This art icle was downloaded by: [ Connect icut College] , [ Jeanne- Marie Jackson] On: 02 May 2013, At : 11: 58 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rsaf20 You Are Where You Aren’t: Mark Behr and the Not-Quite-Global Novel Jeanne-Marie Jackson Published online: 02 May 2013. To cite this article: Jeanne-Marie Jackson (2013): You Are Where You Aren’ t : Mark Behr and t he Not -Quit e-Global Novel, Safundi: The Journal of Sout h African and American St udies, 14:2, 175-190 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 17533171.2013.776753 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae, and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 2013 Vol. 14, No. 2, 175–190, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2013.776753 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 You AreWhereYou Aren’t: Mark Behr and the Not-Quite-Global Novel Jeanne-Marie Jackson In an interview about his 2009 novel Kings of the Water—which stages a gay Afrikaner man’s return from San Francisco to his childhood farm in the Free State—Mark Behr sought to move beyond South African exceptionalism. “I wanted to write a plaasroman for the 21st century,” he said, “one that grapples with what is unique about South Africa while simultaneously insisting that we are radically and inextricably linked to the outside world, that our uniqueness is nothing special… that we, in South Africa, are in fact, at last, quite ordinary.”1 Behr, who like his main character lives mostly in the USA, seems to embody the next frontier for South African studies now that the transition model has run its course. And yet in the essay that follows, I argue that he in fact reveals a persistent incommensurability between South Africa unto itself and in the world, a “failure” to make cosmopolitan ideals manifest in narrative form. The unevenness of the international terrains Kings of the Water traverses (in terms of character development, style, ethical depth, and inter-relational challenge) also marks the novel as a timely case study in South Africa’s fraught relation to transnational genres and trends.2 Nevertheless, Kings of the Water appears at first as a bold if somewhat belated declaration of the global South African novel (which is not just to say one in broad circulation, but one that is confined neither to “local” settings nor to broadly allegorical ones like, for example, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians). Its protagonist, Michiel Steyn, lives with his half-Jewish, half-Arab partner Kamil in a trendy San Francisco neighborhood full of transplants. Michiel works as a language instructor for international students—he’s planning a trip to China—and recounts his social awakening as a young émigré in London and Australia; Kamil is a Correspondence to: Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Email: jeanne-marie.jackson@aya.yale.edu 1 Mark Behr interview by Jennifer Crocker, Crocker’s Shelf. 2 The theme of South Africa’s uniqueness or belatedness in the context of world literature has a long and varied critical history with which Safundi readers are likely familiar. Among many examples see Nkosi, “Postmodernism and Black Writing in South Africa,” and Visser, “Postcoloniality of a Special Type.” Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 176 J.-M. Jackson professor of postcolonial literature at UC Berkeley. Global industry (namely aviation) figures prominently in the book’s plot. On the surface, then, we can easily make room for Behr’s third novel in a story we all know, albeit in different versions: the construct of nationhood gets left in the twentieth century; networks thicken and expand; cosmopolitanism becomes not the achievement of a worldly elite but the everyday reality of hyper-connectivity; fiction rushes to keep pace. In other words, it has all the trappings not so much of what Rosemary George calls the novels of national “leave-taking” that dominated postcolonial writing through at least the 1980s,3 but of more recent works that move fluidly among far-flung locales. But Kings of the Water is really framed more as a homecoming, a novel of repossession that challenges dominant, boundary-busting approaches to global émigré fiction. It centers on Michiel’s anxious return to the family farm, Paradys, from which he fled in scandal fifteen years earlier; his mother, Beth or “Ounooi” has unexpectedly died. This turning point in the character’s life is thus a good place to take stock of developments in thinking about global form, which offers a frame for my reading of the novel and particularly Kamil’s (and by extension San Francisco’s) relative one-dimensionality within it. It would be impossible to survey the whole terrain of the global literature field (to the extent that it can be said to cohesively exist), but it employs a set of terms used with varying degrees of interchangeability. “Since at least the late 1980s,” writes Caren Irr, “ambitious writers have been imagining a new kind of narrative called the global, planetary, international, or simply ‘world’ novel.”4 To this list of related categories must be added the transnational and its occasional synonym the post-national, a designation that seems at once broader and more evocative of literary periodicity. One might make a case for a wide range of ostensibly local works and genres as transnational, and slip easily into the sprawling discourse on world literature as a method or qualitative designation rather than as an identifiable set of literary attributes.5 The “global” in its most salient iterations, though, invokes a more precise set of network-oriented formal concerns with which I think Behr engages. This is also the angle from which Kings of the Water marks an interesting new direction for South African fiction in particular: while scholars have long noted the fascination with and even fetishization of apartheid South Africa on the world stage, even the country’s best-known writers have stopped short of embracing a “new” kind of self-consciously global writing.6 South African literature is thus an ideal vehicle for exploring potential disharmonies between the global construed in 3 George, The Politics of Home, 191. Irr, “Toward the World Novel,” 660. 