Three people spoke at the launch of Porcupine at the Book Lounge earlier this week before the author, Jane Bennett, took the floor. All were highly entertaining, and all expounded on their great enthusiasm for Bennett’s short stories, which attracted adjectives like “compelling”, “disturbing”, “crafty” and – this one drew appreciative murmurs from the standing-room-only crowd – “lusciously dry”.
We’re pleased to bring you video clips of each of the speeches – including a clip of Bennett’s – which capture the exuberance of the occasion and the potential this author has to grow rapidly into a name of major literary note. (She’s already one with us, of course!)
We’ve also brought you the complete text of Helen Douglas‘ speech on the night (which includes a fine, nuanced review of the book) and a launch photo gallery. Enjoy!
THE PRECISE AND PERILOUS PASSION OF A PORCUPINE
Porcupine: Short Stories by Jane Bennett (Kwela Books)
by Helen Douglas
My first glimpse of Porcupine was from across a crowded room, poking its little snout out into the bookish clutter and chatter of book club. My first notice of it was the title and what I took to be a quill on the cover. Very nice, I thought. Later, a closer look showed that the play of light and dark on the cover was actually the fingers of a hand. Ah, I thought. Even later, I noticed the skin that the fingers rest upon. And I thought: Oh, my.
This is, in retrospect, not a bad way to approach a porcupine, both for the approacher and the approached: gradually, with curiosity, letting the creature come into focus as it will.
So, three steps up again, this time as a reader. The first moment of discovering Porcupine is the “quill”, the abundant writerly craft here. Literary short stories are notoriously tricky. Publishers and booksellers find them difficult, and it would probably be best for everyone were writers not to write them. Except, of course, when the form is necessary and essential and true, when something that has to be written can only be written as a short story. As is the case here. No doubt, Jane Bennett could write astonishing novels. I hope that she will. But the short stories in Porcupine are short stories simply because they are and could be nowise else.
Also noticeable up front is the confidence and exuberance of her language. When a weeping woman scrumples a tissue (144), or a portrait photographer imprecates postmodernism (136), that’s just how it is – if imprecation is an out-of-style word, or “scrumple” not even a word at all, that’s merely beside the point.
There is craft in the dialogue. Her people each speak with their own rhythm and syntax, not conveying information so much as telling you, or giving themselves away. And craft again in the narrative voice, in what and how it notices, and in its tone: wry and rueful, all-too-human, slightly removed. You’ll find it, for instance, where one character complains to a friend about a situation gone “pear-shaped”, and the friend “wonder[s] about pears, which seemed to her to have quite an elegant shape, fat-bottomed and smooth, but she understood the problem.”
It’s in the way she makes unfashionably authoritative assertions. “It’s not a riddle”, she tells us, or “It was not possible”. Leaving the reader to think what, exactly – in a terrain inhabited by floating babies, angels, travelling spirits and words floating around in cartoon speech bubbles that burst on contact with streetlights? And yet, she so obviously knows what she’s doing that we let her draw us on, enchanted. (It’s that kind of “craft”, too.)
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Video: Alison Swartz on Jane Bennett
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The precision of description is sometimes as elegant and smooth as a pear’s bottom. Anyone familiar with Kalk Bay station will delight in: “The train owl-hooted good night as it left her on the platform, curving with metallic determination into the shoreline” (12).
Or: “Women were, then, so beautiful I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the ones who wore bright wraps around their temples, who yelled and whispered in languages I half understood. I couldn’t bear the ones who stood like hunters in meetings: tense, hidden, bodies curled round doorjambs. I couldn’t bear the young ones, running with cloth flying around their brown legs, giggling and on their way elsewhere.”(87)
Some observations are startling, even as they turn, precisely, into re-cognition, as we suddenly know something again that we hadn’t known we knew. Especially about relationships. “My body had opened wide enough to let light illustrate the salience of one presence.” (86-7) Or: “She wanted to be totally loved by me, and totally unaware of me, that was how she could be safe.” (142) Or: “I cut her hair and let cheekbones sharpen her eyes.” (95)
And some of the most beautifully attentive language here occurs in scenes of shattering violence – almost (almost) redemptively.
There is also quill-craft in the framing, the way the stories are structured, that is quite astonishing. Stories are busting out all over here, even, in one case, taking up a page in the space between a question being asked and answered. Where they start – with, say, visions of train robbery or a strange new affinity for ancient Greek poetry – does not, in any plain-sailing way, seem likely lead to where they end up. “Crucifix” begins at a Kebble art exhibit and segues into two markedly different encounters at a conference on rape and religion. “Thought Control” begins with spell-casting and the problem of getting someone to talk to you, moves on to a relationship begun through a personal ad, and then into 9-11and an anti-apartheid demonstration in the US in the ’80s.
