Tales of Hate and Love
Evidence of Love.
by Dan Jacobson.
Atlantic Little, Brown. 242 pp. $4.00.
It is impossible to read any of Dan Jacobson’s four novels without feeling how strongly they are suffused by his own humanity. Because he believes that every individual absorbs some of a society’s corruption, his negative judgments are always compassionate ones, pronounced with a sense of pity and sorrow. All four novels deal with the tensions in South Africa, but Evidence of Love, the latest, is the first of them to span more than several weeks. This fact, that it covers something like eight years, not only points to the status of Evidence as Jacobson’s first full-length novel; the time span also signifies an advance in both theme and subject matter.
Jacobson’s first three books, The Trap, A Dance in the Sun, and The Price of Diamonds, portray people who unconsciously accept the assumptions of their society and then, to their surprise and occasionally against part of their will, find themselves actively supporting that society. These short novels give off the sense of being fables—tales of the inescapable. Characters continually edge themselves and others, and are edged in turn, into any one of the various consequences of apartheid and South African life—white boss, or “liberal” student, or diamond lover, or native: throughout their lives, their color and their countrymen seem to betray them into the behavior that is expected of them. In The Trap, a formerly calm and detached white farmer, facing an African who has lied and stolen his sheep, finally becomes a vicious, thrashing baas who “knew he could go on until Willem was a pulp”; in A Dance in the Sun, a Dutchman and a native discover that their articulated hate and fear of each other only freeze their relation of master and servant; and in The Price of Diamonds, two South African Jews, partners for fifteen years, are suddenly alienated by the lust for diamonds with which they have secretly lived. All these people, in fact, live with and act out of a combination of secret desires and half-formed obsessions. The partners find “something harder than diamonds,” but the essential theme of the novels is always the profound ways a society manages to shape a man’s being without his knowlege.
In Evidence of Love, the characters confront this shaping power directly and successfully resist it. Their actions express not the unconscious acceptance of their extremely demanding society, but the deliberate desire to oppose it. Jacobson’s first novels were cameos of South Africa; they described situations. But in Evidence, Jacobson uses South Africa to provide the background for a struggle that leads to a conscious estimate of the “good life.” Simply enough, then, Evidence’s time span fulfills a necessary condition for developing the special consciousness that can make such an estimate.
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Jacobson intends his title quite seriously. The successful outcome of an individual’s confrontation with his society, the success of an attempt to create for oneself something better than the way of life most typically offered, is specifically what the title calls it, “evidence of love.” The “liberals” in Evidence who seek “a cause, or a duty—something which doesn’t begin and end inside one precious self-contained little personality,” do not succeed for the reason that they are without love; their supposed selflessness hides only a drive for power and the arrogance of imagined superiority. For Jacob-son, what they seek—or what his best characters desire, to be their own people—cannot be achieved without love. He considers the connection to be even more of a piece: the very deepening of love almost alone reveals the “good way” and, even better, gives to an individual a true sense of his identity.
The main figure in Evidence of Love is Kenneth Makeer, a South African Cape Colored light enough to pass for white. Through the help of an elderly white woman, a solitary, idealistic “liberal” South African who teaches him to shun the prison of “self,” Makeer receives an education and is sent to England to study law. He will not remain, of course; what he learns there, he learns for his family and for South Africa, not for himself. But when, suddenly, he hears of his sponsor’s death, his faith abruptly leaves him: “he had seen for himself, looking deep into London, that there was no redemption for any people in history, only a continuation . . . but if that was the most he could hope for, then why not here, why not here?” Now that he knows he can always be “white,” he finds that the self which must tell him who and what he is, no longer seems whole. He believes himself going mad.
But another South African in London, a young white girl, Isabel Last, and Makeer fall in love. Like Makeer, she too cannot order the contradictory, ambiguous pressures of her family, her country, and her desires; she and the world also seem permanently at odds. When she discovers Makeer is a Cape Colored, she leaves him, selflessly, for she assumes that he had forsaken his own dream of “action and self-sacrifice” because of their love, not that he, like her, was grappling silently with the same confusions. But it is Makeer’s brother who fiercely explains to her what she and Makeer should have believed in—the ideal truer than “selfless idealism”—and what she must do now: “‘If you really love him, go back to him. I love him, do you hear, he’s my brother; but as true as God, if he comes back here [to South Africa] because he thinks I need him, I’ll never forgive him. I live my own life; let him do the same.’ ” She returns to Makeer; they marry, and after living for two years in England, they purposely and for the last time go back to South Africa where the law declares their marriage illegal. Each sentenced to six months in jail (after which they will, by choice, live permanently in England), they are thus, in Makeer’s words, “‘released from the public and political hatreds, the public and political guilts, which make ugly the most private and secret lives of everyone who lives in this country.’”
