does sa lit still exist

8/13/2019 Does SA Lit Still Exist

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Rhodes University

Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature Is Dead, Long LiveLiterature in South AfricaAuthor(s): Leon de KockSource: English in Africa, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Oct., 2005), pp. 69-83Published by: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40239044 .Accessed: 27/06/2013 04:31

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Does SouthAfrican Literature Still Exist?Or: South African Literature is Dead, Long

LiveLiterature in South Africa1

Leon de Kock

In the mid-1990s I devised an English Honours course for studentsreadingSouth African literature at Unisa called "Issues in South African LiteraryStudies."At the time, my feelingwas that the object of studywas so difficultto grasp cleanly or positively because of its history - a history formed in

multipleacts of definitional contestation- that it would be moreinformative,more conceptuallyhonest, so to speak, simplyto ask the following question:Does 'South African Literature'exist, and if so, in what way or ways can itbe said to do so?This turned out to be a useful question for teachingbecauseit opened rather than closed pathways of thought on a subject riddled withexclusions.In fact, in the immediate aftermath of 1994, the provisional andconvenient, if perhaps illusory, closure provided by the coming ofdemocracyallowed a certainretrospectiveclarity. It was a good time to sumup, to take stock, even if it was confusion, contradiction and misalignmentthat we were totting up; at least we had the space provided by the turntowards discursive meta-reflection, a global wave that was too strong todiscount entirely, and which provided greater tolerance for acknowledgingreferential fracture.

Let me hang on to this phrase, 'referential fracture,' for a while. Thereason I was able to askthe question in the first place, 'Does South AfricanLiterature Exist,' and make it educative, was that it was one of the fewquestions one could ask about the field that did not remove the issue ofreferential fracture, namely the tearing away, or tearing apart, of customarymeans of self-understandingin a context challenged by otherness, which I

felt was fundamental to the historical constitution of this unsteady 'field.'

EnglishnAfrica32 No.2 (October 005):69-83

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70 LEONDEKOCK

Quite simply, I would ask my students whether 'South African literature'was meant to be read as the one or the many: the 'one' that was oftenimplicitly assumed to be normative, namely South African literature in'English,' in global consumption,including some works intranslation fromthe country's several 'native' tongues, or the many literatures in SouthAfrica, seen eitherin their singularityor their totality. I would ask whetheritwas not wishful thinking to see themany as an interacting,cross-referentialentity, formed as they were in the various breaks occasionedby orthographicand political divarication under colonial and then apartheid design. In thecase ofAfrikaans, it was a literaturethat often set itselfagainst the others inan act of self-preservation.

Whose literaturewas it, then, when one invoked the term 'South African'as pointing to a composite bodyof writing?Was it English, isiZulu, Tswana,Afrikaans- and which variant of Afrikaansmight that be? On the 'English'side, the lines of fracturespread even further. Was it the imperial survey, thecolonial firesidetale, the oral panegyric 'rendered' and mediated into writtenEnglish for scholarly use, the settler's diary, the cosmopolitan modernist

poetborn in Natal, the Bushman invocation of shamanic

passage,rendered

into English, the written tales of Xhosa folklore, later translated, theeventually-to-becomeNobel prizewinning novelists and their many less-prominent fellows writing pedestrian social realism? The list goes on. Therainbow-wash of sentimentwhich was so alluring during Nelson Mandela'shoneymoon presidencywould not by itself bind the breaks and the bits andpieces. In fact, the very event of authorized oneness - perhaps evendangerouslyauthorized oneness - was compellingus to take a hard look atthe breaks, now that we were free of the immediate need to defendtheexistence of South African literature itself as a site of struggle, now that we

were free of thecompelling urgeto validate our identities.If the questionI asked then was, "Does 'South African Literature' exist atall" - and if the answer was, yes, perhaps, but only as a signifier whosereference is complicated, divergentand contradictory, held together by theneed to proclaim a South African oneness against the forces of division, oftearing and splitting,then it strikes me as inevitable that we now ask the nextquestion, "Does 'South Africa Literature' still exist," now, in the post-anti-apartheid era, to use Loren Kruger's term? (Kruger 35). If, that is, thefractured existence of this unstable field was rendered as aworking totalityby the need to mend the denial ofhumanity implicated in apartheid and itsdirect forebear, segregationism,then what do we have now, now that ourvarious acts of writing are no longer held in this clasp of denialand counter-statement? Our many identities have been affirmed by constitutional



