BOTTOMLESS WIT
Leon de Kock

Sunday Times Lifestyle
February 24 2008

If you're a writer, a learner-writer or a journeyman, there's one certain way to know if you are, in fact, half as good as you hope to be, or think you are.

How much are you enjoying yourself while you write?

This is also a certain way to know if a writer - any kind of writer, but especially an author of fiction - is really good.

It's also the biggest (if most obvious) secret in the whole writing game. When a writer is hugely entertaining herself, she's likely to be entertaining you too. On the other hand, if you're the one writing, and you're labouring, groaning inwardly under the sheer weight and unwieldiness, the difficulty of your own creation, you can be quite, quite sure that's exactly how it will read. Badly. Heavily.

To write is to keep company with a reader. When people pick up a novel, they're looking for good interior conversation: intelligent, witty, combative, philosophically interesting perhaps, certainly engaging. Above all, engaging.

Think of Jane Austen's authorial voice, for example: astringently ironic about her characters and yet thoroughly understanding; gently mocking but profoundly compassionate. And entertaining.

Cape Town author Finuala Dowling deserves special mention on this score. The author of two novels, What Poets Need, and her recent follow-up, Flyleaf, her plots are unremarkable and meandering, her content politically innocuous - very low on the 'relevance' score-sheet (remember that?) - and the pace of her fiction is a little like a Sunday stroll.

But she keeps amazingly good company - in her novels as well as in real conversation. To me, she's a lot like a South African Austen. Her writing (and her talking too) is acerbic and gentle, witty and satirical, yet somehow also kind. She is very, very funny in a way that can only be described as clever, in the Shakespearian sense of the term 'wit'. She makes you laugh on the inside.

This is a standing joke with my children. When they ask me why I'm not laughing at something they think is really funny, I say: "I'm laughing on the inside." They think that's really funny. But it's true. And I learnt it from reading authors like Finuala Dowling.

It's that interior kind of amusement you get when you read a writer who trades in a very old-fashioned quality called sensibility. I still think this is exactly what Njabulo Ndebele meant when he shook the literary struggle establishment in the late-'80s, by publishing a piece in Staffrider that called for a return to the 'ordinary', a retreat from what he named the 'spectacular'.

In Flyleaf, Dowling's second novel, she does something else that is highly unusual in SA letters: she writes fiction about teaching English, and in the course of her novel she instructs readers, at the same time that her first-person narrator teaches her learners grammar, about necessary ideas such as Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of meaning through difference (the foundation of deconstruction and literary postmodernism), and several other important notions.

That she does this in an incredibly entertaining way is quite remarkable. Remember that old article of faith in the poetics of literature: to delight and instruct? (That was Philip Sydney in the 1500s.)

Flyleaf deals with the ordinary struggles of a writer-teacher to stay alive, and to stay entertained, while teaching at a cram college in Cape Town after a divorce. The book's sheer ordinariness is a feat: Dowling is reinventing narrative texture rather than plot as a value in SA fiction, in a way that few other writers have managed to do.

Talking to Dowling is a lot like reading her: she slips in jokes, accompanied by a comely, rose-tinted laugh when you least expect it. She finds it very hard to keep a straight face for longer than about three minutes. She's one of those people who is funny three-quarters of the time without even trying very hard. It just bubbles up from a wellspring of absurdist intuition somewhere in her belly.

On the parallel I suggest between her writing and Austen, Dowling says: "It's quite possible that Austen is my inner template. I reread her novels every few years in order to fix my sense of sanity.

"I'm aware that in some sectors there's a belief that novels should be about the big hurts - murder, war and so on - but I think there's also a place for writing about the little hurts, the slights, insults, losses and irritations that make up most lives while Napoleonic wars rage on in the background.

'I like to fold up these little hurts in what I hope is a gently mocking humour. I use comedy as a corrective and, sometimes, even as a seductive technique - quite important as a way of drawing readers in when you don't really have a plot. It might even be a subtle form of aggression."

Prodded about her "subtle aggression", Dowling responds: "I feel that SA writers have written with an almost overpowering sense of context, angling themselves towards the big questions of race and colony. At first this attention to the 'national' was a matter of exigency: literature had to do the job that other media and institutions were forbidden to do; but since democracy the habit has remained.

"Perhaps it must remain, if you consider how censorship looms again. This concern with identity has produced great novels - Ways of Dying, Disgrace, The Native Commissioner and All We Have Left Unsaid. But sometimes the self-imposed constraints have produced turgid, didactic work.

"I want to create in my novels a detailed interior world that allows the reader room to breathe, think, respond. And laugh. Comedy is an underrated art form - you're considered 'light' if you produce it. But laughter is complex and deep, and a form of aggression in that it disrupts patterns of breathing and thinking, often by turning ideas on their heads.

"Aggression is important because all writing should stem from resistance - resisting the cliched view, the official line, the received idea... So, whereas some people might read Flyleaf as a lightly amusing college novel with good descriptions of Kalk Bay - I don't mind if they do - in writing it I was actually resisting all kinds of things, including exploitative teachers' wages, notions of educational outcomes, career paths, the folly of romance. Having written down this rather turgid, didactic list, I'm glad that my readers remain unaware of my intentions!"

But you can take it from me: Dowling's intentions are good. And, unlike many other people's intentions, they translate into outstanding conversation. That's rare.

Flyleaf is published by Penguin, R110. Leon de Kock is professor and head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits University