Cars, Capital and Disorder in Ivan Vladislavic’s The

Exploded View and Portrait with Keys

Under apartheid, economies of movement were significantly

over-determined by race; in post-apartheid ways of moving

through the city continue to be informed by race and,

more particularly, class. In a social landscape

increasingly defined by aspirational consumption, the car

has powerful purchase in the South African imaginary as a

site for the enactment of status, wealth and choice. This

article traces the interweaving of urban space, capital

and automobility through a consideration of Ivan

Vladislavic’s short novel The Exploded View and his notes on

the city in Portrait with Keys: The City Of Johannesburg Unlocked. It

argues that while car driving dominates the cityscape

materially and discursively, the lines drawn between

those with cars and those without are neither absolute

nor unchallenged.1

The article follows analyses of Vladislavic’s work that

have engaged his critique of urban space. For Ralph

1

Goodman, Vladislavic’s deconstructive impulses test the

spatial implications of a period of social transition,

satirising attempts to segregate the city along axes of

wealth and poverty (11). Sarah Nuttall reads PwK as it

delineates the interplay between ‘surface and depth’

(83), disclosing the physic and historical worlds that

underlie and are entwined with the formations of world

above. In Shane Graham’s view, the value of the

literature resides in its unveiling of the material

processes informing the construction of space and place

in the city. Thus Vladislavic’s aesthetic of ‘imperfect

erasure’ registers both the ways in which history is

expunged in Johannesburg, and the disquieting traces that

remain behind (7).

The paper seeks to draw some of these threads together in

its recognition of material differences that continue to

shape the city and the ways in which difference is

destabilised. It does so by reading the car as a motif

through which to explore frictions between spatial

manifestations of ‘orderly’ capital and the ‘disorder’ of

2

alternative modes of urban occupation. Vladislavic’s

writing alerts the reader to the multiple spaces existing

within and between expressions of capital. Concomitantly,

he critically investigates the contribution of race and

class to the construction of space in ways that

powerfully suggest the role of aesthetics as social

critique.

The formal qualities of these literatures are intrinsic

to Vladislavic’s negotiation of space in the city. PwK is

a non-fiction, archival collection of his observations on

Johannesburg. The text is divided into 29 ‘long’,

‘moderate’ or ‘short’ itineraries that enable the reader

to navigate its pages through various points in the

narrative. Vladislavic thematically links textual cycles

at the back of the book, suggesting alternative pathways

to typical linear trajectories of reading. The non-linear

structure of the text replicates the impenetrable,

seemingly incoherent topography of the city, drawing upon

the mode of the travel guide to locate or dislocate the

reader within a series of distinct but interwoven

3

encounters, places and memories. Nodes of crossover

imitate the manner in which Johannesburg’s spaces are

both interlinked and discrete; Vladislavic’s formal

technique establishing a specific mode of reading the

cityscape alert to its mutability and fixity.

EV is a collection of four ingeniously interlinked

narratives, each of which details the daily experiences

of four of Johannesburg’s male inhabitants. The

characters never meet but their lives intersect co-

incidentally through the city’s townhouses, restaurants,

billboards and roads. The title of the novel is gleaned

from a line in the story, “Crocodile Lodge” in which

Gordon Duffy, billboard constructer, recalls the American

mechanics magazines of his childhood. The magazines’

technical drawings of household implements depict the

‘divided parts’ or components that form the whole:

every element named and numbered and in its god-

given place, taking things apart in his head,

putting them together again. In time the wholes and 1 Further references to Portrait with Keys and The Exploded View

will be abbreviated and cited as PwK and EV respectively.4

parts grew closer and closer together, infected with

purpose, until they pressed up against one another,

sometimes, and fused…Having consumed the technical

drawing and its qualities, the lifelike image became

manipulable. The exploded view (189).

The disassembling of the whole and its reassembling into

manipulable ‘lifelike’ images is the ‘exploded view’ that

both contracts and expands designations of form and

function. The defamilarisation of the everyday is a

postmodern dislocation of the known that estranges the

individual from the social (historical, political) co-

ordinates of epistemological certitude. But the idea of a

view in which the components have been laid bare,

exploded outwards, also points to disclosure. The image

is pulled apart to reveal the reality underneath. Here

then, the distinct but entwined narratives of the EV

complicate the structures of novelistic form and

cityscape while mining their constituent parts.

5

It is not insignificant that all of the characters in EV

are male— the gendered nature of the text is a call to

attend to the portrayal of masculinities in Vladislavic’s

work, particularly white masculinities as they come under

strain in a country where the white male, once dominant,

seems to be increasingly marginalised. James Graham has

pointed to the presence of a critical self-reflexivity in

Vladislavic that explores, ‘his own position of inherited

privilege as a white, middle-class male.’ (‘Ivan

Vladislavic and the possible city’, 340). Accordingly,

analyses of the car in the following pages operate within

the perspective offered by the texts, that of the white

middle-class male.2

The middle class space of the car is tied to broader

concerns regarding the relationship between the

production of urban space and capital. South Africa’s

entry into the global economy and the processes of

deindustrialisation have meant that local sites of the

production of capital, such as goldmines, shape the urban

less influentially than they once did (Beall, Crankshaw

6

and Parnell 14). Rather, as David Harvey theorises, flows

of capital have come to be defined by their globalisation

and by more flexible forms of accumulation (Spaces of

Capital, 123). Nevertheless, the relationship between

capital and space in the city continues to be shaped by

the segregations established under the apartheid state,

now given a new guise in South Africa’s neo-liberal

economy.

