Losing the Plot
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Losing the Plot

Crime, Reality And Fiction In Postapartheid South African Writing

Leon Kock

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Losing the Plot

Crime, Reality And Fiction In Postapartheid South African Writing

Leon Kock

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About This Book

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature's founding moment was the 'transition' to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a 'wounded' space within which a 'cult of commiseration' compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people's screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781868149650
1
Introduction
This is not a study of postapartheid South African literature. Rather, it is study in that vast field of writing. I do not believe a coherent a study of this dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus is possible, short of the encyclopaedic method (a curated series of topics written by many different writers, or alphabetical listings). Such a ‘companion’ approach remains the default option, and it is duly taken by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, along with their 41 fellow contributors to The Cambridge History of South African Literature, and by Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie in The Columbia Guide to South African Literature since 1945. And still, as these compilers might themselves acknowledge, there will be significant gaps. This book, in contrast to such works of general coverage, proposes a way of examining the distinctive features of South African literature after apartheid. Put differently, it delineates certain through-lines that characterise postapartheid writing.1 Although these lines are, in my view, prominent and important, they remain a partial set of concerns. This relation of single study to corpus may be viewed via the analogy of a hologram. Take this angle of view, and the shape emerges thus; tilt the hologram surface, or change your own angle of looking, and the object under view suddenly looks quite different. All the shapes brought into view, in their provisional wholeness, have validity – call them alternative manifestations of the complexity of the entity under examination. Such an approach allows the making of bold conceptual propositions without resorting to the fixity, and the closure, of all-consuming metanarratives. It means that in advancing a theory about the corpus of work under scrutiny, or more accurately within that body of work as a whole, one’s conceptual model is acknowledged as partial (e.g. Shaun Viljoen, Richard Rive: A Partial Biography). Like Viljoen, one acknowledges, in addition, one’s own partiality too: this is my reading of things, or my reading. Other readings are possible, indeed necessary. Please join the party. Write your own study. But for a moment, consider this one. Perhaps it will influence your own perspective on the field we share, though from different angles of view. This book, then, in full awareness of the risks inherent in such an undertaking, proposes a set of related ideas as a way of conceptualising certain emphases, perhaps, in South African literature after apartheid.
In the course of this study, I mention, and discuss, many writers and, in selected instances, this book offers readings of particular works. These readings lie at the heart of Losing the Plot, as they both instantiate and elucidate major threads of argument. In all such cases, however, the particular work so discussed serves to illuminate the larger idea to which it is yoked, and the reading of the work concerned should be seen as suggestive of trends. There are many worthy writers who are not mentioned in the pages of this study, and a great number of instructive works that do not get the readings they deserve. However, to include everything, and to discuss all works of importance, is both impossible and undesirable. Such an undertaking would result in a shapeless monster, so vastly populated is the field of postapartheid writing, and so varied the directions in which the literature goes.
Still, one particular line does suggest itself quite emphatically, and this is the key notion, or moment, captured in the term ‘transition’ – that putatively transformative shift from one ‘state’ to another in which an entire nation found a form of secular redemption from purgatorial political conditions in the first half of the 1990s. Following this line, Losing the Plot proposes a way of looking at the field of South African writing in the 1990s, 2000s and the current decade that pivots around a continuingly problematised notion of transition. In the contextual, if not immediate, background of most postapartheid writing, as much as in the popular South African imagination, the transition or switch to a ‘new dispensation’ serves as a founding marker in the ‘new’ nation’s collective consciousness. The putative ‘transition’ – a word defined as a ‘movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another’ (Dictionary.com) – ushered in the resplendent idea of a ‘rainbow nation’, a catchphrase coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu,2 who also chaired South Africa’s public (and symbolic) transitional gateway mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The promise of the rainbow nation rapidly became popular mythology, replete with multicultural adverts projecting racial bonhomie. It led also, and inevitably, to an energised counter-discourse which followed the epochal events of 1994, a dialectical, many-sided engagement typical of the combative South African civil sphere, gaining force as the new democracy gradually appeared to lose its lustre, especially after the Mandela presidency of 1994–1998.
