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‘Minor disorders’: Ivan Vladislavić and the devolution of South African English

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0305707042000313013

1465-3893

Stefan Helgesson,

South African History and Culture

Abstract This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's aesthetically radical fictions interrogate the authority of English as a language imposed by colonialism and globalisation. Diverging from the romantic legacy of English letters in South Africa, which has seen literature as an ideal expression of an inner truth, Vladislavić's writing deals with the materiality of the sign and, more specifically, the print medium. In his latest, hilarious novel, The Restless Supermarket, the ironical tension between the perception of English as an ideal order and the shape‐shifting materiality of the sign produces what I (following Deleuze) call a minoritisation of English. However, Vladislavić targets not only the high cultural authority of British English, but equally the instrumentalised English of advertising and commercial media. As he ludically reshuffles and defamiliarises the conventions of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ language, Vladislavić places South African English in the larger flow of transnational history and enables language to function as a mode of becoming rather than being. Notes J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London, Secker & Warburg, 1999); André Brink, The Rights of Desire (London, Secker & Warburg, 2000). * I gratefully acknowledge funding towards this research provided by the Swedish Foundation for International Co‐operation in Research and Higher Education, STINT. I. Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town, David Philip, 2001), p. 259. I. Vladislavić, Missing Persons (Cape Town, David Philip, 1989), pp. 45–59. Vladislavić, Propaganda by Monuments (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), pp. 13–38, 39–50, 67–78. I. Vladislavić, The Folly (Cape Town, David Philip, 1993), p. 70. C. Warnes, ‘The Making and Unmaking of History in Ivan Vladislavić’s Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46, 1 (Spring 2000), p. 84. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 220; J. Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), p. 98. M. Marais, ‘Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket', English in Africa, 29, 2 (October 2002), p. 109. Ibid., p. 115. See http://www.gov.za/reports/2003/census01brief.pdf. S. Stephens, ‘Kwaito’, in C.‐A. Michael and S. Nuttall (eds), Senses of Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 256. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Pour une littérature mineure (Paris, Minuit, 1975), p. 49. ‘Aller toujours plus loin dans la déterritorialisation … à force de sobrieté. Puisque le vocabulaire est desséché, le faire vibrer en intensité. Opposer un usage purement intensif de la langue à tout usage symbolique, ou même significatif, ou simplement signifiant.’ Ibid., p. 35; G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 104ff. L. de Kock, ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary’, Poetics Today, 22, 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 263–298. Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus. ‘Informational’ is used here in the precise sociological sense defined by Manuel Castells – it denotes a mode of development in which ‘the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself’ is the source of productivity. The informational economy is characterised by an ‘interaction between the knowledge sources of technology and the application of technology to improve knowledge generation and information processing’. M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), p. 17. M. Sanders, ‘Disgrace’, Interventions, 4, 3, p. 365. Ibid., p. 366. The key text here, of course, is the ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter in T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, Herder & Herder, 1972). Sanders, ‘Disgrace’, p. 367. Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 117. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 99. Ibid., p. 95ff. A brief but enlightening discussion of the romantic legacy's significance for English letters in South Africa can be found in D. Attwell, ‘Modernizing Tradition/Traditionalizing Modernity: Reflections on the Dhlomo– Vilakazi Dispute’, Research in African Literatures, 33, 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 94–119. For a sustained critique of the expressivist paradigm, see S. Jonsson, Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity (Durham, Duke UP, 2001). F. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems (Amsterdam, G+B Arts, 1997), p. 12. It should be mentioned here that Coetzee, notably in the first part of Dusklands (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1974), also brings the issue of print to the fore. Gradually, however, this has become a less prominent feature of his fiction. Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 4. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 59. C. Warnes, ‘Interview with Ivan Vladislavić’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46, 1 (Spring 2000), p. 278. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 7. According to Vladislavić himself, he uses the same technique of gathering snippets from newspapers and magazines as Tearle does in the novel. C. Backström and M. Marais, ‘An Interview with Ivan Vladislavić’, English in Africa, 29, 2 (October 2002), pp. 123–124. Vladislavić, The Folly, p. 70. Vladislavić, Propaganda, p. 23. Vladislavić, Restless, pp. 24ff., 220. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., pp. 251, 254. I am indebted to Jill Arnott for drawing my attention to Tearle's aural gaffes. As concerns ‘lexical fartlek’, I want to refer the reader in passing to chapter 60 of George Perec's La vie mode d'emploi (Paris, Hachette, 1979). It is devoted to the minor character Cinoc, an editor of dictionaries, and could well be read as a seminal intertext for Vladislavić's novel. Perec's and Vladislavić's modes of writing are proximate, and here the proximity becomes specific. Another much publicised European novel, José Saramago's História do cerco de Lisboa (Lisbon, Caminho, 1989), also boasts a proofreader as protagonist, moreover, but this similarity is more incidental and doesn't add much to one's reading of either Saramago or Vladislavić. R. Barthes, S/Z (1970) in Oeuvres complètes, volume 2 (Paris, Seuil, 1994), p. 558. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976). Vladislavić, Restless, p. 59. Ibid., p. 222. G. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 430. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 216. Ibid., p. 225ff. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Apartheid Thinking’, in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 163–184. Marais, ‘Excess’. F. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (München, Fink, 1987); Kittler, Literature, p. 4. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 6. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., pp. 123, 133. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 12. Warnes, ‘The Making and Unmaking of History’. Although the Michael and Nuttall (eds) anthology Senses of Culture is an example of how ‘culture studies’ are gaining a foothold in the South African humanities. ‘The news at 7’, SABC3, 16 December 2003. I speak from personal observations in Durban during 1996 and 2003. SAFM Radio, 8 February 2004. Ibid., p. 290. Vladislavić, Restless, p. 251ff. Ibid., pp. 41, 92. See, for example, Vladislavić, ‘Autopsy’ in Propaganda. Vladislavić, The Folly. Deleuze and Guattari, Mineure, p. 49. This argument is akin to Marais' notion of an ‘inoperative community’. H. Bhabha, ‘Afterword: A Personal Response’, in L. Hutcheon and M. Valdés, Rethinking Literary History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 201. Ibid. Vladislavić, Restless, pp. 296, 304.