Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2000"

"Little enough, less than little: nothing": Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee

Abstract: It seems logical to assume that substantive changes in history should lead to shifts in emphasis in the preoccupations of politically engaged literature. After all, such literature usually erects history as an a priori structure. For this reason forms of social realism have usually been favored by politically engaged fiction writers in the South African context. During the apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer treated with suspicion the \"disestablishment from the temporal\" that results from the modernist attempt to \"transform the world by style\"; she concluded that the \"essential gesture\" of the white South African writer \"can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully [. . .] that the reader can no longer evade it'\" (248–50). A body of writing whose understanding of the relation between text and history is informed by a correspondence theory of truth must of necessity alter

The Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform

Abstract: In early March 1998 Nelson Mandela met with cabinet ministers and agricultural leaders to discuss the results of an investigation into a series of murders of white Afrikaans-speaking farmers. Since the historic 1994 elections, more than 500 white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, 35 of them killed in the final two months of 1997 alone. Mandela had ordered the investigation in late 1997, when the frequency of the killings had led to speculations from across the political spectrum that the murders were in some way "politically motivated." Derek Hanekom, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, emerged from the cabinet meeting and announced to reporters, "The overwhelming trend is pure criminality. [. . .] Of course, in certain isolated cases there are people with their own motives and own agendas" ("Crime"). Mandela made no public comment on the intelligence report, and it was not released to the public. At the height of the farm murders crisis in late 1997, Afrikaner farmers had claimed to be in a "war situation" with, as Transvaal farmers' organization leader Willie Lewies claimed, "losses of life comparable to the Vietnam and Yugoslavian conflicts" ("S. Africans to Set Up"). However overstated Lewies's analogy to genocidal military conflicts might seem, the South African Agricultural Union cited the statistic—impressive in

Introduction: South African Fiction after Apartheid

Abstract: MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 46, number 1, Spring 2000. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. The \"remaking of South Africa,\" while it was preceded by a generation of armed struggle against a system of state violence, was heralded by a period of \"talks\"—secret exchanges and public negotiation. The \"postapartheid narrative,\" in other words, is in significant part the story of the emergence of a culture of debate, \"umrabulo,\" issuing in a series of protocols, white papers, parliamentary bills, and in 1996 a Constitution. The story is one that was both consensus building and controversy generating. On 2 February 1990, then president F. W. de Klerk had addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town, announcing the release of political prisoners and the unbanning of proscribed political organizations, and describing the \"process of negotiation\" to be of the \"highest priority\" (Republic). A year earlier, the South African writer and jurist Albie Sachs had delivered a literary paper to an African National Congress in-house seminar in Lesotho; under the title \"Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,\" Sachs proposed that \"our members should be banned from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle\" (239). He went on to propose a banning period \"of, say, five years\" (239). Then, in 1990, the David Attwell and Barbara Harlow f INTRODUCTION:

The Whole Country's Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing

Abstract: On 4 July 1996, Mark Behr delivered the keynote address at a conference in Cape Town entitled \"Faultlines—Inquiries around Truth and Reconciliation.\" Speaking of his own novel, The Smell of Apples, Behr said, \"as an act of creation The Smell of Apples represents, for me, the beginnings of a showdown with myself for my own support of a system like apartheid. [. . . I]f the book's publication has assisted white people in coming to terms with their own culpability for what is wrong in South Africa, then it has been worthwhile\" (1). This formulation reveals, perhaps unintentionally, the ambivalence of what we might call confessional fiction, an ambivalence hinging on Behr's phrase \"coming to terms with their own culpability.\" He means, presumably, confronting that culpability; but his phrase could equally mean accommodating, establishing a comfortable relationship with it. No doubt one's reading of Behr's statement is conditioned by the knowledge that he was about to confess to having been for years, while a student leader in the left-wing student organization National Union of South African Students, a paid informer of the South African security establishment; but even in less pronounced instances of complicity with the apartheid regime, the same questions arise. In particular, for my present purpose, the question arises of whether and in what sense confessional fiction

Interview with Ivan Vladislavic

Abstract: VLADISLAVIC: Not really. I'm interested in writing from that part of the world, but I wouldn't call it a genetic predisposition. I'm interested in some Yugoslav writing, for instance, because of the issues those writers deal with—questions of nationalism, their relationship with the Soviet Union, social change and historical memory, and so on. But I suppose such themes would interest me anyway regardless of my background. I also like Czech writers like Kundera, and Polish writers like Bruno Schulz. ́

Mourning the Postapartheid State Already? The Poetics of Loss in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying

Abstract: Despite their rehearsal of the gestures of resistance theatre, Mda's plays never subscribe to resistance theatre's central dogma, the vision of revolution that will transform utterly the lives of those audacious enough to prosecute it. In the spirit of the doubting anarchists he describes as his lasting influences, Mda leaves the stage with few positive commitments. With its thoroughgoing suspicion of systems of every sort, his drama comes closer to the theatre of the absurd than the theatre of commitment. —Jan Gorak, \"Nothing to Root For: Zakes Mda and South African Resistance Theatre\

