Thereafter, I consider a queerer reading of Wolf, Wolf (via LaBruce) that surfaces the potentiality toward alliance, toward the new.
What is at risk with such identitarian echo-chamber (the literary system as pat on the back, as circle jerk), reception is the potential loss of a relational ‘genuine encounter’ that can rupture what we think we know. Along with such a focus on the ability/capacity to be moved to act/to be affected/to feel, comes a rupturing of identity. (What gay, white masculine academia does, not simply what it means.) Indeed, Connel states that masculinity is not situated outside the gender system, but rather a “configuration of practice within a system of gender relations. We cannot logically speak of a crisis of configuration; rather we might speak of its disruptions or its transformation” (1995:84). Lines of flight are needed, then, away from binary-infused
configurations of praxis and on to new, more equitable, practices of maleness, behaviour and connection. Seen in this light, the actual crisis is then that “men have come to believe that the distinction between reason and desire, the intellect and the body, the masculine and the feminine, is not only real, but necessary as well” (Brittan, 1989:204). A line of flight will not only transcend the configurations of lived (gendered) praxis but will also show these distinctions to be arbitrary and artificial – and (thus) transcendable.
There exists a real need for change in how men (and, of course, the term ‘men’ signify a vast array of signifiers, a broad and vague conglomerate of meanings) see themselves. Anthony Clare writes that “[t]he origin for so much male anger, rage and violence lies within the very way in which we conceptualise ourselves as men and women and the very way we negotiate the difficulties and obstacles of human love and hate” (Clare, 2000:37). Instead of a ‘need’, there exists an ethical imperative to rupture our conceptualisation of praxis and being within a system of gendered practices. The crisis in masculinity is not necessarily due to a loss of power (or perhaps due to perceived loss of power – a dissonance not yet adequately addressed in masculinity studies), but more fundamentally due to an inability to fit into new configurations of praxis, because of a) a loss of signifying relation with the overarching imagos of the past, and b) an inability/unwillingness to respond/recode into the imagos of the now. (And, of course, the
ways in which signifying frames are bound in larger structures of normative organisation, including academia.)
I posit that we see Venter as an off-queer, gay literary figure whose work is received as semi- queer85 (in the same manner as he is an extra-national author whose work is semi-Afrikaans – in both ways writing from afar). There is a specific way in which semi-gay authors and poets have been incorporated into the Afrikaans literary system – the sufficiently desexualised Hennie Aucamp, for example – that speaks to the masculinist loss of power-over, as it relates to gay men: “Concerns relating to the family and men’s position […] relate strongly to underlying anxieties surrounding men’s sexuality” (Edwards, 2006:13).
Loss figures in myriad ways in Wolf, Wolf [even when my argument is that we read loss in Venter in a flattened way]. At one point the protagonist, Matt, is denied an inheritance (apart from a white Merc), ostensibly because his lover, Jack, came to live with him in the ancestral home, against the express wishes of his homophobic and religiously conservative father; a father who was, at the time, dying of cancer in the very same home. In the eyes of the patriarch, his son’s desires for another man, and that which happens between the “debauched sheets”
(p.173) of his son’s bed, comes to constitute, for him, his son’s being; for him, the function of male-ness (which in the novel is two-fold: to operate sexually in producing an heir, and to produce in the more general capitalist sense of the word) comes to outweigh the essence of the person’s being. Being is here construed on what we have to do, as opposed to what we want to do – affective potentiality versus dutiful filial adherence – and the inverse of Venter’s rumination of male progeny’s role. The restrictive nature issued from the father’s insistence on the son
85 Venter’s sexuality is still not readily introduced in para-textual texts around his novels, pursuant to how his oeuvre has for the most part struggled to include positive gay (let alone queer) thematic elements. (Examples include:
Ambivalent sexuality in the first published work; the manner in which the pronoun change in My Beautiful Death was handled publicly; Stoney as overly macho red herring alter ego.)
