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University of KwaZulu-Natal Boneyard, an original novella, accompanied by an extended essay on experimental narrative strategies in selected examples of contemporary fiction. Vivienne Elaine Molloy Supervised by Prof. Sally-Ann Murray Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Programme of English Studies, November 2013 DECLARATION I, Vivienne Elaine Molloy (208517087), declare that the following dissertation is my own work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This dissertation has not been submitted for any other degree or examination at any other university. This dissertation does not contain the works and/or ideas of any other person unless specifically acknowledged and referenced. ___________________________ 29 November 2013 I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor superwoman Prof. Sally-Ann Murray for her time, incredible patience, constant encouragement, honesty, insight and advice, all without which I could not have written this dissertation. I would like to thank the NRF and the University of KwaZulu-Natal whose generous financial contributions made it possible for me to continue my studies and made this dissertation possible. I would also like to thank the lecturing and administrative staff of English Studies at UKZN for their endless support and guidance and for making me feel like part of their family. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and family who supported me along this journey. For their unconventional motivation, their gentle gibes, their messages of encouragement and their belief in me, I will always be grateful. II ABSTRACT The following dissertation is comprised of an original novel/la Boneyard, as well as a critical exegesis exploring experimental narrative strategies. The novella works within the shifting boundaries of postmodernism. Techniques will include “contradiction, discontinuity, randomness, excess [and] short circuit” (McHale 1987:7). The work will traverse the transliterated present of the South African landscape while reaching into the recesses of (marginal) historical record in order to speak both of the postmodern culture of the present, and the interconnectivity between time and space. By examining South African authors such as André brink, J. M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavić, the links of the past, the present and the future will be examined in re-orientating identity in a multicultural, mass-mediated and heteroglossic contemporary culture. The critical essay will examine these issues as well as issues of historical representation. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, the work which spurred my interest in the area of identity, historical discourse, memory, re-memory and forgetting, will be examined with particular emphasis of Marianna Hirsch’s term post- postmemory, a term delegated to the active remembrance of the diasporic Jewish American third-generation post-Holocaust community. The questions of memory and remembrance will be explored within the concerns of phantasmagorical amnesia and “museummania” prevalent in contemporary postmodern culture. Lastly, I will briefly reflect on my own manuscript, Boneyard, as well as the future of post-apartheid South African writing in terms of emerging genres, construction of identity via a traumatic past and the ethical implications of these endeavours. III CONTENTS Declaration……………………………………………………………………………………. I Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………… II Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………... III Boneyard Baby Teeth…………………………………………………………………………………… 1 1978…………………………………………………………………………………………. 22 K…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 38 Rails…………………………………………………………………………………………. 59 Dear Jude……………………………………………………………………………………. 69 1978…………………………………………………………………………………………. 73 K…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 97 IT STARTED WITH ONE………………………………………………………………... 117 Dear Jude……………………………………………………………………………….….. 146 1978…………………………………………………………………………………….….. 150 Herman at the monument………………………………………………………………….. 189 Baby Teeth………………………………………………………………………………… 193 Critical essay Forms of Narrative Experimentalism: Notes on the Novelisation of History…………….. 213 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………. 