Rhodes University

Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature Is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa Author(s): Leon de Kock Source: English in Africa, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Oct., 2005), pp. 69-83 Published by: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40239044 . Accessed: 27/06/2013 04:31
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Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa1
Leon de Kock

In the mid-1990s I devised an English Honours course for students reading South African literature at Unisa called "Issues in South African Literary Studies." At the time, my feeling was that the object of study was so difficult to grasp cleanly or positively because of its history - a history formed in multiple acts of definitional contestation - that it would be more informative, more conceptually honest, so to speak, simply to ask the following question: Does 'South African Literature' exist, and if so, in what way or ways can it be said to do so? This turned out to be a useful question for teaching because it opened rather than closed pathways of thought on a subject riddled with exclusions. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of 1994, the provisional and convenient, if perhaps illusory, closure provided by the coming of democracy allowed a certain retrospective clarity. It was a good time to sum up, to take stock, even if it was confusion, contradiction and misalignment that we were totting up; at least we had the space provided by the turn towards discursive meta-reflection, a global wave that was too strong to discount entirely, and which provided greater tolerance for acknowledging referential fracture. Let me hang on to this phrase, 'referential fracture,' for a while. The reason I was able to ask the question in the first place, 'Does South African Literature Exist,' and make it educative, was that it was one of the few questions one could ask about the field that did not remove the issue of referential fracture, namely the tearing away, or tearing apart, of customary means of self-understanding in a context challenged by otherness, which I felt was fundamental to the historical constitution of this unsteady 'field.' inAfrica32 No. 2 (October 2005): 69-83 English

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DEKOCK LEON

Quite simply, I would ask my students whether 'South African literature' was meant to be read as the one or the many: the 'one' that was often implicitly assumed to be normative, namely South African literature in 'English,' in global consumption, including some works in translation from the country's several 'native' tongues, or the many literatures in South Africa, seen either in their singularity or their totality. I would ask whether it was not wishful thinking to see the many as an interacting, cross-referential entity, formed as they were in the various breaks occasioned by orthographic and political divarication under colonial and then apartheid design. In the case of Afrikaans, it was a literaturethat often set itself against the others in an act of self-preservation. Whose literaturewas it, then, when one invoked the term 'South African' as pointing to a composite body of writing? Was it English, isiZulu, Tswana, Afrikaans - and which variant of Afrikaans might that be? On the 'English' side, the lines of fracture spread even further. Was it the imperial survey, the colonial fireside tale, the oral panegyric 'rendered' and mediated into written English for scholarly use, the settler's diary, the cosmopolitan modernist poet born in Natal, the Bushman invocation of shamanic passage, rendered into English, the written tales of Xhosa folklore, later translated, the eventually-to-become Nobel prizewinning novelists and their many lessprominent fellows writing pedestrian social realism? The list goes on. The rainbow-wash of sentiment which was so alluring during Nelson Mandela's honeymoon presidency would not by itself bind the breaks and the bits and pieces. In fact, the very event of authorized oneness - perhaps even dangerously authorized oneness - was compelling us to take a hard look at the breaks, now that we were free of the immediate need to defend the existence of South African literature itself as a site of struggle, now that we were free of the compelling urge to validate our identities. If the question I asked then was, "Does 'South African Literature'exist at all" - and if the answer was, yes, perhaps, but only as a signifier whose reference is complicated, divergent and contradictory, held together by the need to proclaim a South African oneness against the forces of division, of tearing and splitting, then it strikes me as inevitable that we now ask the next question, "Does 'South Africa Literature' still exist," now, in the post-antiapartheid era, to use Loren Kruger's term? (Kruger 35). If, that is, the fractured existence of this unstable field was rendered as a working totality by the need to mend the denial of humanity implicated in apartheid and its direct forebear, segregationism, then what do we have now, now that our various acts of writing are no longer held in this clasp of denial and counterstatement? Our many identities have been affirmed by constitutional