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DOESSOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURESTILLEXIST? 71

proclamation;our oneness sung forth over the airwaves, proclaimed in thepayoff lines of themarketing industry. Our putative singularityhas becomeprofitable even in business, despite the legions of the poor refusing todisappear. On the superstructural,symbolic level, in the founding terms ofthe nation, the paradox of multiplicity in oneness, singularity in diversity,has been resolved. Some wouldsay over-resolved,but the question has nowbecome pressing: Has 'South African literature,' as we cameto know it inthe years leading up to this ambiguous resolution, finally outlived itsusefulness?

In saying this I am suggesting that the real bind, or seam, holdingtogether what was in reality always a fantastically diverse body of writing,was political. Political in the deep sense as a contestover terms of identityand forms of belonging.Further, I am suggestingthat the political bind wasan impulsein the writing to engage with the seams ofbreaking and mending,of denial and counter-affirmation,of overwriting and rewriting, of splittingand splicing. My contention is that this great drama, this segue of rendingand reconnecting,was compellinglyinsistentbecause it derived from a battleover

people's veryhearts and

souls,their

deepestnotions of themselves, or

what we have come to call, in various theoretical terminologies, theiridentities,their subjectivitiesand their subject-positions.

This, in my view, is where the entity that we used to call 'South Africanliterature' found its urgency, its deep reason for being. But in order tovalidly ask my second question - does 'South African literature' still exist;does it still have a raison d'tre that is even remotely as powerful? - I mustoffer more detailed argument to convince you of the validity of my firstquestion, namely did it ever exist except as a deep seam, a place whereidentities were compulsivelystaged and restaged in defiance of panoptical

grand narratives (some would call them 'national' narratives) that sought toreworkthe fabricof identitywithin all-encompassingforms of modernitybutin trying to do so occasioned ruptures and breaks in the fabric of ourhistoricaldestinies, in the flesh of ourbeing.

I have developeda theory of the seamelsewhere,2so my restaging of itnow will necessarily be a recapitulation.In presenting a shorter version ofthe argument,I will frameit in the past tense, as a matter of history perhaps,unlike its first appearance as a case for the continuing present. This isbecause I am no longer certain that our current condition continues to becaptured in the poetics of the seam, and because I have begun to wonderwhether, if the theory holds any water at all, it is for that earliermanifestationof our literature, the one whose continuedexistence I am nowbeginningto question.



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72 LEON DEKOCK

In that argument, I noted that South Africa, in the first instance,and to anextraordinarilyheightened degree, was a country that was neither here northere, neither this nor that but a place, in Breyten Breytenbach's words, of"glorious bastardization" (Breytenbach 1998). In my terms in the "seam"essay, this translated into the conception of a country charged withthoroughly interstitial identities. This, I wrote, was because the country, asan entity, owed its very existence to thefact that it came into being withinthe clasp of the local andthe imperial,a conjunctionthat was both physicallyand epistemically violent. The various acts of provisional synthesisconsequent upon this conjunction - that is, the various constructions ofnationhood - tended to compromise all identities, some more than others.What remains true in the moment of historical retrospection is that to be'South African' has historically meant no longer fully to be somethingelse,no longer to be plainly something one might style as uncomplicatedlyas'Dutch,' 'Xhosa,' 'English,' 'Tswana,' or any of the other language andcultural formations making up the country's brimming residual fund ofidentities. The scale ofheterogeneityhas tended to defeat the various statistmodels of social organization such as segregationism and apartheid, andtheir different mediums, such as the Commonwealth and the Nationaliststate. Put another way, these models of modernity have, in the short term,defeated the recognition of difference. But such defeat has tended to betemporary: the return of the repressed has been a compulsive tendency,andits staging ground has all too often been in acts of engaged literature,perhaps the real heart of the term 'South African literature.'

