When I recently read Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize winning novel The Promise, I recalled Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This is either a sign of a wandering mind or a work that can’t hold attention.
“I know, I know. Parody,” says the Devil in dialogue with the composer Adrian Leverkuhn (Mann’s Faust character) about the nature of music in inter-war Germany. Beelzebub continues, “It might be merry if in its aristocratic nihilism [parodies of form] were not so very woebegone. Do you think such tricks promise you much happiness and greatness?”
Leverkuhn replies, we learn via stage direction, angrily “No.” He wanted to “raise the game to a yet higher power by playing with forms” from which vitality has vanished, but the Devil dismisses this claim. It might be fun for you, but it won’t be great in the end.
Mann, known for a more traditionalist, 19th-century style, what Lukács called “critical realism,” experimented in Doctor Faustus to a degree. The narrative comes to us in the form of letters from Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, PhD, a philologist and friend of Leverkuhn, who as the novel advances laments the state of Germany under Hitler and the eventual misuses of his friend’s compositions by the Reich all the while we see his erotic desire for Adrien.
A novel with a section that appears like a script wasn’t Mann’s invention of form (Fitzgerald deploys this device in This Side of Paradise), but it serves as a hinge within a largely epistolary novel and that moment “I know, I know. Parody” could be read as a wink to criticism of his work and the balancing dialectic elements in the novel, notably the serious Apollonianism of Zeitblom and the Dionysian elements of the Devil.
It is gothic, the conceit in Faustus, but unlike the work of Faulkner in an American Southern mode, Mann through Zeitblom desires some resolution, a correction to the Devil. Mann, in my reading, laments the unhinged, but as its counter, suggests a Bourgeois equanimity. How does one find composure amidst the serious and the base, uncontrollable elements of human life?
In the dialogue, Leverkuhn clings to objectivity in art, to metanarrative, while according to the Devil, he suspects “nothing of value in the subjective.” The novel, as I read it, views subjective tendencies as the road to Dionysus, to loss of control and then a giving over to the horrors of Fascism. I could debate the stuffy claims here, but what drew me back to Faustus was parody not discourse.
Galgut’s The Promise begins with its title: a dying mother, Rachel Swart, in Apartheid South Africa makes her dying wish to her husband. He must bequeath the family farm to their black servant, Salome. Manie Swart, or Pa as his children refer to him, agrees multiple times saying explicitly “I promise.” He thinks he’s the only one to hear her. He doesn’t give up the land, of course, first because at the time it was illegal under Apartheid for black South Africans to own land and second, well, he doesn’t want to give up his property. But someone else heard the titular promise, their daughter Amor (whose name is the noun form of “love” in Latin), stands there in the corner, forgotten “like a black woman to them,” a simile which generously can be understood as color-blind and sloppy, or more directly, tone deaf given the half-human status of black South-Africans in the setting.
The novel proceeds then at pace through four funerals: first Ma, then Pa, then the other two siblings Astrid and Anton. Amor leaves her family for most of the novel (damn, love is what’s missing from this family?), she heads to faraway lands, has a stint as a lesbian, and ends up a nurse. All the while, our Love holds on to the promise offered to the black woman who raised her.
Most of the novel is spent with the other siblings and their various plights: drunkenness, bulimia, unhappy marriages, failed writing careers, a military deserter etc. The events of the novel and its conceit is all particularly trite, like a fairy tale.
Adam Mars-Jones, writing in The London Review of Books, called the novel “almost retro in its sturdiness.” He suggests the fact that South African readers, or those with Google, may cast a skeptical eye to Rachel’s promise as knowingly impossible given the Apartheid legal system. Its use as the inciting incident as it might be called in film may be “partly theatrical.”
The whole of Mars-Jones’s essay in the LRB is brilliant criticism and a rapid takedown of Galgut’s mode, which flitters with postmodernism, but can be distinctly sloppy, confusing writing at points.
“I am not beautiful,” begins an early paragraph inside Amor’s head.
So thinks Amor, not for the first time, as she regards herself in the mirror behind her cupboard door. She’s in her underwear, which includes a small, recently acquired bra, the sensation of budding flesh still new and unsettling. Her hips have widened, and the thickening seems heavy to her, exaggerated, obscene. She dislikes her stomach and her thighs and the way that her shoulders hang down. She dislikes her whole body, as many of you do, but with special adolescent intensity, and it seems even more present than usual today, more thickly, heatedly present.
These details pile up and act as foreshadowing for Amor’s eventual first menstruation during her mother’s funeral, but what is that “as many of you do” doing there? Why, in the middle of a child considering her body and its changes, does the unnamed narrator intervene, and who is “you?”
This move has antecedents in the text and continues throughout. Two police officers investigating Astrid’s murder:
They have been forced on occasion to become creative about earning an income and sometimes cross over to the dark side. But no need to go into it here, hardly applies in this case, shouldn’t have been mentioned.
On a priest after rushing through the concerns of a grieving husband on account of nature’s call:
No character in a novel ever does what he’s doing now, i.e. pulls his buttocks apart the better to blurt out his distress. One way to be sure you’re not a fiction.
But this is fiction! So cool Damon!
