Michael Titlestad

Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback

This article compares the representation of detection in two novels by Mike Nicol, The Ibis Tapestry (1998) and Payback (2008). Each concerns the fortunes of arms dealers. The first is a complex intertextual weave of the biography of (the fictitious) Christo Mercer, the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his tragedy Tamburlaine and reflections on the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second is a crime-thriller that concerns the legacy of the dubious struggle history of two former operatives now offering personal protection to wealthy foreign tourists in Cape Town. Both deal with the persistence of apartheid history into the post-apartheid dispensation and are equally sceptical of any simple notion of recovering the truths of that history. But the novels differ significantly in their mode and in their generic affiliations. The paper speculates about this difference: it argues that contemporary South African crime writing is inclined to reduce the complex questions regarding the elusive nature of historical truth to generic devices. Irony has, perhaps predictably, become the dominant literary mode in a South African present marked, not by agonized interrogations of our past, but by a worldly resignation to routine criminality and corruption. We have, our argument concludes, left the territory of the political for a politics of generic style.

The Foot Does Not Sniff: Imagining the Post-Anti-Apartheid Intellectual

Summary The South African literary institution is engaged in an examination of both its role in the history of apartheid and its potential futures. Originating in Edward Saids search for an alternative to a “politics of blame”, this article considers recent attempts to explore the possibility of “secular interpretation” in (and of) the South African context. Leon de Kocks trope of “the seam” and Mark Sanderss notion of “complicity” are considered. We characterise both as postdialectical descriptions of the interconnections that define South African (multivalent) being and mark its inscription. Further, we suggest that their postdialectical turn, despite the authors’ primary concern with the history of identity and historiography, advocates a persuasive mode of scholarship for engaging contemporary South African identity. Leaving the domain of scholarly debate, we turn to a literary representation of the contemporary South African intellectual. We look at the figure of Camagu in Zakes Mdas The Heart of Redness (2000) in the belief that he, caught as he is between contending cults of interpretation, embodies something of the practice of secular critique sought by Said, De Kock, and Sanders. Through Camagu, we maintain, it is possible for us to describe aspects of the dilemma of the “post‐anti‐apartheid” intellectual as well as the potential of a nondialectical engagement with both our past and our present.

Humility in a Godless World: Shame, Defiance and Dignity in Coetzee’s Disgrace

In the critical literature elicited by the publication of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in 1999, many of the authors address the issue of ethical responsibility in a context of diminished agency. In his article on perversity as a narrative principle, Michiel Heyns reflects upon Coetzee’s protagonist in Disgrace, David Lurie, as a character responding to situations initiated by his free will, but which always produce negative consequences. The perversity of life, its tendency to engender situational irony, the (negative) opposite of our intentions, appears as its most conspicuous feature. A human agent, such as David, may have the freedom to initiate a course of action, but he/she has very little control over its development. For Heyns, there is a metaphysical perspective permeating Coetzee’s novels, namely the assumption that neither history, nor the gods, is responsible for our experiences, which evolve randomly and invariably in a negative (perverse) direction. Recurrent frustrations, disappointments and defeats can only diminish the individual’s sense of effective agency. Heyns’s observations are reminiscent of the concerns of the ancient Greek Stoics, for whom one’s control was confined to one’s responses to circumstances. If one could not fashion them, then at least one could try to control and direct one’s reactions to life’s frequent misfortunes For Heyns, David’s multiple personal disasters produce a personal fall, to which he responds (quite stoically) with a ‘‘sympathetic imagination’’. This notion is one that is explicated thoroughly in Coetzee’s book, The Lives of Animals, in which the fictional animal rights advocate, Elizabeth Costello, delivers a series of lectures and

The Logic of the Apocalypse: A Clerical Rejoinder

Apocalyptic and millennial rhetoric is recycled in countless contemporary literary and cinematic works and is central in versions of progressive political critique. The first part of this essay describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a dystopian allegory mired in Judeo-Christian temporality and which, as a consequence, promotes a sentimental version of human salvation. The second considers the ways in which analogous renditions of catastrophism permeate (new) new left social and political critique. It argues that apocalyptic imagery and discursive structures stunt analysis by indulging simplistic patterns of history and event. The final section of the essay documents a project by Johannesburg-based artist, Jacki McInnes, and the photographer, John Hodgkiss, concerning the lives of the city’s informal recyclers. Their daily journeys are presented in (discursive and visual) counterpoint to the epic southward trek of the father and son in The Road. “Recycling” is presented as a trope of a contrary temporality, which suggests some of the ways in which apocalyptic logic is too teleological to capture the complexities of the lived realities of late-capitalism.

