“I am a father now”: Colonial paternalism and oedipal typicality in Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner

Abstract

This article considers the prevalence and dynamics of colonial paternalism and oedipal typicality as they operate within Shaun Johnson’s novel, The Native Commissioner (2006). Therefore, the article explicates how Freud’s oedipal theory can, read within its historical context, contribute and serve as a tool to elucidate colonial discourses. It also indicates the prevalence of colonial paternalism, not merely through the South African Union government (1910–1961) and apartheid, but as I will argue, within post-apartheid South Africa. Johnson’s novel, which presents a father–son narrative, interfaces with colonial paternalism through the father, George Jameson, and his role as a Native Commissioner. Through an analysis of the ideological assumptions underlying George’s identity as a father (and associated notions of husbandry, gardening, and cultivation), the shared ideological basis of his career as a Native Commissioner and his seemingly neutral role as a patriarch is highlighted. The article then considers how oedipal dynamics structure the novel’s focus on paternalism. Through an analysis of George’s failure as a patriarch and the psychically invested nature of the narrative, we encounter the concomitant anxiety of the son-as-narrator. This anxiety manifests itself in the oedipal mechanics of castration anxiety, rivalry, and identification as originally explicated by Freud. Through these mechanics, the power of the son-as-narrator is emphasized as the father dies and the son identifies with the father’s power. The remainder of the article re-contextualizes these findings within the novel’s reception by South African audiences. The novel’s popularity suggests that colonial paternalism remains a discourse that still has significant purchase for white South Africans even amid calls to identities based on equality and multiculturalism.

Towards the end of Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud asserts the centrality of the Oedipus complex to both the individual and society:

At the conclusion, then, of this exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should like to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psychoanalytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes. (1950: 157)

Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex would provide the first attempt at an etiology of the unconscious, prompting his claim that the complex held the key to society’s genesis. One consequence of this assertion is that while the Oedipus complex highlights the importance of the father–son narrative, it also addresses the significance of generational conflict and societal change.

From this perspective it seems unsurprising that more than a decade after the end of apartheid, Shaun Johnson’s novel The Native Commissioner (2006) was claimed as the most successful literary debut of post-apartheid South Africa (Williams, quoted on BooksLive, 2007). As a novel which primarily focuses on a father–son narrative and seeks to address the political transition from apartheid to democracy, it stands as a testament to the continued salience of oedipal narratives in addressing societal change.

It was understandably not this aspect of the novel though, that was used to account for its popularity among South African audiences. The reception of the novel focused primarily on its reconciliatory message: that behind the label of “oppressor” was a complex history of individuals trapped within iniquitous political regimes — and that narrating this history could lead to understanding and acceptance. In keeping with this reading, the novel was praised by J. M. Coetzee as “a welcome step towards the reconstitution of the South African past in all its moral and political complexity” (quoted on front cover, Johnson, 2006) and Njabulo Ndebele described it as “a novel of reconciliation through personal testimony” (quoted on back cover, Johnson, 2007). Its designation as a novel which humbly grapples with post-apartheid identity issues, challenging hegemonic constructions of identity, facilitated its winning a number of South African book prizes and gaining the considerable public endorsement of being a prescribed text in a number of South African schools (2013: 4). ¹

Yet beneath the novel’s reconciliatory surface remains its oedipal structure, and thus a preoccupation with the authority of fathers and the legitimacy of paternalism. Examining the oedipal dynamics of the narrative within the context of colonial paternalism, I will argue that a latent attachment to white paternalism structures the narrative, accounting for the novel’s resonance with South African audiences. This provides critical readers with an intimation of the half-life of apartheid ideology in post-apartheid South African society.

1

Though Freud’s claim to the universality of psychoanalysis has long been discounted by critics (Young, 1991: 140), there is nonetheless reason to approach Oedipus as a deep structural complex of modernity, able to shed light upon the individual’s relation to modern society. This approach does not deny the limitations of the theory, but rather considers its occlusions and assumptions as a basis for critical reading.

