OPSOMMING
6. Toward an olfactory male intimacy
Previously, I wrote that the protagonist's being is not only “reflected, refracted, in the body of his father, the body of his lover, the body of the other” (Strydom, 2018:108-109), but that the
“process of being South African [is] a process where being (what I am) and self (who I am) are performed in relation to larger, national assemblages of belonging, themselves in constant flux”
(ibid.). I am, now, progressively starting to see the popular and critical reception of Venter's oeuvre (of which I take Wolf, Wolf to be both culmination and punctum) as a compulsively repeating tracing-over of a moment of arrestation in this flux. (Quite where the moment is located – pre-94; post-2000; post-2006 – I'm not yet sure.) In this way, I see distance between my own read-for Venter, and the two other PhD-level studies (Joubert, 2017; Le Roux, 2019) completed thus far on Venter, who conceptualise him as migrant on a quest to belong(ing).
This (still fractal, for now) view of the oeuvre colours how I read Wolf, Wolf, and how the
protagonist's relation to citizenship – national-masculine belonging, specifically – is so impacted by related sets of schema of the past, that it is disallowed to actualise by the arrestation in the decaying body/stench of the father-in-the-now (instead of through the more belonging-centred olfactory memories of the mother, or even in the more erotic father-of-the-past schema). I will consider this arrestation in the first piece that follows, which looks at how the olfactory can be read as sign that indicates belonging (but not unbelonging, yet). The aim of the first section here is to think about Venter's use of the olfactory in Wolf, Wolf – specifically through the decaying body of the father – and to think about it as a material-affective sign in order to conceptualise belonging (only thereafter, non-belonging). In particular, I aim to link belongings (the plural hereafter indicates the assemblaged schema belonging-unbelonging- nonbelonging; belonging itself is never one thing, never static, always in need of renegotiation) to the protagonist’s olfactory schema of his father (and, to a much lesser extent – in this specific novel – of the mother).
For a more granular-material read of Venter this is important, especially when seen through the lens of a becoming-wolf: In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari show how mechanisms of state (capitalism) and socius16 (psychoanalysis and the signifier) arrest desire and pleasure. [In other words, their argument is that the multiplicity of desire that exists in the world is homogenised to become a single (not singular) desire – capitalist desire. In thinking about wolves and
propagation, the idea is to find 'minor' modes of desire that proliferate multiplicity again.] But, also, to look for correlate signs that un-proliferate: every vector of belonging also proliferates un- belonging and non-belonging17 – and therefore it becomes unproductive to think of belonging as singular.
In my 2018 read of Wolf, Wolf, desire [also the desire of the nascent academic] is arrested primarily by the progenitory propulsion (which is so often a driver of Venter’s narratives), now seen in compounded fashion as acting alongside the olfactory desire-repulsion of the decaying body of the father figure. In a similar way, then, the figure of the wolf/Wolfie can be read to act as embodied desire-repulsion sign. In the second piece on olfactory intimacy, I therefore
consider how the figure of the wolf(ie) allows desire (to a minor extent) to escape the constraints of capitalist arrestation – primarily, I argue, through smell (and not visuality, as is often
foregrounded in scholarship on Venter). The relation with the lover, Jack – as intimate,
temporary belonging – is further disallowed to proliferate into desire by the mirroring-arrestation with the embodied sign of the immigrant worker, Emil. (I consider the olfactory – specifically the protagonist's two differing reactions to Jack's and Emil's sweat – being the code to read-for
16 I use ‘socius’ throughout this study in its Deleuzian mode, i.e. not referring to society but, instead to an enplaced,
“particular social instance” in which the temporal-social fabric around a node of being “presents itself as a socius or full body upon which all kinds of flows flow and are interrupted, and the social investment of desire is this basic operation of the break-flow” (Deleuze, 1983:42).
17 In short sections on homonormativity, the homosocial, hetero(happiness), and the homonational, I explore how these vectors of belonging proliferate and unproliferate witinh national frames – crucially, as textualities.
here.) In the second section on the olfactory I consider how this can be read differently, i.e. how the olfactory is a sign for potentially belonging-beyond the Afrikaner-white-past-ethno schema of the father.
