Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space 1683932455, 9781683932451

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Post-Apartheid Gothic

Post-Apartheid Gothic White South African Writers and Space Mélanie Joseph-Vilain

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Vancouver • Madison • Teaneck • Wroxton

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for scholarly publishing from the Friends of FDU Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Joseph-Vilain, Mé lanie, 1976- author. Title: Post-apartheid Gothic : white South African writers and space / Mé lanie Joseph-Vilain. Description: Lanham : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056293 (print) | LCCN 2020056294 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683932451 (cloth) | ISBN 9781683932468 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: South African literature (English)--White authors--History and criticism. | Space in literature. | Postcolonialism in literature. | Gothic fiction (Literary genre) Classification: LCC PR9358.2.W45 J67 2021 (print) | LCC PR9358.2.W45 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/ 968--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056293 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056294 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5

vii

The Sense of Place The Coordinates of Identity Landscapes Cities: South African “Urban Gothic” Non-Places

1 29 95 145 189

Works Cited

239

Permissions

253

Index

255

About the Author

259

v

Acknowledgments

There are many people and institutions to thank for their help and support during the research and writing of this book. I am very grateful to James Gifford for giving this book a chance. I am also very grateful to the University of Burgundy for granting me a research leave to work on the project in 2016. I would also like to thank the organizers of the following workshops and conferences, where I could develop some ideas that have inspired sections of the present book: the International Gothic Association Conference (Guildford, UK, August 5–8, 2013); “Representing South African Cities” (Université Paris Nanterre, France, November 26–28, 2013); the “New Literatures” Workshop at the SAES conference (Université Caen Basse Normandie, France, May 16–18, 2014); “Geographies of Displacement” (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, June 12–14, 2014); the “Crime in Africa” workshop (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, December 8–12, 2014); “Suburbia: an archaeology of the moment. Suburbs in arts and literature of the English-speaking world” (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, November 16–17, 2017). This book has benefited from the feedback of many scholars and friends. Gerry Turcotte was the plenary speaker at the “Postcolonial Ghosts” conference I co-organized with Judith Misrahi-Barak in Montpellier in 2007; his talk was the starting point of my research on South African Gothic, and I could never be grateful enough to him for acquainting me with postcolonial gothic. Thanks to Claire Omhovère, my HDR supervisor, whose work on Canadian landscapes has been a great inspiration and whose ongoing encouragement and insight was tremendously helpful. Thanks to Fiona McCann, who presided my HDR jury; she read the manuscript at an early stage, and her help and support meant a lot to me. Suggestions made by the other members of my HDR jury, Hélène Machinal, Richard Samin, and Laurence vii

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Talairach, have proven useful as well. My gratitude is also due to the anonymous reader of the manuscript of this book for their helpful suggestions. For their friendship and support, I thank Sylvie Crinquand, Marine Paquereau, David Roche, Mathilde Rogez, and Célia Schneebeli. Finally, thanks to my family for their patience during the writing of this book. Love and gratitude to my husband, Yannick, and to my sons, Félix, Armel, and Benoît. And to Rozenn, my own little ghost.

Chapter One

The Sense of Place

“INTERDISCIPLINARY MEASURES”: POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES AND THE SPATIAL TURN It is certainly no easy task to write about contemporary literature because the landscape one is trying to depict is an ever-moving, ever-transforming one. 1 However, in this book, I have set myself the complex task to propose a panorama of contemporary white South African literature, a little more than twenty-five years after the demise of apartheid, which has caused major transformations both in the goals South African literature sets for itself and in the forms used by writers. My approach will be decidedly interdisciplinary. To examine such a complex, mobile field, it is necessary to summon as many, and as varied, critical tools as possible, especially to look at a country in which literature has always been shaped not only by internal but also by external forces. I intend, in particular, to use tools borrowed from the field of literary geography, which shall not come as a surprise in a country where space has always been a defining factor of identity and group assignation, as Rita Barnard reminds us: “Under apartheid, geography certainly did make a major difference. All the essential political features of South Africa’s ‘pigmentocratic industrialized state’ were fundamentally space-dependent. . . . Of all these features, there is not a single one that did not, in practice, rely on the power of space to separate individuals from each other, to direct and control their movements, and to reinforce social distinctions.” 2 My analysis of South African literature is also grounded in close textual analysis, in the French academic tradition, because I want to avoid rigidly imposing theoretical grids. However, I shall not, of course, abandon theory altogether, but I shall attempt to construct new forms of theoretical reading. 1

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My analyses will hopefully navigate between two poles, offering a dynamic interaction between texts and theory and negotiating between “filiation and affiliation,” to take into account the texts’ “being in the world.” 3 As a French-speaking, European academic, I can obviously not claim the same involvement in my field of study as South African scholars. In Postcolonial Imaginings, David Punter makes a central point, arguing that the dominant figures in postcolonial theory “have become involved in prolonging and repeating imperialist subjugation,” and that “the endless ‘theorizing’ exemplified in the seemingly authoritative collections of anthologizing critics like Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, or like Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman . . . is continuingly revealed as in the end a further extension of globalism.” 4 This leads him to actively refuse what he calls “theoretical ‘frameworks’ or ‘matrices,’ which inevitably repeat a prior subjugation and exploitation.” 5 He wants, instead, to “find a kind of criticism which is less panoptical, which ebbs and flows with the complex rhythms of the text.” 6 Like Punter, and like Tariq Jazeel in his illuminating article on the geography of theory, I am well aware of “the spatial politics of knowledge that emerges from theory-driven constellations across a transnational academic landscape in which university space aggressively territorializes theory but in which many of us also continue to work on place.” 7 Examining the asymmetries of power in the global academic world, in which “epistemologically, we (meaning scholars positioned across the Global North and South) are all Eurocentric in terms of the theory cultures that incarnate globalizing landscapes of academic knowledge production,” 8 Jazeel advocates “degrees of theoretical ambivalence and practical introspection.” 9 As my project proposes to apply methodological and theoretical tools which may seem Eurocentric in their origins, I will try to implement a responsible praxis which does not negate the realities of “field” but tries to shed new light on these realities. My use of the notion of “Gothic,” then, shall not become a means of Westernizing or Europeanizing South African culture; instead, my goal is to show that in certain circumstances, namely, in a time of crisis, 10 similar literary tools are used by writers to negotiate the complexities of an evolving world. Yet I also intend to examine the specificities of the South African deployment of such tools, and as I will argue, these specificities mostly lie in the spatially grounded dimension of the texts I examine. In other words, I am offering a form of “literary geography,” a field which is sometimes ill-defined but “theoretically eclectic, synthesizing ideas drawn from phenomenology, historical materialism, structuralism and poststructuralism, art history, urbanism, anthropology, and gender theory, as well as geography and literary studies.” 11 The specificity of my approach also resides in my capacity, as a French-speaking scholar, to mobilize a critical apparatus that has shaped recent literary studies focusing on space, namely the works of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Georges Didi-Huberman, or Marc Augé, for in-

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stance, as well as the critical texts written by French scholars in the Gothic field like Annie Le Brun, Maurice Lévy, or Max Duperray, which have not always been translated and made available to the Anglophone public. Space is not merely a South African preoccupation, as Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone remind us; more generally, “[t]he idea that place plays a significant role in how one defines one’s own identity and, equally, how that identity is defined by others, is continually foregrounded in postcolonial studies.” 12 The centrality of space in postcolonial studies can be felt, they argue, on different levels: in discourses about the nation but also on more “local” levels, “in cities, in rural communities, in homes, in schools, and in other private and public spaces,” as well as on a much larger scale that “transcends national boundaries.” 13 The major figures of postcolonial thought all rely on space to shape their arguments. One may think, of course, of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” 14 used by postcolonial subjects to negotiate their complex identities, a concept which therefore connects the spatial with the personal. Teverson and Upstone remark that both Bhabha and Edward Soja have theorized “third spaces” in different disciplinary contexts, namely, geography and postcolonial studies: That Bhabha and Soja share a “third space” indicates this confluence—but also the important differences of emphasis—between the two disciplines. While Soja’s thirdspace is primarily real—located in Los Angeles—and secondarily is imagined through its inhabitants, Bhabha’s third space, in contrast, is primarily imagined—a metaphor for the hybrid postcolonial encounter—and only secondarily rooted in a material geography. That the two fields are so similar and yet coterminously so different in their approach speaks to how each enriches the other: pointing geography towards its textuality, and literary studies towards the importance of the material. 15

Edward Said, another prominent figure in postcolonial studies, also analyzes space extensively in his criticism of what he famously termed “orientalism,” examining the “imaginative geographies” used by the West to (mis-)represent the East and arguing that East and West are “two geographical entities [that] thus support and to an extent reflect each other.” 16 Said’s subsequent analysis of culture and imperialism similarly rests on an intention to make “a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience. . . . Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.” 17 This focus on space in Said’s work explains why Postcolonial Geographies, a volume which seeks to demonstrate that “postcolonialism and geography are intimately linked,” opens on Said’s memoir, Out of Place, arguing that it is “a spatial story,” “a deeply personal geography that traces the inescapable, and often fraught, interplay between a sense of place and a sense of self.” 18 Following Soja’s assertion that “the nineteenth-century obsession with history did not die in the fin de

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siècle,” 19 both Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan and John Thieme analyze the evolution of postcolonial studies in terms of a shift from the historical to the spatial. This “spatial turn” is of course not limited to postcolonial studies, as Emmanuelle Peraldo reminds us: The Spatial Turn as a transdisciplinary phenomenon in the humanities was coined for the first time by Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies to explain the increasing concern of academics in social sciences for space in the 1960S and 70s, especially with the contribution of Henri Lefebvre, [Gilles] Deleuze and [Felix] Guattari and Michel Foucault. 20 Geography seems to have suddenly invaded philosophical language, among other spheres. 21

Thieme comments that this “reassertion of space and a growing proliferation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches also moved attention away from the privileging of the temporal,” 22 following the work of Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gaston Bachelard, Lefebvre, and Soja. The complexities of postcolonial studies must prompt us to reject binary oppositions between “a colonial past and postcolonial present” 23 or between history and space. 24 It is precisely the complex articulation of time and space within the context of South African contemporary culture that this book will explore. To reflect the “mobility of space and its intersection with time,” 25 I intend to adopt an interdisciplinary method in which postcolonial geographies intersect with theories about a mode of writing that is primarily based on postEnlightenment discourses of the historical: the Gothic. Such a juxtaposition shall help me demonstrate how “undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” 26 POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC: DIS-PLACING GENRE The first step toward a study of the interaction among space, Gothic, and literature in South Africa is a definition of what I mean by Gothic because as Gerry Turcotte points out in his groundbreaking study of Canadian and Australian literature, “the definition of Gothic is not easy to give.” 27 Historically, Gothic literature is a British genre, which was born from different conjunctural and historical factors. Most interpretations of the birth of Gothic agree that it was a reaction to drastic social, political, and philosophical changes caused by the Enlightenment. Faced with a rapidly evolving environment, writers chose to turn to the past for reassurance, so that nostalgia is, and has always been, a central component of the genre, as Isabella Van Elferen aptly remarks: “The nostalgic appropriation of the past has long been identified as one of the main characteristics of the literary Gothic.” 28 Van Elferen even argues that “the simultaneously nostalgic and transgressive rewriting of past

The Sense of Place

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situations and attitudes furnishes one of the consistent links between the various historical appearances of the Gothic.” 29 If we examine the birth of the genre, it appears that the end of the eighteenth century was characterized by a tension between change and continuity, which made it a “schizophrenic” age. 30 One of the reasons for the immediate success of Gothic fiction is precisely the fact that it embodied “the major tensions of the age” 31 and, through its focus on terror, had a cathartic function for a readership unsettled by social and historical changes. In the age of empiricism and reason, “Gothic emerged as a direct challenge to this insistence on the accuracy of evidence, and on those factors stressed by figures such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume.” 32 Thanks to Gothic tales, readers could safely experience terror or horror 33 while enjoying the reassuring restoration of order at the end of the narrative: “In such manner does the Gothic engage with the crisis of the modern subject and offer up various consolatory myths.” 34 Yet one must not oversimplify the Gothic’s relationship to the Enlightenment: “the Gothic novel is at once complicit with and critical of the Enlightenment conceived of as a contradictory ideological formation and intellectual enterprise,” 35 and it “therefore evinces multiple and sometimes contradictory standpoints vis-à-vis the Enlightenment.” 36 Whatever its standpoint, the Gothic clearly is a reaction to the Enlightenment and its consequences. This central feature of the genre explains why it has remained an appropriate mode to negotiate significant social, philosophical, or political changes. The Gothic, in other words, cannot be dissociated from the context in which it emerged. This explains why another of its major aspects is its pivotal relationship to space. The genre famously began in 1764 with The Castle of Otranto, which Horace Walpole subtitled a “Gothick story” as a testimony to his passion for Gothic architecture and the Middle Ages. In its treatment of space, the novel also showed its author’s taste for Piranesi’s Carceri de Invenzione. 37 Otranto’s literary descendants are aptly described by Lévy as attempts to “storify a dwelling.” 38 Otranto, which was widely imitated, set the criteria of a genre which is characterized by its repetitiveness 39 and “formulaic” plots. 40 These formulaic plots are highly dependent on the setting and architecture, so much so that even Devendra Varma’s “spiritual” 41 reading of Gothic fiction acknowledges the fact that “an architectural dream lies at the basis of the genre.” 42 Even when the castle gradually “gave way to the old house” in Gothic fiction, its function remained unchanged: “as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.” 43 But the Gothic castle and its avatars are not the only manifestations of the centrality of space in the emergence of Gothic fiction. Benjamin Brabon argues that landscapes as well have

6

Chapter 1 a talismanic significance for Gothic fictions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, the figuring of European settings in British Gothic novels and romances from the period 1760 to 1830 serves as a means to explore social anxieties at home and abroad. . . . [S]trange and uncanny spaces became central to an emerging Gothic aesthetic in the late eighteenth century. . . . [T]he remote geographies of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury Gothic fictions are both troubling and troubled locales that encapsulate the drama of Britain’s genesis as a modern nation. 44

Brabon argues that Gothic literature of the period was used as a literary tool to interrogate the identity of the new, modern nation that was emerging, thus revealing its “novelty and constructedness.” 45 In keeping with the anxiogenic, and problematic, definition of the nation, the genre was, as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert also reminds us, “from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening,” so that by the 1790s “Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening ‘others.’” 46 Gothic and empire were, then, closely linked from the beginning of the genre; 47 as a consequence, the centrality of space in Gothic fiction serves to interrogate both individual and national identities and to express anxieties which “varied according to diverse changes: political revolution, industrialization, urbanization, shifts in sexual and domestic organization, and scientific discovery.” 48 This capacity to explore and express national and individual identities and the related anxieties is what makes Gothic particularly appropriate in the “new” South Africa. However, before I turn to this, I would like to justify the use of the term Gothic in a context which appears radically different, both historically and geographically, from its initial use. Gothic is, at best, an elusive term, and “a notoriously difficult field to define” 49 because of its protean nature: “The diffusion of Gothic forms and figures over more than two centuries makes the definition of a homogeneous generic category exceptionally difficult.” 50 In fact, the difficulty resides in the distinction between Gothic as a historically and spatially circumscribed genre and Gothic as a mode of writing. Lévy, for instance, is in favor of a restrictive definition of the genre for fear of a dilution of its meaning, which would turn Gothic into an empty signifier testifying to lexical bricolage rather than scientific accuracy. 51 In other words, he would probably, like a number of Gothic scholars, disapprove of the use of the term Gothic in temporal and spatial contexts extending beyond the frame of British novels written between 1764 and 1818. However, as Fred Botting argues, Gothic features spread much beyond the borders of explicitly “Gothic” novels, so that Gothic became “a hybrid form, incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing.” 52 As I have argued elsewhere, then,

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Gothic can either be considered as a fixed genre or as a shape-shifting mode of writing. 53 Not only can, and does, Gothic travel through time, but it also travels in space to become a “transplanted form,” 54 thus giving birth to colonial and postcolonial Gothic, a mode favored in settler-invader cultures to express anxieties linked to a conflictual, unresolved history of confrontation. 55 “Treating Gothic as a mode, not a genre: a way of doing and seeing adaptable across dislocations of culture, time, and space, rather than a substantive category” 56 is what Jennifer Lawn proposes in her introduction to Gothic New Zealand. Such an approach, which has been widely adopted by scholars who have recently read or reread literatures from the postcolony through the lens of the Gothic, should prevent us from falling into the trap of dilution, where “Gothic” would be thought of as an empty category, a label too vague to be used in a fruitful way. The process of globalizing the Gothic is one of metamorphosis: It means transforming the codes and conventions of British Gothic literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adapting them to the local conditions of production of the literary works considered. In a globalized literary landscape, two new categories have emerged: colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic, both historically determined by the process of colonization and its aftermath. Recently, books and articles dealing with Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, or New Zealand Gothic have largely demonstrated the mutability of the Gothic mode. All the attempts at examining the specific category of postcolonial Gothic insist on the necessity to link it, on the one hand, to its European roots and to the sense that the Gothic is first and foremost a literature of terror and, on the other hand, to relate it to the local conditions in which it manifests itself. For instance, in Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Alison Rudd endeavors to demonstrate that “there is something in the postcolonial condition of former colonies that finds expression in the Gothic,” 57 a notion that echoes Turcotte’s assertion that “the Gothic mode was particularly suited to expressing ‘New World’ literary values.” 58 Such a conception of the Gothic implies two things about its globalization and relocation into non-English places: First, because the Gothic is linked to space, globalizing the Gothic means transplanting it from a local context to another local context, without erasing or negating their specificities. Second, the Gothic is linked to colonization and to the specific anxieties it has triggered both among the settlers and among the local populations. Not only do critics assert that the Gothic provides an apt mode to express anxieties about colonization and decolonization, and this regardless of how and when colonization occurred, but they are also careful to reaffirm the local specificities of the postcolonial Gothic, and particularly its various national avatars, because as Philip Holden has amply demonstrated, the postcolonial Gothic can show us “the processes and elisions through which new

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citizens are made.” 59 For instance, Rudd establishes a distinction between the various geographical areas she examines in her book, arguing that Caribbean writing is “drawn to schizophrenia as a trope in order to express the social conditions and psychic stresses on the individual that arise from the history and legacy of slavery, and which has been abjected from imperial memory.” 60 In Canada, she goes on to explain, the postcolonial Gothic is “inextricably linked to a sense of place, as an anxiety of unsettledness,” 61 whereas in Australia it is characterized by the prominence of the relationship between innocence and guilt, and in New Zealand it is specifically linked to “a dreadful silence.” 62 She thus lays emphasis simultaneously on the common features and on the local specificities of the postcolonial Gothic, an approach shared by Lawn, who similarly highlights the necessity to “emphasize local appropriations of national or international influences.” 63 This conjunction of the global, the atemporal, and the local, is also developed by Lawn in “From the Spectral to the Ghostly: Postcolonial Gothic and New Zealand Literature,” in which she argues that the “Gothic lends postcoloniality its achronological temporality and conversely, postcoloniality enjoins Gothic studies to devote close attention to local specificities of geography, history and culture.” 64 In post-apartheid South Africa, Gothic codes and conventions borrowed from the Gothic’s “building blocks” 65 provide writers with tools to situate themselves in a double perspective, inserting their work within a global trend and simultaneously probing specifically South African issues arising from the birth of the Rainbow Nation, as Rebecca Duncan suggests: “It if is amid circumstances of far-reaching transformation—conditions in which attempts to order relations between past and present, self and other become tenuous— that Gothic fictions proliferate at earlier moments in history, then it appears that the emergence of Gothic in post-apartheid South Africa is no exception to this pattern.” 66 If the Gothic mode has tolerated being transplanted into contemporary South African fiction, it is, perhaps, thanks to the Gothic’s special relationship to space. Paradoxically, it might be because the mode is initially so deeply grounded in a specific, local space that it has shown such adaptability. Indeed, most critics agree on the close link between the Gothic and the Freudian notion of the uncanny, a notion which, as Rudd reminds us, is also used by Bhabha as the starting point of his analysis of the postcolonial condition in The Location of Culture: “The notion of the ‘unhomely,’ based on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unheimlich or the uncanny is regarded by Homi Bhabha as the paradigmatic condition of the postcolonial.” 67 The fact that the uncanny is at the core of the Gothic might account for the ease with which the Gothic mode has been adapted to postcolonial locations; such a transplantation was possible, and even natural, because the uncanny is a notion that closely associates the homely with its opposite, unveiling the

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capacity of the reassuring familiarity of home to turn into the “unhomely,” 68 thus revealing a specific kind of anxiety and, even terror, linked to the colonial and postcolonial experiences of displacement. Postcolonial and Gothic discourses have for some time been paired in critical invocations of the “unhomely” or “spectral” legacies of imperialism and globalization. This legacy, which appears in the form of unresolved memory traces and occluded histories resulting from the experience of colonial oppression, diasporic migration, or national consolidations, is readily figured in the form of ghosts or monsters that “haunt” the nation/subject from without and within. 69 Such an association between the uncanny and haunting should not surprise us because as Jean-Michel Rabaté reminds us, “to haunt comes from the frequentative form of ‘to live,’ or else it derives from the Germanic root heim/home.” 70 Through the uncanny, postcolonial texts, and in particular postcolonial Gothic texts, negotiate a multilayered and complex history of appropriation and dispossession, and the trope of the ghost or the monster that haunts and sometimes literally becomes the land is a recurrent feature in postcolonial Gothic narratives. Glennis Byron and David Punter argue that in such narratives “a logic of the phantom, the revenant, a logic of haunting” 71 dominates: “The story of the postcolonial . . . is in the mouths of ghosts; the effect of empire has been the dematerialization of whole cultures, and the Gothic tropes of the ghost, the phantom, the revenant, gain curious new life from the need to assert continuity where the lessons of conventional history and geography would claim that all continuity has been broken by the imperial trauma.” 72 Because it is linked to the uncanny, postcolonial Gothic is grounded in a sense of place or displacement—a feature directly derived, Julie Azzam suggests, from the affinity of the Gothic for space: “in the postcolonial Gothic, homes, territories, and nations are represented as heimlich sites that screen the unhomely, foreign, and threatening nature from sight.” 73 This sense of space, and emphasis on haunted places, is linked to the necessity of exploring personal and collective history. It could well be that the Gothic genre lent itself to adaptations by colonial and postcolonial writers in such a fruitful way because it is grounded in time in addition to place. The ghosts that haunt the Gothic are, first and foremost, the ghosts of history—familial history, as in the case of Otranto, or national history, as many readings of the Gothic have suggested, illustrating the “conflicting impulses” of the Gothic “to return to the past and to create something new.” 74 In the postcolonial Gothic, these conflicting impulses are complicated by the competing historical layers that superimpose themselves over the same territory. The “unhomely” in the Gothic is linked to a sense of individual homelessness—or “unsettledness,” to take up Rudd’s argument about Canadian literature—but also to a more general sense of national homelessness linked to the violence and abjection of colonization and decolonization. “So the postcolonial Gothic is an aesthet-