As Judith Coullie notes in her discussion of psychoanalysis as “literary imperialism” within South Africa, “[t]he most obvious and most damaging hierarchies implicit in psychoanalysis relate to gender and ethnicity: male is privileged over female, modern Western culture over others” (2002: 32). ² Rather than concluding that psychoanalysis’ complicity in a discriminatory narrative of modernity renders it irredeemable as a critical tool in the current literary environment, a more productive approach may assess the writer according to a broader perspective on his work. As Edward Said perceptively notes:

Of course, Freud posits a qualitative difference between primitive and civilized that seems to work to the latter’s advantage, but that difference […] doesn’t excuse or in any way mitigate the rigour of his analyses of civilization itself, which he sees in a decidedly ambiguous, even pessimistic way. (2004: 20)

Thus, an awareness of the limitations and ambiguities of Freud’s vision provides one instance to the willing critic for mapping the hierarchies of dominance and authority that structure discourses of modernity. ³ In this respect, Oedipus can be read as a political text. Its conception of familial relations, as José Brunner asserts, is primarily political, “concern[ed] with the structures and dynamics of power and authority” (2000: 82).

Therefore, rather than approaching psychoanalysis as it has generally been used within the field of South African literary criticism as a universal and structural phenomenon, this article presents a historicized psychoanalysis — starting from the basic understanding of its limitation as a theory steeped in Western ethnocentrism and gender hierarchies.

It is this focus on social hierarchies within modernity which leads me to indicate how Freud’s oedipal typicality structures settler colonial discourse — specifically the colonial paternalism which would remain a prevalent ideology prior to and during apartheid, and even, I will suggest, a decade into post-apartheid South Africa. In doing so, I hope to highlight the dynamics of a particular racialized construction of gender and subjectivity that is still an active discourse in South Africa — and correspondingly, to reaffirm the applicability of psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the dynamics of post-apartheid and postcolonial thought.

In its presentation of the father–son narrative, Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner links the son-narrator in contemporary South Africa to the life of the father, a Native Commissioner living from 1916–1968. ⁴ As a consequence, the greater part of the novel is set in the Union of South Africa (1910–1961), portraying the perceived devastation that apartheid (implemented in 1948) wreaked upon the liberal ideologies of this era. It is through the investments and interests of the father that we first encounter colonial paternalism, and via the concurrency of the two narratives that the oedipal dynamics emerge.

Insofar as Johnson’s novel acts as an elegy for the comparative liberalism of pre-apartheid South Africa, it produces an idealized representation of the political ideologies of the period. Already in 1989, Saul Dubow noted the common misapprehension of apartheid as a rupture from Union liberalism: “[a]lthough now a somewhat discredited view amongst academic historians, the misleading notion of apartheid as the eccentric creation of racist Afrikaners continues to enjoy wide provenance” (1989: 22). Dubow proceeds to outline the Union government’s “segregation policy”, which was effectively a precursor of apartheid. The ideological justification for this policy was two-pronged: that Africans would have to cede rights to the land to become citizens of the settler-colonial state, and the paternalist notion that “Africans were the wards of their white ‘trustees’, under whose benevolent guidance they would be encouraged to develop autonomously” (1989: 1).

The popular appeal of segregation reflects the ambivalence and limitations of South African liberalism during the Union years. Attempts to “reconcile liberalism to segregation” by figures like Alfred Hoernlé (Dubow, 2005: 7) saw deputy prime minister Jan Hofmeyr defining his political task in 1930 as “making South Africa safe for European civilization without paying the price of dishonor to the highest ideals of that civilization” (cited in Freund, 2012: 234). The result was a liberalism tempered by white supremacy, culminating in liberal politicians like Jan Smuts holding “a genuine belief that material conditions could be substantially improved for black South Africans without any real extension of political rights” (Freund, 2012: 241).

It is this denial of the origin of apartheid in Union segregation politics with which the reader is confronted in The Native Commissioner. When the National Party (NP) government (which would implement apartheid) comes into power in 1948, protagonist George Jameson wonders “what the arrival in power of this different nationalism, itself born of a struggle for survival, and now preparing to cow others, would mean for him” (2006: 60). ⁵ The new government is represented as an aggressive force, replacing the “sensible liberalism” (60) of the previous government.