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proclamation; our oneness sung forth over the airwaves, proclaimed in the payoff lines of the marketing industry. Our putative singularity has become profitable even in business, despite the legions of the poor refusing to disappear. On the superstructural,symbolic level, in the founding terms of the nation, the paradox of multiplicity in oneness, singularity in diversity, has been resolved. Some would say over-resolved, but the question has now become pressing: Has 'South African literature,' as we came to know it in the years leading up to this ambiguous resolution, finally outlived its usefulness? In saying this I am suggesting that the real bind, or seam, holding together what was in reality always a fantastically diverse body of writing, was political. Political in the deep sense as a contest over terms of identity and forms of belonging. Further, I am suggesting that the political bind was an impulse in the writing to engage with the seams of breaking and mending, of denial and counter-affirmation, of overwriting and rewriting, of splitting and splicing. My contention is that this great drama, this segue of rending and reconnecting, was compellingly insistent because it derived from a battle over people's very hearts and souls, their deepest notions of themselves, or what we have come to call, in various theoretical terminologies, their identities, their subjectivities and their subject-positions. This, in my view, is where the entity that we used to call 'South African literature' found its urgency, its deep reason for being. But in order to validly ask my second question - does 'South African literature' still exist; does it still have a raison d'tre that is even remotely as powerful? - I must offer more detailed argument to convince you of the validity of my first question, namely did it ever exist except as a deep seam, a place where identities were compulsively staged and restaged in defiance of panoptical grand narratives (some would call them 'national' narratives) that sought to rework the fabric of identity within all-encompassing forms of modernity but in trying to do so occasioned ruptures and breaks in the fabric of our historical destinies, in the flesh of our being. I have developed a theory of the seam elsewhere,2 so my restaging of it now will necessarily be a recapitulation. In presenting a shorter version of the argument, I will frame it in the past tense, as a matter of history perhaps, unlike its first appearance as a case for the continuing present. This is because I am no longer certain that our current condition continues to be captured in the poetics of the seam, and because I have begun to wonder whether, if the theory holds any water at all, it is for that earlier manifestation of our literature,the one whose continued existence I am now beginning to question.

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LEON DE KOCK

In that argument, I noted that South Africa, in the first instance, and to an extraordinarily heightened degree, was a country that was neither here nor there, neither this nor that but a place, in Breyten Breytenbach's words, of "glorious bastardization" (Breytenbach 1998). In my terms in the "seam" essay, this translated into the conception of a country charged with thoroughly interstitial identities. This, I wrote, was because the country, as an entity, owed its very existence to the fact that it came into being within the clasp of the local and the imperial, a conjunction that was both physically and epistemically violent. The various acts of provisional synthesis consequent upon this conjunction - that is, the various constructions of nationhood - tended to compromise all identities, some more than others. What remains true in the moment of historical retrospection is that to be 'South African' has historically meant no longer fully to be something else, no longer to be plainly something one might style as uncomplicatedly as 'Dutch,' 'Xhosa,' 'English,' 'Tswana,' or any of the other language and cultural formations making up the country's brimming residual fund of identities. The scale of heterogeneity has tended to defeat the various statist models of social organization such as segregationism and apartheid, and their different mediums, such as the Commonwealth and the Nationalist state. Put another way, these models of modernity have, in the short term, defeated the recognition of difference. But such defeat has tended to be temporary: the return of the repressed has been a compulsive tendency, and its staging ground has all too often been in acts of engaged literature, perhaps the real heart of the term 'South African literature.' During the long conversations that made up pre-democratic South African writing, from the earliest seafaring accounts right up to the work of black consciousness poets, from the praise song to the rap song, such deep engagement found its focus in the struggle for representational veracity, which is a compulsive return to contested terms of identity, tremors and quakes in the fractures of reference. I have long argued that textual production should be seen as integral to various attempts to 'make' South Africa, in various forms and under different narrative impulses. In more abstract terms, we have seen a concatenation of self-inscription and othering in the midst of what one might call a scene of 'foundationaP difference namely, the territory before it came under the sway of singular rule or statehood. In South African writing in the broadly pre-democratic phase, this translated into a crisis of inscription, a profound insecurity or a severe to the pronouns 'we' or 'us.' arrogance when shifting from the pronoun This representational slippage has haunted all manner of writers in South Africa, marking, as it does, the quixotic attempt to bring a certain order of composure to a place of profound unsettlement. And wherever fictional

