/ 11 March 2011

The cure is in the pen

Writing for Salvation by David Robbins (Porcupine Press)

Whatever his subject, David Robbins is one of those writers who write out of the left field. Fiction blurs into autobiography (assuming one distinguishes these categories in the first place), memoir morphs into meditation — on the nature of repression, the meaning of art and the ­problem of memory.

A 40-year-old unfinished and abandoned manuscript gives Robbins the opportunity to reflect on what helped form him as a writer, journalist and young South African ‘come of age” in the 1960s. For those who were not born then, or are too young to remember, the 1960s were — I am told (I was born in 1966) — a strange mix of conformity and dissent. The decade of resistance had ended at Sharpeville; the global countercultural revolt would be muted for a few years until the early 1970s. For black South Africa, it is a time of silence; for white South Africa, a time of false complacency before the storm of 1976.

In line with the classic tropes of the Bildungsroman, Oliver, the hero of Robbins’s manuscript, is a young artist trying to make sense of this world. He senses that the bourgeois security, the order of things, is not all it seems. His relationships with two women — Lynette and Hester — lead him to at least some inkling of the complexities of the apparently ordered and orderly country he lives in. Lynette challenges his assumptions about the anti-miscegenation laws, forcing him to confront his prejudices. Hester shows up the terrible human cost when political nationalism, the pressures of family and culture and repressive religion come together on people who sense they are out of place. It is the story of the loss of personal innocence, the end of social naivety, which reminded me a bit of the underlying themes of the late Etienne Leroux’s To a Dubious Salvation trilogy.

In between the extracts of the narrative reproduced here, the older Robbins reflects on what he had written, trying at once to reconstruct what had been on his mind then and how he sees it now. Just as his persona is forced to confront his own prejudices rooted in the political and religious culture of his upbringing, Robbins is trying to see how these cultural forces affected him and still affect him. He sees a very close correlation between reactionary politics and fundamentalist religion and — if I read him correctly — sees in the act of writing a way of liberation from both.

Writing for Salvation
is undoubtedly an act of self-liberation on a number of levels. For Robbins, the manuscript was a way of confronting his own life experience and by expressing it, letting it go. After all, we all write best when we write about our obsessions, whether about the outer environment or the inner mindscape, locations that we ‘create” for ourselves as much as they are created for us.

In revisiting it, particularly in the light of his recent book Private Excavations (Porcupine Press, 2010) I sense he is trying to evaluate the themes that have persisted in his life and his subsequent writing; repressive politics, conservative religion and the peculiarities of places. From this perspective, the ‘Oliver manuscript” could be seen as a youthful statement of an unfolding life interest, an unfolding personal struggle for liberation, for salvation from inner oppressions and obsessions.

On another level, we see the author battling on two temporal fronts with his personal themes. I say personal not to belittle their significance but to affirm the particularity with which the writer — any writer, in fact — addresses ‘issues”. There is a deliberate irony, I think, in his use of the term ‘salvation”. After all the dangerous Siamese twins of reactionary politics and fundamentalist religion are both discourses that offer — and claim for themselves — salvation to those who sign on. I think Robbins sees writing as a means of salvation from these discourses, the way in which his younger self ultimately broke from their clutches — though like many a ‘god-haunted” atheist has found, their influence can still linger like ghosts, ­monuments and bad memories.

Robbins would, I suspect, also recognise that just as every act of writing is different, indeed needs to be different, that plots and character develop in different trajectories, so too the act of saving oneself from certain types of religion and politics may even involve the narrative reconfiguration of these difficult discourses into narratives of salvation through liberation.

The more we do this, the more complex it becomes for the powers that be to exert monopoly power over meaning. It is undoubtedly an irony that once they are ‘out there” the texts no longer belong to the author but are part of a conversation between author, reader and text. We read, reread, write and rewrite, we look into the abyss and the abyss looks back into us, and both are changed.

Though his book is complex and the direction of his thoughts often shift, Robbins has written a book about the meaning and value of writing as a tool of liberation, of salvation from rigid and reactionary ideas, that is very helpful. Insofar as writing is a form of therapy, a ‘writing cure” that can save us, Robbins’s highlighting of this is to be commended.