Nostalgia Contretemps As the Concept of Nostalgia

Introduction: nostalgia contretemps The future. She placed her finger under the words. No, I signalled with my eyes, no, no, don’t come with your silly games now Agaat − 12 As the concept of nostalgia continues to be explored with revivalist energy, definitions become increasingly obfuscated and meaning proliferates into sometimes overwhelming forms of relativism. I make this assertion at the outset if only to state an accusation that may be leveled against this thesis in which I challenge the boundaries of nostalgia by embarking on a re- evaluation of its temporal frameworks. My aim, however, is to account for the context specific manifestations that nostalgia assumes within the South African national and literary imaginary as nostalgia contretemps. Seminal theorists such as Benedict Anderson (1986) Homi Bhaba (1990) and Slavoj Žižek (2000) have long since established how the nation, as a socio-political structure, gains discursive presence through narrative production and contestation. Indeed, this belies a complex relationship between the nation and the literary, where often the literary is – for better or worse – in service of nationalist projections. Literature however, through an awareness of narrativity, is less a purveyor of national ideology. Instead, it is a deeply reflexive mechanism that can simultaneously employ and react to discursive structures. More importantly, in its imaginative and generative capacity, literature often assumes the ethical role of creating space for the nation that is always ‘other’ to itself. In the South African context, various literary theorists express relief as they come to define ‘post-transitional’ South African literature through its very ability to step out of its ‘national 1 service’ (Frenkel and MacKenzie 2010, Medalie 2010, Jamal 2010 and Barnard 2012: 652). In recent years the term ‘post-transitional’ has come into usage in South African cultural and literary studies. Its aim is to account for the dynamic changes that occur within a national and literary imaginary after discarding the politically laden impetus of the anti-apartheid struggle and the easy optimism of post-apartheid nation-building. Yet, this illusion of escape is somewhat premature. It fails to account for the ever-evolving nature of political discursive strategies and the literary imaginary. As I argue and illustrate during the course of this thesis, it seems more constructive to explore contemporary literature as a direct reflection of a national imaginary that is constantly changing and being reinscribed as opposed to reading the literary as severing its prior engagement with the national imaginary. In contending this position, I assume a state of untimeliness in relation to the ‘post’ of post- transitional literature, irrespective of the fact that the literary texts I examine in this thesis, with publication dates that range from 2002-2010, could easily be categorised in this way.1 Through a close-reading of Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water (2010), Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning (2002), Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between (2009), Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson (2007), Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006) and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006), I explore these narratives as symptomatic of a national imaginary grappling with the very elusiveness of a ‘post-transitional’ South Africa, and which now makes its accommodations through the conceptual frameworks of nostalgia. 1 Arguably, my analysis alludes to the contre-temporary nature of these texts. 2 Nostalgia, etymologically speaking, reflects a desire for an idyll (nostos), through an assertion of longing, return or loss (algia). It is, quite literally, the dis-ease of dis-placement. My chosen texts all share a common plot structure of a young protagonist who has chosen to live outside of South Africa but now returns to mourn the death of a dead or dying parent. In some senses, these narratives bear traces of exile writing, a familiar genre in the South African context.2 But considering that legal restrictions of apartheid no longer apply and conditions of postmodernity and globalization have turned us all into ‘exile’ figures of sorts, ‘expatriate fiction’ now appears to be a more fitting classification.3 2 Much as Jean Starobinski suggests in “The Idea of Nostalgia” (1966), nostalgia and exile share common themes. Arguably, this makes the genre conducive to the exploration of nostalgic affect. As a case in point, Dennis Walder reflects on his experience as a South African exile, stating that “of course, however I would seek to define myself in relation to my place of origin, as an exile, emigre or, as Christopher Hope once defined himself to me, an escapee, I have to acknowledge that any remembering I indulge in will already be part of a cultural framework that to some extent […] predefines my remembering” (2005: 425). Having spent a childhood in South Africa and his adulthood in the UK, Walder recounts how his early memories are subject to aesthetic representations that make him liable to nostalgia. However, understanding that Romantic feelings for his white existence in apartheid South Africa are questionable, he wonders if the South African white exile can be brought into a less problematic and more authentic relationship with memories of the past. For a more general overview of exile writing in the South African context see Tlhalo Raditlhalo’s “Writing in Exile” (2012). 