In a recent consideration of the role played in the African novel of postcolonial disillusionment by the reactionary subject formation that Hegel names the “Beautiful Soul,” Andrew Adkins argues that writers such as Chinua Achebe deploy the latter to satirize a postcolonial subjectivity caught between tradition and modernity, colonial culture and national independence. Citing Neil Lazarus’s contention that anticolonial African intellectuals were frequently “predisposed to a messianic and middle-class specific conception of decolonization as a revolutionary process,” resulting in an overvaluation of the “emancipatory significance of independence,”Footnote ³ Adkins offers that the Beautiful Soul, which withdraws into abstract solitude from what it perceives as the evil of the external world, “might describe in helpful ways those African literary protagonists who—whether or not they echo their authorial doppelgängers—struggle with brands of self-loathing and self-absolution in the face of modernity’s gaps of inadequately realized change.”Footnote ⁴ Adkins thus finds in the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960), published in the year of Nigeria’s official independence, the Beautiful Soul negotiating “a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism.”Footnote ⁵ Achebe’s Obi struggles with the conflicting expectations of tradition and the new demands of the nationalist elite and recounts “his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal.”Footnote ⁶ However, insomuch as Adkins (or Achebe) presents the Beautiful Soul as a matter of secondary character type, to be described at a distance, rather than as an elementary and untranscendable dilemma of representation itself, he remains confined to the Beautiful Soul syndrome that he undertakes to diagnose. Such an elevation of the isolated imago of the Imaginary is predicated on a displacement or repression of the Symbolic that, for Lacan, lies at the heart of neurosis.Footnote ⁷ Turning to Lewis Nkosi’s polarizing apartheid novel Mating Birds (1983), this essay argues that, in the context of the postcolony, the Beautiful Soul may more productively be thought as what Lacan calls a “dialectical impasse” in the moment between formal independence and the registering of globalization’s unprecedented alienations. The aesthetic expression of this impasse, I further claim, is the genre of postcolonial naturalism, a provisional form defined by the tension between the poles of the hysteric and the Beautiful Soul.

In his influential discussion of American literary naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels interprets the naturalist aesthetic as the formal manifestation of an irreducible double identity, one caught in the interpellative machinery of the market and the logic of the commodity. In this naturalist “economy of selfhood,” the composition of identity through “means of inscription into consumer culture” produces an anxious subjectivity, read retroactively as subjectivity tout court, that is “permanently under construction,” a self that must ceaselessly and anxiously produce and consume itself as the very precondition of its precarious selfhood.Footnote ⁸ Thus, Michaels claims, naturalism might best be described as the intersection of irresolvable antinomies of identity and difference, “as the working-out of a set of conflicts between pretty things and curious ones, material and representation, hard money and soft, beast and soul” with the crucial proviso that naturalism does not thematize these tensions so much as it formally embodies and exemplifies them.Footnote ⁹ Inasmuch as the “characteristic concerns of naturalism”—which Michaels cites as “appropriation, legitimation, the need to end representation, and the desire to represent”Footnote ¹⁰—recall the similar representational dilemmas of the hysteric, whose crisis of self-control is rooted in “the nonidentity of self with either body or soul,” Michaels regards naturalism as the preeminent literary expression of hysteria.Footnote ¹¹ Like hysteria, naturalism “is above all obsessed with manifestations of internal difference or, what comes to the same thing, personhood.”Footnote ¹² Impelled by the “possibility of identity without difference, it is provoked by its own images into ever more powerful imaginations of identity by way of difference.”Footnote ¹³

Hysteria is thus “an exemplary disease” for Michaels’s discussion of naturalism in that it posits a selfhood that is non-identical with either the body or the soul, a self that, borrowing from William James, Michaels describes as “neither us nor ours.”Footnote ¹⁴ Producing somatic symptoms that are nevertheless physiologically undetectable, hysteria is “in the body … without being of the body” and functions as a paradoxical condition/effect attending the problem of embodiment and representation/mediation as such.Footnote ¹⁵ Compelled by the need to script the self, the discourse of the hysteric functions, in Lacanian terms, as the “speaking riddle” put repeatedly before the big Other: “Tell me who I am.”Footnote ¹⁶ In demanding the Other to respond with a concrete or embodying identification, however, the hysteric thereby reveals the lack in the Other; for no particular, finite manifestation can satisfy the hysteric’s insistence that the Other produce this exhaustive knowledge of self. The hysterical question thus encodes a “double gesture: on the one hand, it uncovers the Other’s lack, yet on the other hand, the hysteric offers herself completely as a plug to cover up the void in the Other.”Footnote ¹⁷ Paradoxically, it is the hysteric’s self-sacrificing devotion to the “absolute Other,” a search for a primal father or more “perfect Master,” that rejects the identities proffered by the Other and exposes as false its particulate evidence of universal knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ As Patricia Gherovici glosses Lacan, the hysteric, as epitomized in Freud’s exemplary case of Dora, exhibits an “alienating redoubling”:

That is, in assuming the passive role, the hysteric obscures the extent to which her self-satisfied abjuration of the world is predicated on an unacknowledged imbrication with its architectures of power.