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ic that links the psychological to the sociohistorical and political in a peculiarly direct manner: art’s catharsis is both personal and political because the ghosts of history are linked to self and other.” 75 Furthermore, Azzam argues that “the British Gothic is a ‘form of racial discourse’ that defines the borders between what is British and what is not British, and what is familiar and what is foreign.” 76 As such, it is particularly apt to explore the nature and the limits of national identity in non-English or non-British contexts. What is displaced is not the preoccupation of the British Gothic with Britishness but its capacity to explore the instability of boundaries and the anxieties caused by personal and collective identities in other geographical contexts, as Punter and Byron point out. “The Gothic always remains the symbolic site of a culture’s discursive struggle to define and claim possession of the civilized, and to abject, or throw off, what is seen as other to that civilized self.” 77 POST-APARTHEID GOTHIC Such a preoccupation with the contours of national identity could have incited South African writers to resort to the Gothic mode to express possible anxieties about the Rainbow Nation that emerged after 1994: as “a genre that criticizes cultural dichotomies through the acceptance and radical incorporation of ambivalence,” 78 the Gothic could have provided a literary tool to negotiate new identities. Yet, interestingly, most studies of the postcolonial Gothic exclude South Africa from their scope. The most obvious explanation that can be offered for this absence is that the status of South Africa as a postcolonial country is complex and problematic because of the various “layers” of colonization in the country and, above all, because of apartheid. It can be argued that apartheid, which caused both South African writers and their readers to adopt a particular political or racialized approach to literature, 79 prevented the Gothic mode from emerging clearly in South African literature before 1994 and that only now that the regime has ended can critics turn to South African literature with a Gothic lens—which would suggest that the Gothic could equally be defined as a mode of writing and a mode of reading. 80 Gerald Gaylard, for instance, views Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as an example of what he terms the “Southern African Gothic,” describing J. M. Coetzee’s Gothic as “a heady mix of a philosophical meditation on suffering, the suffering inflicted by Modernity and Empire, and of the possibilities for opposition to and escape from this system and the suffering it inflicts.” 81 Another example is Azzam, who reassesses a motif found in the plaasroman, a South African genre famously analyzed by Coetzee in White Writing, that of the buried corpse that surfaces again, as a Gothic trope which she traces from Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm to Nadine Gor-

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dimer’s The Conservationist and Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country. 82 She argues, in particular, that “[a]s Africa ‘comes back’ from its narrative and historical repression the Gothicized plaasroman has the opportunity to function as a vehicle of political reconciliation through the full acknowledgement and integration of the past with the present.” 83 It is precisely thanks to the capacity of the Gothic mode to function as a “vehicle of political reconciliation” that a specific form of postcolonial Gothic has emerged in the “new” South Africa, a form I label “post-apartheid Gothic.” I prefer the term post-apartheid to alternative phrases like posttransitional. 84 Post-transitional lays emphasis on the differences between literature written during the transition, that is, in a period ranging approximately between 1994 and 2000, and postmillennium literature. My goal will be, rather, to point out the continuities in late-twentieth-century and earlytwenty-first-century literature. This does not imply any denial of possible evolutions; rather, I want to argue that both the transitional and the posttransitional novels I examine testify to anxieties related to apartheid and its aftermath, in agreement with Chris Thurman’s remark that the South African context “has not changed in the last twenty years as much as we might like to think,’ leading him to ‘caution against the employment of categories such as ‘post-transitional.’” 85 My choice of term therefore reflects this focus on resemblances and continuity rather than differences and ruptures, as suggested by Leon De Kock’s definition of “what occurs ‘in’ postapartheid as a reconfigured temporality in which Hal Foster’s ‘future-anterior,’ or the ‘will-have-been,’ persistently surfaces.” 86 I want to argue that the post-apartheid Gothic I am going to examine, which mostly manifests itself in spatial terms, is a consequence, and a legacy, of apartheid. Even Rebecca Duncan, who chooses to use the phrase post-transitional Gothic rather than post-apartheid Gothic to examine the manifestations of horror in recent South African literature, admits this continuity. Referring to Jean and John Comaroffs’ analysis of the “new topography,” 87 which “has come to configure the landscape in the postapartheid imagination,” 88 she remarks that this topography reflects and redistributes the spatial chasms created under apartheid, thus reflecting the “tension which has arisen in the wake of apartheid, between democracy and ‘new’ South African egalitarianism on the one hand, and the widening economic chasm, on the other, that has opened up along old fault lines of racial oppression.” 89 The emergence of post-apartheid Gothic in South Africa might be explained by the fact that apartheid exerted the same pressure on the cultural and national fields in South Africa as colonization in other countries, giving birth to a similar need to come to terms with a violent and repressive history while negotiating a new and problematic identity. What is more, the end of apartheid has radically shifted the ideological and political positioning of South African citizens within the nation, giving rise to a certain instability—

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a phenomenon not dissimilar to the political and ideological instabilities that led to the emergence of the eighteenth-century Gothic and of its nineteenthcentury avatars, as suggested by Punter and Byron: “[t]he Gothic is frequently considered to be a genre that re-emerges with particular force during times of cultural crisis and which serves to negotiate the anxieties of the age by working through them in a displaced form.” 90 Interestingly, a number of articles devoted to post-apartheid Gothic to date have focused on literature in Afrikaans, perhaps because the greatest need to come to terms with the guilt of apartheid is to be found in the Afrikaner community. 91 In his reading of Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf, for instance, Jack Shear argues that Gothic fiction is a “malleable form” and that “the Gothic survived its eighteenth-century roots because its central theme— the presence of horrors that bear an uncanny resemblance to real fears—is easily reworked to accommodate the frictions of an evolving society.” 92 This explains why the Gothic mode has also found its way into recent South African fiction in English: Gothic topoi—the haunted house, the isolated landscape, the skeleton in the closet, maze-like spaces, ghosts, dysfunctional families, to mention just a few examples—have provided writers with tools to explore the deep anxieties generated by the redefinition of South African society as the Rainbow Nation. A comparison could be drawn with Canada where, Rudd argues, because of “official commitment to the ideology of multiculturalism . . . , the process of refiguring a multicultural identity has produced a sense of anxiety that has resulted in a destabilization of the literary and cultural traditions of English-speaking Canada,” an anxiety which is negotiated through the recourse to Gothic topoi. 93 Focusing on South African anxieties does not mean evacuating the global dimension of these anxieties. Even if I want to analyze the specifically South African avatars of the Gothic and their interaction with local forms and genres, like the plaasroman, which I examine both at the end of this introduction and in my discussion of homes and landscapes, I will also take into account the impact of globalization. Indeed, our conception of space and culture has been radically transformed by the process of globalization. Interestingly, Fred Botting and Justin Edwards’s theorization of what they call “globalgothic” starts with a South African example reported by the Comaroffs, 94 leading them to state that “like so many postcolonies, post-apartheid South Africa has been dramatically changed by the social, cultural and economic impacts of globalization.” 95 Globalgothic, they argue, “registers the effects after the interpenetration of global and local has rendered the separation of both poles redundant, thus exploding the myth of a pure globality and shredding the nostalgic fantasy of a return to an untainted local culture.” 96 They particularly insist on the fluidity of globalized spaces 97 and, on their hauntedness, which both generate new forms of anxiety linked to the dissolution of many boundaries. The function of globalgothic is to register these

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anxieties and to construct “an otherness that screens out the excesses of anxiety while turning the mirror back on itself . . . globally, darkly, monstrously.” 98 It is my contention that in South Africa, the effects of globalization, which give birth to globalgothic, are compounded with those of the demise of apartheid, which give birth to globalized Gothic. 99 In both cases, the borders, boundaries, or fences that had been erected are either taken down or challenged, making it difficult for subjects to locate themselves. I will focus in this study on these newly “unlocated,” 100 or “dis-located,” subjects who are often led to express their anxieties in and through postapartheid Gothic literature. “WHITE WRITING?” This study will focus on white writers. This is certainly not a way of endorsing the categories infamously implemented by the apartheid regime. Rather, it is a way of both acknowledging the impossibility to do away with racial tensions in a country where these tensions have been shaping the political landscape as well as the everyday lives of South African citizens for centuries and, admitting the difficulty, for a white, European academic, to analyze black literatures. As De Kock puts it, “While one is loath to reintroduce categorization in terms of race, the latter remains a stubbornly persistent feature, both implicit and explicit, in postapartheid modes of expression.” 101 Of course, I shall not retrace the whole history of racial confrontations in South Africa in the space of this chapter. My point, rather, is twofold: first, white writers have always expressed anxieties about colonization in South Africa through the Gothic mode, even if the latter was not explicitly identified as such, and post-apartheid Gothic situates itself in a local literary history which is more than a hundred years old; second, the group for which the new dispensation is particularly anxiogenic is indisputably the one who used to dominate the political, legal, and financial spheres, that is, white people. The recent emergence of a discourse of victimhood by white male South Africans seems symptomatic of such anxiety. A fictional, but realistic, example of this discourse can be found, for instance, in Justin Cartwright’s Up Against the Night; the narrator’s cousin, Jaco, meets a security guard, who tells him: “Ons is nou die kaffers, . . . We are the kaffers now.” 102 Significantly, the man’s feeling of inferiority is voiced in Afrikaans, the language of the former masters, and he uses a terminology typical of apartheid thinking. Paradoxically identifying Afrikaners with the formerly oppressed groups, designated by the generic and racist word kaffers, he reverses the logic of antiracist discourse and voices, albeit in a rather extreme way, the deep anxieties generated by the new South Africa among a number of white people. 103 These anxieties are not always expressed in such a blunt

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way, and do not necessarily imply the same racist ideologies. However, indisputably, such fears can be felt lurking under the surface of many novels written by white writers in the post-apartheid years. These fears, of course, are not new; Coetzee’s magisterial study of “white writing,” 104 for instance, points to the tensions that have been shaping South African literature for more than a century in terms that are sometimes strikingly reminiscent of Gothic, even if the connection is never explicitly made: the farm, for instance, a central theme in “white writing,” is described as “bastion of trusted feudal values,” 105 like the castle in Gothic fiction. Coetzee’s reading of white writing only offers an incomplete view of South African literature, a point which was clearly made in Lewis Nkosi’s review of the book when it was first published: “The only major weakness in Coetzee’s hermeneutic project is to have left out of account altogether black writing, even if such an exclusion is to be justified by a certain economy of reading. This exclusion which has only negligible results elsewhere is severely distortive in parts of Coetzee’s analyses.” What is missing, in particular, from Coetzee’s study is a justification of his chosen corpus and a discussion of race from a more inclusive point of view. Yet, Nkosi adds, “[t]o enter these caveats is hardly to minimize the value of Coetzee’s interpretive enterprise.” 106 In other words, although I am aware of the limitations of Coetzee’s analyses, and of the context in which they were written—namely, the apartheid years—I am still convinced that they shed light on crucial aspects of South African literature. What strikes me in White Writing is the fact that, in the chapter about “the South African landscape,” Coetzee analyses William Burchell’s and Thomas Pringle’s work in terms of their relationship to pastoral or antipastoral and relies on an analysis of the “sublime,” or nonsublime, nature of these representations of landscape. 107 And the sublime, of course, centrally upholds Gothic narratives and their architecture. 108 Coetzee’s analysis of Sarah Gertrude Millin’s novels and of their emphasis on “blood, flaw, taint, and degeneration” 109 also suggests similarities with the Gothic obsession for lineage, curses, and power relations. I am not arguing, of course, that white writing is Gothic; rather, I would like to argue that Gothic undercurrents have been present in South African literature by white writers since the beginning, that is, since Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, which Jed Etsy describes as an odd duck in terms of genre and style—a kind of Southern exotic or literary platypus whose ungainly combination of parts and functions seems to flummox both classification and periodization. To describe the novel to new readers requires an entire glossary of generic categories, for it is one part South African plaasroman (farm-novel), one part New Woman fiction, one part Dickensian farce (featuring pale sentimental orphans and ruddy sadistic adults), one part naturalist tragedy (with a merciless rising sun and a pitiable fallen woman), one part colonial Gothic, one part Victorian melodrama (fea-

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turing hopeless love and missed letters), one part allegorical tale, one part satire of provincial manners (with a dusty Boer wedding scene), one part spiritual autobiography, and one part neo-Transcendentalist novel of ideas. 110

Rebecca Duncan sees Schreiner’s novel as “colonial Gothic” because of its “complex treatment of spatiality and temporality.” 111 In her doctoral dissertation, Azzam convincingly demonstrates that both Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country “pick up on Schreiner’s Gothic gesture, and develop it in ways that respond to the distinct political climate of 1970s South Africa.” 112 In both cases, she argues, the Gothic mode provides white writers with a tool for exploring the complexities of racial interrelations, although she points out differences in what “Gothic idioms,” as she calls them, achieve in the two novels from a political point of view. Both novels stage the return of the repressed in the guise of the black laborer’s body that resurfaces in The Conservationist and of the father’s ghost in In the Heart of the Country, but Azzam shows that Gordimer’s Gothic logic helps to “reveal evil usurpers and reinstate the misaligned back to their rightful inheritance and historical legacies,” 113 while Coetzee’s “formally experimental” novel uses Gothic tropes “to investigate the ways in which race and gender are important but unstable signifiers, even at the height of racial conflict such as apartheid.” 114 Despite the different political agendas, Gordimer and Coetzee use “Gothic idioms” in their rewriting of the farm novel to articulate anxieties about the place of white people in South Africa. Duncan similarly reads the two novels as examples of South African Gothic, arguing that they unsettle the apartheid idyll and testify to the return of the pastoral unconscious. 115 Ken Gelder also reads these rewritings of the white pastoral (or antipastoral) 116 as a form of postcolonial Gothic which calls into question “legitimacy—one’s right to occupy one place and not another, the origins of one’s claims on property and the lives of others, one’s capacity to possess something or to be dispossessed of something.” 117 Gelder’s analysis of postcolonial Gothic in South Africa focuses on novels by white writers, both during and after apartheid. He identifies various facets in white South African Gothic: Gordimer’s The Conservationist reworks the white pastoral, which is “soon swallowed up by Gothic imagery,” 118 and Coetzee, in Waiting for the Barbarians, “applies his allegory in exact Gothic terms.” 119 Interestingly, Gelder also sees Coetzee’s post-apartheid novel Disgrace (1999) as an example of postcolonial Gothic, in which Lucy’s rape “is a particularly postcolonial Gothic horror, recasting an older colonial fear of black men raping white women.” 120 Ludmila Ommundsen similarly considers Disgrace as a “Gothic story,” in which various boundaries are challenged. She argues, in particular, that “Coetzee problematizes the idea that White nationalism and Black nationalism are both constructed around the idea of masculinity” 121 and sug-

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gests that the novel’s Gothic dimension stages the anxieties of land reform in post-apartheid South Africa. In other words, she associates the novel’s Gothic features to spatial issues, as shown by the terms she uses when analyzing Lucy’s place in Disgrace: to her, “Lucy’s geostrategic body is ‘reformed’ within the economics and politics of male power” so that “there emerges a new geography.” 122 Clearly, then, a Gothic undercurrent has always been present in white writing. Even the “apocalyptic fiction” 123 published in the 1970s and 1980s can be described as Gothic both in its intentions and in its forms. This apocalyptic fiction expressed the fears caused by what Gordimer famously identified, after Antonio Gramsci, as the “interregnum” in the epigraph to July’s People. 124 As André Brink puts it, in the apocalyptic fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, “[t]here seems to reside a peculiar fascination for the novelist in exploring a situation of en attendant: that precarious territory in which one finds oneself in transit from the old familiar world to the cataclysm which will bring one into the new.” 125 For the white characters in these novels, the transition could only prefigure apocalypse. Of course, in post-apartheid South Africa, these novels “take on entirely new resonances now that the long-expected period of political liberation has actually happened. . . . Rather than projecting a world to come, they now depict the anticipations and beliefs of a world that has passed.” 126 And yet, the “transition” and the “post-transition” from apartheid to the new South Africa might also be read as a form of interregnum: 127 Despite democratic progress, many inequalities deeply rooted in the country’s past and geography remain, and the anxieties raised by these ever-present problems still find their way into fiction, which is far from having done with “the inevitable interregnum, arrested birth, the moment before death—in short the foreclosure of the frozen penultimate,” 128 which Elleke Boehmer wished away in “Endings and new beginning.” A number of fairly recent novels or short stories by South African writers show that even if apocalypse did not happen, the anxieties raised by the then foreshadowed, and now past, end of apartheid still linger in the collective consciousness of white South Africans. For all its humor and parodic dimension, 129 for instance, Brink’s Devil’s Valley (1998) expresses anxieties that remain anchored in Afrikaners’ world view. Similarly, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Caine Prize winner short story “Poison,” the last in a collection significantly titled Homing (2010)—a testimony to the spatial grounding of Rose-Innes’s writing—does not only evince environmental concerns but can also be read as a literary descendant of apocalyptic fiction. 130 In both cases, the apocalyptic dimension seems to be couched in Gothicized, if not Gothic, terms. In Devil’s Valley, for instance, a whole array of Gothic paraphernalia can be found, from the living-dead Lukas Lermiet who still haunts the Valley to the various monstrous creatures who visit the narrator at night.

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I have argued elsewhere, following Brink’s own suggestion, that in Devil’s Valley these features participate in the elaboration of a magical realist fictional world and in a strategy of Africanization, 131 but they might also be read as the Gothic remains of white anxieties in the new South Africa. This does not mean that I am equating magic realism with Gothic because each of these modes of writing has different characteristics, emerges for different reasons, and pursues different goals. One of the causes for the preeminence of magic realism in South African and, more generally, African literary works lies in its capacity to reflect a worldview where the physical and the spiritual worlds are more closely related than in Western cultural representations. Thus, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris remind us that texts labeled magical realist are usually written in specific contexts or cultural systems, which they describe as “often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals—that is, in collective (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written, practices 132 ).” In other words, the recourse to supernatural events or beings in magical realist texts does not aim at creating terror, as it does in Gothic fiction, but at showing the porosity of boundaries between the real and the mythical, or spiritual, worlds which coexist in these texts. This capacity to emphasize the seamless interweaving of worlds is one of the defining features of magic realism. As Renato Oliva puts it, “One of the typical elements of magic realism is, in fact, the constant crossing of thresholds and frontiers: from the conscious to the unconscious, from wakefulness to dream, from the familiar to the unheimlich, from the explicable to the inexplicable, from the natural to the miraculous, from the rational to the irrational, and from normality to madness.” 133 In my reading of Devil’s Valley, I interpreted the magical realist porosity of boundaries between the spiritual and the real world in the novel as Brink’s literary strategy to emphasize the haunted nature of Afrikanerdom but also to recuperate Khoisan mythologies and redefine South African identities. This strategy is problematic because it can be considered a form of literary appropriation, or “white talk,” as Melissa Steyn calls the “set of discursive practices that attempts to manage the intersectional positionality of white South Africans to their greater advantage, given the changes in their position within the society” 134 and that consists, in particular, in “mixing and matching cultural repertoires, and in doing so [being] able to exercise a measure of control over the processes of change by being just African enough to gain legitimacy in the new order.” 135 Reinterpreting Devil’s Valley as not only magical realist, but also Gothic, makes it possible to highlight the novel’s capacity to stage anxieties which seem to be mostly white anxieties in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Similarly, as Chris Thurman has argued, “Poison” raises questions about “the place of whiteness in imagined catastrophic or apocalyptic futures.” 136

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Focusing on Lynn, the main character in Rose-Innes’ story, Thurman wonders what “the race and class dynamics of the imagined temporary community(ies) of this apocalyptic setting [might] tell us about present social faultlines,” 137 arguing that the apocalyptic context enables Lynn to realize “how she has developed a habit of misreading her country, and her place (as a white English South African) in it.” 138 Thurman praises “the nuanced and subtle racial self-critique evident in Rose-Innes’ rendering of ‘Poison.’” 139 The main point he makes, in the light of my own agenda, is that race is not the only factor to be taken into account. Race interacts with class and gender so that analyzing anxieties expressed in white writing in relation to space also requires an examination of economic and personal issues. Gothic criticism, again, will prove useful, following Punter’s analyses, which Botting describes as “Freudian-Marxist,” 140 or Botting himself who, in Gothic romanced, 141 explores the complex links among capitalism, Gothic, and gender. To revert to the crux of my argument, though, I contend that Gothic devices provide white South African writers with literary tools that help them negotiate the complex sharing of space as they have always done. Paradoxically, in these South African novels and short stories by white writers “it is not displacement that triggers a Gothic effect, but settlement: the very fact of imagining that one is at home.” 142 The point will be to confront spatial perceptions with Gothic theories so as to try and understand the complex and diverse ways in which white writers negotiate space in post-apartheid fiction in a context where “apartheid’s spatial politics are built into the country’s architecture and infrastructure, and this continues to determine post-apartheid life. The effects of this uneven spatial distribution continue to shape South African fiction, with authors capturing something of the lived experience of these inequities.” 143 I want to reassert my intention not to oversimplify a category like “white,” and I can only agree with Chris Thurman when he points out that South African whiteness is not “an homogeneous entity. This was never really the case, and it certainly isn’t in the twenty-first century, as studies such as Melissa Steyn’s Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (2001) have shown. But as Steyn’s work (in that book and elsewhere) also shows, there is a persistent strand of totalizing, normative dominance in white identity.” 144 Similarly, I do not want to endorse simplistic definitions which would equate whiteness and Afrikaansness or would consider Afrikaansness as a homogenous entity. Afrikaans, the very language which became one of the main propaganda tools of the apartheid regime, has itself been recognized as being the result of a complex history of cultural and racial encounters. 145 It testifies to the artificiality of white Afrikaansness as a construct and as a “political mythology” based, among other things, on the erroneous notion that races were supposedly “unassimilable.” 146

