Reading Damon Galgut's The Promise as a Neomodern Novel.

Neomodernist novelists seek to recreate and rearrange the basic propositions and methods of modernism not to just to keep the modernist enterprise alive but also to expand its range of presentation and interpretation. The art of Neomodernist novelists falls in line with that of their predecessors in that it endeavours to analyse innermost emotions and state of things as they actually are using typically modernist procedures. In other words neomodernist novelists subject modernist principles of taste and style to a new process to analyse contemporary issues. The paper examines how Damon Galgut, in the novel under reference, employs typical modernist strategies to foreground the complications and complexities issuing from an Afrikaner family's inability to keep the promise of passing on a bequest to their Black servant, Salome. This by implication parallels the situation engendered by the policy of racial discrimination or segregation (apartheid) formerly practised in South Africa. It also analyses how the use of characteristic modernist techniques like narrative flexibility, which is easily perceptible through oscillating points of view, allows the author to present the characters from divergent perspectives. Finally the paper looks at how this panoptic narrative perspective lends meaning to the sequence of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]