5 On transnationalism in South African literature in particular, see Stephen Clingman’s recent readings of how Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer construct transposable and boundary-transforming “‘grammars’ of space.” See Clingman, The Grammar of Identity, 209. 6 On Anglo-American representations of apartheid South Africa see Barnard, “Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa” and Barnett, “Constructions of Apartheid.” Even the most formally innovative recent South African writing—Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat, Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys, and Lewis Nkosi’s Mandela’s Ego are just three prominent examples—tends to prioritize clearly delineated localities. 4 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 177 a loose sense—as designating widespread international appeal or distribution, as a fact of a writer’s biography (Behr has allegiances to Tanzania, South Africa, and the USA), or as a successor field for postcolonialism—and globality as an explicit formal aim. So what does global writing in this more limited but ultimately, I think, more productively defined sense entail? In sum, and as is often elaborated through discussion of a select few obviously “global” writers, it is as much (or even more) about enacting interconnection as it is about the places being linked.7 The features best suited to this goal8 are typically thought to unseat longstanding conventions allying novel and nation (namely, a shared sense of bounded time and space as expressed through a representative individual on a linear plot trajectory). In Rebecca Walkowitz’s focus on Caryl Phillips, for example, in her essay “The Location of Literature,” or Rita Barnard’s turn to David Mitchell’s 1999 novel Ghostwritten, global novels center on collating a range of discrete locales and experiences that nonetheless “operate within a linked set of emerging global conditions.”9 In most accounts, these “conditions” include what Ulrich Beck calls the “banal cosmopolitanism”10 of our daily lives—things like watching television, surfing the Internet, and eating food from far away—as symptoms of deeper systemic and epistemic shifts. The challenge of global narrative thus lies in reconciling these two levels, which is to say in depicting the local manifestations of transnational currents as a means of apprehending those currents’ effect on an increasingly wholistic and interlinked conception of the world. Despite Behr’s proclamation of South Africa’s international connection, though, his novel depicts the country’s newfound “ordinariness” not by branching out but by homing in: to the extent that the plaasroman is updated here for a global era, it is through the vigilant policing of its literal and metaphoric borders. The operative question for Kings of the Water, one that makes it a book worth talking about, is thus not whether globalization is ineluctable (it is), but whether and to what extent it can be made meaningful in fiction. This is an essential concern now that the global has come into its own (in spirit if not necessarily in institutional organization) as the new “received wisdom” of the Anglo-American academy.11 In other words, does the value of the transnational turn inhere in its correspondence to a “global” reality as such, or in the challenge it once posed to an assumed priority on the nation? Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman’s warning in 2001 that “too much of the discourse on globalization has failed to remember the force and power of the 7 In contradistinction to staid postcolonial or “world” literary forms like the migrant novel and the colonial bildungsroman, Rita Barnard suggests that global narrative looks toward “a new kind of plot, with new coordinates of time and space, that may serve as a corollary to the brave neo world of millennial capitalism and perhaps even provide the conceptual preconditions for a cosmopolitan society.” See Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” 208. 8 Caren Irr supplies “multistranded narration, broad geographical reach, cosmopolitan ethics, multilingual sensitivity, and a renewed commitment to realism.” See Irr, “Toward the World Novel,” 660–61. 9 Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” 211. 10 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” 28. 11 Walkowitz, “The Location of Literature,” 528. Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 178 J.-M. Jackson residual at every moment of the dominant”12 still seems relevant, and it is the residual with which Behr’s work grapples. Though Edward Said once observed that the concept of nationhood does not quite “cover the nuances principally of reassurance, fitness, belonging, association, and community, entailed in the phrase at home or in place”13—nuances with whose pursuit in a changing world Kings of the Water is intimately concerned—we can amend this to say that in Behr’s case, one nation covers much more nuance than others. Christopher Hope notes in his Guardian review of the book that Michiel “sees clearly the changes going on in [South Africa] as … a voyeur,” seeming to indicate a critical stance that is enabled by Behr’s distance from his homeland. And yet as the main character comes to terms with his past and is resituated in the country he left, the narrative does not achieve the interpenetration of its two main locales—San Francisco and South Africa—so much as it stages a productive gap between Paradys and everywhere else. In its emphasis on the recent past and the émigré experience, Kings of the Water appears to mark a departure from Behr’s 1993 Afrikaans classic The Smell of Apples (Die Reuk van Appels). In fact, though, many of that work’s notable features offer a useful segue to my discussion of its successor. To preface a published interview with Behr, Andrew van der Vlies summarizes the first novel as “… a vivid picture, from the point of view of pre-adolescent Marnus Erasmus, of Afrikaner patriarchy, the structures of complicity in everyday white family life in 1973, and the corruption of innocence. Juxtaposed with