Post-Apartheid Modernism and Consumer Culture

Post-Apartheid Modernism andConsumer Culture

Rita Barnard

In this essay, I wish to extend the terrain of modernist studies andoffer a new, perhaps troubling, way of viewing post-apartheid SouthAfrican literature and culture. After some critical and theoreticalground clearing in the first two sections, I propose to read twocontemporary novels in order to test my sense that their sharedpreoccupations are best grasped if we view them under the rubricof ‘post-apartheid modernism’. I bear in mind, nevertheless, that‘modernism’ – no less than ‘modernity’ – is best treated as a kind of‘native category’, which cannot be defined a priori and which does nottranslate without difficulty.1 As will become clear, I am not proposingan ‘alternative modernity’ in the strongest sense, which would involveidentifying irreducible cultural differences that somehow rupturethe grand narratives of colonial and capitalist expansion. While myconcern is to describe a particular historical context and a set ofartistic preoccupations generated by it, I am reluctant to let go of theidea that such preoccupations respond to a singular, if wildly uneven,modernity. Especially since I am speaking here about Africa. For Itake to heart James Ferguson’s position that, much as anthropologistsand others like to hold forth about the different modernity of Africanlife (of, say, industrial workers with extended family systems, ortransnational business executives who fear witches, and so forth), suchdiscourse is often unfaithful to the experience of many Africans, whohave come to regard modernity, not as a matter of difference, butof lack: as something others have and they don’t, ‘a dream to beremembered from the past’ – and one that, given the intransigent class

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hierarchies of the global world order, is unlikely to be fulfilled.2 I am,in short, reluctant to foreground diversity when inequality is such a vastconcern – and a primary concern in the novels to which I will eventuallyturn.

IMy starting point, however, is a groundbreaking work of literarycriticism: David Attwell’s 2005 book, Rewriting Modernity: Studies inBlack South African Literary History. This monograph makes a signalcontribution: it recognises the fact that the term ‘postcolonial’ andmany of the tropes of postcolonial theory fit South Africa poorly;it therefore makes the surprisingly fresh move of using the terms‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ as key words.3 Attwell explicitly presentshis study of black South African intellectuals as a prehistory to post-apartheid democracy and the vibrant syncretic possibilities it hasopened up for new subjectivities and forms of cultural expression.While not exactly a teleological or nationalist history (he seesthe trajectory of modernity in South Africa as ‘fugitive’, ratherthan coherent, accretive, and developmental), his book neverthelesscelebrates the agency of the ANC as an organisation that – in contrastto the retrograde Afrikaner nationalists – was in possession of a ‘codeof modernity’; the liberation movement, as he puts it, held ‘the rightcards’ all along (RM 3).

Recognising that modernity is not an easy term to define,Attwell nevertheless outlines his sense of it quite firmly. Modernity isassociated with the Enlightenment, with technology, with administeredand industrial society, and even more signally, with ideas aboutpersonhood: autonomy, rights, and citizenship and the like (RM 4).It has to do with ‘what it means to be a subject of history’ (RM 3).These universalising (if originally European) ideas, so the book’s broadargument goes, are subjected in the course of black South Africanintellectual history to a process of rewriting (and writing – print culture,literacy, and authorship – is crucial here). What this process seems toentail, as we proceed chapter-by-chapter, is rather high-minded (or,viewed less sympathetically, slightly staid). The struggle to become amodern self, in Attwell’s narrative, has to do with things like education,Christianity, journalism, and political organisation. What inspires himabove all else – and this marks his book as essentially responsive to themoment of the peaceful transition of the early 1990s, rather than themoment of its publication – is the promise the new democracy holdsfor ‘reconnect[ing] the nation-state with a culture of rights’ (RM 7).

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At stake, in other words, is a revivification of the highest ideals of theEnlightenment: a localisation and actualisation, in Attwell’s terms, ofan often-compromised universality.

His inclination to read such acts of translation not as belatedbut original and vital is perhaps most striking in his comments (afterDerrida) on Nelson Mandela’s inspiring reclamation of liberal politicaltraditions; but it also operates as a methodological principle in theapproach to the writers discussed in each chapter. Whatever the preciseliterary shape of their encounters with, say, the apartheid city ora racist bureaucracy (experiments with lyric form, for instance, orstream-of-consciousness narration, or even realism), its effects andmeanings are not the same as those of comparable writing elsewhere.For, example, Attwell reads the novels of Zakes Mda (which oftenvalorise the very act of making art, irrespective of its ‘message’) asa re-instrumentalisation of what Adorno would see as modernism’scharacteristic anti-instrumentalism. Mda’s aestheticism, if that is whatit is, is deployed in the interest of shaping wholly new subjectivitiesand agencies, responsive to very particular social circumstances. Whatthis all amounts to is not exactly an alternative modernity, thoughAttwell likes and at times uses the term. While conceding thatcertain Enlightenment values may exist in other times and placesindependently of the Western paradigm, he insists throughout thatthe process of modernisation in South Africa was so aggressive andso closely tied to the experience of colonialism and apartheid, thata separately evolving political or literary practice is in the endunimaginable: ‘There is no escape clause from the encounter withmodernity,’ he declares (and we might note the singular here), ‘unlessone is to accept isolation and eccentricity’ (RM 4).

What is curiously absent from this subtle account of a localisedmodernity, one that charts a middle course between exoticising ideasof difference and a totalising unidirectional time-line, is a sensethat modern subjects shape themselves not only through institutionslike church, school, and state, but also through mass-producedcommodities: novelties, fashions, and trends. Today, consumer cultureis increasingly recognised as important to social modernity and even tohigh modernist literature, aloof though the latter may seem from themore commercial definitions of the new. And consumerism is crucialin the South African context, where black South Africans realisedvery soon and very sharply that things – modern commodities – gavethem ‘an expansive, expressive, experimental language with whichto conjure new social identities and senses of self, a language withwhich also to speak back to the whites’.4 Even though the ANC’s

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policies traditionally included a critique of capitalism, the day-to-dayexperience of apartheid – as grinding and humiliating poverty – madeit impossible as Deborah Posel has argued, for black South Africans,to separate the idea of freedom from the acquisition of demonstrablewealth.5 At stake in the new middle-class’s investment in consumeristdisplay since the political transition is a desire to overcome one ofthe crueller aspects of the old order: apartheid’s thorough-goingconstriction of black economic activity, in the interest, not only ofbrute domination, but of making racial distinctions visible as mattersof bodily appearance, of self-care, and self-presentation.

The impact of a global culture of consumption is also fundamentalin the relationship of Afrikaners to what Jonathan Hyslop hasdescribed as shifting ‘patterns of modernity’.6 The apartheid state,with its oppressive bureaucracy, was in a certain restrictive sensequite modern. But ‘like other dictatorial regimes’, Hyslop observes,‘it wanted the technological benefits of modernization without itssocial pains and cultural ferment’.7 While touting its own modernityas evidenced in its nuclear power plants, Boeing airliners, and Miragefighter jets, the National Party also strove to create a ‘pseudo-traditional organizational complex’, in order to encapsulate its subjectsin ‘a self-referential Afrikaner ideological world’.8 This was, ultimately,a quixotic project. For as whites began to benefit from the economicboom of Apartheid’s oppressive third decade, attempts to insulatethem from external influences began to fail. The historian AlbertGrundling points out that, as far back as the late 1960s, popularpublications began to lament the volk’s increasing preoccupation withostentations life-styles and desire to give ‘the impression of beingmodern’. ‘Persian carpets, caviar, private swimming pools, caravans,“doing Europe’’ ’, began to hold the imagination more powerfully thanthe old and corny emblems of nationhood.9 And with the advent oftelevision in the 1970s, even the mildest American soap operas like TheCosby Show had the effect of inclining Afrikaners, the core supportersof Apartheid, to view themselves from an external perspective. WhatSol Plaatje once called the ‘the miserably small world of Boerideals’ began to open up as the forces of late modernity or globalcapitalism eventually rendered the statist project of quarantiningAfrikaner culture unsustainable.10 Though the new consumer culturewas scarcely egalitarian, it was also, as Hyslop observes, ‘inimical toactive mobilization in a totalitarian project’: it tended to interpellatemore individualistic, cosmopolitan, and hedonist subjects.11 Thepolitical scientist Heribert Adam puts the matter laconically: ‘It has yetto be proven anywhere that a BMW-owning bureaucratic bourgeoisie

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with swimming pools and servants readily sacrifices the good life forpsychologically gratifying ethnic identities’.12