TALES OF WHITE UNREST: DAVID MEDALIE'S THE MISTRESS'S DOG: SHORT STORIES 1996–2010

conducted which comes to terms with this proliferation. My response to the term ‘post-transitional’ to describe post-apartheid literature which has sloughed off the conceit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is expressed in this review of David Medalie’s collection of short stories due for publication this year, The Mistress’s Dog: Short Stories 1996–2010 (Picador Africa, 2010). I was approached by Macmillan to edit the collection of twelve stories, nine of which have already appeared elsewhere (in various antholoNew Contrast) and two of which won awards (‘Recognition’ the Sanlam Short Story Award in 1996 and ‘The Mistress’s Dog’ the Thomas Pringle Award in 2008). My editorial intervention was minimal, but the process – of engaging one writer’s pathway across the post-

Allegories of white masculinity in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor

This essay argues that Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) contests the version of national allegory on which its interpreters have relied. It suggests that, in juxtaposing Frank Eloff’s pragmatism and Laurence Waters’ idealism, the novel opposes two ways of making meaning: the one a complex, polysemic mediation of the private and the public, and the other an idealistic version of history that identifies watersheds it subsequently takes to be constitutive of individuals’ consciousness. Following a brief description of allegory in post‐colonial critique, the article proposes that, if the novel is allegorical, it is so in a far more complex sense than schematic impositions of South African history allow. Rather, the novel engages allegory, as a practice of meaning, by foregrounding the process of identification in which individuals encounter, traverse and rework the history of their context.

The persistent castaway in South African writing

There is a small bundle of letters in the archives of the National Library in Cape Town that was assembled and dispatched, with a detailed explanation, by the black Presbyterian priest, John Knox Bokwe. At some point between 1907 and 1920, when he retired closer to his alma mater Lovedale Mission due to failing health, Bokwe wrote from his congregational seat, the United Free Church of Scotland at Ugie, East Griqualand (in the then Cape Colony), to Professor George Edward Cory at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. While appointed to the university as a professor of Chemistry, Cory sustained an avid interest in the history of the Eastern Cape frontier area, and assembled a wealth of documentation and information that was eventually published as the multi-volume work, The Rise of South Africa (191

Future Tense: The Problem of South African Apocalyptic Fiction

In addition to introducing this seminar of five contributions concerning South African apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, this article contextualizes and surveys the history of our literature of pessimistic prediction. It characterizes the representation of ‘dark horizons’ as predominantly the expression of white political, cultural and existential anxieties. Given this understanding, the argument considers the ideological valence and import of this literature. In particular, it explores relations between political history and affect, suggesting that apocalyptic prediction depends on a teleology that inhibits an ethical understanding of the complexities of South African political history. The article goes on to consider the creative and critical dangers of circumscribing the apocalyptic imagination and concludes with a defence of public pessimism.

Secular improvisations: the poetics of invention in Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view

Abstract Each of the four protagonists in The exploded view (2004) attempts to negotiate the field of post-apartheid signs, material objects and ideological possibilities and limits. In this article we analyse the limited capacity of each protagonist to make sense of the transforming world he inhabits. We characterize this limited capacity to make meaning by relating the four narratives comprising the novel to certain theoretical moves in the work of Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu respectively. We conclude that Vladislavić develops a sense of the ineluctably contingent nature of the quotidian based in a secular epistemology. That is, his protagonists experience simultaneously the failed promise of transcendence and their agency as dramatically qualified in the postcolonial context in which they live.

The Secularization of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry

In this article we read Mike Nicols The Ibis Tapestry (1998) as an intertextual novel that brings a postmodern inflection to its interrogation of the principles and practices of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Using the distant mirror of the life, work, and death of Christopher Marlowe, the novel unravels aspects of the ethical ideology and epistemological framing of the Commission in a way that, we argue, amounts to its secularization. This does not mean that Nicol presents a conservative subversion of attempts to accomplish postapartheid nation building. Rather, his novel is one of those literary works that deepens, extends, complicates, and intensifies the work of the TRC by casting doubt on its ecclesiastical framing and its foundational teleology. Further, this article is an attempt to redress the degree to which The Ibis Tapestry has been ignored in the study of South African literature. We argue that its unsettling dynamic needs to be considered if we are to do justice to the literary imprint of the Commission.