Introduction
Saul Auerbach, the great fictional photographer at the heart of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, is more meticulous than most. The unhurried processes and careful results of his photography, taken on the streets and in the homes of the people of Johannesburg, provide the calm pulse of the novel. Photography is a fast art now, except for those who are too old-fashioned to shoot digital. But for most of the art’s history – until about fifteen years ago – most photographers had no choice but to be slow. Film had to be loaded into a camera, the shot had to be taken with some awareness of the cost of materials, the negative had to be developed and the print had to be enlarged. A certain meticulousness was necessary for photographs; a certain irreducible calmness.
The narrator of Double Negative is Neville Lister, ‘Nev’ to his friends and family, a smart young college dropout when we first meet him. He is anything but calm. Nev’s life, detailed in a discontinuous narrative from his youth to his middle age, is the main material of the novel, but it unfurls to the steady rhythm of Auerbach’s photographs: Nev anticipating the photographs, witnessing the places and persons involved in their making, remembering the images years later, and remembering them years later still. Like every worthwhile first-person narrator, Nev has a suggestive and imprecise identification with his author. Meanwhile, the fictional Saul Auerbach has a real-life cognate in David Goldblatt, the celebrated photographer of ordinary life in South Africa for the last fifty years. The temptation is to think that Nev and Auerbach are a pair of photographic positives printed from Vladislavić and his sometime collaborator Goldblatt. But this book is obsessed with imperfect doublings and it comes with its own caveat emptor: ‘Stratagems banged around the truth like moths around an oil lamp.’ Things are not what they seem, and this is not a roman à clef, though it has been expertly rigged to look like one.
With a language as scintillating and fine-grained as a silver gelatin print, Vladislavić delivers something rarer and subtler than a novelization of experience: he gives us, in this soft, sly novel, ‘the seductive mysteries of things as they are’. At heart, the novel is about an encounter between two great intellects in an evil time. It is an account of a sentimental education, though there’s a quickness to the narrative that allows it to elude such categorical confinement. The sceptical, hot-blooded and quick-tongued younger man and the reticent, unsentimental and deceptively stolid veteran navigate their way through a brutal time in a brutal place. Neither of them is politically certain – that rawness of response is outsourced in part to a visiting British journalist who goes out on a shoot with them – but both are ethically engaged, and both realize how deeply perverse their present order (South Africa in the 1980s) is. ‘It could not be improved upon,’ Nev says of that time; ‘it had to be overthrown.’ This young Nev is self-certain but unsteady on his feet. We are reminded that he is, as his name tells us, a Lister. He pitches forward. ‘I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest.’ Vladislavić’s prose is vibrant: it is alert to vibrations, movement and feints, as though it were fitted with a secret accelerometer.
Double Negative is in three parts, dealing respectively with youth, a return from exile and maturity. The plot is light: through the drift of vaguely connected incident, all set down as though remembered, Vladislavić draws the reader into a notion that this is a memoir. But these are stories about an invented self interacting with other invented persons. It is not recollection – but it is also not not recollection. It is a double negative. What sustains this enterprise, and sustains it magnificently, is Vladislavić’s narrative intelligence, nowhere more visible than in his way with language itself. Each section is perfectly judged; we enter incidents in medias res – as though they were piano études – and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.
Above all, there is in Double Negative, as in all Vladislavić’s writing, an impressive facility with metaphor. Metaphors provide the observational scaffolding on which the story is set. They also occasion much of Vladislavić’s finest writing in this finely written book: someone has ‘three wooden clothes pegs with their teeth in the fabric of her dress and they moved with her like a shoal of fish’; ‘a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd’; barbershop clients ‘reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold’; somebody ‘faded into the background like a song on the radio’; and, impishly signalling his own technique, lenses on a pair of black-rimmed glasses are ‘as thick as metaphors’.
In the 1980s, the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that metaphor is pervasive in the English language and that our penchant for metaphorical speech creates the structures of social interaction. But in Vladislavić’s hands, the metaphor goes beyond this quotidian utility and, refreshed, reconstructed and revived, does a great deal more: it becomes a ferry for the uncanny, a deployment of images so exact that the ordinary becomes strange and the strange familiar. Metaphors are at home in South Africa’s strange and sad history, where many things are like many other things, but nothing is quite the same as anything else.
A metaphor is semantic. A double negative, on the other hand, is syntactical: two negations together in a sentence usually lead to an affirmation (in the wrong places, they could be merely an intensified negation). But a double negative, in the sense of two wrongs making a right, is a form of strategic longwindedness. To use two terms of negation to say that something is ‘not unlike’ something else is not the same as saying it is like that thing. Double negatives register instances of self-cancelling misdirection. They are about doubt, the productive and counterproductive aspects of doubt, the pitching ground, the listing figure, and the little gap between intention and effect.