If Attwell’s book seems remote from such accounts of a late oreven belated South African modernity, it is partly the side effect of hisdecision not to include a chapter on the Drum generation of the 1950s,whose version of being modern was decisively mediated throughflashy styles of consumption and American popular culture. But myintuition is that the recoil is more fundamental and has to do withthe high and precarious hopes that Attwell holds for postapartheiddemocracy (and we may notice, in the discussion above, his emphasison the transformation of the state). A prescriptive, even somewhatmoralistic view shines through at certain moments in his book, aswhen he expresses the hope that the newly enfranchised citizenry willtranslate the underlying promises of liberation ‘appropriately’ (RM6). One senses that Attwell may well have been dismayed at the wayin which many black South Africans have striven to overcome whatJ. M. Coetzee once termed ‘the sluggish viscous chronicity’ ofapartheid not only through their achievement of constitutionalfreedom, but through a kind of catch-up game of conspicuous andfashionable consumption.13 Rewriting Modernity thus offers a somewhatconstrained notion of the dynamic, amoral energies of the modern,which as Perry Anderson once worried, threaten to overleap anypolitical script, however revolutionary it might be (RM 109–13).14

IITo construct a version of modernism and modernity more amenableto the textures of post-apartheid culture (indeed, a version that isvery productive for our understanding of it), I would like now to turntowards some of the work that has emerged over the last decade ortwo under the rubric of the new modernist studies. Two interventions,the first rather programmatic and manifesto-like (and, in certainrespects, quite compatible with Attwell’s approach) and the secondmore narrative and historical (and specifically attuned to the impactof global consumer culture), strike me as particularly useful.15

In her 2006 essay, ‘Periodizing Modernism: PostcolonialModernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, SusanStanford Friedman suggests that any sort of nominal definition ofmodernism or modernity (the two terms are for her dialecticallyrelated) is bound to fail. She urges us to give up on any noun-baseddesignation that affixes the term ‘modernity’ to a specific moment inhistory and to a specific place, which most often just happens to be

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Europe. Instead, Friedman proposes a ‘relational mode’ of definitionthat would cast modernity, more open-endedly, as a major rupturefrom what came before. Such a relational definition permits us toapply the term ‘modernism’ to the expressive culture that arises fromthe experience of such rupture anywhere in the world and at anytime. The intention of this proposition is not to rob the terms of allspecificity (as Friedman’s critics have worried), but rather to emphasisetheir qualitative, experiential temporality: at stake is what Friedmancalls a ‘phenomenology of the new and the now’.16 She attempts toevoke lives and times in which the experience of a dynamic andever-accelerating change – and in either utopian or dystopian guise – isfelt across multiple institutions, whether cultural, economic, political,religious, familiar, sexual, aesthetic, or technological (‘PM’ 433).

The ‘phenomenology of the new and the now’, to be sure,may seem little different from well-established ideas in the study ofmodernism such as ‘the shock of the new’. But where Friedman’sagenda is different is in her responsiveness to the fact that Europeanmodernity was inseparable from colonial expansion, and that thecolonial and postcolonial worlds, still living out the effects of thatencounter, are entitled to a chance to have their say. (In fact,she takes as her epigraph Dilip Gaonkar’s observation in his essayon alternative modernities that ‘to announce the general end ofmodernity even as an epoch [. . .] seems premature if not patentlyethnocentric’). Their particular modernities and the modernisms theyevolve, she insists (like Attwell), are not imitative even though theforms they take may bear a family resemblance to those that evolvedin comparable situations elsewhere. To call these social and creativeenergies ‘postmodern’ – as they often are – is, for Friedman, ‘to missthe point entirely’: ‘Multiple modernities create multiple modernisms.Multiple modernisms require respatialising and thus reperiodisingmodernism’ (‘PM’ 427).

While, as I noted earlier, an all-too-blithe notion of ‘alternativemodernities’ can be perilous in Africa in the same measure as it isattractive, there are nevertheless ways in which Friedman’s work clearlyresonates in the South African context.17 First, to view modernityand modernism from a global, or, as Friedman would have it, a‘planetary’, optic is to recognise that they are both fundamentallyand irreducibly hybrid, emerging as they do from situations ofporous borders and of cultural exchange. The modernist agenda of‘purify[ing] the dialect of the tribe’ could only have meaning, after all,in situations of proliferating and intensified contact zones, of self-otherconfrontations, translations, indigenisations, and the like.18 For South

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African readers, Friedman’s description of the scene of the modernaccords beautifully with Sarah Nuttall’s description of the conditionsof creolisation in South Africa and Attwell’s meditations on the idea oftransculturation:

This geography of mobility and interculturality is not a utopian fantasyof peaceful integration, but rather recognizes that the contact zonesbetween cultures often involve violence and conquest as well as reciprocalexchange, inequality and exploitation as well as mutual benefits, andabjection and humiliation as well as pride and dignity.19

To say this is to recognise a need for a revision of establishednotions of modernism’s internationalism, which has often rested onan ‘unexamined center/periphery framework’ (‘PM’ 428). It is nolonger adequate to see it as a matter of a few gifted expatriates andexiles, of Pound in Ravenna and Hemingway in Paris, or a matterof a primitivist interest in the tribal and the exotic. The natureof cultural exchange is no longer that of moving peripheral ‘rawmaterials’ to the metropolitan centers of innovation and aesthetictransformation: at stake are, rather, ‘global weblike formations, withmany multidirectional links, affiliations and often brutal inequities ofpower’ (‘PM’ 435).

Another implication of Friedman’s manifesto also strikes meas crucial: if modernism and modernity become qualitative globalexperiences of accelerated temporality and change, then ourconception of tradition also requires revision. It is not so muchantithetical to modernity, but produced by it in order to distinguishthe ‘now’ from the ‘then’. Modernity, in other words, ‘invents tradition,suppresses its own continuities with the past, and often producesnostalgia for what is seemingly being lost’. ‘Tradition’, as Friedmanputs it, ‘forms at the moment those who perceive it regard themselvesas cut off from it’ (‘PM’ 434). This idea is familiar to scholars inthe field of African studies (one thinks of Terrance Ranger and EricHobsbawm’s book on The Invention of Tradition) and relevant to bothapartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.20 But it is striking to findit so boldly asserted in an American polemic about the direction ofmodernist literary scholarship. I will return to these matters againbefore too long.

The second provocative contribution to modernist studies I wouldlike to describe is Michael North’s book, Rereading 1922: A Return to theScene of the Modern, a work that offers a strikingly fresh conceptionof literary modernism and its cultural matrix, and one that opensup beautifully to postcolonial – and I would, of course, want to say

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post-apartheid – applications. The year 1922 is the defining year forany canonical version of modernism. It is the year that both Ulyssesand The Waste Land were published and when many, not least theanti-modern Willa Cather, thought that ‘the world broke in two’.21

But by reading a very generous range of works from that year ofrupture, books by forgotten novelists, travel writers, celebrities, publicrelations people, journalists, colonial officials, anthropologists, andphilosophers, North comes up with a view of the modern that feelssurprisingly up to date, continuous with contemporary experience.Like Friedman, North notes that our conception of the internationalcharacter of modernist writing needs a radical extension. In the wakeof a world war, of large scale immigration, and accelerated traveland communications, mobility was already so extensive and broadlybased that the disconcerting feeling of living in a social system inwhich ‘all were strangers’ had ceased to be the province of onlya few metropolitan expatriates (1922 13). The world of 1922, thequintessential scene of modernism, was already planetary, to borrowFriedman’s big word. In the course of his discussion of the sensationalnews of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb that year, along withthe wave of fashionable objects spawned in the US and Britain, Northnotes that experience was already simultaneously local and global(1922 21–9): a broadly based sense of the unity and the disunity of theworld, as confusing as it is exciting, was already an aspect of daily life,much as it is today (1922 15). The effect is a kind of relativism or evencynicism that was not possible before: a capacity to stand at a distancefrom the familiar, so that one’s own culture, codes, and language canbe experienced as foreign. Modernism’s characteristic Babel (we mightthink here of the multilingual qualities of The Waste Land and Ulysses),its profound interest in language and translation, arises from this senseof intensified and expanded contact zones.

The long-established emphasis on the medium in modernism,essential to formalist approaches and definitions, becomes yokedin North’s readings with the media in the sense we now use theterm: radio, film, and the commercial image. The conception ofmodernism that emerges from this revisiting of its heyday is thusentirely counter to one that has emerged from theorists of the GreatDivide between high and mass culture such as T. W. Adorno or AndreasHuyssen, or from postmodern backformations, which have produceda staid and austere modernism as necessary foil (1922 10, 207–9).North’s modernism, by contrast, is in no way separable from theaccelerating world of modern consumption, from jazz, sports cars,technology, movies and photography. Indeed, he insists that the artistic

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avant-garde was seen as operating in conjunction with, not inopposition to, the rising advertising industry: a business whose veryraison d’être was ‘to promote newness’ (1922 76). The modernistexperiment in the arts is thus part of a larger cultural change in whichpublic life and private consciousness are dominated by images. Associety ‘begins to consume imaginative and symbolic materials as theyhad previously consumed material goods’, people become acquaintedwith lives different from, yet intimate with their own: ‘everyday lifeacquires an inherently ironic distance from itself’ (1922 208). Subjectsmay achieve new modes of autonomy, selfhood, and connectednessthrough the commodity, but they thereby become penetrated by whatFredric Jameson has called (à propos of Conrad) ‘a strange newglobal relativity’ (1922 208). The definition of modernity that arisesfrom North’s readings in the archive of 1922 is captured by FrancoisBourricaud: ‘Modernity can be characterized by the impossibility ofregarding mankind other than as an irreducible diversity of cultureand societies’ (quoted in 1922 209). And the version of modernismthat arises in dialectical engagement with this modernity, is one thatconcurs strikingly with contemporary theories of globalisation suchas those put forward by Giddens and Appadurai, who are frequentlycited: the modern is, in this sense, ongoing, and it will not settle intoany unified, formalist definition. It is, moreover, impossible to separatefrom commodification, which, North rightly insists, ‘was itself a kind offormalism in the first place’ (1922 211).

IIIThis has been a long preamble, but I trust one that permits the outlinesof my broad conception of post-apartheid culture to come into view,along with the reasons why I would like to speak of a post-apartheidmodernism. At stake in the transition to democracy of 1994 is, firstof all, a widespread and profound experience of rupture. It may evenbe that the implication of Deborah Posel’s history of the old regime’sracialised repression of black consumerism is that we should pinpointthe real moment of rupture as arriving not in 1994, with the firstdemocratic election, but in 1996 with the ANC’s adoption of a WorldBank-friendly macroeconomic policy: an action thought by many to bea selling out of the organisation’s socialist and populist ideals. Thatmay be too scandalous a proposition; but it is a way of suggesting tothose who focus (quite understandably) on the distortions of liberation,equality, and full citizenship, that it is not correct to say that thingshave simply remained the same. South Africa’s re-entry into global

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modernity, along with the opening up of its borders to immigrantsfrom the rest of Africa, has forced all ethnic groups, formerly able,perhaps, to imagine their volkseie (proper cultural goods) as normativeand authoritative, to view their language and culture through anestranged, even opportunistic optic.22 The new sense of belonging toa democratic nation, and one with highly porous borders, created anexpanded and intensified contact zone: one that has transculturatedall South Africans and permitted new subjectivities to be staged,imagined, and performed – often in terms of the new languages ofcommodities and global popular culture that have increasingly becomeavailable for creative use. It is true that apartheid-era writing wasoften inventively intertextual (periodising concepts, while essential, donot operate as strict boundaries), but in post-apartheid writing thetextual terrain seems even more radically open for borrowings andallusions. Post-apartheid South Africa is, finally, a site where the cusp-like ‘then-and-now’ temporality of modernity has been experiencedacutely, with the result that new affective registers, including variouskinds of nostalgia, fears about lost traditions and languages, and flatlypragmatic modes of marketing ethnicity have come into play and haveleft their mark in expressive culture.

Now: it is not hard to find literary texts that respond to theseaspects of the ‘new’ South Africa in inventive ways, even if westrategically stay away from towering experimental masterpieces likeMarlene van Niekerk’s Agaat in order to glean a more ground-levelsampling (and I confess that my examples in this essay are deliberatelyeccentric and diverse). An early classic of postapartheid modernism isFatima Dike’s 1990 play So What’s New?, in which three black womengather to watch The Bold and the Beautiful on a television set thatis placed at centre stage. It is a work that beautifully captures ‘thephenomenology of the new and now’ (we need but think of the title),and it enacts an irreverent and comic transculturation in the threewomen’s struggle to translate the codes of conduct and desire of theAmerican soap opera to their own, very specific social location: atownship shebeen in a time of violence. There is something about thestripped-down modes of theatrical production in South Africa that isquintessentially modernist in one of the senses emphasised by North.Merely by virtue of being staged, and staged so minimalistically, dramabecomes the medium par excellence for making the utterly familiarseem strange, curious, and distant: it draws attention to bodies,props, spaces, and languages (and Dike’s dialogue, significantly, ismultilingual) in a way that no other medium can. But since I havewritten about Dike’s play elsewhere,23 I will instead venture a reading

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of two later novels, Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007) and Eben Venter’sHorrelpoot (2006), translated as Trencherman in 2008, in order to suggestthe importance of a culture of consumption for the experimental workthat has arisen out of the intensified contact zone of the ‘new’ SouthAfrica. By yoking together two very different contemporaneous works,I hope to suggest that the social logic of a particular instantiationof late modernity binds them in ways that may not be instantlylegible.

Coconut, the winner of the European Union Literary Award,has met with considerable popular success (it apparently keeps theinnovative Jacana Press financially afloat). The commercial nature of itsreception already says something about the literary scene in which thework has intervened – very different, to say the least, from that whichpertained in the struggle years. Initial responses by literary criticshave been somewhat predictable, lauding Coconut for, say, transmittinghitherto unheard black women’s voices. But the novel seems to meto open up rather more rewardingly if we read it as engaged withthe dynamics of a simultaneously local and global modernity I haveattempted to outline above. The novel offers a pair of stream-of-consciousness narratives from the perspectives of two black girls,Ofilwe (Fifi) and Fikile (Fiks), the former rich, the latter poor, butboth engaged in a project of self-making that is determined in thefinest detail by contemporary consumer culture. On the basis of itsperspectival narration, its flashbacks, and its many textual fragmentsfrom popular culture, some argument could be made that Coconutcorresponds in a mild sort of way to received features of moderniststyle – if this were the direction one wanted to take. Certainly Coconutis not a work that is legible in terms of Adornian criteria of highseriousness and formalist complexity: it is too commercial, too juvenile.Yet it is worth remembering that the oeuvre of F. Scott Fitzgerald, thevery touchstone of jazz age culture, was also in its day perceived asjuvenile and trendy, and it is precisely in this that its modernity, itsorientation to the present and the future, was seen to lie.

Coconut seems almost deliberately to cast two of the privilegedinstitutions of black South African modernity in Attwell’s account,schoolbook literacy and Christianity, as hopelessly passé. A fecklesscharacter who quotes Shakespeare is considered useless and effete; hishumanistic knowledge gives him no agency.24 Far from manipulatinghis knowledge of English in the interest of his own self-making, heis himself manipulated as a sign by his employers: at meetings heis displayed (very briefly) in suit and tie, as their Black EconomicEmpowerment partner. As for Christianity, the passionate prayers of

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Fiks’s Gogo gain a rather different meaning when they are reiteratedby a young girl, with her very consumerist project of self-creation (shecalls it ‘Project Infinity’):

‘I fear for the patience of your children’‘I fear for the patience of your children’. . .‘They tire of waiting’‘They tire of waiting’‘I do not know Father’‘I do not know Father’‘. . . where this new self will take me.’‘. . . where this new self will take me.’25

For the resentful apartheid-era domestic, weariness with waiting istied to hopes for social betterment, political freedom, and retribution;while for the young fashion-conscious waitress it is tied to preciselythe kind of impatience appealed to in a recent slogan for Nedbankcredit cards: ‘You want to get it all now, but how?’26 Matlwa’s craftylitany, in other words, emphasises rather than overrides generationaldistinctions; it underscores a rather different experience of time andchanged expectations about the promises and nature of modernity.

Any case for Coconut’s modernism, its engagement with the pro-found rupture of South Africa’s belated and materialistic democracy,must hinge largely on its insistent ‘phenomenology of the new andnow’. The novel’s ruling temporality, its official temporal ethos, onemight say, is announced by the radio voice of DJ Tinky, which intrudesinto the fabric of Fiks’s narration: ‘A brand new day! New beginnings!Another shot!’ (C 128). This is not to say that the past or tradition(older black identities, habits, and experiences) are not marked in thetext. Indeed, one of Matlwa’s achievements (one of the things that helppersuade us that we are dealing here with something more than chic-litfluff) is to register a stigmatised older experience of blackness, whetherin the guise of tradition or of personal trauma, as only very uneasilyrepressed. There are consequently moments of abjection in this glossy,girlish text: ‘I need to spring-clean my head . . . I am fearful of thecluttered floor, the dusty shelves, the locked cases, the stuffed drawers,the broken bulbs, and the cracked windows’ (C 177).