this narrative, passages narrating Marnus’s extreme experiences [in the South African Border War] in Angola in 1988 suggest inevitable entrapment in apartheid ideology.”14 Scholarship on The Smell of Apples generally shares an emphasis on what Van der Vlies calls its “claustrophobic” quality, whence it derives its power to illuminate the apartheid state’s persistence in the face of widespread condemnation. “Behr’s novel is the opposite of a bildungsroman,” writes David Medalie, “it is an investigation of the origins of warped understanding and behavior…”15 Or as Rita Barnard explains, the archetypal South African “complicity novel” such as André Brink’s A Dry White Season entails “an awakening to a ‘real’ but repressed knowledge of South African conditions, and a new sense of self…in relation to those conditions,” which might be visualized as “not a circle, but a widening spiral of politically engaged individuals,” (209). The Smell of Apples, on the other hand, is a “circular narrative” that “presents none of these easy moral and readerly satisfactions.”16 12 O’Brien and Szeman, “The Globalization of Fiction,” 609. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 8. 14 Mark Behr interview by Andrew van der Vlies, 1. 15 Medalie, “Old Scars, Old Bones, and Old Secrets,” 512. 16 See Barnard, “The Smell of Apples,” 209. Barnard goes on to analyze The Smell of Apples’ autobiographical resonance, which may already be familiar to Safundi readers. “[Behr], like Marnus, grew up to accept his position in the Afrikaner’s culture of masculinity and secrecy. As he sensationally revealed at a 1996 conference, Behr assented to the solicitations of a family member, a high-ranking police officer, by working as a spy for the security police during the 1980s while a student at the University of Stellenbosch” (210). In his interview with Van der Vlies, Behr discusses this confession in the context of his eventual political awakening and his life as a double agent. 13 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 179 While The Smell of Apples confronts the apartheid past by entering it—as Medalie noted in 1997, it “makes no explicit reference to this decade or very recent events”17—Kings of the Water explicitly tackles the so-called New South Africa and its place in the world. And yet, it does so almost entirely through confinement to a remote farm steeped in fraught apartheid history, where the family patriarch, though withered, still reigns. Both works thus seem to resist what Medalie calls “a widespread desire to cauterize history with the end of formal apartheid in April 1994 and to establish and promote the idea of radical discontinuity as a way of shrugging off the past and its shadows.”18 In other words, Behr’s pronouncements about “the fluidity of life and the inevitability of change”19 conceal a lingering preoccupation with the past, and with the spaces in which it is least readily surmounted, that forms a thread running through his oeuvre. The claustrophobia of a place and ideology which Behr’s earlier, child narrator cannot escape is replaced in Kings of the Water with a protagonist who did escape, and who has ostensibly found happiness and self-acceptance in his new, San Franciscan existence. But the narrative structure in which he is embedded tells a different story, in which the dynamism of “going back” to the farm offsets the relative thinness of the worldly identity that succeeded it. The novel begins with a lilting description of the South African landscape that stands in sharp contrast to the traces we glimpse of Michiel’s life in San Francisco. “Clouds pass overhead like a fleet with sails billowing against the blue,” the book opens, “their shadows rallying across the veld under the noon sun.”20 From this point forth, Paradys is established as a kind of narrative touchstone: all other temporalities and locales are accessed via Michiel’s return to the farm, whose paths “he remembers like lines on his own hand…”21 After emerging from his rental car to take in the multi-sensory experience of homecoming—“The smell of recent rain on grass and soil fills his head,” we read, “It is as if he has never been away”22—Michiel recalls his journey from America. But the details of his identity outside Paradys seem decidedly shallow in comparison, global accouterments against which the depth of Behr’s stake in South Africa can be measured. “This, then, is where the reunion with the old man is to take place,” he speculates, “with him in his Levis and Nike Airs made in Cambodia…”23 More significantly, the local investments of the novel’s South African characters bring the cosmopolitan clichés that Michiel embodies into bold relief. When he tells his mother that he and Kamil have “thoughts of adopting from China or Cambodia,” she mentions that Karien, his former girlfriend, has “adopted two children from the townships” and will soon be taking them on an in-country vacation. “Left unsaid was that the 17 Medalie, “Old Scars, Old Bones, and Old Secrets,” 512. Ibid., 507. 19 Mark Behr interview by Jennifer Crocker, Crocker’s Shelf. 20 Behr, Kings of the Water, 1. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 4. 18 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 180 J.-M. Jackson children’s parents had died of AIDS-related illnesses and that the kids, too, might be living with the disease.”24 The resulting impression is that Michiel’s decision to leave South Africa entails a great deal of loss along with the more obvious gains, as he struggles to transpose what he sees as a narrative of exile into one of emigration; that is, from an involuntary paradigm to a voluntary one, accompanied even by a change in name (Michiel’s partner and American friends call him “Michael,” without the guttural Afrikaans ch). In his review of the novel, Hope adds that its “American sections pale alongside life at Paradys.” He does not, however, make the connection between this and another apparent shortcoming that he mentions casually in the same line, namely that Behr “has a weakness for reading lists of favourite South African writers.” From its very first pages, Kings of the Water does indeed betray a propensity