The hysteric’s act of simultaneously defying and safeguarding the Other’s authority therefore reveals a dialectical torsion between, on the one hand, the force of an irresolvable, destabilizing demand upon reality and, on the other, a duplicitous retreat into the cynical subjectivity that Hegel names the “Beautiful Soul.”Footnote ²⁰ In Hegel’s account of the historical manifestation of Spirit, the Beautiful Soul marks the stubborn antithesis between immediate subjectivity and objective reality, or between thought and action underwritten by moral conscience. Ascribing to itself a transcendent moral duty, the Beautiful Soul locates truth in its absolute and immediate self-certainty. Hegel contends that the Beautiful Soul founds its moral exceptionalism on the claim that “I act morally when I am conscious of performing only pure duty and nothing else than that; this means, in fact, when I do not act.”Footnote ²¹ Abstracting pure thought from engaged socio-material being, this pristine consciousness “lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its inner being by action and existence” and “flees from contact with the actual world.”Footnote ²² However, such self-protective involution ultimately endangers and attenuates the self: “In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called ‘beautiful soul,’ its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.”Footnote ²³

In his reconsideration of the hysteric, Lacan refigures Freud’s problematic contention that Dora colludes in her own victimization with the Hegelian concepts of the Beautiful Soul and the dialectical reversal. If the Beautiful Soul denounces as corrupt and deplorable the world from which it withdraws, the dialectical reversal exposes the subjective limitations of this view and reveals the way in which the Beautiful Soul is complicit in or authors the very corruption that it abhors. Because, as Lacan claims, “a letter always arrives at its destination,” the Beautiful Soul, having sought refuge in pure thought, is forced to confront the objective consequences of its actions in a way that exposes its enclave subjectivity to the very dialectic of history that it works so hard to evade.Footnote ²⁴ As Fredric Jameson puts it in his own Freudian invocation of Hegel, “History is therefore the experience of Necessity,” and the consequent determinations of the former persist in spite of the Beautiful Soul’s arch disavowals:

In its aspect as Beautiful Soul, then, the hysteric colludes with the iniquity of the world with which it pharisaically disidentifies precisely by positing history as that from which it can neatly abstract itself. Indeed, Lacan goes so far as to associate the Beautiful Soul with Hegel’s preeminent agent of evil, the “Law of the Heart,” in whom the moral self-assurance of the retiring Beautiful Soul claims for itself the force of historical necessity and acts accordingly upon the world. In this “frenzy of self-conceit,” the Law of the Heart universalizes the individual’s “inmost law” as the “law of all hearts,” thereby sanctioning the ruthless suppression of anything opposed to it.Footnote ²⁶ Yet the discourse of the hysteric, in its emphatic overidentification with the Other, also presents the latter with the impossible demand and is not, in that aspect, reducible either to the self-exempting Beautiful Soul or the psychotic Law of the Heart.

Achebe’s novel, Adkins suggests, satirizes “the ineffectuality of the beautiful soul’s refined anomie” as well as the postcolonial tendency toward “cynicism and moralism as widespread … responses to failed political visions.”Footnote ²⁷ According to Adkins, Achebe’s satire of the Beautiful Soul lays bare what Achille Mbembe terms the “conviviality” of colonial power relations, “encircling subjects under the same unconscious, mutually dis-empowering episteme.”Footnote ²⁸ Although Mbembe’s approach certainly “avoids facile distinctions between victims and victimizers, oppression and resistance, challenging the beautiful soul’s self-exempting politics of blame while asking us to exchange morality and moralism for ethics and implication,” as Adkins rightly claims, it does not satisfactorily account for the formal procedure, the critical self-exemption that could enable such a satirical response in literary expression.Footnote ²⁹ In Lacanian terms, that is, it sidesteps the stubborn fact of the Symbolic and the formal problem of representation, adopting the empiricist pretensions of what Frank Lentricchia describes as naturalism’s “secretarial imagination.”Footnote ³⁰ But as Lacan’s most celebrated slogan has it, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” which is to say that it is inscribed in the Symbolic.Footnote ³¹ In fact, in reading the Beautiful Soul as a secondary, characterological feature rather than one of elementary form, such an approach merely duplicates the subjectivist (Imaginary) exceptionalism of the Beautiful Soul. Any critique of the latter must therefore be an immanent one obtaining within and sensitive to the contradictions and antinomies of form itself. Any presumption to ethical self-exemption remains, as Lacan instructs, firmly within the binary logic of the Imaginary and is an expression of neurosis.Footnote ³²