The novel’s treatment of race and (colour-coded) tradition isperhaps its weakest aspect from an intellectual and political pointof view. Critics have rightly worried about the essentialist notions ofblackness and whiteness that reside in the very idea of the coconut(dark on the outside, white on the inside) and that inevitably mark

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Matlwa’s novel. But these aspects of the work are quite interestingfor my purposes. Ofilwe’s narration is marked by vague regrets forthe more ‘authentic’ things her black friends seem to share but shelacks: a more authentic township life, rural memories, and fluency inan African vernacular (she claims English as her sole home language).This nostalgia seems to be shared, to judge by certain quasi-oracularinsertions, by the author, who, nevertheless, owes her internationalsuccess to the fact that her novel is written in English: ‘Burnt siennawashing out. DNA coding for white greed, blond vanity and blue-eyedmalevolence. IsiZulu forgotten. Tshivenda a distant memory’ (C 93).To point to this contradiction is not to accuse Matlwa of bad faith (weare familiar, after all, with postcolonial novels that lament the end oforal culture), but simply to reassert Friedman’s point that tradition andmodernity are relational terms: that the very notion of tradition arisesfrom the experience of rupture and loss. This is nowhere as clear as ina passage that laments unused languages, while simultaneously castingthem in tropes of abjection:

Where does an unused language go? Is it packed away in an oldcrumbly cereal box, along with a misplaced tomato, your old locker code,telephone number and the location of your budgies grave and thenshoved into the dusty garage space of your brain. Or is it blown up ordeleted or is it shredded up into a gazillion fragments or degenerated ordecomposed into a nasty smell and excreted out of your body? (C 57)

The underbelly of consumerism, not often visible in coconut, is hererevealed as waste.

The very textual fabric of the novel, however, involves arecognition that the language required for self-transformation is notonly English, but the English of global commercial culture: thelanguage of the fashion magazines that are Fiks’s treasured how-to-books. A telling textual fragment in Ofilwe’s narration offers a kind ofprimer, an alphabet of the language that must be acquired in the worldof the Happy Valley gated community where she and her upwardlymobile family live:

After-Sun. Bikini. Ballet. Barbie and Ken. Cruise. Disneyland. Disco.Diamonds and Pearls. Easter Egg. Fettucine. Frappe. Fork and Knife.Gymnastics. Horseriding. Horticulture. House in the Hills. IndoorCricket. Jungle Gym. Jacuzzi . . . . Video Games. World Wide Web.Wireless Connection. Xmas. Yoga. Yo-yo Diet. You, you, and you. ZeroGuilt. (C 41)

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We are clearly dealing here with a language of goods and a consumeristlife-style. It is no accident that food (‘fettucini’, ‘frappe’, ‘fork andknife’, and so on) features so prominently here and elsewhere in thenovel.27 For the star commodities of the text – clothes, contact lenses,hair-care products and, above all, food and food products – are vitallyrelated to bodily transformation, to the staging and performanceof the self. And it is, of course, a racialised self. The novelconsistently contrasts ‘black’ food – ‘mala le mogodu’ (tripe), ‘ready-to-eat Maotoana’ (chicken feet), and ‘mqombothi’ (sorgum beer) – to(ostensibly) racially unmarked, global, or, as Fiks might put it, ‘first-class’ food: lattes, ginger iced tea, asparagus quiche, muesli and low-fatyogurt.

It is worth bearing in mind here Deborah Posel’s helpfuldefinition of race as ‘the social construction of bodily difference’.28

The radical change between ‘then’ and ‘now’, between the apartheidera and the contemporary social world of the novel, is best calibratedin Fiks’s belief that racial identity may be constructed personally, byindividual rather than social agency. The aim of her ‘Project Infinity’,the mode of agency she chooses, is to ‘become white’. She is thereforekeen to know what to pack on a trip to Bermuda and avid to buy thingsthat would make her – well – less black, such as green contact lenses andcaramel-colored hair extensions. She idealises the globally connectedworld of the restaurant where she works, ironically named (as if tosuggest that arrival in her fantasised first-class world is ever precluded)the Silver Spoon, where the coffees come from Peru, El Salvador, andNew Guinea, and e-mails are ‘sent all the way to Europe and backto the Silver Spoon again’ (C 141). We might well frown at Fiks’sambitions: her self-transformation is what many would be temptedto call (bringing to mind here Attwell’s worries) an ‘inappropriate’translation of the promises of modernity. And the novel does, too,in a way: the narration of the more privileged Fifi makes it clearthat Fiks’s hopes of social and somatic transformation are delusional.The rich girl frequently runs up against the persistent limitations ofher blackness, as when a boy refuses to kiss her because her lipsare too dark, or another asks her where her father hijacked his nicewheels. But it is nevertheless remarkable that the commodity and itslanguages provide the youthful individual with a sense of agency: adrive towards self-transformation (and self-forgetting) unimaginablein the apartheid’s fixed racial order.

Fiks’s delusions, moreover, are not devoid of a moment of truth,and one that is disquieting in what it suggests about the possibletrajectory of modernity and its dynamic temporalities under neoliberal

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capitalism. A dialogue about race and privilege that interrupts thepresent tense stream-of-consciousness narration is worth sampling:

‘And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?’‘White, Teacher Zola. I want to be white.’‘But Fikile, dear, you can’t change the colour of your skin. What I mean

is that you can—’. . .‘I will be white if I want to be white. I don’t care what anybody thinks.’‘But why would you want to do that, dear?’‘Because its better.’‘What makes you think that, Fikile?’‘Everything.’ (C 135–6)

Everything. There is a sense, hinted at especially in the text’streatment of the disjunct spaces of Johannesburg life – its gatedcommunities, uncomfortable shacks, exclusive malls and crowdedmini-bus taxis – that post-apartheid society is beginning to assumethe character of what Ferguson has described as the ‘decomposedmodernity’ that has come to afflict contemporary Africa, one in whichany kind of developmental telos, has been displaced by matters offixed rank (here translated as race). The dynamic promises that oncedrove modernisation (and historically found its novelistic expressionin individual Bildung – ‘Project Infinity’, in the case of Coconut) therebybecome non-progressive. Or spatial, in a sense. For it comes to seemthat one can only emerge from contemporary zones of abjection (inFiks’s case the township, where she shares a room with a pederasticuncle) by going somewhere else. Matlwa does permit the worlds ofher two characters to intersect momentarily: they meet at the SilverSpoon, but on terms that underscore their different positions all tooclearly. Fifi is there as a customer and Fiks is there to serve her. Theseare crucial distinctions, which Fiks, still obsessed with her relentlessproject of self-transformation, is not quite willing to accept. The ‘then’and ‘now’ aspect of the novel’s rendering of the cusp-time of transitionis gradually being replaced by the ‘here-and-there’ of a modernity fromwhich a temporal and developmental thrust has disappeared.

IVThe spectre of a decomposed modernity is starkly evident in EbenVenter’s dark novel Horrelpoot [Clubfoot], rendered as Trenchermanin English.29 This work is certainly more challenging – formally,politically, and emotionally – than the youthful and often banal

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Coconut. Horrelpoot is difficult: ugly, oneiric, and replete with sinistersymbolic leitmotifs (not least that of the ‘trencherman’: the onewho wields the knife to cut meat). The narration is occasionallyretrospective, but, for the most part, the reader is plunged intoan intensely sensory stream-of-consciousness narrative in the presenttense. In a hostile reading, the novel could be seen as ostentatiouslymodernist in the received formalist ways: derivative of experimentsalready conducted and perfected elsewhere. But as I suggestedearlier, a purely formalist and Eurochronological case is not onethat seems productive here. In fact, it is precisely in Horrelpoot’sostentatious belatedness and apparent imitativeness that its originality,paradoxically, lies.

The novel’s intertextual dimension serves as a useful point ofentry and comparison. As I noted earlier, Fatima Dike’s So What’sNew? appropriates an American soap opera, though one that was infact wildly popular with black South Africans and was therefore, in asense, already indigenised. The experimental aspect of the play lies,therefore, in Dike’s staging of a recognisable aspect of daily life, butone that had never before been represented – indeed, one that wouldhave been frowned upon during the period of politicised ‘struggle’theatre. Horrelpoot, by contrast, cannibalises a hyper-canonical work,Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the appropriation hasprofoundly estranging effects – especially in combination with thenovel’s dystopian, futuristic setting. What these diverse intertextualengagements share is that they permit the two South African writersto look awry at post-apartheid consumerism. This much is obvious inthe case of The Bold and the Beautiful; but Heart of Darkness, we mustnot forget, also brings with it (along with inescapably primitivist andracist tropes) a highly critical focus on colonial capitalism and thecommodity. One of Venter’s most chilling epigraphs is taken fromthe scene in Conrad’s novel where Marlow sees the pilgrims of theEldorado Exploration company arriving at the central station withtheir booty: ‘It was an inextricable mess of things decent in themselvesbut that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving’ (T 149).