251 I Boneyard Baby Teeth The smell from the kitchen made my eyes water. Digger, Richard and Frank were playing apothecary again. I heard the rush of boiling water, the hiss as it met the hot plate. “Shit!” someone screamed, and the others shrieked like children. I didn’t remember when they’d arrived or why they hadn’t left but Degor didn’t seem to mind. After his night shift he’d step carefully over the strewn bodies; he didn’t even go ballistic when they woke up at ten and played My Generation on repeat on his old cassette player. It pissed me off. I’d dig my nails into the backs of my thighs, making red half-moons. If I said anything they’d only turn it up louder. Degor was at work and I sat guard. Not that he knew, but how could I trust them or the vagrant slackers who appeared at twilight. Always girls. Always darkly attractive girls who worked dark hours. I’d seen a pattern these last three years. A girl would turn up, say she knew Degor; that he’d offered her a place for the night. And then there she’d be. For a while. Two months, maybe three. At first I’d listen to the tales and tail-ends of their lives, curious how pretty girls ended up in a dirty place like this. But soon the small-town runaway lowlife boyfriend nowhere-to-go need-to-get-clean need-to-get-him-clean story grew too familiar, and after the fourth disappearance my hospitality waned. A veil of smoke hovered above the head of the latest girl. I watched it drift towards the mottled ceiling. Yellow. Brown. A sooty damp. She followed my eyes following the smoke, swinging her freckled legs wide and then crossing and uncrossing them at intervals. She’d been here maybe three weeks, this one. Digger and the boys had no objections to a girl who walked round in her underwear, letting their hands slide across her polyester backside, not brushing off their gropes. The last one hadn’t been as accommodating. The boys had been drunk, and Richard shook her awake. He’d shoved a wad of notes in her face, yanked a handful of her sleep shirt, and pulled her off the couch into the kitchen. He really went for it. She’d come out with a chipped tooth and a swollen cheek then grabbed the black bag of her crummy life and left. She’d gone for it too. Richard was left whining meekly, mewing, really. His left hand streamed with blood, thin ribbons dripping from his elbow onto the carpet. Oh, and the tip of his pinkie finger was missing. Snap. 1 I hadn’t seen that girl since and her replacement had arrived just days later. This one, the girl with wolf eyes, I named Juliet. She sat on the couch gnawed by cigarette smoke, her lower lip pouting, fierce eyes fixed on mine. It was too much. The whole thing felt like a primitive act of seduction and I eased out the way and went to the kitchen where I found the boys lounging on the lino, smoking a joint. They didn’t even notice me coming. The kitchen was pretty dated. Seventies, maybe. The tiles started waist-high on the walls, small and square and mint green. At least, they had been, once upon a time. Sweat and smoke and fist-fights and drunken spills had loosened the tiles from the walls; the remainder looked like a weird version of Tetris. Richard sat on the floor leaning against the sink cupboards, his long legs stretched out. The sink was messed. It matched the walls the way older women matched their eye shadow to their outfits. The association was comforting. Digger’s bony fingers were conducting a fevered speech. “The police, man. Heard those pigs got John last night. Now he’s gonna snitch and then what?” “We’ll be halfway to heaven by then,” Frank said. “Those cockroaches? Roaches’s what they are. In the air vents, in the gutters under the street. They don’t sleep.” “So the road won’t be easy...” A cockroach scuttled across the wall and Richard freaked out, scrambling against the cupboard door. Sealy and Frank laughed until they bent double, their long greasy hair sweeping across the lino. Richard fell into a sheepish sulk until his eyes settled on my shoes, then travelled to my face. “Oh hey! Grace.” He was only twenty six but looked way older. Thirty eight or so. His eyes were sunk into his skull as if the beams behind them had collapsed and been left to rot. Words written in black ink were hidden in the folds under his eyes, and he smudged the script when he woke up. He 2 looked at me now under long dark eyelashes, hazel eyes dazzling the way they did when he wanted to win someone over. Lucky I was made of stronger stuff. His charms lost on me, he engaged his ammo elsewhere, smiling with one side of his mouth, imitating the romantic male leads he’d seen on TV. Hugh Grant was his favourite. Not my type, but still, the look was an improvement as it plumped his cheeks, gifting back years he’d wasted away. He did have good hair, true. Dark curls, shoulder length, and now he shook it out of his eyes. If I stared down at him, from this angle he looked like Jesus; you know the pictures. The type people hang on walls in oval picture frames. Jesus in your living room above the mantelpiece, or watching over you in your master bed in your master bedroom. But Jesus or not, Richard’s charms worked no magic on me and he returned his attention to the boys who were reading palms. Degor worked in a recycling centre that specialised in glass. He sorted the broken pieces into colours, huge plastic bins under factory lights bright as a blower’s furnace. Remnants followed him home under his shoes: stained glass blessings ordinary suburban panes nosy oval spectacle lenses fat beer bottles – he’d leave chipped trails like bird crumbs on the pavements around the block.

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