Menings | Opinion > Onderhoude | Interviews > English > ABSA Chain: Jaco Fouché in conversation with Anton Krueger ABSA Chain: Jaco Fouché in conversation with Anton Krueger

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Jaco Fouché - 2006-12-20

From time to time you pour your energy into prose. I know you've written short stories and at least one novella, called Aden and I, and you mentioned planning another. I liked Aden and I and I trust a publisher will pick it up at some point. Could you tell us a bit about it?

 ... ja i've been sitting with that one for a while, reworking it intermittently ... there is a publisher who may now be interested, but i wouldn't like to say anything about that until it's finalised ...

 ... it's a memoir about a friend of mine, alex van rensburg, who was a kind of extreme & very interesting cat who went off to london after we finished studying in '94 and ended up drowning himself ... he was such an original guy, and it was a real tragedy, so the book is kind of a homage to him and his spirit, something to help him out of the bardo ... .

For the most part, however, you're into playwriting. You've written quite a few plays and you've had some of them performed overseas. Where and how did this come about?

 ... well, various things ... we did a festival in monaco and then got invites out of that to go to the national festival in chile and also to this other smaller fest in venezuela, but that was a few years ago ... i've got an agent now in england and america, so some shows are coming out of that ... a group in wales won the national one-act play festival with a short play this year, and a student group at cambridge also bought a script ... then next year there's a group in australia who're going to do a play for the adelaide festival, and another in the states for some university thing ... so sure, there's stuff happening, but it's all kind of fringie small-scale, amdram, university type stuff you know, it's not exactly broadway ... 

What is your angle on writing? I mean, would you prefer to be the popular or the literary sort of writer, bearing in mind that with the former comes the possibility of making a living scribbling but also critical indifference and with the latter come the accolades, but possible destitution? And does one have a say in this sort of thing when you set out to create something? Didn't somebody once say that the theme chooses the writer? Probably the same goes for genre?

 ... one glance at my bank balance is going to reveal the kind of writer i am ... definitely "literary", for sure ... very much so ... i've got the slips to prove it ...

 ... i don't know if you can cheat the system, you know, and succeed in a genre you don't believe in ... i think you really have to be part of it, you have to be in there with the cogs subscribing to those hierarchies and believe that what you're doing is important, or at least good, or whatever ... so i don't think you can decide to be popular ... but i'll say one thing, i don't know if we've really had a "literary" writer in south africa – in english, anyway – who's also been "popular" ... not since, maybe, herman charles bosman ... so we're overdue ... 

 ... but to go off on a bit of a tangent about "the great divide": ... i read a bio of beckett recently and was well impressed at how he stuck to his guns ... how he just plodded on in his own peculiarly miserable way through rejection after rejection ... forty two rejections for his first novel! ... now and then a house would offer to take it on but wanted him to change the title or this and that, but every time he just said fuck you, it's how it is or not at all, refusing to change a comma ... i mean he was in his late forties when godot finally came through for him! ... it's incredible ... he had this girl supporting him by knitting children's clothes and he just refused to do anything else ... a real inspiration, but at the same time also a miserable bastard who was never satisfied even after he got all the accolades ... still kept whinging and whining about his writing and getting boils out of anxiety and insecurity and generally getting everyone around him depressed ... okay, maybe not such a great role model after all ... hmmm ...
 
You "mingle" quite a bit and you've come to know people from all sorts of backgrounds. You're a believer in networking and yet you don't seem to have ulterior motives (like meeting girls or pushing your career or buying computer components cheaply) when you say you believe this. It's a social thing, the idea being to meet your fellow human being and enjoy his or her company. It's almost a religious thing with you (I say that knowing that in fact you go on retreats from time to time). Could you elaborate a little on this and what you once wrote me about people being "nodes in the information flow"?

 ... hmmm, this is kind of a weird question innit? ... hey, jaco? ... we've had a very inspiring and interesting correspondence going now for, what, it must be a few years already; although we've never actually met in person ... & i know that you, for one, are an A grade hermit, secluding yourself there in bloemfontein watching e-tv and writing away ... so i think it's fair to say that pretty much anybody who does more than go to the library, the dispensary and the checkers down the road every few weeks must seem like a regular socialite ...

 ... sure, i like people & i like meeting new people ... every new person is like a whole new universe of meanings ... but i don't know if i'm a committed "networker" per se ... & i don't know about not having ulterior motives, either, 'cause whenever i meet somebody vaguely related to a publishing house you can be sure i'm going to ask them who the best person is to send my manuscript to, you know? ...

You're working towards a doctorate. What would you say are the advantages of formal education? Do you get to meet the right people? Do you get to read the right books? Do you get to adopt a certain way of looking at the world and culture that is somehow more informed, or valid? (I hope I'm not "leading the witness", as they say in American courtroom dramas!)

 ... well, maybe you meet the right people in the academic world, i don't know ... it's a bit of a closed system for a lot of the time, feeding intravenously its own lifeflow ... it can also be a dangerous world in that it can deal death to your creativity ... because exactly what you described begins to happen: you find yourself adopting a "certain way of looking at the world" ... it's something one needs to actively resist, because once you get sucked into that trap, you know, if you start taking the "knowledge" game too seriously, or think that it really "matters", hoo, you're in trouble ...

 ... i don't know, i find that many academics end up being pretty stilted and narrow-minded people ... the trouble is you're being employed to KNOW more than other people, so you're constantly insecure that maybe somebody else KNOWS more than you ... and you have to keep proving what you KNOW by telling amusing anecdotes related to the canon, or slipping in some comment about your most recent conference in prague to make sure you KNOW that everybody else KNOWS that you KNOW a lot about a lot ... well, that's what i tend to do, anyway ...

 ... on the other hand, you do get people who are just happy to be playing the knowledge game ... because it is quite a thrill, if you think about it, to be able to spend your time just playing with ideas and learning new things ... so maybe i'm talking about the difference between academics who stop asking questions ... because you get these cats who once they turn forty figure they now know what they're going to know and they stop exploring or being interested in finding out about new things & that's when they start dishing out death to all around them ...

 ... so to get back to the terminology you used ... this is most certainly not a "valid" view of the world, then ... in fact, it can become an "invalid"'s view of the world, because there are many academics out there who are spiritual cripples ...

What are you reading at the moment?

for the next few months i’m kind of studying fulltime, so that i can be a proper academic one of these days … (yeah, i’ve already picked out a nice blue wheelchair for myself with shiny chrome handlebars) … so i’m reading lots of juicy academic stuff on culture and nationalism and theatre … on the side i’m reading the tin drum (die blechtrommel) which is fucking incredible – so funny, so grotesque – by günter grass, the ss officer …

 

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