It is through this sardonic optic that Venter regards contemporarySouth African culture – and, in particular, the acquisitiveness ofAfrikaners, which I discussed earlier in a far more positivelight. Indeed, the same rising middle-class subjects, who detachedthemselves by the end of the 1980s from the ethnocentric project ofthe apartheid state, are cast in a mordant passage from the novel as‘the ones who wallowed in icing sugar. Fuller fridges. Bigger Houses.Staircases and multi-storeys and columns. Wedding cakes, to say the

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least. And they just couldn’t get enough of braaivleis and golf. Becametourists, you see. We stayed on as tourists in our own country’ (T 63).

The political meanings of Venter’s intertextual strategy are noteasy to tease out, especially since the Conradian aspects of thework are yoked to a savage revisiting of the hallowed genre of theAfrikaans plaasroman – and not altogether felicitously, since the latterengagement distends and decelerates what we might have expectedto be a leaner sort of quest narrative. (The effect is perhaps tosuggest a nightmarish re-entry into that ‘sluggish, viscous chronicity’of times past.) Each chapter in Horrelpoot bears an epigraph fromHeart of Darkness, and the plot retraces Marlow’s journey into Africaso faithfully as to invite the reader to anticipate familiar incidentsand characters and to savour the ingenuity with which they aretransmogrified.30 ‘You don’t second-guess predestination’ (T 2) is aline that crops up in the first chapter, and it serves not so muchas a comment about the mentality of the novel’s diasporic AfrikanerCalvinists, but as an in-joke about the novel’s predetermined narrativestructure. Even so, Horrelpoot is neither postmodern, nor postcolonialexactly.31 Suffice it to say, for now, that there is something strikinglyinventive and up-to-date in the novel’s remapping of the center-periphery axis of Heart of Darkness (London or Brussels to theCongo) as a South-South one (Australia to South Africa). This revisedgeography sharply reminds us that a contemporary, globally mobileliterary work like Trencherman need no longer write back to theEuropean metropolis; it forces us to acknowledge the possibility ourother routes, other modes of translation, adaptation, variation, andsignification.

Written in the first person, the work chronicles the journey ofthe clubfooted Martin Jasper Louw, known by the nickname Marlouw,an Afrikaans immigrant to Australia in search of his nephew: oneKoert Spies. Koert has returned to rural South Africa and rumourshave started to reach Melbourne that he has assumed strange andsinister powers. His declining mental state is hinted at by the bizarrelanguage of his e-mails (that is, before they stopped coming): a mish-mash of English, Afrikaans, German, hip-hop slang, and the acronymsof text messaging, later described as ‘an abomination that has retainedmerely a splutter of the original language’ (T 240). The countryto which Marlouw dutifully returns (his mission is engineered, likeMarlow’s, by a woman) is hardly a primeval forest: it is a futureSouth Africa, envisaged as a failed state. AIDS is rife, basic servicesare non-existent, airlines no longer meet international standards, cellphone reception is blanked out in what is called ‘the deaf zone’, and

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radio only works during intermittent attempts to re-establish a centralgovernment. A nuclear explosion, governmental incompetence, andcriminal syndicates have made commercial farming impossible. Thelandscape is treeless (they have all been cut down for firewood). Onlythe palms of begging hands, ‘held out . . . like the fronds of giant river-side plants’ (T 57) remind the reader of Conrad’s jungle. There are nolonger any wild animals: the sound of birds can only be heard on a tapethat an anxious white taxi driver plays to soothe his frazzled nerves.And if the novel’s forest is metaphorical, so, too, is its river: Marlouwseems to journey towards Koert on a veritable current of human needand hunger. The taxi driver character, in fact, draws our attention tothe way in which all this differs from Conrad’s Congo: ‘Didn’t old KingLeopold of Belgium talk about carving up ce magnifique gâteau?’ heasks; ‘Difference is: the cake that’s left is very, very meager’ (T 64).

Another difference becomes all the more marked as we readalong. While Conrad’s Marlow travels into an unknown territory,though one imagined as a perverted Eden, Venter’s Marlouw travelsback to a familiar place associated with his childhood. For Koert,it turns out, has established himself as one of the fearsome powersin the land, by taking over the Louws’ ancestral farm, which theyvoluntarily handed over to the black farm workers shortly after theend of apartheid. Koert has recruited from these ranks not only hisconcubine, but also his balaclava-wearing, AK-47-toting guards, andhe is revered (or was until his recent decline) for being the only sourceof lamb and beef in the entire Eastern Cape. While the civilisationalmission that inspired Conrad’s arch-coloniser was centred around theennobling possibilities of productive labour, it is replaced in Venter’stale by a message of consumerist indulgence. For Koert Spies is theprivileged party animal gone native. Even in his better days, his idealshad to do with building palaces and flying in ‘Roquefort and real coffeeand Turkish delight’ (T 218). He prides himself on have brought to the‘specimens’ as he calls them (an echo, no doubt, of Marlow’s ‘improvedspecimen’) the pleasures of Nintendo and booze, ‘silky shirts and shinyboxers, televisions galore, music systems all such classy consumer shit’(T 243) – at least for as long as mommy loads the credit card.32 ‘SinceI’ve arrived,’ the swollen, AIDS-ridden, gangrenous, young coloniserfinally confesses to Marlouw:

I’ve given these specimens in the middle of nowhere eine Leben. Forthem I brought in the music, music from das Welt, for them the DVD, andwe watched it night afta night, mine brudder. Terminator and Ramboand romance shit so tha’ there can be love all over. So much, too much.

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I was one that brought tha Bells and tha Jack Daniels. Do you thinkfor an instant any of these wretched specimens had ever tasted Bells?. . .Sag mir, izzit truly human to propel yourself all the way through thismiserable life without ever sampling a taste of Bells? Einer nach demandern I made then come and plunged my fingertot in de Bells and letthem taste. Baptised with Bells, bruder. Gold in de grain. Do you realizeeverything I managed to do on this Platz? (T 241)

This discourse, this ‘voice’, may well sound comical: a cartoonishparody of the gifted Kurtz’s colonial discourse gone crazy. But sucheffects are cancelled out by the intensity of the novel’s savage climax(a final party at which Koert, even as he proclaims himself to be ‘thetrencherman’ – ‘die horrel, die horrel!’ in Afrikaans – is ritually stabbedby his underlings) and that of the canny rewrite of the Marlow figure’sreturn to the sepulchral Melbourne, where Mama Heleen Spies, inher almond-toed Manolo Blahniks, insists on learning whether Koertin extremis had spoken her name.

I will return to the details of this crucial scene shortly, but it isfirst necessary to register how the novel corresponds to some of theaspects of post-apartheid modernity I have sketched out above. Letme comment, first of all, on the linguistic dimensions of the novel. Thefact that an Afrikaans writer should choose to engage so boldly with thegreat tradition of the English novel attests to the new cosmopolitanismof contemporary South African writing, a phenomenon which hasmoved Leon de Kock to proclaim provocatively that ‘South Africanliterature’, as a distinctive body of work with particular nationalpreoccupations, is dead – and all to the good of writing.33 Eben Venter,who was born and bred on a cattle farm in the Eastern Cape, butwho worked for two decades as a chef in Australia, is a memberof a growing group of contemporary South African writers who liveabroad and therefore draw on a particularly acute sense of relationsamong the local, the national and the global.34 Such writers, as DeKock observes, affiliate themselves with contemporary literary trendsat will. This is certainly the case with Venter, who, in response toa question about the novel’s possible international impact, observedthat Horrelpoot participates in the same Zeitgeist as Cormac McCarthy’sThe Road, Carlos Fuentes’s The Eagles Throne, Jeanette Winterson’s TheStone Gods, and Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark.35 Horrelpoot, as textand event, is therefore symptomatic of that intensified and expandedcontact zone of post-apartheid South Africa: a phenomenon that thenovel’s diasporic Afrikaners – the sort of people who are always awaydoing business in places like Kuala Lumpur – also underscores.

