The Imaginator: Perspective and Possibility in Ivan Vladislavic's "The Tuba"

The Imaginator: Perspective and Possibility in Ivan Vladislavić’s “The Tuba”

Rilette Swanepoel

Seeing and Perceiving

Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction often centres on how characters relate to their

environments and, more particularly, on how they perceive cultural artefacts,

such as monuments, statues, fine-art objects and architecture. He describes

the visual aspects of these artefacts in minute detail. Such artefacts

frequently serve as motifs in his short stories and novels, and he regularly

employs them as markers of ideology and of change. As the author of

several texts on South African fine arts,1 this preoccupation with the visual

comes as no surprise.

The author’s work suggests a link between the ways in which characters

view concrete reality, including cultural artefacts, and their world views.

Experimention with perspective is characteristic of his oeuvre. He presents

readers with the views of children (“The Prime Minister is Dead” [1989] and

“Tsafendas’s Diary” [1989]), megalomaniacs (Niewenhuizen in The Folly

[1993] and Tearle in The Restless Supermarket [2001]) and even, in one

story, the perspective of a statue (“We Came to the Monument” [1989]), as

he points to the important role of perspective in the generation of meaning.

Perspective in Vladislavić’s fiction as a tool to bring a storyworld into being,

however, has received little critical reflection. Many critics and scholars,

such as Wood, Helgesson, Thurman and Peters,2 have investigated the games

that Vladislavić plays with language. In my view, the games the author plays

with perspective are equally intriguing.

Given the South African context that forms the backdrop to all his

fiction, it also comes as no surprise that one particular cultural artefact,

English in Africa 41 No. 1 (May 2014): 109–126 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v41i1.7

http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v41i1.7

namely the wall, should recur in his work. Crime has made South Africa a

walled society. The prefabricated wall in The Folly (1993) and the mural of

Alibia in The Restless Supermarket (2001), the Wall of Jeff and the Ndebele

wall in Portrait with Keys (2006), together with many other walls in his

fiction, are not only important motifs, but are also depicted in a way that

foregrounds their visual features. He even has a story called “Journal of a

Wall” (1989). As with his other cultural artefacts, walls in Vladislavić’s

fiction are described in detail; they are rendered visible to the mind’s eye.

Walls are curious artefacts, in that they are often symbols of division.

They are boundaries and, as David Newman (37–38) implies, while

boundaries divide, they are also contact zones. Physical boundaries, such as

walls and fences, are more often than not indicative of conceptual

boundaries, related to power structures, which is to say that physical, visible

divisions often allude to invisible or conceptual divisions.

“The Tuba” appears in the short story collection Propaganda by

Monuments (1996), which on the whole can be said to explore aspects of

signification and interpretation (Swanepoel 19); it is an overlooked story that

has not received as much critical attention as “Propaganda by Monuments,”

“The WHITES ONLY Bench” and “Courage,” published in the same

volume. In this article, I investigate Vladislavić’s use of perspective in “The

Tuba,” and in particular, the link that he establishes between characters’

views of concrete reality and of the wider world. I do so by exploring

different characters’ views of a rather unobtrusive, almost invisible fence. A

fence, like a wall, is a dividing structure, yet, in this story, it is also a point of

contact. As such, it becomes a metaphor for less literal, less tangible

boundaries and casts light on how conceptual social boundaries are created

and transcended.

Drawing on David Herman’s notion of “embodied existence,” which

emphasizes the relation between seeing, place and conceptualization, I argue

that, through the link that Vladislavić establishes between how one sees

artefacts and how one sees in a more figurative sense, the author foregrounds

perspective to show how imagination – seeing with the mind’s eye – and art

may induce a more playful and hopeful view of reality. He does so by

creating characters who literally view the same fence from different angles,

and relating how they view concrete reality to how they see social divisions.

By slowly guiding our perspective to the edges of the storyworld and

beyond, he gradually makes the storyworld bigger and more complex. He

uses narrative perspective in this story to comment on world view and also

on how perspective affects one’s understanding of deeper-lying, unseen

things, such as division, racism, hope and the future. In English, as in several

110 RILETTE SWANEPOEL

other languages, ‘to see’ is often used also to denote ‘to understand.’

Vladislavić explores seeing in both these senses.

Seeing and Conceptualizing Place and Ideology

Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Herman (“Beyond Voices”)

proposes an integrated approach to perspective and focalization. In contrast

to classical narratological approaches, which tend to isolate viewing and

narrating agents, he prefers a more comprehensive approach to how readers

make sense of storyworlds. Hence, he prefers the term conceptualization to

focalization (“Beyond Voices” 128), which suggests “supplementing

narratological accounts of focalization with cognitive-grammatical research

on construal or conceptualization” (“Beyond Voices” 119). The

supplementation implies moving away from merely seeing the storyworld

through the eyes of a character (or as narratologists would say: “who sees?” /

“who is looking?”) to comprehending or understanding the fictional world,

so that perspective may “[take] its place among a wider array of construal

operations – ways of organizing and making sense of domains of

experience – that are anchored in humans’ embodied existence that may be

more or less fully exploited by a given narrative” (“Beyond Voices” 119).

