The Follower
by Damon Galgut
notes by Ben Oswest
In May 2002, while housesitting for friends, I came across an unpublished manuscript by Damon Galgut called “Free Fall or Flight”, which I duly read, with no small sense - quite thrilling! - of doing something illicit. The piece has since appeared, in shortened form, in The Paris Review (issue 174, summer 2005), under the title “The Follower”. In it, a character called “Damon”, who is both narrator and object of narration, embarks on two long walks with a German man he hardly knows, with consequences that shake each to their foundations. The story’s final form isn’t so different from the draft as to obviate my original impressions - it is an innovative and highly accomplished work - a few of which I reproduce here:
In Damon Galgut’s “Free Fall or Flight”, the style of narration is an homage to that developed by JM Coetzee in Boyhood. But Galgut’s narrator takes a step further in the direction of honesty, by introducing an “I” to follow the “he” of the story, and then admitting that the “he” and the the “I” are one, two pronouns deployed to marshal a single character, “Damon”, around landscapes in Greece and Africa. Whether Galgut, his narrator, and his narrator’s character are the same person remains to be seen. “Free Fall” certainly has the ring of truth about it - but that credits the artist’s abilities, and does not answer questions about autobiography.
There’s more defiance in one page of “Free Fall” than in the entirety of Boyhood - defiance of society, yes, but also, more personally, defiance of one’s own humiliation, shyness, uncertainty and sense of lack of worth - and this fireceness is what makes the work interesting, and, more, highly significant to audiences of South African Literature. It is Galgut’s best work to date. Of all the “white writing” I’ve read, “Free Fall” alone constructs a white consciousness unburdened by what I would call demonstrative nativeness.
“Damon” is burdened, instead, by other things: most notably, elusive love torments him, and by association his sexuality. He moves through southern African landscapes with the sense of unconscious proprietorship of any African. He neither judges nor feels judged by his nationality: his conflicts, his battles, have little to do with territory (though it is clear that he is most comfortable at home, rather than in other areas of white nativeness, such as Europe), and the gloss of Africa that we get through him is unthreatening, unfettering. Galgut’s work, in other words, provokes introspection: the adventure lies in the exploration of the self; external landscapes are sweetly clear, or simply natural, but always naturally apart. No general questions about who belongs where are needed.
