EVENT: Outsiders or Insiders? Galgut, Kunzru, Mukherjee and Heyns (Sunday, 25 September; Fugard Studio)

SEAN O'TOOLE

Damon Galgut, Hari Kunzru and Neel Mukherjee discuss whether their characters are classical outsiders or reflective of a disconnected majority. Chaired by Michiel Heyns.

There are two routes to the answer, I realise. But let me first pose the question. Why do writers feel compelled to speak about their work? It inevitably leads to entrapment.

During a recent presentation at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg, writer and poet Antjie Krog asked this very question, from the ex post facto vantage of the stage, adding that artists and writers continually and voluntarily walk into this trap, a trap that demands of them that they augment with superfluous words the things they have created. She invoked the model of JM Coetzee, austere and largely silent, his completed texts his only response. This is one route to the answer then: silence. But, as the gregarious and self-mythologising German artist Joseph Beuys remarked of one of the 20^th century’s most enduring iconoclasts, “The silence of [French artist] Marcel Duchamp is overrated.”

Silent they weren’t, literary asteroids Damon Galgut, Hari Kunzru and Neel Mukherjee each, in their own literate way, grafting a surplus of words onto their creations. Damon appeared the most hesitant and gauche in his prescribed role as self-reflexive arbiter of his own creative work. In a session that demanded of the three authors that they effectively become literary critics and assess whether their characters are “classical outsiders or reflective of a disconnected majority”, Damon started off by saying, “We are the last people who should have a take [on this]. It is a perception that comes from …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Perhaps the missing word is outside?

UNDER PRESSURE: From left, moderator Michiel Heyns, and authors Neel Mukherjee, Damon Galgut and Hari Kunzru.

Neel, who appreciatively quoted German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum: “‘It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’”, went on to comment that Damon has embarked on a “sustained project” of portraying outsiders. Damon, who demurred answering an earlier question from author and moderator Michiel Heyns, was now quick to point out that he found Neel’s interpretation of his published corpus “startling”. “It is not a sustained project,” he emphasised. “I am just trying to express my own sensibilities.”

In his first foray into the discussion, Hari Kunzru speculated that the sense of character implied by the figure of the outsider is now a bit “shopworn”. Yes, agreed Michiel, who was tasked with gently doing the gear changing – but Michiel later offered that all three writers were working in the aftermath of the realist and picaresque traditions, an analysis accepted by Hari. “My first novel is picaresque,” said Hari of The Impressionist, published in 2003. “I like the idea of a character moving through a certain pageantry, which is what the English empire was.” By contrast, he described My Revolutions (2007) as a “more or less straightforward novel” that tried to explicate the motivations of a particular character. His current ambition is to deploy “gaps and silences to disrupt certain ways of doing plot”. After briefly discussing the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666, he offered that his interest lay in facilitating the “eruption of something else that cannot be domesticated in the plot”.

Neel, who describes this process as the bringing together of two genres into a “frictive state”, remarked on how literary critics tend to employ their own shopworn analyses in accounting for the inexplicable dissonance this strategy allows into the novel. “Whenever anyone doesn’t want to do real thinking they trot out the term ‘magical realism,’” he offered. Neel, who tried, with varying degrees of success, to engage Damon as a sounding board, remarked on the “slippages” between the “I” and “he” pronouns used to identify the character Damon, the young traveller figure in his latest novel, In a Strange Room.

Damon was mercurial in his response, a manner that perhaps reflects his healthy ingestion of Samuel Beckett over the years. The real subject of In a Strange Room, he offered, was not the young man who travels to Lesotho and then further afield, but memory. “The present moment is a memory of what just happened.” If, unlike Coetzee, Damon is willing to entertain the opposite of silence – let’s call it volubility for the sake of exaggeration – his responses, at times acute and pained in their biographical honesty, neatly cut through the crap of being asked to perform a transparent or coherent self for an audience.

“It is amazing how in thrall we are to Aristotelian unity,” quipped Neel somewhere in the midst of Damon’s masterful act of delivery and denial. He was picking up on an idea tentatively birthed earlier in the conversation. “To be an adult,” said Hari, “one must be in mastery of oneself – and it is frightening when it is then taken away.” Later, he would add that to be a functional adult member of society required a measure of collusion in maintaining a variety of fictions. Damon, who offered French writer Albert Camus’s The Outsider as a bold exemplar of a novel that reverses this unity by slowly disassembling the fiction of coherence, said that the narrator’s abiding happiness at the end of the novel – “I was happy still” – was the product of seeing past “the consolation of the fictions of order”.

And, just like that, the hour was up. No questions from the floor.

CAPE TOWN IDOLS: Mervyn Sloman, far left, introduces the 'three best writers of fiction in the world', Neel Mukherjee, Damon Galgut and Hari Kunzru.

BRIEF RELIEF: From left, Mervyn Sloman, with cellphone, Neel Mukherjee, Damon Galgut and Hari Kunzru.