This study, then, proceeds from the premise that an initial wave of optimism, evident in the early phase of upbeat transitional ferment,3 was followed by a gradual and deepening sense of ‘plot loss’4 among South African writers and intellectuals of all stripes. That much was conceded even by the man that now serves as the country’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who commented near the end of Thabo Mbeki’s reign as president that the democratic project was not a dream deferred but ‘a dream betrayed’.5 From the early 2000s, escalating service-delivery protests in poor communities across the country – led by the very people meant to be the primary beneficiaries of liberation – suggested that a wide-ranging sense of dismay had taken root.6 The middle classes – by no means exclusively white – gave fulsome expression to such disappointment, too. Whether this general public disillusionment proceeded from a left-wing point of view, a nonracial stance, an anti-corruption position, or a sense of insecurity as crime statistics rose, the signs were ominous. Neoliberal economic policies were perceived as blocking economic transformation and severely impeding the social-democratic revolution of the liberation struggle. A new racial exclusivism emblematised by Thabo Mbeki’s ‘Native Club’ ushered in a resurgence of what Xolela Mangcu in 2008 described as ‘racial nativism’.7 Alarming disclosures about crime and corruption in a wobbly criminal justice system all contributed to the belief that the longer-term transition was going off the rails.8 In Anthony O’Brien’s words, the post-1994 years saw a ‘normalization of the political economy’ which he typified, following Graham Pechey, as ‘the neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (3).9 Such looming disillusionment, if not disorientation, rooted in a social imaginary that continues to hold dear the founding tenets of the ‘new’ democracy, effectively sets the scene for postapartheid literary culture. It creates the conditions for a wide-ranging investigation into the causes of the perceived inversion, or perversion, of the country’s reimagined destiny, a derailing that has widely come to be regarded as criminal. Hence the remarkable efflorescence of crime writing in the post-liberation period, in both fictional detective stories and nonfiction works of ‘true crime’, not to mention critical analyses of this work.10 In various chapters in this study, I consider the manner in which crime authors Antony Altbeker, Angela Makholwa, Deon Meyer, Sifiso Mzobe, Mike Nicol, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Jonny Steinberg and Mandy Wiener seek to redefine the locus of public virtue in a context in which the boundaries between right and wrong have blurred. It is a context of social disorder, typical of the late-modern postcolony, in which the signs by which we read the social have, in Jean and John Comaroff’s description, become ‘occulted’,11 i.e. obscured by contending regimes of information and legitimation. Unlike the situation during apartheid, when all good, or even half-good, writers knew who was right and who wrong, the postapartheid milieu is less easily legible.12 As in other postcolonies in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and elsewhere, this is a context in which, as the Comaroffs write, ‘social order appears ever more impossible to apprehend, violence appears ever more endemic, excessive, and transgressive, and police come, in the public imagination, to embody a nervous state under pressure’ (‘Criminal Obsessions’ 803).13
Such wayward, hard-to-read social conditions require exacting and forensic examination, which is what crime writing sets out to do, holding up to the light South Africa’s reconstituted public sphere and finding it riddled with symptoms of criminal pathology. Crime writing’s generic inclinations come conveniently to hand, since the crime story typically sets out to pinpoint the culprit, or, in the tale’s implicitly wider terms, the sources of social and political perversity. I see such acts of writing as works of social detection; the underlying context that gives rise to them may be related to both immediate pressures on the ground and more extensive transnational conditions. The diagnostic works of crime writers refract a real but perverted transformation in which the postcolonies of the late-modern world are awash with criminality despite a heightened preoccupation with law and (dis)order.14 In particular, the ‘criminalisation of the state’ is hardly peculiar to South Africa but rather a common feature of postcolonial polities, of which the postapartheid state is but a belated example.15
While many postapartheid writers choose to write about anything they like, a large number of authors seem compelled to chronicle the grit of urban existence in South Africa. This may be an aspect of a transnational impulse to narrate the textures of disorder in the global south (not to mention the faltering north), charting African destinies more widely now that Azania had come about (except it was still called South Africa) and was no better or worse than other developing regions. Some academics began seeking broader connections in the global south, including the Antipodes, while nonfiction scribes like Steinberg found stories of displacement and reconnection both inside and outside the once ‘beloved country’, from Liberia to New York to Somalia and back to Johannesburg and Cape Town. A new wave of crime writers and speculative fiction innovators sought answers in a dystopian, entangled global scene where individual destinies traverse connected cities. The post-millennium hangover was not confined to any one place, and the exceptionalism (famously outed by Mahmood Mamdani16) that apartheid had once conferred on South Africa was now really gone for good. As South African writers and scholars, we found ourselves tainted by the more general rot of a neoliberal world order of hyper-capitalism.17 But we also found an almighty stink at home, where venality had taken root, not only in the place where political virtue had once seemed to reside, but everywhere else, too. The scramble for position, privilege and wealth was the new contagion, and writers were overwhelmed with an abundance of ready-to-hand plots.
