Kirby Manià 0202514H
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1 University of the Witwatersrand PhD Thesis in English Literature Kirby Manià 0202514H Title: “On the Brink of the Mundane”1: Postapartheid Literary Representations of Johannesburg in the Work of Ivan Vladislavić Supervisor: Professor Gerald Gaylard 1 Vladislavić, I. The Restless Supermarket. David Philips: Cape Town, 2001, p.215. Cover Image: Kirby Manià 2013 © Kirby Manià 2 Declaration for PhD Thesis I undertake that all the material presented for this degree is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged. Signed: ____________________________ Date: _________________ Kirby Manià 3 Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job. Yet words on a page make all things possible. Any line, even this one, may be a place to begin. - Ivan Vladislavić, The Loss Library2 2 Vladislavić, I. The Loss Library. Umuzi: Johannesburg, 2011, Location 947 (Kindle eBook). Kirby Manià 4 Abstract This thesis adopts a contrapuntal reading of Johannesburg through the work of Ivan Vladislavić. While it evaluates the dominant and pervasive readings of the city in current and historical scholarship, carefully considering the way in which its gold-mining origins have shaped a city that is dominated by a culture of surface, violence, and socio-historical amnesia, it ultimately aims to show how Vladislavić’s fiction subverts and challenges these prevailing means of perceiving Johannesburg. As part of inaugurating a depth reading of the city, Vladislavić sets about defamiliarising both the textual and urban landscape as a means of engendering a momentary state of lostness. The experience of lostness means that habitual markers are no longer able to guide or provide comfort to the textual and urban navigator. As a result, lostness dislodges accustomed ways of seeing, reading, and writing the city, thus allowing for both textual and urban rediscovery to ensue. The abandonment of conventions of meaning allows Vladislavić to render the city afresh. What his depictions reveal are the less commonly noticed aspects of Johannesburg city-life – in other words, what lies beneath its culture of surface. This depth reading uncovers a variety of palimpsests of both an urban and natural variety. Moreover, in this process, nature, something we tend to view as peripheral to the urban environment, is exposed and shown to exist in the shadows of the postcolonial city – haunting culture. This revelation ultimately deconstructs Johannesburg’s often paranoid culture of surface and proffers the ameliorative alternatives of natural flow, provisionality, and flux. Kirby Manià 5 Dedication: La Città d’Oro I dedicate this thesis to my late grandmother, my Nonna, who left post-WWII Italy eight months pregnant with my father to come to South Africa for a better life. Three weeks after arriving in Johannesburg she gave birth to my father. At the time she spoke no English, had very little money, no home, a toddler in tow, and another baby on the way. She came to join my grandfather, who, in putting his wartime aeronautical experience to good use, had found factory work, first in Port Elizabeth and then Johannesburg. Having experienced fascist Italy for most of her life, and upon arriving in a country mired by its own despotic, segregative politics, she decried this move from one dictatorship to another. It was something she held against my grandfather for all of his life, and the rest of hers. My grandparents were decidedly working-class, and while many white middle-class women of the time lived a life of leisure, my grandmother worked many long hours as a seamstress (sewing clothes for wealthier women) to help support the family. She taught herself English, and many years later, regaled my sister and I with colourful accounts of embarrassing linguistic misadventures – all drenched in the musicality of her thick Bolognese accent. She had always wanted to study further to become a teacher, but war and Italian gender-politics insisted that she leave school at the age of fifteen to find work to help support her parents. And so it seems that both education and the English language were important tools for success – at least from her vantage point. In retrospect, it makes sense that I have dedicated my life to both the field of education as well as the academic pursuit of English Literature. On her deathbed, just over a year ago, she told me that she did not want her death to interfere with my doctoral studies. It was an unexpectedly selfless thing to say at the time, but completely in character for a woman whose life evinced her admirable magnanimity, compassion, verve, and resilience. For these reasons, she has always been, and continues