South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond

SOUTH AFRICAN GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series visit www.uwp.co.uk

South African Gothic

Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond

by

Rebecca Duncan

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2018

© Rebecca Duncan, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-246-7

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-248-1

The right of Rebecca Duncan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Zugl.: Giessen, Univ., (FB 05), Diss., 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Roger Ballen, Alter ego (2010), from Asylum of the Birds. Courtesy of the artist.

For Finn

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: South African Gothic, Heterotopia and Dissent

2 The Pastoral Unconscious: Gothic and Interregnum in Late Apartheid Fiction

3 Writing Phantoms: Gothic Mourning in the Time of Transition

4 Liberation/Neoliberalism: South African Horror after the Millennium

5 Coda: Towards Creative Dissent

Notes

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the product of many things. Its distant roots lie, in the first instance, in the English department at the University of Cape Town, which brought me into contact with both gothic and South African writing across my undergraduate and MA careers. Since then, South African Gothic has taken me from South Africa to Germany and to Scotland. It has entailed the challenges and rewards of learning a new language, and of multiple relocations. As a result, the valency of this book is – as is doubtless always the case – much wider and weightier than the mass of its collected pages. That it is also my doctoral research makes it all the more significant to me. For the studentship that has enabled me to bring this project to fruition I gratefully acknowledge the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

To my doctoral supervisors Professor Ulrich Horstmann and Professor Dale Townshend, I extend my profound thanks: for their unfailing guidance, their support and their enthusiasm. I also acknowledge, with appreciation, the support for this project provided by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and by the International PhD Programme (IPP), both at Giessen University. For their responsiveness and their constructive criticism, I thank, in particular, all the participants of the IPP colloquia for Jahrgang X. Special thanks are extended, too, to Dr Christina Schwanecke, without whom navigating the administrative labyrinth of a new institution would have been a far less painless experience.

To Rebekah Cumpsty, for reading unreasonably vast swathes of this book and for countless conversations, I am deeply and especially grateful. Esthie Hugo and Lobke Minter have also provided welcome extra pairs of eyes during this writing process, and I thank them both for their careful reading. For illuminating conversations that took place during the early stages of this project, my thanks to David Attwell, and to Meg Samuelson. To Matt Foley, for his advice – and for the conviction with which he is able to deliver the phrase ‘It’ll be fine’ – I am grateful too. And also to many others: Shannon Rollins, Laura Rose, Katharina Zilles, Liam Langan, Carolin Lubos, Glenn Moncrieff, Jen Burton, Neil McRobert, Tobias Gabel, Alexander Eilers, Elizabeth Kovach, Matt Forrest. All deserve particular mention.

I would also like to thank Sarah Lewis, commissioning editor at University Wales of Press, for guiding me assuredly through my first foray into monograph publishing, and also Andrew Smith, co-editor of UWP’s Gothic Literary Studies series.

For his patience, his painstaking proofreading, and his ceaseless support, my deepest thanks to Finn Daniels-Yeomans.

And finally, to my family, and to Lesley and Gordon Duncan especially: thank you.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission granted to reproduce extracts from the following works:

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974 Nadine Gordimer; by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, all rights reserved

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, published by Jonathan Cape; reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd © 1974

In the Heart of the Country: A Novel by J.M. Coetzee, copyright © 1976, 1977 J. M. Coetzee; by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, all rights reserved

In the Heart Of the Country by J. M. Coetzee, published by Secker; reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd © 1987

David’s Story by Zoë Wicomb, copyright © 2000 by Zoë Wicomb; reproduced by permission of The Permissions Company Inc., on behalf of The Feminist Press www.feministpress.org

Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor (Picador, 2017), copyright © 2001 Achmat Dangor; reproduced by permission of the author.

Single quotation marks are used throughout the book to indicate quoted material; double quotation marks are used as scare quotes, or to indicate a coined expression that has passed into wide usage.

1

Introduction: South African Gothic, Heterotopia and Dissent

In 1985, Reza de Wet published a short play in Afrikaans entitled Diepe Grond. The piece, which is set in a ruinous farmhouse, follows two incestuous and nocturnal siblings – Sussie and Frikkie – who spend their time re-enacting scenes of play from their childhood, digging, and functioning eerily as conduits for the voices of their dead parents. Much of the action derives from a visit the two receive from a lawyer named Grové, who comes to their ancestral farm to suggest that they sell the place and move to the city. This does not go down well. By turns, the siblings taunt the man and offer him hospitality, and at the end of the play, after they have trapped him in the house by removing part of his car’s engine, they hang him from a hook on the wall and flay him alive with a sjambok (leather whip). This, we then learn, is not their first killing: the bodies of their conservative parents lie scattered in pieces under the earth between the farmhouse and the family graveyard.