What I find particularly useful in this approach is Herman’s emphasis on

“embodied existence,” by which he means the experiencing subject’s

physical location in place3 and time. Vladislavić’s fiction shows an acute

awareness of the physicality of being in and engaging with a particular

place. However, Herman’s approach also accounts for more abstract, less

physical, notions of understanding and experience in the conceptualization

of a fictional world, which are also relevant to Vladislavić’s rendition of

storyworlds. Herman explains that “narrative perspective is best understood

as a reflex of the mind or minds conceptualizing scenes within

storyworlds” (“Beyond Voices” 122).

Suggesting a focus on the cognitive dimensions of focalization

(“Beyond Voices” 120), Herman’s approach falls within the field of

cognitive narratology, a field that is currently viewed with scepticism and

referred to with caution. Marie-Laure Ryan explains that cognitive

narratology is “a project uncomfortably sandwiched between the speculative

and interpretative disciplines of the humanities and the experimental

disciplines of the hard sciences” (“Narratology and Cognitive Sciences”

474). In her article “Narratology and Cognitive Sciences: A Problematic

Relation,” she draws attention to some of the slippery edges of the

discipline. An important concern that she raises is the fact that each reader

THE IMAGINATOR 111

construes the same storyworld differently and that these construal operations

are impossible to measure (470). Herman, however, suggests an approach

that is measurable and that draws attention to that which is knowable in each

text, by looking into the nature of the information that the author provides.

Herman’s approach focuses on aspects such as foreground and

background relations; the level of granularity and abstraction; issues of

selection, “which concerns the scope of a predication, meaning how

much of the scene that one is construing is included in the

conceptualization” (“Beyond Voices” 129); motility; the direction of

viewing or “‘sighting’ in a particular direction (spatially and temporally)

from an established perspective point” (“Beyond Voices” 130).

These focus points that Herman deems important in the rendering of

storyworlds are linked to the physical presence, or embodiment, of the

viewing agent in time and in place, even though he acknowledges the

importance of operations that are not specifically linked only to physical

context. He writes that such operations, “which underlie the organization of

narrative discourse, are shaped not just by factors bearing on perspective or

viewpoint, but also by temporal, spatial, affective, and other factors

associated with embodied human experience” (“Beyond Voices” 128).

Herman thus adumbrates a comprehensive understanding of how a

storyworld comes into being for the reader.

He illustrates his approach with reference to literary texts and to a

graphic novel, indicating that the approach is applicable to both text-based

narratives and narratives that depend on visual as well as textual

information. Vladislavić often presents readers with visual signifiers, such as

statues and photographs, describing them in detail and using them as motifs.

Even though Vladislavić’s works are texts, they reveal a preoccupation with

the visual as he frequently suggests links between how characters see

cultural artefacts or places and how they see the world in general. Herman’s

approach is particularly suited to an analysis of Vladislavić’s fiction,

because Vladislavić foregrounds perspective by linking seeing with

construal and understanding, relating concrete reality to abstract conceptions

of reality. Vladislavić leads us to understand by linking physical presence in

time and place to conceptualization; he leads our perspective from concrete

reality to abstract reality, and vice versa.

The idea that physical embodiment is linked to world view is popular

among ecocritics. Jonathan Bate reminds us of Charles-Louis de Secondat

and Alexander von Humbolt’s insistence that the weather influences

ideology, and he warns that “[b]ecause they work indoors in their air-

conditioned libraries, modern analysts of ideology – like Frankensteins

enclosed in their laboratories – have forgotten about the weather” (101). He


acknowledges that this insistence is simultaneously pre- and postmodern.

Tracing Kant’s reading of De Secondat, he extends this idea to issues of

race, saying: “There is, indeed, no such thing as racial essence. Move people

to a different environment and they will behave according to the conditions

of that environment; they will not be bound by their racial origin” (101).

The link that Herman perceives between physical embodiment in time

and place and conceptualization is thus compatible with, even analogous to,

ecocritics’ notion that environment influences ideology. It is thus possible to

link seeing from and being in a particular time and place to conceptions

about reality. Vladislavić’s fiction also interrogates the relationships among

time, place, perspective and world view.