The shift towards social forensics was more than mere opportunism or clever marketing, and from the 2000s, the quest to uncover what’s going on in an obscured public sphere became a consuming obsession for many writers. Ventures into the heart of the country, exemplified by Steinberg’s Midlands, reveal rebarbative forms of social interaction, a disorienting return to the violence of the frontier. Public levels of distress rise (and fall) with predictable regularity as each new media exposé uncovers the latest instance of state corruption, cronyism or, worse still, criminal neglect of and violence against citizens. Lately, the hashtag wars (such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) have come into play as a means of social mobilisation via broad and instantaneous dissemination of information. Government’s counter-efforts in the information wars include the Secrecy Bill,18 as well as growing influence over the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the Independent newspaper group, and the New Age newspaper. Hence Meyer’s acute fictional analysis of warring information regimes in Heart of the Hunter, and Orford’s Gallows Hill, which may likewise be read as a form of fictionalised reconnaisance, a quest to uncover reliable, inside information.19
Postapartheid writing constitutes an investigation into, and a search for, the ‘true’ locus of civil virtue in decidedly disconcerting social conditions, in an overall context of transition.20 I have chosen not to follow this line through Gordimer and Coetzee, the latter’s 1999 novel Disgrace rendering problematic any easy notion of transformative reconciliation in the South African body politic, as does Gordimer’s final opus, No Time Like the Present. In this novel, her main characters, ‘having worked so hard to install democracy ... see its fragile stability threatened by poverty, unemployment, AIDS, government scandal, tribal loyalties, contested elections and the influx of refugees from other African countries’.21 One could equally take a view of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat as twisted love stories, respectively on the cusp of, and beyond, transition. Likewise, one might read the novels of Mandla Langa – The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, in particular – as telling parables about the ambiguities of power in post-liberation conditions, along with similar novels by Zakes Mda, while the works of Zoë Wicomb reveal the enduring intractability of race and gender issues, despite constitutional freedom (David’s Story, Playing in the Light and October). And so one could go on, including Etienne van Heerden’s complex meditations on the slippage between past and present in works such as In Love’s Place, 30 Nights in Amsterdam and Klimtol; Breyten Breytenbach’s reflective lyricism in Dog Heart, with its focus on ambiguous transformations that give the lie to notions of communitarianism implicit in rainbowism; Ivan Vladislavić’s articulation, via Aubrey Tearle in The Restless Supermarket, of the persistence of the old despite the new; Achmat Dangor’s wry depiction of the torsions of power in Bitter Fruit, which sees a post-liberation state ‘bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither principle nor compromise’(154). More, too: Nadia Davids, Rayda Jacobs, Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Njabulo Ndebele, Eben Venter and still others, too numerous to mention let alone discuss equally within the confines of a single study. All of them, in one way or another, can be seen to be testing the limits, and the possible breaches, of a reconfigured sense of probity in a public sphere so bewilderingly remixed, and so seemingly in a state of ‘plot loss’, that almost nothing can be taken for granted.
Rather than conduct a Cook’s tour through postapartheid literary works on the basis of how they unsettle the founding myth of transition, this study seeks to trace some of their internal dynamics. It asks the question: what formal patterns emerge from postapartheid writing, in relation to a widespread sense that the transition has been derailed?22 While such writing includes diverse forms, including popular and nonfiction, the field is limited mainly to narrative. (In selected cases, I include Afrikaans works.) A more general bifurcation seems to have taken place on the formal level of plot and plotting in postapartheid narratives: one strain – particularly genre fiction and incident-heavy nonfiction – tends towards a playing up of plot, while another tends to downplay this aspect, as in much literary fiction. In underplotted work, writers seem to take the position that, given the refractoriness, and the unpredictability, of the unfolding postapartheid experiment, the writer acts as a kind of camera or projector, throwing images onto a screen – for example, the eye of Milla in Agaat, and the news clippings in Van Niekerk’s convulsive play Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W; the various photographers in Vladislavić’s Double Negative; the imprint of gender and race upon Zoë Wicomb’s characters; the autobiographical ‘I’ introjected into the subject of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears. In works such as these, plot plays a lesser role. For Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, the ‘ambitious hero ... stands in as a figure of the reader’s efforts to construct meanings in even larger wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present and future in a sentient shape’ (48). Such plotting, implying as it does an near-omniscient grasp that is capable of totalising experience in time, is eschewed by certain writers, often the more ‘literary’ ones. Of course, there is imaginative invention...

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