for allusion: Michiel’s ruminations on the flight to Johannesburg contain a quote that only a South African reader is likely to recognize as being from André Brink’s 1975 novel An Instant in the Wind (‘n Oomblik in die Wind), and a later, revealing reference to Nadine Gordimer’s 1981 book July’s People is similarly unmarked.25 Rather than see this as a mere stylistic tick, I propose that it is indicative of Behr’s efforts or at least his success at situating his work within a South African literary tradition, rather than the global one to which it seems to aspire. Behr refers to the work he first quotes from only as a banned “Brink novel” in which “Ounooi or Karien had underlined the words” that he remembers. The passage, as quoted in Kings of the Water, reads as follows: “… here is my hand, take it, let’s jump into the abyss, whatever happens; even if we fall to death, let us at least be hand in hand.”26 A classic of Afrikaans fiction, the novel concerns an interracial love affair in eighteenth-century South Africa. It is telling that this is Michiel’s available reference as he thinks about Kamil’s assertiveness in addressing marriage inequality in the United States. Even this most highly charged of American social issues—one that would seem to offer common ground for Michiel and Kamil in their relation to a shared place of residence—is related to the legacy of South Africa’s oppressive past, though gay marriage is already legal there. South Africa, in other words, begins to look like Michiel’s only meaningful source of self-identification, and by extension Behr’s only meaningful way of driving the narrative forward. He is unable, or more likely unwilling, to hazard what Barnard calls the “experientially limited point of view that the national novel à la [Benedict] Anderson would exclude…a kind of synthetic or sutured omniscience that transcends any single individual’s experience.”27 The resulting impression, though, is not so much of dogged adherence to individualist narrative in the face of its global diffusion (though that may be true), but of juxtaposition between locales that are more or less able to still support this sort of narrative. 24 Ibid., 8. Ibid., 54. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” 212. 25 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 181 South Africa is the hub through which all other experiential traffic must be routed, and its primacy grows more apparent if we contrast “insider” literary references—which make deliberate points about South African history and Michiel—with the smorgasbord of non-South African titles that follows. At one point, Michiel “strains to recall” what his mother was reading on her visit to San Francisco before she died: “Something … bought at Borders the evening before. […] Margaret Atwood? Was it Roth—The Human Stain? The Michael Cunningham?”28 Unlike the allusion to Brink, these names do not appeal to any particular readership or invoke common themes of any weight; indeed, they serve no real purpose at all other than to suggest Ounooi’s (and Behr’s) familiarity with the contemporary literary landscape. The July’s People’s reference also demands fleshing out for the entrée it provides to more penetrating social and textual insights. “In his palm, Michiel finds the familiar smell of Lifebuoy,” Behr writes, before quoting Gordimer: “July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind … black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap…” The narrative then segues with only an ellipsis back to Michiel’s past, specifically graduate school, with “… the phrase with the smell. Five double-spaced pages of his dissertation on little more than that one sentence.”29 This faintly mocking portrait of Michiel’s work is underscored by a return to the novel’s present tense and the accomplishments of a black child he grew up with, the daughter of Paradys’ head domestic servant. Little Alida, as she is still known on the farm, is now an executive at a major international corporation. Rather than simply contrast the period of July’s People with the present day, though, to marvel at the distance between the New South Africa and the “Old” one (after all, Little Alida’s mother occupied July’s role in the Steyn household), Behr speculates about how this powerful black woman might relate to the many workers who still reside on the farm. Her relation to them thus forms a kind of third zone between apartheid South Africa and its modern “global” successor, complicating the transitional linearity that might seem to hold from the outside. (Furthermore, Little Alida remains xenophobically allied with Michiel’s father despite her prominent standing in the New South Africa: “Little Alida has been to China too,” Oubaas proudly taunts at one point, “She told your mother it’s the filthiest place on earth and that they eat dogs.”30) “Here,” Michiel thinks to himself of the workers in their trailer, “not only separate from the house and the white world, but also from the woman in the black pantsuit and the Volvo. How does she relate to this part of the farm and these people to her?”31 This is a crucial juncture at which Behr enforces the disconnect between disaffiliated and embedded—what we might term loosely global and local— 28 Behr, Ibid., 30 Ibid., 31 Ibid., 29 Kings of the Water, 6. 54. 29. 54. Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 182 J.