Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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has now become even more diverse, as befits its newfound liberty, its deliverance from what one might term the closure of apartheid logocentrism. In keeping with this new script about the literature of postapartheid, Frenkel and MacKenzie propose that ‘scores of writers [in the years 1999–2009] have produced works of extraordinary range and diversity’ (1). These writers have ‘heeded Albie Sachs’s call to free themselves from the ‘ghettos of the apartheid imagination’, with ‘new South African literature accordingly [reflecting] a wide range of concerns and styles’ (1). This literature is ‘unfettered to the past, but may still consider it in new ways’ or ‘ignore it altogether’ (2).
Without contradicting Frenkel and MacKenzie,2 I wish to suggest a line of reasoning that departs from the theme of being ‘freed from the past’. In my view, a significant section of postapartheid literature finds itself less liberated from the past than engaged in the persistent re-emergence of this past. Frenkel offers the figure of the palimpsest to explain how post-transitional writing allows for ‘a reading of the new in a way in which the layers of the past are still reflected through it’ (25). I argue for an even stronger emphasis, and contend that in the hands of Kevin Bloom, Antjie Krog and Jonny Steinberg, the three writers who form the main focus of this chapter, postapartheid literature is inescapably bound to the time of before. A compulsive reiteration of certain South African literary tropes is evident in their work, particularly those of the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, I argue that much postapartheid literature written in detection mode is distinguished by strong rather than weak or merely vestigial continuity with the past. Such ateleologial (re)cycling – decidedly against the grain of a widely alleged rupture with the past – runs counter to theses that postapartheid literature is mostly novel, or substantially different from earlier South African writing. However, it is also true that the very reprocessing I hope to uncover gives rise to features of authorial voice that are characteristic of a postapartheid generation of writing, for reasons I elaborate below. The argument about continuity or discontinuity between apartheid and postapartheid in South African literature, I suggest, needs stronger conceptual treatment of how past and present are disjunctively conjoined;3 the time of now-and-going-forward and the time of history, or what-has-been, are, I propose, mixed in a way that suggests the conception of a split temporality – altering from a bad ‘before’ (apartheid) to a better ‘after’ (postapartheid) – is perhaps overworked. It might indeed be more accurate to describe what occurs ‘in’ postapartheid as a reconfigured temporality in which Hal Foster’s ‘future-anterior’, or the ‘will-have-been’, persistently surfaces. This is consistent, to a large extent, with Grant Farred’s sense of a doubled temporality (see Chapter 1), in which the supposed ‘epochal progress’ of postapartheid ‘quickly showed itself to be less a march toward an ideal political future – let alone present – than a new democracy living in a double temporality’ (‘Not-Yet Counterpartisan’ 592–593).4 Foster’s proposition is invoked by Ashraf Jamal in a critique of certain conceptions of South African literature. Jamal writes:
My reason for this emphasis [on the future-anterior] rests on the assumption that South African literature in English has elected to sanctify and memorialize its intent, producing a literature informed by a messianic, liberatory, or reactive drive, hence a struggle literature (which precedes liberation from apartheid) and a post-apartheid literature (which establishes a democratic state of play). These phases, however, are hallucinatory projections, or candid attempts to generate a cultural transparency: see where we have come from; see where we now are; see where we are going. The logic is overdetermined, teleological, and in effect diminishes our ability to grasp that which is impermanent, hybrid ... (‘Bullet through the Church’ 11)
Jamal identifies what he perceives to be a major fault in conceptions of South African writing: a fixation with going somewhere, of getting from a dead-heavy past to a re-envisioned future. Instead, Jamal proposes that the South African literary imaginary contains ‘a latent sensation that South Africa as a country suffers the unease of never having begun’ (16, Jamal’s emphasis). Following Raymond Williams, Jamal argues that if nineteenth-century realism stems from the presumption of a ‘knowable community, such a hermetic logic fails to apply to a heterogeneous outpost such as South Africa’ (17).
It is with a similar sense of unknowability amid a scene of unresolved heterogeneity in South African culture at large that the texts I examine in this chapter, Bloom’s Ways of Staying, Krog’s Begging to be Black and Steinberg’s Midlands, take on their burden of (re)discovery, as if nothing can be taken as known, again, and as always. Indeed a felt anxiety, again and renewed, about ‘never [quite] having begun’ lies at the heart of the affective charge in such texts. Now, however, the notion of postapartheid, and the popular, widely shared social imperative of a desired teleology, a clean break from the past, raises the stakes considerably. The writing of Bloom, Krog and Steinberg, though sharp and unsentimental, is, consequently, suffused with concern about the clear failure of postapartheid’s grand narrative. This, despite the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to set the story of the new South Africa on the right track. As Shane Graham comments in his book on the TRC and the South African literature that followed in its wake, the Commission ultimately succeeded in setting up a perceived ‘contrapuntal dialogue’ that enables a ‘reconceptualization of such fundamental spatio-temporal constructs as the dichotomies between public and private, past and present’ (South African Literature 33). Here, indeed, is a necessary form of ‘plot loss’, a corrective to the always-looming teleology inherent in the very signifier ‘post-’, whether this be understood as ‘post-transitional’ or ‘post-apartheid’. Periodicity in its more commonly understood sense, as in the named phases of time marked as ‘transitional’, ‘post-transitional’, and so on, thus runs into a mash-up of temporalities in which the time of before intrudes on the present.5 In using the term ‘mash-up’, I draw on both the literal meaning of a collision of forces implicit in the verb ‘mash’ and on the composite term’s use in music and video as ‘blend, bootleg and bastard pop/rock’ in a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs (Wikipedia). The ‘bastard’ blend of styles and versions, in this description, exhibits a violently reintegrated (mashed) character whose pulpiness defies pre-imagined, distinct shapes.
In Ways of Staying, Begging to be Black and Midlands, the felt torsion of oneself becoming implicated in such destabilising mash-ups, and of seeing others undergoing a similar grinding or crushing, is almost obsessively focused on a single, if contested, signifier – that ultimate South African scare word: ‘crime’. Not only is ‘crime’ an everyday matter, integral to the daily newsfeed – with which it is complicit in the constitution of a ‘wound culture’6 – but it also has the potential to wreck the progress, the socially and economically necessary teleology, of the ‘rainbow nation’. The spectre of ‘crime’ is, indeed, the joker in the pack for South Africa’s negotiated settlement, creating as it does uncomfortable connections with the apartheid past, both in everyday life and in the realm that more immediately concerns us here, namely the felt imaginaries discernible in ‘transitional’ or ‘post-transitional’ writing.
Given the extraordinary saturation of the signifier ‘crime’ in postapartheid South Africa, a brief examination of social discourse in relation to this resonant (though problematic) term is necessary. The bogey of ‘crime’ has possibly been one of the most prevalent facts of life in South Africa over the past twenty years or so, as scholars such as Steinberg, Altbeker, Gary Kynoch and others have shown. Any street survey in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town that asks what the country’s biggest ‘problems’ are will likely yield the answer ‘crime’, followed by that other ‘c’-word, ‘corruption’. This chimes with perceptions of criminal corruption elsewhere, as argued above in relation to conditions in which ‘felonious’ states are able to thrive in the world’s postcolonies, which now include postapartheid South Africa.
The images of a ‘spectre’ and a ‘bogey’ are used because, although a statistical consensus about the incidence of crime in postapartheid South Africa remains elusive, the fear of crime has escalated, particularly but by no means exclusively among white South Africans. As