‘carrying on the line’ crystalises in a sense of dutiful progeny (often a primary driver of Venter’s protagonists) and considerations of such a “duty” permeate the first parts of the novel: Matt is the “only, the first-born, the son […] he’s the one who’ll be able to take it further” (p.106). This sense of duty literally manifests in the room between Matt and his father as a spectral apparition (add quote) and clearly constitutes a conflated tension between son-as-dutiful-carer, and son- as-needing-to-carry-the-line.
However, in making proclamations such as “What would happen to the world if everybody was like you and your friend? Where would our children come from? […] There will be no more progeny. The bloodline runs dry” (p.178), the father is shown to conflate species continuation with the continuation of himself (as the reader gets a hint at the white male privilege in the subtext), allowing a reading in which the fear of his son as sexual other is shown to be partly a projection of his own fears about dying, about his own corporeal non-continuity, assuaged only by the (possible) continuation of his line/surname. The notion of a gay son being tasked with continuing the progeny, carrying the fatherly seed, but refusing, go some way toward queering this specific role. Venter, however, does not frame this non-acceptance in positive, productive terms: shows how it is experienced by the protagonist as a failing of some sort, as a less than form of masculinity.
Unsurprisingly, not only does the son go against the father’s wishes; he goes one further by allowing Jack entry into his father’s house, which results in a different kind of non-continuation:
non-inheritance. (The son refusing the transfer of line; the father in return denying transfer of inheritance.) Fuelled by indignation at the non-inheritance, and at the forced selling of the family home, Matt goes to live in a car on Rondebosch Meent/Commons with Jack and starts
terrorising the new owners of his old family home, the Mkhonzas, menacing them at night while wearing a wolfhound mask, the same mask, ironically, that Jack wears the fateful night he is
invited into the patriarch’s house. The hooliganism echoes white-on-black violence, dogs/canids as machinic extensions of white power-over during Apartheid – an echo the author seems unwilling or unable to face.
The decidedly anti-social behaviour seems puzzling to the first-time reader (and is not nearly as
‘playful’ as reviews make it out to be), as it appears to constitute a further negation of self – or even a (further) self-marginalisation through an acceptance of undomestication – which is compounded by the fact that Matt then loses his livelihood (he bungles his takeaway business due to incompetence, sulks and mopes and scares off customers [to add quote on sullen proprietor] and, in the last pages of the novel, Jack is killed, presumably by the new owners of the house, driven to desperation by the campaign of terror. The end of the novel thus ostensibly constituting a complete stripping away not of power, place and positionality, but rather of white male centrality (financial, cultural, symbolic). This decentring is experienced by the reader without textual awareness that we are experiencing it by proxy (through the white male affluent protagonist), echoed in reviews which posit it as dystopic, which it patently is not (and cannot be, except if the white South African subject’s experience is centralised as universal).
In addition to the inability to adjust to new(er) imagos through which to enter into configurations of praxis, a related aspect of the masculinity ‘crisis’ is insecurities generated around a perceived loss of economic power, insecurities which are then projected onto violence toward ‘easy
targets’, such as, for example, women, gay men, and immigrants86. Capitalism seeks to make (white) power and (male) desire universal because it is structurally arranged on the vestiges of colonialism and the continuing stronghold of patriarchy. On this point, when considering a loss
86 Venter’s use of Tannie Sannie as one-dimensional antagonist, as well as the Mkhonzas (who are only mentioned but not described, making them empty signifiers to be filled with white fear mongering about land appropriation and property transference), are examples of easy targets.
of male power, Heartfield (2002) reminds us that we are best suited in reconceptualising the crisis not so much as a “loss of [male] power in relation to women [but] rather in relation to capital that men and women alike have lost authority” (Heartfield, 2002). Except for some reviews of Wolf, Wolf which focus on the masculine crisis presented in the novel, while
considerations of socio-economic nature are relegated or overlooked. This is exacerbated in the academic discourse constructed around Venter’s novel (and his oeuvre).
4.5 Moving up (South), or: An ethical imperative for moving toward a model for