During the long conversations that made up pre-democratic SouthAfrican writing, from the earliest seafaring accounts right up to the work ofblack consciousnesspoets, from the praise song to the rap song, such deep

engagement found its focus in the struggle for representational veracity,which is a compulsive return to contested terms of identity, tremors andquakes in the fractures of reference. I have long argued that textualproduction should be seen as integral to various attempts to 'make' SouthAfrica, in various forms and under different narrative impulses. In moreabstract terms, we have seen aconcatenationof self-inscriptionand otheringin the midst of what one might call a scene of 'foundationaP difference -namely, the territory before it came under the sway of singular rule orstatehood.In SouthAfrican writing in the broadly pre-democraticphase, thistranslated into a crisis of inscription, a profound insecurity or a severe

arrogance when shifting from the pronoun to the pronouns 'we' or 'us.'This representational slippage has haunted all manner of writers in SouthAfrica, marking, as it does, the quixotic attempt to bring a certain order ofcomposure to a place of profound unsettlement. And wherever fictional



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DOES SOUTHAFRICAN LITERATURESTILLEXIST? 73

composures importednto a text,much of thewriting hat has set itselfupas coveringSouthAfrica and itspeople,in a pluralsense,has beenmarkedby variousmechanismsf homogenizationnd erasure.Thepeculiarqualityof thiswritinghas been a sense ofoverextension, nervation,abulationorfixity as the crisis of inscriptionencircles the text, like the watersthatencircleAdamastor, nd render ts relation o its referent therealiaand thepeopleof SouthAfrica increasingly roblematic.

In my original 'seam' essay, I cited Adamastoras one of thegreatexamplesof suchproblematiciteraryrepresentation. ut simply,AfricainCamoens'sepicbecomes a footnote to Greco-Romanmyth.The sceneofphysicalencountern TheLusiads,in which John Purves claimedto find"our portionof the Renaissance"in Gray, "Camoensand the PoetryofSouthAfrica"2; emphasisadded)and in whichStephenGraydiscerned"thewhite man's creationmyth of Africa"(Gray,SouthernAfricanLiterature15-37),is matchedby a crisisof inscription, representationalmpasseasbig as Table Mountain itself. So much, I argue, is clear from thecumbersomemythicaloverlay hateffectivelyerasesthe intended eferentatthis

point,the

Capeof GoodHope,and behindit the populous nteriorof

SouthernAfrica, leavingin its place a bad-tempered,airy-talegiant. Ifanything, t is this crisis thatthe supposed whiteman's creationmythofAfrica' carries orward nto the culturalmemoryencodedin SouthAfricanletters:a crisisof writing n and aboutone of thegreatseamsof themodernworld.

I borrowedhe term seam' fromhistorianNoelMostert,whoinhisworkFrontiersclaimsthat "if there is a hemisphericeamto theworld,betweenOccident and Orient, then it must lie along the eastern seaboard ofAfrica"(Mostertxv). I chose to explorethe conceptof the seam,which

Mostert eft undeveloped,as an alternative o the morecommon notionofthe frontier,becauseI felt that the representational imensionof cross-border onflictdeservedas muchattention s its materialdimensions.To seethe crisis ofinscriptionn SouthAfricafollowingcolonizationn termsof a'seam,' I wrote,deliberately onjoininghe literalwith the figurai,was tosee thesharppointof the nib as astitching nstrumenthat seeks to suturethe incommensurate. he seam, fundamentally,s therefore he site of ajoiningtogetherhatalsobears he markof thesuture.Expresseddifferently,the postulate s that the crisis of inscriptiongermane o writingin SouthAfrica,in the broadlypre-democratichase,was markedby a paradoxicalprocess:on the one hand he effortof suturingheincommensurate as orisan attempt o close thegap that definesit as incommensurate,nd on theother hisprocessunavoidablyears he markof its owncrisis,the seam.



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74 LEONDEKOCK

To summarize, then, the ubiquitous South African 'frontier,' a place ofwhat I then styled as 'radical heterogeneity,' has historicallyconstituted oneof the great meeting points: the ground, in my argument, of simultaneouscultural convergence and divergence, where a representationalseam is theparadox qualifying any attempt to imagine organicism or unity. Further, acompulsivetendencyin cultural assertion appears to be the attempt to flattenthe seam or imagine it differently. Finally, my propositionheld that the seamwas the place where difference andsameness were hitchedtogether- where