It seems hardly surprising, given all of this, that when Diepe Grond was translated into English in 2005, the title under which it appeared was African Gothic. And yet, this moniker is, in the South African context, an unusual choice. Until very recently, the designation ‘Gothic’ has had little currency within South African literary criticism. Gerald Gaylard, who has given the most comprehensive account to date of the possibility of a South African Gothic, identifies as the roots of this absence ‘a distinct embarrassment [that] lurks around the mere mention of the term, apparently because it appears all too obviously aesthetic and not political or committed enough’ for the contexts of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.¹ Apartheid, on which I will say more momentarily, designates the infamous system of racial ‘apart-ness’ brought into being in South Africa in 1948 by the National Party: that administration which, having invented four artificial categories of race (‘Black’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’ and ‘White’), attempted for the next four decades of its rule and with a psychotic fastidiousness to organise the world in its own segregated image. The imperatives to political consciousness and commitment that shape engaged South African literature over the second half of the twentieth century are thus imperatives that issue from the need to interrogate this regime, to bear witness to its absurd banality – in Hannah Arendt’s sense of the word – and to its atrocities. As a result, as André Brink writes, ‘an urge to report … aright was a prime mover in the work of most writers caught up in the culture of resistance’. A ‘need to tell things as they are’² is palpable, albeit in various forms, across black and white writing of the apartheid period, and this in turn is one basis for the insidious mistrust of the mythopoeic to which Gaylard attributes South African literary criticism’s distaste for the gothic.

A related critical question mark hangs – in the context of apartheid in particular – over gothic’s obvious predilection for violence, represented, as it is by de Wet, in excessive or speculative terms. Comments from J. M. Coetzee on the position of the author before the torture chamber are illuminating in this respect. Writing in the final decade of apartheid, amid growing insurrection and successive states of emergency, Coetzee identifies the impossibility of representing the obscenity of torture under conditions where torture is a routine – if obscured – state practice: there is ‘something tawdry about following the state’, he writes, about ‘making its vile mysteries the occasion for fantasy’.³ The writer is thus placed in an apparently irresolvable dilemma, faced with the options, each unacceptable, of either ignoring the prolific violence of apartheid’s security police, or, by representing it, risking conferring on it a ‘lugubrious grandeur’.⁴ To make recourse to the gothic, one might imagine, would be to succumb to the latter of these pitfalls. And yet, Gaylard reads Coetzee’s own solution to the problem of torture, elaborated in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), as achieved through gothic poetics – and it is worth noting, too, that Zoë Wicomb, writing the tortured body two decades later in her David’s Story (2001), draws very explicitly on the resources of gothic, as I will show.⁵ What should be becoming clear, then, is that even if critics have largely eschewed gothic as an interpretative category for South African literature, South African writers have engaged less gingerly with the gothic mode. Including in the work of authors known precisely for their political commitment – Nadine Gordimer springs to mind – gothic poetics are present in South African writing, and have been, as I go on to discuss here, in different forms from the fin de siècle to the post-millennial moment.

Indeed, the life of de Wet’s play – translated into English in 2005 and adapted as a film in 2014 – would seem to suggest that the profile of gothic in South African cultural production is currently rising. A series of texts published from around the second decade of the millennium confirms this trajectory. Gothic is being written in different styles by a host of authors whose work belongs to South Africa’s emergent post-millennial corpus: Lauren Beukes, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Sarah Lotz provide the best known examples here, but gothic forms are pronounced, too, in a growing canon of young adult fiction – which includes Lotz’s collaborative work under the pseudonym Lily Herne – and across different textual media. Josh Ryba and Daniel Browde’s graphic novel Rebirth (2012) rewrites colonial settlement in South Africa as a vampire narrative, for instance, and the photographer and visual artist Roger Ballen – whose work with ‘zef’ music phenomenon Die Antwoord will be familiar to international readers – frequently forays into shadowy territory that might legitimately be called gothic. Alongside this marked upswing in gothic production, a handful of critical essays – and Gaylard’s among them – demonstrates a slowly unfolding interest in gothic in South African literary criticism. Most notably, Dominic Head, Cheryl Stobie, Eva Hunter, Catherine Kroll and Jack Shear have – independently – considered gothic forms in the work of, among others, Coetzee, Angelina N. Sithebe, Karel Schoeman, Nadine Gordimer and Marlene van Niekerk.⁶ These interventions join with a wider and relatively established interest in postcoloniality in gothic studies – which has nonetheless commented only infrequently on South Africa⁷ – but also with recent work in world literature and postcolonial studies that demonstrates gothic’s currently growing traction in these circles.⁸