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is imported into a text, much of the writingthathas set itself up composure as coveringSouthAfrica and its people, in a pluralsense, has been marked of homogenization and erasure.The peculiarquality by variousmechanisms or of this writinghas been a sense of overextension, enervation,fabulation fixity as the crisis of inscriptionencircles the text, like the waters that - the realiaandthe andrenderits relationto its referent encircleAdamastor, problematic. peopleof SouthAfrica increasingly In my original 'seam' essay, I cited Adamastoras one of the great Put simply, Africa in literaryrepresentation. examplesof such problematic Camoens'sepic becomes a footnote to Greco-Roman myth. The scene of physical encounterin The Lusiads, in which John Purves claimed to find "our portion of the Renaissance"(in Gray, "Camoensand the Poetry of SouthAfrica"2; emphasisadded)and in which StephenGraydiscerned"the white man's creationmyth of Africa"(Gray, SouthernAfricanLiterature a representational impasseas 15-37), is matchedby a crisis of inscription, from the I is clear itself. So Table Mountain as much, argue, big at intended referent erases the that cumbersome effectively mythicaloverlay this point, the Cape of Good Hope, and behind it the populousinteriorof SouthernAfrica, leaving in its place a bad-tempered, fairy-talegiant. If man's creationmyth of the 'white it this crisis that is supposed anything, Africa' carriesforwardinto the culturalmemoryencodedin SouthAfrican letters:a crisis of writingin and aboutone of the greatseams of the modern world. Noel Mostert,who in his work the term'seam' fromhistorian I borrowed seam to the world,between Frontiersclaims that "if thereis a hemispheric Occident and Orient, then it must lie along the eastern seaboard of Africa"(Mostertxv). I chose to explore the concept of the seam, which to the more commonnotion of Mostertleft undeveloped,as an alternative dimension of crossI felt that the the frontier,because representational To see dimensions. as its material borderconflictdeservedas muchattention in SouthAfricafollowing colonizationin termsof a the crisis of inscription 'seam,' I wrote, deliberately conjoiningthe literalwith the figurai,was to that seeks to suture see the sharppoint of the nib as a stitchinginstrument is thereforethe site of a The seam, fundamentally, the incommensurate. differently, joiningtogetherthatalso bearsthe markof the suture.Expressed the postulateis that the crisis of inscriptiongermaneto writing in South Africa, in the broadlypre-democratic phase, was markedby a paradoxical the incommensurate was or is process:on the one handthe effortof suturing and on the an attemptto close the gap that defines it as incommensurate, bearsthe markof its own crisis,the seam. otherthisprocessunavoidably

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To summarize, then, the ubiquitous South African 'frontier,' a place of what I then styled as 'radical heterogeneity,' has historically constituted one of the great meeting points: the ground, in my argument, of simultaneous cultural convergence and divergence, where a representational seam is the paradox qualifying any attempt to imagine organicism or unity. Further, a compulsive tendency in cultural assertion appears to be the attempt to flatten the seam or imagine it differently. Finally, my proposition held that the seam was the place where difference and sameness were hitched together - where they were brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms. South Africa offers an acute example of the crisis of the sign in colonial and postcolonial identity formation in the wake of imperialism. Historically, what we came to call 'South Africa' as a third-person singular entity came into being only by virtue of tumultuously clashing modalities. It required a series of extraordinarily violent ruptures - genocide of the Bushmen and massive slaughter among the Nguni-speakers in the 100 Years War on the Eastern frontier in the nineteenth century, to name just two examples before hegemonic political entities preceding the creation of 'South Africa' could come into being. My argument was that the violence witnessed on the grounds of the territory was matched by a violence of representation, a fracturing of such proportions that no wonder South African cultural politics witnessed, in the late phases of apartheid, what Louise Bethlehem called a "rhetoric of urgency," a deep and pervasive attempt to weld signifier to referent, to bypass the fraudulent contingencies of the sign and seek a place where things meant what they said. On a primary level, I argued, the country had witnessed great volumes of crassly ethnocentric cross-cultural representation of the kind common to colonial occupations and racist mentalities - the sign as a stabbing needle. On a secondary level, a more subtle and unavoidable doubleness came to inhabit every representational act ever made in the efforts to stitch difference into sameness (as the missionaries did, all equal under one God, but even better in the same clothes, too), or to pretend that sameness - equality - actually inhered in formalized difference, as in apartheid's elaborate discourses upon being 'different but equal' In my original argument, therefore, a crisis of representation was endemic to the cultural and geographical conjunction that had become South Africa, and that 'it,' the country conceived as a third-person entity, was a seam that could be undone only at the cost of its existence. Its very nature, its secret life, inhered in the paradoxes of the seam. In terms of engaged literature, doubleness and representational recalibration were almost the sine qua non of what came to be read as serious work. Prior to the democratic moment, it