they were brought to self-awareness,denied, or displaced into third terms.South Africa offers an acute exampleof the crisis ofthe sign in colonial andpostcolonial identity formation in the wake of imperialism. Historically,what we came to call 'South Africa' as a third-person singular entity cameinto being only by virtue of tumultuously clashing modalities. It required aseries of extraordinarily violent ruptures - genocide of the Bushmen andmassive slaughter among the Nguni-speakers in the 100 Years War on theEastern frontier in the nineteenth century, to name just two examples -before hegemonic political entities preceding the creation of 'South Africa'could come into

being.My argument was that the violence witnessed on the grounds of theterritory was matched by a violence ofrepresentation,a fracturing of suchproportions that no wonder South African cultural politics witnessed, in thelate phases of apartheid, what Louise Bethlehem called a "rhetoric ofurgency," a deep and pervasive attempt to weld signifier to referent, tobypass the fraudulent contingencies of the sign and seek a place wherethings meant what they said. On a primary level, I argued, the country hadwitnessed great volumes ofcrassly ethnocentriccross-culturalrepresentationof the kind common to colonial occupationsand racist mentalities- the sign

as a stabbing needle. On a secondary level, a more subtle and unavoidabledoubleness came to inhabit every representational act ever made in theefforts to stitch difference into sameness (as the missionaries did, all equalunder one God, but even better in the same clothes, too), or to pretend thatsameness - equality - actually inhered in formalized difference, as inapartheid's elaborate discourses upon being 'different but equal' In myoriginal argument, therefore, a crisis of representation was endemic to thecultural and geographical conjunction that had become South Africa, andthat 'it,' the country conceived as a third-person entity, was a seam thatcould be undone only at the cost of its existence. Itsvery nature, its secretlife, inhered in the paradoxes of the seam. In terms of engaged literature,doubleness and representationalrecalibration were almost the sine qua nonof what came to be read as serious work.Prior to the democratic moment, it



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DOES SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURESTILLEXIST? 75

was only those South Africa authors who 'hit the seam' directly andtrenchantly, such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Paton,Mphahlele, Fugard, Brutus,Serote, Breytenbachand Brink, who got taken up in the world of letters atlarge - who became 'global' South African writers. Perhaps to be a 'SouthAfrican' writer in the full sense, I wrote then, required imaginativeinhabitation of the seam as a deep symbolic structure. The seam was also aline of struggle, the line where attempts were made to rendermisrepresentationvisible toa bigger audience than the closed communityofapartheid South Africa. Writers were caught in either-or positions: dissidentor conformist, exiled or working within the system, black or white, pro- oranti- the cultural boycott. These polarizing forces, I argue, were inherent inthe context of the time. And in the hothouse environment created byenforcedisolationunder apartheid, iterature and publishingflourishedundercrisis. Our writers could take on a sense of grave importance by virtue ofwriting in and about one of the great crisis points in the world. South Africahad become one of the world's grand allegories of racial strife, of thestruggle for justice and truth in the wake of successivewaves of imperial,colonialand neocolonialmisrule.

Now, of course, in the post-anti-apartheidphase, the critical question iswhether this great drama of representationaldoubleness,created in the claspof denial andmisnaming,of repressionand false singularity, this constitutingground of 'South African literature,' has not been so dissipated anddissolvedby the conceptualand actual freedoms of democracy that, perhaps,'South African literature' as we came to know it under conditions ofstruggle, no longer fully exists. The democratic moment, to use thatconvenient figure of historical description, contained some delicate ironies.The convergenceof globalizationwith the fall ofthe Berlin Wall, at roughlythe same time that South Africa began to enter its democratic period,literally changed the world in which democracy had been imagined.Freedom was gained, but suddenly a socialist freedom no longer foundsecure correlativesin the larger world, precisely that larger world where theinspirationfor socialism had been derived. Instead, it was rapidly becomingan economically and technologically borderless world in which nationsstood and fell notby their constitutions and their entrenchedinstitutions,notby their ability to subsidize the underprivilegedin their ranks, but by theircompetitivenessin securingfixed directinvestment,the foreign capitalflowswhich determine individual countries'ability to generate jobs in a piraticalglobal economy.The national stage, which had loomed solarge in the age ofthe modern state, now became amere matine show, a mere moment in thepolyphonic strobe-play of the postmodern world, in which multiple



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resonances of theglobal and the local, the national and the transnational,orensembles thereof, mixed offerings and recombinations, increasinglybecame a dominant rhythm. Similarly, what we used to know as 'SouthAfrican literature' in the engaged sense, as struggle literature, and all theprevious forms of writing in the folds of the seam, also encountered whatcan only be described as a change of texture, or medium. Suddenly the lidwas off, the allegoryof racialstrife over, the divisionsummarilyhealed.

Of course I am foreshortening dangerously for the sake of historicalperspective.Of course I am talking superstructurerather than material base.Many of these resolutions remained largely symbolic, largely conceptual,and still are, while the actualities of division and economic disparitystubbornly persisted, and still do. But the conceptual is to a large extent thestaging ground of serious writing. Granted, the country still needed therough therapy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, still neededtexts like Antjie Krog's Country of MySkull,Zakes Mda's Ways ofDying orAchmatDangor's Kafka's Curse and his Bitter Fruit. But even in these texts,and similar ones, there appears to be a shift from the vortex of a singleobsession, a

deep symbolic polarity,a

compulsive seam,to a more

open-ended and perhaps less clearly framed scene of contest. On theone hand,writers whose drumbeatmay have been too firmly established in the arena ofwhat we used to call 'protest literature' perhaps began to find themselveswithout an audience, or without the immediate spur to take up theirrepertoires. On the other hand, artists could begin to play a far moreimprovisational beat, one that increasingly diverged from the well-wornmoves. Take, for example, Nadine Gordimer's comment in the TimesLiterary Supplementon Dangor's Kafka* Curse: "[It] has been the surpriseof the hybrids, an interchangeof events and identities, the latter doubledbythe wildly mixed blood of its characters, Malay-African-White, Afrikaner-Jewish, in the swirl of post-apartheid.The prose is that rare achievement,anequivalent, in lyrical energy and freshness, to its subject. This is a SouthAfrica you haven't encountered in fiction before."3Gordimerherself, in herevolution fromMy Son's Story (1990) and The House Gun (1998), on theone hand, to ThePickup (2001), makes a remarkable move outwards, fromclosely observed turns of fatein a society where race and gender continue toshow grim ironic potential, to a parable of how issues of nationalidentityaretraversed by the surges of global and transnational flows, means andpotentialities.

One might discern a similarly outward move in the works of SouthAfrica's other Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee (whose emigration is perhapssignificant in this regard), from Disgrace in 1999 to ElizabethCostello in



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2003, although that shift was already prefigured by the appearance of TheLivesofAnimals in 1999,alongside Disgrace. The work ofAthol Fugardhasseen a similar widening of scope, a broader play of theme andcontent. Onecan make like-minded arguments for Vladislavic, Mda,Jamal, Duiker andother writers who spanned this transition from anti-apartheid to post-anti-apartheid. It is also my view that some of thepost-2000 writers publishingout of SouthAfrica more recently have taken this bigger space for play andimprovisation to extents that make their work only incidentally 'SouthAfrican' in the old sense. Thesewriters are South African in a very differentway. (I am thinking here of Henrietta Rose-Innes's The RockAlphabet andFinualaDowling's WhatPoets Need, to namejust two.)

However, I would rather not go into a ratings game, an evaluation ofindividualworks. That is a different and importantproject, one that we needto perhaps think seriously of resuming, just to keep track of a literaryindustry that has become diverse and productive in the last few years - somuch so that I think the academy is once again several years behind thegame. The larger point is that it may be a good idea to question thecontinued existence of 'South African literature' as a

composite entity,as

somethingmore than physical contiguity of culturalobjects or a confluenceof expressionfrom the same politically defined geography. That confluencemay or may not speak together in conversation.And the lines of confluenceare taking on shapes that we may still decide are quite different fromanything that has gone before. If we argue that the seam of compulsiveidentity formationunder conditions of referential fracture has been undone,then the lines of affiliation, logically, are free to go where they like. Thedisappearance of the obvious struggle, which contained 'South Africanliterature' as we used to know it, means our strugglescan now leavebehind

the absolutecontests andthe grim polarities of the past. This is really a verysimple point. But its implications are profound, and I am not sure that wealways allow ourselves to entertainthem exuberantly, joyfully enough.

From the point of view ofreading, of being a reader, a subjectwho is nolonger necessarily trapped in South Africa by politics and immigrationrestrictions, the embrace of less grim parameters means, plainly, a moreliberating repertoire for the improvisation of individual identity. In thatsense, globalization and the drift towards transnationalism has createdoptions for being that render possible more complex constellations, morechoice. Andif that is the case, I want to say that I salute the death of 'SouthAfrican literature' as we used to know it. Frankly, it was often a place ofasphyxiatingrepetition and nausea-inducing pain, a play of stereotype andantitype which, even in the hands of a master such as Herman Charles



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Bosman or Es'kia Mphahlele, could become too singularly obsessive, tomuch about race and twisted irony, or in the hands of otherwriters, too muchabout skin, skull and jackboot. If our liberationfrom the actual torturers, heSpecial Police and the Vlakplaas killers, has taken away the immediateprospect of sanctioned terror, then our secondary liberation is from thecompelling urgencyto deal with the politics, first, before taking a widerview. Liberation first, then education. Many of you will remember that asdefenders of 'South African literature' against its detractors among the

academicsnobs in our English departments,we would refer toBertolt Brechtvalidatingthe social andpolitical function of art, and we wouldquote WalterBenjamin's famous line, "Every act of civilization is also an act ofbarbarism." That was 'South African literature' - it was a mood, a way offeeling about mustering all the symbolic capitalwe couldagainst those benton keeping us in the grey chambers of racial governance, censorship andneo-coloniallordship. In some senses, it really was as simple as that. But weno longerhave such clear andsimple urgencies, such absolute contests- thespace for dialogue and exploration has become infinitely more diffuse. Inaddition, there is another,

very importantpoint.Ashraf Jamal, in his

strongturn away from Coetzee's acid regard for South Africa as a stunted and'unlovable' country, challenges us to reconceive our home ground as aplace, preeminently,of love(Jamal 52). This is a matter of no smallimport-to see it as a place of love before we have recourse to the reflex ofseeing itas beyond love; for Jamal, the post-anti-apartheidscene contains thestrikingdanger of ennui where our onenesstakes on the hue of /difference(42), ofletting it all go, so to speak, now that the big and exhausting struggleshavebeen settled.

To say goodbye to 'South African literature' in the old sense - as the

doppelganger of oppression, as obstinate and heroic refutation, as the'unlovable' site of struggle - is to embrace a liberation of no smallimportance.The re-entry into the world, as the phrase goes, like the our re-admission into the world's political pageantryand the world's border posts,is an emphatic shift, an opening into greater choices ofmodality and self-positioning,not to mentionre-energizedself-assertion.

I want to offer you a recent history of my own reading, as a limitedexample of such recombinations ofaffiliation,of how self-mappingcan nowbecome more improvisational,with feeling. Because I still have a residualsense that English-speaking scholars continue to imagine South Africanwriting as normatively English,I try to read Afrikaanswriting when I can, tobreak this habit in myself, too. Recently, I took on Marlene van Niekerk'snew novel, Agaat, because I knew that Van Niekerk's work is seldom less



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DOES SOUTHAFRICAN LITERATURESTILLEXIST? 79

than momentous in its perspectives, scope and concerns. But evenwith theexpectationof a big encounter,Agaat still shook every tenet I had held ofwhat South African fiction might be: I had not before encountered suchJoycean play of word and ideain a South African work of fiction, such deepinhabitation of historical lives from themost acute of narrativeperspectives:a half-blind,paralyzed matriarch of the land, a woman with motor-neuronedisease whose lastrefuge is a mind thatremembersevery last ironic detailofan entire life, reconfiguring the course of a century. The novel is writtenwith mastery of a kind that necessitates literary re-evaluation in severalsenses, if that is still our work: of thepossibilities for probing, large-scalenarrative in South African letters; of an expanded capacityfor feeling of thekind that Jamal is so intent upon us recalling into our work; and of therecombinationof form in South African narrative writing in ways that areambitious in a big sense. Van Niekerk has set a new standardfor the wholeof South Africanwriting.