All of this together suggests the time has come for a criticism that takes seriously the presence of gothic forms in South African texts: one that explores the contexts to which these respond, which seeks to chart their shifting poetics and which examines their roles within South Africa’s literary imaginaries. What does South Africa gothic look like? What animates it? And what does it do? These questions are addressed in the following chapters, in which I consider gothic forms effulgent over the negotiated revolution that brought about the fall of apartheid in 1994. In this introduction, I will draw attention, too, to strains of gothic that appear about a century earlier in South African writing in English and Afrikaans, around the fin de siècle period of another revolution in the country’s history, but one that had to do primarily with gold. I will also lay the foundations for the arguments that will be pursued over the course of this book, salient across which – as will be clear from the above comments – is the connection between gothic narrative and moments of profound social upheaval or transformation. Concisely put, gothic as I understand it here, gives shape to anxieties that emerge with force under conditions of change. It deals with these by encoding them in forms – flexible and often locally specific – that render them visible and immediate, and which situate them beyond the pale of what is deemed rational and acceptable by a particular dispensation. In a secondary sense, and as a result of this function, gothic has also become a mobile vocabulary that can be summoned and adapted to a particular context in order consciously to interrogate the obscure and anxious places within the social organisation or history of that context, enabling in this way a mechanism of critique.

I will go on, in the next section, to adapt Fred Botting’s suggestion that gothic fictions present what Michel Foucault called heterotopian reflections of the worlds in which they are produced. And as the South African world shifts over the course of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, so gothic in South Africa has shifted as it has been appropriated to various ends. At the fin de siècle and in the first decades that followed it, gothic is marshalled, as I will show, to colonial and then nationalist causes: its hyperbolised figures of threat are deployed to crystallise violent conceptions of racial difference, or to shore up the unity of an imagined national collective. And yet, these strategies are never wholly successful: the language of the gothic is inevitably too closely connected to states of vulnerability, of real anxiety and disorientation, to articulate any kind of stable and ordered relationship. It is on this inherent instability, this sensitivity to a disordered world, that I will argue post-apartheid writers capitalise in their engagement of gothic forms. Gothic is deployed in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction to register sites of anxiety that emerge over the transition democracy, but where the disorder of such sites is refused by earlier writers, it is emphasised in later texts, which mobilise gothic’s apprehension of a world resistant to organisation to challenge organising efforts underway at different moments in South Africa’s recent history – or to imagine beyond these. Further still, I will suggest towards the end of this book, this dissenting action might also be used to productive ends, as a means through which to conceptualise less rigid social configurations. To map the forms that facilitate all of this, I turn now to the gothic in its early iterations.

Gothic, modernity and heterotopia: a ‘proliferation of monsters’

‘Gothic’, writes David Punter in the introduction to his formative The Literature of Terror, ‘is most usually applied to a group of novels written between the 1760s and 1820s’. If this were the term’s only denotation, he goes on, ‘it would be reasonably easy to … define’.⁹ In this case, gothic would refer to the medievalist tradition inaugurated by Horace Walpole with his Castle of Otranto (1764): to what Punter describes as ‘a fiction of the haunted castle, of heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors, of the blackly lowering villain’.¹⁰ This collection of tropes remains enduringly recognisable as gothic. However, over the more than two centuries since its inception as a literary designation, the sign ‘gothic’ has also become more complex, appearing in connection with multiple, varied forms of cultural production, and travelling – as this book itself shows – beyond the purview of eighteenth-century Britain. Gothic has witnessed ‘many changes and variations’ since its emergence.¹¹ It might describe, to offer only a sparse sample, the poetics of the ghost story, the American South as this is grimly imagined by William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, the postcolonial hauntings that proliferate in the work of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, or the horror fiction and film – emerging in increasingly diverse and digital forms – of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Supporting this diversity is the sense in which gothic’s iconic castles, its antique villains, have always – as Jerrold E. Hogle argues – been ‘quite obviously signs only of older signs’. They constitute what he terms ‘ghosts-of-the-counterfeit’: figures ‘broken off from past connections’.¹² Not concerned with historical authenticity, their early authors fashioned visions of the medieval from previous visions: from Shakespeare, from portraiture, from half-finished drawings of castles and cathedrals now long-ruined or perhaps entirely imaginary, entirely – as in Walpole’s Otranto – unseen. This unrootedness facilitates adaptation and re-appropriation, rendering gothic’s signature tropes wandering and flexible: a vocabulary through which varying meanings might be explored. It is to this kind of flexibility and variability that Dale Townshend refers when he writes that ‘Gothic is more a mode than a consistent, stable and formally recognizable genre, one that … continuously metamorphoses and reinvents itself across time’ – and also across space.¹³ And yet, a consideration of the poetics of what might – albeit with a degree of caution – be termed the original gothic continues to be instructive. It sheds light on the conditions under which gothic emerges, and on the strategies informing its response to these.

