with a solid identity – except that it is fading from its central position in a South Africa with 11 official languages and a new post-apartheid configuration of political and social power.
Yet Ian also has the problem of finding the new language, the “chronolect”, as Van Heerden calls it, of this particular historical situation, hard to get his head around. He can’t translate it into his mother (or father) tongue, or he won’t absorb these terms into his idiolect. He would very much like to keep them in inverted commas, or at least distancing italics:
New terms. White tears. Beach racism. Whitesplaining. Tenderpreneurs. State capture. The night of the long knives. Post-fact. Land grab.
The miserable phrases with which people grapple with their struggles and transgressions and longings and sins and angers. Phrases of hunger and intimidation. Feverish, rabid. Phrases that make audible a deep pathology.
That’s how it is in this country right now …
It is not entirely clear whether all this should be located in Brand’s thoughts or whether the author is ventriloquising here, if those functions can be separated out. Either way, a reader might wonder (because this is a translated novel) which of those phrases appeared in Afrikaans in the original, and which in English (the global language that Brand also resists, despite his being apparently heeltemal tweetalig, as people used to boast in the days when Afrikaans and English were the only two official languages of South Africa, united in their whiteness). So I checked this passage against the Afrikaans (with a lot of English) original, and noted that there it has staatskaping, die nag van die lang messe and, oddly, post-feit. You’d have thought landgryp was now current in Afrikaans, but perhaps not.
This says something about Brand’s taalstryd, but also about the nature of the violent discourse enveloping him and the other characters (Thuli, Eliot and Jerome, at least, as “discussants”, but also the larger society). It may be that the arguing-through of different viewpoints is pointless because those viewpoints are encoded in different languages, different sociolects, and their core meanings may not be translatable from one to the other. It’s as though these meanings emerge from different “regimes of truth”, to use Michel Foucault’s idea; their truths are incommensurate. They are post-Babel truths: They come into being after the tower that was meant to reach heaven collapsed and the God of the Book of Genesis “confused the tongues” of those remaining amid the wreckage. These discussants are, then, at cross-purposes, and no amount of whitesplaining, or indeed blacksplaining, will help.
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And yet the novel contains a fair amount of explaining. The parallel plot about the development of facial recognition and other means of state surveillance requires some unpacking at places, and there are little handles given to the reader to facilitate further research on such contentious material. (One almost wants hyperlinks.)
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And yet the novel contains a fair amount of explaining. The parallel plot about the development of facial recognition and other means of state surveillance requires some unpacking at places, and there are little handles given to the reader to facilitate further research on such contentious material. (One almost wants hyperlinks.) But this plotline is also embedded in a conspiracy (theory) or two, and at the level of narrative in competing conspiracies. When Thuli discovers that her father, Cat Khumalo, is part of a scheme to place the whole South African populace under perpetual surveillance, she feels the anger of generational betrayal and heads for China, where she intends to uncover her father’s secrets but finds herself lost in another labyrinth of secrets, lies and, indeed, ideological contestation and power plays.
She, at least, is future-driven, while Brand is committed (until the conclusion, at least) to the past – to rescuing the past, or that part of the artistic past he finds valuable and feels he is losing, that South Africa is losing. This is his “library at the end of the world”, a notional repository of the language, the writing and the art, that is being destroyed or otherwise invalidated by the Fallist assault on existing power structures and, physically, the relics of the old society’s artistic production. Behind that library, which Brand’s imagination locates somewhere in the Karoo, is a reservoir that will contain the decanted water brought by each visitor – water from their places of origin – as a symbol of the multi-ethnic, multilingual society that can possibly (hopefully?) be blended into an undifferentiated whole. Is that the answer to the questions about identity that the novel raises? Dissolution? Is it a kind of “back to the womb” scenario, an Eden to contain what has escaped from Babel? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly a fantasy solution to a real problem, and for the likes of Thuli, and possibly for Ian in another part of his mind, it is a “library to flee”.
In any case, the real library that stands in opposition to Ian’s lonely Karoo library is the internet, and it is everywhere but nowhere, like God: The internet has communicative functions which have revolutionised human discourse, and the surveillance functions the novel speaks of, but it also has storage functions. The Gutenberg Project, for instance, scans and stores books going back to the earliest history of printing, but there are all sorts of virtual reproductions (of literature, sub-literature, art and sub-art, etc) lodged somewhere in this ever expanding library, a cloud library that will never be full because it has no limits, and cannot ever be encompassed by a single human mind because it is too vast and chaotic. It’s as though humanity’s discursive productions have escaped into the wild.
It also means that the “regimes of truth” produced by human discourse(s) ramify and, in a weirdly organic way, generate both links that form networks of meaning and forms of untranslatability as each language or “chronolect” develops its own specific features. They breed, willy nilly, like feral cats, and their genetic content mutates. I called this novel panoramic, but it is also kaleidoscopic, so pregnant is it with fractured reflections that reconfigure themselves at each quick shake.
Ian, at least, reaches some kind of resolution for himself, and it is portrayed with sufficient realism to be credible for the reader. Thuli does not, because her narrative resolution is ambiguous and not fully interpretable, but then, she represents to some degree the unknowable future – the new languages that can’t be translated back into the old. For the secondary and tertiary characters, it appears, there is not much resolution at all. But perhaps that is too much to ask from an over-populated novel that only toys with the conventional strictures of fiction. As the reader reaches the last page of this novel of Pynchonian or Bolañesque length, one is asked to jump from a nearly concluding colon to a Chinese phrase hovering in the otherwise blank space of an open page – a phrase that will, appropriately enough, have to be Googled.
See also:
Resensie: Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld deur Etienne van Heerden