-M. Jackson perspectives on Little Alida’s position, illustrating the larger impasse between “insider” and “outsider” experiences of place that characterize the work as a whole. Michiel uses Kamil to claim a bluntness he is otherwise unable to muster in addressing what he knows as a complex situation in South Africa, one to which he is now just peripheral enough to be guarded in his critique: “The former house niggers, Kamil might make the comparison. The house n-word, before tenure.”32 The brief hint of self-servingness that this would-be quote admits robs Kamil’s critical bravado of any weight, as it comes throughout Kings of the Water to seem increasingly like a luxury of distance. Moreover, it is representative of his stock radical viewpoints as they are paraphrased throughout the book, and which serve to keep the reader from caring that the character gets such short shrift. In other words, the disconnect between Kamil’s posturing about abstract figures and the people who actually inhabit Paradys keeps us from forming competing attachments of our own. It is peculiar that the chief emblem of Michiel’s progress—the man with whom he has finally built a home that accords with his values—should be so ambivalently portrayed. A page later, though, Behr clarifies the trade-offs inherent in this sort of electivity, directly opposing what Katerina Clark summarizes as the recent view that “there is no necessary contradiction between the call of the national and that of the ‘cosmopolitan’.”33 In Michiel’s life as with the design of the novel in which he appears, we are forced to confront precisely the either/or that theorists like Kwame Appiah and Bruce Robbins, to name just two of the best known, have sought to overturn.34 The following passage suggests that Michiel’s reasons for staying away from South Africa transcend even his painful rejection by Oubaas on account of his homosexuality: Walking from the car to the men’s room, the cafeteria and back [Michiel] made at least four moral choices before eight upturned hands, four pairs of eyes. Somehow those signified something different from the requests, threats, and familiar jocularity of the homeless on Powell below International House [in San Francisco]. Here, unlike there, he felt responsible beyond the gesture of giving or not giving. When he gives there—and he does, often—a note stuffed into the pouch, dropped in the bowl, placed in the fingers, he is merely being kind. This morning…the meaning of receiving too seemed different. Here, the surprised dankie Baas alleviates nothing of the giver’s sense that not enough is being done. This too, he knows, has in time become part of why he lives there. At a certain 32 Ibid. Clark, “M.M. Bakhtin and ‘World Literature’,” 276. 34 See Robbins’ and Pheng-Cheah’s much-cited 1998 anthology Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. “Understood as a fundamental devotion to the interests of humanity as a whole,” Robbins writes in his Introduction, “cosmopolitanism has often seemed to claim universality by virtue of its independence, its detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives. It has seemed to be a luxuriously free-floating view from above. But many voices now insist … that the term should be extended to transnational experiences that are particular rather than universal and that are unprivileged—indeed, often coerced” (1). 33 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 183 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 point the moral responsibility of here (where so much of him belongs, is owed) exceeds the returns.35,36 Besides encapsulating the disjointedness of the novel’s overarching design, the firm use of “here” and “there” in this excerpt indicates a predicament that is out of sync with familiar diasporic models. Migrant texts have typically been thought to confound or erase cultural boundaries, at least since Homi Bhabha’s pioneering work on the “ghostly” postcolonial afterlives of the nation,37 and Rita Barnard notes that their global successors similarly demand a “culturally flexible insider/ outsider” reader.38 Behr, on the other hand, uses the experience of displacement to convey an infungible sense of origin and destination. If Michiel’s transnational experience ever troubles the concept of roots, of a here against which there is always defined, the reader does not see it. Caren Irr writes that “in recent immigration fiction, we commonly find that any single location is shadowed by a sister city.”39 San Francisco in Kings of the Water is more like an escape, one whose haunting by South Africa only works in one direction. Indeed, Michiel’s mother Ounooi was the only other person to have negotiated between the novel’s two main narrative planes, and this live connection is literally severed for it to even begin: it is her death that serves as the catalyst for Michiel’s return to Paradys. In other words, the only bridge between these places other than the protagonist is quite literally a ghost, and Michiel’s relationship with Kamil is effectively quarantined from the dynamic space of the novel. This symbolism is perhaps clearest in Kamil’s gesture of sending a card with a silver coin and poem in it to Ounooi’s funeral with Michiel. “Put it on her coffin,” Kamil instructs him, and so buries the chance of locational or narrative conciliation.40 While Michiel does communicate with Kamil from South Africa via text messaging, this requires an isolation that stands in dramatic contrast to the in-the-flesh social reconnections taking place in the rest of the book. It is thus difficult to read Michiel’s ability to maintain ties with his global network as evidence of postcolonialism’s characteristic coincidence with “massive economic, political, and technological transnationalism world-wide,” accompanied by the “internationalization of literature and literary studies.”41 Rather, the juxtaposition of global connectivity and Paradys’ hard-won intimacy dilutes the significance of international networks to the novel, indicating its refusal of what Michael Chapman has called the 35 Behr, Kings of the Water, 36. I do not want to place too much weight on Behr’s personal statements, but it seems fair to include here an especially resonant moment from his Safundi interview with Van der Vlies: “I doubt that I could live in the US if I were unable to continue my relationships with people and places in Africa,” Behr concedes, “Every year I spend three to four months there and teach at times in the University of Cape Town’s master’s program in creative writing. […] Certainly, youth’s idealization of traveling the world and living ‘abroad’ has long since been cut to size” (12). 37 Bhabha, “DissemiNation.” 38 Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” 213. 39 Irr, “Toward the World Novel,” 666. 40 Behr, Kings of the Water, 10. 41 Boehmer, “Global and Textual Webs,” 11. 36 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 184 J.