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Examining the resurgence and the variety of Gothic motifs will be an instrument in mapping both mental and physical territories, individual and collective, so as to critically scrutinize the centrality of space in South African letters from a fresh perspective. This volume, then, revisits the central spaces of white writing from a postcolonial Gothic perspective, so as to understand what anxieties are staged and how. Such an approach shall also shed light on British Gothic and, perhaps, “provincialize” it, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, and like his study of Indian literature, the present volume will show that “European thought . . . is both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the various life practices that constitute the political and historical” 147 in South Africa. In other words, what will be demonstrated is both the Gothic’s rootedness in a specific space and its interrelatedness with the local and temporal contexts in which it is produced and the way in which “South Africa exemplifies the complex interaction of European ideas and African realities, as its political and cultural life during and since apartheid has been marked by ‘complicities’ and ‘entanglement.’” 148 The novels and short stories I examine have been selected for their representative nature, but I shall also, of course, demonstrate their idiosyncrasies. My study shall be rather different from the perspective adopted by Duncan in her analyses of South African literature, which mostly focus on “horror Gothic,” 149 bodies, and scars. She has chosen to adopt a much broader scope in her recent South African Gothic, which is restricted neither to the post-apartheid moment nor to white writers and which does not take the specific position of expatriated writers into account. As convincing as her work on South African Gothic is, it is based on premises that I do not entirely share. First, she considers Gothic only those novels that explicitly stage horror, particularly bodily horror, like Westby-Nun’s The Sea of Wise Insects 150 (2013) or S. L. Grey’s novels (2014). 151 Secondly, she focuses on the breaks rather than the continuity in post-apartheid literature, trying to assess the specificities of post-transitional literature, while my contention is, rather, that post-apartheid literature still explores the wounds left by colonization and apartheid. This has led me to select novels and short stories which do not necessarily stage horror in a direct, gory way but, rather, express anxieties linked to the occupation of space through the Gothic mode by using Gothic topoi such as prisonlike spaces or doubles. Unlike Duncan in South African Gothic, I have no intention to offer an exhaustive panorama of South African literature. Instead, I have selected works of fiction which seem to be as representative as possible of recent white South African novels and short stories by male and female writers from within or without South Africa. Being a specialist of prose fiction, I have also chosen not to include any play in this study, even if I am aware of the Gothic undercurrents in many South African plays—the most obvious example being Reza de Wet’s African Gothic in which, Duncan argues, “the

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pastoral scene is mapped out only to become the locus of gothic action” 152 so as to revisit the pastoral fantasies staged in the plaasroman—a genre which will be discussed in my second and third chapters. Including plays in my discussion of Gothic fiction would require studying these plays as texts, of course, but also performance, staging, and scenic spaces—that is, an altogether different approach. Instead of dividing the volume into chapters devoted to a specific author or novel, and even if I try to offer fairly detailed readings of the works I have selected, I have chosen to successively (re-)visit the places which have been shaping South African white writing since Schreiner’s African Farm—in other words, its topoi, both in the etymological sense of “place” and in the literary sense of recurring themes or arguments. As Etienne Helmer remarks, “the fact that the same word, topos, is both part of the ontological and of the rhetorical fields, suggests that place, far from being limited to its spatial dimension, also has a signifying and symbolical scope which testifies to its importance. Place, in short, is a language.” 153 Each chapter of this study, then, will take the reader to a different topos, which will be defined and explored through close readings of novels by white writers, relying on critical tools specific to each topos: analyses of the place of Gothic buildings in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction to examine “home” in my second chapter, theories about the South African genre of the “farm novel,” or plaasroman, in my third chapter, or definitions of crime fiction or speculative fiction in my fourth and fifth chapters, to mention just a few examples. I hope that this method will enable me to show the specificities of each novel while simultaneously offering a wider look at the state of white writing today through a combination of micro- and macroanalyses. The book will, therefore, successively visit the white South African home, the landscapes surrounding it, the city, and what I will call “non-places.” This will enable me to examine a number of genres affiliated to Gothic literature or grounded in South African literary history like the farm novel, crime fiction, or speculative fiction and also fiction less obviously affiliated to a given genre like Rose-Innes’ short stories and novels and Freed’s or Cartwright’s novels. It will thus involve, implicitly, a form of generic mapping of recent South African literature, a testimony, perhaps, to the unavoidability of generic categorization in literature. 154 For instance, the typically South African genre of the farm novel, closely associated with white writing, will be reexamined. Indeed, because Coetzee’s seminal study of the genre only concentrated on novels written before or during apartheid, his perspective cannot be totally transposed to post-apartheid fiction since the literary, cultural, and political context has radically changed. As Mathilde Rogez reminds us, the genre has political implications deeply grounded in South African spatial politics: the plaasroman, for instance, the Afrikaans version, “is essentially associated with a literature written in Afrikaans which tends to

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confirm imaginary representations of the land upheld by the apartheid regime and, before that, by white, or even strictly Boer, supremacists.” 155 If in farm novels, “the farm is the very place of Afrikaner identity and of familial roots,” 156 and despite the clearly pastoral influences which underlie the genre, a number of post-apartheid rewritings of, or variations on, the farm novel imply a much more complex relationship to the land than their literary ancestors because of the complexities of post-apartheid politics. Examining some of these recent novels in the light of Gothic fiction will thus help me to trace the contours of the genre in this new context but also to show some of its shortcomings or aporias and to analyze how these shortcomings or aporias are emphasized, or transcended, by South African writers. NOTES 1. I am borrowing the title of this section from Graham Huggan’s magisterial book Interdisciplinary Measures (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2008), in which he interrogates the theoretically interdisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies (1–18) before providing examples of what he calls his “interdiscursive rather than interdisciplinary” method. 2. Rita Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond. South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 3. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 35. 4. David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 9. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 10. 7. Tariq Jazeel, “The Geography of Theory. Knowledge, Politics and the Postcolonial Present,” in Postcolonial Spaces. The Politics of Space in Contemporary Culture, ed. Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 165. 8. Ibid., 171. 9. Ibid., 165. 10. The term crisis itself has multiple implications, from its etymological meaning of “decision” to the current sense of “uncertainty” (Edgar Morin, “Pour une crisologie,” Communications no. 25 [1976]: 149). For a thorough discussion of the implications of crisis, see Thierry Portal’s analyses in “Liminaires,” in Crises et facteurs humains. Les nouvelles frontières mentales des crises, ed. Thierry Portal (Bruxelles, Belgium: De Boeck Supérieur, 2009), 13–31. 11. Neal Alexander, “On Literary Geography,” Literary Geographies I, no. 1 (2015): 5. 12. Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone, “Introduction,” in Postcolonial Spaces. The Politics of Space in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. Teverson and Upstone acknowledge that they are also indebted to Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan’s Postcolonial Geographies (2003), which “accurately reflect the inherent spatiality of postcolonial studies” (Ibid., 6). 13. Ibid., 2–3. 14. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 15. Teverson and Upstone, “Introduction,” 10. 16. Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. With a New Afterword (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]), 5. 17. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 6. 18. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan, Postcolonial Geographies (London: Continuum, 2002), 1.

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19. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 10. Soja was himself influenced by Michel Foucault. He quotes Foucault’s comment that “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” as part of an epigraph for his opening chapter (Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 70; quoted in Soja, Ibid., 10). In Postcolonial Literary Geographies. Out of Place, John Thieme also points to this aspect, adding that “more generally Foucault’s work . . . asserted the mobility of space and its intersection with time” (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 5. More specifically, Foucault argues that “the spatializing description of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power” (“Questions on Geography,” 70). 20. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography.” 21. Emmanuelle Peraldo, Literature and Geography. The Writing of Space Throughout History (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 1. For a nonexhaustive list of publications analyzing literature and geography, read Juliane Rouassi’s “Géocritique: carte et géographie littéraire,” in Géocritique: Etat des Lieux / Geocriticism: A Survey, ed. Clément Lévy and Bertrand Westphal (Limoges, France: PULIM, coll. Espaces Humains, 2014. E-book.) 22. Thieme, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, 4. 23. Blunt and McEwan, Postcolonial Geographies, 3. 24. John Thieme, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, 5. Thieme refers to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope to foreground the “dynamic interconnectedness of time and space in the formation of social relations.” The chronotope is developed by Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 25. John Thieme, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, 5. 26. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 27. Gerry Turcotte, Peripheral Fear. Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Bruxelles, Belgium: Peter Lang, 2009), 37. 28. Isabella van Elferen, “Introduction: Nostalgia and Perversion in Gothic Rewriting,” in Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day, ed. Isabella Van Elferen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 4. 29. van Elferen, “Introduction,” 2. 30. Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 27. 31. Ibid., 32. 32. Ibid., 29. 33. See Jerrold E. Hogle’s well-known distinction between “terror Gothic” and “horror Gothic.” “The first of these holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity kept largely out of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past, while the latter confronts the principal characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences.” Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. Hogle does not see it as a clear-cut distinction but, rather, as a “continuum” (Ibid., 3). 34. Margaret Carol Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 54. 35. James P. Carson, “Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264. 36. Davison, Gothic Literature, 45. Max Duperray convincingly argues that seeing the Gothic genre as a mere reaction against the triumph of rationalism means neglecting its need

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for canonical reconnaissance; this, of course, points out the genre’s complex relationship to the canon. Duperray, Le Roman noir anglais dit “gothique” (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 14. 37. Read Davison, Gothic Literature, 29–30, and Giuseppe Massara, “Horace Walpole and the Sources of ‘The Castle of Otranto’” (PhD. diss., University of Glasgow, 1977), 134–35, http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5060/1/1977MassaraPhD.pdf. 38. Maurice Lévy, Le roman gothique anglais. 1764–1824 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), v (my translation). 39. Duperray, Le Roman noir, 51–52. 40. Carson, “Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction,” 257. Brendan Hennessy, for instance, offers a rather harsh reading of Gothic fiction, which, he argues, can hardly be read for its own sake. But he also acknowledges the fact that Otranto brought a number of innovations to British literature. These innovations are the use of the castle as a pivot for the work, the recourse to “the forces of nature” to create an atmosphere conducive to terror and, finally, its set of characters. Hennessy, The Gothic Novel (London: Longman, 1978), 10–13. These innovations are precisely the features which were widely imitated by Walpole’s followers. Annie Le Brun refers to novels which “all tell the same story, in the same setting, with the same grandiloquence.” Le Brun, Les châteaux de la subversion (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 9, (my translation). Le Brun sees the genre’s use of “mechanization” as its main subversive tool to counter the spiritual beliefs which predominated before the Enlightenment (Ibid., 261). 41. Scott Brewster, “Gothic and the Question of Theory,” in The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2014), 311. 42. Duperray, Le Roman noir, 52. Varma argues that the castle is “the embodiment of all emotions and themes displayed in Gothic novels.” Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964 [1957]), 18. Annie Le Brun similarly emphasizes the centrality of the castle, which becomes “the threatened and threatening place where life endlessly comes to interrogate and find itself” (Les châteaux de la subversion, 142, my translation). 43. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. 44. Benjamin A. Brabon, “Gothic Geography, 1760–1830,” in The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2014), 98. 45. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 167. 46. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: the Caribbean,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 229. 47. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, “Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism,” in Empire and the Gothic. The Politics of Genre, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3. 48. Botting, Gothic, 3. 49. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), xviii. 50. Botting, Gothic, 14. 51. Lévy, Le roman gothique anglais, vii. 52. Botting, Gothic, 14. In “Twentieth Century Gothic,” Lucie Armitt also insists on adaptability in her introduction to twentieth-century Gothic. Observing, after Sigmund Freud, that in contemporary societies we have officially stopped believing in spirits and ghosts, she suggests that “the answer to this conundrum, it seems, is that, in the active pursuit of what most frightens us, we continually reshape our Gothic monsters to fit society’s changing fears.” In Terror and Wonder. The Gothic Imagination, ed. Dale Townshend (London: The British Library, 2014), 150. 53. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “‘Something Hungry and Wild Is Still Calling’: Post-Apartheid Gothic,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 34 no. 2 (Spring 2012): 61. Julia Round argues that it is precisely this definition of Gothic as a mode of writing which has made it possible for Gothic to be reshaped and adapted in other media like film or comics: “Gothic is best defined as a mode of writing that has been particularly prominent at certain points in time and space. . . . It is interesting to note that these periods are often at a time of extreme stress or social unrest; supporting David Punter’s argument that Gothic is a response to social trauma—a

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subversive and critical way of addressing problems in society. Defining Gothic as a mode—an ongoing tendency or style—means it can subsume genre . . . and cross media.” Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2014), 55. 54. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, ed. Unsettled Remains. Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), viii. 55. Sugars and Turcotte, Unsettled Remains, x. 56. Jennifer Lawn, “Introduction,” in Gothic New Zealand. The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture, ed. Misha Kavka, Jennifer Lawn, and Mary Paul (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2006), 14–15. 57. Alison Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), 3. 58. Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 18. 59. Philip Holden, “The ‘Postcolonial Gothic’: Absent Histories, Present Contexts,” Textual Practice 23, no. 3 (2009): 357. 60. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 27. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 28. 63. Lawn, “Introduction,” 12. 64. Jennifer Lawn, “From the Spectral to the Ghostly: Postcolonial Gothic and New Zealand Literature.” Australasian-Canadian Studies: A Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences 24, no. 2 (2006): 146. This resonates with Botting’s suggestion that “Gothic is a mobile and specific form” and thus produces different meanings in different cultures” (Botting, Gothic, 20). As a consequence, a culture-specific reading of Gothic forms is needed. 65. “A haunted castle, a pact with the Devil, crime and punishment, the tribunal of the Inquisition: so many elements that must never disappoint the reader’s expectations. Paradoxically, the themes are known in advance. The Gothic is like a building game in which the arrangement of the various blocks makes endless variations possible.” Liliane Abensour and Madeleine Charras, eds., Romantisme noir (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1978), viii–ix (my translation). 66. Rebecca Duncan, South African Gothic. Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 34. 67. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 13–14. Also see Julie Azzam, “The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and the Politics of Home” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2007), 19. Andrew Teverson offers a close examination of “Bhabha’s Gothic” in his reading of the dual role of the Gothic and the Sublime in Rushdie’s fiction in “The number of magic alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic nights,” in Empire and the Gothic. The Politics of Genre, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 208–13. 68. “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII (1917–1919), ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1955 [1919]), 226. 69. Sugars and Turcotte, Unsettled Remains, vii. 70. Jean-Michel Rabaté, La pénultième est morte. Spectrographies de la modernité (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993), 51–52, my translation. 71. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 55. 72. Ibid., 58. 73. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 4. See, in addition, Hélène Machinal’s assertion that the English Gothic novel is first and foremost about architecture, as it is a construct, both in terms of internal and external layout. Machinal, “Regards croisés: littérature et architecture gothiques,” Otrante. Art et littérature fantastiques 12 (2002): 15. 74. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 178. 75. Gerald Gaylard, “The Postcolonial Gothic: Time and Death in Southern African Literature,” Journal of Literary Studies 24, no. 4 (2008): 5. 76. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 37. 77. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 5.

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78. van Elferen, “Introduction,” 4. 79. Louise Bethlehem offers a synthetic view of “the rhetoric urgency” and the pressures of realism, which she partly deconstructs, in the first chapter of Skin Tight (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2006), 1–20. 80. Reading is part of the identity of the Gothic, perhaps because the first Gothic writers were so much inspired by their readings, from medieval romances to revenge tragedies. The success of the genre in the eighteenth century was certainly linked to its strong appeal to readers, who could easily identify with the characters. Jane Austen plays with this feature in Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland is both an enthusiastic reader of Gothic romances and a young innocent heroine similar to the ones found, for instance, in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. 81. Gaylard, “The Postcolonial Gothic,” 9. Also see Sheri Ann Denison, “Walking Through the Shadows. Ruins, Reflection and Resistance in the Postcolonial Gothic Novel,” (PhD diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 175–79. 82. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 80–130. Also see Lars Engle’s reading of The Conservationist as an example of what he calls “the political uncanny” in “The Conservationist and the Political Uncanny,” in The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, ed. Bruce King (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), and Catherine Kroll’s analysis of the novel as “settler Gothic” in “Bodies of Evidence: South African Gothic and the Terror of the ‘Twice-Told Tale,’” Textus 3 (2012): 92–95. 83. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 85. 84. For a discussion of the term post-transitional, read Ruth Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie, “Conceptualizing ‘Post-Transitional’ South African literature in English,” English Studies in Africa 53, no. 1 (2010): 1–10, and Meg Samuelson, “Scripting Connections: Reflections on the ‘Post-Transitional,’” English Studies in Africa 53, no.1 (2010): 113–17. 85. Chris Thurman, “Places Elsewhere, Then and Now: Allegory ‘Before’ and ‘After’ South Africa’s Transition?” English Studies in Africa 53, no. 1 (2010): 101. Michael Chapman argues that “post-apartheid” is a “problematic” term: pointing to the continuity in the social and economic fields, where apartheid hardly seems to be over, he still maintains the necessity to oppose “then” and “now” “in the subjective, experiential terrain, the terrain of literary expression.” Chapman, “Preface,” in SA Lit Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011), viii). De Kock, on the other hand, uses the notion of “transition” as the basis for his analysis of post-apartheid genre literature in Losing the Plot (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016). Such contradictions show that a middle ground is needed between the necessity to oppose apartheid and postapartheid and the obvious continuity between these two moments in South African history. 86. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 58. 87. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist, 26, no. 2 (1999): 292. 88. Rebecca Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror: On Meat, Neo-Liberalism and the Postcolonial Politics of a Global Form,” Horror Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 88. 89. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror.” 90. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 39. 91. On this specific issue, see Jack Shear’s discussion of Triomf in “Haunted House, Haunted Nation: Triomf and the South African Postcolonial Gothic,” Journal of Literary Studies 22, no. 1–2 (2006): 70–95, Eva Hunter’s reading of Karel Schoeman’s This Life in “Gender Politics and the Gothic in Karel Schoeman’s This Life,” Journal of Literary Studies 24, no. 2 (2008): 1-20, and Denison’s “Walking Through the Shadows,” 203–17. 92. Shear, “Haunted House,” 2. 93. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 69. 94. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 788. 95. Fred Botting and Justin Edwards, “Theorising globalgothic,” in Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 11. 96. Ibid., 18.

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97. Justin Edwards makes a similar point in “‘She Saw a Soucouyant’: Locating the Globalgothic”: “[T]he globalgothic is not just about representations of the borders separating life and death, real and unreal, self and other; it is also about depictions of the liminal spaces that blur the boundaries between the local and the global, here and there, nation and migration.” Edwards, Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 50. Edwards argues that globalgothic is related to migrations or displacements and can help us to rethink nation and nationalism. 98. Botting and Edwards, “Theorising globalgothic,” 23. 99. Isabella van Elferen makes the following, and useful, distinction between globalized Gothic and globalgothic: “Globalized Gothic, on the one hand, can be defined as the circulation of Gothic themes and styles in worldwide locations, through a range of media, and embedded in the capitalist structures of market and consumption. Globalgothic, on the other hand, offers a Gothic critique of globalization, exposing the anxieties and excesses that sift through the carefully laid out safety nets of international culture. ” Van Elferen, “Globalgoth? Unlocatedness in the Musical Home,” in Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 91. The distinction therefore points to the different levels at which they operate, articulating, once again, a tension between local and global perspectives. 100. Ibid. 101. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 64. 102. Justin Cartwright, Up Against the Night (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 155. 103. See, for instance, Melissa Steyn’s suggestion that, in post-apartheid South Africa, whiteness “constructs itself as the victimized in the new dispensation. . . . The binaries that underpin whiteness are seen to be simply reversed. Whites, it is averred, are now in the ‘the same’ position now as black people were in the past under apartheid.” Steyn, “‘White Talk’: White South Africans and the Management of Diasporic Whiteness,” in Postcolonial Whiteness. A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. Alfred J. López (New York: State of New York University Press, 2005), 131. 104. Coetzee uses the phrase white writing to refer to those writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were “no longer European, not yet African.” Coetzee, White Writing. On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 11. My own acceptation of the phrase is different: I will use it to refer to contemporary white writers expressing a sense of unsettledness in their literary works. 105. Ibid., 4. 106. Lewis Nkosi, “White Writing. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places by Nadine Gordimer; White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa by J. M. Coetzee. Review” Third World Quarterly 11, no. 1 (January 1989): 160–61. 107. Coetzee, White Writing, 36–62. 108. For a detailed analysis of the Gothic sublime (as opposed to Enlightenment sublime), read Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994). 109. Coetzee, White Writing, 138. 110. Jed Etsy, “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 407, my emphasis. 111. Duncan, South African Gothic, 51. 112. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 87. 113. Ibid., 97. 114. Ibid., 115. 115. Duncan, South African Gothic, op. 71–88. 116. For a discussion of pastoral, anti-pastoral, and post-pastoral, see Terry Gifford’s enlightening chapter, in which he insists on the locality of pastoral and on the distinction between pastoral as a genre, a mode and a concept. Gifford, “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17–30. 117. Ken Gelder, “The Postcolonial Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 196. 118. Gelder, “The Postcolonial Gothic,” 197.

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119. Gelder, “The Postcolonial Gothic.” 120. Ibid., 198. 121. Ludmilla Ommundsen, “‘The Demons Do Not Pass Him By’. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: A Gothic Story,” Cultures of the Commonwealth 13 (2007): 107. 122. Ommundsen, “The Demons Do Not Pass Him By,” 108, italics added. 123. For an overview, read Michael Titlestad’s “Future Tense: The Problem of South African Apocalyptic Fiction,” English Studies in Africa 58, no. 1 (2015): 30–41. 124. Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). 125. André Brink, “Writing against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa,” World Literature Today, 58, no. 2 (1984): 192. 126. Susan VanZanten Gallagher, “The Backward Glance: History and the Novel in PostApartheid South Africa,” Studies in the Novel 29 (Fall 1997): 390. 127. See Sally-Ann Murray’s discussion of the term, based on Gordimer’s 1982 James Lecture. This discussion leads Murray to remark that “the challenges for white writing since [the end of apartheid] have been many,” from “the strategic diminution of categories such as English Literature” to “the quest for relevance”: “How to write—why write?—when the persistent noise of your privilege seemed to rebuke the cries, variously faint and strident, of topics, styles, human lies, previously stifled?” Murray, “On the Street with Vladislavić, Mhlongo, Moele and Others,” in SA Lit: Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011), 71–72. 128. Elleke Boehmer, “Endings and New Beginning. South African Fiction in Transition,” in Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51. 129. See my reading of the novel in “Devil’s Valley: une histoire littéraire de l’Afrique du Sud,” Palabres V, no.1 (2003): 75–89. 130. Significantly, apocalypse is one of the major tropes identified by Greg Garrard in Ecocriticism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992, 8) to examine “the production, reproduction and transformation of large-scale metaphors” to study “the relationship of the human and nonhuman” (Ibid 5). It comes as no surprise that apocalypse should be one of the defining tropes in white South African writing because, as Garrard also reminds us, apocalyticism and crisis are closely interconnected since the former “both responds to and produces” the latter (Ibid., 94). 131. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André Brink,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25, no. 2 (2003): 17–31. 132. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s” in Magical Realism. History, Theory, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 3. 133. Renato Oliva, “Re-Dreaming the World. Ben Okri’s Shamanic Realism” in Coterminous Worlds. Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Casotti, and Carmen Concilio (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures, 1999), 177. Also see Linguanti’s introduction, in which she highlights “the non-disjunction of contradictory elements (myth/history, naturalia/mirabilia)—not either/or, but both/and” in magical realist texts. Linguanti, “Introduction,” in Coterminous Worlds. Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Casotti, and Carmen Concilio (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures 1999), 6. 134. Steyn, “White Talk,” 120. 135. Ibid., 127. 136. Chris Thurman, “Apocalypse Whenever. Catastrophe, Privilege and Indifference (or, Whiteness and the End Times),” English Studies in Africa 58, no. 1 (2015): 61. 137. Ibid., 62. 138. Ibid., 64. 139. Ibid., 65. 140. Botting, Gothic, 19. 141. Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London: Routledge, 2008). 142. Gelder, “The Postcolonial Gothic,” 198.

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143. Graham K. Riach, “Henrietta Rose-Innes and the Politics of Space,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 1 (2020): 24. 144. Thurman, “Apocalypse Whenever,” 61. 145. See for instance Achmat Davids’s contention that he “can only conclude that Afrikaans had a ‘coloured’ image in Cape Town in the nineteenth century.” Davids, “The ‘Coloured’ Image of Afrikaans in Nineteenth Century Cape Town,” Kronos 17 (1990), 47, or Lionel Adendorf’s provocative description of Afrikaans as a language which “was created by the slaves, perfected by the Muslim scholars and hijacked by the Afrikaners in 1875.” Adendorf, “There’s No Such Thing as a Coloured Identity,” Cape Argus, August 18, 2016, https:// www.iol.co.za/capeargus/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-coloured-identity-2058521. 146. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 69–101. 147. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6. 148. Iman Coovadia, Cóilin Parsons, and Alexandra Dodd, eds. Relocations. Reading Culture in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015), 15. The words complicities and entanglement refer to specific works about South Africa, namely Mark Sanders’s Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) and Sarah Nuttall’s Entanglements: Literary and Cultural Reflections of Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009). 149. Hogle, “Introduction,” 3. 150. Rebecca Duncan, “‘My Skin, a Parchment of Tales.’ Trauma, Wounding and the PostApartheid Gothic in Terry Westby-Nunn’s The Sea of Wise Insects,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 1 (2013): 76–87. 151. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror,” 85–106. 152. Duncan, South African Gothic, 61. 153. Etienne Helmer, Ici et là. Une philosophie des lieux (Lagrasse, France: Verdier, 2019), 15, my translation. 154. See Sandrine Sorlin, “Le genre: ligne de force de la théorie et de la pratique littéraire?” in Les genres textuels, une question d’interprétation? ed. Driss Ablali, Ayoub Bouhouhou, Ouidad Tebbaa (Limoges, France: Lambert-Lucas, 2015), 103–12. Also see my discussion of the primacy of literary genres in postcolonial literatures in my HDR dissertation, “Filiations textuelles, nationales et culturelles: les genres littéraires en contexte postcolonial,” HDR diss., Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, 2018, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01959982v1. 155. Mathilde Rogez, “‘White Writing’, ‘Dark Continent’: les enjeux de la représentation du paysage dans la littérature sud-africaine,” Etudes Littéraires Africaines 39 (2015): 61. 156. Richard Samin, “Les paysages du Karoo dans la littérature sud-africaine: une esthétique de l’indicible,” Etudes Littéraires Africaines 39 (2015): 43.

Chapter Two

The Coordinates of Identity

In an introduction to South African literatures and their spaces, Jean Sévry reminds us that space cannot be dissociated from history and describes the emergence of what he terms a “topography of white literature.” 1 This topography, he suggests, is based on a history which celebrates “the conquest of spaces which were described as empty.” 2 Sévry identifies two main spaces which were particularly aestheticized by white writers: the space of the Karoo, “where the subject faces his or her destiny on this African land,” and the farm, which gave birth to a specific literary genre, the farm novel or plaasroman. 3 Sévry’s essay, which was published in 1998, mostly focuses on novelists who wrote before or during apartheid. However, his analysis remains valid in post-apartheid South Africa where, as I suggested in the previous chapter, space remains a crucial concern and is the locus of power struggles reflected in literature. Settler literatures have often been described in relation to their capacity to reflect a sense of unsettledness. This sense of alienation is, of course, not specifically South African: A trait of most colonial and postcolonial texts written by settlers, it results from the very process of colonization, which displaces people, their cultures, and their identities. Australian writer Kate Grenville’s fictional account of the arrival of convict William Thornhill in New South Wales in 1806 in The Secret River testifies to such a sense of displacement, of not feeling at home: The dark landscape is described through the newly arrived convict’s eyes as “alien,” a “foreign blaze, unreadable, indifferent,” and he feels that “[h]e would die here under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth.” 4 Grenville’s protagonist illustrates what Gerry Turcotte calls “colonial Gothic”; this literary form reflects the colonial experience, which “can be described as one characterized by a fear of nothingness, produced when an individual is propelled into a ‘wilderness’ 29

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of sorts. It is a fear of being negated, stripped of identity, or blanked out in a land ‘without history.’” 5 Turcotte argues that the settlers’ sense of disorientation in colonial surroundings leads to an anxiety of unsettledness, which a number of writers have expressed through the Gothic mode. 6 Turcotte, like Homi Bhabha, links this unsettledness to the Freudian notion of the uncanny, which articulates the sense of being at home with its opposite, the Unheimlich. Settler anxiety, it seems, emerges from the fact that home is neither in what used to be the mother country nor in the new land; hence, a sense of perpetual displacement leads to an anxiety which is expressed through the Gothic—which shall not surprise us since, as Bhabha reminds us, “Etymologically unsettled, ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrere (to frighten) whence territorium, ‘a place from which people are frightened off.’ The colonialist demand for narrative carries, within it, the threatening reversal: Tell us why we are here.” 7 Territory is therefore intrinsically, and etymologically, linked to terror. But is it also linked to identity, and Gothic is precisely the literary mode through which the problematic tension between them can be explored. Gothic offers a means to depict the ways in which the alien land is appropriated or not, the ways in which “space” becomes “place,” and provides a locus for identity. 8 Indeed, identity is defined through a number of variables, among which space plays a prominent part; in other words, identity can be located thanks to coordinates which are both individual and collective, both spatial and temporal, both “natural” and “cultural”—but only imperfectly and problematically, as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson aptly remark in their study of the relationship between space and identity. Questioning the “assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture [and] the implicit mapping of cultures onto places,” Gupta and Ferguson want to “understand the processes whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place” to “reconceptualise fundamentally the politics of community, solidarity, identity, and cultural difference.” 9 The identity of the subject is therefore the result of interactions with a space characterized by its own multiple identity and whose definition is complexified by the fact that it is perceived by the subject himself or herself. “Like time, space is notoriously difficult to define philosophically—because as in the case of time, what we understand as space is both an aspect of physical reality and also the varying ways in which human beings experience and conceptualize this reality. The difficulty is also related to the fact that—again as is the case with time—our conception of space constitutes one of the instruments that we use in order to think, write, and read.” 10 The coordinates of identity are therefore grounded in a space which is problematically subjective but not impossible to map. The obvious starting point to locate the coordinates of identity is probably the most intimate of spaces, the home. Gaston Bachelard, for instance, devotes his Poetics of Space to a careful exploration of the home to define what he calls a “poetics of the house.” 11 Bachelard’s analysis initiates a topoanaly-

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sis of the house because, he argues, the image of the house becomes the topography of our intimate being. Bachelard insists on the house’s duality; it is both a physical space, a building, and a symbolical space where intimacy is condensed and protected, 12 so that it is “a state of mind” and expresses an intimacy. 13 Even if Bachelard’s topoanalysis aims at showing the positive values of houses as loci of intimacy and well-being, its premises are useful to understand the values attributed to houses in Gothic fiction. If the house can be endowed with such intimate values, it is, Bachelard argues, because it can be dreamed about and invested as an imaginary space where dreams and memories can be stored. But this process is not without its dangers or instabilities: “Although the house (as one instance of place) can contribute to the formation of human identity, it does not follow that place, or places, cannot complicate and disturb our sense of identity as well. The house marks a boundary, a transition from something controllable and safe to something larger, something attractive but potentially dangerous.” 14 It can also be suggested that danger does not necessarily come from outside, challenging the safe space of the house. Instead, what Gothic shows us is that danger can lurk inside the house, so that the house may also be a nightmarish place rather than Bachelard’s dream space. Marangoly George points to the positive, and unambiguous, values assigned to home in Bachelard’s work and extends her criticism to other theories about home. She underlines the “absence of any kind of ambivalence about the assertions made or any recognition of the sweeping assumptions beneath the theses on home.” 15 And yet, she argues, the house is sometimes not a home, and home is not an unambiguous notion. We need to distinguish between the two concepts because they are not necessarily synonymous. A house is a building, a point of orientation, but it becomes a home only when dwelt in, or inhabited, as shown by Martin Heidegger. 16 Comparing Heidegger’s and Bachelard’s conceptions of houses, Marita Wenzel observes that they both “perceive houses as points of orientation or places, while homes (in the sense of ‘dwellings’ or personal spaces) function as significant and relevant spaces or spheres of influence in personal and public life.” 17 Wenzel also asserts that “the most significant associations of ‘home’ relate to social relationships and networks, to the idea of a place as a refuge, and to the sense of continuity gained from its existence.” 18 One major point which emerges from these definitions of both house and home consists in the necessity to take the temporal dimension into account, a temporal dimension linked to the subject’s memory. Bachelard’s description of the birth house as “a house of dream-memory” 19 testifies to this necessity. But even when inhabited, when they become “homes,” houses are not necessarily homely. This is, partly, what Gothic narratives tell us. The house in its various guises has been a major trope in Gothic literatures from the origins of the genre, as Fred Botting reminds us, tracing a

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continuity from the castle, “gloomily predominant in early Gothic fiction,” to “the old house: as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.” 20 Botting’s point is crucial in understanding the connection among the house, Gothic, and identity because it emphasizes the way in which the Gothic house has always articulated individual and collective identities through its association with family—from the eponymous Castle of Otranto to Edgar Allan Poe’s “House of Usher,” whose ending famously describes the simultaneous collapse of both house and family, to mention just two examples. Gothic homes are the site where identities are defined or challenged. Interestingly, in his analysis of Victorian Gothic, Botting reminds us that Gothic homes can be the place where the sins of the father are visited on his children so that in Victorian Gothic the home “could be a prison as well as a refuge.” 21 The ambiguity of home in Gothic fiction is further exemplified by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the heroine, confined to a former nursery, finds herself increasingly oppressed by a home which becomes uncanny. The motif of imprisonment is materialized on her room’s walls, where the pattern turns into a prison: “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, in candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” 22 The narrator spots a woman trapped behind the bars on the wall and gradually identifies with her, so that, as Charles Crow points out, “[b]y the story’s end, the narrator has become that other woman. Her madness, like her obsessive writing (another patterning on paper), is a sign of her rebellion against the mind-forged manacles that her culture has imposed upon her.” 23 This example of American Gothic, then, calls our attention on two crucial aspects of Gothic representations of homes: the gendered dimension of the anxiety epitomized by the Gothic home on the one hand, and the ambiguity of the supposedly safe space of home, which often comes to epitomize the way in which, in Sigmund Freud’s words, “[u]nheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich,” on the other hand. 24 In his introduction to what he calls “affective geography,” Robert Tally Jr. examines Yi-Fu Tuan’s “joyous phenomenology,” 25 manifest in Tuan’s concept of “topophilia” defined as “all of human being’s affective ties to the material environment.” 26 But Tally observes that not all affective perceptions of place are positive, suggesting that critics also need to examine “the more angst-ridden or menacing features of certain places. If ‘home’ is somehow understood to be a topophilic space, then what of the unhomely spaces in which an alienated subject experiences the cartographic anxiety or sense of bewilderment that so typifies many literary representations of space?” 27 Referring to Heidegger’s suggestion that “in anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich],” 28 Tally Jr. argues that “one can also see how familiar places might engender in the subject feelings of fear and loathing.” 29 Although

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Tally Jr. surprisingly does not relate this to Freud’s definition of the uncanny, he offers two possible terms to label the negative reactions a subject may experience in reaction to space: topophobia or misotopia. It is my contention that the Gothic precisely offers writers literary strategies enabling them to explore and express topophobia, that is, the anxiety linked to place. More generally, Tally’s suggested notion of topophrenia, that is, “that condition of narrative, one that is necessary to any reading or writing of a text, in which the persistence of place and of the subject’s relation to it must be taken into account” 30 seems to provide a useful conceptual frame to read South African literature. The starting point of my exploration of South African Gothic topophrenia will start with an examination of the unhomely nature of home in a country whose history makes most of its inhabitants deeply unsettled. In itself, home is a notion which does not merely connote coziness and comfort but also relies on “a pattern of select inclusions and exclusions. Home is a way of establishing difference. Homes and home-countries are exclusive.” 31 George’s assertion resonates particularly strong in the context of post-apartheid South Africa where identities need to be redefined after having been assigned for decades to specific places through legal and complex patterns of exclusion. George also insists on the absence of any fixed value inherent in the concept of home, which may be used “to articulate a whole range of political stances—radical, reactionary and revolutionary.” 32 Because home may serve different, and sometimes contradictory purposes, it needs to be examined, not as a fixed entity but, rather, as an unstable concept. Despite its instability, we may nevertheless rely on George’s definition because it takes into account the ambiguities and the complexities of home: One distinguishing feature of places called home is that they are built on select inclusions. The inclusions are grounded in a learned (or taught) sense of a kinship that is extended to those who are perceived as sharing the same blood, race, class, gender, or religion. Membership is maintained by bonds of love, fear, power, desire and control. Homes are manifest on geographical, psychological and material levels. They are places that are recognized as such by those within and those without. They are places of violence and nurturing. A place that is flexible, that manifests itself in various forms and yet whose every reinvention seems to follow the basic pattern of inclusions/exclusions. Home is a place to escape to and a place to escape from. Its importance lies in the fact that it is not equally available to all. Home is a desired place that is fought for and established as the exclusive domain of a few. It is not a neutral place. It is community. Communities are not counter-constructions but only extensions of home, providing the same comforts and terrors on a larger scale. Both home and community provide such substantial pleasures that have been so thoroughly assumed as natural that it may seem unproductive to point to the exclusions that found such abodes. 33

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My literary exploration of unhomely homes will be based on Glennis Byron and David Punter’s assertion that “[i]f there is such a thing as a general topography of the Gothic, then its central motif is the castle.” 34 Historically, the Gothic castle has been endowed with multiple values, all linked to the production of terror: The castle is a labyrinth, a maze, a site of secrets. It is also, paradoxically, a site of domesticity, where ordinary life carries on even while accompanied by the most extraordinary and inexplicable of events. It can be a place of womblike security, a refuge from the complex exigencies of the outer world; it can also—at the same time, and according to a difference of perception—be a place of incarceration, a place where heroines and others can be locked away from the fickle memory of “ordinary life.” The castle has to do with the map, and with the failure of the map; it figures loss of direction, the impossibility of imposing one’s own sense of place on an alien world. 35

Among these diverse features, one is struck by the Gothic castle’s fundamental ambiguity; the castle can be both a reassuring, homely space and an unsettling, unhomely—or, rather, Unheimlich—place. I have already argued that the castle has a number of literary descendants, among which, for instance, Daphne Du Maurier’s Manderley or Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. Most of these examples testify to the often gendered terror experienced within the walls of the castle or of its avatars. GENDERED SPACES AND THE ANXIETY OF UNSETTLEDNESS: LYNN FREED’S “HOUSES OF WOMEN” In eighteenth-century Gothic novels, the castle is a place where female heroines are locked by foreign villains, as in Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho, an edifice which, as Coral Ann Howells pointed out, shares many features with its owner, Montoni, in the young heroine’s mind. 36 Howells’s reading of Udolpho evinces the gendered and subjective dimension of the castle: “The environment is supreme and things have an active life of their own, imposing their own conditions upon the human beings who come there. This is more than the effect of impressionistic description; it is basic to the Gothic heroine’s experience of the world.” 37 Sheri Ann Denison furthermore observes that in The Mysteries of Udolpho the castle “metaphorically represents the house, an enclosed female space in a world controlled by men.” 38 In his introduction to a volume of Otrante about Gothic castles, Maurice Lévy laments the trivialization of this trope in countless novels which similarly and “indefinitely reproduce the same narrative schemes, the same patterns.” 39 The plot, he argues, is “always the same: it deals with the relationship between a woman and an architecture.” 40 Such reproducibility, Lévy

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argues, weakens the subversive potential of Gothic fiction and turns it into a fictional machinery which confirms gender stereotypes. 41 Before analyzing the larger space of the nation, and the ways in which Gothic fiction provides white writers with a way of staging what Jack Shear calls the “haunted nation,” 42 I would therefore like to try and understand how and why some of these white writers appropriate the Gothic trope of the female house or gendered castle to express unsettled identities. A striking example is expatriated writer Lynn Freed. A writer who has chosen to live abroad might seem an unlikely choice to start exploring the notion of home through local avatars of the Gothic castle. First, because, for decades in South Africa exile was often not the consequence of individual choices but was imposed by the political context. Yet, Freed is representative of a major trend in current South African literature, where, as Rita Barnard reminds us, many writers have chosen to write from abroad: J. M. Coetzee has emigrated to Australia, Breyten Breytenbach lives in Paris and Dakar, Anne Landsman and Yvette Christiansë in New York, Zakes Mda in Ohio, Marita van der Vyver in Provence and Eben Venter . . . commutes between Prince Albert and Melbourne. Whereas South African writers during the apartheid era often spanned the dual imaginary locations of home and exile, they are now fully and voluntarily diasporic; the geographical and thematic range of their work has been broadened accordingly. 43

By pointing out Freed’s representativeness, I do not want to suggest that my analysis of her fiction can, or must, be transposed to all of these writers’ works—if only because the reasons for their expatriation, and the moment when they left South Africa, are extremely diverse and individual. What is more, the list includes writers who are not white and, therefore, have relationships with South Africa, identity, or space, which cannot be satisfactorily compared to Freed’s own relationship with her country of birth. Instead, I would like to use Freed’s work as an illustration of the literary mechanisms through which homes can become unsettling, and unsettled, places in Gothicized fiction. Freed defines herself in her nonfictional works as a displaced writer. In Reading, Writing and Leaving Home: Life on the Page she stresses and explores the close link among the three components in her title (reading, writing, and leaving home), all connected by the autobiographical dimension of most of her writings. Her autobiographical stance is also reinforced by the photographs at the beginning of each chapter, which all show either Freed herself or her relatives. The volume revolves around two main axes: the first one is her family and, particularly, her parents; her mother, in particular, is portrayed as a colorful character whose life often inspired Freed’s novels. The second main axis of Reading, Writing and Leaving Home is the notion of place and, more specifically, her birth country, South Africa, and her desire

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to leave it. The two aspects are intimately connected because, she explains, her desire to leave both South Africa and her family triggered her writer’s vocation. In the first chapter, “A Child’s Reading,” a kind of “portrait of the artist as a young reader,” Freed insists on the chasm which separated her everyday reality from the reality she read about in books written by English writers; these books were not about her or about her South African world: I believed that these strange customs and creatures were more real than those of the world I lived in, and far more worthy of fiction. The real world of my childhood—a large subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, with beaches and bush and sugarcane and steaming heat, a strict Anglican girls’ school, massive family gatherings on Friday nights and Jewish holidays, and then my parents’ theatre world, the plays my mother directed, my father learning his lines every evening in the bath, both of them off to rehearsal night after night, leaving the next episode of her story for me to listen to on a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder—this world did not exist, not even peripherally, in the literature available to me. Nor did I think that it should. 44

