Losing the Plot

Leon Kock

Description

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.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• General
• General officer
• Biography
• Literary Criticism
• Comparative Literature

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868149650
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Losing the Plot

Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Leon de Kock 2016
Published edition © Wits University Press 2016
Photographs in Chapter Six © Greg Marinovich
First published in 2016
978-1-86814-964-3 (Print)
978-1-86814-967-4 (PDF)
978-1-86814-965-0 (EPUB – China, North & South America)
978-1-86814-966-7 (Rest of the World)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders.
Copyedited by Inga Norenius
Proofreader: Lisa Compton
Index by Clifford Perusset
Cover design: Riaan Wilmans
Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works
Printed and bound by Creda
For Jeanne-Marie
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 From the subject of evil to the evil subject: Cultural difference in postapartheid South African crime fiction
3 Freedom on a frontier? The double bind of (white) postapartheid South African literature
4 The transitional calm before the postapartheid storm
5 Biopsies on the body of the ‘new’ South Africa
6 Referred pain, wound culture and pathology in postapartheid writing
7 Fiction’s response
Notes
Works cited
Index
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Ashraf Jamal, who twisted my arm one afternoon in 2013 and convinced me to write a book on postapartheid literature. In the three years of reading and writing that followed, Jeanne-Marie proved to be a consistently outstanding interlocutor, loving friend and partner, and so this book is dedicated to her.
I owe debts of gratitude both big and small to Michael Titlestad, Darryl Accone, Jean and John Comaroff, Dawie Malan, Frederik de Jager, Imraan Coovadia, Donald Brown, Jonny Steinberg, Kavish Chetty, Willem Anker, Marlene van Niekerk, Niq Mhlongo, Francis Galloway, Fourie Botha, Roshan Cader, Veronica Klipp, Catherine du Toit, Colette Knoetze, Sally-Ann Murray, Pete Colenso, Dawid de Villiers, Tilla Slabbert, Michiel Heyns, Dominique Botha, Christo van Staden, Etienne van Heerden, Maria Geustyn, Wamuwi Mbao, Charis de Kock, Jane Rosenthal, Cuthbeth Tagwirei, Eben Venter, Adi Enthoven, Paul Voice, Peter Midgley, Craig MacKenzie, Tommaso Milani, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Raymond Suttner, Corina van der Spoel, John Eppel, Hettie Scholtz, Ingrid Winterbach, Sandra Platt-Tentler, Kerneels Breytenbach, Luke de Kock, Peter Wilhelm, Ned Sparrow, Gareth Cornwell, Hans Pienaar, Veronique Tadjo, Lesley Cowling, Gary de Kock, Dirk Klopper, Stephen Clingman, and still many others. At Johns Hopkins University (JHU) over the course of 2015 and 2016, I benefited from my association with The Writing Seminars and the Department of English. I am grateful to Eric Sundquist, Christopher Nealon, Douglas Mao, Sharon Achinstein, Sally Hauf, Tracy Glink, Mary Jo Salter, David Yezzi, Amy Lynwander and Yvonne Gobble for making my work at JHU yield such rich rewards.
Lynda Gilfillan’s first round of editing the manuscript constituted a formidable engagement and led to many substantial improvements to the text, for which I am more than usually grateful. I feel thankful, also, for Inga Norenius’s perspicacious second round of editing.
This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa, and by the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA). Opinions and conclusions expressed are those of the author.
Some of the chapters published here are more developed versions of previously published material. Chapter 2 is derived, in part, from the article ‘From the Subject of Evil to the Evil Subject: “Cultural Difference” in Postapartheid South African Crime Fiction’, published in Safundi:  The Journal of South African and American Studies Volume 16, Issue 1, 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17533171.2014.950483. It is published here with the permission of Taylor and Francis Group.
Chapter 3 grew out of the article ‘Freedom on a Frontier? The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature’, first published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature Volume 46, Number 3, July 2015, pp. 55–89, DOI 10.1353/ari.2015.0022. This version is published with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Part of Chapter 6 was first published as ‘Postapartheid as wondkultuur binne ’n patologiese openbare ruimte: Mark Gevisser se Lost and Found in Johannesburg’ in LitNet Akademies , Jaargang 13, Nommer 1, Mei 2016, available online: http://www.litnet.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LitNet_Akademies_13-1_DeKock_272-293.pdf.
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 Ma