Then, with Van Niekerk' s lyrically, iterativelywoven narrativefabric inmy mind - two of the novel's key metaphorsare embroidery and angles ofvision in mirrors - I drifted into

readinga work of collected translationsof

Jorge Luis Borges's poems, lyrics where mirrors often become ways ofunsettlingthe eye of the persona, in ways that resonate with Van Niekerk.At a book launchI picked up a copy of the controversialrecent Afrikaansnovel, Kontrei, by an author who calls himself Kleinboer, in whichunrepentantlyobsessive and lovingly described mercenary sex betweentheAfrikaans male protagonist and scores of black prostitutes in Johannesburgis played out to an extent that is innovative for SouthAfrican writing of anykind, if not redemptive or, in the last resort, resolved in any metacognitiveframe. For that, I found resonanceby stumbling onto Michel Houellebecq's

novel, Atomised, which took the question of disembodied sexualconsumptionto an artisticallymore finely conceived levelthan Kontrei evercould.

In Houellebecq's novel, life in an age of severe atomization isunforgivingly depicted, such that the attenuation of human capacities forlove runsparallel with the utter depletion of sex as apathway to the vitalinstincts or to humanreconnection.It is a shatteringvision that demandsthatone take a position, feel strong disagreement or, perhaps, a kind of bleakcomfort. The point of recalling this small portion of an incidental map ofreading is that the nodes ofurgent personal interest in all these examples ofreading cut right across, or shall I say through, the geographical andespecially the national template. You might say in response to this that thishas alwaysbeen the case, and you would bepartly right. But there is a sense



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in which the invitation to take our national text of reading deeper into theparticularity of one of itsnow-multipleseams, on the one hand, and, on theother, into the multinationalhypertext,has been strengthened,rendered moreirresistibleby the growing emergenceof 'world' perspectiveson culture,andthe concomitant crossflow oftechnologies, capital, people,music, art, andthe exponentially expandingand interpenetratingworld reading market. Butmost of all, I felt able to read these works as my own, as speaking to myown, now more nuanced concerns, in a way that I used to reserve for the

reading of South African literature of old. These works, in theirrecombination, were speaking to my interests directly, in a way that nonational boundary-marking, no overtly political sense of 'appropriate'regional positioning,could mark or touch.

What I am saying, then, is that South African literaturein the old sensewas a function of oursubject-positioningas fellow-travellerswith apartheidand its schisms. Second, that the coincidence ofapartheid's downfall withthe collapse of the BerlinWall and the onset of globalizationhas inserted usinto a more free-flowing,and a larger, geography in which wewill map our

subjectivity,and our

reading,with

greatervariation and choice. If we add

Jamal's important imperative, then our changed sense of identity as SouthAfricans includes an insistence on more generous feeling, a return to oursense of home asa place of joyful, rather than painful,hybridity.

What I am trying to describe is a sense of diffusion in two differentdirections. It strikes me that the attempts many of us had been party to,especially in the immediate aftermath of 1994, to conjoin our variousliteratures in a spirit of fusion and ofhealing, was perhaps misguided. Thefact that we have still barely made a start to the great localizedcomparativeproject, suggested so many years ago by Albert Gerard, is surely telling us

something. Let me return for a moment to the Afrikaans strand of SouthAfrican writing. Over the past ten to 15 years, Afrikaans writing hasdeveloped as if the restraint of apartheid had been holding it back. Thisdevelopmentseems to have little todo with English South African writing.If, for argument's sake, one takes Etienne van Heerden and MarlenevanNiekerk as the two leading novelists at workin Afrikaans, then it is notablethat their intertext is not Coetzee andMda, Gordimer and Dangor, Mpe andDuiker, or whoever you may wish to mention. Their work may beincidentally influenced by some of these writers, but they seem to beworking within a much larger terrain, informed by historical re-readingwhich is deeply South African, and conventions of formwhich are, in thelast resort, more broadly transnational than national. I believe that this istheir positioningas writers, too: they read literature at large, of which South



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African writing is a sub-set, but their immediate stage is" stronglyparticularized: frikaans iterature s a predominantntertextof historicalreckoning.

What hisexamplesuggestso me is that he notion some of us onceheld- thatwe could and shouldconjoinSouthAfricanwriting nto a higher-levelunion,a greatoneness,was in all likelihood a blinderror, a perverseandreactionary esponseto apartheid nd its either-ordictates.Surely,it nowstrikesme,thepointwas tounpick heseam,to let the fabricdiverge,at last.At last,we coulddo andsaywhatwe liked. Atlast,we couldwritewhatweliked. Isn't thatwhat freedomwassupposedo have meantforus, for all ofus? Freedomas licence,but 'licence' understood s a writer-friendecentlyput it to me: "It's like we've moved from licencein the prohibitiveorrestrictiveense to licenceas inmulti-libidinousantonness,deviation."