Another factor that is important in the dynamic relation between

concrete reality and abstract conceptions of reality is power. As far as

situatedness in a particular context is concerned, the link between

perspective and identity is important. Gerald Gaylard traces the development

of postmodern subjectivity via Marxism and existentialism, and explains that

postmodern subjecthood embraces many of the values of humanist

individualism, but differs from the latter in its emphasis on the influence of

context on the individual and “the extent to which [an individual] can resist

those contexts and be truly individual” (63–64). Significantly, he asserts that

“individuality and subjectivity in postmodernism are always changing and

dynamic and dialectically related to the hegemonic power of the herd, the

social” (64). Gaylard clarifies the link between subjectivity/identity and

context in postmodernism, focusing on hegemonic power. Because

perspective emanates from an individual, context is equally important for

how one sees and conceptualizes. One can thus say that an intricate dynamic

among seeing, setting, identity, power and conceptions about reality is at

play when a storyworld is created. This dynamic is observable in “The

Tuba.”

I employ the term ‘perspective’ to denote this dynamic, specifically to

refer to seeing and conceptualizing from a particular place and time and

ideological context. The terms ‘narrator’ and ‘focalizer’ I employ in the most

straightforward narratological sense of denoting ‘who speaks’ and ‘who

sees’.

Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe correctly observe that “there is

never one perspective from which we can take in the whole border from all

sides” (11). In this article, I consider characters’ views of a fence that marks

the edge of a yard, but also initially the end of the storyworld. Vladislavić

places characters literally in different relations to this fence in order to

comment on perspective, social organization, racism, hope and the future.

The fence in this story serves as both a physical boundary and a conceptual

THE IMAGINATOR 113

boundary. Because boundaries are fundamental to the construction of

categories, they play an important role in identity formation. The self is

identified in relation to the boundary (Schimanski & Wolfe 18). Reflecting

on the nature of boundaries, Newman remarks that “the other side of the

border becomes partially invisible and unknown” and “[w]e tend to perceive

invisible spaces as places that threaten us, as places within which our own

normative practices are brought into question” (41). This is indeed the case

in “The Tuba.”

“The Tuba” foregrounds perspective by interrogating its limits and how

they might be transcended. Unlike the highly visible and detailed walls in

the rest of Vladislavić’s oeuvre, “The Tuba” presents a fence as a boundary

that is unobtrusive and almost ‘invisible,’ acting as a silent testimony to

divisions. Herman contends that the representation of artefacts is one of the

means by which interpreters make sense of narrative worlds (“Cognitive

Narratology” 30). The almost invisible fence is functional, as it shows how

boundaries become hegemonic, how they create blind spots that cause

people to cease noticing or recognising them. The fence also points to the

edges of the known world, and alludes to what lies beyond the known. The

unobtrusiveness and subtlety of the fence offer insight into how boundaries

become accepted, rather than questioned. The story explores how conceptual

boundaries can be transcended through imagination and art (in this case,

music), placing the act of boundary crossing, and concomitantly change and

adapting to change, in a positive light. As such, “The Tuba” is a story of

hope.

Of Bad Fences and Bad Neighbours: “The Tuba”

“The Tuba” relates the story of a suburban family and their friends who

enjoy a lazy afternoon of braaiing, throwing darts and drinking too much.

The narrator’s son, Richie, colours “in the holes in the alphabet stencilled

across the top of the blackboard” (3) and keeps score for Basil and Basil’s

friends: Cliffie and Sergeant Dundas, who “push darts” (1). Behind the

seemingly normal and amicable setting, however, lurks a thick and almost

tangible racism that becomes pronounced when the Salvation Army

marching band of black musicians approaches the house.

The antagonism and dichotomizing that underlie racism are already

subtly invoked by an artefact, the dartboard that sports the face of Saddam

Hussein. The narrator explains that, as the face faded from the many dart

pricks, “they recognised in its pock-marked features other faces that enraged

them: politicians and priests; members of parliament and talk-show hosts;

managing directors and their wives; half-remembered headmasters,


playground bullies, army corporals; ex-wives, bad friends. And in the small

hours, invariably, their brothers, themselves” (2).

The dartboard becomes symbolic of hatred and anger as it foregrounds

the self–other opposition that underlies racism, when the narrator locates its

essence in hatred of the self. Still, with the possible exception of Cliffie, who

is rude and derives pleasure from other people’s misfortune, the racist

characters are not projected as bad individuals. Instead, they appear as

normal ones with personal opinions and perspectives. Their normality is

foregrounded by the way they are introduced. They are presented as though

we, as readers, have known them for years. The story begins with the words:

“The darts started when Cliffie brought home a Saddam Hussein dartboard.

Basil went out and bought them each a set of darts, plastic flights for Cliffie

and feathers for himself” (1). The interpretation of the storyworld is

confused: readers enter the world in medias res, part of the goings-on, and

the narrator seems to assume a familiarity and communality between reader

and characters, yet there is quite a lot that the reader does not know about

this world and its characters. As readers, we are immediately part of the

story and the community; we are on the inside of the fence, yet, like the

characters, unaware of the fence’s existence, until Vladislavić leads our

perspective over the fence. The “scope of predication” (Herman, “Beyond

Voices” 129) is small, the perspective narrow.

Vladislavić uses the assumed familiarity between reader and characters

to complicate perspective and focalization in this story. Because we are

treated as though we know the characters, they are not properly introduced,

so their identities remain obscure. And, because we know them, the

relationships between them are consciously concealed or underemphasized,

which complicates commentary on perspective. The reader deduces that the

narrator is female when she recalls how one of the men explained to her that

“you don’t throw a dart, lady, you push it” (1; my emphasis). Her

relationship with Richie is clear, as she often refers to him as “my boy” (1).

Her race and that of her son, however, is never explicitly stated. Basil’s

behaviour towards both the narrator (5) and Richie (7) may suggest that he is

in a relationship with the narrator and Richie’s father, but it could also be

interpreted as patronizing behaviour towards a black or brown female

servant and her son. The other relationships are even less clear. The

characters just seem to be friends. The fact that the various relationships, and

to an extent, their class are concealed makes it difficult to denote their

perspectives or behaviour as, for example, ‘typically that of a white lower-

class father.’ Only the blatant racism of the dart throwers towards the black

musicians denotes them as white. Their concealed social identities enable

Vladislavić to comment on racism without creating stereotypes.

THE IMAGINATOR 115

Simultaneously, it places readers in a curious position: they have to resort to

their own stereotypical constructions in order to understand and comment on

(for example) a given perspective, and in the process, they are made aware

of their own assumptions. I am going to assume that Basil is Richie’s father,

even though the text does not offer specific evidence to this effect.

Another result of the unclear relationships between the characters is that

spatial markers modulate the reader’s perspective and interpretation of the

storyworld to a greater degree than would otherwise have been the case. A

reader relies strongly on references to Jan Smuts Airport (6) as well as

certain Afrikaans words (6, 7), which give the environment a particularly

South African atmosphere. Within this setting, a very particular South

African racism is evoked: the “little Irish chap” and John de la Porte,

whose surname may indicate French descent, and Beachball Buitendag,

a character who sports an Afrikaans surname, are all welcome at the dart

parties (1), whereas black characters must remain outside the fence. The

specifically local setting houses a black–white racism, rather than a

general xenophobia, as it would seem that white characters of all

nationalities are welcome inside the fence. Seeing that readers have been

unceremoniously dumped on the inside of the fence, and are assumed to

know the characters who have not been introduced, they seem to be

welcome too, even though they may be uncomfortable with their

alignment with these characters and their views. Clearly, spatial markers

and ideology influence the reader’s conceptualization of the storyworld. It

becomes evident very quickly, that the inside of the fence is an exclusive,

bounded-off place.

In this small world, Vladislavić sets up a seeing-is-believing paradigm,

which is to say that characters’ perspectives and their conceptualization of

their world are limited to what they can see. The many references to eyes,

especially to Richie’s and the conductor’s eyes, underscore the role of

perspective in the story. While the band sings the carol “Good King

Wenceslas,” and specifically the line, “When the snow lay round about, deep

and crisp and even,” the narrator thinks to herself: “I have never seen snow.

A white Christmas is inconceivable” (5). The choice of words here is telling:

the narrator had never seen snow, and so she cannot conceive of a white

Christmas. The link between seeing and cognition is established and taken

further when she sees that one of the trumpeters “was actually smiling as he

blew” and remarks: “I hadn’t thought it was possible” (8). Not merely

cognition, but reality and possibility are linked to sight. She is open to the

possibility of playing a trumpet with a smile, only after she has seen it with

her own eyes. Similarly, during the dart game, Basil announces that he has

thrown a “[d]ouble bull;” however, the Sergeant doubtfully says: “We


weren’t watching so it doesn’t count” (5). Again, something is thought to be

true and real only when it is seen. At the end of the story, Basil expresses his

disbelief about the Sergeant’s fate (to be discussed shortly), by saying: “Now

I’ve seen everything” (12), implying that he had not thought such an event

possible; he would not have believed it, had he not seen it. The world created

is small and truth, fact and possibility are linked to that which can be seen.

Establishing what is true and possible in a storyworld is an important part of

one’s understanding of that world, as Ryan points out. She states that for

readers:

[t]rying to establish what holds as fact in the actual domain of the

narrative universe, distinguishing the factual and physical from

the possible and virtual located in the mental representations of

characters, and building an image of these mental representations

as a way to grasp the human significance of physical events and

actions are some of the most fundamental of the cognitive

operations that lead to the construction of narrative meaning.

(Ryan, “Possible Worlds”)

The world on the inside of the fence stays small and intact for the first

quarter of the story. Within this short-sighted little world, where seeing is

believing and where seeing equals truth and possibility, Vladislavić leads

readers to look beyond the limits of their own perspective.