Beyond the grammatical sense of ‘double negative’, Vladislavić wants us to think of the photographic negative, upside down, its colours flipped, its habitation of the dark. Its double, the printed photograph, is the right side up, with a system of colours and shadows that resembles our world, and a form that invites viewing in the light. ‘A photograph is an odd little memorial that owes a lot to chance and intuition’, Auerbach says. But a photograph is also a little machine of ironies that contains a number of oppositions: light and dark, memory and forgetting, ethics and injustice, permanence and evanescence. There is an echo of ‘double negative’ in the term given to a photographic negative that has been exposed twice before it is developed: a ‘double exposure’. In a double exposure, two instances of light, two photographic events, are registered in a single frame. Nev’s return to the places he visited with Auerbach, and his superimposition of two sets of memories on a single location in Johannesburg, are a kind of double exposure, too.
Late in the novel, a grown-up Nev Lister talks to his wife Leora about a recent interview:
‘She was being ironic, obviously,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And so are you.’
‘I guess.’
‘The whole thing is ironic.’
‘Including the ironies.’
‘Maybe they cancel one another out then,’ Leora said, ‘Like a double negative.’
Teju Cole
New York, May 2013
Available Light
Just when I started to learn something, I dropped out of university, although this makes it sound more decisive than it was. I slipped sideways. After two years of English Literature and Classics, not to mention History, Sociology and Political Science, as we used to call it, my head grew heavy and I no longer wanted to be a student. Once my studies were over I would have to go to the army, which I did not have the stomach for either, so I
registered for my majors at the beginning of the academic year and stopped going to lectures. When my father found out, he was furious. I was wasting my time and his money. The fact that I was living under his roof again, after a year or two of standing on my own feet, made it worse.
How can I explain it now? I wanted to be in the real world, but I wasn’t sure how to set about it. My studies had awakened a social conscience in me, on which I was incapable of acting. So I wandered around in town, seeing imperfection and injustice at every turn, working myself into a childish temper, and then I went home and criticized my parents and their friends. We sat around the dinner table arguing about wishy-washy liberalism and the wages of domestic workers while Paulina, who had been with my family since before I was born, clattered the dishes away through the serving hatch.
After an argument in which my father threatened to cut off my allowance, I drove over to the Norwood Hypermarket, in the Datsun he’d bought me for my eighteenth birthday, to look at the community notice board. Most of the adverts for part-time employment were for students, which suited me. Technically, I was still a student, while having no real studies to pursue made me flexible.
I flipped through the handwritten notices with their gap-toothed fringes of telephone numbers. Door-to-door salesmen, envelope stuffers, waiters. It might be amusing to watch the middle classes fattening themselves for the slaughter. ‘Record shop assistant’ was appealing: I knew someone who worked Saturday mornings at Hi-Fi Heaven and she always had the latest albums. But it all seemed so bourgeois. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I would have gone picking tomatoes if that had been an option, following the seasonal harvest like some buddy of Jack Kerouac’s.
The ad that caught my eye looked like a note from a serial killer. Not everyone was a graphic artist in those days, a cut-and-paste job still took a pair of scissors and a pot of glue. I tore a number from a full row.
Jaco Els painted lines and arrows in parking lots. This kind of work was usually done with brushes and rollers; Jaco was faster and cheaper with a spray gun and stencils. He got more work than he could handle on his own.
First impressions? He was my idea of a snooker player, slim and pointed, and a bit of a dandy. Slightly seedy too. He gave me a powdery handshake while he sized me up, working out an angle. Later I discovered that he had acquired the chalky fingertips in the line of duty.
Jaco himself did the skilled part of the job, for what it was worth. He wielded the gun and managed the tanks, which were mounted on the back of a maroon Ranchero. My job was to move the stencils and do the touching up. The stencils were made of hardboard and hinged in the middle for easy transport and storage. They opened and closed like books, oversized versions of the ones I was trying to get away from. This was a library of unambiguous signs. Turn left, turn right, go straight. On a good day, we repeated these simple messages on tar and cement a hundred times.
Being a worker was even harder than I’d hoped. I pinched a dozen blood blisters into my fingers on the first day and breathed in paint fumes until I reeled. The next day I brought along gloves and a mask from my father’s workshop. We had to wikkel, as Jaco put it. A section of a parking garage would be beaconed off or a lane on a ramp closed while we painted, and it had to be done on the double. Together we marked out the positions with a chalk line, and then Jaco sprayed while I set out the stencils and touched up the edges with a roller. From time to time, he would move the van and turn over the tape. Music to work by.
Within fifteen minutes of meeting him, I learned that he had employed a string of black assistants before me. ‘None of them could take the punch,’ he said. ‘Now I don’t mind working on my own, hard graft never killed anyone, but I’m a person who needs company.’ You mean an audience, I thought, a witness. ‘I reckon it’s worth laying out a bit extra and having someone to shoot the breeze with when I’m on the road.’ No black labourer would have ridden in the cab, of course, he would have gone on the back like a piece of equipment.
My new boss was a storyteller with a small, vicious gift: he knew just how to spin out a yarn and tie a slip knot in its end. ‘You’re bloody lucky you’ve still got to go to the army,’ he told me. ‘My camps are over. I volunteered for more, but the brass said no. Suppose they’ve got to give lighties like you a chance to get shot.’ He was full of stories about floppies and terrs. Once he got going, you couldn’t stop him. Chilled as I was by the brutality of these stories, they drew me in, time and again, and even made me laugh. In the evenings, as I rubbed the paint off my hands with turps in my mother’s laundry, among piles of scented sheets and towels, I felt queasily complicit. But I told myself that this was also part of the real world. I was seeking out bitter lessons, undergoing trials of a minor sort, growing up. Such things were necessary.