On the other hand, if the colonial power relation is, in fact, convivial, capillary, and unconscious, how much more so are the ramified ministrations of postcolonial power and transnational capital under globalization’s comprehensive dislocation and refunctioning of time, space, culture, class, and identity? Fanon suggests in The Wretched of the Earth that colonialism effectively places the colonized in a position that we at once recognize as that of the hysteric—forced “to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?”Footnote ³³ The postcolonial subject, encircled by the unconscious, unlocalizable, and disempowering episteme of a new historical situation, however, can address the hysteric’s question only to an already obsolete, irremediably diffuse Big Other, that of an erstwhile colonialism. The postcolonial intellectual is thus caught in hysterical naturalism’s intractable antinomy, insisting on pure identity without difference, provoked by ever more insistent visions of identity by way of difference. Yet, as Michaels suggests, the naturalist writer as hysteric does not (and cannot) merely thematize these irresolvable conflicts from the outside, as Adkins avers of Achebe; rather, his work inhabits and exemplifies them in the manifold textures of its formal expression—history functioning here in Jameson’s precise sense as both ground and untranscendable horizon, as the objective precondition for speaking and as the intolerable constraints imposed upon the utterance. And, as I suggest of V. S. Naipaul, such expressions are not obliged to the subjective attitude or custodial vigilance of the writer (as Beautiful Soul) but are rather the living crystallizations of a dynamic and dialectical historical process.Footnote ³⁴

Therefore, if Achebe’s critique remains, in its recourse to satirical meta-language, caught within the self-exempting horizon of the Beautiful Soul, this is less an indictment of the author’s imaginative failure than an illumination of the postcolonial dilemma that produces it, in which resistance and critique find themselves suddenly without a defining object and incommensurate to an unfamiliar historical circumstance, oscillating between principled, if objectless engagement (hysteria) and self-acquitting irony or resignation (the Beautiful Soul). Michaels’s appeal to hysterical naturalism, in which the repudiation of representation is matched by the lingering compulsion to represent, thus applies more satisfactorily to the nebulous condition of the postcolony under the regime of late capital than to Fanon’s directly administered colonial state. If Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the split discourse of the hysteric/Beautiful Soul. In the lyrical subjectivism of his apartheid-era debut novel Mating Birds (1986), the cynical retrospection on the guerrilla campaigns of the outlawed South African Communist Party and ANC’s liberation army in Underground People (2002), and the psychoanalytic reversals of his The Black Psychiatrist (2001)—even in his trenchant critical appraisals of fellow South African writers—one may discern the traces of the hysteric’s double-voiced discourse. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the reckoning of globalization’s volatile new dispensation, refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the subjective dislocations of exile, Nkosi’s work articulates in its complex interplay of form and content the noble self-exemption of the Beautiful Soul and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given and for whom no form is satisfactory.

Mating Birds recounts the fatal encounter of Ndi Sibiya, son of a Zulu chief, erstwhile university student activist, and aspiring writer, with Veronica Slater, a White “English girl” (about whom we know little else) on the beach at Durban in direct violation of the Immorality Act of 1927/1950 prohibiting sexual relations between White and Black South Africans.Footnote ³⁵ Narrated by Sibiya, who awaits execution for the rape of Slater, the novel is deliberately ambiguous on the point of the assault for which Sibiya is convicted:

Although the uncertainty of both the event and the nature of Sibiya’s culpability may, as Nkosi claims,⁴ illustrate the fundamental absurdity of the Immorality Act, in which consent could neither legitimately be asked nor given, its most immediate effect for the narrator is the impression of a naturalistic fatalism:

Sibiya professes, for example, no resentment toward dignitaries of the court, like the judge, who is likewise borne by the twin currents of duty and fate: “As he himself was at pains to point out during the trial, he was merely carrying out his duties; his own personal feelings did not enter into the matter at all.”Footnote ³⁸ Sibiya’s philosophic resignation extends more broadly to the trial, the perfunctory ritual of which inspires a stoic acquiescence before what he regards as the impassive processes of a natural destiny:

The narrator thus regards the trial as an “elaborate primitive game” fulfilling an “atavistic need for ritual” before an implacable nature.Footnote ⁴⁰ Between what he indignantly views as the prurient trial sessions and intervening interviews—“the excited curiosity aroused in my observers by the slightest revelation of anything to sexual matters borders on the morbid and unsavory”Footnote ⁴¹—he sits in his cell in Camusian contemplation, “reading, writing, and reflecting on the human condition.”Footnote ⁴² Prompted by Dufre, an eminent criminologist and “great Swiss doctor of mental health,” who is compiling a scientific dossier of the (rather unaccountably) infamous case, Sibiya sounds traumatic personal and collective histories in order to locate the origins of his present compulsion, which he describes as the “fatal attractiveness of an ungovernable passion”Footnote ⁴³ and which he experiences in his dreams as the “total surrender to an impulse older than human law, more ancient than civilization itself.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Belatedly denouncing the apartheid laws of the 1950s in the very moment when the Immorality Act is being officially repealed (Michael Chapman judiciously deems the novel “an anachronism” in this regard), Nkosi invokes a primeval natural order and an existentialist acquiescence to fate that appear to abrogate altogether the contingent determinations of history. Despite a vague dissatisfaction with Dufre’s theory of intermittent cultural evolution (“Your civilization is at the very beginning of a long and cheerful struggle that must be waged with vigor and intelligence. Of all people, you should be an optimist, Mr. Sibiya!”), the narrator nevertheless concedes his inability to resist the universalizing eloquence of “appeals of this sort to first principles, to the eternal laws of man’s existence, of his constant, indeed, uncheckable regeneration.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Such an admission therefore problematizes Therese Steffen’s exemplary reading of Dufre—whose name, as Steffen notes, is an obvious anagram for Freud—as “a Eurocentric expert who is mainly interested in confining a black man’s sexual behavior in the cage of his Freudian theory.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For Steffen, Dufre functions not only as the embodiment of European psychoanalytic hubris, but curiously as “the political unconscious of Marx and the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The “ironically detached” Sibiya, who “has nothing to lose but his life”Footnote ⁴⁸ is thus endowed with the exceptional ability to outstrip the Eurocentric ideology in which “everything in our age apparently leads back to the Trier on the Moselle or to Zurich and Vienna, to the Interpretation of Dreams and The Communist Manifesto.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this reading, Sibiya’s ironic detachment plies cultural difference to present an ambivalent critique of the totalizing framework of psychoanalysis, which is ultimately revealed as a metonymic displacement of the encompassing historical dialectic of Hegel/Marx. The irony here is that Sibiya strikes an exemplary figure of what Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues long ago called the “African Oedipus,” whose significance, they instruct, “cannot be assimilated to a characterology” but which “circumscribes the fundamental structures according to which, for society as well as for the individual, the problem of evil and suffering, the dialectic of desire and demand, are articulated.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Despite anxieties of Eurocentricism, the utility of psychoanalysis for African literature has by now been established, from Jonathan Crewe’s measured assessment that “the language of psychoanalysis continues to supply terms for negotiating between what Rose calls the phantasmagoric identifications and the shifting realpolitik of political and cultural identity”Footnote ⁵¹ in an African context to Ato Quayson’s more general claim that Freudian concepts such as the uncanny, trauma, castration, and the unconscious offer us indispensable means to calibrate an immanent symptomology of the global present.Footnote ⁵² Such a totalizing view is obliquely indicted in Mating Birds, however (perhaps by way of the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper), in the racist burlesque of Professor Van Niekerk, who invokes a “great historian who needs no introduction to some” and who once claimed that “before the white man there was no African history,” echoing Hegel’s infamous claims in The Philosophy of History. Footnote ⁵³ Like the virtuous renunciations of the Beautiful Soul, however, Sibiya’s rejection of Freud/Hegel/Marx remains firmly, fittingly confined to the Oedipal structure of the pleasure principle, to which he appeals as if to primordial nature. Such becomes his chief self-justification as he recollects the event of the rape: “I remember that my one thought was to return, by force if necessary, to that narrow fount, to the source of all forbidden pleasure where I had just been welcomed and then rejected.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Sibiya notes that Dufre “asks about my feelings toward my father. Did I ever wish to kill him, or perhaps did I not secretly hope that while my father was cutting the trunk of a tree, the tree would come crashing over his head.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Like Freud’s Dora, then, Sibiya’s unresolved Oedipal complex, combined with his self-exonerating recourse to the supreme Other of natural law, suggests the figure of the hysteric. Like many of Nkosi’s male characters, Sibiya is repeatedly associated with nervous unrest, of which he is both compulsive chronicler and longsuffering victim. Awaiting his fate on the dock, he finds that carefully observing the activities of the court is his only “way of dealing with the ennui that spreads like an epidemic.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Sibiya significantly neglects to disclose to Dufre the incidental encounter with a White girl in his youth that, he claims, “marked me for life,” leaving a “permanent wound.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The incident in fact prefigures his literally bumping into Veronica in a tobacco shop in an “accidental embrace” that excites a “nervous agitation”;Footnote ⁵⁸ and he describes the recurrent horror of his “white, harrowing dreams” as bearing the amorphous shape of “a searing wound, like a memory of an exquisite torture undergone a long time ago but whose recollection it is hard to erase.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Awaiting Veronica’s daily arrival at the shore beneath a sun that threatens to “consume everything beneath it in a slow burning heat like the outbreak of a dreadful voluptuous fever,” Sibyia is overcome by an “[a]nxiety [that] gripped my heart like a vice.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He walks about the township to relieve his “jangling nerves” and to stave off a “lack of my own sense of worth and direction” and an “innate sense of uselessness” about the world.Footnote ⁶¹ Overcome by debilitating physical lethargy, he writes that “I felt the physical discomfort as an addition to the already accumulated, though as yet unassessed, spiritual discomforts of the soul, as though I had been absorbing the hot stickiness of the humid air through my pores.”Footnote ⁶²

Examining his past under Dufre’s direction, Sibiya recalls his mother’s “high nervous laugh” as sometimes tending toward “dry hysteria.”Footnote ⁶³ Upon arrival in Durban following the death of his father and the displacement of his village, he and his mother encounter Gabela, a “mesmeric” preacher/prophet of the local Church of Zion, who is “irresistible to women” and “was known to have cured many hysterical women simply by laying his huge hands on their heads and shoulders—though some said his hands wandered to forbidden places.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Such abuse is rumored to have been the cause of his mother’s abrupt departure from the Church of Zion after two years, and though the details of their encounter are never divulged to the narrator, he observes that “its lasting and damaging effects on her personality were unmistakable.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Subsequently giving way, in the narrator’s eyes, to a cynical immodesty unbecoming a “self-respecting Zulu widow,” his mother grows disturbingly responsive, in her hysterical dereliction, to the crowd of suitors who perpetually surround her:

Giving up what Sabiya deems respectable work as a laundress for Whites, she “succumbed to the temptation of running a shebeen,” at which point her pursuers “buzzed like bees around a sweet-smelling but cankerous flower” until, Sabiya writes, “I could no longer feel that my home was my own.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Still, he admits, even these revelations are “digressions,” “detours,” “evasions,” duplicitous screen memories that attempt to displace responsibility for his actions onto the figure of a morally frangible mother even while acknowledging in passing the historical circumstances that conditioned them.Footnote ⁶⁸ His efforts to cast his mother (and, later, Veronica) in the role of hysteric, thereby exonerating himself in the attitude of the Beautiful Soul, serve to belie his own status as hysterical subject.

Sibiya’s narrative likewise expresses a deep, pre-Oedipal fixation on what Melanie Klein theorized as “part-objects,” particularly the primordial image of the maternal breast.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such a refusal to perceive the “whole object” of the other in her complex personhood also resonates with the naturalist repudiation of totality in favor of disconnected, fragmentary images, what Georg Lukács describes as “a series of static pictures, of still lives connected only through the relations of objects arrayed one beside the other according to their own inner logic, never following one from the other, never one out of the other.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Scholars have repeatedly noted what Johan Jacobs calls the novel’s “mammary obsession,”Footnote ⁷¹ expressed not only in the “quick, tantalizing view” of Veronica’s “pale breast with its nipple puckered into a pointed tip of frilled purple flesh”Footnote ⁷² on the beach, but also in Sibiya’s memory of Cato Manor and the “pliant waists of languid girls, and middle-aged women who stared out of open windows, their rounded breasts lilting out of summer dresses.”Footnote ⁷³ Fittingly, as Andre Brink writes, “Even (and especially) his mother falls victim to his sexually-loaded observation,”Footnote ⁷⁴ as Sibiya’s death-row account curiously lingers over his mother’s “high pointed breasts” that “bounced like pears on the branch of a pear tree”;Footnote ⁷⁵ and her subsequent submission, “like a dumb suffering beast,” to the sexual aggression of Big Joe, is provided with the preliminary glimpse of her bare breast.Footnote ⁷⁶ The narrator clearly perceives this latter moment as both a personal betrayal and the rupturing of his milieu by an elemental force:

His maternal world upended, the Oedipal son subsequently transfers what he views as his mother’s depraved, animal sexuality onto a remorseless, inexorable nature. The sea, which will later serve as primary conceit for and symbolic motivator of his transgressive sexual passion, he describes as “reposing in its watery bed like a slothful woman, bare to the sun and naked to the caressing breeze, with an occasional steamer plowing its course across the immense lagoon.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet, its stillness, like Veronica’s, is “capricious and untrustworthy”; storm clouds ever threaten to condense without warning, and “raindrops as large as the breasts of a young Zulu virgin will roll down from the sky,” making impassible the “swollen and turbulent river … carrying before it uprooted trees, drowned animals, and, occasionally, even the dead body of some unlucky individual.”Footnote ⁷⁹ That Sibiya, perennial victim of women, is one such unlucky individual is understood. Similarly, “as if the sea had been stirred by a powerful hand,” it begins to “swell and froth” in the moments prior to his mimed, “telepathic” sexual encounter with Veronica at the beach: “At intervals, the waves broke upon the shore with a roar as elemental as the beating of blood in my own feverish veins, harsh, murderous, deranged.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Inasmuch as he is thrall to Veronica’s “quivering pagan motion of astounding primitive sensuality,” he thus repeats the inexorable fall into a base, feminized nature. “Like a river in flood,” he writes of his final entrance into Veronica’s bungalow, “My lust swept me off toward that half-open door, toward the room in which the girl lay like a watchful lioness ready to spring.”Footnote ⁸¹

Brink effectively argues that the narrative functions as Sibiya’s self-exculpatory testimony as the unfortunate dupe of feminine guile, in which his account increasingly takes on the tenor of both a “personal pathology” and the calculated self-acquittal of its narrator (if not its author). The narrator thus stages his self-redemption through a strategic figuration of masculine sexual violence as anti-imperialist politics, but this elision is enabled, as the metaphoric turn to nature here affirms, by dissolving both of these symbolic strands into the master trope of writing, the book’s ultimate, self-legitimating horizon. Mating Birds is as much a novel about the hysterical anxieties of postcolonial production, of producing and consuming the postcolonial subject in language, as it is a lyrical rumination on the intimate politics of apartheid or even, as Brink has it, the self-legitimation of the exile. This series of sublations, repeatedly enacted in the book, is summarily forecast in the narrator’s first glimpse of Veronica on the beach:

Apart from being an instance of what Chapman calls one of Nkosi’s “several purple passages about the female body,” the passage performs with synoptic economy the novel’s defining thematic progression from the dilating horizons of female sexuality and impassive nature to that of literary figuration, a second nature both encompassing and metaphorizing the first. Inasmuch as the turgid prose and imprecise imagery here recall the narrator’s overweening ambition to become, as he puts it, “the first truly great African writer my country has ever produced,” they likewise suggest the narrator’s compulsive scripting of a postcolonial subjectivity for literary consumption.Footnote ⁸³ However, unlike Naipaul, in whose fiction, as Sara Suleri claims, “the writer is never exempted from the text’s graphic indictment of the postcolonial world,” Nkosi (or his narrator) seeks anxious refuge in the closed helix of literary similitude, in which every object is made fungible with another, and all are finally dissolved in the self-reference of a writing that engages the object of its representation from the outside, from the exceptional aesthetic of the Beautiful Soul.Footnote ⁸⁴ The maintenance of such an empiricist distance is also, again, the very hallmark of literary naturalism.

Indeed, Mark Seltzer identifies a similar process of displacement and rewriting at work in the novels of the American naturalist Frank Norris. Intervening in the late nineteenth century’s “insistent anxiety over production and generation,” and apropos of the Foucaldian biopolitical inscription of the subject, Norris’s novels contrive what Seltzer describes as a narrative machinery in which, drawing on a “thermodynamic technology of power,” the opposition between biological female generativity and industrial male productivity (or between conservation and dissipation, production and consumption) are imaginatively resolved through the interposition of what Norris names force. Footnote ⁸⁵ As Norris writes in The Octopus (1901):

Circumventing or converting the procreative “threat posed by the ‘women people,’ ” force enables a “technique of nonbiological and autonomous reproduction, or what amounts to a mechanical reproduction of persons,” or of subjects.Footnote ⁸⁷ Norris’s category of force, Seltzer argues, thus reconciles the incompatible energies of generation and dissipation, the (male) katabolic and (female) anabolic tendencies, within a regulatory mechanism that is at once the primordial generation of nature (“Nature was, then, a gigantic engine …”Footnote ⁸⁸) and the technical reproduction of that nature, which renders its omnipresence narratively intelligible. As Seltzer summarily describes it, “The naturalist machine operates through a double discourse in which the apparently opposed registers of the body and the machine are coordinated within a single technology of regulation,” which is none other than the naturalist novel and the emergent reticulations of power that it both maps and codifies.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus, “creation, in Norris’s final explanation, is the work of an inexhaustible masturbator, spilling his seed on the ground, the product of a mechanistic and miraculous onanism.”Footnote ⁹⁰ If force displaces a feminine nature, the “onanist-machine” of writing outflanks and redirects force within naturalism’s “autonomous and masturbatory economy of production.”Footnote ⁹¹