These two sections differ structurally from the queer canids section (and from each other), in that the first focuses quite narrowly on one facet (the decaying body) of one figure (the father), in order to explore how the olfactory can be seen as a marker of belonging, while the second is less narrowly focused, more associative, and include a number of personal interjections. This is intentional, not only in how it traces the narrative structure of the novel itself but also how it points to the surface of the textual, where research(er) and novel snuffel at each other – an ethico-intentional uitsnuffel with an ethical imperative front and centre.
6.1. Or towards a plural ‘belonging’
Indeed, the second section ends by noting an ethical imperative in reading-for signs of olfactory belongings. I base my understanding of such an imperative on how A.P. Colombat, in Deleuze and Signs (2000) speak to the coimbrication of scholarly enplacement and methodology (in a set of quotes I return to, mantra-like, often and frequently): “The task of any researcher is not merely to find answers but to invent and define his or her problem and his or her problematic.
Regarding signs, this implies that we are or become sensitive to certain linguistic or non- linguistic signs depending on our receptivity, on the arrangements and haecceities we become part of. One way we define an individual is through the characterisation of the signs [here:
smells - WS] to which this individual re-sponds.” (2000:19)
In this way, my own being-in-the-world resonates with the scents and smells of the Venter oeuvre: father, lover, deodorant, immigrant, past, homosocial, wood polish and wax, Ingrams camphor cream, sweat, trainers, Brut, wilting proteas, seep, fynbos gin, Jik, Omo, rooibostee, bloekombos, plaaspad-afdraai na Rietkuil en Groendraai en Erfdeel, sheepshearing season, the smell of optimistic friskiness on a cold morning, Ricoffy, dried cum on a verekombers, rosyntjies in water vomited up after a pushed-myself-too-hard jog, Buffelsfontein brannas en coke, Oros, Protex and Venter and I combine in molecular multiplicity.
The assemblaged readerly engagement facilitates a consideration of being-South-African beyond the merely-Afrikaner, akin to how E. Holland, in Nomad citizenship, sees an Onward- faced “human life-form […] launch[es] forth on the thread of a tune to self-organise in a multitude of different ways” (2013:94). As readers, we riff on the affective engagements – or, rather, our bodies’ affective response(s) – to the text, both as document of the arrest in the filial and as text that opens up readerly potentiality toward civil alliance: I first read Venter when I was 19 – a coming of age occurring not even a half-decade after our country’s emergence out of a near-stifling, suffocating form of coloniality; a stench which lingers, insidiously but ever- here, into the Now.
In a previous article (Strydom, 2018), I ask whether the doubled state of being suggested by the novel’s title offers two sides of being: subversive against normative. However, I’d like to qualify that: This should not be seen as an oppositional duality, or a binarism – in the same way that belonging should not ever be singular, or even merely ‘doubled’ – but instead as a continuum engaging with larger groupings18. We are indeed subversive to, and normative from, and to de- emphasise the oppositional (in order to bring belonging into the plural) is not to negate that
18 Especially because, within the renewed contexts in which white-queer moves, subversive is not necessarily an act of power-to.
these subject positionings are ways to position ourselves in relation to others. Rather, moving through the notion of doubled being toward an understanding of belonging as plural, moves us to find new ways of articulating our orientation to power. We look North, South. (Even when we irk at how these terms have come to signify.)
In my view of ferality19, I posit that forever positioning ourselves as marginal groupings to power negates the fact that power is multifold, and that belonging itself is not static; and we therefore need to more urgently differentiate between (though not to simplify into binary) power-to and power-over. This is where part of the value of this study lies: in considering one such way of positioning ourselves in relation to others that attempts to traverse categorical oppositionality:
the olfactory.