In PwK Vladislavic writes, ‘the complexity of cities, the

flows of traffic across ever-changing grids, coupled with

the peculiarities of physical address, occupations,

interests and needs, produces for each one of us a

particular pattern of familiar or habitual movement over

the skin of the earth...It is literally impossible for

certain of these paths to cross…this is all the more

reason why the crossing of paths, the places where they

touch like wires on a circuit, for no better reason than

chance, should be taken seriously’ (12). The text’s

philosophical echoing of de Certeau’s work on the

subversive potentiality of everyday practices has led

7

critics to focus on Vladislavic’s depiction of unexpected

and coincidental encounters thrown up by walking in the

city.3 However, trajectories of car driving in PwK and EV

disclose in the urban nodes of difference and unforeseen

convergence. The roads and highways along which the car 2 It should be noted that private car use is not the

provenance of white drivers. For black South Africans the

car increasingly figures in the construction of

postapartheid identities— such is the case in EV with the

black artist Simeon Majara. However, the text’s self-

conscious ironizing of Majara’s appropriation of African

“traditional” culture is framed by his middle-class

lifestyle. For Paul Gilroy, the imbrication of black

subjectivities in “car culture” (84) is not clearly

beneficial. Writing on the car in African American

popular culture, he argues that driving signifies

historical processes of, “American apartheid.” (100).

Although theoretically rooted in enunciations of

identity, he maintains that African American “car

culture” actually depoliticizes as identity is subsumed

by consumerist practice. My thanks to Sarah Nuttall for

her observations on this point. 8

travels uncover widening inequalities. Simultaneously,

alternative forms of mobility impinge upon car-space in

ways that test the boundaries between ‘haves’ and ‘have-

nots’ or, for our purposes, car drivers and non car-

drivers.

As James Graham observes, critical emphasis on walking in

Johannesburg as a liberatory practice has insufficiently

acknowledged the dynamics of driving in the city

(‘Exploding Johannesburg’, 71). The overwhelming

prevalence of the automobile and its contingent

formations— roads, billboards, traffic signs— points to

structures of power and difference which the car

embodies. For if the car dominates the cityscape it is

affordable to a minority of its inhabitants. Jeremy

Cronin notes that the neglect of public transport, a

hangover from apartheid era administration, has meant,

‘While only 37% of households in Johannesburg own a car,

private car use to get to work has now surpassed other

modes… Another staggering 46% of households in

Johannesburg are spending more than 10% of their poverty-

9

level incomes on transport.’ Those forms of public

transport that are available, particularly minibuses, can

be unreliable and dangerous. The recently implemented Bus

Rapid Transit (BRT) system provides some access to the

CBD for Soweto residents, but has met with vigorous and

violent opposition from the taxi industry. Depressingly,

plans for expansion face resistance from residents of the

wealthy northern suburbs, suggesting the continuing

legacy of race and class divisions in the city. The

project for a train system linking different parts of the

city known as the Gautrain has been criticised for

catering to the wealthy while neglecting the transport

needs of the poor. So Johannesburg remains a city of

drivers, whether of Mercedes or mini-buses.3 See for example Mike Marais, “Visions of Excess:

Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Community in Ivan

Vladislavic’s the Restless Supermarket.”; Michael

Titlestad and Gerald Gaylard; “Controversial

Interpretations: Ivan Vladislavic.”; Michael Titlestad

and Michael Kissack “Secular Improvisations.”; Carrol

Clarkson “Visible and Invisible: What Surfaces in Recent

Johannesburg Novels?” 10

All of the characters in EV rely on cars to conduct their

business. The protagonist of the story “Villa Toscana”,

Les Budlender, is a statistician in his forties involved

in drawing up a population census that itself is a

metaphor for the unmappable qualities of the South

African experience. Stopped at a traffic light, Budlender

encounters the very elements of an informal economy his

numbers-oriented mind seeks to contain, ‘He wound up the

window and glared at the curio-sellers and their wares,

ranged on the verges and the traffic islands…Arts and

crafts. Junk. Every street corner in Johannesburg was

turning into a flea market’ (4).

Budlender’s catalogue of objects is an attempt to

quantify the diversities of contemporary Johannesburg

that nonetheless remain elusive. The objects are gathered

together in a chaotic and unrelated assemblage that

displaces their meaning and renders them, in Budlender’s

eyes at least, ‘junk.’ Simultaneously, the very listing

11

of these objects manifests a history and a present that

continue to be shaped by the distribution of wealth.