to be, an inspiration to me. Kirby Manià 6 Acknowledgements I would like to thank and acknowledge a few people whose time, support, and contributions proved invaluable to the development and writing of this thesis. Firstly I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Gerald Gaylard. Thank you for all your guidance, enlightening critique, patience, validation, and words of encouragement. Thank you for the innumerable hours you devoted to reading, responding, and commenting on my work and thank you too for being so punctual with your feedback. Furthermore, thank you for sharing the “rhino-hide” philosophy with me. Your scholarly work continues to inspire and motivate me. I have grown so much over this time and your various interventions have proved to be an indivisible component of that growth. I would like to thank Ivan Vladislavić, the man behind this study, for expressing interest in my work and for being generous enough to send me the manuscript proofs of his essay “Flow.” I was delighted to be extended this privilege. “Flow” will form part of a collection edited by Vladislavić called Ponte City, which has been produced by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, and will be published by Steidl in 2014. My thanks also go to the Wits Transformation Office and the Carnegie Foundation for awarding me a ‘Time-off from Teaching’ Research Grant for six months in 2012. To both Professors Beatrys Lacquet and Ian Jandrell, thank you for supporting me with a Dean’s Discretionary PhD Completion Grant in 2013, which afforded me a further six months off teaching in the second half of 2013. Without these grants, I would not have been able to finish my thesis. I managed to complete about eighty percent of the doctoral work during these two grant periods. Moreover, I would like to extend my thanks to the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Learning, Teaching, and Development for accepting me into their PhD Coaching Programme and for assigning me to one of the most thoughtful, kind, and compassionate people I know, Professor Gillian Drennan. I could not have asked for a better mentor. Thank you, Gill, for helping me overcome various personal obstacles in order to come closer to realizing this life goal. Kirby Manià 7 I would like to thank my family for all their love, support, and understanding during this time. To my mother, thank you for reading almost everything I have produced and for being my number one fan. My love of literature is thanks to you. To my father, thank you for always believing in me and for making the effort to be interested in my work – despite not always enjoying it! I would like to express my gratitude to my sister, Amy, for designing the beautiful cover of the bound copy of this thesis document. Amy, thank you, too, for encouraging me to explore other creative outlets during the process of writing this thesis. And lastly, to my husband Ernesto Dos Santos Soares, thank you for helping me in more ways than can be expressed. Thank you for your unwavering support, for the countless affirmations, for keeping me grounded and calm and happy. Thank you for ensuring that my teacup was always full and for insisting that I take breaks and respect mealtimes. Thank you for magically producing food and snacks when I could not fend for myself, for accompanying me on walks, and for listening to me ramble on about inchoate ideas and half-formed theories. On one of these walks you were instrumental in helping to develop the ‘untended garden’ metaphor in my concluding chapter. Thank you for all of this and for what I may have forgotten to mention. Please note that the fourth chapter of this thesis was adapted and submitted for publication in 2013. It was published as an article entitled “Zoo-keeping in Johannesburg: Man/Beast Contestations in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys” in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 25:1, 2013, pp.100-113. Kirby Manià 8 Contents Introduction: Taming the City on Paper 10 Chapter One: Auri Sacra Fames 38 Chapter Two: Postcolonial Formalism 70 Chapter Three: “The Art of Getting Lost” 120 Chapter Four: Zoo-keeping in Johannesburg 158 Chapter Five: Diving the Reef 197 Conclusion: Flow and the Untended Garden 232 Appendix 251 Bibliography 252 Kirby Manià 9 Johannesburg is a blank, impenetrable slate for everyone but the local – and only the local with the most honed narrative and observational skills, with the greatest capacity for stillness, knows how to tame the city on paper … Which is why Vladislavić could be the most important writer working in South Africa’s intractable heart. 3 – Kevin Bloom, “Writing the Divide” 3 Bloom, K. “Writing the Divide” in Empire, 1:2, p.63.