Mark James
DOG HEART by Breyten Breytenbach (Human & Rousseau)
If there is one point where politics, art and religion intersect in the current cultural life of this country, it is in the rage for confession. With differing degrees of enthusiasm, the whole country is at it, mesmerised by it, implicated in it. After the lies, the deceptions, the “dirty tricks”, comes the ringing – and washing – of hands.
This ubiquitous confessional thrust requires that we re-examine our histories, and critically interrogate notions of the past and the role of narratives in constructing versions of that past. And it is here that our literary artists and critics, so long relegated to inconsequence by our sport- crazed society, might assume a position of acute cultural significance. For it is they who can best inform us of the narrative processes at work in our processing of the information that constitutes what, vaguely, we term our “history”.
Breyten Breytenbach’s latest book is subtitled A Travel Memoir. The blurb on the dustjacket tells us, rather blandly, that the book is “a celebration of the Boland of Breytenbach’s youth”. But, in fact, the work is a quest for origins and a meditation – and self-conscious exemplification – of the act of remembering.
The author returns to many of his childhood haunts, remembers many ancestral figures and one-time acquaintances. He is a mental as much as a physical traveller, and to revisit stands as a figure for recollection. The act of remembering is the motive force impelling the narrative, and mind and imagination are the topographies traversed: “Just as you cannot survive without dreams, you cannot move on without the memory of where you come from, even if that journey is fictitious.”
The text can bulge with technical/philosophical rumination about memory and remembering. Not surprisingly, there is much about the interface between the living and the dead, the factual and the fictitious, the present and the past. Is memory a mausoleum of the dead, or a source of vitality for the living? Or both? “Memory,” Breytenbach writes, “will be emptied like a glass held to lifeless lips.” “Imagination,” on the other hand, “is the discovery of new possibilities to dress up memory, like going back on my tracks to explore another direction.”
Memory is intimately entangled with the dead. So it is that the book’s master images are graves and graveyards, coffins, and those celluloid shrines, photographs. The book’s opening sentence reads:”To cut a long story short: I am dead.” And the work closes with the author and his wife visiting a graveyard. Wishing to memorialise an ancestor, they nominate as hers an unmarked grave: “This, we decide, will be the last resting place of Rachel Susanna Keet.” The book’s interest in the making of history finds a compelling metaphor here: “I’m planting a beacon in Africa. A landmark. Am I not allowed to mark out my history?” In a telling ambiguity, Breytenbach once more insists on history- making as that which “marks out”, which at once highlights and obliterates.
Throughout, Breytenbach insists on the slipperiness of memory and, hence, the unreliability of narrative: “Have I come here to read the prints in the dust, to speak about the light of youth, and how my memories got mixed up with those of others? You will hear many stories. Do be careful with the memory.”
Unsurprisingly, the text is crucially concerned with identity, with the productive interplay between the self and other, writer and written. In a post- Freudian age, the self is, clearly, the narrated self, while the nation is a repository of stories, known, rediscovered, mutually reinforcing: “Is this not what life is about: to leaf through the book of yourself and come upon known stories which you’ve never read before?” The good life, exemplified by the artist Franois Krige, is that which leaves a legacy of significant traces: “Is it not ultimately about the dignity of leaving a few marks?”
The kaleidoscopic rearrangements effected by memory are constantly alluded to. So it is that actual genealogies vie with speculative or fantastic ones. And folkloric figures loom up alongside historical ones, the former as much a part of what we term “reality” as the latter.
But for all its philosophical speculation and literary self- consciousness, what keeps one turning the pages is the abundant supply of lucid, sensual and evocative detail. The quirkinesses of character (Breytenbach’s grandfather passed his later days perched in a pepper tree); the unflinching focus on grimly unromantic traits (“it’s Saturday, see … which in this rural environment adds up to `weekly shopping’ and `hopeless inebriation'”); the touching delusions appreciatively relayed (a tunnel is blasted through Kalkoenkrans and “ever since then a cold wind has been blowing through the hole, one elderly lady in town complains”) – it’s these that evoke a powerful sense of place and display the writer’s humanity.
Towards the end of the book Breytenbach asks: “Why have we become so obsessed with origins and beginnings?” And he replies: “Surely it must be because of some alienation.” In South African terms, obsession with origins has been deeply negative and estranging in impact. Breytenbach insists on the inescapability of hybridity – “bastardisation cannot be turned back” – and urges that one has to “keep on making and finding oneself”. Here the confessional merges with the self’s reconstruction, and personal memoir dramatises larger national imperatives.
If one wishes to understand something of the ways we live now, and why writing remains a crucial political necessity in this country, one could do worse than read Dog Heart. Put it on your “must read” list.