There is a distinct commodification process at work, of

nature (the giraffes), of history (the national flag) and

of society (the AIDS awareness badges). The unmooring of

history and its reification as commodity signals the

increasingly unstable parameters of meaning upon which

identities such as Budlender’s depend.4 Those who sell

history are the marginalised, the poor, whose situation

on the traffic island keeps them outside the parameters

of wealth. They and their goods are easily classified as

‘junk’. But there is also a subversive facet to this

expression of disorder that repeats throughout the text

as the spaces of ordered capital are ruptured by other,

unruly urban presences.5

Budlender’s unease in the confines of his car is

reflected in an episode in PwK where Vladislavic

undertakes a shopping trip to an O.K. Bazaar (a South

African supermarket chain). In the car park adjoining the

store, he is accosted by a vagrant who promises to

12

protect his car from would-be thieves. The scene is a

sequence in a long itinerary named “Engaging the Gorilla”

(18-19), including Vladislavic’s recent purchase of a

steering wheel lock bearing the commercial name

‘Gorilla’. The lock is intended to signify inviolable

security but fails to do so, as its attempts at order are

persistently disrupted by the disorderly manifestations

of crime and deprivation.

For as Vladislavic comments with some irony, incidence of

hijacking are, ‘directly related to the efficacy of

vehicle security systems. The increasing application of

alarms, electronic immobilizers and steering and gear

locks…has made it almost impossible to steal an

unoccupied, stationary car’ (69). Expressions of order

have the paradoxical effect of generating disorders that

are not only more frequent, but also inflict greater

violence on those bodies inhabiting the car.

The territorialisation of the car as an exclusive and

proprietary space finds its parallel in another sequence

13

from the cycle centred on the celebrity status of “Max

the Gorilla” (31-32). Max, a gorilla at the Johannesburg

Zoo, acquired fame in the nation’s media by defending his

enclosure against the incursion of an armed criminal

fleeing a burglary. Max’s protection of his territory is 4 Jean Comaroff has shown how the politics of cultural

identity in post-apartheid South Africa are tied to the

commodification of history and ethnicity. Citing the

plethora of historical representation in the media and

the everyday, she argues that, “history is endangered

less by its appropriation by the powerful than by its

unrestrained indulgence, its diffusion everywhere and

hence to nowhere in particular” (142).

5 Budlender’s obsession with lists is pre-figured by the

character Aubrey Tearle in Vladislavic’s earlier novel,

The Restless Supermarket. Tearle is a proof-reader formerly of

“The Department of Posts and Telecommunication”, whose

retirement is spent compiling a compendium of

“corrigenda.” That is, grammatical and linguistic errors

that occur with increasing frequency in the media,

advertising, everyday speech and other forms of public

discourse in South Africa. 14

projected onto the defence of personal property by the

media (and the makers of security products) as

indisputable right in a country where private and

domestic spheres must be secured against the socio-

economic inequality embodied in crime and vagrancy.

Vladislavic’s car is an interface between these two

(linked) forms of rupture in middle-class space,

underscoring both the acute economic discrepancies

persisting in Johannesburg and the ways in which the

boundaries constructed between the spaces of wealth and

poverty are perforated. The vagrant will not go away.

‘His face is close to the window again. Talking.

Gesturing…I stick the key in the Gorilla but it won’t

disengage: in my haste to get away I’ve jammed the lock

somehow. He goes on talking. I cannot ignore him…I open

the window two inches. His face comes closer. He’s

tilting it to one side, so that I can see more of it

through the gap. He wants me to know who he is, to look

at him. He wants me to recognize him when I see him

again’ (68).

15

The defensive value of the gorilla lock is undermined by

Vladislavic’s inability to operate it and, perforce, to

keep the outside out. The vagrant ‘goes on talking’, that

is, goes on enunciating his presence and inserting

himself into the car’s socio-spatial exclusivity. This

disruption is not a singular event— by inscribing himself

onto Vladislavic’s memory, insisting that the author

recognise him whenever he drives to the O.K. Bazaar, the

vagrant establishes an undeniable and discomforting link

between the spaces of consumption and the spaces of

deprivation. Vladislavic’s increasingly desperate

attempts to ‘engage the Gorilla’ and escape the vagrant

constitute a defence of his middle-class identity against

the unnerving evidence of extreme socio-economic

difference. It is ironic that this defence occurs as a

result of the vagrant’s offer to defend Vladislavic’s car

against crime, another consequence of those discrepancies

that make the author’s encounter with him so awkward.

16

Vladislavic knows that middle-class space is ultimately

indefensible; affluence and destitution do not simply

intersect. All too often, justification of the former is

contingent upon a refusal to see or to engage – to borrow

the terminology of the Gorilla— with poverty and

unemployment that manifest throughout the city. In a

subsequent entry in PwK, Vladislavic clearly establishes

the roots of crime and dependency in economic inequities.

1998 may have been the year in which 107 675 cars were

stolen in South Africa, but it is also the year in which,

‘the executive directors of South African companies

earned an average of R 99 916 per month…A factory worker

earning R 1 800 a month— the average minimum wage – would

have taken five years to earn what the average company

director earned in a month. Yet these workers had to

consider themselves fortunate, because 40 per cent of

black South Africans were unemployed’ (69).

Examples like these demonstrate the breakdown of

boundaries between outside and in, between the privileged

and the poor. The car is enclosed and fortified against

17

the unpredictable qualities of the spaces it navigates.

The problem is that the outside world keeps invading,

keeps pressing its face to the window. Thus, the car also

reveals the continuous and unavoidable intersection of

interior by exterior and those places in which they 6 South African cities are defined by their uneven

development. For Patrick Bond, the ruling ANC’s neo-

liberal, free market politics bears minimal resemblance

to the socialist mores established by the 1955 Freedom

Charter and has resulted in, “more continuity than change

from urban apartheid to post-apartheid” (Cities of Gold,

Townships of Coal, xv). In the party’s movement away from

popular nationalism, he identifies a critical shift in

its abandonment of the socialist Reconstruction and

Development Programme (RDP) in 1996 for the neo-liberal

orthodoxy of Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)

in June of that same year (Elite Transition, 16-17). GEAR’s

conception as, “an economic framework demonstrably

structured in favour of the interests of foreign and

local capital,” estranged the ANC from its Alliance

partners COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions)

and the SACP (South African Communist Party) and had 18

‘touch like wires in a circuit.’ This tension between internality and

externality can be mapped onto the city itself— conceptions of order intended to shield capital are

interrogated by poverty and inequality that lie outside the walls of gated communities and closed

car windows.6

The road routes taken by the drivers in EV stress the

car’s signification as a site in which order and disorder

are in constant push and pull for primacy. The

spatialised divisions constituting Johannesburg are

flagged by the presence of gated communities that are

barricaded against the disorder of the outside. One such

community is the eponymous mock Tuscan village “Villa

Toscana”, home to census volunteer Iris Du Plooy.

Budlender’s increasing obsession with Du Plooy leads him

to call upon her more than is professionally necessary.

Leaving her home after his third visit, he takes a wrong

turn and becomes lost among the identikit properties of

Villa Toscana. The inertia that the complex produces in

Budlender is worth quoting at length here:

profound consequences for South Africa’s urban areas.

(Tony Ehrenreich, quoted in Tom Lodge, 26). 19

At first, he was irritated. Not just with himself

for his carelessness, but with the whole ridiculous

lifestyle that surrounded him, with its repetitions,

its mass-produced effects, its formulaic

individuality. But then this very shallowness began

to exert a pacifying effect on him. Gazing out at

the pink and yellow facades, rumbling over the

cobbled speed bumps that kept the car down to a

walking pace, he grew calmer. He felt the tension

leaving his body, draining out in to the afternoon,

almost visible, like some dark strand on the pastel

air. He rolled the window down and dangled his arm

in the breeze, trailing his stress behind him like a

purple ribbon. On a slope down into the valley the

distant freeway hummed, he put the car into neutral

and coasted, betting on himself to get over the next

speed bump (31-32).

Despite his initial annoyance, the anesthetizing affect

of Villa Toscana’s ‘repetitions’ lulls Budlender into a

sense of false security. The neat order of its pink and

20

yellow units is mapped onto his pacified consciousness.

This in turn manifests in the slow coasting of the car,

its gear the mechanical expression of Budlender’s

neutralisation. The freeway that carries Budlender around

the city and connects the spaces of difference obscured

by places such as Villa Toscana, is reduced to a far-off

and dreamlike hum. The streets of the gated community

manufacture their own simulacrum of reality in which the

outside barely features.

Budlender’s rolled down window offers a direct contrast

to the passage discussed earlier in this paper, in which

he winds up his car window to better glare at the street

vendors. If that scene suggested an attempt at preserving

the inner sanctum of the car against the disorderly

outside, then here the spaces of gated community and car

are continuous, forming part of an undisrupted semiotic

flow in which both are signs of prosperity and the power

of purchase. The inhabitants of Villa Toscana, described

as ‘Tuscans’, are, ‘rudely healthy, and well-dressed,

banging the doors of their cars, fetching briefcases and

21

grocery packets from their boots, pressing the remote

control devices that switched on the alarms of their

obedient recreational vehicles’ (32). Ownership, whether

this takes the form of clothes, groceries or

‘recreational vehicles’, enjoins the spaces of

exclusivity within ‘obedient’ parameters of capital.

Insiders are therefore consumers and the car is

simultaneously an object of consumption and a means

through which to consume.

The tussle between order and disorder in the city is

expressed discursively and materially through modes of

security. In PwK, Vladislavic comments that,

‘Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested

boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it

will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the

defences multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls

replace low ones, even the highest walls acquire

electrified wires and spikes’ (69). This observation

resonates in a collection of essays on architecture and

space in contemporary South Africa, Blank_ : Apartheid,

22

Architecture and After edited by Vladislavic and Hilton Judin.

The architect Lindsay Bremner discusses the changes in

the inner city since the ‘greying’7 process started in the

mid-80s and the subsequent flight of white capital to

northern suburbs such as Sandton and Rosebank.

Bremner diagnoses the impact of racial desegregation on

the city, examining new forces shaping Johannesburg’s

spaces of which crime is the most significant. Discourses

of security, militarisation and privatisation have

attended the creation of gated communities in the

suburbs, of alarms and guards and razor wired walls.

Bremner observes that, ‘Separations deepen, and a sense

of shared space is lost’ (62). The “Tuscans” inside the

walls of Villa Toscana may inhabit a communal space but

this is predicated on divisions that profoundly alienate

sections of Johannesburg’s populace from one another.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper in 2005, the South

African author Christopher Hope describes one such

community, the heavily secured Dainfern, ‘In South 7 A term used to refer to the deracialization of formerly

“whites only” areas.23

Africa, say the residents of Dainfern, it's no longer

about colour – just money. Their money buys them a space

in an idyllic carefree community protected by guards and

a four-metre high electric fence. Their servants –all

black – live in the slum next door.’

The realities of urban poverty and squalor that mark

other parts of the city are manifested not only in the

proximity of slums to Dainfern, but also by their waste—

suspended in piping above the walled suburb. This

explicit spatialisation of capital and its intersecting

by the outside reveals the order the wealthy attempt to

maintain as a veil drawn over pervasive disorder.

Notably, these spaces continue to be racialized. Most of

the inhabitants of Dainfern are white. All of its

servants are black. Fighting their losing battle against

the outside, the spaces of gated communities such as

Dainfern are carefully monitored; few are allowed in,

many are kept out.

24

In contra-distinction to the apparently effortless

mobility offered by car-driving, security often manifests

as immobility. In PwK, Vladislavic laments that unlike

Dickens’s London, Johannesburg is not a city that

welcomes walkers, ‘A stranger, arriving one evening in

the part of Joburg I call home, would think that it had

been struck by some calamity, that every last person had

fled. There is no sign of life. Behind the walls, the

houses are ticking like bombs. The curtains are drawn

tight, the security lights are glaring, the gates are

bolted. Even the cars have taken cover’ (52).

The unhomeliness of home is indicative of the great

failure of the apartheid state’s project of Heimlichkeit,

that is, to make white South Africans ‘belong’. As Rita

Barnard remarks, the segregating imperative of apartheid

was continually disrupted, ‘The presence of black South

Africans could never be totally erased, either in

official political discourse or in literary forms…

Apartheid, to put it in Freudian terms, operated not so

much by the mechanisms of psychosis (occlusion) as by the

25

mechanism of neurosis (repression)’ (47). In post-

apartheid, neo-liberal South Africa, the apparatus of

neurosis is somewhat altered. Rather than repressing the

existence of Africans in the cityscape, official

discourse stifles the presence of the poor, most of whom

continue to be black, and the attendant levels of crime

that are the consequence of economic inequality. Neurosis

is physically realized through high walls, security

lights and bolted gates, while Vladislavic’s reflection

that ‘even the cars have taken cover’, points to its

immobilizing effects. There is a price to pay for the

suppression of difference and that price is stasis, as

those who own the houses and cars are literally trapped

inside the very possessions they seek to protect.

The deployment of security to defend against incursions

from the outside can have the ironic effect of excluding

even those who would usually be considered insiders.

Early on in his professional meetings with Iris Du Plooy,

Budlender is denied access to Villa Toscana because he

writes down incorrect car number-plates on the guard’s

26

security questionnaire, ‘The number had been changed to

the new provincial system when the car was licensed a few

weeks back. Gauteng province. Without thinking, he had

filed in the old number with its concluding T, claiming

allegiance to the vanished Transvaal’ (8). Budlender’s

discomfiture amidst new social referents suggests once

more that he is out of place and a relic adrift in a new

era; the Transvaal became defunct as a geographical

entity in 1994. Budlender’s unconscious alignment with

this place of the apartheid past imbeds him within a

system where the parameters of race, gender, class were

more easily essentialised. That his car, the extension of

his white masculinity, is the cause of his displacement

points to the depth of his identity crisis.

The irony of Budlender’s exclusion lies not only in its

basis in his white middle-class orientation— it also

undermines the purpose of his visit. The point of the

census is to establish new categories within which to

contain identity. That is, to establish a new form of

order with Budlender as its bearer. The gated community

27

is a spatial materialization of order, the gates of which

Budlender cannot pass. Thus Bremner’s diagnosis of the

loss of a sense of shared space applies not only to the

ways in which order attempts to separate itself from

disorder, it also describes the conflictual nature of

varying expressions of order as they cancel each other

out, generating spaces of confusion and unease.

Juxtaposed against the regulated space of Budlender’s

middle class car is a crammed mini-bus taxi, the most

affordable (and unregulated) form of transport available

to the majority of Johannesburg’s population. Budlender’s

encounter with a taxi is a good example of the city’s

order/disorder dialectic:

He felt like putting his foot down…but a minibus was

creeping up the rise ahead of him and he could not

overtake. He dropped back and flicked on his

brights. The taxi was listing so badly it seemed on

the point of tipping over. Either the shocks had

gone or the load had shifted. On the roof rack were

stacks of cardboard boxes, a suitcase, a

28

wheelbarrow, something wrapped in black plastic. A

blind with ‘Born to Run’ printed on it in Gothic

lettering had been drawn over the rear window (EV,

19).

The minibus subverts the logical geography of the road.

It veers from left to right, taking up more space than it

is entitled to. It disregards the rules of road travel,

impinging upon and even threatening the space of other

drivers. The confusion of the items stacked on the roof

and their apparent disconnection is indicative of the

incoherence the taxi imprints on the ordered. The minibus

is itself an unstable space, generating disorder wherever

it goes. The sanctity of Budlender’s white, male middle

class body/car is literally disfigured when a stone

shoots up from one the taxi’s wheels, smashing his

windscreen and leaving a bullet-hole like fracture.

The visual correlation between the impact of the stone on

glass and the impact of a bullet gestures towards the

association of mini-buses with crime and the ways in

29

which crime infringes middle-class space, forcing a

connection between places of prosperity and places of

poverty. Vladislavic signals the variable meanings

attached to the window fracture at the beginning of the

story. Returning to Budlender’s disapproval of the

roadside vendors, we find the following sentence,

‘Budlender tilted his head so that the crack in his

windscreen, a sunburst of the kind made by a bullet,

centred on the vendor’s body and broke him into pieces’

(4). The immediate association of the hole with a bullet

reveals the extent to which crime shapes the everyday in

Johannesburg. But its presence has other connotations too

— the car is permanently marked by disorder, its once

sacrosanct interior now carries the mark of the mini-bus

wherever it travels.8

This in turn has a literal effect on the ways in which

Budlender perceives the city. He sees the vendor through

the crack in the windscreen in order to break him into

pieces or interpretable signs, reinforced by the next two

sentences, ‘Was he a Nigerian? It was time to learn the

30

signs’ (4). However, the signs are evasive and their

meanings cannot be relied upon, ‘Could the aliens have

outstripped the indigenes? There were no reliable

statistics’ (5). As ever, Budlender’s attempt to impose

order on the external spaces of the city is frustrated.

The fracture in the window pane is an ‘exploded view’,

disassembling the whole into components that refute

certainty. Like the pictures in the magazines, they can

be manipulated to construct a variety of images that are

defined as much by the viewer as by the viewed.

The mini-bus further exposes Budlender’s incongruity in

the marginal spaces of the city:

he saw that the taxi was lurching away down a side

road, its headlights illuminating shacks all around,

Budlender realized where he was. A squatter camp had

sprung up here in the last year on the open veld

between this road and the freeway, directly opposite

the new housing scheme. He had no idea what either

place was called, but he had seen them from the

freeway often enough, under a cloud of smog that

31

drew no distinction between the formal and the

informal (20).

In combination with Budlender’s disorientation, the

blurring of formal and informal suggests the potential 8 The anxieties related to mini-bus taxis began to take

effect in the late 1980s subsequent to the deregulation

of the taxi industry. The impetus to deregulate was

initiated as part of a project of liberalization in the

final days of apartheid that sought to stimulate the

growth of the black middle class. Sixteen-seater mini-

buses, known locally as “kombis”, transported black

commuters living in townships to and from work in wealthy

suburbs or city centers. However, uneven management of

deregulation processes, growing competition over

passenger routes and the segregation of taxi associations

along ethnic or political lines resulted in violent

conflicts known as “the taxi turf wars”. The industry

continues to be marked by violence but also by

entrepreneurial opportunity. As Thomas Blom Hansen notes,

taxis are synonymous both with the criminal underworld

and with black economic empowerment. 32

fragility of spatial segregation in the city as the

marginal thrusts itself into the centre. Driving past the

informal settlement, Budlender remembers that, ‘Somewhere

in this field of mud and rust he had once noticed a

bright sign saying Vodacom, an enterprising builder had

used a billboard for the wall of his house’ (20). The

cellular network Vodacom is part of a matrix of

consumerism predicated on selling the kinds of lifestyles

available to those who live in gated communities. Once

Vodacom’s advertising billboard has been taken down and

used as part of the structures of the settlement its

consumer function is subverted. The marginalised

inhabitants of the settlement appropriate this marker of

prosperity and disrupt its meaning, thereby undermining

and ironising its association with the spaces of wealth.

Hani View, the new housing scheme opposite the

settlement, is an RDP project hampered by inadequate

council spending and is explored in the story “Afritude

Sauce.” The protagonist of that story, Egan, is a

sanitary engineer who discovers first hand how little

33

resemblance the housing plans bear to the scheme’s

reality. As Tom Lodge notes, statistics suggest RDP did

make significant in-roads into improving the quality of

life for South Africa’s poor, particularly in the areas

of water and housing (57-60). However, bureaucratic

bottlenecks and insufficient funding meant that housing

schemes were poorly implemented, ‘one research

investigation found in 2000 that only 30 percent of the

new houses it surveyed complied with building

regulations’ (64). The contingent and fragile nature of

the housing is revealed in the poor construction of the

houses, which are structurally weak, and the transient,

dusty roads that criss-cross the housing scheme, ‘The

main road had been graded recently and spread with

gravel, which rattled against the underside of the car.

The whitewashed pegs along the edge of the roadway, where

a ridge of sand had been piled up by the graders,

suggested that they would be tarring it soon. It would

make a difference, it would damp down these shifting

sands, fix things in place’ (57).

