As She Climbed Across the Table

Bear with me, folks. I have two very unlikely books to compare, and I'm sitting in the sun on an autumn Sunday mor- - midday, and if I stand the cat will claim my cushion and I won't have the heart to move him. Keep me company, because days spent contemplating in the sun are best shared, in silence.

Speaking of silence... That Tome of Silence, Agaat (it's there, to your left, under 'today's read') where the diacritics are plentiful and so are the pages (metaphorically speaking, since I'm reading on Kindle), but the plot is not. This is not a spoiler, but a warning. At least one of the characters has the symptoms of clinical depression and no personality left to anchor herself. By turns, the farm that is the setting (Groetmoedersdrift - Google translate that one out) is a metaphor for the protagonist's... reality... and for relationships on the farm and perhaps in general.

And herein lies my real gripe with South African literature. It takes itself too seriously. 'Serious' being the operative root word here. As if it is intent on revealing the truth about humanity, in a world in which truth is undecipherable.

Deja vu.

That's the cue. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem. I picked it up to ward off the spreading depression in the soil of the Western Cape that is 'Greet Mother's Drift'. And finished it in a few hours. I may have mentioned that I dislike the tongue-in-cheek playground of contemporary literary fiction that attempts to disguise the cynical seriousness with which it is written - a protective critique before the critics spot it. But some authors have a style that forgives this.

Perhaps its forced metaphors are tolerable because it is short. The metaphors? Can you guess? The principles of physics and quantum physics, forced into the shape of people and relationships and even settings. Ugh, how the physicists must hate us writers. (They must hate Ian McEwan the most, for his empathetic critique of their critique of our critiques in Solar. It's the lowest hand in any argument: empathising with the other person, so they aren't sure whether it's genuine or not, which the first person knows, because they're being empathetic.)

But Lethem's novel fits more comfortably than van Niekerk's does. There is a scene at the end of Possession by AS Byatt in which she observes, basically and probably badly paraphrased, that post-modernists (meaning me and every other BA student) crave to simply cease to be, to dissipate, to go gently into that good night. Right there is the sum of my desperate scrabbling, which made me stop for a second to nod.

Because, as all those tongue-in-cheek-to-catch-us-out authors are trying to express, here is a piece of science that embodies our conundrum: the world seems to be real - to possess 'truth' - but it is not. Take your moral relativity and subjective realities, pour some paraffin on them and light it. Perhaps you realise that you are replacing one paradigm with another to be able to live (because our minds need it - and that's the human condition), and perhaps not. But think of the word 'truth', think of the word 'real', and no matter how much you twist them, they are bonded to objectivity.

And here comes the inevitable 'there was this study...' I'm not asserting the 'truth' of it, only that it is a good display of my point. There was this study at some university (has anyone ever made that connection with 'universe'?) into how we make everyday decisions - reaching out for a glass of water, taking a step down one path and not another. They recorded at what level and in what sequence decisions are made in. They found that the instinctive, automatic part of the brain is triggered first, and you begin moving before the rational, supposedly decision-making part of the brain kicks in. That, in essence, you justify decisions on a conscious level in retrospect.

Paradigm. Oh I hear your chorus of hooting. Simmer down, I disclaimed myself first - look above.

Study or not, paranoia or not (and what post-modernist isn't?), your subjective reality is controlled by a part of the brain that does not consult you. Does that sound like something you really want to hold too tightly on to? You might want to check with it before your answer. Maybe by Ouija Board.

All I'm really saying here (and this goes out particularly to the physicists) is that the quantum realm offers us hope. It would give us a definitive answer. Hope. The option of dissipating into tiny particles. But also, of knowing for sure. Because despite my argument and those of my fellow writers, and in part alliance with - we don't know. Our language says there are things that are true and real, but our experience says not. So which is it? We just want to know. Even as we spit on knowledge and trample it.

I cannot relate to Agaat because (apart from the constant whinging) the characters have realities and we can see them and we can see the misunderstandings, and even though each does things they cannot rationally justify, they remain blithely unaware of the effusiveness of any kind of truth - in the moment - but justify these irrational moments in hindsight to make another complete story. An evolving one.

To me, it reads as a Romantic story - as in that era of human history where Luther has questioned religion and that question has kept rolling, on and on, with each rotation pulling up the scabs of societies' paradigms. Forcing some backlashes, some projections, some truces - in Romanticism, the transcendent was forced to earth to imbue everything that human beings have not touched. (The Modernists did the same, but with less babbling, and with more cynicism. That I get.)