This perception of the world shows that as a child, Freed perceived herself and her country as peripheral because the reality of her world was not validated by texts. The subtitle of Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, then, also might suggest that life is paradoxically on the page or, rather, that “life on the page” is truer than life in the real world. This tension between reality and its transcription and transformation into text lies at the heart of Freed’s work. Her perception of South Africa as unreal, or not real enough, explains why she describes her longing for exile as a longing for “the real world”: “in Blyton’s pre-adolescent novels, Five Go Off in a Caravan, Hollow Tree House, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, there were rebels and runaways and naughty children finding adventure beyond the pale—this freedom was a wonderful thing for a girl living at the bottom of Africa and dreaming of leaving herself one day, somehow, for the real world.” 45 When Freed discusses the scandal caused by her autobiographical novel Home Ground (1986) in “Sex With the Servants,” she elaborates on this theme of the relationship between reality and fiction, of life on the page. “In a battle of competing truths, fiction, if it is done right, will always win over what fondly passes for fact. Of course it will. It is life on the page. It has made order out of chaos, sense out of the senseless. It has given shape to lives that, without the intervention of the writer, had only the shape of chronology to them—that is to say, one long line.” 46 To illustrate this point, Freed relates how her mother once referred to a fictional episode Freed had made up in Home Ground as if it had actually happened; despite that, unlike their fictional counterparts in Home Ground, her parents had never actually owned a theatre, Freed once heard her mother tell her father: “Pity we had to sell the theatre, darling, isn’t it?” 47 More interestingly for the present discus-

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sion, Freed also explains that she had not imagined the outrage which would be caused by her novel in South Africa because she had already left the country 48 —which testifies to her displaced identity. She repeatedly insists on the centrality of the notion of displacement in her work and in the mechanisms which led her to become a writer. Thus, she describes Home Ground in the following way: “Only much later did it dawn on me that the title of the novel itself, which I had had in advance of writing the first sentence, was the real subject of the book—of everything I’d written, in fact, and probably of everything I would ever write. Home Ground. It was a novel about belonging, about place and displacement. And if, as someone said, we have only one novel in us, I felt sure I had already written it.” 49 Even if one always needs to be careful with what writers say about their own motivations, it seems to me that this statement aptly highlights Freed’s identity as a displaced South African writer and is an appropriate starting point for an examination of the tension between the homely and the unhomely in white writers’ texts. The fact that Freed ended up writing a sequel to Home Ground testifies to the centrality of the theme of leaving home in her work; the list of titles she considered for this sequel, eventually titled The Bungalow, also significantly displays the centrality of space in her work: “Foreign Territory; In a Foreign Land; Resident Alien; Close to Home; Stranger in a Strange Land: Some Time Overseas; Equal Strangers; Time and Distance; A Way of Life; Voluntary Exile; Far from Home; Overseas Visitor”; “Halfway to India”; “Equal Distance”; “Pride of Place.” 50 As a matter of fact, the trope of leaving home recurs in most of her novels. In Home Ground, the protagonist, Ruth Frank, who is clearly based on Freed herself, feels she does not belong in South Africa. The novel repeatedly asserts the idea that leaving home is a form of liberation. It is expressed explicitly at the end of the novel when the heroine’s plane takes off: “Home, I thought, trying to turn the lump in my throat into tears. I stared down at the smoke hanging low over a kraal. Home, I thought. Home, home, home. But my father’s nostalgia wouldn’t work on me. My heart lifted instead, I remembered that I could come back. Jocelyn had been right. I could leave and I could return. Like Maya. I was free.” 51 These final words can be compared with the ending of The Servants’ Quarters (2009), in which, and it is certainly no coincidence, Ruth happens to make an appearance as a friend of the main protagonist, Cressida. Both novels bear a number of resemblances, among which the fact that they seem to partake of the Bildungsroman because they both narrate the education and coming of age of a Jewish South African girl. Cressida shares a number of similarities with Ruth, but at the end of The Servants’ Quarters she does not go to university; instead, she chooses to stay with Mr. Harding and marries him despite his poor health, which eventually leads him to commit suicide to put an end to his physical pain. Cressida, who is pregnant at the moment of her husband’s death, has

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their child and marries another man belonging to the same social background as Harding. At the end of The Servants’ Quarters, then, the heroine has achieved a form of social displacement; unlike Ruth, she does not leave the country, but her family and her social class, and this social mobility is experienced as a form of liberation. This means that even if the fates of Ruth and Cressida seem rather dissimilar, the two young women reach a form of selfassertion through a process which could be described as unbelonging or, to use Edward Said’s terminology, as an itinerary where affiliation replaces filiation and where the country or family of election has replaced the country or family of birth. 52 This process of unbelonging challenges or unsettles the notion of “home,” which is redefined as the place or family the protagonists choose to belong to rather than to their country of origin. The resemblance between the two novels can therefore be detected both on the structural level and on the level of characterization: not only are Ruth and Cressida similar but so are their mothers—even if Cressida points to their differences. Significantly, in The Servants’ Quarters Ruth’s father is caught kissing Cressida’s mother. 53 Even if it seems to be a rather minor incident in the novel, it points to another form of displacement: the various textual recombinations Freed operates in her novels, in which many characters seem to echo one another. The servants, for instance, are all rather similar and often fulfill the same function; considered as members of the family, which is not without posing a number of ethical and political problems in novels written by a white South African writer, they usually provide a form of comic relief, like Pillay in Home Ground, who is comically described as screeching back at the dogs not to be bitten. 54 Another figure which seems to be duplicated in Freed’s novels is the Jewish mother, who does not only feature in Home Ground and The Servants’ Quarters but also in House of Women (2002). In the latter novel, the character of the mother is based on Freed’s own mother, 55 like Ruth’s mother. And yet, House of Women seems much less realist than Home Ground, as suggested by the names—or rather, the absence of names—of the characters. This namelessness might be because of the origins of the story, which is a variation on the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who eloped with Hades and finally chose to lead a double life, spending six months a year as a queen of the dead and six months a year as Core, helping her mother in spring and summer. The novel constantly weaves realistic details about everyday life in South Africa with a paradoxically imprecise description of places which gives them an almost eerie dimension. For instance, the mother often drives to a place vaguely designated as “inland” to see Katzenbogen, a psychoanalyst, thus obviously actualizing the metaphorical dimension of the “journey into self”; she also goes to “the mountains” after her daughter’s departure for “the island,” which is never named nor situated precisely.

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However, even if it is different from Home Ground, the novel displays the same obsession for leaving, linked to a clear insistence on imprisonment. House of Women might be read as a rewriting of Home Ground, a variation on the theme of the daughter who wants to leave an invasive mother. This similarity points to what could be termed Freed’s “aesthetics of displacement,” that is, the acknowledgement that she can never be at home anywhere, so that fiction may provide the stability she lacks. Indeed, Freed does not describe this sense of permanent displacement as a weakness but as an asset, a source of freedom: What I had come to understand—sitting on verandahs where no English was spoken, riding across deserts, eating crocodile in vast colonial dining rooms— was the natural affinity between travel and fiction. Playing stranger in strange places gave me the perspective of other worlds from which to examine my own. Estrangement, I realized, was a necessary ingredient of my work. Over the years, I began to feel more or less strange everywhere. I also felt more or less at home. Homesick for nowhere. Permanently displaced. Free to come and go at last. 56

This paradoxical equation between feeling at home and feeling strange everywhere seems to suggest that Freed’s identity illustrates the closeness of Freud’s Heimlich and Unheimlich. What Freed advocates here is an aesthetics of displacement from which, beyond a personal, autobiographical dimension, a number of more collective issues emerge, particularly regarding the link between self and place. I now propose to confront her praise of estrangement with her fiction so as to understand how Gothic strategies have provided her with tools to give literary shape to her aesthetics of displacement. The plot of House of Women relies on the same duality of place as the original myth of Proserpina. The protagonist, a young woman named Thea, elopes with a friend of her father’s to flee her invasive mother. The man takes Thea to his island, where she gives birth to twins. She then temporarily goes back to her mother, who reveals that the man Thea has always believed to be her father is not her biological father—but Thea chooses to ignore the revelation. The novel is apparently far from realist, and unlike Home Ground, it can be described as a romance rather than a novel. The derealizing aspect of names in House of Women is a case in point: Most of the characters are either not named or named very late in the novel, like Thea’s husband. 57 Another major factor of derealization is the constant oscillation between realism and a dreamlike reality through internal focalization. The romance-like atmosphere might explain the Gothicization of the narrative. Indeed, Freed’s treatment of space, in particular, consistently relies on Gothic strategies. The heroine’s trajectory multiplies prisonlike spaces which fit with the Gothic tradition since its origins. 58 Like a Radcliffian heroine, Thea goes from prison to prison, starting with her mother’s house, where she

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is held almost captive for fear her father, who does not live with them, might try to take her away. Thea’s seclusion is epitomized by “the padlock on [the] gate,” 59 a recurrent motif in the first pages of the novel, and by her mother’s suspicious attitude toward any man who might want to take her daughter away from her. When she invites “the Syrian” to her house with Thea’s father, she immediately regrets its, suspecting him of having “had a wife and murdered her” and adding: “They kill them for their jewelry, you know, burn down the so-called villa with the wife locked in it. Quite barbaric!” 60 The mother’s suspicions about the Syrian encapsulate many motifs of Gothic fiction, from the traditionally pejorative assertion that anything or anyone foreign is “barbaric,” a notion reinforced by the exclamation mark, to the intertwined motifs of marriage, violence, entrapment, and death. In the mother’s imagination, the Syrian becomes a threatening figure of alterity reminiscent of traditional Gothic villains. 61 He thus becomes a hybrid figure, between Bluebeard and a Gothic villain. The association between the Syrian and entrapment is announced early in the narrative when Thea and the man are alone together in the same room for the first time: “And then suddenly he reaches out and closes his hand around my foot. ‘Do you know what a beautiful woman you are?’ . . . Up here we are invisible in the silence, he and I. We are his hand on my foot.” 62 The relationship between the much older man and the very young woman is thus immediately defined as physical, emotional, almost irrational, and based on the domination and imprisonment of Thea by Naim. But the mother herself is a threatening figure who holds her daughter captive in her house: Even if the Syrian were to come for me, how would he get past her door? She is like Cerberus, she sees everything, she hears everything too, even when she’s snoring. Once, when I was home for the holidays and my mother was inland, my father came to the gate and made a fuss. He threatened Maude, and shouted, and said that he would bring the police. But she only shouted back. She picked up a stick and threatened to hit him with it. After that, my mother bought a thicker padlock, and had a new wrought-iron fence put in, with sharp, curved spikes along the top. 63

The detailed and visual description of the gate vividly suggests the mother’s ambiguity as both loving and stifling, an all-controlling keeper of keys: “My mother keeps every key to the house on a ring attached to her bag. When she goes inland, she hands the ring over to Maude.” 64 The mother’s attitude leads Thea to fear permanent imprisonment: “And I will stay locked up here until I am too old and too ugly to matter anymore.” 65 Yet, Thea manages to elope with the Syrian, but the motif of entrapment is echoed and redoubled by the spaces she goes to. Even the “huge, grey ship” 66 on board which she flees is described in terms which are reminiscent

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of the characteristics of Gothic buildings: “It looms above us, dark and terrifying, with green slime on the sides and on the ropes that hold it in place.” 67 The motif of imprisonment expressed in Gothic terms is therefore taken up and developed, especially as Thea feels unable to escape once they sail North, which leads her to wonder: “What would be the point of running away? All my papers are locked in the safe. And anyway, where would I go? And why?” 68 Thea therefore navigates from one carceral space to the next, so that when they reach the island where her husband is taking her, both the island and the house are also described in Gothic terms, recalling, again, Radcliffe’s novels, particularly the famous scene in The Mysteries of Udolpho where the protagonist, Emily, approaches the castle through sublime landscapes. 69 In House of Women, Thea reaches the island not by traveling through picturesque mountains covered by pine forests, but by sea, in a similarly staged, or theatrical, manner because the mist veils and unveils the island to the young woman’s eyes: “But there was trouble landing, everything covered in mist. And then when the mist lifted, I forgot completely what I had imagined it would be like—villa and gardens and dogs—because there was the island, steep and high, like a mountain rising out of the sea. The sea itself was calm all around, with bright sun, and boats in the distance. But even so the island was cold, bitterly cold and windy.” 70 Like Udolpho, the island stands like a desolate mountain in the middle of a lovely, picturesque landscape. The “calm” sea with its “bright sun, and boats in the distance,” reminds readers of the countryside Emily leaves behind, “the campagna of Italy, where cities and rivers, and woods and all the glow of cultivation were mingled in gay confusion.” 71 Like Udolpho, perched “along the brow of a precipice above” 72 Emily, the Syrian’s villa is built on the island’s summit and has to be reached by means of a funicular. And, like Thea’s mother’s house, like the ship, and like the island, the villa is described in terms which are strongly reminiscent of Gothic novels: All you can see of the villa from the garden is the massive front door under a stone archway, and shuttered windows on either side. When you go in, though, it is enormous, with the bedrooms at the bottom and the mountain falling away under your feet. All of the rooms except the kitchen and his study look out over the sea on the other side of the mountain. When you look out there, it is as if the gardens in the front don’t exist, because it is as bleak and bare as it was coming up. The villa is bleak too, with its winding passages and stone stairways, and its large, gloomy rooms. 73

As in Udolpho, in which the castle is described by the omniscient narrator through Emily’s eyes, as shown by the repetition of phrases like “Emily gazed” or “Emily continued to gaze,” 74 the Syrian’s house in House of Women is described through Thea’s eyes. Thanks to the first-person narration,

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Thea’s feelings and expectations are projected onto the Gothicized building she is discovering. All the paraphernalia of Gothic castles crop up in the description, from the place’s architectural characteristics, both carceral and labyrinthine, like the “massive front door under a stone archway” or the “winding passages and stone stairways, to its more subjectively “bleak” and “gloomy” features. But what is particularly striking is Thea’s apparent ambivalence toward all these carceral spaces in which she feels trapped but which she longs for when she leaves them, just as she longs for their owners. The whole novel is based on a constant sense of displacement, and the Gothicized features of Thea’s “homes” seem to suggest that the young woman is constantly unsettled. Choosing to rewrite the myth of Persephone may be Freed’s way of fictionalizing the condition of the exiled writer and the sense of permanent displacement which she repeatedly describes in her essays. No wonder, then, if Thea wants to go home to her mother when she is at her husband’s place but conversely wants to go back to her husband and her children when she is at her mother’s house. The ambiguity of the novel partly lies in the fact that both houses seem to be the two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same prisonlike space where Thea remains childlike and powerless. Subjected to Nalia’s authority as a child, she becomes one of her husband’s possessions when she follows him to his island. Her marriage is depicted in terms reminiscent of Angela Carter’s neo-Gothic fairy tale “The Bloody Chamber,” in which the combination of the motif of a castle on a Gothicized island and of an older, Bluebeard-like husband enables Carter to denounce the excesses of patriarchy. The title of Freed’s House of Women encapsulates the novel’s ambiguities because the reader is led to wonder what “house” it refers to: Does it refer to Nalia’s house, where Thea lives with her mother and Maude or to Naim’s house? Freed’s narrator explicitly voices the criticism of patriarchy which is often more implicit in female Gothic. Thus, after giving in to her husband’s sexual advances, Thea describes her state of mind in almost Kristevian terms: Even though I am his wife, it is not as his wife that I go up to his study. It is as someone I have never been before, Ma, not even in my dreams. When I am with him in there, I am furious and grasping. I am helpless and abject and shameless. And my father is wrong. The stinking swamp is not marriage at all. It is up there, in that study. What is marriage anyway, but a form of theft? Someone taken, someone left behind. But with this, I am his, I will always be his. And I know there is no way back. 75

Thea’s self-description seems to borrow both from Julia Kristeva’s suggestion in Etrangers à nous-mêmes that leaving one’s country, one’s family, and one’s language for a new place leads to sexual frenzy 76 and from her analysis of abjection in Powers of Horror, in which she explains, as Christine Berthin

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puts it, that the abject is “the state in between object and subject, the stage when the subject, not yet a subject, has not completed its separation from the body of the mother.” 77 Thea seems to be reduced to her sexual desire and reified by her monstrous husband-jailer. 78 It is significant that she addresses her mother directly, emphasizing the fact that she is torn between Nalia and Naim, a passive object rather than a subject. Another example is when Naim tells her that she does not have a home to return to because her mother has locked up her house and gone to the mountains: “Come,” he says, “come with me.” He takes my hand and leads me like a child to the divan. I let him lay me back there and close my eyes with his fingertips, trace my eyebrows, my cheeks, my jaw, my neck. It is as if he is a blind man trying to know what he cannot see. His touch is so light that it is almost nothing, and yet it stops everything but the knowledge that I am living two lives, the one in which I know what I think and what I want, and the other this—his hands at my waist, on my hips, lifting me like a cup, like a bowl, so that I am nothing without him to use me like this, and I will never be free. 79

This passage emphasizes Thea’s passivity, both through the comparison, first between herself and a child, and then between herself and an object whose function is merely to be used by Naim, and through the final statement which shows unambiguously that she is forever his, forever a prisoner in his Gothic mansion. Another striking aspect is the way in which Thea’s body seems to be reduced to its parts and not perceived as a whole: the enumeration of eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, jaw, neck, and later waist and hips, thus testifies to her partial desubjectification under her husband’s touch. Thea’s “two lives” correspond to two versions of herself, as a thinking subject and as a passive object, a basic duality which informs the novel and redoubles the duality she already felt when she lived with her mother. What is suggested here is that she merely escaped from one form of imprisonment to fall into another trap, from entrapment in her mother’s house and will to entrapment in her husband’s house and sexual desire. More generally, doubling, a typically Gothic motif, seems to be omnipresent in House of Women on different levels. The duality of space triggers a more general duality, which turns the characters into pairs of identical or opposed doubles. Thea herself perceives her mother as her own double, as shown by the scene at the beginning of the novel where they both look at Thea’s reflection in the mirror, a classic way of representing both identity and duality: “When I look in the mirror, it is she who is behind me, looking too.” 80 Reflected in the same mirror, mother and daughter are presented as two versions of the same person—hence, the necessity for the girl to flee and become a distinct subject because “for Nalia, the girl has always been the flesh and echo of herself—her furious persistence, her pride, her revenge.” 81 Mother figures are also redoubled: Maude, who helps Nalia look after Thea,

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arouses her boyfriend Sonny’s jealousy, so that he asks Maude: “Who is she to be sad? Your own daughter?” 82 Maude even wants to call her baby Thea if it’s a girl. Father figures also abound and function as mirrors or echoes of one another: Thea’s father is in fact her husband’s cousin, thus creating a disturbing doubling effect between the two men. And, of course, Katzenbogen functions as Thea’s father’s double; Nalia even reveals to him in a melodramatic scene that he is the young woman’s real father. 83 Siblings also function as pairs or doubles: Thea, an only child, finds out that she has a half-sister, the mysterious blind woman she meets on the island when she escapes, who tells her that “[t]he man who came to my mother was your father. He is my father too” 84—a fact which can hardly be checked but contributes to the dazzling impression that all the characters echo one another. The motif of doubling is even pushed to its most extreme form with Thea’s children, who are twins and are taken care of by Sonja, Naim’s half-sister, a witchlike figure who excludes Thea from her own life. Significantly, Sonja is heard treading down the passage, “her keys clinging in her pocket. She has keys to every room in the villa, even to Naim’s study.” 85 The motif of the keys obviously links her both to Thea’s mother and to Naim, turning her into their double. But the narrative suggests that she is Thea’s double as well, replacing her as a mother figure for the twins, so that Thea is forced to watch them from afar, “like a ghost. . . . And so I squat where I am, in the shadow of a tree, silent, watching like a thief.” 86 The specular nature of their relationship is reinforced by the fact that each of the two women is jealous of the other’s relationship with Naim. This specularity is epitomized by a scene where Thea secretly watches Sonja trying on her own dress: “I watch her wanting it for herself, and I am frozen with hard pleasure. The dress is mine, the children are mine as well. They are more mine than anyone else’s, even Naim’s. One day, I will tell them this. I will find a way to rip them from his eyes. But, for now, I must wait.” 87 The combined violence and ambiguity of the scene point to the complexity of the relationships between the characters. Indeed, it can be argued that the dazzling accumulation of doubling effects creates an almost infinite pattern of doubling which challenges the possibility of any stable identity. The novel’s Gothic spaces, therefore, become the site where Gothic identities are staged in a kaleidoscopic way. Family identities, in particular, are placed under the sign of repetition— yet another typically Gothic motif. Nalia, for instance, identifies with her own grandmother, whom she dreams about repeatedly after her daughter’s departure for the island. But the grandmother’s image becomes indistinct: “she is confused with the girl herself, with Nalia, too. Every night, Nalia expects a visit from all three.” 88 Such lack of differentiation between the generations is not merely attributable to Nalia. Thea fantasizes a similar blurring of boundaries among herself, her mother, and her daughters, about whom she thinks: “And yet I know that they are mine as surely as I am yours.

