The post-apartheid sublime: rediscovering the extraordinary

Abstract

My concern in this essay is to offer an account of the unfolding post apartheid condition within which contemporary South African writing takes place; the working premise of my investigation is that that writing (at its best) relates to its environing condition as the latter's most fully reflexive self-knowledge. In thus reading the condition through the optic of the writing (and vice versa), I wish to position myself beyond the space opened up by Njabulo Ndebele when, in the dying apartheid years, he called so eloquently for a post-heroic culture of irony, the local, the ordinary: that is to say, a culture, or a literature, preoccupied not with the polar conflicts of ‘the people’ versus ‘the state’ but with textures of life which have eluded that epic battle and have grown insouciantly in the cracks of the structures that South Africa's fraught modernity has historically thrown up. As my guide to occupying this space I have enlisted the work of J. M. Coetzee, and in particular his novel The Master of Petersburg (1994). Seemingly poles apart from that of Ndebele, Coetzee's work will nonetheless be seen to stand to Ndebele's in a relation of illuminating complementarity. More to the point: in his most egregious digression thus far from the ‘South African’ theme, Coetzee licenses me to wander as extravagantly in the territory of history and theory and indeed into the same national culture: that of Russia. Coetzee's use of the late Dostoevsky is, in short, my precedent for drawing on the early Bakhtin.

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