The title of South African TV critic Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s self-help satire, I Moved Your Cheese, mocks a recent bestseller that used anecdotes from hypothetical laboratory rat experiments to help people cope with change.
Like other such satires, Bristow-Bovey’s book invokes absurdist humour to poke fun at the ludicrous metaphors through which self-help books instruct their readers.
Against the grandiose promises of authors who draw on world history, religious mysticism and scientific theories to offer career tips, Bristow-Bovey offers advice that is starkly banal: “This is my advice on coping with change: keep a small jar on the kitchen counter,” he suggests.
Funny enough — but hardly fresh material. What makes I Moved Your Cheese distinctive is not its humor, but its grim nihilism. Bristow-Bovey not only pokes fun at the self-appointed prophets of self-transformation; he attacks the idea of self-transformation itself. Trying to improve yourself, he says, “takes time and effort, almost invariably doesn’t work, and still leaves you stuck with being you.” This advice applies equally to social transformation. It is not worth thinking about larger issues, Bristow-Bovey tells us; one should rather get distracted by the “little irritations” in life. “Little irritations can be solved, and they keep your mind away from the big issues, which are just going to bog you down and depress you and about which you will never be able to do anything meaningful,” he writes.
Bristol-Bovey, like many other South Africans, wonders whether change is just an empty fantasy, a superficial façade that mocks the masses with the promise of a better life. He repeats, ad nauseam, his dictum that “anything can be faked”, and places it at the centre of a social critique that moves beyond Afro-pessimism into might be called Afro-nihilism. Along the way, Bristow-Bovey rejects the bevy of millennial religious and political fantasies that many South Africans cling to in the post-apartheid era — especially the new-age spiritualism that his fellow young white professionals have substituted for the do-gooder liberalism of their youth.
But he offers no alternative. Instead, he clings to his ironic detachment and surrounds himself with the absurdist creations of his prodigious wit. His hero is Xam, a young Bushman given to masturbation who gains acclaim from his tribe by pretending that his empty ostrich egg is full of something. That is how Bristow-Bovey, from his pop-culture-obsessed perspective, seems to see contemporary South Africa — as a thin and fragile white shell surrounding a dark and confusing void about which it is better to do nothing.
In the author’s defence, it is important to note that absurdist nihilism has been a way of coping with profound social and political change ever since World War I, when the Dada movement emerged among a generation of urbane young artists in Western Europe.
The ironic detachment of the post-Cold War era, which Bristow-Bovey exemplifies both in his book and in his television commentaries, draws on Dada’s nihilistic legacy.
Moreover, much of the best South African writing, both during apartheid and after it, has seized upon the absurdity of South African life. And in the midst of an ongoing global war between “the West” and “Islam”, Bristow-Bovey’s book is timely: it reminds us of the folly of utopianism and the importance of scepticism.
But scepticism should not be carried to self-destructive lengths; in restraining the wildest of our dreams, it should not deny us the capacity to dream altogether. And absurdity, while useful and entertaining, becomes tiresome when taken to an extreme. The surrealists, in breaking away from their Dadaist forebears, insisted that absurdist art and literature should not merely be critical and nihilistic, but should point the way towards social transformation. That, ultimately, is where Bristow-Bovey’s book fails: he moves your cheese, only to let it go rancid.