Magical Realism Beyond the Wall of Apartheid? Missing Persons by Ivan Vladislavic Valeria Guidotti A boundary is not that at which something stops but [... ] from which something begins its presenang. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, l.Ilnguage, TIwught)l OUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE, LIKE SHEHERAZADE, has repeatedly Sbeen threatened by death. Critics and intellectuals, mainly from out­ side Africa, formerly feared that the oppressive restriction of apart­ heid would kill creativity; more recently they have been afraid that its demise, with the collapse of that totalitarian system encompassing all fields, social, political, and cultural, would have the same result. How can South African literature survive? Where can it find new life and sustenance? I wish I could make a definite reply to these obsessive ques­ tions: magical realism, a major component of postmodernist fiction and an important feature of post-colonial writing, is also a well established literary practice in post-apartheid literature. However, the transition to freedom is a moment of "cultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability."2 This paper will therefore simply attempt to trace the existence of a fictional mode identifiable as magical realism in South Africa; it will also attempt to uncover connections with and local 1 Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" in Poetry, l.Ilnguage, TIwught; quoted by Homi K Bhabha in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994 ): 1 (author's emphasis). 2 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 35. 228 VALERIA GUIDOTTI 1'0 divergences from the paradigmatic work of that genre: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Stephen Gray denies the possibility of a South African magical-realist tradition, in that he sees magical-realist literature as the manifestation of a baroque, Catholic culture which cannot take root in the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture of South Africa.3 Ivan Vladislavic, the writer on whose collection of short stories, Missing Persons, my analysis will focus, says: "I am suspicious of categories like Magical Realism, I do not think of my work that way, but I wonder has any writer actually ever admitted to being a magical realist?"4 His work, however, was immediately paired with The Powers That Be by Mike Nicol, and both authors have been acclaimed by reviewers as the first South African magical-realistic writers. In addition to the inherent difficulty of defining magical realism, in South Africa the literature in question includes that written by anglophone writers, literature written by blacks, both in English and in local languages, and also works written in Afrikaans by white and coloured, and the rich and imaginative production of the Indian community. Until recently South Africa was a divided and unnaturally fragmented nation. In spite of this, there is the basis for Common literary strategies, and magical realism, "a mode suited to exploring - and transgressing - bound­ aries,"S free from conventionalism, narrowness and hate, might function as a catalyst in the development of a new, national and cross-cultural post­ apartheid literature. Magical realism, then, may replenish exhausted narra­ tive traditions, as John Barth, one of the writers from whom Vladislavic admits having drawn imaginative sustenance, has suggested.6 Other influ­ ences on Vladislavic include Rabelais, Sterne, Swift, Stevenson, Borges, Ka£ka - "a large and motley bunch," as he says? In my opinion, this list denotes a precise, coherent, and quite homogeneous choice. The 'Sestigers' or dissident Afrikaner writers, who as early as the Sixties had already severed links with their 'tribe' and its ideological and cultural orthodoxy, made some original aesthetic choices. Mazisi Kunene argues that 3 Conversation between the author and Professor Gray Oohannesburg, July 1996). 4 From a letter to the author, July 1995. 5 Lois Parkinson Zamora &t Wendy B. Faris, ed., MIlgical Realism: History, Theory, Com­ munity (Durham NC/London: Duke UP, 1995): 5. 6 See John Barth. liThe Uterature of Exhaustion," Atlantic Monthly 220.2 (August 1967): 29-34, and liThe Uterature of Replenishment," Atlantic Monthly 233.1 Oanuary 1980): 65- 71. 7 From a letter to the author, July 1995. .