On SA politics: our public selves, our private elves (yes, elves)

Probably the most fascinating “novel” I have ever read is JM Coetzee’s recent Diary of a Bad Year. It is written on three levels on most pages, with a line between each level:

Narrative one: the public figure, JC, where we read his observations on a variety of contemporary topics in scholarly articles ranging from terrorism to pedophilia.

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Narrative two: JC’s private thought life in the first person. The greyly elven, private figure, elderly, retired, lonely and horny, keen on a sweet Filipino lass he meets in the local and oh so wonderfully prosaic laundromat.

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Narrative three: the sweet Filipino lass’s stream of consciousness at the bottom of the page and how she relates to the lonely old scholar and writer whom she calls “Senor Juan”, J.C, and surely a version of John Coetzee. And oh, she knows well and loves the fact he cannot take his eyes of her stunning bum. Coetzee surprises us with humour (so unlike JC) when her stream of consciousness starts up only some 23 pages into the book: “As I pass him, carrying the laundry basket, I make sure I waggle my behind, my delicious behind, sheathed in tight denim”.

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Elven: we can be our own deep, healing myths, potentially our own twinkling surprises even in the deepest nights of sufferings or yearnings, if we choose to be truly alive, take risks, sacrifice, explore our creativity. Or, as TL commentator Benzol put it so well under my last blog, “You speak your mind, you get into trouble with society, you don’t speak your mind, you get into trouble with yourself”.

I don’t know if Benzol gets this lovely aphorism from elsewhere, but he is the kind of gentleman who would have said so. I sense, from the online acquaintance he and I have struck up, and through looking at his comments elsewhere, that his is a life well-lived and rich with many experiences and has learned, the resonant way, his own adage.

In Diary of a Bad Year, bitterly rich with self-reflection as a portrayed older version of himself, J.M. Coetzee holds up to the light the similarities and contradictions between the public self and the private self, especially if that public self has enormous fame. The novel is bewitching and the way the three levels comment on each other pushes at the boundaries of the thinkable, the sayable. Which of course is one of the ultimate compliments one can give a master of his craft; Coetzee’s prose rises high and stately above the mundane nature of his medium: words. Or rather, he remembers for us the potential richness of that medium. Words: forgotten storehouses of our millenia as humans.

The subtext on how our words form the selves, ourselves, is alone a reason for reading the “novel” again. Is it a novel? It is a compact of what amounts to a series of articles on contemporary life and two short stories, the private JC and the sweetly elven, unattainable, gorgeous Anya.

There are such tensions between the selves if there is no harmony: and all too often we know there is not much harmony between the selves of many of our famous, public figures.

The duality, or the attempts to overcome a hegemony of selves, makes me think of the Heisenberg principle. Ah, it is a rich, melodic universe we live in. An inexhaustible treasure trove, lavish, even wasteful in its abundance: If I look at a sparkling, surely elven miracle such as aspects of an atom, am I seeing a wave or a particle? Oh, the elven wonder breathes back, that depends on how you are observing me. Am I a wave or am I a particle? Or, going back to Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, am I a novel or am I what you, the reader, make of my many selves in this text? Thus I am saying something about you, the reader, or revealing more to you about you, J.C. is surely asking.

I have always held to the following apothegm that I have not fully understood, though it resonates through me: the best art is that which says nothing about itself, but so much about you, the reader, the observer.

“Who are you? Do you want people to know who you really are?” the famous, public self must sometimes ask of herself as she adjusts her hair or tie in the mirror, the kind of question the rest of us sometimes also ask.

How does Jacob Zuma answer himself, or Julius Malema? Helen Zille? The great Madiba? Do they lie, muttering to themselves all is well, all is well, and turn away from the suddenly blank, unrewarded mirror? Or do they somewhere keep a bleakly honest journal, chastise themselves with the strokes of daily, private confession? In the case of the first two luminaries mentioned above, the word “bleakly” obtains. Surely they don’t hold themselves accountable, even in the solitary monk’s cell of a privately kept journal. Those two gentlemen lie to themselves.

In the Observer Effect theories that abound in social psychology, we know that people change their behaviour when they are aware they are being watched. They behave in ways they think are desirable to the observer. They seek approval. Whose approval is the current leadership of SA seeking? Surely not mine or the many other bloggers and commentators out there, or Llewellyn Kriel’s or even Helen Zille’s. In fact our collective distaste, indeed even horror and disgust, seems to negatively reinforce the behaviour.

As a teacher of children in China I know one of the best ways to deal with a child’s misbehaviour is sometimes to just ignore it, instead of imploring him to behave or settle down, which negatively reinforces and increases the behaviour.

Of course the lemming-like masses roaring, fist-waving approval is all the positive reinforcement our current leadership could ever want. The example of irresponsibility, undeserved status and shallow analysis vented by some in the ANC leadership is precisely, of course, what the masses want for themselves. Or so the observation theory chugs out for us at the end of its analysis of those luminaries — not me.

Let me create for you, as per Coetzee, on three levels, the thoughts of the next leader of SA, whoever he may be (and as a disclaimer I refer to no particular individual):

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“I am your property. All I am is yours. I am the will of the people. Do not blame me for my actions. My actions are the result of you. I am not my own person. You decide my options. And those who are against my options, which are the will of the people? We shall chase them off the beaches, we shall chase them off the landing grounds, we shall hound them off the fields and the streets, we shall toss them off the hills; we shall make them surrender. I am the will of the people.”

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She stands before me, big-breasted in the mass rally as I loudly proclaim the will of the people. Like the others, she is waving her arms at me and again I feel that surge, that sense of being a saviour of the people. Of course I feel something else surge, because I am a red-blooded man, not a fairy or an elf.

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Oh, he’s noticed me! Is it my breasts? It must be. I know so many men notice them. And why not? I am proud of them, the way they enticingly wobble, the nipples staring at men when I walk. Let me undo another button. Oh! that I could lie in his arms, be part of the will of the people. Such strength. Such authority and wisdom!