To underscore this point, George reminds himself of his “motto” (60), taken from Union statesman Jan Smuts’ rectoral address at St Andrews University, Edinburgh, in 1934:

In a world of racial cleavages, in a world of growing economic nationalism and antagonisms, English and Afrikaans are busy closing ranks and building an enduring peace. Africa is once more true to her reputation for novelty. May she also yet find the formula of understanding and co-operation between white and black. (1934: 15)

But underlying Smuts’ liberalism remains an unexamined sense of racial superiority which surfaces in his Rhodes Memorial Lecture in 1929:

The negro and the negroid Bantu form a distinct human type. It has largely remained a child type, with a child psychology and outlook […] A child-like human cannot be a bad human, for are we not in spiritual matters bidden to be like unto children? (cited in Nederveen Pieterse, 1992: 104)

Through the language of benevolence, the white supremacy of South African liberalism emerges under the guise of paternalism: fathers caring for children. Though this discourse does not rely on traditional images of the other, the relationship of father to child still ascribes dominance and superiority to the white male (Nederveen Pieterse, 1992: 104).

This discourse which produced black South Africans as the recipients of white “benevolent guidance” is a prevalent undertone in much white liberal South African literature — with Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1949) as a foremost example. In his analysis of Paton’s novel, Stephen Watson highlights that the conclusion of Paton’s narrative seeks to resolve South Africa’s dire social entropy created by institutionalized racial discrimination through “a paternalistic handout to a [white] ‘boys club’” (1982: 36), which is effectively “an acceptance of the hegemony of the oppressor” (1982: 38).

Later, this paternalism was also carried over to the racial discourse used by apartheid ideologues:

[The Afrikaner] was historically bound to be the protector of the black man. The new policy [apartheid] should be introduced in a spirit of “responsible guardianship.” “It is the duty of the Afrikaner,” [Geoff] Cronjé declared, “to show the way in which the native must be led in his own interests and with a view to his own development.” (Sparks, 1990: 177)

Geoff Cronjé’s book, A Home for Posterity, is considered the first statement of the emergent apartheid ideology. The title of this publication preempts the nuances of paternalistic authority which are suggested by phrases such as “responsible guidance” and “be[ing] led […] to his own development”. Moreover, in the introduction to the book, Cronjé states,

Ons wil vir ons nageslag tot in lengte van dae in hierdie land ‘n tuiste verseker; ons gun egter ook vir hulle [die Bantoeras] en vir die kleurlinge ‘n tuiste onder die suiderson. (1945: 8)

[We want to guarantee a home in this land for years to come for our posterity; we truly also grant them [the Bantu] and the coloureds a home under the Southern sun.]

The balancing of providing a home for future Afrikaner generations and granting a home for other race groups in the country is suggested by the use of the semi-colon. This illustrates how apartheid rhetoric presented the need to provide a home for future generations as co-dependent and contingent on segregation. A sense of belonging is thus premised on the notions of exclusion and isolation. More significantly, it suggests that within this discourse, white men provide not only for their children, but that they are vested with the authority to grant black South Africans a home in Southern Africa.

Foremost in this context emerges the Native Affairs Department (NAD) of the Union government (latterly known under apartheid as the Bantu Affairs Department) for which George Jameson, the father in Johnson’s novel, works: “the Native Affairs officials generated an internal ideology which was expressed in terms of a protective relationship towards its African ‘wards’. The coherence and credibility of this ideology determined that the NAD be seen to function on behalf of Africans’ interests” (Dubow, 1989: 12).

The end of apartheid led, along with the de-legitimation of Afrikaner nationalism, to the de-legitimation of colonial paternalism as a discourse. But The Native Commissioner, as I will argue, is a novel which produces a highly regressive representation of paternalism that is still preoccupied with the authority of white South African men. It is through an analysis of this novel that we are allowed an insight into the discursive value of liberal paternalism in post-apartheid South Africa and the currency which this ideology continues to hold in the new dispensation.

