towards merging stories of self-making and ‘history’, and they also point to the productive tensions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ with their multiple meanings.
2
From the subject of evil to the evil subject
Cultural difference in postapartheid South African crime fiction
One of the more energetic debates about postapartheid South African literature revolves around the question of why genre fiction, and more particularly crime fiction, so heavily saturates the book market. This debate has often been conducted anecdotally or superficially in reviews and comments on literary websites, despite scattered journal articles and one or two special issues on the topic.1 Particularly contested has been my own suggestion that crime thrillers may have come to stand in for what used to be seen as political or engaged fiction, in response to which some academics have argued that the generic or formulaic nature of detective novels precludes them from a nuanced treatment of sociopolitical issues.2 A common strand has been the contention that it is far-fetched to assume that genre fiction can engage with political themes in the manner of Gordimer, Langa, Mda or Serote. A great deal of this commentary appears in the form of stabs of opinion in the comment threads of digital media, and as such does not penetrate much beyond provisional position-taking.
An exception to this trend is Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s essay ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, in which the authors argue that Nicol’s own turn from serious fiction (as exemplified by his 1998 novel The Ibis Tapestry) to the popular form of crime fiction (as in his 2008 novel Payback) represents an unfortunate withdrawal from more serious literary writing in which matters are, fittingly, in a state of unresolved tension. Instead of keeping faith with the open-form novel, Nicol gives way to the temptation of neat but ultimately superficial gestures of closure. Although Titlestad and Polatinsky do not say so explicitly, there is in their argument a strong sense of disappointment that an outstanding South African author, in the older, more serious vein of South African writing, should ‘sell out’ to the seductions of a popular market where trite ‘answers’ are laid out in accordance with the norms of the genre. For Titlestad and Polatinsky, the intense grappling of pre-2000 writing with the challenges of cultural difference – how to give people of all ethnic, gender and class variations their due – appears to have given way to ‘thriller’ computations of the social totality. Nicol’s neo-noir3 palette, for Titlestad and Polatinsky, amounts to premature closure, as if the new democracy is little more than a motley gangland version of the rainbow nation. Reading Titlestad and Polatinsky, one finds it difficult not to agree that, if it is indeed true that crime fiction mostly dishes out cheap closure, such totalisation would be premature, to say the least. The sense of disinvestment so brought about, a divestiture of multilayered texture and imponderable complexity for the sake of superficial resolution and easy entertainment, is helped along by some of Nicol’s own statements. These utterances (as disingenuous, perhaps, as Athol Fugard’s protestations that his writing is ‘not political’) make the case that Nicol has abandoned serious fiction to write ‘commercial fiction’ because he supposedly enjoys it more, and it sells better.4 So, in a sense, Titlestad and Polatinsky’s article reads as a kind of parable for a literature that has ‘lost the plot’, abandoning its moral compass and its sense of direction. This, indeed, is a common theme in discussions of postapartheid writing (see Frenkel and MacKenzie). One might argue that, being lost, this new writing has surrendered to the quick fix of genre fiction, though with a patina of political content in its preoccupation with social violence, or ‘crime’. Given the subtext of Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument, one is invited to read the story of a once-great literature, with redoubtable names like Breytenbach, Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer, Hope, Langa, Leroux, Matshoba, Mda, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Serote, Van Heerden, Van Niekerk and Vladislavić, against an alarming recent trend of ‘dumbing down’. The post-transitional genre writers are seen as copping out of the real deal, i.e. complexity and openness, for the sake of quick-sell entertainment. These supposedly cheap tricks, in addition, feed off a still-volatile society in a manner which, some might claim, borders on the unethical.
Titlestad and Polatinsky’s argument is generally sound and well executed, though Christopher Warnes (‘Writing Crime’ 983) detects a ‘popular’ and ‘highbrow’ binary in their reasoning. Without going into the merits of an argument that compels one to choose between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, I would like to suggest that there may be a different way of looking at Nicol’s work, and that of other crime writers. This chapter, then, asks a different question of crime fiction, one which might be introduced as follows: what if one were to read the large (although by no means universal) shift from, let’s say, social-realist ‘complexity’ to crime-detective ‘genre’, as something else entirely? This would involve reading the genre as symptomatic of a bigger movement, of a seismic social shift. What if the upsurge in South African ‘crime writing’, in all its forms,5 rather than selling out on intricate ‘entanglement’ (see Nuttall, Entanglement), is in fact prising open the workings of a genuinely transformed social condition? This is a condition, moreover, that is no longer just national, just ‘South African’, but transnational in its dimensions, and global in its derivations.
The question, then, might be posed thus: why this obsession, in the new millennium, with law and (dis)order, and more particularly with the spectacle of ‘crime’, as presented in mediated forms such as fiction and nonfiction writing? Articulated in this way, the question leads us away from the ultimately futile war of opinion about whether or not crime fiction is sufficiently ‘literary’, or adequately complex as an object of formal literary architecture. Instead, it concentrates attention on the questions: what is this fiction about? And what is it doing out there? This, indeed, is the issue to which Warnes also directs scholars of South African writing, suggesting that writers such as Meyer and Orford ‘keep faith with some of the core features of “serious” South African literature: its capacity to document social reality, to expose injustice, and to conscientise readers into different modes of thought and action’ (‘Writing Crime’ 983). I would add a further set of ‘core’ questions which the literary scholar might address: why the relatively sudden, and major, shift in circulation and reception from liberal-humanist and late-modern forms of fiction to genre-based novels? To what larger socio-historical complex might this be attributed, as a more general syndrome? This is a by no means uninteresting question, and one that Warnes seems not to probe sufficiently, merely resting his case on the argument that ‘the postapartheid crime thriller should be read as negotiating – in the ambivalent sense of the word – the threat and uncertainty that many feel to be part of South African life, creating fantasies of control, restoration and maintenance, and reflecting on the circumstances that gave rise to this unease’ (‘Writing Crime’ 991). But what of the greater complex of circumstances that underlie the ‘threat and uncertainty’ that Warnes identifies?
Cultural difference in a postapartheid frame
My argument commences with an overview of the changing role of cultural difference before and after the political transition of the 1990s. For several decades now, postcolonial theory, not to mention grassroots cultural politics, has encouraged an emphasis on cultural difference as a modifier of political subjectivity and identitarian position-taking. More general studies of cultural difference in its many dimensions, such as those by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young,6 in addition to local ones by, inter alia, Attwell, Duncan Brown and Wylie,7 have tended to place the spotlight on the many ways in which cultural difference has been misrecognised, in the colonies and the Orient, within reductive epistemic frames of reference. The centuries-long discourse around the ‘wild man’,8 primitivism, exoticism and other categories, including the fixations of social-Darwinist thought and biological racism,9 found a rebuttal in postcolonial theory and revisionist cultural history, most emphatically perhaps in Said’s Orientalism, and stretching beyond literary and