When the Salvation Army first arrives, several “us” versus “them”

comments illuminate the white characters’ disposition towards difference.

Sergeant Dundas, for example, instructs the narrator to turn up the volume of

the portable TV (4) to drown out the sound of the Salvation Army’s music,

remarking “[f]unny thing about blacks, you know, they can’t hold a tune.

Not one of ours, I mean. Their ears are different” (4; italics in original). This

black–white dichotomy is articulated by the fence separating the yard from

the street. Although it is presented in an unobtrusive, almost by-the-way

fashion, it marks the boundary between the black musicians on the outside

and white people inside. The scene suddenly becomes bigger. The reader

had not previously been aware of the edges, the ends of the yard and of the

storyworld. With the band’s arrival, readers, along with characters, conceive

of a bigger storyworld than before, as Vladislavić leads their perspective

beyond the fence. The band draws the attention of characters and readers to

the fence, the boundary. The band looks shyly at the family and then crosses

the street to stand in a semicircle in front of the gate. The narrator points out

that the band preferred the sunny spot in front of the gate to the shady spot

underneath the itchy ball tree. The decision to stand behind the gate, rather

than behind the fence, could indicate a yearning to cross the boundary; a

THE IMAGINATOR 117

yearning for contact. As the band starts to play, Richie runs to the fence to

listen (4): in these two actions (Richie’s and the band’s), the fence becomes

both a boundary and a contact zone. The child’s action also marks the first

instance where the fence is mentioned. It is informative that from the outside

there is movement towards a gate, an inherently dynamic image, whereas

from the inside the movement is towards a fence, a more stagnant structure.

Movement, or “motility” (Herman, “Beyond Voices” 130) affects the

reader’s understanding of the social dynamic of the scene. The storyworld

becomes more complex, as it now includes the ‘other,’ it includes difference.

The scene beyond the fence is construed as slightly bizarre and

ridiculous: the narrator remarks that “[i]n front was a man carrying a music

stand and a white baton. He was wearing sun-glasses with wrap-around

frames and reflective lenses, incongruous under the melodramatic peaked

cap with its puffed up crown” (3). The uniforms that the Salvation Army

band members wear are not only impractical for December in South Africa,

because they were designed for European weather, but are also indicative of

European culture. The baton-carrier adapts his uniform by wearing wrap-

around glasses that are ideal in South African weather, but they look

“incongruous.” The reflective glasses that adapt the conductor’s apparel for

South African conditions would have the effect that if people came close

enough, they would be able to see themselves in the face, in the eyes, of the

other. Uniforms are associated with the military and hence with colonizing

culture. (Both Cliffie and Sergeant Dundas would have been uniform

wearers, due to their occupations.) The black musicians are dressed in the

clothes of the ‘other,’ the Europeans or colonizers, rather than in their own

traditional garb. In addition, the Christmas carols that they sing are a

European form of cultural expression that they have appropriated in order to

collect money for charity. Not only is the Salvation Army a European

institution, which may have been a vehicle for colonization and, in Louis

Althusser’s terms, an ideological state apparatus, but both the uniforms and

the songs are hybrid forms of expression: European things adapted to or

reappropriated in the South African context, yet not devoid of their

association with hegemonic colonial power structures. Again, ideology and

artefacts aid in the creation of a complex storyworld.

The fence, the physical boundary, also signifies the cultural divisions

between the two groups and creates both distance and unity, separation and

contact. When the narrator, for instance, wants to give the band some

money, the Sergeant objects that “they will spend it on booze” (5), while,

ironically, it is clear from the beginning of the story that alcohol flows freely

on the inside of the fence. The narrator describes the dart throwers as

“ungovernable” in the festive season (2). The Sergeant’s attitude accentuates


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the division between the two groups and highlights the hypocrisy of the

white characters inside, because, belonging to a teetotal Christian

organisation, the members of the Salvation Army are least likely to be

inebriated. The Sergeant’s projection of his own bad habit onto the band

members on the other side of the fence nevertheless creates a link between

the drinkers on the inside and the presumed drinkers on the outside.

The two contexts (inside and outside) are also linked and contrasted by

the words of familiar Christmas carols on the outside and the swearing

inside. The narrator comments a number of times on the other characters’

foul language, especially in front of Richie (1, 3). As the band plays,

Sergeant Dundas places his hands over his ears and says “Me, me, me” (4).

The very next line reads “Chri-i-st the Lord” (4) – without an indication of

who is speaking. The reader is momentarily unsure as to whether this is yet

again one of the party of dart throwers swearing, or the Salvation Army

singing the chorus of the Christmas carol “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” which

they had begun singing a moment before. The elongated “-i-” (4) probably

indicates that the phrase is part of the song, but it could equally be uttered by

one of the darts players in blasphemous mimicry. The two contexts, at that

moment separated by a fence, are joined by these words, which signify quite

differently in the two contexts. A short while later the narrator wonders to

herself if the Salvation Army band “deem[ed] it their duty to provide a

soundtrack for our squabbles” (8), again suggesting a link between the two

contexts, and bringing them together more strongly with the words: “The

same breeze that brought the devilled smoke from Cliffie’s sosaties to our

noses kept rifling through the pages of music, turning them in flurries and

carrying off the melody” (4). Music and nature are oblivious to the

boundary, indicating the unnaturalness of the division that separates the

white and black characters’ embodied experience within the storyworld.

To belittle the musicians, the Sergeant and Cliffie decide to give them

what they call “big money” (6). The narrator explains that, as an employee

of Lost Property at Jan Smuts Airport (6), Cliffie had got hold of a treasure

chest with “paper mâché barnacles and oversized padlocks” filled with

oversized wooden Kruger Rands the size of dinner plates (6). The chest had

been used for a trade fair in Montevideo and ended up in Lost Property

where Cliffie appropriated it. He derives pleasure from tipping people with

this big money, giving it to beggars (7) and even – in what he considered to

be practical jokes – paying casual labourers with it. When the black victims

of such pranks became upset, he concluded that this proved that “your blacks

didn’t have a sense of humour” (9). Cliffie seems oblivious to the pain that

he has caused, since the narrator says that the “memory of these transactions

made him laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks” (7). His laughter at

THE IMAGINATOR 119

these powerless people is a mean act that asserts his dominant position.

Once, when Cliffie used the money to pay a labourer, the labourer started to

cry. The narrator remarks that she “thought Richie [who was summoned to

watch the remuneration] would cry too, but his eyes were hard and dry. It

made [her] lids itch just to look at them” (9). Richie remains a bit of an

enigma throughout the story. Here, he does not laugh as Cliffy expects him

to do, nor does he cry as the narrator expects. The narrator offers no

explanation or interpretation of Richie’s hard and dry eyes. In the light of the

ending of the story, I will venture to say that he sees something else, a third

possibility, which is at that moment still concealed from both the reader and

the other characters.

When the characters on the inside of the fence are about to engage with

those on the outside, Vladislavić changes the paradigm from ‘seeing is

believing’ to ‘not seeing is believing,’ or, more accurately, the storyworld

changes to a place where imagination, not sight, constitutes what is real. By

doing so he shows that art and imagination can alter reality for the better.

The two men send Richie in to fetch the last of the Kruger Rands to

donate to the band. Richie returns with the last coin, but then runs away with

it and climbs into a tree, out of reach of the adults. By commenting expressly

on Richie’s eyes, the narrator implies that Richie sees things differently. The

narrator therefore foregrounds perspective when she mentions that “[h]e was

always drifting off, he didn’t answer when he was spoken to, he looked

through us with his round eyes” (2) and adds that “Richie was always

otherwise. He would be staring down at us absently, through eyes too full of

colour, as if the irises had been stirred into the whites” (8). She wonders

what he sees from up there in the tree. Being up in the tree would allow

Richie to see beyond the fence, to regard the fence as a line, rather than a

three-dimensional structure. His position, his physical situation in time and

space, would make the fence less imposing. Like a high-angle shot in a film,

his elevated vantage point would enable him to perceive, from a different

perspective, the event about to happen.

When the Salvation Army starts to laugh at the family, and specifically

at Sergeant Dundas, beneath the tree trying to retrieve the big money, the

Sergeant marches across the street to his house to fetch his tuba. He now

literally crosses the boundary. Vladislavić does not mention the fence when

the Sergeant leaves the yard. Just as the reader was, at the beginning of the

story, suddenly in the midst of the characters, the Sergeant is suddenly

placed in the midst of the band members. The boundary, once crossed, has

lost its value as a dividing structure and the street becomes a liminal zone,

where the Sergeant is neither part of the safe space inside the fence, nor part

of the more dynamic context outside the fence. His liminal experience opens


new possibilities and gradually leads him to a new perspective. Without

attempting to play a melody, Sergeant Dundas starts to make loud sounds on

the tuba: “The Sergeant crossed the street, picking up his feet and plumping

them down to the rhythm of his own music” (10; my emphasis). The

reference to his own music emphasizes the extent to which the music – a

form of cultural expression – articulates difference. Even though Sergeant

Dundas has physically crossed the boundary and is in the midst of the

‘other,’ his ‘art,’ or rather noise, still creates a conceptual and perceivable

boundary. The physical boundary crossing, however, gradually leads to a

conceptual one, as a strange thing happens: the conductor incorporates the

Sergeant’s noises into a new melody. The music is given a material quality,

treated as though it is an object, when the conductor “waved his arms,

scooping up the music in his hands and splashing it over them” (10).

Sergeant Dundas forces his way into the semicircle of musicians, trying to

cause chaos: “he puttered up and down in the space between the conductor

and the musicians, huffing and puffing louder and louder, trying to drown

them out or break their rhythm” (10). Even though the music falters for a

moment (10) the conductor is unperturbed, and “with his head thrown back,

gazing up into the sun, [he] gathered the drifting parts and pulled them

together again. A new melody assembled itself from the disjointed

components of the old one and to our great surprise, and his own, Sergeant

Dundas was at the heart of it” (10). The Sergeant inadvertently becomes part

of a new community, as he crosses a conceptual boundary and

found a new rhythm, a difficult one he had never conceived of

until now, three rising notes full of hurt and resentment dredged

up from the depths of his being, which he began to blast out, as if

he was hurling stones from the throat of the tuba. This time the

faltering was barely perceptible. The music closed over the

Sergeant like brown water.

(11)

Interestingly, the new rhythm is not an easy one, it encompasses hurt and

resentment, accommodating and transforming them into something the

Sergeant “had never conceived of until [then].” Still, the Sergeant does his

best to cause chaos; he even tries to escape, but the rest of the musicians will

not let him (11). Suddenly, he starts to dance and disappears, at last absorbed

into a new harmony. Felicity Wood, the only critic who has written about

“The Tuba” in any sort of depth, regards this as a symbolic overturning of

the world view that Sergeant Dundas represents (32). Even though the reader

is not told of a change in the Sergeant’s perspective, the dance suggests that

THE IMAGINATOR 121

he has indeed begun to subscribe to a new way of seeing. In the same way

that cultural artefacts in Vladislavić’s fiction become markers of change, the

music in “The Tuba” becomes indicative of change and a way in which a

boundary may be crossed. The music represents the power of art to

transcend boundaries and shift perspective. The narrator thinks to herself:

I would choose to be with Richie, in the tree, nested in leaf-green

shade, with rough bark scratching pleasantly against my spine,

with the tang of itchy-balls stirring a monumental sneeze in my

nostrils. I would be the one to let fall the useless currency. But I

am unable.

What does he see from there?

[. . .]

And I imagine he sees a multitude, something more than a mass,

growing larger and clearer as it recedes, and Sergeant Dundas

borne along in it, his spot marked by the big mouth of the tuba,

growing smaller and fainter, passing out of our neighbourhood,

our times and our lives.

(12)

The story concludes with an almost magic-realist intimation that a larger

conceptual boundary crossing is at hand. After a verb like “imagine,”

one might expect a modal auxiliary (I imagine that he would see, or

might see . . .), establishing a sense of uncertainty and suggesting that we

cannot believe what the narrator is saying. But Vladislavić uses simple

present and present continuous tenses (“I imagine he sees [. . .] a multitude

[. . .] growing larger”), thereby removing the uncertainty. The narrator states

her imagination thetically, as fact. The verbs used in the paragraph shift

emphasis to that which is, to that which is visible. Importantly, the narrator

imagines. She does not see. The world in “The Tuba” evolves from a place

where seeing is believing, to a world where believing, or imagining, is

seeing, and where imagination constitutes reality and possibility. The fact

that the narrator-focalizer is inside the yard is important in this regard: her

physical presence in time and place, as well as her embodied experience of

the division articulated by the fence, influence the way she conceptualizes

her world. She imagines Richie perceiving a vast and inviting world. Hers is

a world and a future of hope. We are never told what Richie really sees, and

as such he represents possibilities and outcomes that are not obvious.

Wood interprets the ending of the story as “a glimpse of a world in

which oppositions and polarities melt away and nothing, however hardened

and inflexible it may seem, is impervious to mutation” (32–33). I have

shown that the “glimpse” that Wood mentions is not a glimpse in the normal


sense of the word: the narrator does not see, but, significantly, “imagines”

that Richie perceives not only beyond the physical boundary of the fence,

but also beyond the conceptual racial boundary; he gazes into a future where

that boundary no longer exists. The narrator imagines in the same way that

John Lennon imagined in his famous song “Imagine,” inverting the

restrictive seeing-is-believing paradigm. She is able to look into a future

without boundaries, making use of perspective and imagination, even though

she does not physically see.

Conclusion: The Imaginator’s World

In “The Tuba,” Vladislavić employs a complex form of focalization in which

the ‘focalizer’ imagines and narrates what her son would see from his

vantage point up in the tree. The reader conceptualizes the ending of the

story, and the suggested future world, through an agent who does not see.

Perhaps one should speak of an ‘imaginator,’ rather than a focalizer. This

imaginator draws attention to perspective, to seeing and having insight, as

she imagines and relates how her son would/might see the racist Sergeant

disappear into another, more inclusive dimension of being.

