Reading Resistance in Damon Galgut’s The Promise: An Analysis of Narrative Perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper concentrates on the self-reflexive and multi-voiced narration in Damon Galgut’s The Promise. Adopting Elleke Boehmer’s analysis of postcolonial poetics and Derek Attridge’s notion of resistance, the discussion shows how Galgut’s novel both invites and resists modes of reading associated with the third-person narrative, specifically the principles of detachment and narratorial omniscience. The first part of this article investigates the narrator’s complex interaction with the protagonists and the narratees. One feature of narration in The Promise is that it shows the narrator as belonging to the same racial group as the protagonists, at the same time seeking to transcend the limitations of their viewpoint. The fact that the protagonists’ racially inflected perception of the world is projected onto the narratees impacts the readers’ reception of the narrative text, denying them a stable subject position from which to judge the thoughts and actions of the protagonists. The second part of the article is devoted to the treatment of narratorial omniscience, which is consciously and self-reflexively limited by Galgut’s decision to focus on the perspective of white South Africans. It is shown that the narrator’s limitations direct our attention to the boundary between the said and the unsaid, thus resisting modes of reading connected with the realist novel. The conclusion of the article considers The Promise in the wider context of the liberal humanist tradition, arguing that the novel can be situated in the broad tradition of reconstructed liberalism, though it should be kept in mind that Galgut’s treatment of this stance is characterized chiefly by cautiousness and political realism.

KEYWORDS:

• Damon Galgut
• The Promise
• narrative perspective
• resistance
• self-reflexivity
• irony
• the South African liberal novel
• reconstructed liberalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Attridge makes this comment (157) in his discussion of Mongane Wally Serote’s poem ‘The Actual Dialogue.’

2 Attridge 173. He refers to the notion of resistance also in his later study The Work of Literature in which – referring to Adorno – he points out that works of literature ‘resist a culture of instrumentalization’ (99).

3 In an interview by Diana Cooper-Clark, published in 1983, Gordimer made the following comment: ‘I feel inadequate as a human being in my situation as a white South African but as a writer I think I have arrived at a stage through my work where if I write about blacks or I create black characters, I feel I have the right to do so. I know enough to do so. I accept the limitations of what I know’ (Bazin and Seymour 223). In Gordimer’s understanding, the years that she had devoted to the issue of race in South Africa gave her both the knowledge and the ‘right’ to write from the perspective of black characters. Writing about black South Africans is a topic that Gordimer also addressed in her 1979 lecture at the University of Cape Town titled ‘Relevance and Commitment,’ in which she made the following comment: ‘Although I am white and fully aware that my consciousness inevitably has the same tint as my face, when I have spoken of white attitudes and opinions I have not taken it upon myself to speak for whites, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by whites themselves, or manifest (in my opinion) in their work. When I have spoken of black attitudes and opinions, I have not taken it upon myself to speak for blacks, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by blacks themselves or (in my opinion) manifest in their work’ (143).

4 As Lukács writes, ‘The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations’ (6).

5 Lukács writes: ‘It is a condition sine qua non of great realism that the author must honestly record, without fear or favour, everything he sees around him’ (137–38).

6 A similar note is sounded in Jane Poyner’s The Worlding of the South African Novel. Poyner points to what she calls ‘an apparent paradox: that despite South Africa undergoing momentous political transition, little in socio-economic reality has actually changed’ (1).

7 I am referring to David Welsh’s definition of liberalism (1–2), specifically to his contention that liberalism implies ‘an optimistic belief in the possibilities of individual and social “improvement”’. While no such optimism can be found in Galgut’s novel, other distinctive features of liberalism enumerated by Welsh (‘a commitment to fundamental human rights’, ‘a belief in equality’, ‘an emphasis on the primacy of the individual as the possessor of inalienable rights’, ‘tolerance of conflicting viewpoints’ and ‘compassion’) are all emphasized by way of negative critique. Indeed, while the narrator implicates themself in the viewpoint of the Swarts (perhaps an indirect admission of Galgut’s complicity due to his racial origins and social position), an even more pronounced tendency is to separate themself from their world. There is the sense that both the narrator and the author remain sympathetic to Amor, sharing her viewpoint while remaining alert to its blind spots and failure to effect socio-political change. Nevertheless, if Amor’s stance is shown as ineffectual, this points to the failure of the post-apartheid transition rather than to the moral bankruptcy of liberal humanism.

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Marek Pawlicki

Marek Pawlicki is an assistant professor at the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of the book Between Illusionism and Anti-Illusionism: Self-Reflexivity in the Chosen Novels of JM Coetzee and articles on the works of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Damon Galgut. His study ‘Enactments of Life’: The Short Stories of Nadine Gordimer was published by the University of Silesia Press in 2023. His critical interests include South African literature, postcolonial studies and affect studies.