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was only those South Africa authors who 'hit the seam' directly and trenchantly, such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Paton, Mphahlele, Fugard, Brutus, Serote, Breytenbach and Brink, who got taken up in the world of letters at large - who became 'global' South African writers. Perhaps to be a 'South African' writer in the full sense, I wrote then, required imaginative inhabitation of the seam as a deep symbolic structure. The seam was also a line of struggle, the line where attempts were made to render misrepresentationvisible to a bigger audience than the closed community of apartheid South Africa. Writers were caught in either-or positions: dissident or conformist, exiled or working within the system, black or white, pro- or anti- the cultural boycott. These polarizing forces, I argue, were inherent in the context of the time. And in the hothouse environment created by enforced isolation under apartheid,literatureand publishing flourished under crisis. Our writers could take on a sense of grave importance by virtue of writing in and about one of the great crisis points in the world. South Africa had become one of the world's grand allegories of racial strife, of the struggle for justice and truth in the wake of successive waves of imperial, colonial and neocolonial misrule. Now, of course, in the post-anti-apartheidphase, the critical question is whether this great drama of representationaldoubleness, created in the clasp of denial and misnaming, of repression and false singularity, this constituting ground of 'South African literature,' has not been so dissipated and dissolved by the conceptual and actual freedoms of democracy that, perhaps, 'South African literature' as we came to know it under conditions of struggle, no longer fully exists. The democratic moment, to use that convenient figure of historical description, contained some delicate ironies. The convergence of globalization with the fall of the Berlin Wall, at roughly the same time that South Africa began to enter its democratic period, literally changed the world in which democracy had been imagined. Freedom was gained, but suddenly a socialist freedom no longer found secure correlatives in the larger world, precisely that larger world where the inspiration for socialism had been derived. Instead, it was rapidly becoming an economically and technologically borderless world in which nations stood and fell not by their constitutions and their entrenched institutions, not by their ability to subsidize the underprivileged in their ranks, but by their competitiveness in securing fixed direct investment, the foreign capital flows which determine individual countries' ability to generate jobs in a piratical global economy. The national stage, which had loomed so large in the age of the modern state, now became a mere matine show, a mere moment in the polyphonic strobe-play of the postmodern world, in which multiple

