Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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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 of events purely for the sake of entertainment, and there is plotting, as in putting together a frame or adding to a palimpsest for the recovery, or rendition, of that which is perceived to be the ground of the insistently ‘real’. Rita Barnard notes that significant postapartheid novels like Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney, Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Van Niekerk’s Agaat and Wicomb’s David’s Story ‘have multilayered plot lines’. Barnard argues: ‘Their forms, one might say, are palimpsestic: the narrative oscillates between contemporary events and parallel (or originary) events in the past’ (‘Rewriting the Nation’ 660). The layerings of plot, in Barnard’s argument, serve to inscribe the mark of the real (events) on the palimpsest of the aesthetic/cultural record.23 Barnard reminds her readers, too, that the ‘most characteristic and pervasive tropes’ in postapartheid writing, unearthed by Shane Graham in his study South African Literature after the Truth Commission, are the archive, the palimpsest, and excavation, along with digging and holes (657).
At a deeper level, the impulse to under-invent can be read as a yielding to the real, in this case because the meaning of what’s going on out there, as well as the substance – increasingly the single most urgent issue in public life – is perceived to have been occulted. To a large extent, this precludes the need for, indeed possibility of, imaginative reconstruction. Conversely, genre practitioners, crime writers in particular, overplay plot, dealing with the experience of occultation by turning it into a process of search and discovery, and often exaggerating for effect. This ‘solving the crime’ approach acts as an analogy for detecting the source of public misgovernance or private malfeasance, or (as often occurs) both. These, of course, are very real problems. The thickly plotted crime novel, then, seeks to capture the perverse details of plot loss in its search for representational adequation24 of actual, lived conditions. This is a feature not only of genre fiction but also