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Reviewers of Damon Galgut's novel, In a Strange Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, are in agreement about its most distinctive quality. Toby Lichtig describes it as a narrative which "radiates alienation" (21); Philip Womack characterises Galgut as "a master of isolation and intensity;" while Eileen Battersby defines the theme of the novel as "loneliness and the search for love," adding that Galgut "invariably describes psychological suffering and emotional alienation with the accuracy of a punch dispatched hard and deep to the stomach," Jan Morris lists a number of "preferred Galgutian words" that convey the quality of In a Strange Room: "placelessness, free-fall, centreless, inertia, unweighted, substanceless" (41), And Maria Russo begins her review by saying of the novel's protagonist that "he moves from place to place and country to country 'in acute anxiety,' like a fever running its course."
Alienation, I suggest, characterises all the protagonists of Galgut's novels: solipsism of one kind or another is the dominant feature of their lives, and his narratives foreground the alienation of these protagonists and their efforts to break out of it - to achieve what Stephen Clingman, in his analysis of the "syntax of the self in The Grammar of Identity, calls a "transitive syntax" (16). This essay will trace a genealogy of alienated subjects in Galgut's novels, then attempt to explain them in terms of Clingman' s notion of intransitive and transitive selves, and finally offer a reading of In a Strange Room through the lens of Clingman' s theory of the transitive syntax of the self.
The Alienated Subject
Patrick Winter, the young narrator of The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, provides a prototype of Galgut's fictional South African subjects who are alienated from society and acutely aware of their condition. Emotionally numbed and friendless, Patrick suffers from debilitating anxiety attacks - "Part biological, part psychological, they tore me up like a cloth," he says (43) - which he controls with ever-increasing doses of Valium. As a young boy he was unable to enjoy the kind of manly bond that his elder brother Malcolm had with their father; and later, as a young man doing his military service on the Angolan border, he was similarly conscious of his exclusion from "a brotherhood...