Losing the Plot
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
Copyright © Leon de Kock 2016
Published edition © Wits University Press 2016
Photographs in Chapter Six © Greg Marinovich
First published in 2016
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Copyedited by Inga Norenius
Proofreader: Lisa Compton
Index by Clifford Perusset
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For Jeanne-Marie
CONTENTS
2 From the subject of evil to the evil subject: Cultural difference in postapartheid South African crime fiction
3 Freedom on a frontier? The double bind of (white) postapartheid South African literature
4 The transitional calm before the postapartheid storm
5 Biopsies on the body of the ‘new’ South Africa
6 Referred pain, wound culture and pathology in postapartheid writing
7 Fiction’s response
Notes
Works cited
Index
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Ashraf Jamal, who twisted my arm one afternoon in 2013 and convinced me to write a book on postapartheid literature. In the three years of reading and writing that followed, Jeanne-Marie proved to be a consistently outstanding interlocutor, loving friend and partner, and so this book is dedicated to her.
I owe debts of gratitude both big and small to Michael Titlestad, Darryl Accone, Jean and John Comaroff, Dawie Malan, Frederik de Jager, Imraan Coovadia, Donald Brown, Jonny Steinberg, Kavish Chetty, Willem Anker, Marlene van Niekerk, Niq Mhlongo, Francis Galloway, Fourie Botha, Roshan Cader, Veronica Klipp, Catherine du Toit, Colette Knoetze, Sally-Ann Murray, Pete Colenso, Dawid de Villiers, Tilla Slabbert, Michiel Heyns, Dominique Botha, Christo van Staden, Etienne van Heerden, Maria Geustyn, Wamuwi Mbao, Charis de Kock, Jane Rosenthal, Cuthbeth Tagwirei, Eben Venter, Adi Enthoven, Paul Voice, Peter Midgley, Craig MacKenzie, Tommaso Milani, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Raymond Suttner, Corina van der Spoel, John Eppel, Hettie Scholtz, Ingrid Winterbach, Sandra Platt-Tentler, Kerneels Breytenbach, Luke de Kock, Peter Wilhelm, Ned Sparrow, Gareth Cornwell, Hans Pienaar, Veronique Tadjo, Lesley Cowling, Gary de Kock, Dirk Klopper, Stephen Clingman, and still many others. At Johns Hopkins University (JHU) over the course of 2015 and 2016, I benefited from my association with The Writing Seminars and the Department of English. I am grateful to Eric Sundquist, Christopher Nealon, Douglas Mao, Sharon Achinstein, Sally Hauf, Tracy Glink, Mary Jo Salter, David Yezzi, Amy Lynwander and Yvonne Gobble for making my work at JHU yield such rich rewards.
Lynda Gilfillan’s first round of editing the manuscript constituted a formidable engagement and led to many substantial improvements to the text, for which I am more than usually grateful. I feel thankful, also, for Inga Norenius’s perspicacious second round of editing.
This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa, and by the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA). Opinions and conclusions expressed are those of the author.
Some of the chapters published here are more developed versions of previously published material. Chapter 2 is derived, in part, from the article ‘From the Subject of Evil to the Evil Subject: “Cultural Difference” in Postapartheid South African Crime Fiction’, published in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Volume 16, Issue 1, 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17533171.2014.950483. It is published here with the permission of Taylor and Francis Group.
Chapter 3 grew out of the article ‘Freedom on a Frontier? The Double Bind of (White) Postapartheid South African Literature’, first published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature Volume 46, Number 3, July 2015, pp. 55–89, DOI 10.1353/ari.2015.0022. This version is published with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Part of Chapter 6 was first published as ‘Postapartheid as wondkultuur binne ’n patologiese openbare ruimte: Mark Gevisser se Lost and Found in Johannesburg’ in LitNet Akademies, Jaargang 13, Nommer 1, Mei 2016, available online: http://www.litnet.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LitNet_Akademies_13-1_DeKock_272-293.pdf.
1
Introduction
This is not a study of postapartheid South African literature. Rather, it is study in that vast field of writing. I do not believe a coherent a study of this dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus is possible, short of the encyclopaedic method (a curated series of topics written by many different writers, or alphabetical listings). Such a ‘companion’ approach remains the default option, and it is duly taken by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, along with their 41 fellow contributors to The Cambridge History of South