Ken Barris, who won the M-Net Book Prize for The Jailer’s Book, has just published a new novel. Shaun de Waal interviewed him via e-mail
Your new novel, Evolution (Zebra) is not nearly as dense as The Jailer’s Book, either on the level of the prose and metaphor, or on the level of the narrative itself. Was this a conscious decision on your part, a need to do something different from your first novel?
Yes. I needed to write something less intense than The Jailer’s Book, to allow more distance between the reader and the subject matter. I wanted to let more light in, less steam. When it comes to the language, I grew increasingly respectful of the fact that nouns and verbs do the job they’re supposed to, and don’t necessarily require much ornamentation.
Evolution focuses on two transracial sexual relationships. Why do you think such relationships are so important to South African fiction?
I suppose it is one of the more intense encounters possible between people. A conversation over tea or a game of chess just won’t bring the same fullness of response to bear, nor the same level of restriction and transgression. It is also a useful measure of change: as it is no longer forbidden, sex across the colour line reverts to its primary nature – as a sexual rather than a political event, though it might well retain political undertones.
The present-day relationship in Evolution seems to be somewhat satirised; the historical one is treated very seriously, almost tragically. Is there a sharp contrast of past and present here?
I imagine that is what the book is about – the dystopia of the past won’t easily be evolved into an unambivalent Eden, at least not without releasing a stream of Fanta all over one’s readers. I feel edgy and unclear about my own freedom, greatly relieved as I am by our transformation. Part of the satire is my reaction to the characters involved, more a personal than a social dynamic of writing.
Is it just a matter of the present-day relationship repeating the older one, like the tragedies of history repeating as farce?
Perhaps the political element in the contemporary relationship recedes more into the background. I don’t mean to suggest that it vanishes. A sexual relationship in free circumstances with uncertain boundaries would probably be less stark than its opposite, and more complex, with a more nuanced social text written into it. If there’s a history lesson in there, I didn’t do it on purpose – but maybe it’s a question of the present shaping itself, with certain ironies and inversions, on foundations laid in the past.
What is the purpose of serious literature?
Serious literature is part of an undeclared war of consciousness that expresses itself through language. There is an immense flood of banality throughout world culture – in the media, in literature, in movies, in living speech – and then there is the possibility of inventing a compelling and original language of expression.
I’m not suggesting that writers of serious literature are automatically on the side of the angels, but good writing should show the linguistic marks of that tension, of that struggle to shape something more vital from the relatively inane materials of life and common speech.
I believe that the shadow of any artist is the tendency to slide into predictable forms of expression. So the purpose of writing, seen at least from this angle, is to redeem sensibility from the pre-existing forms that at once define and limit it.
There is another aspect to serious literature that has nothing to do with purposes. Like other forms of art, it explains itself just by existing, creating through its activity an open complex of discovery and questioning, of feeling and recognition. In doing so it should move beyond the clearly definable spaces contained within the notion of a “purpose”.