6.2. Or, at the very least, a queering of a textuality
In order to show how we can read texts of queerness-in-service-of-whiteness in a more productive way, reading instead for its oppositionality, it would be productive to explore the olfactory as a sign (a material-affective sign, in the Deleuzian sense) that grounds the
characters (and by extension, the reader) in the material, while also moving beyond it via the affective to the pack (in order to pack/plug into the oeuvre; to pack/plug into reader-Venter- novel). To turn back to Colombat, on what the critic/scholar/reader – faced with such a stench – does: “One task of the critic will be to unfold linguistic signs to reach this intensive level of non- linguistic signs, of `traits of expression', of the expression and of the expressed” (Colombat,
19 In this study ferality operates on both thematic and methodological plane: as to the former, I follow N. Garside’s work in Celebrating the invasive: The hidden pleasures and political promise of the unwanted (2016); for the latter I look toward the wild scavenger queerness of J. Halberstam (primarily in Female Masculinity, 1998, but also elsewhere), as well as to E. Oinas’ Wayward academia – Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis (2021).
2000:25); i.e., to trace how olfactory signs fold into contours of affect20 to make the novel, and, perhaps, one day, even the oeuvre thrum to the intensities with which at least one reader – this reader – enfolds with it.
This is important to do – near-essential in the lived actuality of the Now – and in terms of how it adds to the ways Wolf, Wolf (and Venter) can be read-for citizenship, belongings, civic
relationality. In the study's final two parts, A longer concluding part, with footnotes and personal interjections, that cubilicates into further/future research, and Addenda, I emulate, textually, how the preceding sections progressively consider how Venter’s novel fits into the tradition of the textual imaginaire by surfacing (and coding, and position in relation-to) signs and codes (in this study: olfactory intimacy between men).
At the end of any study, there must be a proliferation of questions, or at the very least more questions than answers.21 In the first part of the conclusion, I build on parts 2.2, 2.3, and 2.7 from the literature review, to ask questions around the queering of one’s own discourses of the erotic, as well as how access to these discourses can be seen as a resource that activates frames of belonging (in part as the result of – but not directly referencing – how the section on wilting proteas and Jack’s smell opened up indiscernible zones of possible molecular
multiplicity, into which flowed my own onto-smell-memories). The second part of the conclusion, along with the parts of the addenda, sees the indiscernible zones of the study itself bubble up textually in a proliferation of footnotes, and I ponder where this (into ‘queering’ the plaasroman;
20 After M.L. Johnson (primarily in Embodied Reason, 1999, but also elsewhere) and D.N. Stern’s Vitality contours (1985), within an understanding of textual immersion as a plugging into of bodies-as-connections-of-affects (in Beckman’s view of desiring machines, 2013:139), I see contours of affect as the ways in which affective investment in a text modulates, shivers and contracts over time.
21 During the finalisation of this manuscript, I marvel at the clairvoyant naivety of this sentence, written
somewhere/sometime in 2019. I also wonder how much the title of Section 1 gives away, and, of course, how often (or, rather, how much) we use language, cleverly, to paper over trauma. And, also, how humour – mostly off-hand, but barbed at times – is used/useful.
in cubilication; in feral citizenship) may possibly lead Onward from the Now; as well as, of course, what the possible limitations to such onwarding would be/were.
Why won’t the academic textuality be able to mimic how olfactory relation in the novel (through the alloyoing lens of LaBruce’s contrarian zombies) signal new ways of desire-citizenry – through the text – to tie in with new and more inclusive and relational conceptualisations of citizenship that moves askew to queer-whiteness? Why won’t the interplay between Venter’s interrogating of ‘Afrikaner-ness’ and how critical reception of his work re-narrows identity lead the budding scholar to consider their own olfactory entering-into-relation with the ethno-national (through the novel’s olfactory ambit of body, desire, the abject, spatiality, filial structures,
pleasure praxis, addiction)? Why won’t films about a plague, and a novel about anosmia, chafe in an era (I write these words in 2021, during my country’s third Covid-19 peak) where a loss of smell indicates the entry into the body of a pathogen, a virality, a difference? Why won’t the text itself (this one, the one in your hand or on your screen) become feral, become-different, so as to actualise or construct something akin to the interplay between belonging and becoming? Why not a meaningful wolfie, for a change?