(Re-)Inventing Our Selves/Ourselves: Identity and Community in Contemporary South African Short Fiction Cycles

(RE-)INVENTING OUR SELVES/OURSELVES: IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN SHORT FICTION CYCLES A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY at RHODES UNIVERSITY by Susan Jacqueline Marais January 2014 Supervisor: Professor Gareth Cornwell Acknowledgements This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (sabbatical grant SGD13021617369). I would also like to thank the following for their support in the completion of the project: My long-suffering supervisor, Gareth Cornwell. The men in my life – Mike, Kyle, Baldrick, Gimli and Marley – without whom it would not be worth living. Those friends whose warmth and humour has kept me sane: Bridget, Buzo, Carol, Karen and Minesh, Paul and Carol, and Thando, in particular. I owe a particular debt to Karen, for editing and reformatting under pressure. My dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my parents, John and Hazel Hampton. Ernest Hemingway perhaps wrote the best six-word short story ever but, in his recent novel, The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes devised an equally poignant two-word short story, which I repeat here: “Sorry, Mom”. Abstract Within and between the discourses of interacting narratives, transversions question boundaries of identity … – Fiona Gonçalves (1995: 68) In this study I focus on a number of collections of short fiction by the South African writers Joël Matlou, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb and Ivan Vladislavić, all of which evince certain of the characteristics of short story cycles or sequences. In other words, they display what Forrest L. Ingram describes as “a double tendency of asserting the individuality of [their] components on the one hand and of highlighting, on the other, the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole”. The cycle form, thus defined, is characterised by a paradoxical yet productive and frequently unresolved tension between “the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit”, between “the one and the many”, and between cohesion and fragmentation. It is this “dynamic structure of connection and disconnection” which singularly equips the genre to represent the interrelationship of singular and collective identities, or the “coherent multiplicity of community”. Ingram, for example, asserts that “Numerous and varied connective strands draw the co-protagonists of any story cycle into a single community. … However this community may be achieved, it usually can be said to constitute the central character of a cycle”. Not unsurprisingly, then, in its dominant manifestations over much of the twentieth century the short story cycle demonstrated a marked inclination towards regionalism and the depiction of localised enclaves, and this tendency towards “place-based short story cycles” in which topographical unity is a conspicuous feature was as pronounced in South Africa as elsewhere. However, the specific collections which are my concern here increasingly employ innovative and self-reflexive narrative strategies that unsettle generic expectations and interrogate the notions of regionalism and community conventionally associated with the short story cycle. My investigation seeks to explain this shift in emphasis, and its particular significance within the South African context. Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction: The “Storm Years” to the “Cusp Time”- Critical Responses to South Africa in Transition 1 Chapter 1: The Modern Short Story Cycle 24 Chapter 2: South African Short Stories and Short Story Cycles – A Selective Overview 81 Chapter 3: “The Hell of Unhomely Lives”: Joël Matlou’s Life At Home and Sindiwe Magona’s “Women At Work” 126 Chapter 4: Deconstructions of Identity and Community: Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Ivan Vladislavić’s Missing Persons 199 Chapter 5: “You Left. Remember?”: ‘Roots’ Versus ‘Routes’ in Wicomb’s The One That Got Away 252 Conclusion 348 Works Cited 353 Introduction: The “Storm Years” to the “Cusp Time” – Critical Responses to South Africa 1 in Transition At this moment of transformation in the country … what we hope for is not so much fictions which imagine the future in detail, but narrative structures that embrace choice or, if you will, stories that juggle and mix generic options. – Elleke Boehmer (1998: 51) The early nineties in South Africa witnessed a period of intense debate, not least in cultural, literary and academic circles, as it became clear that the demise of apartheid was imminent. In these spheres, prognoses of the shape a ‘new’ literature for a ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa would take, arguments on the relevance of postmodern and postcolonial theories to the South African situation and its cultural/literary products, and re-evaluations of the relationship between politics and aesthetics were especially prominent. Though the terms of and positions adopted within these debates were not entirely new (or unique to South Africa), as some somewhat acrimoniously pointed out, there was a certain sense of gravitas and historical poignancy to such discussions. In this anticipatory climate, two specific interventions by local commentators, both couched as critiques of the effects of ‘protest writing’, occasioned an unprecedented response. The most controversial of these was Albie Sachs’s paper “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom”, first presented to an ANC in-house seminar on culture in 1989 and published in the Weekly Mail in February 1990. Briefly, Sachs questioned whether, on the verge of a transition to “a free and united” country, the South African populace was not “still trapped in the multiple ghettoes of the apartheid imagination”, and he called for a ban on the instrumentalist slogan “culture is a weapon of struggle”, since it had fostered “an impoverishment of our art” (1991: 117, 118).2 Berating the ‘protest tradition’ for its endorsement of a reductive polarisation of positions and “solidarity criticism” (1991: 118), Sachs pointed to this type of writing’s suppression of complexity, ambiguity and irony, and its preoccupation with oppression and trauma to the exclusion of other aspects of human experience. He appealed, then, for greater artistic freedom in terms of both subject matter and style, and his rather vague advice to artists was simply to “write better poems and make better films and compose better music” (1991: 124). Nevertheless, somewhat programmatically, he stipulated that art in the future should emulate the Constitutional Guidelines laid down by the ANC, that is, by “building national unity and encouraging the development of a common patriotism, while fully recognising the linguistic and cultural diversity 1 of the country” (1991: 121). Hotly debated in the media and in political, cultural and academic forums, as a result of their apparently unorthodox deviation from ‘received’ policy and practice, Sachs’s pronouncements immediately generated at least two compilations of commentary in 3 book form. The second perhaps less publicly polemical intervention during this period was the appearance of Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, in 1991. Though these essays had been published individually in magazines and academic journals from 1984 onwards, their cumulative impact in a single volume had a significant bearing on the wider debates current in the early nineties, with the phrase ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ accruing something of the force of a maxim or leitmotif in subsequent years.4 Ndebele’s central injunction, addressed to ‘black’ South African writers, was to relinquish the “unreflective rhetoric of protest” with its obsessive focus on the ‘spectacular’ confrontation of victim and oppressor, and to turn to the specificities of the “ordinary daily lives of people … because they constitute the very content of the struggle, for the struggle involves people not abstractions” (1991: 62, 55). In other words, rather than merely rehearsing positions predetermined by the stunted binaric logic of the apartheid state, such writers should affirm the possibility of locating agency and resistance within the realm of the quotidian, and assert the autonomy and value of ‘black’ culture in its own right.5 For Ndebele, then: the greatest challenge of the South African revolution is in the search for ways of thinking, ways of perception, that will help break down the closed epistemological structures of South African oppression. Structures which can severely compromise resistance by dominating thinking itself. The challenge is to free the entire social imagination of the oppressed from the laws of perception that have characterised apartheid society. For writers this means freeing the creative process itself from those very laws. It means extending the writer’s perception of what can be written about, and the means and methods of writing. (1991: 65) In particular, Ndebele drew a distinction between the propagandist and the artist, a distinction premised on the recognition that the latter, “although desiring action, often with as much passion [as the former], can never be entirely free from the rules of irony … the literary manifestation of the principle of contradiction” (1991: 67). He advised writers to choose the “storytelling, narrative ambience” above the “journalistic, informational ambience”, to draw on the resources 2 provided by popular, oral storytelling traditions, and to turn to the complexities of rural peasant life as a theme, instead of fixating

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