That this works, and is not a complete gemors, takes us to the second step of encountering this Porcupine. After the writer’s quill, the fingers of a hand come into focus. Hands are for working, and these are working stories. Although “slippery” is one of the collections’ most frequent adjectives, Bennett is actually pretty upfront about the fact that these are stories of ideas. As one of her narrators says, “it’s not my fault that she spoke the way she did – long sentences so full of highfalutin philosophy and speculation. She was working something out.”(86)
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Video: Terri Barnes on ‘Work vs Art’ and Jane Bennett
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These aren’t just “make believe” stories; they want also to make sense, to make true. They’re working something out. In “Thought Control”, it’s something about intervention, how to change the world, if it’s yours to change. Here’s the dilemma:
“the readiness to exert will, to control the planet, to have things her own way… that was wrong. But, what was also wrong was passivity. Sitting there, doing nothing, letting oneself fall into abjection and the realm of the squashed. No. That was indisputably wrong, too.” (49)
The first sentence of the story “Extreme Motherhood” says: “He did not trust his relationship with history.”(32) That’s true of many characters here, busy “working something out” in their relationship with South African history, of “living between the grids and blocks of brutal laws concerning presence, identity, body and name”. (10)
They remember Mandela’s inauguration speech, when he said, “‘Our actual daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul’” (97) – and, in their various ways, they want to understand how we got from there to this actual South African reality of raped babies, sexual coercion and violence. They are dubious about what has passed so far for explanations. (And if, perhaps, the problem was men’s penises and we managed to get rid of them all, as in “Disarmament”, what would happen then?)
But above all, the “working out” of history takes place in relationship, between this one and that one. In “Domestic Skills” and “Contracts” (with a lusciously-drawn counterpoint in “Porcupine”, the title story), there is a lot of negotiating and “exploring the terrain” (14) between “historically-advantaged and -disadvantaged” women, in which the white woman, as Lottie tells Julia in “Contracts”, often comes off faintly ridiculous and even hard to like. But how not? It’s a ridiculous situation, trying to give up domination without losing control, and always feeling at a loss. Julia says,
“I don’t know, Lottie… I’m not one of those TV people – on call in the emergency room, sewing up stab wounds, making jokes, having an affair at the same time. No one’s ever going to give me one of those awards for being an unsung heroine in my community. Maybe I need to eat more breakfast. Maybe my skin doesn’t work.”
Lottie stares at her, and says, “Or maybe it does… Maybe it works all too well, Julia. Whatever.” (84)
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Video: Helen Douglas on Porcupine
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And now we’ve arrived. From the work of the quill, to the work of the hand, to the work of the skin. Women’s skin, certainly, but also skin, before it has any colour or history, that is how we touch and are touched, how we feel, how we are soft, what both preserves and exposes us, what holds us together. And by skin, we also mean something about words.
When you get right up close with this porcupine, it turns out that it’s really a love song. While it is fine, and even important, to be clever and skilful and spiky, the real question is how do we love? How are we called to love, and how do we respond? This is what drives and gives meaning to the honing of craft and to the need to understand. This is the work of skin.
Maybe I have gone too far here. I’m not sure. But there are two gestures toward theology, where everything is at stake. The narrator of “Taking the Initiative” writes:
“Theologically, my only hope is that I’ve been right all along – that this quest among women’s singularities, their skins, their deep, incredibly deep thought, is taken on in the name of god. If I’m wrong, I am up shit creek.” (109)
And Michael, at the beginning of her story, says: “I want not to call it theology. I want to say that, viscerally, I know that women in our bodies are shatteringly precious, each one un-graspably precious. I have a faith in women’s resistances to death, her resistance to what was death to/in her.” (85-6)
This isn’t bubblegum love. It doesn’t strike poses. It looks us in the eye and says, come. A difficult invitation: to listen, to attend, to locate, to grieve, to stop hurting each other. Michael, stripped of her skin, struggling not to lose her mind, holds to her passion for women, becoming herself a woman “made of war, love, evasion, fur and arithmetic”. (95)
It becomes hard to speak of the writing at this level. Skin and bodies, word and thought. An imminence of violence, a civil war in the blood, a double heartbeat. An honouring of the authority of woundedness. Something needing to be worked out, urgently and with care – a double imperative that has a lot to do with the occasional whiff of, what? Hysteria? Madness? Women on the edge? Yes, or just a barely contained panic that we have to do this now, and we don’t yet exactly know how. Something needing to be gone through, undergone, borne. Something about justice, and confidence in the human soul. In the words of “Taking the Initiative”: to “breathe underwater for so long” that we will “know, exactly, the intolerability of ‘air’”.
Of all of the narrators, I think that this is the one who has most unflinchingly endured and returned the frank gaze of love, and counts herself lucky. And so, she must have the last word:
“I think I have a long way yet to go. Every day I learn how little I know of a compass. I learnt yesterday how to creep down Silvermine in the dark, following the course of rain rivers thick and foam-white. When I looked up through the wet leaves, a banana-moon hung in the sky, sharp and yellow. Her light glanced across the slippery stones where I was perched, not afraid, not either at home.
“This is an invitation.” (115)
Helen Douglas is a philosopher in private practice (counselling and writing) in Kalk Bay.
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Video: Jane Bennett on Jane Bennett
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Launch gallery
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