34

The inability of the road, tarmac, or RDP reconstruction

to provide the poor lasting purchase in the cityscape is

humorously (and tragically) illustrated by outraged Hani

View inhabitant Mrs Ntlaka, who describes almost every

aspect of her newly built home as fucked (65). At the end

of his visit Egan returns to his car to find that his

steering wheel lock, an ‘Eagle Claw’, has jammed, ‘But

Mrs Ntlaka called an aging Young Lion from the house next

door and he picked it in a minute with a Swiss Army knife

and a length of wire’ (70). The ease with which Egan’s

car lock is picked points to the insecurity of his

identity in a new cultural climate and is subsequently

reinforced throughout the fiction as he dithers over what

to wear, what to eat and how to interact with black

colleagues. The text’s repeated weakening of the car’s

psycho-social solidity and its inescapable sabotaging by

what is unknown and therefore uneasy, finds it full

realisation in the character of Gordon Duffy.9

Duffy is the final protagonist in the four short stories

making up EV. Duffy’s billboards advertise real estate

35

developments like Villa Toscana and the “African style”

imitations of “Crocodile Lodge”. In ways that are

archetypically postmodern, the billboards delineate the

city as simulacra, blurring the boundaries between the

real and the fantastic. The prevalence of simulacra in

the landscapes of post-modern cities has been described

by Harvey, ‘The interweaving of simulacra in daily life

brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the

same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to

conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the

labour processes that produced them, or of the social

relations implicated in their production. The simulacra

can in turn become the reality’ (The Condition of Postmodernity,9 Throughout the story, Duffy is referred to as “he.” The

reader’s only clue as to his name is provided when he

calls his misplaced mobile phone and hears his own voice

mail greeting, “Gordon Duffy…The Outside Edge” 179. The

consistent referral to Duffy in the text as “he”,

stresses the everyman qualities of his character. The

fact that his name is only revealed to the reader when he

calls his lost phone re-iterates the ease with which

identity can be “lost” with the loss of ownership.36

300). Yet the billboards cannot entirely conceal their

origins in factual labour. As Shane Graham demonstrates,

their construction by black workers brought in from

Tembisa township discloses the unequal relations on which

the city is built, rooting imitative fantasy in corporal

toil (12-13).

Of all the characters in EV, Duffy’s narrative is most

taken up driving. It is, ‘a map of sensations keyed to

his own body, to the ball of his foot pressing on the

accelerator pedal and the palm of his hand lazing on the

gear lever’ (EV, 159). This amalgamation of the human and

the vehicular has been theorised by Nigel Thrift as

producing ‘new bodily horizons and orientations’ (49)

that offer up emancipatory modes of urban practice.

Thrift’s affirmation of the empowering enmeshment of

personhood with the mechanical draws upon Mimi Sheller

and John Urry’s notion of ‘automobility.’ The

interweaving of personhood with the car is captured in

the term’s double gesture towards humanist conceptions of

‘self’ and the movement of machines (p739). Arguing that

37

forms of automobility have substantially reshaped urban

social practice Sheller and Urry assert, ‘civil society

should be reconceptualized as a “civil society of

automobility”, a civil society of quasi-objects, or “car-

drivers” and “car-passengers”, along with disenfranchised

‘pedestrians’ and others not-in-cars, those that suffer a

kind of Lacanian “lack”’ (739).

In his article, “Exploding Johannesburg”, James Graham

utilises a reading of Vladislavic to pressurise the

term’s application to the city’s spatial forms. Examples

of automobility represented in the literature, he argues,

generate a ‘discontinuous city’ and by default, a

‘discontinuous community’ (78). Automobility may engender

new modes of being in the city, but it does so at the

expense of other kinds of mobility, particularly walking,

in ways that are both oppressive and alienating (77).

This paper agrees with Graham’s analysis, although what I

wish to stress is not simply the socially harmful

implications of automobility, but its vulnerability to

alternative forms of urban habitation and movement. These

38

modalities put pressure on the pre-eminence of

automobility, or at least the dominance of urban private

car drivers, testing assessments of the boundedness of

city space without eliding the socio-economic

disjunctures that continue to mark it.10

Returning home from the Crocodile Lodge building site one

evening and stuck in rush hour traffic, Duffy turns back

when he realises he has left his cell phone behind. His

increasing frustration over loss of the phone and

obstructive heavy traffic is matched by radio reports

that are full of accidents and emergencies, roads and

routes blocked. Here then, the matrix of automobility

‘breaks down’ and its temporal and spatial organisations

are subverted. If highways are intended to facilitate 10 Between the 11th -20th August 2010, the National Union of

Metalworkers of South Africa, which represents some 31

000 autoworkers, called a strike over wage increases. The

strike directs attention to the processes of manufacture

underlying “automobility”, further complicating

assertions of its liberatory potential and re-imbedding

use of urban space in the means of production. 39

speed, then the excess of drivers results in the obverse—

a drag of time rather then its acceleration. The easy

navigation enabled by road systems criss-crossing the

city is similarly hampered— a stasis rather than a flow.

