Table Of ContentPRESENT IMPERFECT
Present Imperfect
Contemporary South African Writing
ANDREW VAN DER VLIES
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For my mother and for Patrick,
and in memory of my father.
Preface
PresentImperfectisastudyofaffect,temporality,andforminwritingfrom
postapartheid South Africa. Put another way, this book explores how
contemporary literature, for the most part fiction, from one of late-
twentieth-century history’s most affectively charged locations—stage for
thespectacleofdehumanizingracialdiscrimination,siteandoccasionfor
vicarious global investments in the performance of struggle, liberation,
andreconciliation—engageswiththeaftermathofapartheid.
South Africans had much to celebrate on the occasion of the first
democratic, universal-suffrage elections in late April 1994, the culmin-
ation of a long struggle against centuries of colonial and subsequently
white-minorityrule thathadmadeapartheida bywordforracism. There
were great expectations for the multi-racial democracy that Desmond
Tutu memorably named the ‘Rainbow Nation’. Hopes were high that
thisdecolonizationwouldbedifferent,thatitwouldnotdevolve,asithad
doneelsewhereinAfrica,intoaversionofwhathadcomebefore,that(as
NeilLazarusputit)‘ournationalliberationfrontwouldnotserve,onceit
becamethepartyinpowerafterdecolonization,tocoveroveritstracesand
disavow both its heritage and its historic responsibility; our leaders, our
“menofthepeople”(and“womenofthepeople”)wouldnotbecome,as
elsewhereonthecontinent,thepuppetsofinternationalcapital’.1
And yet, perhaps inevitably, much of the hopefulness of the early post-
transition years has faded. South Africans now find themselves, in Achille
Mbembe’sdiagnosis,miredin‘thebloodymiasmaoftheZumayears,these
yearsofstagnation,rent-seekingandmediocrityparadingasleadership,[...]
as institutions after institutions crumble under the weight of corruption, a
predatorynewblackéliteandthecynicismofformeroppressors’.2Ifthepoor
hoped that the Age of Zuma might yield more than had accrued to them
throughtheMandelaandMbeki(andMotlanthe)administrations’accom-
modationswithneoliberaleconomics,theyweretobefurtherdisappointed.
Indeed,itmightbesaidthatlifeinthepostapartheidnationhascometobe
characterized, for many, by a profound experience of disappointment—
disappointment that the liberation struggle failed to deliver the equality of
opportunity and shared access to the country’s wealth that was promised,
thatthepricepaidbymanyforreconciliation,aguidingprincipleofNelson
Mandela’spresidency,mayhavebeentoohigh.
SimilarbadfeelingscanofcoursebereadintoSouthAfricanhistoryandin
the literature that explores its lived experience from the moment of first
viii Preface
contact—in relation to promises to autochthonous peoples betrayed by
European settlers, through proto-Afrikaner reactions to British hegemony
(the end of slaveholding, the annexation of the Dutch Republics, the Boer
War),tothedespair,grief,andoutrageofblackSouthAfricans,deniedtheir
landinthewakeoftheNativesLandActin1913andtheirdignityunderthe
dehumanizingapartheidlawsenactedafter1948.Varietiesofdisappointment
and the dysphoric feelings associated therewith thus have a past in South
Africa; all involve feeling trapped in an imperfect present that is not as the
futurewasimagined,apresentbeyondwhichitmightbeastruggletosee.