Together, the two of them have leapt triumphantly into a humanism that is individuality, into a unity of society and self; their strength in withstanding society’s predetermined and so deadening traps of both left and right gives evidence of their love. This love is an act of self-creation, a complex of will and emotion; through it, each surpasses what shaped them—recognizes, understands, and transcends it. Those who do not love are captives. Yielding to the confusions and hatreds of their society, such people deny themselves and lose their chance for individuality and self-control. Makeer and Isabel are in love and free; the characters of Jacobson’s earlier novels are neither.
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Yet, from another point of view, Evidence of Love is very similar to the early novels. The themes of hate-subjection and love-freedom, despite their antipodal opposition, actually involve the same reasoning; they are only alternative versions of a vision of the world in which the consequences of either love or hate are inevitable. The first three novels “posit” hate in their characters (or, sometimes, lack of love), and their stories have an aura of being fables because Jacobson treats the action as if it were the ultimate and inevitable result of this hate. In depicting the distorted self-consciousness that can rationalize a behavior it also fearfully doubts, Jacobson makes this false self-consciousness the key characteristic of a strictly ordered series of reactions which proceed, without deviation, step by step.
In Evidence of Love, the given is love. Evidence does not contain the degree of inevitability demanded by The Trap, A Dance in the Sun, or The Price of Diamonds, but does not precisely because throughout most of it the two main characters, hovering on the edge of love, have not yet reached the point beyond which both individual realization and an embrace are equally natural. Once they love, however, then suddenly the world is clear and won, and freedom follows. Like the white farmer’s pummeling of his native worker in The Trap, Makeer and Isabel’s actions, given love, are also inevitable.
The turning point in Evidence—from the uncertain to the certain—occurs during a short, lyric exchange between Makeer and Isabel:
“I know what I am, now I love you again.”
“We know ourselves through each other.”
“But only when we are true to ourselves,
apart.”
“What a mystery it is, my love.”
“A sweet mystery.”
Identity and love and (implicitly) social action—those bewildering states—all meld harmoniously, so interjoined that to touch one, like a triphammer, releases them all. In the brief, remaining chapter, the two years elapse in which Makeer and Isabel marry and decide to return to South Africa to challenge its laws. Nothing in this chapter or the novel indicates that anything more could be said about their decision than that it was an act of great bravery; none of its other complexities are raised. The action has become inevitable.
With this ultimate inevitability, however, the crucial difference between the farmer of The Trap and Makeer or Isabel, true consciousness—the difference that makes the earlier novel much more simple than Evidence of Love, and defines, in fact, the precise advance of the latter—is suddenly quite uncrucial. The abrupt shift from a reality consistently being discovered and made, remade and re-discovered, to a reality of immediate obviousness, becomes—in a cruel contradiction—a betrayal of consciousness itself. The characters’ triumph finally seems romantic, not real.
Yet as the meaning of the novel slowly emerges, Evidence always asserts both intellectual and emotional force. Jacobson achieves a prose which, as in his previous novels, is simultaneously constrained and lyric, as if the emotion charging it were too profound, too shaking to be completely articulated. At the same time, his lyricism overlays the descriptions with suggestions of denser, more ultimate meanings:
. . . in his imagination Kenneth followed her down, into the concrete tunnels beneath . . .; he watched her as the men in raincoats on the platform watched her, covertly, their cheekbones gleaming in the electric light. Then the air roared . . . and her train rushed out of its dark hole, sloped in alongside the platform, came to its halt, sighed as the doors opened, sighed when they closed again. Like an animal bounding, rhythmically, the train went noisily away . . .: Kenneth stood unconscious at the head of the moving stairs, to which he had run too late to see her go.
The diffuse tones here of sadness, violence, and fatalism give to this not particularly important parting an ambiguous but intriguing significance.
The story of Evidence often jumps backward or ahead in time and thereby extends the knowledge of an event’s causes or effects; or it moves from character to character and so reveals the event in different perspectives. Such jumps and moves compound the story’s levels, just as they literally give the story away—by the third chapter of Evidence of Love, much of the plot has already been told. The structure, like the prose, makes the reader attend to meanings rather than events.
In Evidence, Jacobson asks nothing other than the question of how a man might become better than the society that has made him—how a man might become a hero. It is not a small question and, perhaps, a peculiarly modern one. If part of the answer is, indeed, that love is freedom and hate subjection, yet such a formulation remains incomplete. But because Jacobson attributes an almost complete determinism to love and hate in general, he is forced to ignore the hard complexities produced by the many kinds of love, the many kinds of hate. Were he to detach himself in a future novel from this broad, undifferentiated commitment to Love and from his equally undifferentiated opposition to Hate, that novel would be a more important advance over Evidence than it is over the previous books; such a novel, questioning the most central of Jacobson’s own beliefs, could fulfill what Evidence has begun.
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