A hapless journalist visits South Africa to write a novel that will include
Truth, Art and Sex.
Gabriel Gerrity made his first trip to South Africa to cover the election. He also
went there to write a novel. Well before he arrived, he knew what both his dispatches and
his novel would say. He figured that out on the train down from Rhodesia...
Gerrity’s novel was going to be about a journalist who
went to South Africa to cover the election.
Gerrity saw South Africa—without ever having seen
it—as so full of contradictions and tensions, conflicts and submerged anxieties that
all by itself his novel would explode into action. The country’s cruelty would
provide its own elements of drama. The journalist wandering through those elements would
serve as the Catalyst; he would make the elements flame and flare and shatter. The
journalist would be a kind of Graham Greene character: rootless and urbane, a world-weary
Actor-Observer. Someone like himself, Gerrity thought.
Gerrity had a Theory about the creation of a novel. The main
thing was truth—Truth. There was nothing complicated about capturing Truth. All you
did was write everything down just the way it happened. Get it down, that was the basic
thing.
Then you went through and tightened it, compressed it,
eliminated all but the bare essentials. The fact that you scratched out the dross meant
that what remained had Tension and Solidity. Tension and Solidity were parts of the
iceberg that didn’t show. They were there all the same, the sub-structure of what did
show. And what did show was Art. |