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They are mine and they are yours. They are ours together.” 89 This nearsyllogistic series of sentences suggests a form of genealogical continuity which disturbingly eliminates the children’s father from their line of engenderment and points to a fantasy of matrilineage giving a new meaning to the novel’s title: The “house of women” might be this female family where women give birth to women, a revisiting of the genealogical trope familiar to the readers of Gothic fiction since The Castle of Otranto. The Gothicization of matrilineage is confirmed by Thea’s relationship with her twin daughters, whose ambiguity seems to be encapsulated in a passage in which the young woman dances with her children in her arms. Thea first sings to Nema: “‘My mother has left me,’ I sing softly into her hair, ‘left me, left me, left me,’” 90 ambiguously referring either to herself or to her own mother—or to both. She then picks up her other daughter, Mina: “They are heavy on my hips, both of them, but as I begin to dance, they lighten, and the laughter becomes a kind of song, a kind of scream among us. We are a three-headed monster howling together, orphaned, homeless, happy.” 91 The ternary gradation ending the sentence, “orphaned, homeless, happy” points to a state of paradoxical unity between mother and daughters. Undistinguished, they become a dual creature who both sings and screams, oxymoronically characterized by fusion and separation. This suggests that in House of Women identity is constructed only through a paradoxical fusion with the other—as if the women in the family only existed in relation to others, but others who are extensions of themselves. Mothers and daughters are codependent, as shown, as well, by Nalia’s apparent disorientation once Thea is gone: “Now that she is gone, Nalia is back with herself, like a visitor—someone who has come out of the shadow and is trying to remember her own name.” 92 The loss of identity epitomized by the loss of her own name seems to suggest that she could only exist as Thea’s mother. Simultaneously, while she is away from Nalia, Thea underlines her dependence on her mother and her mother’s voice: “Even when she is silent, her voice is everywhere around me. Everything I see, I see for her.” 93 Such codependence might explain the doubling process which also characterizes the narration. If the first four chapters of House of Women are written in the first person by an autodiegetic narrator, Thea, the rest of the novel oscillates between chapters in the third person which are often focalized by Thea’s father, Maude, or Nalia and chapters told in Thea’s voice. But despite this apparent alternation between two spaces and two perspectives, the boundaries between the chapters seem porous, as mother and daughter, in particular, tend to use the same words and phrases, thus undermining the division between them. For instance, the phrase “the King of Nonentities,” 94 uttered in direct speech by Thea to refer to her father, is echoed by “He is the King of Nothing” 95 in a passage in free indirect speech voicing Nalia’s concerns about her daughter and the part possibly played by her father in a hypothetic return. A few pages later, Thea uses the same phrase, but about

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her husband: “I only know that, even if he is nothing—even if he is the King of Nothing—I can’t help it, Ma, I am glad to see him.” 96 This example shows the way in which the apparently distinct narrative threads following respectively mother and daughter while they are apart contaminate each other; just like places and characters, narration is characterized by echoes and repetitions. Such narrative porosity foreshadows a form of repetition which is made explicit at the end of the novel after Nalia’s death: “But I know now that I will go back with Naim, and that I will keep my mother’s lie hidden, as she did herself. One day, I will tell him the truth. But first, I’ll find a way to bring my children here. I will put the padlock back on the gate, and ask Katzenbogen to return my diaries to me. Until then, I will leave my mother’s notebook locked in her drawer, and I will lock up the house as she did.” 97 Thea’s plans seem to suggest that genealogy, in typical Gothic fashion, has been turned into mere repetition, as shown by the recurrence of the motif of the padlock on the gate, which was supposed to prevent her from going out and now becomes her own way of keeping her daughters inside the house. Her new motherless condition makes her wonder who she is: “What are [my diaries] anyway without her to hear them? Without her to listen? What am I myself, now that I am no longer a daughter?” 98 The answer provided by the novel’s ending might be that she has become her mother’s double and has turned from female prisoner to Gothic jailer. However, it also may suggest that she remains her mother’s daughter by planning to repeat the same patterns. Such a systematic Gothicization of both space and subject in House of Women significantly points to a basic duality which characterizes both Freed’s characters and Freed herself, the duality of the exiled, who lives between two countries, just as Thea lives between two houses and two people—her mother and her husband. Freed’s novels, from Home Ground to House of Women, can be read as variations on the same theme. They all express a sense of displacement, an in-between identity. In House of Women she uses Gothic motifs to express the anxieties generated by unbelonging, by leaving home. This could be extended to another of her novels, The Servants’ Quarters, in which literary displacement expresses displaced identities. The Gothic motifs in her work may point to a contradiction between her explicit praise of displacement in her essays and a deeper anxiety of unbelonging—or not belonging; while she repeatedly claims her happiness with being displaced, all her novels take place in South Africa and can be read as expressing a form of South African identity—displaced but South African. In that sense, it illustrates her idea, quoted previously, that “[i]n a battle of competing truths, fiction, if it is done right, will always win over what fondly passes for fact. Of course it will. It is life on the page. It has made order out of chaos, sense out of the senseless. It has given shape to lives that, without the intervention of the writer, had only the shape of chronology to them—that is

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to say, one long line . . . Life is a mess; fiction is orderly.” 99 If we take this to be true, we may contend that Freed’s novels give access to a deeper truth than her autobiographical texts about leaving home as a form of liberation. It also testifies to the fact that even when exile has been freely chosen, it affects identity—real and literary. But another hypothesis may also be ventured. In a quote from Home Ground which has already been mentioned, Freed writes: “Home, I thought, trying to turn the lump in my throat into tears. I stared down at the smoke hanging low over a kraal. Home, I thought. Home, home, home. But my father’s nostalgia wouldn’t work on me. My heart lifted instead, I remembered that I could come back. Jocelyn had been right. I could leave and I could return. Like Maya. I was free.” 100 The mention of Freed’s father (“my father’s nostalgia wouldn’t work on me”) may point to another equation in Freed’s work: an equation between family and place, which has been at the center of my reading of House of Women and also features prominently in Home Ground, in which leaving South Africa does not merely mean leaving a place but also leaving her family and asserting her difference. In Home Ground the protagonist’s family, like the families of all Freed’s heroines, is Jewish. This is an aspect of her fiction which must not be overlooked. Her novels teem with references to Jewishness and Jewish identity coupled with a sense of haunting associated with the Second World War. In The Servants’ Quarters, for instance, Mr. Harding himself seems to literally embody the war, an association which turns him into a kind of monster as a textual web of Gothic-like comparisons is woven around him: he is described “looking down at us like a ghost,” 101 and even refers to himself as “this monster, this vision of Hell.” 102 He is also the cause of the heroine’s nightmares about the war, which she never experienced directly but only through secondhand narratives: “What I couldn’t tell her was that the war was becoming a terror for me, too—that it had taken the shape of Mr. Harding’s scarred, pink, dented head with its freckles, and its false eye, and its sprouts and tufts of hair. Just as I’d be squinting to block out the bad side of it, he’d twist the whole thing around to look down at me and say, ‘Would you pass the butter please, Cressida?’” 103 Much later in the novel, Harding himself underlines the link between himself and Cressida’s nightmares: “Until last night it had never occurred to me that the horror could come alive for someone who hadn’t been born until it was over—brought back into existence, if you will, by my own misplaced pedantry. That, and the horror of my own face and head. Ha!” 104 The intertwined motifs of horror and haunting aptly place the Second World War nightmares under the sign of haunting, suggesting that Harding is the ghost of a traumatic memory which has been passed on to Cressida—an individual instance of what Alison Landsberg has analyzed as “prosthetic memory” 105 on the collective level, and which enables memories to be shared through cultural objects like films or books, regardless of the ethnic or cultu-

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ral background of the memory’s receiver. The constitutive elements of prosthetic memory are its unnatural or inorganic nature, the fact that, like an artificial limb, it can be worn on the body, its interchangeability and exchangeability in the commodified form, and its usefulness and capacity to produce real feelings and empathy. 106 Harding’s memories of the war are shared through books he lends to Cressida’s family, and they obviously are characterized by empathy 107 because Miranda, and then Cressida, have nightmares where they experience the same terror as he did during the war. As in House of Women, Harding’s terrifying aspect also characterizes his house, Harding’s Rest, so that on Cressida’s first visit there she is scared of the statues, “dark and old and horrible” and of the kist, in which “anything could have been hiding . . . , waiting to lift the lid and jump out at [her].” 108 Harding’s office is “even darker than the hall,” and there Cressida realizes that “when you didn’t have money, anyone could just come down the road and tell you where you had to live, whether you liked it or not. Tonight the Germans would be coming up the wall again, and there was nothing I could do about it. War! I kept saying to myself, it’s war, not wall! But nothing helped. Germans were always climbing up the wall now, it was easy for them. And there would never be anyone to help me, nowhere for me to hide.” 109 The narrative thus initially, and subjectively—through first-person narration—constructs her as a victim and Harding as a Gothic villain. The novel plays on motifs similar to Jane Eyre because Cressida belongs to a lower social class than Harding and because she comes to live at Harding’s Rest as a companion for Harding’s old mother in replacement of the former governess—a substitution which is, unsurprisingly, described in Gothic terms when Harding tells Cressida he is going to have the servants prepare a different room for her: “I’ll have to alert my mother or she’ll think she’s seeing a ghost. Can you stand the company of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s ghost for another night or so until the servants get it ready?” 110 The marriage between Cressida and Harding, beyond the rather obvious class displacement I have already mentioned, might be read as an illustration of the contradictions of the heroine: She literally marries the embodiment of the war, but he soon commits suicide because the consequences of his war wound are slowly killing him and he refuses to become a weight for his young wife. Cressida’s marriage to Harding could be read as a manifestation of the impossibility to get rid of memories of the war for a Jewish writer and as the trace of a deeper, and different, anxiety. The ghostlike, monstrous, ambiguous figure of Harding might not only express her protagonist’s “prosthetic memory” but also Freed’s own “postmemory.” Discussing the difference between these two forms of transmitted memory, Amy Kaminsky argues that, “unlike postmemory, prosthetic memory does not imply a generational difference. Moreover, it is not transmitted via family or other close

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personal ties. Postmemory and prosthetic memory are, by definition, transferred from one subject to another. They are forms of secondary memory. The impact of postmemory is intergenerational. But whereas postmemory is diachronic, prosthetic memory is synchronic.” 111 She adds that although prosthetic memory is deliberate, postmemory is often inadvertent. Postmemory was defined by Marianne Hirsch in the context of the Holocaust as “a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience”: Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experience of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one´s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. 112

Postmemory may help us to understand Freed’s Gothicization of the Second World War. Indeed, Freed herself makes no mystery of her Jewish origins. In Home Ground for instance, Ruth’s mother tells her a fairy-tale version of her own story, starting with the family’s European origins: “Once upon a time in a country called Lithuania, there lived a poor Jewish family—a man and his wife and their three children. . . . One day the father heard there was a country at the bottom of Africa where people, even Jews, could go and find diamonds and gold and riches. He sold everything he owned and bought five tickets on an old leaky boat to take his family to that magical country.” 113 The “magical country” is, of course, South Africa—and the embedded story does shed light on Ruth’s family and on Freed herself. Both the writer and her fictional heroine have inherited their Jewish mothers’ history of resettling to South Africa, and most of Freed’s novels can be read as variations on this theme, thus evincing her appropriation of what Hirsch calls “postmemory,” that is, a common history of migration—and the history of the Holocaust, which fascinated Freed, as she explains at length in the opening essay of Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, in which she narrates how her imagination was shaped by her readings when she was a child. In her parents’ study, she remembers, she was “allowed to read whatever was available.” 114 When she found a pile of books about the Holocaust, she became obsessed with them:

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Chapter 2 As soon as I discovered their existence, I returned to them obsessively, reading book after book and then rereading them, looking up words I did not understand, scrutinising the horrifying photographs so that, even to this day, they are burned into memory. In contrast to the comfortable remove at which I felt myself from the horrors of received children’s fiction, nothing separated me from those of the Holocaust. They seemed quite able to reach off the shelf, out of a book, and swallow me. Other children I knew dreaded bogeymen under the bed, emblems, no doubt, of the revolution their parents expected to happen one day. My demons, however, were Nazis with guns and gas ovens. Having one’s throat slit by the next-door neighbour’s servant someday in the distant future seemed mild by comparison.” 115

These books, then, were the tools through which a collective, Jewish postmemory was transmitted to young Freed—thus providing the source for Cressida’s nightmares in The Servants’ Quarters. The novel’s Gothicization of the Second World War can therefore be read, as often with Freed’s novels, as a fictionalization of Freed’s own experience in the house where she grew up, a house which, she contends, “is in everything [she] write[s].” 116 In an essay published in the Jewish Quarterly in 1996 and titled “Being Jewish, Looking Jewish,” Freed explains that she “always ha[s] had a horror of being held captive—in a place, in a role, in an image.” “Among Jews, I feel a little Gentile; among Gentiles, I long for the company of a Jew or two” 117—thus confirming the sense of permanent displacement which has already been pointed out. However, Freed also affirms her undoubtedly Jewish identity: “Despite the strange combination of worlds and religions, I was never in any confusion as to what I was. I was Jewish in a Gentile world.” 118 Freed repeatedly insists on her sense of being a diasporic writer, as in Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, in which she states that “I was an expatriate, living in America. And that is where I would remain.” 119 She highlights the “distance” expatriation gave her: “Confronting daily the anomaly of my presence in a country that was both my home and could never be home to me, I found it easy to contemplate the conundrum of alienation and belonging. Alienation became my subject. In fact, it was my subject long before I even left home.” 120 Unsurprisingly, she refers to V. S. Naipaul, quoting from an interview in which he declared, “Leaving home was an immensity. I’ve been trying all my life to express that, the bigness of that. The central experience of my life.” 121 Like Naipaul, Freed seems to have found a home in fiction rather in a real place. It is my contention, then, that the unsettledness which characterizes both her own life and her protagonists’ is repeatedly expressed in various rewritings of Gothic motifs expressing an anxiety of unsettledness. Considering her complex relationship to Jewry, which displays the same kind of tension between belonging and unbelonging as to South Africa, it may be argued that Freed’s identity as a writer is not easily pinpointed and that more than “expat,” as she puts it, this identity is, rather, diasporic. Claiming for

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herself the identity of “expat writer” may not be a way of unbelonging but, instead, a way of belonging to a Jewish diasporic identity, which is found, precisely, in the “sense of permanent displacement” she claims for herself and expresses through Gothic tropes. Both space and identity, in Freed’s fiction become uncanny—a permanent and disturbing mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Because of this complex relationship to expatriation, Freed is not to be thought of as an emblem of all white South African writers’ perception and representation of home. She must not be perceived either as a representative of all South African Jewish writers’ relationship to their country. Many of them feel perfectly comfortable with staying in South Africa and thinking of the country as their home. The most obvious example is Nadine Gordimer, whose essays and fiction never stopped interrogating what it meant to be a white writer in South Africa. Despite her initial difficulties to feel at home in a country divided by apartheid and racial tensions, 122 she eventually expressed her satisfaction at having managed to forge an identity for herself after the end of apartheid: “I was born in that place, but it is only now that I can feel undivided identity with it, the place where my color doesn’t matter, where I have no rights denied others. Such a place is the only real face of home.” 123 As Nancy Topping Bazin explains in her overview of Gordimer’s “fictional selves,” this vision is quite idealistic 124 but testifies to a belief in the possibility to be “home” in post-apartheid South Africa. This shows that Freed’s position is deeply individual and may differ from other writers’ perception of home from abroad—whether their exile has been chosen or not. And yet, the way in which she handles her restlessness in her fiction and essays can be usefully read as an emblem of the ambiguities characterizing some white writers’ sense of displacement. What is more, the notion of “home” in this chapter is also to be understood in a more literal way as the building where characters live—a permanently central feature in Gothic fiction, which was born out of a revived interest in Gothic architecture. “ANTI-DWELLINGS?” DESTABILIZING “HOME” Home: A “Dangerous Sign” Bachelard observes in his Poetics of Space that houses are essentially vertical and characterized by a “polarity from the cellar to the attic” 125 opposing the “rationality” of the roof to the “irrationality” of the cellar: he “explains that the clear outline of the roof and the definite pattern of rafters in the attic are conducive to rational thinking, but that the cellar is ‘first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces.’” 126 Elizabeth Durot-Boucé contends that Bachelard’s conception of houses as vertical is particularly prominent in Gothic buildings, whose verticality per-

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haps constitutes the most basic feature. 127 Simultaneously, these vertical buildings, with their towers, turrets, labyrinthine corridors, winding stairs, and underground cellars, have always been pointed out as the tools necessary for Gothic narratives to unfold: “the fact that the birth of the literature of terror was simultaneous with the first Gothic renewal in architecture is not a coincidence: the diegesis needs the enclosed space of the castle . . . to achieve darkness.” 128 Classically, this verticality has always been used in Gothic fiction to stage the return of the repressed, a repressed reemerging from subterranean passages and brought to light in the upper parts of the building. As Durot-Boucé suggests, “subversion cannot be achieved without the subterranean.” 129 In eighteenth-century Britain, the vertical tension between subterranean, hidden spaces and the more visible parts of Gothic buildings staged the anxieties of Enlightenment. 130 Another major duality inherent in Gothic buildings is the tension between imprisonment and freedom, which determines the ways in which the subject can, or cannot, settle in them. “Imprisonment is an obsession in Gothic fiction, which favors enclosed places for its settings. . . . There is not a Gothic novel in which there is no cell.” 131 Such a systematic inclusion of enclosed spaces enables writers to stage the mechanisms of repression which accompanied the emergence of the Enlightenment and were brought to light in Gothic fiction. Thus, in eighteenth-century Gothic novels, convents became “anti-dwellings” so that their natural function as asylums was inverted, leading to a “shrinking of space.” 132 In other words, Gothic buildings have always been fundamentally ambivalent, combining the homely and the unhomely within the same space to create uncanny effects. This fundamental ambivalence of buildings and homes has remained present throughout the history of the Gothic mode, even when it migrated in time and space. However, as Jennifer Lawn suggests in her analysis of New Zealand Gothic, Internal spaces, and the architectural façades that belie these spaces, remain a powerful and familiar domain for the concentration of Gothic energies. This feature of Gothic phenomenology not only survives migration to the new world, but if anything intensifies through unflinching depictions of domestic life and the sick nuclear families associated with it. “Home” is a dangerous sign, in part because mythologies of security, safety, and fulfilment continually work overtime to obscure their own fragility: intimate relationships both sustain us and strip us bare; a thin border separates safe enclosure from entrapment; and . . . transmissions flow secretly and seemingly uncontrollably from one generation to the next.” 133

The fundamental ambivalence of home, which turns it into a “dangerous sign,” is often expressed through Gothic strategies, through the juxtaposition of the reassuring values of domesticity with terrors emerging from the build-

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ings’ subconscious. The equation of the subterranean with the subconscious is one of the reasons why Gothic buildings have often been analyzed in psychoanalytical terms, 134 particularly through the suggestion that the space of the castle is a “prime site for psychological exploration.” 135 Gothic labyrinths and dark corridors can often be interpreted as figurations of the dark recesses of the soul. As Lawn points out, the sometimes contradictory and ambivalent values of Gothic homes are not altered when the Gothic travels to new locations; in post-apartheid Gothic too, buildings become a literary stage for terrors expressing an ambivalent conception of home reflecting the individual and collective anxieties of white writers in the so-called “new” South Africa. In the rest of this chapter, I will therefore examine a few novels by white writers which seem emblematic of the ambiguity of their relation to home. Gothicized homes become a site for exploring collective identities, a sense of general displacement, but also—and, again, in typically Gothic fashion—a more gendered kind of anxiety. Significantly, a number of white writers also choose to revisit the farm novel, a genre which, in itself, bears a number of resemblances with Gothic fiction, notably a capacity to express problematic relationships among place, self, history, and identity. Gendered spaces: Shark’s Egg In her study of Gothic literature, Berthin relies on Kristeva’s notion of abjection, an intermediary state between object and subject, to analyze the “association between the abject, the feminine and the maternal” in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, in which “the subterranean crypt of the convent concentrates all the desire and the horror liberated in the novel. The crypt is like the underskirt of the convent, a hidden, private world, which looks like a womb with its dark corridors and recesses.” 136 In The Monk, then, “the catacombs are the spatial equivalent of the Bleeding Nun.” 137 Berthin’s analysis points to one of the possible interpretations of the various crypts and subterranean spaces whose omnipresence in Gothic fiction has already been highlighted. In a number of Gothic works of fiction, the repressed which reemerges from the underground spaces of the home is femininity itself. 138 As I have already tried to show in my reading of Freed’s House of Women, the Gothic castle’s avatars are universally recognized as a female symbol: “the plot, always the same, is about the relationship between a young woman and an architecture.” 139 Of course, this initially applied to Radcliffian novels as well as to Jane Austen’s parody in Northanger Abbey but might not be totally appropriate for later avatars of the Gothic like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Yet, Lévy remarks that in the twentieth century, a number of popular writers have chosen to revert to this relatively outdated form of Gothic fiction in novels about which he is extremely criti-

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cal. 140 But we may detect other ways of reinscribing the gendered space of Gothicized buildings in novels which are much less formulaic than the marketed avatars whose stereotyped narrativization of femininity is lamented by Lévy. Interestingly, Lévy comments on the apparently invariant structures at work in the “poorly-written” popular novels he criticizes. “The real villain, in these stories, is invariably the castle, whose architectural presence confines, immures, locks up and tortures characters. It is really amazing that absolute evil should still be represented, nowadays, by structures inherited from another era, which may have appeared to be archaic. Does it mean that we should invest the castle with a permanence in imagination and a relative invariance?” 141 This hypothetically invariant value of the “castle” and its avatars is precisely what I would like to examine here, particularly in its gendered and subjective dimensions. My chosen example does not feature a “castle” per se but seems to rework the values of Gothic buildings in the South African context. Henrietta Rose-Innes’s debut novel Shark’s Egg is the story of a young woman, Joanna—who renames herself Anna in the course of the novel—and of her coming of age. Starting with her childhood memories of being a relative outsider, it tells the story of her encounter with Alan, with whom she soon chooses to live, and of her former friend Leah’s reappearance in their lives. Even if the novel is not explicitly Gothic, it does rework so many Gothic conventions that it can be described as Gothicized. The most obviously Gothic motif in the novel is that of duality, as suggested by the protagonist’s change of name and by the relationship between her and Leah. 142 This motif appears very early in the novel when Leah shows her mirror to her friend Joanna. The whole scene multiplies references to both duality and subjectivity (or identity); when Leah places the mirror on Joanna’s desk, the object is described in the following way: Leah had placed something in the middle of her desk: a round object the size of two fists, covered in strawberry-colored silk. It looked like a pink heart clasped in her thin brown hands. Intrigued, Joanna watched over Leah’s shoulder as she pressed the little bronze catch and the thing hinged apart: in each half a circular mirror was set into pearly silk. The circles of reflection trembled, holding briefly views of the ceiling, of Leah’s tan cheek, and of one amber eye. Joanna smiled back tentatively. 143

The description interweaves several Gothic motifs: the mirror, a traditional psychoanalytical symbol of identity, is described through consistent association with the body (“the size of two fists,” “a pink heart”), which suggests that the object is a metaphor for personal issues. The comparison between the mirror and “two fists” also introduces the motif of duality, which is also developed in the brief description of the object, which in fact does not hold one mirror, but two, in which, as Leah remarks to Joanna, “you can see both sides of your face at once.” 144 Duality is therefore suggested as being charac-