-M. Jackson “in-between” place of South African fiction in this “transnational moment” of “transformational movement.”42 It is telling in this light that many of the longest, most complex, and most memorable scenes in Kings of the Water revisit and rekindle apartheid relationships. Even if we attribute this to what Louise Viljoen has called a post-apartheid “truth commission”43 for Afrikaans fiction to negotiate “the intricate relationship between the colonial and the postcolonial,”44 there is a tension between this orientation and the global or more loosely transnational one—which Chapman suggests is “post-postapartheid”45—that Behr claims to favor. Whereas the global paradigm generally entails an emphasis on network expansion, Michiel’s development hinges on the moral friction afforded by immediate encounter. The depiction of this contrast, however, is essential, and distinguishes Kings of the Water from more “local” queer fiction by South African writers (one thinks of Damon Galgut or K Sello Duiker). In particular, an extended scene early in the book in which he is called on to bathe his decrepit, unforgiving father—a challenge which he is initially loath to accept—reinforces Paradys’ robustness vis-à-vis a similar scene of caretaking in San Francisco. Though Michiel had bathed Kamil during his near-death struggle with HIV years before this return to South Africa, we are privy to that experience only as it is refracted through the more detailed event with his father. “Will it not be easier if I lift you right in, Pa?” Michiel asks when his father tries to assert his strength to stand. “He does not say: I have lifted weights every other day since first carrying another in to the bath of our own home. Your sour breath, the baby finch curled in its nest and the stale musk of night sweats on warm days are familiar to me.”46 That is to say that though Kamil’s illness occurred prior to Oubaas’, it is placed in a subservient narrative position: Kamil becomes a tool for enriching Behr’s depiction of Paradys, a function only of memories that are activated by a place that possesses both past and present. Short maxims that Kamil “might say”47 pepper the text, refusing to allow this ostensibly central figure to rise even to the vibrancy of real dialog. Instead, clichés like “Honesty will do … Truth is sometimes too much”48 act as ligaments connecting more multidimensional, well crafted exchanges between father and son. Despite his gruff bearing and antiquated mentality (at one point he exclaims, “You sound like a woman, for Christ’s sake”49), Oubaas is charged with the comparatively weighty task of catalyzing “something of what the religious call grace.”50 42 Chapman, “Introduction,” 1. Viljoen, Rev. of Triomf, by Marlene van Niekerk, 246. 44 Viljoen, “Postcolonialism and Recent Women’s Writing,” 72. 45 Chapman, “Introduction,” 1; italics added. 46 Behr, Kings of the Water, 29. 47 Ibid., 32; italics added. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 35. 50 Ibid., 31. 43 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 185 We are left, then, to reconcile Michiel’s (and Behr’s) assumed condemnation of Oubaas’ politics with the fact that he is not only a richer character than the forward-thinking Kamil, but demands more ethical and interpretive work of Michiel and the reader alike. Where we might expect a post-post-apartheid (or post-anti-apartheid, as some have suggested) and thereby “global” South African novel to chronicle Michiel’s journey from repressed Afrikaner youth to comfortably situated cosmopolitan man, in fact his social and moral development is expressed in reverse. In confronting his father’s illness, unlike in confronting Kamil’s, Michiel and the reader are pulled up short by the sprawling emotional range that Oubaas both exhibits and incites. The following passage conveys the undeniable brutality, but also the descriptive pay-off of Michiel’s subjecting himself to his father’s invective (and immediately follows the hypothetical quote from Kamil which I have referred to as a narrative ligament): “I’m thinking, Pa, how life brings us to unexpected places.” He lathers and washes the diminished thighs, rubs the cloth closer to the protruding bones of the hips. The old man coughs once. And then says, “Next unexpected place you’ll be is my dick.” He guffaws and Michiel chuckles, unable to stop himself from laughing. Oubaas’s laughter comes from his belly, his head thrown back. His chest rises and falls. A soapy cascade over the tub’s side drenches Michiel’s jeans. Still smiling, Michiel returns his eyes to Oubaas’s face. What he sees now cannot be mistaken for mirth. The mouth is open, with the lips drawn into a snarl, the eyes stretched to bursting. The face is contorted and there is no sound from the throat. The arms bring up the hands, somehow manage to place them, again doddering, over the open eyes, leaving visible only the mouth’s soundless gape.51 In the space of just five lines, Behr moves from the relief of laughter over a crude joke shared between father and son to Oubaas’ reinvigorated tenacity and patriarchal authority. The rapid shifts in his demeanor and the tonal recalibration they demand of Michiel accentuate Paradys’ uniquely confrontational capacity, as its characters both do and do not conform to the social roles they inhabit. In contrast, Kamil is only a passive agent in the depiction of his own illness toward the end of Kings of the Water, and Michiel’s role as his caretaker is mercifully shared with Kamil’s parents as they banter about Israeli–Palestinian relations. Though Kamil’s degradation is described in graphic detail, Behr gives us next to no access to the character himself.52 He does not speak but is spoken of, and his very disease is a catalyst for further insight into Michiel’s inner struggles: “In Michiel’s imagination—this, too, he shares with no one—the virus initially resembles bilharzias larvae.”53 Though this dark period in their relationship ultimately solidifies the bond between the two men and forces Michiel to confront 51 Ibid., 32. Ibid., 178–79. 53 Ibid., 177; italics added. 52 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 186 J.