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The transnational aspects of the novel inevitably foregroundthe problem of language (and we may recall here Michael North’sreflections on modernism’s Babel). My earlier sampling of Koert’s‘babble-speak’ captures Venter’s own fears about the disappearance ofAfrikaans: in his interviews, he has roundly confessed that the novel, inthis respect, gives expression to his own nightmare.36 But while in suchcasual venues Venter might risk a word like ‘bastardisation’, resonantof ethnocentric purism, Horrelpoot’s use of language reveals somethingmore complicated and more in keeping with the post-apartheidmoment. With its inclusion of the untranslated epigraphs from Conradand the direct speech in English of a character who refuses, for politicalreasons, to speak Afrikaans, Horrelpoot is obviously addressed to areadership not only devoid of Anglophobia, but fluent in the Englishlanguage and the English literary canon. Moreover, in contrast toearlier plaasromans, whose authors did not hesitate to translate all thethoughts of black characters into Afrikaans (Mikro’s Toiings, whichJ. M. Coetzee subjects to a devastating linguistic analysis, is anexample), Horrelpoot is open to isiXhosa, the language in which thespeech of the farm workers and of Koert’s sinister entourage is oftendirectly rendered.37 It is true that the novel’s focal character, Marlouw,is not comfortable with the language: he describes it at one point asan irritant in the ear, ‘slopping like pap from [a] man’s mouth’ andcausing a strange possessiveness to rise up within him (T 139–40).38

But the novel itself is less proprietorial: it recognises, in its verylinguistic textures, that the farm – and the world at large – is occupiedand shared by a diversity of others. If, in the case of Coconut, we maydetect a certain tension in the novel’s explicit advocacy of disappearingvernaculars even as its characters are studiously acquiring the globalEnglish that would displace it, we may note, in the case of Horrelpoot, amuch more conscious paradox. The novel’s muscular and inventiveprose registers a profound aesthetic commitment to the Afrikaanslanguage, but it simultaneously recognises that the world the novelinstantiates diegetically, no less than the one it needs to negotiateextradeigetically, must be multilingual and global. One of the work’sprofound ironies, in fact, lies in the tension it creates between theisolated ‘middle of nowhere’ it depicts, and the translated work’spotential international circulation.

A related irony obtains in the novel’s ambivalent attitude totradition, or more specifically to the plaasroman: Venter has describedhis book as an attempt to deal the deathblow to this sentimental andpolitically suspect genre, but it also, in effect, keeps this tradition alive,not only through the poetic power of the Afrikaans prose, but through

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its continued interest in some of the plaasroman’s familiar tropes (suchas inheritance and the proper stewardship of the land). Marlouw’s‘“I’m not nostalgic,’’ I lie,’ (T 215) speaks to Venter’s own attitude:one that is perhaps characteristically modernist in its contradictorybut inseparable drives toward abolishing and preserving the past. The‘then-and-now’ effect – the sense of rupture that Friedman considersthe crucial feature of modernism – is marked in the novel. It isanimated, as all dystopias are, by the problems of the present moment:the anxieties of whites about political corruption, land claims, andfarm attacks, as well as more generally shared fears about AIDS,environmental degradation, and the shaky provision of services likewater and electricity. Indeed, one might say that the projection intoa dystopian future makes the cusp-time of transition all the morevisible in its disillusionment and exaggerated distortion. After all, thenarrative premise of Marlouw’s return to the decayed family farmpermits a constant comparison between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and thechanges he notes are both genuinely disturbing (where they are darkculminations of current trends) and a little ludicrous (as when Venterironises Afrikaners’ yearnings for the good old times: ‘Oh, the rugbydays, the Saturday afternoons with braaivleis and beer’ (T 215); ‘Passme a tissue, please’ (T 108)).

Moreover, like so many earlier modernist novels, Horrelpootmanipulates time self-consciously and programmatically, with flash-backs, flashforwards, long sentences suggesting subjective time, andperhaps even that strange deceleration of which I spoke earlier. Theseeffects are amplified by the recurrent reflections on the experientialquality of time in Africa: ‘How do you define time on this continent,anyway?’ (T 84) ponders a Swedish character; while Esmie Phumzile(the novel’s rather sad, AIDS-ravaged counterpart to Kurtz’s proudsavage woman), observes: ‘You white people have so little time andso much stuff. While we have such an awful lot of time, and nothingworthwhile to show for it after all these years’ (T 168). One might say,then, somewhat impressionistically, that the novel immerses us in aruinous future perfect tense; but it seems more diagnostically incisiveto suggest that Horrelpoot projects us into the decomposed modernitythat James Ferguson describes with such disturbing clarity. In a worldlike Venter’s South Africa, inequalities are so dramatic and entrenchedthat the temporal and dynamic axis of modernisation falls away, so thatthe promises of modernity can only be regarded nostalgically.

Or, again, spatially. The exacerbated consciousness of ‘then’ and‘now’ that runs through the novel is matched by a similarly painful con-sciousness of ‘here’ and ‘there’. The privileged world of upper-middle

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class Melbourne and the dystopian South Africa of fear, despair, andscarcity are also constantly juxtaposed. It is significant (and a poignantreflection of contemporary global realities) that at the end of thenovel, Esmie Phumzile begs Marlouw to take her with him to Australia:something unimaginable in the case of Kurtz’s savage concubine, whomust obviously stay behind on the river-bank as the steamer departs. Ina world where development is impossible, Ferguson notes, the dreambecomes one not of progress, but egress, and mobility becomes themost desirable thing of all.39 This situation is powerfully staged in thenovel when a throng of people gathers to stare at Marlouw as he arrivesin Bloemfontein. His taxi-driver explains:

They know you’re fresh from the airport. It’s a precious sight tothem. . . . I’m not talking about clothes and cameras and watches and thatsort of thing. . . Another world, that’s what they see . . . It’s the knowledgethat something better still exists somewhere. It fascinates them. (T 56)

This said, Venter’s novel is also very obviously aboutcommodities – about ‘cameras, watches, and that sort of thing’. Thefact that it tales place, for the most part, in places of extremescarcity should not hide the fact that it is as fully preoccupied witha consumerist modernity – however problematically decomposed – asMatlwa’s more realistic novel. Indeed, Venter’s many lists of themiscellaneous commodities that remain available in the devastatedSouth African countryside give a certain strange, surreal emphasis toeach pathetic object (as in the case of the meagre assorted goods forsale at a country stall: three brown onions, sunglasses, razor blades, Oilof Olay, fan belts, a religious tract, and so on (T 160)). No less than thestacks of random loot that Koert has piled up in the old farmhouse,these things come to seem, somehow, like the sad remnants of thecolonial ‘spoils of thieving’. And they certainly enable us to view thetasteful collections of African accoutrements that the expatriates haveassembled around themselves in Melbourne – the paintings by AlexisPreller, the stinkwood chairs, ‘the zebra skin on the tiled floor, thekieries and shields and masks on the wall’ (T 7) – as morally repugnant.

As in Matlwa’s novel, the star commodity in Horrelpoot is food:appropriately so, since it is, after all, in terms of access to andconsumption of food that the rawest and most basic differences insocial power have historically been measured.40 The fact that Venterearned a living as a chef gives this novel a particularly rich repertoireof details to draw on as he develops this crucial motif. Horrelpoot isa novel in which we suddenly encounter a reference to a recipe forpigeon pie with raisins, bacon, garlic, and Cape Muscatel (T 157) and

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where the sight of fourteen pumpkin seeds drying on a windowsill inAfrica brings to mind the way they would be used ‘on the other side’:‘roasted, with tagliatelle, arugula, smoked salmon, and baked pumpkinshavings’ (T 199). Most importantly, this is a novel in which the Kurtzfigure is re-imagined as grotesquely obese (Koert is the ‘king larva’,allegorising the belly politics of colonial and postcolonial greed) andin which the most nightmarish scene is set, not under the shadows ofjungle trees, as in Conrad’s famous grove of death episode, but in theColony Restaurant in the Free State town of Smithfield, where a longcurtain divides the neatly laid dining tables from a makeshift hospicewhere groaning AIDS sufferers have come to die.

The novel’s substitution of meat for ivory as the key fetishcommodity has a terrific critical potency, which perhaps emerges moststrikingly in Venter’s version of the famous final encounter betweenMarlow and Kurtz’s Intended I mentioned earlier. At the end ofthe novel, Marlouw meets his sister Heleen at a fancy restaurant inMelbourne to report on the fate of her son. The locus of the privilegedmetropolis has, of course, shifted, but the scene’s revelation of globalconnectedness and complicity is no less powerful than in Conrad. Thehorror of Marlouw’s identity with Koert is registered in the meal hedevours: ‘marbled black Angus rib-eye steak with porcini dust in a lightsauce of parsley, oyster mushrooms, and garlic’ (T 308). Though theepigraph to the chapter reminds us of Conrad’s throw-away referenceto the ‘infamous cookery’ and ‘unwholesome beer’ of the ‘sepulchral’city, the far more sustained focus on food in Horrelpoot reinscribesglobal inequalities in a particularly grotesque manner: they are nolonger to be measured in terms of extraction and labour exploitation,but in terms of mobility and consumption, quite literally conceived asdevouring more than one’s share. In this respect Venter’s updating ofConrad is far more than a postmodern game.

It is worth recalling, at this point, the long-standing (and ratheraccurate) stereotype of Afrikaners as gourmands, whether it be thefamiliar potbellied braaivleis-devouring male, or the newer generationof sophisticated, pretentious, and cosmopolitan foodies, who areroundly excoriated in the novelist Marlene van Niekerk’s hilarioustypology of Afrikaner eaters.41 Van Niekerk, like Hyslop and Grundlingin their histories of the Afrikaners’ rise to middle-class status, makes itclear that there lies behind this rather late entry into the indulgentvalues of consumerist modernity, a long and not-too-distant history ofisolation, scarcity, and poverty. It is therefore possible to see in a worklike Horrelpoot, a locally specific restaging of the conflict between thevalues of a culture of production and an emergent, or perhaps newly

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dominant, culture of consumption that was such a prominent feature ofAmerican life and artistic expression in the early part of the twentiethcentury. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that this transition from oneset of broadly held values (thrift, work, self-control, planning for thefuture) to another, (expenditure, leisure, indulgence, living for thenow) was the central and animating tension in the work of many keyAmerican modernist writers and in 1930s Hollywood cinema as well.42

This comparative vantage enables us to think more positivelyabout Horrelpoot’s engagement with the plaasroman. Though it ispossible to argue that this aspect of the work embroils us in the slow,the passé, and the all-too-ethnically specific, it nevertheless providesVenter with a set of residual values from which an ethical critique ofthe culture of consumption may be launched.43 Venter notes, ratherpoignantly, that the older generation, who made the land productiveand ‘stood upright on the earth like cypresses’ would have been baffledto think that ‘their daughter would find it liberating to sit completelyalone in an alien city, licking froth from her coffee spoon, andplanning her shopping – even though she lacks for nothing’ (T 28).This essentially ‘producerist’ view of the culture of consumption fullyextends to the black characters in the novel. Though Venter claims inhis interviews to have treated the folks on the farm sympathetically,they nevertheless seem doomed, in that they are incapable of doinganything but consume. If the Afrikaners’ possessiveness and greed isexposed, so, too, is the helplessness of the farm’s black inheritors, wholive – badly – off handouts and the legacy of the previous owners, andwhose pathetic interest in fashion is no less readily exploited than aretheir simple appetites.

It is therefore significant that the novel’s strange coda, tackedon after the effective Conradian conclusion in the shiny ivory-tiledMelbourne restaurant, imagines a return of an earlier state: one thatprecedes, even, the productive occupation and commodification ofthe land. Venter imagines here, in tropes rather reminiscent of theending of Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, that the farm would lie fallowand regenerate, that it would become the ‘wild fragrant landscape’it was when the San once wandered through it, that rooigras andthen rock pigeons and bees and springhare and springbok wouldreturn, ‘but no human footprint or human voice ever again [exist]on that piece of land . . . Imagine: wind blowing through the ruinsof the farmstead as if no one had ever lived there’ (T 314–16). Noless than the restaurant scene, though in a lyric rather than satiricmode, the coda expresses a recoil from the consumerism the novel hasdescribed with such nauseating verve. It reverts, significantly, to a time

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of hunter-gatherers, before even the most basic forms of consumerism(for which agriculture, as Peter Stearns has argued in his work onconsumption in world history, is a precondition).44 That this visionshould be retrogressive, is another sign of the novel’s vivid imaginingof a decomposed modernity, one of whose symptoms, as Ferguson hasargued, can be found in narratives of degeneration: ‘the worst off’ – theSan, let’s say, or the novel’s sick and idle farm workers – ‘are not the“least developed’’, those still at the start of their journey of uplift andimprovement. Rather, the worst off are those who are farthest along ona very different journey: a downward slide into degeneration, chaos,and violence.’45

VI would prefer not to end with such a dark view, which arises,after all, from a satirical and dystopian novel, and does not carrythe force of socio-political prediction. But what is imaginable, shouldnevertheless hold our attention as literary critics. In this case, itsuggests how complicated and compelling a terrain contemporarySouth Africa is for scholars of modernism and modernity. Let mesign off by giving a very compressed final overview of this terrain, inorder to open debate and stimulate further investigations. Jed Esty’scomments in his study of the modernist Bildungsroman strike me asuseful. He proposes that ‘the modernist era should be located at thedialectical switch-point between residual nineteenth-century narrativesof global development and an emergent twentieth-century suspicionof such narratives as universalist and Eurocentric’.46 Such a conceptuallocation gives greater specificity to those situations in which modernistforms of expression may arise than what we find in Friedman, thoughit is still quite open geographically. A great deal of South Africanliterature, even contemporary works that one would usually (by virtueof the current structuring of our discipline) call postcolonial, couldbe positioned at this particular switch-point. But my readings in thisessay appear to suggest that, as we move further away from thatdynamic moment full of promises, when a democratic South Africarejoined the world of global modernity, the relevance of Ferguson’smeditation on the decomposed modernity of parts of Africa in anera of neoliberal capitalism, becomes increasingly evident. And suchdismal possibilities were, indeed, in the cards from the start. Considerthe complexities and temporal compressions of John Comaroff’s viewof the ‘new’ South Africa: the country claimed global attention inthe 1990s, he argues, because it represented ‘a heroic, hopeful effort

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to rebuild a modernist nation-state under postmodern, postmortemconditions; at just the time when the contradictions of modernitywere becoming inescapable’.47 It has, arguably, been the fate ofSouth Africans since the democratic transition to occupy three aspectsof modernity – dynamic and progressive, alternative and ‘different’,and hopelessly spatialised and hierarchical – at the same time. Forthose living through such complicated chronicities, the experience isexhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. And it is certainly a fertileground for complex and innovative literary expression – far more sothan those who supposed that South African literature would fizzle outwith the end of apartheid for lack of stirring materials could ever havepredicted.

AcknowledgementsThanks are due to Leon de Kock, Jed Esty, Lucy Graham, AlbertGrundling, Dirk Klopper, Michael Moses, Sarah Nuttall, StevenRobins, and Jonny Steinberg for their various forms of criticalengagement, encouragement, and inspiration.

Notes1. I am here following James Ferguson, an important interlocutor in this essay, who

notes that ‘modernity’ is a ‘native category’, but one ‘shared by an enormouslyheterogeneous population of natives’. See Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in theNeoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 177.

2. Ibid. p. 186.3. To be sure, Attwell uses the latter term in a rather gingerly way. Recognising

that modernism cannot simply be defined and then applied to the workof the black writers he is considering, he favors J. M. Coetzee’s term ‘theexperimental line’. David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South AfricanLiterary History (Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press. 2005),p. 175. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically as RM, followed bypage number.

4. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics ofModernity on A South African Frontier, Vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1997), p. 235.

5. Deborah Posel, ‘Revisiting South Africa’s History of Race, Consumption, and theStruggle for Freedom’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (2010): 57–175, p. 159.

6. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Why did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate? “Whiteness,’’ Classand Consumption in Urban South Africa, 1985–1996’, Society in Transition 31. 1(2000): 36–45, p. 3.

7. Ibid.8. Ibid.9. Albert Grundling, ‘ “Are We Afrikaners Getting Too Rich’’: Cornucopia and Change

in Afrikanerdom in the 1960s’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 21 (June/September2008): 143–65, pp. 148–9.

10. Quoted in Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, p. 33.

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11. Hyslop, ‘Why did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate?’, p. 11.12. Quoted in Grundling, ‘Are We Afrikaners Getting Too Rich?’, p. 158.13. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell,

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 209.14. Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review 144 (March–April

1984): 96–113, pp. 109–13.15. Andries Visagie, in the only other essay I know of with a similar agenda to mine

(namely to take the new work in modernist studies and their applications to SouthAfrican literature seriously), has a longer line-up of critics and theorists: SusanStanford Friedman, Fredric Jameson, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Marjorie Perloff, andPeter Sloterdijk. See Visagie, ‘Globalisering, modernisme en postmodernisme: Instede van die liefde (2005) van Etienne van Heerden’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 47: 2(2010): 95–112.

16. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities andthe Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006):425–43, p. 433. Subsequence page references will be given parenthetically as ‘PM’,followed by page number.