Strangely enough, of all the violent stories Jaco told me, the one that comes back to me now has nothing to do with the war on the border or patrols in the townships. It concerns a woman who caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her dress as she alighted from a Putco bus, and fell, and knocked the teeth out of the plastic comb she was holding in her hand.
Jaco and I drove from one end of Johannesburg to the other with Hotel California blaring from the speakers. The knives were out but the beast would not die. A revolution was afoot in the retail world: the age of the mall was dawning (although we had not heard the term yet). Corner shops were making way for new shopping centres, and the pioneering ones, already a decade old, were growing. The parking garages were growing too. Jaco could not have been happier. We drove and drove, he talked and I listened, and then I scrambled for the stencils, hurling them open like the Books of the Law, and he zapped them with the spray gun. Turn left, turn right, go straight. It tickled him when I didn’t get out of the way in time and he put a stripe of red or yellow over my wrist.
There were hours of calm pleasure, when Jaco went off to buy paint or do his banking, or more secretive duties in the service of the state that he hinted at too broadly, and left me behind in some parking lot to join the dots. Working alone, in silence, I sometimes thought I was achieving something after all. In my jackson-pollocked overalls – I had to stop Paulina from washing the history out of them – in a clearing among the cars defined by four red witch’s hats, I was a solitary actor on a stage: a white boy playing a black man. In a small way, I was a spectacle. Yet I felt invisible. I savoured the veil that fell between my sweaty self and the perfumed women sliding in and out of their cars. I flitted across the lenses of their dark glasses like a spy.
One afternoon, I was painting little arcs in the parking area at Hyde Square, turning the sets of parallel lines between the bays into islands, when there was a bomb scare in the centre. Businessmen ran out through the glass doors clutching serviettes like white flags. And then a woman in a plastic cape with half her hair in curlers, who looked as if she had risen from the operating table in the middle of brain surgery with part of her head missing. Everyone flapped about, outraged and delighted, full of righteous alarm. Model citizens. Along the façade of the building was a mural, a line of black figures on a white background, and this separate-but-equal crowd drew my attention. They looked on solemnly, although their eyes were popping. The masses, I thought, the silent majority, observing this self-important European anxiety with Assyrian calm. I took my cue from them. I went on nudging new paint into the cracks in the tar, cold-blooded, maliciously pleased.
The bomb turned out to be a carry case of bowls left behind by an absent-minded pensioner.
In time, Jaco’s stories got to me. I could laugh off the knowing asides on brainwashing and espionage, which were straight out of The Ipcress File, but the nightlife in Otjiwarongo was less amusing the third time around. It shamed me that I said nothing when he launched into one of his routines. Why was I silent? If I am honest, it had nothing to do with needing the money or enjoying the work: I was scared of him.
When I was living in a student house in Yeoville, we had played a party game, an undergraduate
stunt called ‘The Beerhunter’. A game of chance for six players. It was Benjy, I think, who picked it up on a trip to the States as an exchange student. The ringmaster would take a single can out of a six-pack of beers and give it a good shake. Then the loaded can was mixed in with the others and each player had to choose one and open it next to his head.
Jaco was like a can that had been shaken. For all his jokey patter, he was full of dangerous energies, and if you prodded him in the wrong place, he would go off pop. He pointed the spray gun like a weapon. He was a small man, but he made a fist as round and hard as a club, spattered with paint and freckles. I could see him using it to donner me, the way he donnered everyone else in his stories.
While this was happening, my parents acquired new neighbours. Louis van Huyssteen was a young public prosecutor, just transferred to Johannesburg from his home town of Port Elizabeth. He had a wife called Netta and two small children.
The first thing that struck us about them was how much they braaied. ‘It’s a holiday thing,’ my father said. ‘When the chap goes back to work in January, it’ll stop.’ But they picked up the pace instead. ‘Perhaps they still have to connect the stove,’ my mother said, ‘or organize the kitchen?’
That was not it. They simply liked their meat cooked on an open fire. Minutes after Louis came in from work, long enough to kick off his shoes and pull on a pair of shorts, a biblical column of smoke would rise from their yard, and before long the smell of meat roasting on the coals wafted through the hedge that separated their place from ours. The braai was an old-fashioned one fit to feed an army, half of a 44-gallon drum mounted on angle-iron legs, standing close beside the kitchen door. Often, Netta would lean there in the doorway holding a paring knife or sit on the back step with a bowl in her lap, and they would chat while he turned the meat over on the grill. Once I watched him pump the mince out of a dozen sausages, squeezing them in his fist so that the filling peeled out at either end and tossing the skins on the coals. And I saw her lift the folds of her skirt and do a little bump-and-grind routine to an undertone of music, until he pulled her close and slid his hands between her thighs. It sounds like I used to spy on them, I know.
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