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teristic of the subject but also as the sign under which the relationship between the two girls will be placed throughout the novel. Indeed, Leah invites Joanna to put her face next to hers: “She leaned forward and put her cheek next to Leah’s. Together they peered into the little case, a face in each mirror.” 145 This time, what the mirrors reflect are not the two sides of the same face, but the two girls’ faces, which are therefore constructed as two mirror images of each other. Leah’s reaction is also significant and may foreshadow the ending of the novel: “‘You and me,’ breathed Leah, and slowly shut the reflections on each other. They locked together with a subdued snap of the catch. Joanna sat back in her seat, smiling uneasily. She imagined her reflection trapped inside the strawberry-silk box with Leah’s, knocking up against the mirrored walls.” 146 Leah’s apparently ordinary gesture brings together a sense of entrapment (“shut,” “locked,” “trapped,” “walls”) and subjectivity because everything is perceived through Joanna’s point of view. A number of apparently neutral terms seem to connote a sense of violence or cruelty (“slowly,” “snap”) and show that Joanna is affected by Leah’s gesture (“uneasily”). The final image of the two reflections locked together in the mirror is the result of her subjectivity (“she imagined”) rather than an objective notation. More importantly, through the motif of imprisonment, the mirror is assimilated to a building in which Joanna feels trapped, so that this apparently harmless scene seems to prefigure the articulation of space and subject in the rest of the novel, which will mostly be achieved in Rose-Innes’s use of a Gothicized building, Alan’s house. Joanna’s relationship with Alan, which starts on the banks of a dam, begins with visual exchanges. She watches him tossing a Frisbee from one side of the dam to the other and she takes a picture of him: “She had him now, caught in the metal trap of her camera.” 147 The image of Alan being trapped in the camera recalls the motif initiated by the earlier scene involving Leah’s mirror. Later, they meet again, on campus, where he is a handyman, and she suddenly decides to change her name for Anna when he asks her to tell him her name. This may suggest that their encounter has already begun to alter her identity. When they get to know each other better, Alan shows her a scar on his skull, the result of a diving accident, years before—thus leading Anna to remember Robbie, a boy who drowned when they were at school, a rather grim memory. 148 Just before Robbie drowned, she met him on the beach, and they kissed. Joanna’s perception of the encounter suggests that Robbie’s kiss was intended for Leah, with whom he left immediately afterward, and constructs Joanna as a ghostlike figure: “Straight through me, she thought. They never did see me . . . And all she got was this fake, sweet trace of alcohol on her lips; not even his real taste. It was as if he had not touched her.” 149 The fact that Anna suddenly remembers this scene when Alan shows her his scar indirectly creates connections between their relationship and Joanna’s brief encounter with Robbie. She even perceives Alan as a kind of

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reincarnation of the dead teenager: “Alive, alive, she wanted to shout: altered, older, but alive.” 150 The relationship is thus characterized from the outset by a pattern of doubling—the pair Anna/Alan seems to echo the pair Leah/ Robbie—and, therefore, carries dark undertones linked to Robbie’s tragic death. However, they are initially described as young and happy, and the love story starts in a fairly conventional way, when Alan invites Anna to come to his flat. The building looks like a lighthouse, Alan tells Anna beforehand, and is characterized by its verticality: She had imagined a tower out to sea, a round yellow sun, a blue wave curling like a pirate’s hook. The reality was brighter and dirtier: a narrow, tall building in one of those steep streets running up from the Muizenberg main road, painted white. When her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the entrance lobby, Anna made out mosaics on the walls: blue and gold sea horses, pocked with squares of brown gum where tiles had fallen off. In one corner, a spiral stair wound upwards; a high window was a piece of light set into the wall, too bright to look at. At her shoulder, a tiled sea horse stared with a glossy alien eye. 151

Even if the building is not Gothic at all, the description does include elements reminiscent of Gothic buildings: verticality, a spiral stair, contrasts between light and darkness, and decay (“squares of brown gum where tiles had fallen off”). What is more, Anna does not go directly to Alan’s flat by ascending the stairs but, instead, she climbs up “a zig-zag fire escape, made of silver steel mesh, like a vertical cage” 152 to join him on the rooftop, where he is painting the door of a shed. This moment of supposedly happy reunion between lovers is paradoxically characterized by rather negative feelings conveyed through Gothicized notations suggesting a sense of impending hostility and latent violence: Alan claims that he does not know any little girl, so that the girl Anna met on her way becomes a mysterious or ghostly figure; and Alan does not seem particularly happy to see Anna. “His dark glasses were impenetrably chromed, and he had not smiled at her yet . . . She almost stood aside, as one would move from the path of an oncoming car. But instead she held her ground, watching her distorted self approach in the lenses of his shades.” 153 She then takes a picture of him, raising her camera “like a gladiator’s mask,” 154 a simile which connotes latent violence. Once Alan takes her to his flat, Anna is “distracted by flash and glitter, a sense of hot, excessive light. There were mirrors everywhere on the walls: full-length, fish-eyes, slices and places of glass balanced above the lintels like exotic blades.” 155 The place, perceived through Anna’s subjective reactions to it, is therefore associated with both light and mirrors and does not entirely correspond to the attributes of the Gothic; although vertical and linked to a certain

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sense of unease, it is also characterized by excessive light rather than threatening darkness. Yet, gradually, as the narrative unfolds, the building and the flat become endowed with Gothic characteristics. First, when Anna drops out of art school, she spends a lot of time there and is unnerved by the many mirrors, which are explicitly described as aggressive and threatening because they force her to constantly face herself: “In the flat she could find no faces but her own, staring seriously back from the mirrored walls. The mirrors occupied the space aggressively, putting shine and movement into the corners of the rooms, ambushing her with unexpected planes of light.” 156 The flat becomes a place where her image is refracted and multiplied, somehow leading to a certain dissolution of her identity. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist, who spots a tiny woman on the yellow wallpaper of her room, Anna starts seeing “a woman’s pale face—not her own—retreating into the mirrored distance” 157 when she moves around the flat. The place, therefore, seems to be haunted, threatening her sense of self, so that she feels the need to find a refuge in the pages of her photo albums, where she can trace her own evolution. The albums provide the solid ground of a traceable identity which counters the ghosting process caused by the mirrors in Alan’s flat; they help Anna to understand who she was as a baby, a toddler, a child, and now as a young woman. The dark room where she works on her photographs of Alan, also provides a refuge, away from the excessive light of the flat and from its mirrors: “She liked it up there: the close sweet-smelling air, her own softly glowing red skin, the secretive alchemy of the chemicals. She felt hidden and safe, high above the highest tide”: 158 this room, an appendix to the house, a shed on the rooftop, seems to contradict Bachelard’s conception of the house. Indeed, Anna’s dark room is endowed with characteristics usually associated with cellars in Bachelard’s topoanalysis; it becomes a reassuring womb-like space, dark and enclosed, where she feels “hidden and safe.” It also seems to contradict the dynamics of Gothic buildings, where dark secrets emerge from such enclosed spaces and invade the rest of the building. Instead, its location reflects Anna’s sense of safety, which is consistently characterized in the novel by a taste for high places: the safe space of the dark room on the roof is redoubled by the safe space of the Mountain, up which she regularly climbs to be alone and where she feels at home. “It is my country, up there. I am at leisure in my own landscape. I decide where to go, and when; I turn left and right with no one’s permission; I climb, I touch the rocks, I fall and stand unseen. I talk and sing to myself out loud, I lie down and rub the soil onto my hands or crush the prickly scented leaves. Nothing harms me. It is different, here in the city. Here only a few paths are permitted.” 159 Unlike the city, with which it is explicitly contrasted, the mountain is emblematic of the way in which space and self become closely intertwined in Shark’s Egg: Anna’s “landscape” enables her to map her own self; it is a safe

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space, like the dark room (“nothing harms me,” she claims), where solitude allows her to shape her identity by moving around freely, without being constrained by society or alterity. However, when Anna finds a job at the aquarium in town, the dynamics of her relationship with Alan and her sense of self are affected. Seemingly at peace with herself and with her life, she gradually relinquishes her restlessness. Alan, on the other hand, spends more and more time in the flat, so that the dynamic of their relationship appears to be reversed. But the turning point of the novel is the chapter titled “Ghosts,” in which Leah reappears in Anna’s life at the aquarium. The description of their reunion recalls the mirror scene at the beginning, with its emphasis on dual identities perceived through Anna’s eyes: “The left side of the stranger’s face was green-lit, the other half in darkness. It occurred to Anna that she must be similarly masked.” 160 The motif of duality is taken up and developed once Leah has identified herself and comes to stay at Alan and Anna’s place: “Look, we match,” 161 Leah exclaims, and Anna has to agree: “In the lobby, she caught sight of their reflections in the glass door. They did indeed match each other: dark twins, the body and its shadow.” 162 This doubling pattern immediately creates an uncanny effect; Leah’s entrance into the flat is described as an unwelcome intrusion, the beginning of an unstoppable and threatening process. “As Leah slipped quickly past her into the flat, Anna had a sudden cold sensation that she had made a mistake, done something irreversible. As if she had opened a box and released something dark and cold and lithe.” 163 The process is not rendered objectively; rather, it entirely depends on Anna’s perspective, as suggested by the word sensation and the hypothetical clause which follows. And yet, despite this subjectivity, which associates dark undertones with individual perception, as in Gothic fiction, Leah’s behavior once she spots Alan sunbathing naked on the roof seems to confirm Anna’s impression. After exclaiming “Nice, very nice,” 164 she seems to mimic Anna’s gesture when she first visited the place: “She put her hand to her face and crooked her index finger, taking the picture with a camera made of air.” 165 This arrival scene turns home into an uncanny place where Anna’s identity is threateningly redoubled and initiates a process of dispossession through which Anna’s identity will slowly be stolen from her by Leah. Leah’s joke about her own black clothes which match Anna’s might be read as a clue pointing to the literary patterns Rose-Innes is playing with: “Black on black. Such goths,” 166 she says. Of course, Leah is referring to fashion, but the word goth also indirectly suggests that the novel revisits Gothic motifs. Here, in particular, what may be suggested is the fact that Leah is constructed as an avatar of the vampire, who will gradually and, metaphorically, suck away Anna’s life and identity from her as Anna is slowly removed from her own life, ghostified, and loses her physical connection with Alan. The association between Leah and a vampire is reinforced by the fact that she is a figure from

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Anna’s past, just as in Dracula the vampire embodied the return of a dark past threatening modernity. 167 Significantly, Anna’s gradual estrangement from Alan is expressed by the progressive transformation of their common home into an unhomely place: “But when she came home that evening, everything was different again . . . Anna felt she was visiting in some stranger’s kitchen.” 168 One scene, in particular, exposes the way in which both the place and her self are taken away from her: One day, she comes home to “loud orchestral music” by which she feels “affronted” 169 because she prefers silence. In the flat, Leah has spread all of Anna’s photographs of Alan and of rays and sharks at the aquarium. Indifferent to Leah’s enthusiasm, Anna keeps on insisting on the fact that the pictures are hers and is deeply affected by this appropriation—a feeling which is reinforced by the unsettling proximity she notices between Leah and Alan, so that her reaction, “But they’re mine, they’re of you,” 170 seems to blur the boundaries between her jealousy and her feeling of artistic ownership over her pictures. Anna’s reaction does not deter Leah from using the pictures to create a form of art—an art which is suitably placed under the sign of doubling, monstrosity, and space. Leah’s work is an appropriation of both Anna’s pictures and home and a duplication of her work which gives birth to “monsters.” “Now every evening Anna would return from work to find fresh monsters laid out on the lounge floor. Leah had started to make photocopies, multiplying the images with cancerous zeal.” 171 The adjective cancerous equates Leah’s work with disease, a variation on the classic association between the figure of the vampire and contagion or disease. 172 What is more, Leah removes the mirrors from the room to clear some space for her photocopies and her art work, a fairly obvious sign that while appropriating Leah’s home and pictures she is also slowly depriving her of her identity. “There had been beautiful things in those mirrors once: they had shown her a body, a face. But that was all going now. Without the mirrors, the room was less bright. The walls turned slowly darker—the photocopies like some kind of dull algae growing inch by inch across the plaster.” 173 Although the image of the algae elaborates on the idea of invasion initiated by the previous comparison with cancer, this passage also shows the transformation of Anna’s home, which slowly turns into a Gothic place characterized by darkness (“less bright,” “darker”) and leading to the dissolution of identity. “Suddenly Anna felt very lonely, with her reflection stripped from the walls—all those lovely pictures of herself.” 174 In Anna’s eyes, the flat is invaded by Leah’s “magic” 175 and latent violence, so that she becomes increasingly reluctant to go back there, and she starts walking up the mountain, as before, nearly every evening, before coming back to the “two strangers” 176 in her flat. Once home, when they talk at the dinner table, she is “far away, halfway up the mountain, suspended kilometers above their heads” 177 Both the moun-

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tain and the aquarium gradually become her real homes, while the flat simultaneously becomes unhomely: Sometimes Anna was tempted not to come home at all; to curl up in a dark corner of the aquarium and wait for morning, comforted by the night-light of the green tanks. After hours, Anna would linger near the sleepless sharks: their constant movement always soothed her, like white noise. She would lean her hands and then her forehead up against the glass, the fierce creatures patrolling centimeters from her face. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at death so easy and near; kept away by nothing stronger than a sheet of glass. 178

This reverie about the womb-like space of the aquarium, a dark, aquatic, soothing location where she pictures herself lying in fetal position, is a regressive fantasy which aims at countering the anxiety-ridden, invaded space of the flat. Anna’s walks up the mountain similarly take her to spaces close to water, like a reservoir where she watches “creatures curling and crawling beneath the mirror surface.” 179 But one day even the habitually reassuring space of the mountain becomes the site of an unsettling experience when she meets an apparently suicidal woman, who ignores her questions and acts as if she were not there at all. Unsettled by this disturbing encounter, Anna starts feeling unsafe on her walk back, and she almost runs over a man while driving back home. Her subsequent anxiety is unsurprisingly expressed in Gothic terms: “the world was breaking apart, grey ghosts entering through the cracks.” 180 When she arrives home, the place seems to be contaminated by the violence of this unsettling experience, and the flat seems to be characterized by a sense of impending violence epitomized by the knife Alan is holding and by the man’s darkness, which echoes the gradual darkness of the lounge since the removal of the mirrors: “His body seemed dense with shadow. Anna thought of black pigment dissolving into a glass of water: darkness diffusing through him. . . . The room grew quickly dimmer around them, shadow furniture piling up against the real. Alan’s darkness clung to her, smelling of smoke, paint, oil; of turpentine and fire.” 181 As previously noted, Alan’s transformation, like the flat’s, is expressed through internal focalization; it is the result of Anna’s perception of him but is not confirmed by any objective comment on the omniscient narrator’s part. In other words, as in Gothic fiction, because potential male violence is mediated through the female character’s gaze, it remains ambiguously associated with her subjectivity. 182 Anna’s “uncoupling” from Alan is described in animal and gendered terms, still based on her subjectivity: “it seemed that she was metamorphosing into something sleepless, cold-blooded, reptilian. . . . So Leah was also awake, listening to the night sounds. While Alan visited his grey dream country, the female of the species were wide-eyed, tracking with their heightened hearing

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his every mutter and snore. He seemed suddenly soft and human to Anna; vulnerable to such wakeful creatures as themselves.” 183 Nighttime becomes a time of reversal, when potential male violence is replaced by frailty, so that the “females of the species” have to watch over a man whom sleep has turned into a frail creature. The final stage of “uncoupling” from Alan and from their home occurs when Anna becomes ill at work, comes back early to an apparently empty flat where she feels “like a trespasser,” 184 and finally finds Alan and Leah having sex in the old darkroom which used to be her own womb-like refuge: the place is thus turned into an unfamiliar one in an uncanny moment of unrecognition where the bodies of Alan and Leah are perceived in a fragmented, disjointed way through the “gaps between the boards” 185 and cannot be perceived as whole. The regressive aspect of the scene is reinforced by the fact that Anna first perceives Leah as a “girl” rather than a woman, which makes it particularly disturbing: “A girl’s back, striped with light: sharp shoulder blades, narrow buttocks like a boy’s, naked. She might be twelve years old.” 186 It also reinforces the link between Leah’s reappearances and Anna’s childhood and can be read as a kind of reenactment of the scenes at the beginning of the novel, when Leah met with boys in the shed at school. Seeing Leah and Robbie walk into the shed, Joanna had been fascinated at the time: “She was invisible: she could stand up now, open the door and walk straight into the shed, and still they would not see her. Less than a mouse, less than a bird: I am a ghost, a pair of eyes only.” 187 The parallel between the scenes is also heightened by Joanna’s perception of the school shed as “a nest of shadow, a clot of blood in the corner of the sunlit world. Could nobody else hear the sounds that issued from it, the moans and cries? Could they not see the ghosts, those longing wraiths that loitered on the edges of the bright field?” 188 The whole scene on the rooftop, once again mediated through Anna’s perspective, seems to take the process of estrangement to its climax as Anna is contaminated by the darkness inside: “But still there was darkness in her stomach, behind her eyes.” 189 After fleeing from it, Anna realizes that Alan has become a complete stranger, a feeling which is described through spatial images: “She had not recognized him. Of course those had been his hands, his face: she knew them by heart. But he was changed, a stranger now— living in a foreign place where she had never been, speaking a new language.” 190 Significantly, the place she has fled to, and where she feels “safe” 191 is a children’s park with slides and swings. This confirms the pattern of regression also perceptible in her walks on the mountain or in the fantasy of staying at the aquarium. When Anna comes back to the flat, the process of Gothicization of the place is complete: “the lighthouse was inverted now, a darkhouse, projecting beams of shadow.” 192 And yet, paradoxically, it is in this “darkhouse” that Anna now feels able to counter the

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process of invasion and appropriation initiated by Leah and which has led to her own ghostification—her apparent elimination from Alan’s life and from the flat. The motif of ghosts and haunting, another typically Gothic theme, is found repeatedly in Shark’s Egg. In the early stages of the narrative, when Joanna is still a child, she describes herself as a ghostlike figure lacking substance, and again, this ghostification is described by means of a scene involving mirrors and self-perception. After Leah’s departure from the school Anna sat in class in “the traditional seat of ghosts who do not speak,” 193 writing her own name over and over, obsessively, trying to retain her identity but failing to do so, a process “leaving her nothing but a pair of eyes” 194—a phrase which was already used previously when she saw Leah and Robbie going into the shed. “These days, she hardly knew what she looked like—averting her gaze from any mirror or photograph, refusing the image. But despite her precautions, she would occasionally glimpse a translucent figure, reflected by a window or some other unanticipated surface. Pushing open the glass door of the art classroom, for example, she might see the pallid face swinging away in a rapid arc—a flying ghost, a trick; less substantial than breath on the pane.” 195 Her apparent ghostification is therefore described, again, as both a subjective and a visual phenomenon. However, in Rose-Innes’s precise writing, all the details matter; here, the fact that the chosen example shows Joanna catching a glimpse of herself in “the glass door of the art classroom” may foreshadow the fact that art will become her weapon to counter the threat of dissolution. Once a young adult, Joanna goes to art school, where she becomes Anna. Her physical description through the combined perspectives of the omniscient narrator, who compares her clothes to those of a “Victorian widow” 196 and of Joanna herself through internal focalization (“Joanna felt very dark next to the other students. . . . They must have found her strange—with her somber clothes, her small pictures, her silence—and she remained largely solitary” 197) seems to suggest Gothic undertones through the reference to Victorian times and the use of a lexicon referring to strangeness and darkness. Interestingly, at this stage of her life, it is not Joanna herself but her fellow students who lack substance. “Years later she would remember her classmates as butterflies, yellow and white, fluttering on the edges of a circle of vision. At the center, so much more substantial, were her own two hands, dark against a pale canvas. The fingers, though heavy with the tarnished rings and often smudged, were swift and clever: they knew how to handle ink and charcoal, cameras and knives.” 198 Significantly, what has given substance to Joanna’s body at this stage is her artistic gift, which turns her hands into something solid, useful, and reliable. Artistic practice is therefore constructed, through Joanna’s point of view, as the element which provides substance to her existence. And this is precisely why, in the final chapters of the novel, she counters her own ghostification by appro-

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priating Leah’s art just as Leah previously appropriated her own pictures. Intruding into her own flat—she left her keys inside the flat when she fled from it after finding Alan and Leah together in the dark room—she first takes a shower to wash herself clean, literally and metaphorically. The trope of rebirth is made explicit when Anna feels that “now she did not smell like Alan, or herself, or any human thing. Rather like some new being, young and raw.” 199 This “new being” sets about destroying Leah’s poor artwork to turn it into something different. The violence of the process is expressed by the use of the word weapons to refer to the materials Anna is going to use. She also employs the mirror Leah gave her when they were children, and Robbie’s photograph, which she had cut out of her school’s yearbook, to perform a kind of artistic exorcism—“a bad spell,” 200 she thinks before starting to work. The process of artistic creation she initiates is described as geometric and symbolical, a violent mapmaking through which she repossesses her pictures and, through them, Alan’s body. “She tore his spine right out of the photo. Clean murder, bloodless torture and dismemberment. And then a slower reconstitution, a recombination, a painstaking healing.” 201 Because her artistic creation also transforms and recreates space, 202 the flat itself becomes homely again, an enclosed, reassuring place where being locked up becomes synonymous with safety: “But she was safe: she had locked all the doors, closed the windows and bolted them. Nothing could enter, storm or animal or any other visitor.” 203 In other words, she seems to have managed to counter the pattern of invasion initiated by Leah, who is now safely out of the flat and of her life, making it possible for Anna to recover her identity. This explains why her artwork gradually turns into something “more organic: less a landscape or map, more a diagram of an animal’s body” 204 which becomes “almost human . . . a giant, stretched out on the floor of the lounge, as if asleep.” 205 As a symbol of the process of reconstruction of identity at the core of the creation, Anna shatters the little mirror and knits “the broken pieces into the fabric of the picture.” 206 Yet, the ending of the novel is much more ambiguous than Anna’s triumphant appreciation of her creation may suggest. First, after completing her “giant,” or landscape, she has a grey dream—the color of Alan’s dreams— where she lies next to his naked body but her own hands have become “ghostly and translucent” 207 and she cannot touch him. But she sees Leah on the other side of Alan’s body, looking as she did when they were teenagers and placing one finger on her lips, just as she did when Joanna saw her coming out of the shed with Robbie. 208 The grey dream seems to destroy the positive effects of the creative session and might explain why, the following morning, Anna perceives her “shadow man” as a “pitiful thing,” 209 a “paper corpse” 210 which cannot replace Alan’s body and presence. When Alan and Leah come back, she hides and they do not see her: “But she was safely hidden behind the kitchen table. Or perhaps he’s looked straight at her, and

