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Identity, Belonging and Ecological Crisis in South African Speculative Fiction

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Identity, Belonging and Ecological Crisis in South African Speculative Fiction IDENTITY, BELONGING AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS IN SOUTH AFRICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of English of Rhodes University By Elzette Lorna Steenkamp 2011 Just as the new worlds and galaxies of science fiction are often models of already known worlds and galaxies (literary ones, too), so also future history is plainly modeled on past history – Frederick A. Kreuziger, Apocalypse and Science Fiction 2 ABSTRACT This study examines a range of South African speculative novels which situate their narratives in futuristic or ‘alternative’ milieus, exploring how these narratives not only address identity formation in a deeply divided and rapidly changing society, but also the ways in which human beings place themselves in relation to Nature and form notions of ‘ecological’ belonging. It offers close readings of these speculative narratives in order to investigate the ways in which they evince concerns which are rooted in the natural, social and political landscapes which inform them. Specific attention is paid to the texts’ treatment of the intertwined issues of identity, belonging and ecological crisis. This dissertation draws on the fields of Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Studies and Science Fiction Studies, and assumes a culturally specific approach to primary texts while investigating possible cross-cultural commonalities between Afrikaans and English speculative narratives, as well as the cross-fertilisation of global SF/ speculative features. It is suggested that South African speculative fiction presents a socio-historically situated, rhizomatic approach to ecology – one that is attuned to the tension between humanistic- and ecological concerns. 3 CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………. Contents………………………………………………………………….. Acknowledgements………………………………………………………. Introduction……………………………………………………………… Chapter One –‘Living as a speck of ant-feet’: Environmental and Socio-political Responsibility in J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People Chapter Two – Elegy for the Plaasroman: Afrikaner Identity and the Ecology of the Farm in Karel Schoeman’s Promised Land and Eben Venter’s Trencherman Chapter Three – Sinister Ecology: The Child as Mediator of Moral and Environmental Redemption in Jenny Robson’s Savannah 2116 AD Chapter Four – Expressions of Alterity: The Symbolic Novum of the Clone in Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir Chapter Five – Familiar Animals: Becoming-Animal in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City Chapter Six – How to ‘learn the words of the monkeys and the crocodiles’: The Speculative Short Fiction of Nick Wood and Henrietta Rose-Innes Conclusion…………………………………………………………… Bibliography…………………………………………………………… 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was made possible by a generous scholarship provided by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. However, the ideas and opinions expressed in this thesis are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the above-mentioned organization. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Dan Wylie, for his tireless support, friendship and unfailing enthusiasm for the game of cricket during the past three years. None of this would have been possible without you, Dan. Special thanks to my long-suffering family – my mother, Dorothea, my father, George, my grandmother, Maria, and my sister, Madri – for instilling in me a love of books, and for allowing me the freedom to pursue this passion. Thank you to all the friends who have made this process a little less lonely, especially Ann Smailes, Thando Njovane, Helena Langner, Nicolette Nel, Marelise Fenwick, Jennifer Schmidt and Erns Grundling. 5 INTRODUCTION This study examines a range of South African novels which situate their narratives in futuristic or ‘alternative’ milieus. It investigates the ways in which these texts, despite their association with the ‘pulp’ genres of science fiction and fantasy, are in fact deeply concerned with the very issue that ‘serious’ South African authors have been examining for many years – alterity. Whilst many of the texts in question contain elements of the fantastic and/or tropes common to the SF genre, they have been broadly categorized as ‘speculative narratives’ for the purpose of this dissertation. The term ‘speculative fiction’ is often used interchangeably with ‘science fiction’, but can be more narrowly defined as “a particular subtype of science fiction in which ‘established facts’ are extrapolated to produce a new situation” (Wolfe Critical Terms 122). Judith Merril locates ‘speculative fiction’ as stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, of ‘reality’… I use the term ‘speculative fiction’ here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional ‘scientific method’ (observation, hypothesis, experimentation) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes – imaginary or inventive – into the common background of ‘known facts’, creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters or both. (Merril 60) 6 ‘Speculative fiction’ has been identified as the most appropriate designation for the remarkable set of Southern African texts under consideration since the term suggests an element of ‘fancy’ distinct from the realist mode, whilst at the same time not foreclosing a substantial relation to the ‘real’. In this sense, speculative fiction shares a common trait with satire: its “bite”, to use Dustin Griffin’s word, lies in the knowledge that the alternative, sometimes seemingly alien, realms presented by the speculative narrative in many ways reflect, with a calculated degree of distortion, the very real historical, socio-political and economic concerns of the society which informs such a text (132). Commenting here specifically on the genre of satire, Griffin asserts: Satirists are released from certain restraints – about violating particular truth or fairness, about exaggeration or bias or evidence, whether in drawing or in applying a character. They have a license to lie. Yet they do not simply create a world of make-believe. The excitement of satire (its bite) is based on our knowledge (or just our suspicion) that the victims are “real”, even if we can’t always identify them. Our interpretive task as readers is not simply to identify the victim; it is also to identify the principles of selection and distortion that shape the satirist’s “facts”, and the ideological bias – perhaps invisible to the satirist – that undergirds the enterprise. (Griffin 132) Similarly, authors of speculative narratives operate within a flexible literary landscape that allows them the opportunity to test the borders of the realm of possibility, to exaggerate, and even to “lie” (Griffin 132).1 However, in much the same way as the “victims” of the satirist’s wit are “real” (Griffin 132), speculative novels cannot be removed from their specific socio-historical contexts, often serving as dire warnings 1Of course, this may be said to be true of all writers of fiction. However, by placing their narratives in alternate realms in which certain laws may not apply, speculative authors certainly have more freedom in this regard. 7 to societies regarding the possible future crises that could result from their current political, historical, environmental and/or economic trajectories. In an article titled “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels”, Margaret Atwood, one of the few writers of speculative fiction to have achieved a great measure of success within the academic sphere, comments on the social role of science fiction: “We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants” (Atwood “Aliens” n.pag). However, in both “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels” and “Perfect Storms”, an essay in which she gives an account of the events and influences which led to the conceptualization of her post-apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood distinguishes her ‘social’ speculative work from what she classifies as ‘science fiction proper’. In “Perfect Storms”, Atwood controversially separates her speculative narratives from the genre of science fiction on the basis that “[i]t contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians” (Atwood “Storms” n.pag). She continues to assert that her two speculative novels, Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), invent “nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent”, and suggests that each novel simply “begins with a what if and then sets forth its axioms” (Atwood “Storms” n.pag). This “distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction” is again emphasized in “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels”: For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth. (Atwood “Aliens” n.pag) 8 Whilst Atwood’s seemingly dismissive attitude towards SF has dismayed many of its supporters2, her eagerness to separate her work from otherworldly fiction can be understood as an attempt
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