The control of the ventriloquist

Walter McKay

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My voice is under control now
Peter Horn
Kwela Books
R59.95

Kay Boyle in The World of the Short Story outlines the task that lies before the writer who attempts this difficult genre; it is, simply, ‘to invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of style, selection and ordering of detail and — most important of all — to present the whole action in such a way that it is at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real, both a valid picture of some phase of experience, and a sudden illumination of one of the perennial moral and psychological paradoxes which is at the heart of la condition humaine‘.

How does Peter Horn’s collection, My Voice is Under Control Now, measure up? In bringing together these nineteen stories which have as their subject matter such diverse topics as sexual politics, racial stereotyping, the freedom struggle, generational conflict, incest, the politics of a paranoid state, the discovery of a self-identity, and the artist’s effort to find a vehicle of expression, Horn has an abiding concern: the need to find and speak the truth in the face of the mounting obstacles of custom, politics, family secrets, culture, the fragmentary nature of the personality, and the slipperiness of words themselves.

The unequal nature of this struggle to reveal the truth that underlies some arbitrary intersection of characters and events, capturing them in a random moment in the narrative of their experiences which will yet illuminate for the reader the unexpected and the mundane with the force of truth, is compounded for Horn by the condition of the society within which he writes. These stories of transitions and transformations, of human vulnerability as its naked form, are revealed crossing the dangerous territory of boundaries: leaving an old life or entering a new one, or caught suspended in-between, at the point where to take a decision or declare oneself will be to mould the future pattern of events. They are written in and for a polyglot society, a people cast together by history and being dragged across a threshold into a world of uncertainty and doubt, or of hope and opportunity. Collectively, they are inclined towards amnesia and can hardly bear the terror of Adorno’s declaration that ‘perhaps humanity is nothing other than keeping alive the consciousness of the horror of that which can no longer be made good’.

By this defining epigraph, Horn undertakes to be that good conscience and, through the writing of ‘that which can no longer be made good’, to restore the horror, but also the humanity of a people who otherwise would choose determinedly to live by their bad faith.

The anonymous narrator of the title story learns through terror to gain control over her voice and live in accordance with the customs of her people. In accomplishing her act of self-denial, she passes from wishing to engage in idle gossip into being a silent murderess who cannot betray herself because she cannot speak. A number of stories in the collection enact a similar scenario in which the narrative voice falters as the character, under a form of extreme pressure exerted upon it primarily as the result of the distortions of the social order, collapses into a variety of destructive pathologies. Not all the voices fall silent; some more stridently and insistently assert the twisted logic of their reality as they writhe in the grip of fantasies foisted upon them by a persecutory society and, through Horn’s telling of their stories, spill the speech that is precious and must be guarded.

Fatally, Peter Horn monstrously inflates his guardian role and takes the voices into custody. Rather than reverberating with human significance, the narrative voice is divested of the rich detail of lived experience and mechanically intones the message of sophisticated wit: ‘To spill our speech into other ears, to engage in idle gossip or senseless prattle while our guardians are preoccupied with other, much more important matters, such as drinking beer with their friends and the worthy ancestors, is not only a waste of this precious substance, but a serious disturbance of the harmony of the universe, which is expressed in the custom of men to share their beer with the ruling spirits of the universe, the ancestors, in a solemn and ancient ritual of holy jokes about the curves of women’s arses and breasts, and the textures of their cunts.’

The story of Mbulelo, The kaffir who read books, recounts how a man is taught to read by his young son, Tom. Mbulelo, we are told, is not satisfied with being merely a functional reader. Rather, he is the fulfilment of any teacher of literature’s dream; he is absorbed by books, he devours them. Naturally, in his life he suffers the indignities delivered by a vicious and cynical society, but books are, if not a key to, a confirmation of his dignity and humanity. So, the discovery of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood is a celebratory moment: ‘An African writer ... I never believed that there were Africans who wrote books.’ Of course, books can offer a scant protection against the buffetings of an evil world, and the lives of Mbulelo and Tom are intertwined with the workings of a vile political system. Mbulelo’s home and his precious store of books are destroyed in the violent upheavals of the Khayelitsha squatter community and Tom is imprisoned and tortured. Re-united, father and son return to their earlier practice of settling down to read. However, this reading is different for them, the book, Matigari, is to be a manual, a weapon against a white skin: ‘He held an AK 47 in his right hand. His left hand was raised to shield his face while he looked across the river, as he had often done over many years, across many hills and valleys, in the four corners of the globe’.

The reader of this collection is not stunned into silence, illuminated by the rich detail of other lives and awed by the diversity of ways of living them, instead, the head is filled with the comforting chatter of the reader’s prejudices, a superiority amplified by the easy judgements and occupation of the moral high-ground afforded by the narrative text. Unfortunately, the voices in this collection are too greatly under the control of the ventriloquist.

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