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resonances of the global and the local, the national and the transnational,or ensembles thereof, mixed offerings and recombinations, increasingly became a dominant rhythm. Similarly, what we used to know as 'South African literature' in the engaged sense, as struggle literature, and all the previous forms of writing in the folds of the seam, also encountered what can only be described as a change of texture, or medium. Suddenly the lid was off, the allegory of racial strife over, the division summarily healed. Of course I am foreshortening dangerously for the sake of historical perspective. Of course I am talking superstructureratherthan material base. Many of these resolutions remained largely symbolic, largely conceptual, and still are, while the actualities of division and economic disparity stubbornly persisted, and still do. But the conceptual is to a large extent the staging ground of serious writing. Granted, the country still needed the rough therapy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, still needed texts like Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying or Achmat Dangor's Kafka 's Curse and his Bitter Fruit. But even in these texts, and similar ones, there appears to be a shift from the vortex of a single obsession, a deep symbolic polarity, a compulsive seam, to a more openended and perhaps less clearly framed scene of contest. On the one hand, writers whose drumbeatmay have been too firmly established in the arena of what we used to call 'protest literature' perhaps began to find themselves without an audience, or without the immediate spur to take up their repertoires. On the other hand, artists could begin to play a far more improvisational beat, one that increasingly diverged from the well-worn moves. Take, for example, Nadine Gordimer's comment in the Times s Curse: "[It] has been the surprise Literary Supplement on Dangor's Kafka* of the hybrids, an interchange of events and identities, the latter doubled by the wildly mixed blood of its characters, Malay-African-White, AfrikanerJewish, in the swirl of post-apartheid. The prose is that rare achievement, an equivalent, in lyrical energy and freshness, to its subject. This is a South Africa you haven't encountered in fiction before."3 Gordimer herself, in her evolution from My Son's Story (1990) and The House Gun (1998), on the one hand, to The Pickup (2001), makes a remarkable move outwards, from closely observed turns of fate in a society where race and gender continue to show grim ironic potential, to a parable of how issues of national identity are traversed by the surges of global and transnational flows, means and potentialities. One might discern a similarly outward move in the works of South Africa's other Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee (whose emigration is perhaps significant in this regard), from Disgrace in 1999 to Elizabeth Costello in

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2003, although that shift was already prefigured by the appearance of The Lives of Animals in 1999, alongside Disgrace. The work of Athol Fugard has seen a similar widening of scope, a broader play of theme and content. One can make like-minded arguments for Vladislavic, Mda, Jamal, Duiker and other writers who spanned this transition from anti-apartheid to post-antiapartheid. It is also my view that some of the post-2000 writers publishing out of South Africa more recently have taken this bigger space for play and improvisation to extents that make their work only incidentally 'South African' in the old sense. These writers are South African in a very different way. (I am thinking here of Henrietta Rose-Innes's The Rock Alphabet and Finuala Dowling's WhatPoets Need, to name just two.) However, I would rather not go into a ratings game, an evaluation of individual works. That is a different and importantproject, one that we need to perhaps think seriously of resuming, just to keep track of a literary industry that has become diverse and productive in the last few years so much so that I think the academy is once again several years behind the game. The larger point is that it may be a good idea to question the continued existence of 'South African literature' as a composite entity, as something more than physical contiguity of cultural objects or a confluence of expression from the same politically defined geography. That confluence may or may not speak together in conversation. And the lines of confluence are taking on shapes that we may still decide are quite different from anything that has gone before. If we argue that the seam of compulsive identity formation under conditions of referential fracture has been undone, then the lines of affiliation, logically, are free to go where they like. The disappearance of the obvious struggle, which contained 'South African literature' as we used to know it, means our struggles can now leave behind the absolute contests and the grim polarities of the past. This is really a very simple point. But its implications are profound, and I am not sure that we always allow ourselves to entertainthem exuberantly,joyfully enough. From the point of view of reading, of being a reader, a subject who is no longer necessarily trapped in South Africa by politics and immigration restrictions, the embrace of less grim parameters means, plainly, a more liberating repertoire for the improvisation of individual identity. In that sense, globalization and the drift towards transnationalism has created options for being that render possible more complex constellations, more choice. And if that is the case, I want to say that I salute the death of 'South African literature' as we used to know it. Frankly, it was often a place of asphyxiating repetition and nausea-inducing pain, a play of stereotype and antitype which, even in the hands of a master such as Herman Charles