The Smell of Apples, Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology

Abstract: Mark Behr's novel The Smell of Apples, first published in Afrikaans in 1993, has been described as an autopsy, a meticulous dissection of apartheid's moldy corpse (Morphet 226–27). But for a reader like me, who grew up as a child of the Afrikaner elite in exactly the same period as the children in the novel, it is more like a haunting, an uncanny encounter with nearly forgotten, yet instantly recognizable shades and echoes. The stale notions and phraseology recited by the novel's young narrator—for example, \"the Communists will use pop music to take over the Republic\" (67), \"a Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory\" (38)—are as intimate to me as the names in the parade of faded celebrities that the novel resurrects: Pierre Fourie, Glenda Kemp, Eddie Barlow, Mitzi Stander. They greet me as familiars—Mitzi's tragic car crash, Louwtjie Barnard's broken heart, John Vorster's détente, the Rapportryers! It all comes back, across an ocean and across the even wider gap of the English translation.1 Behr's novel offers a veritable compendium of the sayings, stereotypes, and justifications that made up the everyday banality of apartheid. It analyzes the system's ideological workings in a knowing and remarkably claustrophobic fashion. The narrative traces a closed circle. It starts f

The Making and Unmaking of History in Ivan Vladislavic's Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories

Abstract: When Thabo Mbeki was officially inaugurated as South Africa's second democratically elected President, a gala event was held to celebrate the consolidation of a democracy born five years earlier. The retirement of an iconic statesman, Nelson Mandela, and the anointing of his chosen successor, validated by almost two-thirds of South Africans in a peaceful election, drew leaders from 120 countries to South Africa. The date of the inauguration, 16 June 1999, had been carefully chosen to commemorate the Soweto uprisings, in which more than 700 black schoolchildren died protesting apartheid education exactly 23 years earlier. The day is now a public holiday in South Africa—Youth Day—and after the solemnities of the inauguration 100,000 South Africans gathered on the rolling lawns of the Union Buildings to gyrate to the latest kwaito—the distinctive, hybridized music of South African townships—in celebration of a new president. In one sense, the inauguration can be seen as an apogee in the quest for democratic ideals in South Africa. The compound damage of a blood-soaked past appeared to have been vanquished by the triumph of democratic justice. Moreover, the departure of Mandela was proving to be a cause of celebration rather than an occasion for despair, demonstrating the vitality of the country's newly democratic institutions. Against

The "Walking Wounded": Rethinking Black Women's Identity in Ann Petry's The Street

Abstract: It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. —Paul Laurence Dunbar, \"We Wear The Mask\

"I'm in the Business Too": Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler's The Big Sleep

Abstract: Marlowe most resembles the "true" knight. In The High Window he is even called a "shop-soiled Galahad" (Stories 1136), that is, a "son" of Lancelot. That he "test[s] very high on insubordination" and was in fact fired for that reason as a former investigator for the district attorney (10) suggests that Marlowe has repeatedly been asked to place his loyalty to superiors above his dedication to justice, and refused. He is, in short, looking for a liege lord worthy of a "true" knight like himself. While Marlowe's strict adherence to the rule of comitatus may prevent him from betraying Sternwood by sleeping with his daughters, it does not, in the long run, serve the cause of justice. For the General has ordered Marlowe not only to protect him and his family, but to protect and

Surviving Murder: Oscillation and Triangulation in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun

Abstract: These, the opening two sentences of the third paragraph of Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun (1998), introduce a sequence which appears to be, in narrative terms, fairly accessible. The setting, though it begins to stage a moment of shock and incomprehension, is clear. Claudia and Harald Lindgard, secure in their middle-class professions (she as doctor, he as well-placed business executive) as well as secured for physical safety's sake within the confines of their small but comfortable townhouse in Johannesburg, are faced with a sudden and unexpected entry. The caller at the door, whom Harald has risen to question through the intercom before admitting, turns out to be Julian, a friend of their son Duncan, who has arrived at their home to tell them that someone has been shot and that Duncan has been arrested for the killing. The couple has been interrupted while watching evening news of disasters elsewhere (the television images Claudia is still half-following in her mind), to hear an

Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation (review)

Abstract: information multiplicity american fiction in the age of media saturation. Book lovers, when you need a new book to read, find the book here. Never worry not to find what you need. Is the information multiplicity american fiction in the age of media saturation your needed book now? That's true; you are really a good reader. This is a perfect book that comes from great author to share with you. The book offers the best experience and lesson to take, not only take, but also learn.

Interview with Sindiwe Magona

Abstract: ATWELL: Sindiwe, to begin with Mother to Mother and To My Children's Children, would it be fair to say that in Mother to Mother, you have a different sense of your readership? The event brings the United States and South Africa together through the experience of Amy Biehl's death, and then the fiction constructs a relationship between mothers across that national division. Is this perhaps a feature of the situation after apartheid, that we are becoming more globalized, that our audience is more diverse?

Rediscovery of the Magical: On Fairy Tales, Feminism, and the New South Africa

Abstract: MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 46, number 1, Spring 2000. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. She believed in the power of imagination, Griet decided, rather than the impotence of reality. She believed in the possibility of love rather than the certainty of death. She believed in stories . . . but was that enough? —Marita van der Vyver, Entertaining Angels