In Andr Brink, Africa meets Europe. He talks about his latest novel to John Higgins
`There he stopped, and turned his back to the precipice, and …” The audience gasped in horror as Andr Brink completed the sentence from his new novel, Devil’s Valley (Secker &Warburg). Genuine horror: Brink’s narrative had captivated everyone, no mean feat for a reading to a heard-it-all-before audience of sceptical academics at the University of Cape Town, where Brink has been professor of literature since 1991.
In his early 60s, Brink – the author of 15 novels in both Afrikaans and English – is all modesty, charm and intellectual energy. Devil’s Valley continues the shift away from realism apparent in recent novels such as On the Contrary.
This new phase brings together the sceptical questioning of history associated with post-modernism and a touch of magic realism. Yet Devil’s Valley is just as firmly located in a history and landscape that remain recognisably South African – though freshly, vividly and differently imagined – as anything in his work to date.
The seeds of the novel were planted in a journey through the Swartberg Pass in the Little Karoo, an area of semi-arid desert. The pass is startling and sublime, resembling nothing so much as Viking II’s photos of Mars.
Brink’s response to this environment was immediate: “Ever since I visited the Gamgas Kloof [in the Swartberg mountains], known as The Hell, I just knew there was a novel I had to write. I had the idea of someone coming in, I wasn’t quite sure in the beginning who he would be. In fact, it was only after I started writing that he turned out to be a journalist rather than the academic or historian I had first imagined.”
Finding the right tone for the narrator – a seedy journalist who leaves the usual routine of his crime reporting in the Western Cape to take back the ashes of a young man he had befriended to the isolated community of Devil’s Valley – was Brink’s first problem. “Initially, the book’s style was much more literary, but there was something that didn’t work about it. I must have rewritten it 13 times, every time adding to the curses of the narrator, and trying to capture on paper the speech of some of the crime reporters I had known. They have a very limited vocabulary; there’s such a repetitive recourse to the F-word. I wanted to convey something of that without becoming monotonous.”
The struggle against his own natural literariness was a useful one. “I am aware of the fact that very often when I write I tend towards a kind of …” – he pauses, awkwardly – “of fondling of adjectives. Being kept down to earth by the narrator was a salutary experience. Perhaps I’ve cleaned up my prose a little.”
This sense of imposition is perhaps the key to Brink’s creative drive, since good writing, for him, comes precisely from this tension between controlled and unconscious expression. “I want to have the illusion that I know where I’m going when I embark on a book,” he says. “I draw up a plan – very roughly – and it gives me a kind of reassurance, but I never stick to it. It gets broken down. I know beforehand that it won’t be followed, but I need the feeling of safety that it gives me: at least I have something to fall back on.”
It is this process which makes writing a necessity for him. “I open myself up to my own subconscious,” he says. “That’s why I write: to feel in touch with the whole of your self. All kinds of unexpected things keep surfacing all the time. You remember things you never knew you knew.” Writing is a dialogue with the self, and with the forces that shape the self, from the closest and most intimate relationships to the deepest social and cultural ones.
In his early work he sought to persuade Afrikaners that their dissidence might best be expressed through a “total identification with the African context”.
At the same time, his writing was always powered by a love for European literature and ideas. Culturally exclusive notions of “pure African” identity hold no appeal for him.
“I think they’re regrettable,” he sighs. “One can understand that, at a certain phase of a society’s development, or even an individual’s private philosophical development, it can be useful and necessary. Black consciousness was important in its time, but I think it would be catastrophic now. In the end, I think hybridity better describes what we are … You can’t go back to a pre-colonial innocence, which in any case probably never existed.”