Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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to the real, apart from its salience transnationally,25 also picks up from the TRC’s emphasis on witnessing and (re)discovery, and from the perceived need to excavate and confront previously concealed or repressed forms of truth, as Graham suggests. Narrative forms, especially post-2000, continue the TRC ethos of investigating perversities by folding these into a past-present conjunction. This is done either in nonfiction writing that follows an ‘evidential paradigm’, implicitly following the example of Carlo Ginzburg in his work Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (see Chapter 3), or in generic fictions founded on decidedly real conditions: human trafficking in Andrew Brown and Diale Tlholwe (Refuge and Counting the Coffins, respectively); farm murders and their complex causes in Karin Brynard (Plaasmoord, translated as Weeping Waters); inter-gender violence and abuse in Angela Makholwa (Black Widow Society); abuse of women and children in Margie Orford’s novels; public corruption in Mike Nicol (the Revenge Trilogy); corrupt policemen exploiting civil violence in Roger Smith (Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood). In nonfiction, a slew of writers cut to the quick about law enforcement, among them Antony Altbeker and Kevin Bloom.
My argument is structured around the following set of concepts: Chapter 2, crime fiction; Chapter 3, nonfiction; Chapter 4 focuses on the influence of, and ferment among, literary-cultural analysts, from the ‘spring is rebellious’ phase in the early 1990s and the critical reception of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying to the dialogue between Ashraf Jamal and JM Coetzee concerning South Africa as a ‘pathological’ space. Chapter 5 traces the accelerating sense of derailment and its effect upon the ailing body of the no-longer-new South Africa, with a focus on the noir-like detachment of Roger Smith, and Makholwa’s ‘chick-lit’ neo-noir frame in a tale of revenge against patriarchal abuse. The next part of this chapter follows nonfictional investigations into crises of policing and corrupt dealings in the criminal justice system, taken up by Steinberg, Altbeker and Mandy Wiener. Chapter 6 traces the powerful influence of the new media on reading as well as writing. Here, I examine recent nonfiction by Mark Gevisser and Mzilikazi wa Afrika as well as the journalism of Greg Marinovich. Chapter 7 dwells on fiction’s implicit response to this onrush of the real, examining Ivan Vladislavić’s 2010 novel Double Negative, and then looking at a series of recent fictional works that have reported on states of public pathology, as relayed through the perceptual registers of fictional subjects.
In summary, current South African writing is characterised by the rise of both genre fiction and creative nonfiction as ways of responding to a widely perceived sickness in the body politic, where the plot, metaphorically speaking, is thought to have been lost, and there is a premium on uncovering actual conditions. The real issue, for writers, is to find the right story, or to get the story right.
Conceptualising the ‘transition’: Ambiguity and temporality
This study proposes that the concept of transition – its uptake, problematisation and forensic-diagnostic investigation – serves as a pivot in postapartheid literary culture. In view of this emphasis, the term itself needs to be unpacked. Whether it references a sceptical ‘transition’ to democracy or an optimistic ‘democratic miracle’, this moment indubitably signals a shift in post-1994 South African literature from the centrality of apartheid.26 The process most commonly described as the ‘transition to democracy’ has been well documented across several disciplines.27 It is common cause that the year 1994, when South Africa finally became a fully inclusive political entity, serves as a decisive marker in the country’s history, similar to the shorthand of 1910 and 1961, when the country became a Union and a Republic, respectively, or 1948, when the National Party rose to power and proceeded to consolidate colonial segregation into the notorious ideology of apartheid.
The historic elections in 1994 ushered in a remarkable series of changes, bringing reforms in social welfare, housing, electrification, and the like, although terms such as ‘silent revolution’28 and tags like ‘Mandela’s miracle’29 suggest a bloodless turnaround, a ‘quiet coup’. The changeover of power was there for all to see in the structures and make-up of government, along with the superstructure of the new Constitution, though it was far less discernible on the ground, where there was little evidence of the elimination of severe economic disparities. The transition was of course manifestly, and symbolically, dramatised in the public domain by means of the TRC, from which flowed a quintessential postapartheid work, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull. This work is key because it inaugurates major trends, both in its content and its forms of address. It brings into stark relief what Mark Sanders calls the ‘ambiguities of witnessing’ as a through-line in postapartheid discourse, including the ‘new’ South Africa’s reinvented literary culture. At once testimony and witnessing that might enable national healing, the TRC also set a precedent for writing up the real, disclosing and uncovering, as an urgent priority. For Sanders, testimony is neither ‘fiction’ nor ‘truth’ but both: fundamentally unverifiable, it ‘[facilitates] both a narrative and a counternarrative’ (8). Essentially productive, this ambiguity strikes a bass note in postapartheid writing, and in considerations about the nature of the transition. It is as if the TRC inaugurated a quest for establishing the truth of ‘what really happened’ – and what continues to happen – in relation to a past that is itself subject to continual revision. In their introduction to Beyond the Threshold, Hein Viljoen and Chris van der Merwe write about the ‘dilemma of being stuck between past and present’ (2), and ‘the impasse of being caught on the threshold between past and present’ (3). Similarly, Meg Samuelson suggests that the concept of transition in South African literary culture can be seen to enable ‘thinking about being-at-home that is at the same time inherently liminal ... entering the house that locates one on a perpetual threshold’ (‘Walking’ 134). In a sense, the new literature serves as a measure of an unreadable present and an unplottable future, appraised in relation to an eternally unsettled past.30 All in all, this is a mission of (re)discovery which, nevertheless, plays havoc with the teleological thrust implicit in the notion of a transition to democracy. So, for example, Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia speaks to this imperative of rediscovery, and to the ambiguities of witnessing, in its blending of memoir and essayistic journeying into finer calibrations of conceiving both current and past lived experiences in relation to established narratives. Dlamini’s work retrospectively confirms a line of similar postapartheid works in which reflective, literary nonfiction emerges as a reverberant form of expression about who and where ‘we’ are, now, and how we have come to be in this place. This is a line of writing that, in keeping with global trends,31 begins to surge under postapartheid conditions. Inaugurated, in a sense, by Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and, earlier, Charles van Onselen’s epic oral history The Seed is Mine, postapartheid nonfiction comprises powerful writing32 that in one way or another addresses the problematic nexus of past and present, as concentrated in the notion of transition.
Despite the efflorescence of postapartheid writing, its apparent release from the straitjacket of political themes,33 it is also true that much of the new writing consists of narratives and counter-narratives that set up a dialectic around the very notion of a fresh start. That is to say, the idea of transition itself, in its denotation as a process or period of change from one state to another, a linear path that somehow yields the telos, or end point, of postapartheid – Desmond Tutu’s multicultural rainbow nation, the ‘democratic miracle’ of popular discourse – is questioned, problematised, cast in doubt or rendered ironic.34 While scholars such as Graham Pechey rightly warn that the term postapartheid ‘defines a condition that has contradictorily always existed and yet is impossible of full realisation’ (153), writers remain aware of the persistence of founding myths, the bedrock mythography of ‘new’ South Africans. The foundational event was instantly memorialised in SA, 27 April 1994: An Author’s Diary / ’n Skrywersdagboek, edited by André Brink, and it continues to infuse political commentary, invoking the promise – and disillusion – of the rainbow nation as a standard trope.35 Indeed, it remains a serviceable trope for all manner