In this story, Vladislavić introduces a small and restrictive world that he

gradually makes bigger and more complex. The white characters’ world

views and perceptions of their place are limited by the ‘invisible’ fence.

Vladislavić gradually leads the reader’s perspective towards the edges of the

storyworld and beyond. He also foregrounds perspective by positioning three

characters in different relations to a fence that marks the ends of the small

world to which we are introduced initially and, in addition, becomes

symbolic of racial and social division. The fence obscures not only the world

at large, but also possibility for the characters on the inside. It makes sense

for the fence to be unobtrusive, almost underemphasized, because it allows

the characters as well as the reader to become aware of the conceptual

boundaries rather than the physical one. This awareness underscores the

extent to which people are often unaware of conceptual boundaries, or blind

to them, until they cross them. As is the case with the fence at the edge of

the yard, people become used to boundaries: the boundaries become

hegemonic. Furthermore, by making readers aware of what they initially do

not see, the author alerts them to the limits of their own perspective. Richie’s

mysterious vision and our awareness of our lack of insight into what he sees

and thinks are particularly important in this regard. We are almost

frustratingly aware of the fact that we do not know what the child with the

strange eyes sees.

THE IMAGINATOR 123

Vladislavić shows that social boundaries can be transcended in many

ways. Sergeant Dundas, the least likely character to cross the boundary, does

so first physically and later conceptually. The Sergeant’s music, which

initially articulated the difference between outside and inside, becomes a

vehicle for transcending the boundary between black and white and for

broadening perspective, revealing art as a means of crossing social barriers.

The music is a form of cultural expression, an immaterial cultural artefact

and, like other cultural artefacts in Vladislavić’s fiction, may be read as

reflecting metafictionally on the role of art.

The narrator, who does not physically see, but who imagines, serves to

point to the imagination as instrumental in how boundaries are transcended,

whereas Richie sees past the boundary merely by climbing up into the tree,

adjusting his perspective. Their two different perspectives, emanating from

an adjusted physical and mental position respectively, shape the way they

see the present and future worlds – and both, in their own ways, perceive a

larger world than do the characters inside the yard.4 “The Tuba” illustrates

how perspective can be limited by an ‘invisible,’ hegemonic boundary until

that boundary is crossed; like The Folly, it presents both limited and

enlightened perspectives and emphasizes the role of perspective in the

construal of present and future realities.

In this article, I have used David Herman’s notion of embodied

experience, in order to investigate how Vladislavić creates the storyworld in

“The Tuba.” This approach makes it clear that conceptualizing storyworlds

is a complex and multi-faceted process, dependent not only on focalization,

but also on place, time, power relations, relations between the seer and the

object seen, the descriptions of artefacts, and the representation of states of

consciousness. The approach is a fitting one to use in the case of Vladislavić

who, throughout his work, points to a correlation between how one sees

concrete reality and how one understands the world. I emphasize how

readers are gradually led to see more and more of the storyworld through the

eyes of characters whose views of reality are limited and enabled by place,

time and ideology. I argue that, in the case of “The Tuba,” Vladislavić’s

employment of narrative perspective correlates with the story’s thematic

concern with perspective, insight and the ability to envision new

possibilities, better worlds. Hope, the story seems to show, is a matter of

perspective.

NOTES

1. Vladislavić published a book on conceptual artist, Willem Boshoff, in 2005, a

chapter in a catalogue for William Kentridge’s exhibition Tapestries, in 2008, and

several other texts on South African art.


2. There are several others who have explored aspects of Vladislavić’s language.

For an overview of the main tropes in this line of criticism, see Swanepoel (22-23). 3. Cultural geographers and literary scholars distinguish between space and

place: space is traditionally viewed as the clear canvas, abstract openness, whereas

place is associated with the intimate and with specificity. Space becomes place when

it is imbued with meaning. As Lefebvre contends, space is never empty but always

“embodies a meaning” (154). More specifically, people make space into place when

they make the space meaningful. When space is delineated by boundaries – abstract

or concrete – it also becomes place, which is linked to the idea of belonging. In the

words of Tim Cresswell, “places have spaces between them” (8). Place is thus

associated with belonging, memory and identity, and it holds significance for the

people who inhabit it. 4. Another text where art articulates boundaries is “Curiouser” in The Exploded

View (2004), while texts that illustrate how art transcends boundaries include

“Propaganda by Monuments” (1996) and Mevrouw Bonsma’s piano music in The

Restless Supermarket (2001).

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Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavić.” scrutiny2 11.2 (2006): 27–35.

Herman, David. “Beyond Voice and Vision: Cognitive Grammar and Focalization

Theory.” Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in

Narrative. Ed. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 2009. 119–42.

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THE IMAGINATOR 125

Swanepoel, Aletta Catharina. “Re-Placing Memories: Time, Space and

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The Imaginator: Perspective and Possibility in Ivan Vladislavic's "The Tuba"

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