To elucidate the textual dynamics of this ideology, a psychoanalytic model of subjectivity is particularly useful. As Jacqueline Rose states, “[i]f ideology is effective, it is because it works at the most rudimentary levels of psychic identity and the drives” (Rose, 1986: 5). Therefore, to understand the dynamics of paternalism, we need to examine the psyche of the subject that identifies with the image of the white patriarch. Sigmund Freud’s oedipal model, which concerns itself with the relation of the father to the development of identity, provides a lens through which to highlight the conflicts and precariousness of dominance and power.

The Oedipus complex focuses on the triangulated relationship between father, mother, and child, whereby the child encounters its first sexual conflict — the repression of which is fundamental to the child’s later psychological well-being. The complex is initiated when the child positions itself as a rival to the father, with the desire to be the sole object of its mother’s affections (Freud, 1950: 129). But threatening this wish is the perceived danger of castration, and insofar as the child envies the power of the father, he is also afraid of him (Freud, 1975: 119).

Juan-David Nasio (2011) argues that Oedipus is the fundamental concept of psychoanalysis in that it provides an aetiology for the unconscious, upon which all psychoanalytic thought is premised. Freud similarly attests that it “constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses” (Freud, 1950: 157), but goes further to establish it as the driving impulse of modern society. Elaborating on its significance, Freud conceives of a primal oedipal struggle, which led to the development of the first exogamous society. Making use of Darwin’s conception of the first evolutionary grouping of man being “the primal horde” (1950: 125), Freud produces a heuristic myth which enacts the desire and restriction which the Oedipus conflict foregrounds. In it, the patriarch of the first social grouping of man holds exclusive sexual rights to the women in the horde (Freud, 1950: 125). Jealously guarding the women, he excises his sons from the group rather than sharing his wives (Freud, 1950: 126). One day the excised sons come together and in their collective strength overthrow him, resulting in the first exogamous society (Freud, 1950: 141).

In the myth, when the sons kill and devour the father, this has two effects: the sons, by consuming him, consume his power and are left with both guilt for his murder and the acquisition of “a portion of his strength” (Freud, 1950: 142). The patriarch’s power has been transferred to the sons. The equivalent scene in the modern psychoanalytic situation is where the child, fearing and envious of the father, psychically “kills” the father. This is not a literal or physical death, but an identification with the father in which the child acknowledges that by acting like the father and abiding by his laws, he will eventually take the father’s place and inherit his power. As José Brunner notes on the resolution of the Oedipus complex,

through the Oedipus complex the child learns not only to abandon his or her desires in the face of authority but also to cope with the presence of authority by identifying with its demands. Where desire is opposed by authority, authority is internalized and made one’s own. (2000: 88)

Both narratives thus share a focus on identification, which in the primal horde myth is signified by “the oral cannibalistic incorporation of the other person” (Freud, 1975: 94). Identification, for Freud, is the fundamental result of both Oedipus and its primal horde myth; whereby the father’s ego is assimilated into the child’s “as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself” (1975: 94).

Insofar as paternalist ideology situates power and dominance in the patriarch, Oedipus and its primal myth foreground the question of how that power comes to be transferred through identification. Thus the Oedipus complex, with its focus on authority, the conflict between generations, and the identification and passage of power, can foreground how paternalist ideology operates textually.

2

The Native Commissioner plots the demise of Native Commissioner, George Jameson, as reconstructed and narrated by his son, Sam. George Jameson starts out working for the Union Department of Native Affairs as a clerk in 1934. Having developed an interest in Zulu language and culture from childhood, he becomes a promising civil servant. George is promoted to Native Commissioner, and over the following years from 1948 he is reassigned five times to different outposts around South Africa. As he relocates, the jurisdiction of his position turns more towards implementing the social engineering of apartheid, and he is eventually caught in the hypocritical position of instituting racially discriminating laws. Being forced into a position where he violates his liberal investment in black South African cultures pushes George into an entrenched depression, and after two bouts of hospitalization, he commits suicide. ⁶

As noted earlier, the novel is primarily about father–son relationships. On entering the Native Affairs Department, George marries, and sires four sons: Billy, Ryan, Chris, and Sam. George’s story is pieced together by his youngest son, Sam, and the plot moves between Sam’s experience of remembering — or as I will argue, fantasizing — George’s professional and familial narrative, and the events and aetiology of George’s death.

The tragedy which awaits George Jameson at the end of the novel can be understood as a failure in “doubling”. Christopher Bollas, in discussing what he terms “the fascist state of mind”, indicates how individuals that have been co-opted by fascist or genocidal states do not necessarily display abnormal psychologies. One psychic trait that an individual may develop to cope under these circumstances is doubling. Robert J. Lifton indicates in his study of Nazi doctors how people may be able to remain ordinary family men while committing acts of genocide, enacting “[a] division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part self acts as an entire self” (1986: 418). As Bollas notes, “[s]uch doubling may be ordinary — for example, when a surgeon needs to be his ordinary doctor self in order to perform operations” (1993: 199).

The requirement to separate oneself into an apartheid enforcer and into a pacifist is signposted in the novel when the regional director of George’s department, Fanie Aucamp, is reported as saying, “I feel sure that you take far too much personal responsibility for the work we are now having to do” (19; emphasis added). At various points, George attempts to sever the self which is personally accountable from the Native Commissioner who has to implement racist laws. “Let us live”, he instructs his family, “a quieter and fuller more selfish but not self-centred life. The garden for me. That’s where I belong” (21).

In this way, the garden becomes one of the key images through which George’s state as the good patriarch of the domestic scene is emphasized as authentic, rather than the authority he wields in his role of working for the apartheid state. However, as the text will show, this willed separation of the public and private spheres will soon collapse. The reason for this lies in the interconnection of the two spheres and the shared ideological investment in paternalism upon which both aspects of his life draw.

Along with their prominence in the text, gardens symbolically reflect the domain of the settler-colonial patriarch in South Africa. J. M. Coetzee indicates how the first outpost of the British in South Africa was portrayed as “the garden colony of the Cape” (1988: 2). This depiction includes both the biblical implication of a “return to Eden and innocence” (1988: 2), and the emphasis on the rights of gardeners: “Thus in the theory of ‘double right’ […] the rights of cultivators, who clear and settle the land, always take precedence over the right of nomads, who merely hunt over it” (1988: 3).

Therefore, the role of gardens and cultivation in the settler-colonial imagination is at once a marker of legitimate ownership over and above the rights of native inhabitants, as well as a marker of permanence. This discourse appears unquestioned in The Native Commissioner when George’s birth is represented in pastoral terms:

it […] signaled […] that the Jamesons were staying, planting bulbs that would flower and trees that would provide shade only in future seasons. Impermanence was in the blood of the white settlers; it was the knowledge that the place they loved used to belong to someone else. (50–1; emphasis added)

Furthermore, gardening, as it appears throughout the novel, is an act performed by the head of a household and falls into the ambit of what may be termed “husbandry”. Etymologically, this word originates from the idea of a man caring for his household. It also denotes “the control and judicious use of resources” and the “cultivation or production of animals and plants” (Merriam-Webster, 2013). The link between “control” and “cultivation” which the two uses imply, situates the patriarch as managing and disciplining wild and generative landscapes so as to render them useful and productive (or aesthetically pleasing) to satisfy a particular aim or need. This approach to cultivating gardens is signalled in the text, as one of the family’s households is described as having “acres of wild garden for George to tame” (122).

As the discussion of cultivation and husbandry suggests, these notions are inscribed with racialized ideas concerning authority and control which premise the legitimacy of the white patriarch. In this way, the cultivation of gardens, and moreover, the “cultivation” of family, take on political charge. Consequently, the doubling whereby George’s authentic private life is elevated over the betrayal of his public office as Native Commissioner has to be forced onto the narrative. Therefore, the project of representing George’s powerlessness and benevolence as an enforcer of apartheid legislation, which are so central to the manifest message of the novel, can be recognized as being riddled with anxiety. The doubling cannot be maintained.

3

If the garden represents the failure of doubling through the shared ideological basis of both apartheid discourse and the presumed innocence of familial paternalism, then it also highlights the oedipal fantasy with which this novel is latently concerned.

