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The Returnee Detective and Postcolonial Crime Fiction

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The Returnee Detective and Postcolonial Crime Fiction RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: THE RETURNEE DETECTIVE AND POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION By Kamil Naicker, University of Cape Town 2017. NCKKAM003 Supervised by Associate Professor Meg Samuelson and Associate Professor Sandra Young, UCT. University of Cape Town 1 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town ‘Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective book he’d ever want to read would be one in which not even the author knew the murderer’s identity. Instead of decorating the story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author’s imagination’ – Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the ways in which the crime novel genre has been taken up and adapted in order to depict and grapple with ideas of justice in selected postcolonial contexts. It approaches this investigation through the figure of the ‘returnee detective’ in these texts and determines how this recurring figure is used to mediate the reader’s understanding of civil conflict in the postcolonial world. What makes this trope so noteworthy, and merits investigation, is the way in which guilt and innocence (and their attendant associations of self and other) are forced into realignment by the end of colonial rule and the rise of civil conflict. In the context of civil war, crime becomes more insidious and intimate than the traditional mystery motif will allow. The returnee detective furthers this breakdown by performing the role of hybrid mediator within the text. The returnee figure is at once strange and familiar, lacking both the staunch sense of identity that is necessary in order to maintain the mystery of the ‘other’ and the objectivity to comfortably apportion blame to one side. Postcolonial fictions of crime set in the context of civil conflict thus emerge as belonging to a distinct category requiring a distinct critical approach. The primary texts are When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman, Red Dust by Gillian Slovo and Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah. My theoretical framework combines genre theory and postcolonial theory. By combining two critical strands I demonstrate that the intimacy of civil war and the returnees’ ambivalent attitudes to home and away unsettle crime genre conventions, producing a new form that challenges notions of morality, legitimacy and culpability. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go to the University of Cape Town and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) for their generous support. Thank you also to Dr. Derrick Higginbotham, for taking so much time to help me to clarify my original proposal. Many thanks, of course, must go to my supervisor Dr. Sandra Young, for her incisive and original contributions to this project, and to my supervisor Dr. Meg Samuelson for her unfailing patience, encouragement and insight. Thank you to my students, for inspiring me with their enthusiasm and humour. A special thank you to Sydney Peiris, for being my first ever reader, editor and transcriber (of my poetry, written at age four). Thank you to Katherine Lanham and Kavindra Ramphal for their companionship and tolerance, and to Chantelle Hulett for making me laugh all the way from Swaziland. Special mention to Ms. Londi Rabkin- Fakudze for demonstrating the finer points of the interrogative form (‘But why?’) And of course, to my family in Cape Town, for everything. This is for you. 4 CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 6 A Case of Arrested Development: Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans………………………………………………………………….....25 Investigating the Pathologist: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost………………... 57 Death of an Idea: Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens…………………………………………………………………………. 92 Another Country: Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust……………………………………….... 128 Hijacked Narrative: Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones……………………………….... 165 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….. 193 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………. 218 5 INTRODUCTION This thesis will investigate the ways in which the crime novel genre has been taken up and adapted in order to depict and grapple with ideas of justice in selected postcolonial contexts. I will approach this investigation through a discussion of the ‘returnee detective’, determining how this recurring figure is used to mediate the reader’s understanding of civil conflict in the postcolonial world. In my examination of five novels, I will explore the different ways in which they subvert crime genre conventions in order to challenge and disrupt popular notions of legitimacy, culpability and belonging. The crime genre has always had a paradoxical appeal. The canon is replete with lurid descriptions of violence, retribution and death, yet it has historically been perceived as a source of light reading. The stacks of paperback crime novels found in most airport bookshops tend to suggest them as diverting and disposable entertainment, appropriate for a beach holiday or long haul flight. Broadly speaking, these novels are known for their relaxing properties rather than for their tendency to provoke serious thought. In ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on Detective Stories, by an Addict’, WH Auden depicts his ‘addiction’ to detective stories as a markedly unserious vice, or guilty pleasure. He writes, For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: Firstly, the intensity of the craving — if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it. Secondly, its specificity — the story must conform to certain formulas (I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England). And, thirdly, its immediacy. I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and have no wish to read it again. If, as sometimes happens, I start reading one and find after a few pages that I have read it before, I cannot go on. (1) 6 Indeed, the idea of the crime novel as light, forgettable entertainment owes, in part, to the genre’s reputation for formulaic storytelling, which Auden describes here as ‘specificity’. No matter what horrors the texts evoke, the reader can very often be assured that a satisfactory conclusion is in store. In the majority of cases, these conclusions deliver a kind of justice: if not to the fictional perpetrator, then to the reader herself. The mystery motif evokes questions and the expectation of their solution, and the ‘solved case’ lays these questions to rest, honouring a generic contract between writer and readership. However, the mere honouring of expectations does not sufficiently explain the genre’s allure. Gill Plain writes, ‘crime fiction in general, and detective fiction in particular, is about confronting and taming the monstrous. It is a literature of containment, a narrative that “makes safe”’ (3). With this formulation in mind, crime fiction can be said to offer the best of both worlds: it offers the reader a thrilling close encounter with the monstrous, but the evil portrayed is curbed and corralled by the strict rules of narrative. Even in cases where the literary criminal evades the reach of the law, they are seldom permitted to slip the bonds of narrative authority. The formula is predicated on an ethos of isolation and naming: the perpetrator is identified amid a group of other characters and clearly marked as the guilty party. This act of separation ‘makes safe’, as Plain would have it, by suggesting evil as something anomalous, which may be extracted and labelled as beyond the bounds of social acceptability. In the meantime, there is the pleasurable fear that comes from watching it at work. Auden describes the mystery story as ‘the ethical and eristic conflict between good and evil’ [1]). The double-ness of the struggle Auden describes is a staple of 7 early crime fiction, but even the more anarchic later forms tend to maintain the ‘eristic’ triumph implicit in identifying a criminal. This may be true even in cases where the meting out of ethical punishment proves to be beyond the investigator’s power. Where the justice system itself is portrayed as being too flawed and inadequate to deal with aberrant individuals, the texts still frequently hew to the principles of the ‘whodunit’ by naming their perpetrators as such. These later forms include the spy novel, the hardboiled crime novel, the psycho-thriller, the legal thriller, the police procedural, and many more variations on the original mystery format. Many of these later forms, particular those which employ the thriller aesthetic, tend to evoke suspense through the depiction of a potentially deadly investigation and the uncertainty of justice, rather than solely holding out the promise of a solution to the initial crime. Eyal Segal writes, Although the hard-boiled mode preserves the basic overarching structure of investigation, it shifts the emphasis from curiosity to suspense as the dominant form of narrative interest, mostly because the events that take place in the narrative present become less subordinate to the goal of solving the past crime mystery. The interest that these events generate by their own internal dynamics, based on the detective’s ‘adventures’, acquires a more autonomous status.
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