Similarly, Mating Birds ultimately vindicates Sibiya’s raping of Veronica as both an act of political defiance, sanctified through a tendentious juxtaposition with “political prisoners lustily singing freedom songs” at the novel’s conclusion, and as the symbolic seizure of the generative technology of writing, which Veronica is made vividly to personify.Footnote ⁹² Sibiya describes Veronica’s appearance on the witness stand as being “as pale as a piece of paper,” anticipating his later recollection of his mother’s hopeful ambition to see him “driving his pen across the white page”; “A real devil Ndi is going to be with a pen, you wait and see,” she effuses of his intellectual potential.Footnote ⁹³ His desire for “attaining knowledge of some willing white woman”Footnote ⁹⁴ is thus made analogous if not wholly continuous with his desire to “attain the magic of the white man” and the “vast empires to be conquered with nothing more powerful than a pen.”Footnote ⁹⁵ That Veronica symbolizes not merely White authority, but specifically the alluring power of White writing is made clear during her court testimony. Sibiya is awed by “her ability to invent her fictions” and describes her as “an accomplished storyteller, with a considerable grasp of human psychology.”Footnote ⁹⁶ He enviously appraises her “instinctive knowledge of what constituted audience appeal,” her “lively sense of timing, an ingenious and subtle faculty for creating suspense,” and her virtuosic ability to craft “scenes of great climactic power”; “As a narrator,” he writes, “she was quite simply magnificent.”Footnote ⁹⁷ She was, he determines, “a fantasist by nature,”Footnote ⁹⁸ and he finds himself “enchanted by the intense expressiveness of her face, which resembled the passionate absorption of an artist in a moment of self-creation.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The narrative’s jarring rehearsals of colonialist/racist stereotypes—as in the narrator’s assertion that his jailers are curious to see his “well, yes, let us admit—oversized penis”Footnote ¹⁰⁰—are therefore seemingly redeemed as metaphoric assertions of the phallus/stylus in a comparably demiurgic invention of the postcolonial self as artist. Thus, the narrative does not so much stage the destitution of language and the dilemmas of incommensurability, the “profound silence between cultures which cannot finally be traversed by understanding,” as Bill Ashcroft and others claim, as it repeatedly and anxiously refers us to its own self-generating, self-legitimating mechanics.Footnote ¹⁰¹

If Veronica symbolically embodies the tandem of White and literary authority, it is inevitable that Sibiya should direct the hysteric’s query to that authority, which he comes to view as his subjective complement. Thus, he reasons, for Veronica, he is the “ultimate mirror in which she saw reflected the power of her sex and her race,” just as she reflects his own, an analysis that elicits a hardy “Bravo!” from Dufre.Footnote ¹⁰² Similarly, only Veronica can provide him with the “missing links in [his] faulty and, no doubt, hopelessly affected memory.”Footnote ¹⁰³ She has become, he admits, “the center of [his] desire, the focus of all [his] eternal longing, [his] inexhaustible passion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Once, reading “had been one of [Sibiya’s] greatest delights,” but following his destabilizing encounter with Veronica, in a moment when he fervently dreams of escaping South Africa, he “could hardly make any sense” of his books:

His aphasiac loss of concentration is a crisis in subjective (and historical) self-representation that, he imagines, can be mediated only through appeal to the twin authority with which he invests Veronica. His dilemma, however, is that “it was just this girl who could not now be trusted, who had managed to weave a web of fiction so completely divorced from the truth that, paradoxically, it seemed the more credible for being so entirely a work of a diseased fabulist imagination.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The extreme subjectivism for which Sibiya condemns Veronica’s testimony is, of course, equally applicable to his own, which seals itself within the self-referential idiosyncrasy and masturbatory self-generation of the Beautiful Soul.

No image more effectively exhibits this tendency than the crude symbolism of the titular “mating birds.” Having expressed in the opening paragraph the naturalist observer’s “lack of involvement in [his] own fate,” Sibiya immediately relates the tendentious scene beyond the barred grill of his window:

A number of elements give one pause here, not least Sibiya’s claim that the birds appear “sometimes” and mate “often,” assertions that are immediately contradicted in the next paragraph by the declaration that “[t]he scenario is the same every morning.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The narrator’s fatalistic appeal to nature, confirming in advance both an absence of volition and his victimization by female treachery, is sufficiently transparent, and the “unruly birds” will return at the novel’s conclusion to join the singing prisoners in a tableau anticipating the “near-dawn of freedom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Of the rather absurd image of failed copulation, however, Brink proposes three possible explanations: “either an extraordinary faculty of observation in the prisoner, or an incredibly copious discharge by the bird, or—most likely?—a tendency toward gross exaggeration and wild imagination in the narrator.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The most compelling possibility is, of course, the latter not least because this image conspicuously encapsulates in its sterile or onanistic return exactly the structure (the ending concealed in the beginning) later disclosed by the narrator, casting the narrative as the object of its own masturbatory representation. Yet this system of self-reference is neither the historical dialectic of Hegel nor what Jacobs dismissively calls “a half-hearted stab at post-modernism.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Rather, the bad infinity evoked here and throughout the novel is that of the naturalist machine, circumventing natural (female) generation and history itself and interposing its own conspicuously self-governing practice. Nkosi’s novel formally embodies the Beautiful Soul, which renounces every metalanguage save its own. That critics remain divided over whether this is Nkosi’s genius or his folly is indicative of the cultural and historical impasse to which the book gives mediatory expression.

As Brink points out, Mating Birds is simply the most visible of a series of Nkosi’s early fictions constructed around the troubling slippage between professedly public mediations and Nkosi’s personal interests, in which the former become the alibi for the fictional exorcism of the latter. Recalling the title of fellow “Drum boy” Bloke Modisane’s autobiography Blame Me on History, Brink wryly observes that “Blaming himself on history is precisely what the narrator of Mating Birds is trying to do, but without the irony Modisane applies to the endeavor.”Footnote ¹¹² Thus, Nkosi’s fiction expresses the “general dilemma of the Drum intellectual elite, who so often found themselves in limbo, between the black masses with whom they could no longer identify and the privileged whites.” “I am the eternal alien between worlds,” writes Modisane, “the Africans call me a ‘Situation,’ by Western standards I am uneducated.”Footnote ¹¹³

Nkosi already defines “Situation” in a 1962 essay as a “term of abuse for members of the African middle class trying to ‘situate’ themselves above the masses.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Nkosi’s liminal position as an exiled postcolonial intellectual therefore delineates the personal stakes of what Brink describes as Sibyia’s “extremely subjective and one-sided account, offered as self-justification, and as indictment of the system of apartheid which has allegedly dictated the crime.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Indeed, recalling Steffen’s unqualified claim for Nkosi’s indirect repudiation of Jameson, Brink cites as the novel’s “Jamesonian ‘political unconscious’ ” Nkosi’s “desperate need to vindicate his own exile.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

What is more, Brink claims, Nkosi inexplicably embellishes and distorts the sufficiently fraught historical period that he presumes to represent, a failing for which Brink provides the following summary emendation:

Although it is no doubt true that such glaring inaccuracy and artistic license betray the self-justification of the exile, as Brink recommends, such subjectivist explanation, considered on its own, hardly satisfies the determinate conditions of history as the ground and untranscendable horizon evoked in Jameson’s model of the political unconscious. If Nkosi’s more immediate intent, conscious or otherwise, is to legitimate his relevance as exiled intellectual, such recognition, confined to the terms of the Imaginary, does little to reveal the motivation of the device. Footnote ¹¹⁸ In fact, Nkosi comes closer to the mark in a review of Nadine Gordimer’s apocalyptic vision of black uprising, July’s People (1981), when he reflects on the likelihood that the climax of South Africa’s three-hundred-year anticolonial struggle might not manifest in the revolutionary upheaval everywhere anticipated, but in “a rather banal muted whimper, a finale in which the fundamental economic structures of society would remain largely uncontested.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ From here he offers an oblique invocation of Hegel:

Although this reflection was published in 2001, just prior to his own belated and sardonic meditation on revolution in Underground People (2002), Nkosi’s review of Gordimer’s novel originally appeared in 1983 and demonstrates a properly historical, even prescient, grasp of the postcolonial situation, much as predicted in Fanon’s theorization of a national bourgeoisie. It is precisely within this historical context, one perspicuously observed by Nkosi himself, that the withdrawal into naturalist aestheticism may be understood. The ouroboric formal and ethical logic of Mating Birds, according with the subjectivist retreat of the Beautiful Soul, may therefore have more to do with Nkosi’s structural position within a postcolonial, middle-class “Situation,” alienated from the masses and caught in the historical interstice between colonialism and global capital, than with the exile’s anxious production of self; or rather, the latter may be seen as the subjective expression of the former’s determinate historical substrate. Only by sustaining the dialectic of the subjective (or local) immediacy of the Imaginary and the pervasive architecture of the Symbolic can we, with Quayson, abandon “any simple notion of literature as mirror” and begin to perceive it “as a variegated series of thresholds and levels, all of which determine the production of the social as a dimension within the interaction of the constitutive thresholds of literary structure.”Footnote ¹²¹