We can identify the shifting dynamics of repression and fantasy, when Sam says of his archaeological and narratorial process, “[i]t was as if my father and mother came fully alive in my head […] I wondered whether this fitting together of fragments was creating real people, or a fiction of my own” (45). This passage, signalling Sam’s unreliability as a narrator, also suggests that his narration is psychically invested in a way that reality is not — his parents will now become “fully alive”.

Three anxieties registered in the textual portrayal of the garden signal that this psychic investment is primarily oedipal: impermanence, absence, and passivity. George’s inability to settle and establish his family, to plant “trees [that] would provide shade only in future seasons” reflects paternal failure. Due to the itinerant nature of his profession, the garden, like his family, is consistently “trying to take root in strange soil” (105). If impermanence questions both George’s legitimacy and authority, then his absence also foregrounds a loss of control and significance. George’s description of the letters he receives while he is in hospital pertinently evokes the state of the garden back home:

He [his son Chris] says because of the storms every day the apricots are big and the peaches huge and the lawn is looking very green and class […] apparently even the tiny little new trees have fruit on them. The old hacked about peach tree near the Goldman’s fence is laden with peaches and the plums are ripe too. My vines are sagging with big grapes. (17)

This passage expresses a level of abundance and fertility which, though it features in some of the depictions of unadulterated African landscapes, is not present elsewhere in the novel. What is important is that George is significantly absent from this “green”, “laden”, and “sagging” scene of fertility; though he may have “planted” this garden, its flourishing and growth is not (or is no longer) dependent on him.

In the last moments of George’s life, this failure is primarily represented by George becoming passive and withdrawn in precisely those domains where he is libidinally invested:

Then he starts to traverse the small garden slowly, covering carefully every inch on its perimeter, starting at the loquat tree where the cats roll on their backs and present themselves for scratching. He passes the fuschias, the vines, the flower beds with their daisies, the jumping beans, the fruit trees; he passes and looks at every single thing he has planted in the close to three years of life we have lived in this place. (207)

This scene details the moments before his suicide. George’s passivity and withdrawal seem to imply a tallying of his paternal investments (“every single thing he has planted”) but without the ascription of any value. This representation of George’s paternalism as inconsequential and failed is excessive, suggesting the malicious projection of the son-as-narrator — the narrative has been placed in the realm of Sam’s oedipal fantasies.

4

In parallel, a fantasy of rivalry emerges in the shared traits between George’s sons and their father. Significantly, Sam embodies George’s liberal investment in Africa because the first words he speaks are Xhosa. When the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development visits the district, part of the success of the visit is suggested by the fact that “Sam was presented to the minister and did not misbehave” (128). This inclusion symbolizes that George has not voiced his own political views, his discomfort with the apartheid regime. Sam acts as a cipher for George’s investment in Africa. His son, Ryan, on the other hand, embodies George’s more cynical and self-destructive aspects. “Oh my Ryan”, Jean muses, “such a talented youngster but so troubled […] and a danger to himself; I think he inherited all George’s fragile sensitivities, but none of his caution […] he has a recklessness and a self-destructiveness that truly frightens me” (31). Consequently, it is apt that these two sons should most directly experience George’s death.

Additionally, this “mimetic” rivalry accounts for various points in the narrative where the reader is made aware of George and Jean “trying” to have a daughter (69; 101; 114). Each extra son George sires challenges his dominance as patriarch. This is reminiscent of the overthrow of the patriarch in Freud’s primal horde. As Edward Said notes,

[a] significant and influential aspect [of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory] posits the potentially murderous outcome of bearing children, we have the unmistakable impression that few things are as problematic and universally fraught as what might have been supposed to be the natural continuity between one generation and the next. (1984: 16)

Signalled by their similarities to George, the two brothers may (and are able to) come together with newfound strength that is equal or greater to that of the patriarch. As Freud notes, “[u]nited, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually” (1950: 142).

