The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology
Mark Behr's novel The Smell of Apples, first published in Afrikaans in 1993, has been described as an autopsy, a meticulous dissection of apartheid's moldy corpse (Morphet 226–27). But for a reader like me, who grew up as a child of the Afrikaner elite in exactly the same period as the children in the novel, it is more like a haunting, an uncanny encounter with nearly forgotten, yet instantly recognizable shades and echoes. The stale notions and phraseology recited by the novel's young narrator—for example, "the Communists will use pop music to take over the Republic" (67), "a Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory" (38)—are as intimate to me as the names in the parade of faded celebrities that the novel resurrects: Pierre Fourie, Glenda Kemp, Eddie Barlow, Mitzi Stander. They greet me as familiars—Mitzi's tragic car crash, Louwtjie Barnard's broken heart, John Vorster's détente, the Rapportryers! It all comes back, across an ocean and across the even wider gap of the English translation.1 Behr's novel offers a veritable compendium of the sayings, stereotypes, and justifications that made up the everyday banality of apartheid. It analyzes the system's ideological workings in a knowing and remarkably claustrophobic fashion. The narrative traces a closed circle. It starts f