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Bosman or Es'kia Mphahlele, could become too singularly obsessive, to much about race and twisted irony, or in the hands of other writers, too much about skin, skull and jackboot. If our liberation from the actual torturers,the Special Police and the Vlakplaas killers, has taken away the immediate prospect of sanctioned terror, then our secondary liberation is from the compelling urgency to deal with the politics, first, before taking a wider view. Liberation first, then education. Many of you will remember that as defenders of 'South African literature' against its detractors among the academic snobs in our English departments,we would refer to Bertolt Brecht validating the social and political function of art, and we would quote Walter Benjamin's famous line, "Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism."That was 'South African literature' - it was a mood, a way of feeling about mustering all the symbolic capital we could against those bent on keeping us in the grey chambers of racial governance, censorship and neo-colonial lordship. In some senses, it really was as simple as that. But we no longer have such clear and simple urgencies, such absolute contests - the space for dialogue and exploration has become infinitely more diffuse. In addition, there is another, very important point. Ashraf Jamal, in his strong turn away from Coetzee's acid regard for South Africa as a stunted and 'unlovable' country, challenges us to reconceive our home ground as a place, preeminently, of love (Jamal 52). This is a matter of no small import to see it as a place of love before we have recourse to the reflex of seeing it as beyond love; for Jamal, the post-anti-apartheidscene contains the striking danger of ennui where our oneness takes on the hue of /difference (42), of letting it all go, so to speak, now that the big and exhausting struggles have been settled. To say goodbye to 'South African literature' in the old sense - as the doppelganger of oppression, as obstinate and heroic refutation, as the 'unlovable' site of struggle - is to embrace a liberation of no small importance. The re-entry into the world, as the phrase goes, like the our readmission into the world's political pageantry and the world's border posts, is an emphatic shift, an opening into greater choices of modality and selfpositioning, not to mention re-energized self-assertion. I want to offer you a recent history of my own reading, as a limited example of such recombinations of affiliation, of how self-mapping can now become more improvisational, with feeling. Because I still have a residual sense that English-speaking scholars continue to imagine South African writing as normatively English, I try to read Afrikaans writing when I can, to break this habit in myself, too. Recently, I took on Marlene van Niekerk's new novel, Agaat, because I knew that Van Niekerk's work is seldom less

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than momentous in its perspectives, scope and concerns. But even with the expectation of a big encounter, Agaat still shook every tenet I had held of what South African fiction might be: I had not before encountered such Joycean play of word and idea in a South African work of fiction, such deep inhabitation of historical lives from the most acute of narrativeperspectives: a half-blind, paralyzed matriarch of the land, a woman with motor-neurone disease whose last refuge is a mind that remembers every last ironic detail of an entire life, reconfiguring the course of a century. The novel is written with mastery of a kind that necessitates literary re-evaluation in several senses, if that is still our work: of the possibilities for probing, large-scale narrative in South African letters; of an expanded capacity for feeling of the kind that Jamal is so intent upon us recalling into our work; and of the recombination of form in South African narrative writing in ways that are ambitious in a big sense. Van Niekerk has set a new standard for the whole of South African writing. Then, with Van Niekerk' s lyrically, iteratively woven narrative fabric in my mind - two of the novel's key metaphors are embroidery and angles of vision in mirrors - I drifted into reading a work of collected translations of Jorge Luis Borges's poems, lyrics where mirrors often become ways of persona, in ways that resonate with Van Niekerk. unsettling the eye of the At a book launch I picked up a copy of the controversial recent Afrikaans novel, Kontrei, by an author who calls himself Kleinboer, in which unrepentantly obsessive and lovingly described mercenary sex between the Afrikaans male protagonist and scores of black prostitutes in Johannesburg is played out to an extent that is innovative for South African writing of any kind, if not redemptive or, in the last resort, resolved in any metacognitive frame. For that, I found resonance by stumbling onto Michel Houellebecq's novel, Atomised, which took the question of disembodied sexual consumption to an artistically more finely conceived level than Kontrei ever could. In Houellebecq's novel, life in an age of severe atomization is unforgivingly depicted, such that the attenuation of human capacities for love runs parallel with the utter depletion of sex as a pathway to the vital instincts or to human reconnection. It is a shattering vision that demands that one take a position, feel strong disagreement or, perhaps, a kind of bleak comfort. The point of recalling this small portion of an incidental map of reading is that the nodes of urgent personal interest in all these examples of reading cut right across, or shall I say through, the geographical and especially the national template. You might say in response to this that this has always been the case, and you would be partly right. But there is a sense