But if the impending murder is present, then the text also suggests paternal resistance. This manifests itself when the narrator, Sam, slices his toe with his father’s spade one day while attempting to be a gardener like his father (135–6). The episode represents what Freud termed “castration anxiety”, in which the oedipal son fears his father will castrate him if he challenges his power. This episode indicates a narratorially perceived resistance on George’s part to relinquishing the dominance which he assumes as the cultivator of the garden. Cultivation is closely linked to George’s authority, and when Sam picks up the spade, he threatens his dominance. George’s resistance is figured by the spade metonymically acting as a substitute for one of the father’s limbs. Hereby, the father enacts violence upon his son, severing the phallic toe in an attempt to withhold or safeguard his potency.

It is fitting then, that Sam and Ryan are the sons who most intimately experience George’s death. Identification characterizes the description of the father shooting himself, replicated metaphorically with the sons:

1. George: “He pulls the trigger. The bullet does what bullets do when fired at point-blank range into a human head” (207);

2. Ryan: “Something bangs in his head too when he looks inside [his parents’ room]” (208);

3. Sam: “My eyes register a dark wet spreading stain seeping out from the bedroom carpet behind the closed door. Something bangs in the head of yet another Jameson just then.” (209)

This identification in Freud’s primal myth is signalled by the brothers, after murdering the father, then “devouring” him, thereby accomplishing their identification with him, “and each one of them acquir[ing] a portion of his strength” (Freud, 1950: 142). In that this identification is complete, the sons experience George’s death internally as a shared attribute — one that has been passed down.

This places the narrative firmly as a fantasy of oedipal conflict, with the garden as a space upon which the narrator enacts his repressed wishes. The garden which flourishes in George’s absence is therefore not reliable. This highlights not the absence or impotence of a patriarch, but the narrator’s unacknowledged need or desire to represent the absence of his father as fertile and positive. Therefore, anxiety in the novel does not reflect George’s anxiety about his dominance and potency, but rather the narrator Sam’s ambivalence towards his father as the competitor for his mother’s affection. This emerges when Ryan attempts to tell Sam that his father has died:

In the yard under the mulberry tree from which I feed my silkworms, my brother […] looks at me and says […]: Dad has gone away. Again? I say, quieter now but with tears streaming down my cheeks. He can’t go away again, he’s just got home. Where to this time? And for how long? And why are all these people here? Why are the police here? And where is Mom? (210)

Corresponding to Freud’s description of the child wishing for his father’s absence, the ambivalence that Sam feels towards his father is reflected in his misinterpretation of what Ryan is saying. “Dad has gone away” is a standard euphemism or image of death, but Sam can only interpret this as his father being at the hospital. Additionally, this discussion is taking place under a mulberry tree, a symbol of fertility (particularly in that it provides leaves for Sam’s worms). In this scene, the phrase “gone away” becomes a safe midway between George’s presence and death. “Leaving” is an absence which allows Sam the gratification of his sexuality (represented by the mulberry tree which yields its leaves) without death. It is the son’s guilt for actually wishing his father would die which makes him cling to the idea of his father’s temporary absence, rather than the actual fulfilment of his repressed wishes. This is confirmed by his description of the box from which he will reconstruct his father’s narrative, “inside was the presence of absence which had shadowed my life” (4). Similarly, the description of the father as both absence and presence is how Freud comes to assert the fundamental role of the oedipal crisis in modern day society:

They hated the father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse … The dead father became stronger than the living one had been. (1950: 143)

Freud uses this conception of the reappearance of the father, the psychic presence of his absence, as an explanation for exogamy. In this conception, the sons internalize their father’s censure of coupling with the women of the tribe (1950: 143). Symbolically though, the killing of the father leads to an internalization of his law and an acquisition of his power. The former of these effects presents itself as guilt, which feeds into the manifest reconciliatory message of the novel. But as the emphasis on identification suggests, transmission of power is more significant to the novel’s latent mechanics.

5

At the beginning of this article I established the paternalism inherent in George’s position as a Native Commissioner, and the investment in a benevolent paternalism which relies on white superiority. I also established that the garden acts both as a discursive trope of settler-colonial paternalism and as the primary site through which the oedipal conflict is staged. But having highlighted the oedipal dynamics of colonial paternalism within this text, what does this tell us about the saliency and reception of the novel in post-apartheid South Africa?