Thisbookdevelopsfrommysensethatdisappointmentisasignificant
structure offeelingincontemporarySouthAfrica.Thisisan observation
neither new nor singular (disappointment is in the air), but there is
somethingalittledifferentthistimearound,Ibelieve.Ifdisappointment
isastructuringaffect,Iargue,itshouldalsobeunderstoodasatemporal
condition. As feeling, in the sense of the term that is most familiar,
disappointmentconnotesthefrustrationoftheexpectationof—anddesire
for—somethingdifferent.3Inthissense,SouthAfricansaredisappointed
becausetheirleadersarecorrupt,inequalitiespersist,andthegapbetween
richandpoorgrowseachyear.However,inameaningnowobsolete,but
close to that of undoing or frustrating something determined or
appointed,todisappointoncealsomeant‘tofail tokeeporcomplywith
(anengagement);tofailtofulfilanappointment’.4SouthAfricansexistin
thistemporalstateofdisappointment—ordis-appointment—becausethey
have missed the appointment they were promised with a better future,
with democracy and the promise of equality, the putative fruits of revo-
lution.Thattheywereledtobelievethattheappointmenthadbeenkept,
theclaimimplicitinthepresentationofthecountryaswholly‘New’,asan
unprecedented ‘Rainbow Nation’, makes postapartheid disappointment
(andallofitsassociatedbadfeelings)distinctive.
Present Imperfect does not track the representation of a uniformly
expressed or understood affect or experience, nor are the works about
which I writerepresentative of the same shared sense of disappointment,
either as bad feeling or missed appointment. Disappointment serves
instead to focus and direct my engagement with a range of negative
feelingsthatarealsoexperiencesoftemporaldisjuncture,includingstasis,
impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. I use disappointment as a
category description, emphasizing variously its suggestions of affective or
temporaldislocationastheworksinquestion,andtheirculturalcontexts,
demand. As such, what the chapters that follow offer is a cohesive
approachratherthanasingleargument.
Attuned to the sometimes elusive workings of the writerly, Present
Imperfect asks what thinking about affect and temporality together
Preface ix
might unlock for the reader, the scholar, and the student of present-day
South African writing, and of postcolonial and contemporary world
literaturemorebroadly.ItaddresseskeyquestionsinSouthAfricanstudies
abouttheevolvingcharacterofthehistoricalperiodinwhichthecountry
nowfindsitself:thelongtransitionthathasfollowedtheendofapartheid.
It also looks outward, making a case for the key place of South African
writinginglobalconversations.Itdoesthisbothbyfollowingintertextual
conversations that the works under discussion themselves frequently
pursue,andbytestingtheusefulnessofconceptualframesnotfrequently
consideredinthestudyofSouthAfricanwriting.Iaminterestedinwhat
the payoffs might be when we follow these already global conversations
andread‘local’literaryworkswith(oralongside)suchglobalframes.One
payoff is that mobilizing the energies of a turn to affect in recent literary
andcultural-studiesscholarshipallowsustounderstandaspoliticalthose
feelings—and especially bad feelings—that might otherwise seem merely
personal or private. Rather than a sign of its evacuation, these feelings
indexa potentialtoreinvigoratethepolitical.Anotherpayoffistounder-
stand how literature, and especially the novel, might provide spaces in
whichimaginativeopeningsoutofthepresentuncertainaftermathofthe
endofapartheidaremadevisible.
This book traces such openings in work by key fiction writers of the
contemporary moment, specifically J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk,
Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, and Ingrid Winterbach, as well as in the
last work of the late Nadine Gordimer and in debut novels by younger
writers Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. Several of these
authors (Coetzee, Gordimer) have established international reputations;
some (Wicomb, Vladislavić, Van Niekerk) have rising profiles; others
(Winterbach, Mahlangu, Ntshanga) are still relatively unknown outside
of South Africa. Van Niekerk and Winterbach both write in Afrikaans,
and in discussing their work I hope toaid the expansion of the canon of
contemporary South African writing visible to international anglophone
readers. I mobilize readings of writing marked in various ways as ‘South
African’ but which also contest such labels in order to complicate the
contoursof‘WorldLiterature’asitisdevelopinginthepresentmoment—
as category, discipline, and pedagogy. What South African writers have
to say continues to reverberate in a world that becomes, perversely,
more like the country every year: more unequal, but also concerned
with the legacies—and in some cases the resurgence—of restrictive and
exclusionaryideologies,andatthewhimofnon-stateactorsandspecula-
tivecapital.Thisis,inconsequence,alsoabookaboutthediscontentsof
neoliberalism, aboutthepoliticalenergiesofreading,andaboutthe fates
ofliteratureinourtroubledpresent.