Galgut, it is worth mentioning, is also a playwright of some renown. Thus, his breaking of the fourth wall in this novel makes sense if the reader thinks of it as a play, but it’s a novel. And what of that pesky narrative voice? Garth Greenwell, in a blurb, suggests the novel recalls “the great achievements of modernism” (perhaps Faulkner or Woolf), while Mars-Jones terms it “casual postmodernism.” In their concern for the 20th century, these men miss the pre-modern, indeed the ancient texts. The narrator here acts like a Greek Chorus.
There are asides in parenthesis “(It did not happen), (I do not hear)” that are attributed to the narrator. Moments of setting are structured speeches from Aeschylus:
Nearby [the city] is the Jewish cemetery where very soon, but no, don’t think about that, and don’t look at the graves, though you can’t help seeing the sign for Heroes’ Acre, but who are the heroes, nobody ever explained, is Ma a hero now, don’t think about that either, and then you are sinking in that horrible zone of cement and car washes and dirty looking blocks of flats on the other side.
And random asides from seemingly nothing, for example, “in the hearse, I mean the house.” Viewed as a chorus of sorts, the narrator and then the novel takes on a separate register, one that accounts for the fable-like conceit. Galgut attempts a play-form to turn a simple tale into a grand one, to elevate a fantasy to nation-defining tragedy.
However, the Greek tragedies viewed the plight of their subjects as such—Sophocles felt bad for Oedipus to some extent. Galgut instead delights in the misery and grotesque, not out of affinity, but superiority. His chorus thinks it’s funny his characters suffer under the writer’s torments.
When Manie passes from a snake bite he received attempting to survive in a vat of cobras to prove God’s grace1, the chorus snickers “his family have all gone home [from the hospital] to their various beds, where they snore and fart and mumble and toss their way towards dawn.”
The minister presiding over Manie’s funeral, we learn through the narrator/chorus, committed incest with his sister and the narrator/chorus chides him “but no keep telling the other story, the one we all agreed on, you know which one I mean, about salvation and humor and renewal and forgiveness.” Okay, man!
Incest isn’t a joke here or worthy of chide, but being a Christian is? Why? For whom does Galgut protest so much? Putting his characters through the ringer for his reader’s delight isn’t immediately bad form or literature, A Little Life proved this possible. Yet, with that novel there was an emotional element. Sorrow and pain came at such a rapid pace, the question had to be asked who the joke was on, the characters or the reader? The novel here desires the gothic, but is simply cringe-worthy, filled with such extreme violences and shifts in tone there is an instability that isn’t exciting, but in fact deeply boring.
The final section is another funeral, this time for Anton. His death leaves Amor the sole executor of the Swart estate, which means she can finally give over the property to Salome. Forget about her? So did the narrative. We inhabit a vagrant given a fake name, Bob, before we hear the inner thoughts of Salome, whether she wants the property, feels aggrieved by the fake promise or if she likes working for the Swarts. Before Astrid’s funeral, Anton asks Amor what Salome thinks, that maybe they should ask what she wants, Amor says that whatever Salome thinks, their “mother wanted her to have the Lombard place. It was her last wish and Pa agreed to it. He promised.”
Salome is at once “apparently invisible” and so is whatever she feels according to narration. Yet, why would the writer use “apparently” if not to undermine that appearance? If not to offer some insight beneath the surface or beyond the simple? Why did I spend five pages reading about a vagrant with a fake name, but I can’t hear from a principal character in the drama? Towards the end, as Amore goes to visit Salome and hand over the Lombard place, the chorus chuckles “if Salome’s house hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care to know.”
Who is “you?” Me? The author? Certainly, and last I checked, The Promise was not a “choose your own adventure story,” and thus the reader had no control over what facts are relayed. Galgut doesn’t care to imagine what Salome’s life could be, or how a black woman’s inner-dialogue could function to cohere his fairy tale.
But Salome is given the land, once it is arid and poor. Galgut, given his narrative finds ground in major national events, offers this as a parallel to the post-Apartheid regime—the white South Africans gave the troubled land back to the black South Africans who deserved it in the first place. Amor and Salome hug after the exchange of property and “they’re close, but not close. Joined but not joined. One of the strange, simple fusions that hold this country together.” Writing with the vision of a United Colors Benneton-Ad.
The final pages crib Joyce’s “The Dead” when rain begins to tumble onto Amor and it “falls without judgement on both the living and the dead and continues to fall like that, for hours through the night.” Joyce’s far superior snow-version of this phrase at least has a soul “swoon” and “generous tears” that fill eyes, whereas Galgut offers us “calmness.”
Galgut exists in parody, not out of delight but anger and fury. His narrative becomes so worked up and twisted by direct, concrete feelings towards the characters at play, the literary gravity of the text suffers. His experimentation should be considered at least an admirable breech amidst the persistent observance of bland versions of the novel that often exist, but its immense inability to take the experimentation and do something entertaining or even intellectual should not. Midway through the text, the chorus says “you are what you are, even if ratness is your fate. Nothing to be done.” Okay. Literature, however, is not only fate for it is not meteorology or solidity. It isn’t rain and snow, those solid, impermanent things, otherwise it would wash away with the season’s change, fourth walls and all.
As an American, we have some religious cranks of course, but this is so beyond the pale from a man we’ve only seen being a complicated father, I had to roll my eyes for fifteen pages.