First, it is important to note that The Native Commissioner has been described as “arguably the most successful literary debut in recent South African history” (Williams, quoted on BooksLive, 2007). It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2007), the M-Net Literary Award (2007), and the Nielsen Booksellers’ Choice Award (2007), and has been prescribed as a setwork for IEB schools (2013: 4). ⁷ What this indicates is that discursively the novel resonates with many South Africans. On the surface, this is explainable through the manifest “reconciliatory” message of the novel, which considers George Jameson solely as an unwilling participant in a nefarious regime. But as my analysis suggests, to cut from the manifest symptoms through to the latent content may provide a more accurate analysis of the novel’s affective value. Writing this father and son narrative, the author embeds the narrative within an oedipal framework which once made explicit betrays an identification with white paternalist ideology. Though the racial discourse of paternalism was considered valid and was openly asserted in the public sphere prior to the end of apartheid, the discourse now presents itself latently, as an unconscious internalization on the part of the author.

This unconscious imperative is already present at the beginning of the novel where the narrator, Sam, is described: “[o]ne morning it all started, I woke and sat in one movement. I remember the feeling clearly; it was as if I’d been propelled upright by a forklift” (1). Being “propelled upward” and sitting up straight is suggestive of a phallic erection. In Peter Brooks’ phrasing, this imagery reflects “the tumescence of a self in a state of domination, an imperious and imperial self” (1984: 51). This will towards power at the outset of the novel will provide the “textual energetics”, as Brooks terms it, for the rest of the plot (1984: 38). This suggests that on one level the novel is much more preoccupied with inheriting power than resolving feelings of shame and guilt.

In keeping with the beginning, Sam’s will to power is granted by the end of the novel. As Brooks notes in his discussion of the psychoanalytic dimensions of plot, “the telling is always in terms of the impending end” (1984: 52). This is especially evident in The Native Commissioner where the plot and action are premised by the knowledge that something disastrous will happen. This foreknowledge presents George’s life as following an inevitable path over which he has little or no control, his death inspiring pity. George’s demise is foregrounded, but significantly this is not where the novel closes. In the last few pages the reader returns to Sam’s first-person narration:

Of course I wish my father could come back, so we could talk at last and perhaps see if we could find some of the answers together. But I know well that this is one thing I can never have, no matter how hard I work and run and fight in this life I have lived so ridiculously quickly and unreflectively. I am a father now. (242; emphasis added)

Sam’s stating “I am a father now” suggests not only that he has children, but more pertinently, that having told his father’s story he has taken on the role of the patriarch. Sam has now identified with the father’s role and has quite uncritically placed himself in the role of the dominant patriarch. As Michael Billig notes in his description of oedipal identification, “[i]n his imagination the son becomes the father” (1999: 106). If white supremacy was publicly disavowed when apartheid ended, then the power which Sam inherits at the end of the novel is in effect involved in the recuperation of a de-legitimated discourse: a conservative fantasy where under the guise of multiculturalism and redemption, white supremacy is legitimated.

Along with the acclaim and popularity of the novel, what this suggests is that rather than finding alternative forms of white subjectivity that are premised on equality, the affective quality of the novel speaks to an aspect of white South African identity that is implicitly still invested in the resuscitation of white dominance as benign and benevolent. In this way, the reception of The Native Commissioner suggests that white identity post-apartheid may have more in common with the curbed liberalism of Union Government ideology than with the new public discourse of equality and identity.

In conclusion, this article highlights how psychoanalysis contributes to understanding the dynamics underlying apartheid discourses and ideologies as they contribute to the development of subjectivity. The Native Commissioner is a novel whose fundamental impulse is conservative, looking backwards and hoping to resuscitate the dead father’s power. As to the success of the novel, we may infer that the ideology of colonial paternalism which has been openly disavowed resonates psychically for many South Africans under the guise of a benevolent gesture towards multiculturalism and reconciliation. This involves seeing beyond the veneer of the publicly sanctioned discourses towards a deeper acknowledgement of the structural continuation of apartheid ideologies.