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in which the invitation to take our national text of reading deeper into the particularityof one of its now-multiple seams, on the one hand, and, on the other, into the multinational hypertext, has been strengthened, rendered more irresistible by the growing emergence of 'world' perspectives on culture, and the concomitant crossflow of technologies, capital, people, music, art, and the exponentially expanding and interpenetratingworld reading market. But most of all, I felt able to read these works as my own, as speaking to my own, now more nuanced concerns, in a way that I used to reserve for the reading of South African literature of old. These works, in their recombination, were speaking to my interests directly, in a way that no national boundary-marking, no overtly political sense of 'appropriate' regional positioning, could mark or touch. What I am saying, then, is that South African literature in the old sense was a function of our subject-positioning as fellow-travellers with apartheid and its schisms. Second, that the coincidence of apartheid's downfall with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the onset of globalization has inserted us into a more free-flowing, and a larger, geography in which we will map our subjectivity, and our reading, with greater variation and choice. If we add Jamal's important imperative, then our changed sense of identity as South Africans includes an insistence on more generous feeling, a return to our sense of home as a place of joyful, ratherthan painful, hybridity. What I am trying to describe is a sense of diffusion in two different directions. It strikes me that the attempts many of us had been party to, especially in the immediate aftermath of 1994, to conjoin our various literatures in a spirit of fusion and of healing, was perhaps misguided. The fact that we have still barely made a start to the great localized comparative project, suggested so many years ago by Albert Gerard, is surely telling us something. Let me return for a moment to the Afrikaans strand of South African writing. Over the past ten to 15 years, Afrikaans writing has developed as if the restraint of apartheid had been holding it back. This development seems to have little to do with English South African writing. If, for argument's sake, one takes Etienne van Heerden and Marlene van Niekerk as the two leading novelists at work in Afrikaans, then it is notable that their intertext is not Coetzee and Mda, Gordimer and Dangor, Mpe and Duiker, or whoever you may wish to mention. Their work may be incidentally influenced by some of these writers, but they seem to be working within a much larger terrain, informed by historical re-reading which is deeply South African, and conventions of form which are, in the last resort, more broadly transnational than national. I believe that this is their positioning as writers, too: they read literature at large, of which South

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African writing is a sub-set, but their immediate stage is" strongly Afrikaansliterature as a predominant intertextof historical particularized: reckoning. Whatthis examplesuggeststo me is thatthe notionsome of us once held - thatwe couldand shouldconjoinSouthAfricanwritinginto a higher-level union, a great oneness, was in all likelihooda blind error,a perverseand and its either-ordictates. Surely, it now reactionary responseto apartheid strikesme, the pointwas to unpickthe seam,to let the fabricdiverge,at last. At last, we could do and say whatwe liked. At last, we could writewhatwe liked. Isn't thatwhat freedomwas supposedto have meantfor us, for all of as a writer-friend us? Freedomas licence, but 'licence' understood recently in the prohibitiveor it to me: "It's like we've moved from licence put deviation." sense to licenceas in multi-libidinous restrictive wantonness, in more two different diffusion directions,going So, specifically local, local, without apology - Brett Bailey comes to getting more irreverently mind - on the one hand, while also feeling utterly free to ride the big waves whereverthey may take you. Because thereis no map, transnational forays.That is what it feels like to me, to sunderthe only improvisational seam.For surelyit was only held togetherby the clenchingof ourhands,by our interpellationwithin a system now gone, a system that enforced whichwe felt compelledto recalibrate. of distinctions Indeed,the grammars towardstoo much seaming,too dangernow may be an ironiccounter-surge much seemingoneness.When divisionwas forcedupon us as a people, we insisted upon our right to act as one. But that was always a voluntary It was the voluntariness of the association thatwe were insisting association. on singularity,singularityas a national upon. However,an over-emphasis of the was never the point. If that is what the new narratives confinement, nationare headingtowards- and there is some evidence of this - then we must insist on breakingfrom the one seam, from the dialecticof the seam itself. We must say: let therebe many seams, and let therebe muchdiverse fabric,to stretchthe metaphor.Surely the commitmentwithin the idea of freedomis to a scene of affiliativechoice thatis unbound, preciselya scene of writingthat foresakesthe singularityof the one great seam, and which choosesthe freedomof the many. Postscript In the immediate we may post-apartheid years,followingJamal'sargument, on differenceinto a sense of oneness as have flippedfroman overemphasis - 'the politicians indifference,a terrifyingnew species of homogenization