Searching for his phone at the isolated building site,

Duffy is parked in by the same mini-bus taxi encountered

by Budlender. Four men get out, ‘One of them was carrying

the pipe he’d taken from the minibus. It might be a

spanner for the jack. He was not pointing it or

flourishing it, it was simply there, an incidental

object, hanging from his fingers’ (199). The man carries

what may or may not be a mechanical tool, its

indeterminacy as ‘incidental object’, reducing its

symbolic power as an implement of order.

As the text continues, it becomes evident that the men

want to take Duffy’s car keys from him. At this point the

tool is established more clearly as a weapon to be used

on Duffy’s body should he refuse to yield. That car tools

and fists are used to beat Duffy, rather than the guns he

40

expects, suggests those very fists and tools which shape

his experience and the experience of the city— its roads

and traffic, its billboards and real estate— are also the

means of its demolition. The private space of his car,

and consequently his body, is broken open by the public

space of the taxi and the threatening and anonymous

bodies it transports. The anticipated theft of his car by

the four men points to its tenuous relation to Duffy’s

white middle-class identity; it is to be removed and

reconfigured within an alternate paradigm of (illegal)

possession.

Duffy response is to retreat into machine, ‘A boxing

machine. A boxing machine in molasses. A primitive thing,

clankier than Gutenberg’s press, driven by belts and fly-

wheels, speaking an ancient oily language of cranks and

cams, sprokets and valves. He would resist’ (201).

Marooned from his car, Duffy’s attempt at withdrawal into

the mechanical is figured as a return to a pre-automobile

world. Against the seamless cohesion of the car-driver

hybrid, the cranky visibility of nuts and bolts evoke not

41

the invulnerable machine Duffy intends, but a desperate

defence of the flesh. If Duffy represents the socio-

spatial dominance of Sheller and Urry’s hybrid car-

driver, then he is also the site through which this

dominance is dismantled. Ultimately the text leaves the

reader uncertain as to the outcome of Duffy’s conflict

with the four unknown men, thus evading any obvious

synthesis of the tension between order and disorder,

inside and out.

The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys are texts of a particular

place— Johannesburg. The situated-ness of the texts

within an identifiable landscape ties them to a specific

historical context to which they are consistently alert.

The features of this current phase of South African

history — expanding neo-liberalism, consumerism and the

continuing segregation of space — are mirrored in

Vladislavic’s preoccupation with the ways in which place

is formed through structures as seemingly disparate as

wealthy gated communities, RDP housing and informal

settlements. He maps his reader within the referents of

42

consumption and conflict in Johannesburg’s cityscape and

forces recognition of the ways in which inequality is

materially and spatially constructed. In this sense,

Vladislavic’s writing responds to Frederic Jameson’s call

to heed the politicality of space and to consciously

position oneself as reader, critic, or writer vis-à-vis

the persisting inequalities that capitalism engenders.11

Simultaneously, his work demonstrates what Paul Smethurst

has described as a post-modern complication of the

differentiations between, ‘past and present, inside and

outside, real and representational, space and place’

(14). The interweaving of seemingly discrete but

connected narratives and lives, and the interlinking of

spaces through the dismantling of the categories such as

‘outside’ and ‘inside’, ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ are

formally mirrored by the literature. Portrait with Keys is a

shifting grid of meaning much like the traffic on the

roads of Johannesburg. The routes through the text are

varied and overlapping, mapping convergence and

disjuncture in the urban landscape. The Exploded View is the

43

fictional representation of the separations and

crossovers of the city, in which the car operates as a

linking motif. Vladislavic’s aesthetic, combining as it

does the historically specific and the postmodern, is

11 Jameson has argued that understanding subjectivity

within the shifting spaces of postmodern cities ought to

be based on what he describes as “cognitive mapping” that

is, “pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow

the individual subject with some new heightened sense of

place in the global system” (54). Jameson maintains that

cognitive mapping is able to give the subject situational

stability in relation to, “That vaster and properly

unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of

society’s structures as a whole” (51). More particularly,

and clarifying the concept’s representational opacity,

Jameson acknowledges that the term is, “in reality

nothing but a code word for “class consciousness”’ (418).

This class consciousness must take on new forms (Jameson

does not specify what these would look like) in order to

engage with the increasingly intangible and globalized

spaces capital inhabits. 44

well-placed to limn these spaces of confluence and

conflict.

In Vladislavic’s ouevre, the car can be read as a

signifier for the severe, and worsening, socio-economic

discrepancies marking the lifeworlds of Johannesburg’s

inhabitants. But is also a site through which difference

is contested and interrogated. Car interiors are not

hermetically sealed, but are transgressed by the exterior

spaces they navigate. Thus, while analyses of driving and

its relationship to urban forms have rightly stressed the

ways in which automobility radically reconfigures and

organises space, the margins between car drivers and

other modalities of urban habitation have been conceived

too rigidly. These spaces are not immutable but in

tension in ways that unsettle the dominance of the car;

enunciating alternate mobilities and challenging the

functionalist ordering of Johannesburg’s cityscape.

45