-M. Jackson his own longstanding fear of monogamy, the only transformational interactions we are privy to take place between Michiel and his psychotherapist, Dr. Glassman (“We have our work cut out for us, I see”54 he says at one point). My argument here is not that Michiel’s San Francisco life with Kamil somehow “matters” less to him than where he comes from, but that Behr is unable to derive the same level of narrative and ethical thickness from it. Indeed, in the initial bathtub scene with Oubaas, the therapeutic language that stands in for Michiel’s relationship with Kamil in terms of demonstrating his maturation is revealed as insufficient to address the challenges of Paradys. “Could the outbursts at his boys and at farm workers be given a neurological rather than psychodynamic diagnosis?,” Michiel ponders of his father’s irascibility. No, he ultimately concludes, because “how to account for the selectivity of [Oubaas’] rage?”55 It is at this point that the specific legacy of the plaasroman deserves mention, rather than just the fact of its modernization as a “genre of the nation [stretched] to incorporate politically charged elements of the global scene.”56 In other words, what attributes of this South African literary tradition might make it especially powerful as a tool for critiquing the assumed transition from national to transnational narrative? J.M. Coetzee describes the hermeticism of the plaasroman’s chronotope, which I have already indicated continues through Kings of the Water, with particular elegance: “Somewhere intermediate between the infinitesimal and the infinite,” he observes, “the farm asserts its own measures of time and space, and on these axes carries out its own self-absorbed existence.”57 Traditionally, this has been seen as Afrikaner fortification against the cruel realities of wider South African existence, describing “a deterministic relationship between genre and ideology,” in the words of Nicole Devarenne, and “justifying the disenfranchisement of blacks and the disempowerment of women.”58 As concerns Kings of the Water, however, it is through maintenance of the farm’s confines that Behr depicts national and personal change. As I have shown, the “global” sensibility that the novel represents does not permit the sort of reckoning that Michiel’s face-off with his father does, so that the stubborn content of the old man’s insults becomes less relevant than the process of conflict and transformation that they effect. Similarly, the fact that Little-Alida at first resumes her place outside the farm’s main house despite her powerful job reads most readily as an illustration of the plaasroman’s incompatibility with a new, internationalized social hierarchy of which she sits at the top. But we might also read her character as part and parcel of Behr’s effort to transform the genre from within, without recourse to a different and differently problematic set of external values. As Rebecca Walkowitz notes, we 54 Ibid., 180. Ibid., 30. 56 Irr, “Toward the World Novel,” 661. 57 Coetzee, “Farm Novel and ‘Plaasroman’,” 2. For a masterful overview of the genre’s development in Afrikaans, see also Ampie Coetzee’s 2000 monograph ‘n Hele Os vir ‘n Ou Broodmes: Grond en die Plaasnarratief sedert 1595 (A Whole Ox for an Old Bread Knife: Land and the Farm Narrative since 1595). 58 Devarenne, “Nationalism and the Farm Novel,” 627. 55 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 187 would be well served by reading not only “beyond the nation,” but also in search of narratives “that are narrower than the nation, or those that emphasize alternative grounds of collectivity.”59 In other words, Little-Alida’s standing in a global corporation—which we are simply told exists—is the “thin” version of the more nuanced social reordering that we see taking place at Paradys. The “beyond” of the nation is ultimately beyond the novel, too, and it does not necessarily determine Little-Alida’s progress within it: by the end of the book she is called by her real name of Lerato and sits at the table with Oubaas and everyone else, yet there is no clear causal relationship between one thing and the other. Behr’s rewriting of the genre thus does not quite “deconstruct its themes and tropes”60 in the vein of earlier leftist critiques like those of the Sestigers, or even like Coetzee’s Disgrace in its subversion of the pastoral mode to “[transcend] space and place.”61 One could certainly take issue with Kings of the Water’s insufficiently radical stance toward a genre that Devarenne argues “lent credibility to a story about Afrikaners’ rural origins that provided an illusion of continuity in South African history and a description of an unchanging Afrikaner identity.”62 And yet this critique is vulnerable to Medalie’s and others’ suspicion of the need to promote historical discontinuity, a need, moreover, that is interestingly resonant with Beck’s representative assertion that “It is the future, not the past, which ‘integrates’ the cosmopolitan age.”63 If historical progress seems curiously disjointed from Behr’s book about the intimate manifestations of social change, it is because he seeks neither to deny Lerato’s place at the table nor to affirm her ascent to the world plutocracy as the source of his respect. Is the global the only way out and up? And if so, at what cost? As Michiel remarks a bit more than halfway through the novel, the choices that his racial status have afforded him, and whose universalization is ostensibly the goal of post-apartheid social mobility, come at the price of self-delusion. “When on occasion his accent was questioned,” he recalls, “… he offered the new South African traveler and émigré’s stock phrase: I left because I couldn’t abide that terrible system. No one, ever, black or white, had supported, been complicit in or privileged by apartheid or any other kind of exploitation. By its own magnificent volition, a system existed without human agency.”64 While the connection is not made explicit, this thinly veiled exasperation provides some explanation for Kamil’s and San Francisco’s lack of depth vis-à-vis their South African counterparts. The one-size-fits-all progressive politics with which Kamil is associated in the novel, and which are less generously voiced by anonymous Australian college students during this same diatribe, are associated with what Michiel calls “A world chained and unchanging.”65 Unlike Kamil’s students at Berkeley, Michiel describes 59 Walkowitz, “The Location of Literature,” 540. Devarenne, “Nationalism and the Farm Novel,” 627. 