Book Review : Three Hypothetical Tales Left Untold

States of Emergency by Andre Brink (Summit: $18.95; 248 pages)

“No, I don’t think I shall be writing my book after all,” says the narrator at the end of Andre Brink’s “States of Emergency.”

This narrator, a troubled South African writer, is for all practical purposes Brink himself, author of seven searching novels about the warfare of private and public life in his tragic society. This eighth book is less a novel than an argument, half personal and half fictional, that novels can’t be written in such a condition.

Self-Fulfilling Theme

The argument is the theme of “States of Emergency.” It is, in part, a self-fulfilling theme. Brink has written a portrait of a writer in disarray. The disarray invades the book.

Ostensibly, “States” is told at four different levels. N., the narrator, is trying to write his novel, inspired by two events.

Sometime before, he had received the manuscript of a short novel by a woman named Jane Ferguson. It told of an affair between a young woman and a middle-aged man, which ended when he abandoned her and she committed suicide by burning herself to death. N., who greatly admired the work, tried in vain to get it published. Publishers were not interested in a private love story from South Africa, one that did not deal with the public events there.

Later, Ferguson’s father brings N. her diary. She had a love affair with DeVilliers, a middle-aged doctor who left her to resume his work in the anti-apartheid underground. He was arrested, tortured and died in jail, allegedly by suicide. Jane Ferguson burned herself to death.

Ferguson’s novel and her diary comprised two of “State’s” mutually reflexive layers. A third is the principal narrative in the form of notes for the novel that N. proposes to write. Should it get written, it will tell of the affair between Philip, a middle-aged professor of literary criticism, and Melissa, his young graduate student assistant.

Finally, there are N.’s own difficulties in writing. Events interrupt him; notably, his unsuccessful effort to help Milton, a saintly schemer who struggles to keep his black township from being destroyed in the fight between young extremists and the South African authorities. More persistent interruptions are provided by N.’s struggles with his story, the various versions he suggests for it, and his frequent sorties into post-structuralist theories that cast doubt on the solidity of fiction itself.

N., his speculations and frustrated digressions growing increasingly feverish, makes a mighty stew of politics and literary ideas. The names of Roland Barthe and Jacques Derrida are conjured up along with security police colonels and African immolation legends.

The classical novels of characters and emotions that matter, the structuralist philosophies that take account of them--all these are associated with the rigidities of South African society. The newer literary ideas--Melissa is a deconstructionist, her lover-professor, a structuralist--are associated discovery, resistance and change.

There is a serious, provocative notion in the disruption of N.’s fictional efforts by the catastrophes around him. There is at least a playful and stimulating provocation in the invasion of the deconstructionist plot--and--body snatchers.

Still, a novel about the difficulties of writing a novel, however interesting these difficulties may be, does not make a novel. The other things that Brink provides failed to do the job. Jane Ferguson’s abortive bit of fiction is only a whiff of a story. Her diary account of her affair with DeVilliers is more substantial, though at the end, N. indicates that both Ferguson and her novel are invented exercises to help him get going on Philip and Melissa.

A Banal Tale

In fact, the Philip-Melissa affair is a fairly banal story of an older man and a younger woman, undermined by guilt, nightmares and the tensions of the world outside. Neither character is memorable; they are appealing but they inhabit a worn-out plight. And the alternative beginnings and endings suggested by N. drain them of whatever life and individuality they possess.

If Brink’s characters are drained, so is his considerable narrative strength. We get involved, in spite of ourselves, in what will happen to the couple; we get involved in the atrocities happening outside, and in the story of Milton, the only authentically fascinating personage in the book.

But Brink, or N., will not allow us our interest. We are continually jerked back and reminded that all these stories are hypothetical and unsound, and that finally--as we have seen--they will not be told.

It is one thing for contemporary theory to come in afterward and argue that the fiction we have read tells us not about real characters but only about how its text was created. It is another for this reductivism to be applied in the moment of creation. It is literary contraception; nothing emerges alive.