In his early assessment, Devendra Varma sets out the conventions of an eighteenth-century gothic in terms similar to those glossed by Punter above. He associates gothic with a ‘medieval atmosphere … [invoked by] castles, dungeons and lonely towers’, and also with ‘supernatural incidents’ – with, as in Otranto, animated paintings and bizarre or extravagant hauntings.¹⁴ These are characteristics that would be appropriated – perhaps most famously – by Ann Radcliffe, and which would transmute, in the hands of Matthew Lewis and other progenitors of horror, into ‘grotesque, ghastly and violently … superhuman fiction’.¹⁵ Varma’s analysis, largely a descriptive catalogue of the influences and poetics of gothic literature from the late 1700s, remains useful for the detail in which it maps a gothic lexicon of violence, superstition and medievalism – an iconography, significantly, that emerges under conditions of profound socio-economic transformation, in which the shape of British society was being re-made. Punter elaborates:

The period that saw the birth of the Gothic novel was that in which the early forces of industrialisation were producing vast changes in the ways people lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by the enclosure of land and by the labour demands of urban centred industry. The stability of an at least theoretically longaccepted social structure was being dissolved amid the pressure of new types of work and new social roles.¹⁶

I will return to the connection between gothic forms and circumstances of transition momentarily, but for now it suffices to note that gothic’s ominous conjuring of a feudal age appears just as the last vestiges of that age were giving way to a new and – as Fred Botting notes – self-professedly modern organisation of society.¹⁷

This was, after all, the moment of Enlightenment: the age – ostensibly – of ‘unexampled social, political and philosophical progress’.¹⁸ British society, at this time, was modelling its identity conspicuously on codes drawn from classical antiquity, prioritising ‘civilised, humane and polite civic culture’, and recovering from Greek and Roman sources blueprints for ‘virtuous behaviour, [and] harmonious social relations’.¹⁹ The construction of this present and its ideals as ‘modern’ emerges, Botting writes, through an ‘extensive rewriting of history’.²⁰ It required the postulation of a break between present and past, in which the latter came to appear ‘a barbaric and primitive stage, the dominance of which had been discontinued’.²¹ And as enlightened social values were imagined to succeed a baser, more violent organisation, so enlightened modes of knowing were held to triumph over the supposedly cruder understanding of that earlier time. The eighteenth century was as much an age of self-conscious social refinement as it was envisioned – Terry Castle writes – to be ‘the expansive, unruffled, serenely confident Age of Reason’, and this designation is itself bound up with the modern schism.²² In the wake of the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, Bruno Latour locates a consciously produced ‘break in the regular passage of time’, which creates the age of reason as ‘a new regime’, one presumed to be ‘continually exiting from an obscure age’.²³ Following Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno famously and searingly describe the Enlightenment programme in similar terms, as oriented by a protracted expulsion of obscurity: it was, they write, ‘the disenchantment of the world’ intended to ‘dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge’.²⁴ Thus the Enlightenment seeks to ‘establish man as the master of nature’, which ‘stripped of its qualities’ becomes the ‘stuff of mere classification’.²⁵ For Latour, the distinction between past and present that defines the eighteenth century as modern is the mechanism par excellence of this categorising enlightened rationality.²⁶ Its binaric logic is replicated as the hallmark of what he calls the ‘modern Constitution’:²⁷ an epistemological protocol which seeks to divide the human from a measurable and taxonomisable nonhuman world. On Latour’s view, what is ostensibly left behind following the temporal rupture is a ‘pre-modern’ disposition that – insensitive to the putative salvations of the binary – insists on ‘making a horrible mishmash of things’ by animating the universe, rendering it opaque and mysterious, in ways that admit of the numinous and the supernatural.²⁸