61 Smit-Marais and Wenzel, “Subverting the Pastoral.” 62 Devarenne, “Nationalism and the Farm Novel,” 627. 63 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” 27. 64 Behr, Kings of the Water, 134. 65 Ibid. 60 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 188 J.-M. Jackson his own experience at college in Australia as one in which “he kept his head down and completed his degree,” because, “As if out to prove the worthlessness and inherent futility of all education, reading and lived experience, no other student, ever, from anywhere in the world, had changed world views or shifted allegiances. No one had been wrong. Everyone had been born the way they are: if not progressive, then certainly liberal or open-minded.”66 In fiction, then, if not necessarily in life, the historical and social progress that Behr describes in terms of South Africa’s universal ordinariness must be expressed through confinement or not at all: Paradys too is chained in a sense, but only in order to affirm its evolution. More provocatively, Kings of the Water stages a return to non-elective circumstances and relationships—where Michiel is from, whom he was raised by—as the sole grounds from which a narrative of interpersonal reckoning and personal transformation can emerge. I would thus like to gesture, albeit briefly, to an alternative critical paradigm for Behr’s work that I think is resonant for addressing the many writers who less eagerly enact the global than David Mitchell or Caryl Phillips, even given shared terms of engagement with it. “We should grant ‘fixation’ its virtues,”67 the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his classic The Poetics of Space, before associating this localization with “a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed.”68 At a time when scholars of world literature employ overridingly print-cultural and historical methodologies, it is well worth reflecting on how a hermeneutic vocabulary might enrich our understanding of literature’s globalization (or lack thereof). I linger for a moment on this formulation, then, because it captures the challenge of holding strong to a specific locale without sacrificing the fluidity that a cosmopolitan vantage often claims to distinguish itself from a national one. How to use fixation to preserve narrative robustness, and how to maintain the binding that “home” requires in the name of enacting its change? Much as Behr’s novel thwarts the over-determinacy of leap-frogging over local forms to global ones, Bachelard sees his mission as going beyond history and “the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness.”69 Put another way, the unifying concern is with nurturing the diachronic in a synchronic space, something like the paradox of Bachelard’s “intimate immensity.”70 This aim is underscored by Behr’s increasingly ambivalent portrayal of emigration, which on the surface is a more obvious means of enacting both Michiel’s development and that of South African literature. And yet, it is not clear toward what either is reaching: “This, [Michiel] thinks, is at long last the new being born, dragging its afterbirth along with it, scratching its head to figure out a way to imbibe the past or otherwise see itself perish. And he has chosen to remain apart from it.”71 66 Ibid. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 6. 68 Ibid., 10. 69 Ibid., 8–9. 70 Ibid., 183–210. 71 Behr, Kings of the Water, 94. 67 Downloaded by [Connecticut College], [Jeanne-Marie Jackson] at 11:58 02 May 2013 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 189 The above quote, a last unmarked reference to July’s People and its Gramscian interregnum, points toward a contradictory desire to make South Africa “of the world” and to preserve the literary legacy of its isolation. And if Kings of the Water is chiefly this conflict’s manifestation, the work’s final scene is not so much a way forward as a way out. En route to the airport to catch a flight back to the USA, Michiel gets a call from his brother at the farm he’s just left. It is 11 September, and all flights are canceled. We might read this as Jennifer Crocker does, as “the world of Paradys and the events of 9/11 colliding,” or as a “comment on the connectedness of life in the new global village.”72 Or we might read it as Behr’s attempt to have things both ways. Instead of turning the car around, Michiel stops and steps outside to greet a horse wandering in the veld. When in the “wide silence he cups his hands and blows into them for warmth, finding the smell of [the horse] on his fingers,”73 Michiel is freed by circumstances beyond his control from having to choose between the life he has built and the one he was born into. The global networks that tease at the edge of the novel come to a merciful standstill so that Behr can end in one place. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to James Maguire for reading an earlier version of this essay, the organizers of the panel “Contemporary South African Literature: Modernity, Futurity, Banality” at the 2012 conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Leon de Kock for his seminar feedback at Stellenbosch University. REFERENCES Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Barnard, Rita. “The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2000): 207–26. Barnard, Rita. “Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalization of Suffering.” English Studies in Africa 47, no. 1 (2004): 85–101. Barnard, Rita. “Fictions of the Global.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 207–15. Barnett, Clive. “Constructions of Apartheid in the International Reception of the Novels of J.M. Coetzee.” Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 2 (1999): 287–301. 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