3 Furthermore, this distinction allows for the reflexive irony that has developed in response to the ‘exile’ figure of late. In Lost Ground (2011), Michiel Heyns also employs a white male protagonist, Peter Jacobs, who returns to South Africa after living in London for the past 22 years. Engaging in conversation with a young, black woman, Nonyameko, the following exchange is had: “‘You are a novelist who is having trouble finding a subject in England, and now you have come out here to write a novel about an ex-South African coming back, let me guess, to be by the bedside of a dying parent – yes, the dying parent is obligatory, like a necklacing in the novels of the eighties – a man who is forced to revisit the past, or confront the past, more particularly his own tortured past, the torture usually figurative, sometimes literal, involving the Truth and Reconcilation Commision. At the end of the novel he will go back to England vaguely defeated and strongly relieved.’ ‘You seem to have the plot off pretty pat.’ ‘Oh, the plot is standard ex-pat. We have had about twenty of those, treating us to their momentous return to the mother country and the examination of their own entrails and consciences. The details may differ but the essence is the same: a mixture of self-examination and self-congratulation, with poor tired old South Africa serving as both punch bag and security blanket. Your novel, like the others before it, will sell reasonably well and be commended in the press. The Brits like being reminded that South Africa is after all as backward as they always suspected before they were obliged, for a short while, to profess admiration. (Heyns 2011: 28) Heyns’s ironic stance is interesting in that it already implies a set of ready thematic and structural conventions that govern ‘ex-pat’ literature. Additionally, the irony is suggestive of impatience with the sentimentalism these texts sometimes exude. 3 However, the broad description of ‘expatriate fiction’ is also crude in that there are notable variations in the repetition of this central thematic concern. Behr’s Kings of the Water is the only novel that narrates the experiences of a homosexual protagonist named Michiel. As a result, this novel explores, with greater focus, themes of sexual shame, guilt and confession when the protagonist returns to South Africa for his mother’s funeral. Cartwright’s White Lightning is the only text that employs humour and reflexive irony as a means to explore the protagonist’s return to South Africa and his mother’s last days. Coovadia’s High Low In-between forgoes the pastoral emphasis that is central to many of the other texts, and is, by far, the most politically situated novel. The death of the father in this novel is the result of a political murder and the son, Shakeer (who returns and unexpectedly learns of his father’s death) seeks resolution of his father’s murder case. The sense of mourning is deliberately conflated with the political and we are never allowed to escape the harsh circumstances of South Africa by slipping into reveries of personal memory, as is possible with the other texts. In The Rowing Lesson, Landsman uses her female protagonist as a ‘medium’ for her dying father: when Betsy returns to South Africa to sit at her father’s death bed, the protagonist expresses a desire to ‘enter’ his body in order to access the memories it contains. The style is eulogistic and, in comparison to the other narratives, finds a greater level of narrative resolution. Agaat is interesting in that Van Niekerk has made the formal decision to use the expatriate narrator, Jakkie, only for the prologue, when he is returning to South Africa for his mother’s funeral, and the epilogue, when he is leaving South Africa soon after the funeral. The rest of the narrative consists of the experience and pain of his absence as reflected through the stories of the female characters, Agaat and Milla De Wet. In Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, the protagonist, Marion, is not an expatriate figure in the strict sense of the 4 word. Yet Marion is proud of her ‘European’ standards of living and, rather tellingly, owns a travel agency. Also, she does eventually embark on a long trip out of the country during the course of the narrative.

Load more