Something of Latour’s pre-modernity is discernible in gothic’s superstitious and primitive vision of history, which thus appears instrumental in the imaginative instantiation of a modern disjuncture. Gothic emerges, Botting confirms, as ‘a point of cultural consolidation and differentiation’ within an eighteenth-century British ‘culture defining itself in opposed terms’.²⁹ With its scenes of medieval tyranny and its flagrant supernaturalism, gothic offers its enlightened audiences ‘a reconstruction of the past as the inverted mirror image of the present, its darkness allows the reason and virtue of the present a brighter reflection’.³⁰ In this way, Botting suggests that gothic – at least at first glance – facilitates the projection of what Michel Foucault describes as a ‘utopia’ in his ‘Of Other Spaces’. Utopias, on Foucault’s account, are sites that have ‘a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They reflect society itself in its perfected form, or else society turned upside down.’³¹ Insofar as gothic presents such reflections, it does so in the ‘upside down’ – or perhaps dystopian – form. Texts of this kind apprehend the defining ideals of the contexts through which they circulate – social harmony, rational thought – but they subject these, as Botting has suggested, to negation, with the effect that positive iterations of dominant eighteenth-century values and rationalist modes of knowing are affirmed, made to cohere as the substance of an implied utopia. Even, then, as it inverts the moral and social codes of its present, gothic continues to endorse these codes, ‘deliver[ing] a sense of discontinuity’ with the history on the page that produces a feeling of modernity. In this way gothic’s ‘utopic mirror’³² preserves the logic of Latour’s modern Constitution intact: the text presents its readerships with visions from which they might decisively turn away – which might be situated behind the secure barrier of a modern break – and thus it locates its audiences implicitly in a present world structured by the separating action of categorisation.

And yet, at the same time as they engage their readerships in binary processes of identification and rejection, gothic fictions also serve to complicate these categories, to jam the operation, as it were, of the differentiating mechanism. This second, less clearly discernible function emerges with that peculiarly labile quality of the gothic lexicon to which Hogle refers, and which renders archaic gothic figures adaptable bearers for diverse meanings. As tropes of this kind offer gothic’s readerships visions of a dark and barbarous history, they also – as Punter has begun to suggest above – respond to anxieties that are alive and breeding in their present. Fear is – Punter writes elsewhere – perhaps the most enduringly stable marker of gothic production across its varied history,³³ and the fears that animate eighteenth-century gothic’s impressions of a sinister and supernatural feudal past arise amid the socio-economic shifts of nascent industrialisation in its contemporary moment.

The social, moral and philosophical modernity of the Enlightenment occurs in tandem, we are reminded, with modernity as capitalist modernisation: with transformations in the organisation of space, time, work and community that characterise the shift from a feudal economy to one founded on private property and wage labour – as they characterise subsequent shifts from one capitalist mode of production to another. Such transitional phases, successively occurring across the history of capital as Marx showed,³⁴ are invariably also periods of heightened disorientation and unease: they are defined, writes Immanuel Wallerstein, by ‘wild oscillations of all those structures and processes we have come to know’, and this in turn ‘lead[s] to considerable anxiety’.³⁵ Stephen Shapiro explores the manifestation of this anxiety in gothic productions, which, he notes, ‘cluster’ around the ends of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries – periods that mark transformations in the modes of capitalist accumulation.³⁶ Drawing on Marx and on Wallerstein, Shapiro sees gothic as inevitably tied to the disruptions of these moments. In them, an existing social order is incorporated into a new, complex mode of production, which, geographically divided and entailing exploitative labour practices, is both frequently experienced as violent, and remains – significantly – difficult to grasp in its totality from the ground. Punter – also informed by Marx in this instance – fleshes out the bewildering sense of alienation that emerges under such conditions in respect of the eighteenth-century rise of a laissez-faire economy. He notes that while this demonstrably facilitated the ascendency to great wealth of certain individuals, its operation appeared ‘utterly mysterious’ to most people.³⁷ For a population grappling with low wages and unregulated labour conditions, the promise of bourgeois prosperity, although seemingly imminent, remained in practice largely unattainable. Indeed, E. J. Clery points out that across the eighteenth century, the ‘inscrutable causalities’ guiding the distribution of