Round and round the question rolls, even though my fellow writers and I like to believe we have stopped it in mid-rotation. And in a sense, in a moment that is shorter than the speed of light, we have. We have stopped it to look at it, but we are no wiser than we were before. Cynicism is a kneejerk reaction to the desecration of something you hold dear. (I know this well; I work in publishing.) It is an insufficient response to the world, but the only one that keeps us safe from being hurt again.

Agaat

Why do we (young South Africans) dislike reading our own literature? That's a generalisation. Many of the young 'uns whom I know. Because it is about past, not our present into which the past is woven. Again, a generalisation. What about Zakes Mda? I enjoy Andre Brink but dislike JM Coetzee - the man and his work - intensely (don't get me started). Now, here I am, delving into Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (Kindle tells me I am 9% of the way - this means little to me though, I miss page numbers).

Thumbs up or down, I like to imagine you wondering, literally clinging to the edge of your seat. Don't disillusion me.

Let's get to specifics here. I managed about fifty pages of A Story of an African Farm before I placed it beside my bed and then on a bookshelf. What is it? The style? The subject matter? South African literature, to me, feels awkward, stilted, heavy with symbolism, with little relief. The stories are often manufactured and not enjoyable. Although I have argued differently before - why read a story without a plot? Perhaps Aristotle and Joseph Campbell were correct? Why else spend leisure time in someone else's world? (This doesn't bode well for me and my novel.)

I feel the same about contemporary North American literary fiction. Twisted into itself, moral tales, a game of academic critique. Maybe also because these are realities that I know, whether living them or watching them on big and small screens. Maybe I need distance to be able to face a story's moral tale - because, honestly, isn't there always some kind of symbolic warning? That's just how our brains work, folks, like it or not (always preaching my own paranoid doomsday tale of consciousness - dammit, and so it goes round and round and round).

Thumbs up! There you go! I threw it in here, sans reference to the book title, hoping you'll miss it as you scan down the page.

Perhaps it was the hype that attracted me - I enjoy translations, to wade through the logic of a language literally made foreign - I have been meaning to read Agaat (written originally in Afrikaans) since it was published. I have even taken it out from the library a couple of times, and stared at its very serious bulk, intimidated, before returning it. The Kindle version is far less intimidating (I yell in defence of my betrayal of the printed book - the very thing from which I make a living!).

Somewhere between high school and now, the desperate attempts of my Grade 11 Afrikaans teacher (truly desperate, she once told us we were horrible and left the classroom crying) sunk in. Afrikaans demonstrates meaning, it doesn't just present it; it embodies things that we don't have translations for in English; it has a different poetry, melody, physicality; it holds its own story of past and present tightly, while as an English South African, it sometimes feels as though I have no past - only a present and a future, here, in a country I love. That's it, too - it has loved this place for as long as it has existed.

In varsity, we were taught that new media has something in common with newspaper journalism, for a different reason: readers reading on screen scan, so serve them the who, what, where, when, why and how up front, in the first paragraph. It differs though, in that you should keep something back for the conclusion - something to keep this allegedly lazy reader reading. My posts ignore these 'rules' (I scoff at rules in this new realm of expression) and let you hang on (on my every word...?), hoping you'll bear with me to the end.

My point? My point is that I have a point, but I need to warm up before I find it. The translator, Michiel Heyns, no doubt in consultation with the author, has carried some of the conventions of Afrikaans into English, sometimes making the prose a syrupy river to wade through, but in others translating the physicality of a language, for which English has no equivalents. I am speaking (writing) specifically of the stresses: é and è. 'Thére,' she writes, and I know the character is nodding or pointing, verbally or non- or both, without her having to prosaically tell me that she is doing so or leaving it my imagination.

I am enamoured with this one little stroke, not only because it carries something of the language that I functionally understand, but also because I envy it. I envy its usefulness and its utility of written codes; its force and its subtlety... I imagine that I do not understand any Afrikaans, its culture or our culture, and I appreciate it more, for conveying meaning and context that written words alone do not; the written is uplifted to the verbal. Oh, how I envy a whole language (and others) that have this one little stroke that I cannot (says who?) use.

I confess though (why confess? why not recount or just explain?) that at first (the first 3%) I was a) confused and therefore annoyed (another characteristic of South African fiction, and perhaps of our culture(s)) b) reminded of A Story of an African Farm. At the risk of being superficial, I might have kept that book on-hand if it had used diacritics.