Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock

Literature since 1945. And still, as these compilers might themselves acknowledge, there will be significant gaps. This book, in contrast to such works of general coverage, proposes a way of examining the distinctive features of South African literature after apartheid. Put differently, it delineates certain through-lines that characterise postapartheid writing.¹ Although these lines are, in my view, prominent and important, they remain a partial set of concerns. This relation of single study to corpus may be viewed via the analogy of a hologram. Take this angle of view, and the shape emerges thus; tilt the hologram surface, or change your own angle of looking, and the object under view suddenly looks quite different. All the shapes brought into view, in their provisional wholeness, have validity – call them alternative manifestations of the complexity of the entity under examination. Such an approach allows the making of bold conceptual propositions without resorting to the fixity, and the closure, of all-consuming metanarratives. It means that in advancing a theory about the corpus of work under scrutiny, or more accurately within that body of work as a whole, one’s conceptual model is acknowledged as partial (e.g. Shaun Viljoen, Richard Rive: A Partial Biography). Like Viljoen, one acknowledges, in addition, one’s own partiality too: this is my reading of things, or my reading. Other readings are possible, indeed necessary. Please join the party. Write your own study. But for a moment, consider this one. Perhaps it will influence your own perspective on the field we share, though from different angles of view. This book, then, in full awareness of the risks inherent in such an undertaking, proposes a set of related ideas as a way of conceptualising certain emphases, perhaps, in South African literature after apartheid.

      In the course of this study, I mention, and discuss, many writers and, in selected instances, this book offers readings of particular works. These readings lie at the heart of Losing the Plot, as they both instantiate and elucidate major threads of argument. In all such cases, however, the particular work so discussed serves to illuminate the larger idea to which it is yoked, and the reading of the work concerned should be seen as suggestive of trends. There are many worthy writers who are not mentioned in the pages of this study, and a great number of instructive works that do not get the readings they deserve. However, to include everything, and to discuss all works of importance, is both impossible and undesirable. Such an undertaking would result in a shapeless monster, so vastly populated is the field of postapartheid writing, and so varied the directions in which the literature goes.

      Still, one particular line does suggest itself quite emphatically, and this is the key notion, or moment, captured in the term ‘transition’ – that putatively transformative shift from one ‘state’ to another in which an entire nation found a form of secular redemption from purgatorial political conditions in the first half of the 1990s. Following this line, Losing the Plot proposes a way of looking at the field of South African writing in the 1990s, 2000s and the current decade that pivots around a continuingly problematised notion of transition. In the contextual, if not immediate, background of most postapartheid writing, as much as in the popular South African imagination, the transition or switch to a ‘new dispensation’ serves as a founding marker in the ‘new’ nation’s collective consciousness. The putative ‘transition’ – a word defined as a ‘movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another’ (Dictionary.com) – ushered in the resplendent idea of a ‘rainbow nation’, a catchphrase coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu,² who also chaired South Africa’s public (and symbolic) transitional gateway mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The promise of the rainbow nation rapidly became popular mythology, replete with multicultural adverts projecting racial bonhomie. It led also, and inevitably, to an energised counter-discourse which followed the epochal events of 1994, a dialectical, many-sided engagement typical of the combative South African civil sphere, gaining force as the new democracy gradually appeared to lose its lustre, especially after the Mandela presidency of 1994–1998.

      This study, then, proceeds from the premise that an initial wave of optimism, evident in the early phase of upbeat transitional ferment,³ was followed by a gradual and deepening sense of ‘plot loss’⁴ among South African writers and intellectuals of all stripes. That much was conceded even by the man that now serves as the country’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who commented near the end of Thabo Mbeki’s reign as president that the democratic project was not a dream deferred but ‘a dream betrayed’.⁵ From the early 2000s, escalating service-delivery protests in poor communities across the country – led by the very people meant to be the primary beneficiaries of liberation – suggested that a wide-ranging sense of dismay had taken root.⁶ The middle classes – by no means exclusively white – gave fulsome expression to such disappointment, too. Whether this general public disillusionment proceeded from a left-wing point of view, a nonracial stance, an anti-corruption position, or a sense of insecurity as crime statistics rose, the signs were ominous. Neoliberal economic policies were perceived as blocking economic transformation and severely impeding the social-democratic revolution of the liberation struggle. A new racial exclusivism emblematised by Thabo Mbeki’s ‘Native Club’ ushered in a resurgence of what Xolela Mangcu in 2008 described as ‘racial nativism’.⁷ Alarming disclosures about crime and corruption in a wobbly criminal justice system all contributed to the belief that the longer-term transition was going off the rails.⁸ In Anthony O’Brien’s words, the post-1994 years saw a ‘normalization of the political economy’ which he typified, following Graham Pechey, as ‘the neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (3).⁹ Such looming disillusionment, if not disorientation, rooted in a social imaginary that continues to hold dear the founding tenets of the ‘new’ democracy, effectively sets the scene for postapartheid literary culture. It creates the conditions for a wide-ranging investigation into the causes of the perceived inversion, or perversion, of the country’s reimagined destiny, a derailing that has widely come to be regarded as criminal. Hence the remarkable efflorescence of crime writing in the post-liberation period, in both fictional detective stories and nonfiction works of ‘true crime’, not to mention critical analyses of this work.¹⁰ In various chapters in this study, I consider the manner in which crime authors Antony Altbeker, Angela Makholwa, Deon Meyer, Sifiso Mzobe, Mike Nicol, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Jonny Steinberg and Mandy Wiener seek to redefine the locus of public virtue in a context in which the boundaries between right and wrong have blurred. It is a context of social disorder, typical of the late-modern postcolony, in which the signs by which we read the social have, in Jean and John Comaroff’s description, become ‘occulted’,¹¹ i.e. obscured by contending regimes of information and legitimation. Unlike the situation during apartheid, when all good, or even half-good, writers knew who was right and who wrong, the postapartheid milieu is less easily legible.¹² As in other postcolonies in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and elsewhere, this is a context in which, as the Comaroffs write, ‘social order appears ever more impossible to apprehend, violence appears ever more endemic, excessive, and transgressive, and police come, in the public imagination, to embody a nervous state under pressure’ (‘Criminal Obsessions’ 803).¹³

      Such wayward, hard-to-read social conditions require exacting and forensic examination, which is what crime writing sets out to do, holding up to the light South Africa’s reconstituted public sphere and finding it riddled with symptoms of criminal pathology. Crime writing’s generic inclinations come conveniently to hand, since the crime story typically sets out to pinpoint the culprit, or, in the tale’s implicitly wider terms, the sources of social and political perversity. I see such acts of writing as works of social detection; the underlying context that gives rise to them may be related to both immediate pressures on the ground and more extensive transnational conditions. The diagnostic works of crime writers refract a real but perverted transformation in which the postcolonies of the late-modern world are awash with criminality despite a heightened preoccupation with law and (dis)order.¹⁴ In particular, the ‘criminalisation of the state’ is hardly peculiar to South Africa but rather a common feature of postcolonial polities, of which the postapartheid state is but a belated example.¹⁵

      While many postapartheid writers choose to write about anything they like, a large number of authors seem compelled to chronicle the grit of urban existence in South