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DEKOCK 82 LEON will see to it'; into senses of public identity emptied of particularity as a revived substance. One feels this 'empty' subjectivity in Vladislavic's new work, The Exploded View, in characters who seem to perceive themselves at a remove from their own settings, as if they have been placed there in the same way that the faux Tuscan townhouses that Vladislavic describes are placed on the landscape: imitative forms, reactive behaviour, rote action, as though the world has already played out, like the exploded view of a Do-ItYourself guide to the building of model aeroplanes or kitchen cupboards. My call, and really it is a personal manifesto rather than an impositional statement, is that there might be some merit in reviving ourselves as changed and changing subjects, passionately invested with the freedom of reenergized particularity of whatever kind, in a world of exponentially increased fluidity. If that is the scene of South African writing in the current moment, then I say "viva, longlive"!
NOTES 1. This article originated in a keynote address delivered to a colloquium entitled "Present and Future Directions in South African Literary Studies" held at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, 26 May 2005. 2. Originally, in "South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction," a special issue of Poetics Today (De Kock 2001; reproduced in De Kock, Bethlehem and Laden 2004). The essay has been discussed by Titlestad and Kissack (2003) and by Jamal (2002). 3. Quoted in http://www.nb.co.za/Kwela/kCatalogueDisplay.asp?iItem=133. WORKS CITED Breytenbach, Breyten. 1998. Dog Heart: A Travel Memoir. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Coetzee, J.M. 1999. Disgrace. London: Seeker & Warburg. . 1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton UP. . 2003. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Seeker & Warburg. Dangor, Achmat. 1997. Kaflca s Curse: A Novella and Three Other Stories. Cape Town: Kwela. . 2001. Bitter Fruit. Cape Town: Kwela. De Kock, Leon, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden, ed. 2004. South Africa in the Global Imaginary. Pretoria:Unisa Press; Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Dowling, Finuala. 2005. WhatPoets Need: A Novel. Johannesburg:Penguin. Gordimer, Nadine. 1990. My Son 's Story. Cape Town: David Philip. . 1998. The House Gun. Cape Town: David Philip. . 2001. The Pickup. Cape Town: David Philip. Gray, Stephen. 1979. Southern African Literature: An Introduction. Cape Town: David Philip.

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. 1980. "Camoens and the Poetry of South Africa." Camoens Annual Lectures No. 1 (Johannesburg:Oppenheimer Institute for Portuguese Studies). Houellebecq, Michel. 2000. Atomised. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: Heinemann. Jamal, Ashraf. 2002. "Predicaments of Culture in South Africa." PhD thesis, U of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Kleinboer. 2003. Kontrei: Roman. Dainfern: Praag. Krog, Antjie. 1998. Country of My Skull. Johannesburg:Random House. Kruger, Loren. 2002. "'Black tlantics,' 'White Indians' and 'Jews': Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others." scrutiny2: issues in english studies in southern africa 7.2: 34-50. Mda, Zakes. 1997. Waysof Dying. Cape Town: OUP. Mostert, Nol. 1992. Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Epic of the Xhosa People. London: JonathanCape. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2004. The Rock Alphabet. Cape Town: Kwela. Titlestad, Michael and Kissack, Mike. 2003. "'The Foot Does not Sniff: Imagining the Post-Anti-Apartheid Intellectual." Journal of Literary Studies 19.3/4: 25570. Van Niekerk, Marlene. 2004. Agaat: Roman. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Vladislavic, Ivan. 2004. The Exploded View. Johannesburg:Random House.

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