So, diffusion n two differentdirections,goingmorespecificallylocal,gettingmore irreverentlyocal, withoutapology- Brett Baileycomestomind - on the one hand,while alsofeeling utterlyfree to ride the bigtransnational aves whereverhey maytakeyou.Because there isno map,

only improvisationalorays.That is what it feels like to

me,to sunder he

seam.Forsurely t wasonlyheldtogetherby theclenchingof ourhands,byour interpellationwithin a system now gone, a system that enforcedgrammars f distinctionswhich we feltcompelledo recalibrate.ndeed, hedangernowmaybe an ironiccounter-surgeowards oo muchseaming,oomuchseemingoneness. When division was forceduponus as a people,weinsistedupon our right to act as one. But that was alwaysa voluntaryassociation.twas the voluntarinessf theassociationhatwe wereinsistingupon.However,an over-emphasisn singularity, ingularityas a nationalconfinement,was never thepoint.If that is what the new narratives f the

nationare heading owards and there is some evidenceof this- then wemustinsist onbreaking rom the one seam,from the dialectic of theseamitself. We mustsay:let therebe manyseams,and let therebe much diversefabric,to stretch he metaphor.Surelythe commitmentwithinthe idea offreedom s to a scene of affiliativechoice that isunbound,preciselya sceneof writingthat foresakes hesingularityof the onegreat seam,and whichchoosesthe freedomofthemany.

Postscript

In the immediatepost-apartheidears,followingJamal'sargument,wemayhaveflippedfroman overemphasisn difference nto asense of onenessasindifference,a terrifyingnew speciesof homogenization 'the politicians



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82 LEONDEKOCK

will see to it'; into senses of public identity emptied of particularity as arevived substance. One feels this'empty' subjectivity in Vladislavic's newwork, TheExploded View,in characterswho seem toperceive themselves ata remove from their own settings, as if they have been placed there in thesame way that the faux Tuscan townhouses that Vladislavic describesareplaced on the landscape: imitative forms, reactive behaviour, rote action, asthough the world has already played out, like the explodedview of a Do-It-Yourself guide to the buildingof model aeroplanesor kitchen cupboards.

My call, and really it is a personal manifesto rather than an impositionalstatement,is that there might be somemerit in revivingourselves aschangedand changing subjects, passionately invested with the freedom of re-energized particularity of whatever kind, in a world of exponentiallyincreasedfluidity. If that is the scene of South Africanwriting in the currentmoment, then I say "viva, longlive"!

NOTES

1 This article originated in a keynote address delivered to a colloquium entitled"Present and Future Directions in South African

LiteraryStudies" held at the Wits

Institute for Social and Economic Research,26 May 2005.2. Originally, in "South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction," a

special issue of Poetics Today (De Kock 2001; reproduced in De Kock, Bethlehemand Laden 2004). The essay has been discussed by Titlestad and Kissack (2003) andby Jamal (2002).

3. Quoted in http://www.nb.co.za/Kwela/kCatalogueDisplay.asp?iItem=133.

WORKS CITED

Breytenbach, Breyten. 1998. Dog Heart: A Travel Memoir. Cape Town: Human &Rousseau.

Coetzee, J.M. 1999.Disgrace. London: Seeker & Warburg.. 1999. The LivesofAnimals. Princeton: Princeton UP.. 2003.Elizabeth Costello:Eight Lessons. London: Seeker& Warburg.

Dangor, Achmat. 1997.Kaflcas Curse: A Novella and Three Other Stories. CapeTown: Kwela.

. 2001. BitterFruit. Cape Town: Kwela.De Kock, Leon, Louise Bethlehem andSonja Laden, ed. 2004. SouthAfrica in the

Global Imaginary. Pretoria: Unisa Press; Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV.Dowling, Finuala. 2005. WhatPoets Need:A Novel.Johannesburg:Penguin.Gordimer, Nadine. 1990.MySon 'sStory. Cape Town: David Philip.

. 1998. The House Gun.Cape Town: David Philip.. 2001. ThePickup. Cape Town: David Philip.Gray, Stephen. 1979. SouthernAfrican Literature: An Introduction. Cape Town:

David Philip.



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does sa lit still exist

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