17. Friedman’s phrase ‘the phenomenology of the new and now’ immediately bringsto mind the project of Sarah Nuttall: that of ‘reading the “now’’ ’ in the fluid livedrealities of Johannesburg. See Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and CulturalReflections on Post-apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009) and herrecent work more generally.

18. Consider here Ivan Vladislavic’s evocation of the end of apartheid as a time when‘suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another. They wouldn’t shut up’.Double Negative (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011), p. 75.

19. Nuttall, Entanglement, p. 22; Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, p. 20; and Friedman,‘Periodizing Modernism’, p. 435.

20. On apartheid as a ‘particularly dramatic example of the “Invention of Tradition’’ ’,see Hyslop, ‘Why Did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate?’ (3) and as an ‘imaginedcommunity’ invented by a nationalist intelligentsia, see Eric P. Louw, The Rise,Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid (Westport CT: Praeger, 2004), pp. 32–3. For post-apartheid versions of tradition, see John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff,Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). This work explores theincreasingly commercial expressions of ‘cultural identity,’ ‘custom,’ and ‘heritage’today.

21. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York:Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3, 173. Subsequent page references will appearparenthetically as 1922, followed by page number.

22. This attitude is pervasive and can perhaps be captured for foreign readers ina cartoon entitled ‘Pride is a Tricky Thing’. In it a student notices a T-shirtdepicting the Boer general De la Rey and wonders if people would be offendedif she wore it on campus. When an interlocutor proposes that it could be wornironically, the student responds, ‘That would just offend everybody else’. The jokeis, of course, that irony about the past has become familiar and commercialisedto the point of tedium. See Albert Grundling, ‘Die “De La Rey’’-fenomeen’, inVan Volksmoeder tot Fokofpolisiekar: Kritiese Optelle oor Afrikaanse Herrinneringsplekke,eds. Albert Grundling and Siegfried Huigen (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2008),p. 184.

23. See Rita Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 143–6.

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24. On the uses (or uselessness) of Shakespeare in Coconut, see Natasha Distiller,‘Shakespeare and the coconuts: close encounters in post-apartheid South Africa’,Shakespeare Survey Volume 62: Close Encounters with Shakespeare’s Text, ed. PeterHolland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 213–16.

25. Kopano Matlwa, Coconut (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2007), pp. 158–9. Subsequentpage references will be given parenthetically as C, followed by page number.

26. Reading this passage, I bring to mind Ferguson’s description of a photograph takenduring the Liberian civil war: ‘The photograph showed a young man standingat a roadblock, waiving an assault rifle in the face of the driver who had beenstopped. The young man with the rifle wore a T-shirt, on the back of which werewritten the following English words: “Patience my ass!’’ ’ Ferguson, Global Shadows,p. 186.

27. The reference to ‘knife and fork’ has a fascinating resonance in the South Africancontext. In 2009, the loud-mouth ANC Youth League President Julius Malemacommented as follows on the politics of consumerism in South Africa: ‘The ANCchanges lives. It can change you from a hobo into someone very important. ThisANC has taught those who are insulting it today to use fork and knife, to taste redwine, to wear expensive suits’ (quoted in Posel, ‘Revisiting South Africa’s History’,p. 159).

28. Posel, ‘Revisiting South Africa’s History’, p. 161.29. Since it is important to me to speak of the linguistic effects in the Afrikaans

original, I feel I must refer to the work as Horrelpoot; my quotations, however, forthe convenience the present readership, are from the English translation and pagereferences, provided parenthetically (as T, foolowed by page number), are keyed tothis text. The relevant editions are Eben Venter, Horrelpoot (Kaapstad: Tafelberg,2006) and Trencherman, trans. Luke Stubbs (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2008). TheEnglish rendering of Venter’s original Afrikaans title is quite ingenious in bringingthe novel’s preoccupation with food into play. ‘Horrelpoot’ means clubfoot orcripple (‘horrel’ is etymologically connected to ‘hobble’) and a prefatory note inTrencherman reminds of the term ‘trench foot’; but a ‘trencherman’ is, of course,‘a feeder or eater, a person who cadges a free meal, a parasite’; and a ‘trencher’in Middle English refers to a cutting instrument, but also to ‘a person who carvesmeat’.

30. The knitters of black wool, the neat accountant, Kurtz’s painting of the blindfoldedwoman – all these and more appear, transmogrified in interesting ways. The bestexample is perhaps Conrad’s selfless Russian adventurer and admirer of Kurtz inhis harlequin rags, whose book on seamanship Marlow discovers as he nears theinner station. He becomes the hip and acquisitive Pilot Hlongwane, with his bluereflective sunglasses and golden Nikes.

31. There is no escaping Horrelpoot’s primitivist moments (not least the climacticritual murder, complete with witchdoctor). I take these as a sign of its essentialagreement with, rather than subversion of, Conrad, and of the novel’s modernistrather than its postcolonial inclinations. Even so, there is one way in which thephysical grotesquerie (‘wanstaltigheid’ is the potent Afrikaans word) of the novel’sKurtz figure can be given a postcolonial turn. In The Event of Postcolonial Shame(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), Tim Bewes turns to a moment inSartre’s introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, where he imagines Europe as afat white body: ‘This pale, bloated continent ended up by lapsing into what Fanonrightly calls narcissicm’ (5). Europe, in other words, has historically gazed at its

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own reflection, but has never had to endure the kind of shaming scrutiny of whichFanon writes in the famous ‘Look, a Negro!’ episode of Black Skin, White Masks.There is, therefore, or so Bewes argues, something transgressive in fiction wherethe white body is no longer normative, but racially marked, rendered corporeal inshameful ways. Venter’s description of the bloated body of Koert Spies, the figurepar excellence of all greed and acquisitiveness, of unrestrained power and appetitiveexcess, pulls no punches: ‘The flesh of all flesh rises in front of me, flesh consumedby flesh that has multiplied and swollen into a malformed colossus of humandough with pink folds hanging from its side. The giant rounding of the shoulders,the ox-like shoulder blades that shimmer with secretions of fattiness, the drop ofthe breasts, the belly that shudders and is stretched to a bursting point at the navel’(T 239).

32. The phrase ‘classy shit’ makes visible that abject underbelly of consumeristindulgence in the metaphor of excrement: ubiquitous in this novel as in otherpostcolonial African satires.

33. Leon de Kock, ‘Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South AfricanLiterature is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa’, English in Africa 32. 2(October 2005): 75–82.

34. Others include J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Zakes Mda, Mark Behr, DenisHirson, Anne Landsman, Yvette Christiane, Gabeba Baderoon, and Marita van derVyver.

35. Interview with Charles Malan in LitNet, 15 October 2008 (http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin /giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id=54356&cause_id=1270),n.p. Accessed 4 July 2011.

36. Ibid.37. See J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa

(Braamfontein: Pentz Publishers, 2007), pp. 134–40. In his on-line interview withMalan, Venter described this effect as deliberately distinct from Conrad’s notoriousdenial of human speech to his African characters.

38. I would translate the Afrikaans ‘lellerig soos pap uit die man se oop, dreigendemond’ with more intensity: ‘like dangling flesh or porridge from the man’s open,threatening mouth’.

39. Ferguson, Global Shadows, p. 192.40. As Venter observes in the LitNet interview with Malan: ‘To most people meat on the

table is a privilege. Plenty of meat becomes an indulgence. Heaps of meat is puredecadence, and in the case of Koert, who exploits meat, devours and wallows inmeat, it becomes repulsive’. See also Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History:The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 2–4, on thehistory of consumption and inequality in premodern societies (where it is largely amatter of food and especially meat).

41. Marlene van Niekerk, ‘Die Etende Afrikaner: Aantekening vir ’n klein tipologie’,in Van Volksmoeder to Fokofpolisiekar: Kritiese Optelle oor Afrikaanse Herrinneringsplekke,eds. Albert Grundling and Siegfried Huigen (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2008),pp. 81–2, 85–7.

42. Warren I. Susman’s wonderful book Culture at History (New York: Pantheon, 1985)originates this view. See also Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture ofAbundance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 23–38.

43. These seem signally lacking in Matlwa, whose one admirable character, Filwe’sbrother, thinks that working in a fast-food restaurant is the way to get closer to the

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people and regain some sort of black authenticity. An alternative to a consumeristlate modernity is virtually unimaginable in the world of Coconut, as we see from theutter failure of the attempt to stage a sacrifice to the ancestors in an up-scale gatedcommunity.

44. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire,2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 7.

45. Ferguson, Global Shadows, p. 19146. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development

(Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2011 [forthcoming]).47. Quoted in Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, p. 7.

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Post-Apartheid Modernism and Consumer Culture

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