Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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give people of all ethnic, gender and class variations their due – appears to have given way to ‘thriller’ computations of the social totality. Nicol’s neo-noir3 palette, for Titlestad and Polatinsky, amounts to premature closure, as if the new democracy is little more than a motley gangland version of the rainbow nation. Reading Titlestad and Polatinsky, one finds it difficult not to agree that, if it is indeed true that crime fiction mostly dishes out cheap closure, such totalisation would be premature, to say the least. The sense of disinvestment so brought about, a divestiture of multilayered texture and imponderable complexity for the sake of superficial resolution and easy entertainment, is helped along by some of Nicol’s own statements. These utterances (as disingenuous, perhaps, as Athol Fugard’s protestations that his writing is ‘not political’) make the case that Nicol has abandoned serious fiction to write ‘commercial fiction’ because he supposedly enjoys it more, and it sells better.4 So, in a sense, Titlestad and Polatinsky’s article reads as a kind of parable for a literature that has ‘lost the plot’, abandoning its moral compass and its sense of direction. This, indeed, is a common theme in discussions of postapartheid writing (see Frenkel and MacKenzie). One might argue that, being lost, this new writing has surrendered to the quick fix of genre fiction, though with a patina of political content in its preoccupation with social violence, or ‘crime’. Given the subtext of Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument, one is invited to read the story of a once-great literature, with redoubtable names like Breytenbach, Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer, Hope, Langa, Leroux, Matshoba, Mda, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Serote, Van Heerden, Van Niekerk and Vladislavić, against an alarming recent trend of ‘dumbing down’. The post-transitional genre writers are seen as copping out of the real deal, i.e. complexity and openness, for the sake of quick-sell entertainment. These supposedly cheap tricks, in addition, feed off a still-volatile society in a manner which, some might claim, borders on the unethical.
Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument is generally sound and well executed, though Christopher Warnes (‘Writing Crime’ 983) detects a ‘popular’ and ‘highbrow’ binary in their reasoning. Without going into the merits of an argument that compels one to choose between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, I would like to suggest that there may be a different way of looking at Nicol’s work, and that of other crime writers. This chapter, then, asks a different question of crime fiction, one which might be introduced as follows: what if one were to read the large (although by no means universal) shift from, let’s say, social-realist ‘complexity’ to crime-detective ‘genre’, as something else entirely? This would involve reading the genre as symptomatic of a bigger movement, of a seismic social shift. What if the upsurge in South African ‘crime writing’, in all its forms,5 rather than selling out on intricate ‘entanglement’ (see Nuttall, Entanglement), is in fact prising open the workings of a genuinely transformed social condition? This is a condition, moreover, that is no longer just national, just ‘South African’, but transnational in its dimensions, and global in its derivations.
The question, then, might be posed thus: why this obsession, in the new millennium, with law and (dis)order, and more particularly with the spectacle of ‘crime’, as presented in mediated forms such as fiction and nonfiction writing? Articulated in this way, the question leads us away from the ultimately futile war of opinion about whether or not crime fiction is sufficiently ‘literary’, or adequately complex as an object of formal literary architecture. Instead, it concentrates attention on the questions: what is this fiction about? And what is it doing out there? This, indeed, is the issue to which Warnes also directs scholars of South African writing, suggesting that writers such as Meyer and Orford ‘keep faith with some of the core features of “serious” South African literature: its capacity to document social reality, to expose injustice, and to conscientise readers into different modes of thought and action’ (‘Writing Crime’ 983). I would add a further set of ‘core’ questions which the literary scholar might address: why the relatively sudden, and major, shift in circulation and reception from liberal-humanist and late-modern forms of fiction to genre-based novels? To what larger socio-historical complex might this be attributed, as a more general syndrome? This is a by no means uninteresting question, and one that Warnes seems not to probe sufficiently, merely resting his case on the argument that ‘the postapartheid crime thriller should be read as negotiating – in the ambivalent sense of the word – the threat and uncertainty that many feel to be part of South African life, creating fantasies of control, restoration and maintenance, and reflecting on the circumstances that gave rise to this unease’ (‘Writing Crime’ 991). But what of the greater complex of circumstances that underlie the ‘threat and uncertainty’ that Warnes identifies?
Cultural difference in a postapartheid frame
My argument commences with an overview of the changing role of cultural difference before and after the political transition of the 1990s. For several decades now, postcolonial theory, not to mention grassroots cultural politics, has encouraged an emphasis on cultural difference as a modifier of political subjectivity and identitarian position-taking. More general studies of cultural difference in its many dimensions, such as those by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young,6 in addition to local ones by, inter alia, Attwell, Duncan Brown and Wylie,7 have tended to place the spotlight on the many ways in which cultural difference has been misrecognised, in the colonies and the Orient, within reductive epistemic frames of reference. The centuries-long discourse around the ‘wild man’,8 primitivism, exoticism and other categories, including the fixations of social-Darwinist thought and biological racism,9 found a rebuttal in postcolonial theory and revisionist cultural history, most emphatically perhaps in Said’s Orientalism, and stretching beyond literary and cultural criticism to empirically founded historical works of epistemic redress such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. JM Coetzee’s South African novels may be said to deal with the politics of cultural difference in one way or another. The same is true for Nadine Gordimer and legions of other novelists working in the pre-2000 period. A common strain is the sense that cultural difference has been mismanaged in both colonial and neocolonial contexts, not to mention neoliberal conditions; also, vigilance regarding all forms of difference – whether relating to race, gender, ethnicity, language or culture – remains an important ethical task. It is also fair to suggest that South Africa’s negotiated settlement put in place (at least via the justice system and the Constitution) a process of remediation. By 1994, racial discrimination and the mismanagement of difference came to be seen by all except the far right as a universal evil, as the very subject of evil. By this time, apartheid, solidly based on the segregationist foundation laid by more than three centuries of colonialism, had been declared a crime against humanity; now, after the advent of full democracy, even the insiders of apartheid, the privileged whites, were persuaded to accept that ‘rainbowism’ – a symbolic figuration of ‘good’ or equitable cultural difference peculiar to South Africa’s late ‘revolution’ – was a virtuous state of being.10 For a short while during President Nelson Mandela’s five years of rule, rainbowism was enthusiastically promoted, not least by its originator, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Mandela himself, who will be remembered for, among other things, magnanimously taking tea in the white ‘homeland’ of Orania with Betsy, widow of apartheid’s architect, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.
The cultural-difference rainbow, in its fresh phase, was fleeting. Starting around the ANC’s second term of office in 1999, and the ascension to the presidency of the remote, less conciliatory Thabo Mbeki, a pervasive current of disillusionment set in. This occurred amid widespread perceptions of, first, the consolidation of a neoliberal form of ‘class apartheid’ in a ‘choiceless democracy’ (Bond, ‘Mandela Years’ n.p.) and, second, an emerging political discourse which was race-inflected to a degree that many found uncomfortable. One example of the new focus on race – particularly the valorisation of ‘pure’ blackness – was the controversy over the Mbeki-supported ‘Native Club’,11 which was part of a bigger pattern that Finlay describes as typifying the Mbeki presidency up to 2008: ‘[A] polarity in public exchanges dealing with race that, for many, felt quite different from the spirit of the preceding period, where notions of nonracialism and inclusivity were the guiding ideology of state decision and the zeitgeist of public discussion’ (Finlay 36).
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