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simply could not see.” 211 This shows the ambiguity of Anna’s identity, mediated through her point of view (“perhaps”); the narrative offers both a rational explanation for the fact that Alan does not see her—she is hidden behind the table—and an irrational one—she might have become a ghost, and he looked through her. When Anna finally chooses to leave the room, Leah looks up, and the way in which Anna perceives her in this final moment shows that the process of invasion or replacement which was initiated the first time Leah entered the flat is now complete and has not been countered by Anna’s frantic art session. “Anna smiled tiredly. Look at her, she thought. She looks just like me.” 212 Leah has taken her place, literally and figuratively, and Anna, in turn, seems to become Leah when she mimics a gesture which was described at the beginning of the novel and in her “grey dream. 213 “On impulse, she placed a finger to her lips. Shhh.” 214 After finally leaving the flat, Anna runs to the sea, ambiguously longing to be reunited with the “shadows” she discerns under the surface. The chapter’s title, “Sink or Swim,” points to the ambiguity of this ending, which may either suggest a rebirth in the womb-like space of the sea or a suicidal longing for death in a tomb-like world where strange creatures swim. Shark’s Egg seems to recycle a number of Gothic motifs to express the difficulty of grounding oneself in space. The novel constructs a gendered Gothic space where femininity is both victimized (Anna) and dangerous (Leah), the two young women being the two sides of the same coin. As in many Gothic novels, 215 the ambiguous construction and deconstruction of space and self is achieved through a narrative technique relying on the character’s subjectivity; the use of internal focalization and the fact that most of the uncanny or Gothic elements explicitly rely on Anna’s subjectivity (modality, adverbs of uncertainty) make it difficult for the reader to determine whether what is described really happens or merely is the product of Anna’s imagination. It might even be suggested that Anna and Leah may be one person, whose split personality can be explained by the guilt she feels after causing Robbie’s death. Such an interpretation would mean reconsidering many scenes in the novel, starting with the mirror scene, which, instead of initiating a pattern of resemblance between two girls, might be a clue of a single girl’s split identity. Leah’s disappearance, and her return, might therefore be interpreted as projections of different stages in Anna’s mental illness, which might first be controlled, leading to the provisional disappearance of Leah, before returning with a vengeance, leading to her reappearance. Some of the confrontations between the two young women and Alan might then be read as fantasies. As in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which internalized Gothic forms to interrogate individual anxieties, “the uncanny disturbs the familiar, homely and secure sense of reality and normality,” leaving “readers unsure whether narratives describe psychological disturbance or wider upheavals within formations of reality and normality.” 216 Unlike eighteenth-

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century Gothic novels, whose “resistance to ambiguous closure is also found in the preference for the happy ending,” Rose-Innes chooses an open ending which resists any definitive interpretation. Rose-Innes’s novel mostly focuses on individual identity, and the space of the unhomely home becomes the site where the construction of the self is played out, but the real world remains conspicuously absent—which, in itself, seems to offer a statement in itself. Apart from the flat which becomes Anna’s territory before her final departure, few spaces are mentioned: the school, a friend’s house, the museum where she works, the mountain where she finds a refuge at different moments in her difficult relationship with Alan. This in itself shows that she cannot really fit anywhere. In Damon Galgut’s The Impostor, on the other hand, the space of the unhomely home is not merely a locus where individual identity is explored; the protagonist’s sense of unsettledness is also used as a tool to explore the complex way in which white people relate to what was then still the “new” South Africa—the phrase recurs several times in the novel. The Impostor: Gothicizing White Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa The Impostor focuses on a white man, Adam, who experiences what could be described as a midlife crisis. Having lost his job, he decides to revert to what was his original activity, writing, and accepts his brother’s offer to lend him a house he has bought in the Karoo but never goes to. When Adam arrives there, the house is described in terms reminiscent of Gothic buildings: “The house was a shock. It was out at the edge of the white town, where the roads were untarred and the ground sloped steeply upwards to the rocky crest of a ridge. It was very bare and basic, with a slanted tin roof. The windows had a blind, blank look to them. The paint was faded and peeling. The fence was overgrown with creeper, and the creeper had twined through the gate.” 217 As I observed in “‘Something Hungry and Wild is Still Calling’: Post-Apartheid Gothic,” 218 the description reads like a catalog of gothic conventions: The place is isolated, the derelict house reminds us of the prominent part played by ruins both in the Gothic revival and in Gothic fiction, its windows are reminiscent of blind eyes, and the creeper symbolizes contamination and invasion, a recurrent motif in the novel. Inside, the air is “dead and heavy, as if it had been breathed already,” and Adam’s brother’s wife, Charmaine, insists that “there are presences here.” 219 From the start, Adam finds this new home deeply unhomely. “In the daytime he was a rational and skeptical man and he didn’t believe in presences. But now, at night, with strange walls enclosing him and a strange roof creaking overhead, a lot of things seemed possible. It was as if another person, from another time, was buried under his skin. This person was squatting by a fire, with a vast darkness pressing

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in.” 220 Unhomeliness arises from the conjunction of darkness—Adam has to light a candle as there is no power in the house—strangeness and haunting; Adam feels trapped in a space characterized by the gothic superimposition of different eras, as testified by the feeling that he is somewhat haunted by a more primitive version of himself. The motif of haunting is consistently developed throughout the novel as Adam comes to accept the existence of this other version of himself, whose presence becomes almost physical. At the end of the first section of the book, “Before,” Adam gradually realizes that he cannot really become a poet again; instead of writing, he finds himself doing nothing, “laps[ing] into inertia,” 221 which paradoxically leads to a simultaneous dilution and shrinking of time within the space of the derelict house, where two types of time have been brought together by his arrival. “On the first day, when he’d arrived, he’d felt time flowing in through the front door behind him. He’d brought time back into the house. But now he could feel a different time—old time, dead time—trapped inside, unable to pass back out into the current.” 222 The various layers of time which cohabit within the house lead to haunting; the past materializes in the shape of almost substantial ghosts: He would catch a movement out of the corner of his eye, or he heard the sound of breathing from the room next door. One night he went to bed early, but struggled to sleep. When he did eventually fall into a hot, shallow doze, somebody sat down on the bottom of the bed. He was between waking and sleeping, just under the skin of time, and even after he’d jolted into full consciousness again he wasn’t sure whether it had happened or not. He lay there rigidly in the dark, hearing his heart. Then he lunged sideways, fumbling for the lamp. He knew, before the light came on, that nobody would be there. But it felt as if someone was watching. So he was alone, but he didn’t feel alone. 223

This passage emphasizes the mode of apparition of the “presence” in the house; its existence mostly relies on Adam’s senses—sight and hearing—and is characterized by uncertainty. The whole passage is written, as is most of the novel, from Adam’s point of view: the omniscient narrator enables the reader to share Adam’s thoughts, so that the presence is never described objectively but always mediated through Adam’s subjectivity. Such a mode of narration is reminiscent of the strategies used by Gothic writers to describe ghosts or apparitions, which appear frequently in Gothic novels but whose existence is almost always attributable to the possibly delusional perspective of a character, as I have already pointed out in my reading of Rose-Innes’ Shark’s Egg. But unlike Gothic heroines who never fail to swoon when confronted to ghosts or apparitions, Adam does not seem to be disturbed by his personal ghost, which he interprets as a projection of his own self—“He thought of it as part of himself” 224—and whose existence he both denies— “there was no spirit, no presence, no thing there in the house. Of course he

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knew that” 225—and accepts, discussing his personal dilemmas with it. Such an unproblematic acceptance of the “ghost” of his dual self might suggest connections with magic realism rather than with Gothic fiction because magic realism usually involves the unproblematic coexistence of concurrent explanations of the same reality. 226 The entity’s answers stand out on the page as they are usually transcribed in italics. The conversations with the “presence” occur more often once Adam starts feeling guilty after falling in love with Baby, his childhood friend Canning’s wife. The reader may therefore interpret the presence not as something which fundamentally belongs to the house, but as a projection of Adam’s feelings onto the empty space of the building, especially as the voice reappears in the narrative once Adam has started writing his love poems, which express his yearning for Baby (who has not yet become his lover). But the voice of the “presence in the house” seems to become more autonomous: “He still talks to it in a half-real, half-fanciful way. But now its replies take on a tone and volition of their own.” 227 Adam’s guilt leads him to think of the voice not as being a projection of himself, as he did at the beginning of his stay, but as a voice belonging “to the serpent in the garden,” 228 tempting him until he asks it to leave: “‘Leave me alone! Go away!’ Laughter, a low, hissing sound, maybe only the wind coming under the door.” 229 Here again, what predominates is a sense of uncertainty about the nature of the presence, or voice, Adam talks to. The sentence encapsulates two interpretations of the voice as either belonging to an actual snake-like entity (“a low, hissing sound” takes up the biblical motif of the serpent initiated earlier) or created by Adam’s imagination from noises he can hear in his immediate environment (“maybe only the wind coming under the door”). The presence, therefore, corresponds to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as being characterized by an oscillation between a rational and an irrational explanation of a given phenomenon, the uncertainty being often, but not always, grounded in the character’s perspective. 230 Unlike eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, which is characterized, according to Todorov, either by its reliance on the “explained supernatural,” as in Radcliffe’s fiction, or by the “accepted supernatural” as in Horace Walpole’s, Lewis’s, or von Mathurin’s novels, 231 Galgut’s post-apartheid Gothic fiction seems to rely on a mode which is much closer to the fantastic because it is based on the protagonist’s subjectivity. Galgut does not use a first-person narrative, a salient feature of fantastic fiction. 232 He replaces it with the systematic use of internal focalization, which fulfills the same function, that is forcing the reader to rely entirely on the character’s perspective. What is more, Galgut often uses forms of modality which ground the presence’s existence in figurative discourse, another attribute of the fantastic as defined by Todorov. 233 However, the presence is not the central element in the story; it is just one aspect of the Gothicization of the relationship between self and space in the novel. When Adam discusses it with Gavin and Charmaine at the

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end of the novel, he calls it “something”: “Something listened. Something watched,” 234 and provides a rational and psychological interpretation for the phenomenon. “But he thought of the other presence as a split-off part of his own mind, something real and imaginary at the same time, a sort of byproduct of the depression he was going through.” 235 Although he seems to think of it in terms which still express a sense of hesitation (“real and imaginary at the same time”), the clinical diagnosis which is provided, that of depression, rationalizes the nature of the entity and seems to erase the supernatural explanation which dominated when Adam felt guilty about betraying Canning. The presence can therefore be interpreted as a form of projection of his guilt onto the space of the “gothogenic” 236 house and seems to fulfil a function often associated to ghosts, that of materializing guilt. But Gavin’s house, which temporarily becomes Adam’s house as he settles there for a while to write his poems, is not the only building which seems to be Gothicized. Canning’s home, Gondwana, can also be described as a gothogenic zone whose Gothicization is a strategy to stage conflicts within the family. Gondwana “has many attributes of the Gothic castle—including the clear sense that Canning rejoices in having inherited it from his dead father.” 237 The conflict between father and son is explicitly at the core of the novel’s plot. Canning has decided to turn the place into a golf course to exact revenge against his dead father, with whom he “had a very bad relationship.” 238 Gondwana, his father’s “big dream” 239 was meant to become a game park. But what is left of the project is merely a solitary lion, who is fed every night by Canning’s workers and can be heard roaring at night and an empty game lodge. Adam’s first visit immediately relates the place to the past and to decay: Walking into a “tall, sepulchral space” he discovers an uncannily empty place which “feels as if it should be jammed with people.” 240 Even if the place is not explicitly decaying, its emptiness and halffinished state seem to relate it to the Gothic motif of ruins. Ruins, in Gothic fiction, usually stand for a lost past—here, a fake and idealized version of pristine Africa dreamt of by Canning’s father. What is more, Gondwana is a place with multiple identities, and Adam soon discovers that its core is not the game lodge nor the surrounding rondavels. Instead, the real Gothic core of the place is Canning’s father’s house, which Adam discovers quite late in the novel. Hidden in the woods, “[i]t’s like a house in fairy-tale: a witch’s cottage at the heart of the woods,” a secluded place where Canning’s father wanted to live “out of sight.” 241 The house is the real family house, where Canning’s mother’s ashes are scattered and inside which Canning himself refuses to go. Instead, it is Baby who shows the place to Adam, who perceives it as “feel[ing] distinctly haunted”: “Adam shivers; the house is creepy.” 242 When Baby shows him Kenneth’s room, Adam thinks that the boy “has left no trace; more powerful ghosts are in residence.” 243 Once again, the Gothicization of the place is constructed through the protagonist’s

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eyes thanks to internal focalization through the motif of haunting. The house makes Adam so uncomfortable that he soon suggests leaving, “wanting to escape both the mental picture and the place.” 244 Paradoxically, the Gothicization of the house is pursued when Adam and Baby start meeting there to avoid being found out by Canning; the cottage becomes domestically sublime, a mixture of familiarity (“he comes to know the drab, stark interior of the place very well” 245) and violence: “Beauty and violence together: it would be easy to hate the old man. Adam has a sneaking fascination with him. It’s his guilty secret that he suspects that they might have been alike; that they might have understood one another far too well. The house resembles, in its roughness and simplicity, the one where Adam lives in town. But the affinity runs deeper than that.” 246 Significantly, Adam envisages his supposed similarity with Canning’s father through a parallel between their two Gothicized homes, the cottage in the woods and the house on the edge of the city. This shows how the novel constructs identities that are shaped through space and projected onto it, so that the protagonist’s perception of places and people, including himself, is often spatialized. The connection Adam feels with the old man also adds to the sense of haunting consistently associated with the house because it is described as a form of possession. “He becomes somebody else, a creature he doesn’t know: this stranger-self is a powerful, goatish, reckless figure, who fornicates without restraints and talks dirty and doesn’t care what damage he’s doing.” 247 These temporary transformations are described as “strong and scary, like catching fire.” 248 The link between the Cannings and Gondwana is similarly based on a connection between characters and space. Canning himself insists on the difference between himself and his father. And yet, the two men’s relationship to Gondwana seems to be quite similar because they both try to reshape it. When Canning takes Adam for a drive, they discover a land from which the homesteads have literally been wiped out: “Along the way, they pass more shattered homesteads and Canning explains that his father has had to dynamite any habitable buildings on the various farms he’d bought, so that squatters could not move in. It’s as if the land has been emptied out by war.” 249 This is not dissimilar to Canning’s own planned destruction of the place at the end of the novel; even if the motives behind the destructions are different, the modus operandi seems quite similar. This similarity can be explained by the fact that despite his constant claims of hating his father and not wanting to be like him or to accept his heritage, Canning is not different from the old man. Indeed, both Canning and his father are constructed as fundamentally ambiguous figures through Adam’s point of view, as shown by the following passage, in which Adam tries to figure out both the personality of his friend and that of his father:

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The rhetorical oscillation between two poles (“on the one hand . . . on the other hand”) reinforces the fundamental sense of duality which affects both Canning and his father, a parallel which Adam highlights several times in the novel as, for instance, when Canning tries to explain his father’s project to him: “Now the contradictions in Canning seem to extend backwards, to the shadowy figure of his father behind him.” 251 Canning is thus repeatedly, and disquietingly, perceived as ambiguous. “But as time goes by and they get to know each other better, Adam becomes more used to the two warring extremes of Canning’s nature. . . . His alternating moods of buoyancy and bleakness sometimes follow on so quickly from each other that he seems like two different people joined together.” 252 Even his feelings for his wife, Baby, are characterized by a constant oscillation between unconditional love and a feeling of insecurity: “Often, just after he has spoken about how ‘amazing’ Baby is, or how she has transformed his life, Canning will lapse into brooding introspection, and then start muttering about how unfeeling she is.” 253 Baby herself is also an ambiguous figure, almost ghostlike in her sudden appearance in Canning’s life and possible disappearance: “‘She arrived so suddenly in my life,’ he says. ‘What’s to stop her disappearing as quickly’?” 254 This apparently generalized ambiguity affects the way in which identity is simultaneously constructed and destabilized in The Impostor. Canning seems to have based his entire project on erasing his father’s heritage, to wipe away the traces of the old man: “I love this place too, in my own way. You know that—you’ve seen it. But in the end, it still belongs to my father. It’s his big dream, not mine. . . . And I go to sleep happy at night when I think of how I’ll dismantle his dream. Bit by bit, piece by piece. I’m going to savour every second of it.” 255 And yet, by doing so, it seems that his behavior and identity are still determined by the dead man’s will. Such a sense of transmission recalls the Gothic motif of lineage, a central feature of Gothic fiction since its origins, as Berthin reminds us; relying on Abraham and Torok’s analysis of transgenerational transmission, based on the idea that “[n]othing is ever abolished that does not resurface in one way or another in the shape of an enigma, a sign or a phantomatic presence in a later generation,” she emphasizes the close link between haunting and genealogical transmission in Gothic novels, arguing that “the Gothic enacts the idea of

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transgenerational haunting.” 256 Canning’s identity, which seems to be directly generated by his father’s behavior, is therefore placed under the sign of both negative transmission and a compulsion to repeat. However, his permanent duality, which is underlined by Adam repeatedly in the novel, makes his behavior and his reactions largely unpredictable—and quite threatening. Even if he is not a fully-fledged Gothic villain, he is partly constructed as an ambiguous, dual figure who destroys the landscape for the sake of personal revenge. The very fact that he seems to have inherited his duality from his father adds to the Gothicization of the novel. Adam’s sense of being settled (“a growing harmony in Adam’s life, a settling into his new incarnation” 257) is soon revealed to be an illusion: his friendly neighbor, Blom, turns out to be a former torturer who killed people in the name of the apartheid regime. Blom confesses his sins to a reluctant Adam, who reacts by telling him: “I don’t want to know these things about you. I can’t help you.” 258 Afterward, when Adam thinks about the confession, the terms he uses suggest a Gothicization of the past: “Of course he knows about such people . . . But they were always, somehow, somewhere else, living, as it were, in another country—not in the house next door, digging in the garden, doing metalwork in their spare time. That the dark and dirty past of South Africa should have taken on form and come to visit Adam at home, wanting absolution . . . well, it’s too much.” 259 What these thoughts suggest is that Blom is a ghost from the past, the ghost of apartheid, who haunts the house in a way that is different from the other presence in the house, that of Adam’s double. The Gothic motif of the haunted house is therefore used in different ways in The Impostor to explore both the protagonist’s complex identity and sense of guilt and the collective history of the country. The home which is unsettled by these visits is not only Adam’s, but South Africa as well, the “home country.” The sculpture Blom gave him, which Adam impulsively throws away in the garden, epitomizes the fact that the haunting past of the country is not easily laid to rest. Indeed, it reemerges when Adam clears the weeds from the garden, a suggestion that what has been buried or hidden tends to reemerge when you least expect it. Blom is not the only character whose appearance is misleading: Baby, Canning’s wife, turns out to be as much an impostor 260 as Adam—the novel’s title points directly to Adam’s feeling of unsettledness: “The place where Adam feels an impostor is explicitly the new South Africa, with its new social hierarchies and conventions which are repeatedly described as incomprehensible to him—a case in point is his relationship with the mayor. In The Impostor, the gothic mode, in particular the Gothic characterization of places, therefore offers Galgut tools to express a sense of ‘unsettledness’ linked to the social and cultural changes in post-apartheid South Africa.” 261 The perspective adopted by Galgut, therefore, encompasses the whole South African society, and his unsettled protagonist is meant to be a synecdoche of

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the white inhabitants of South Africa, as he himself pointed out in an interview with French daily newspaper Libération: “The issue of race is still present. I am constantly reminded of it: what it is to be white, what my place in society is . . . I tell white people’s stories because, if I were to write a story about a black man’s experience in South Africa, it would be an outright lie. Sadly, we are separate human groups who cannot talk to each other or understand each other. But it is changing.” 262 The Impostor does not merely recount the midlife crisis of a white South African; it also reveals the extent of the corruption which characterizes the “rainbow nation.” Canning’s absurd project epitomizes the new South Africa 263 but also the mechanisms of corruption and greed which are slowly undermining the dream of a new country, as shown by Genov’s intention to lose money with the scheme: “This is too much. The travesty that Canning is cooking up is made of greed and absurdity, with a big moral hollowness at the core.” 264 And yet, paradoxically, the character who is constructed as guilty in the narrative is not so much Canning as Adam himself, whose petty betrayal—sleeping with his friend’s wife— stands for a broader sense of guilt for being who he is, a white man who does not really fit in the new South Africa. Guilt is a motif which recurs throughout the novel, associated with Adam’s sense of being several people at the same time: “yet he does feel guilt. It still comes over him. It still comes over him in a nauseating rush when he’s alone in town. Then he looks back on his other selves with a mixture of horror and amazement.” 265 The latter phrase points to Adam’s self-perception of his “other selves” in Gothic terms, especially as he also mentions feeling “tormented” by his guilt. This evil part of him, the Gothic villain in him, is even tempted to consider murdering Canning when Baby jokingly suggests that her husband might have an “accident.” 266 The Gothic mode thus becomes a tool to explore colonial guilt, as signaled by the epigraph of the novel, which explicitly places it “under the dual sign of space and colonization.” 267 “Your hinterland is there. Inscription on a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, The Company’s Garden, Cape Town.” 268 The novel’s Gothicization of the individual home, Adam’s house and Gondwana, expresses a collective sense of unsettledness linked to the emergence of postapartheid identities. GOTHICIZING THE FARM NOVEL: THE FARM Masters and Servants: Revisiting Feudality in the New South Africa Colonial guilt is also linked to the relationships of subservience between white and black people in South Africa. In The Impostor, the narrator describes the relationship between the Canning family and their servants in terms reminiscent of feudality. Grace and Ezekiel, Canning’s elderly black

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servants, have been literally passed on from father to son, as he explains to Adam: “They were my father’s most devoted servants, actually. They followed him around from farm to farm, all over the country.” 269 Canning also tells Adam that Ezekiel does not like him much and preferred his father, who could speak isiXhosa and Zulu: “He was the old-style feudal overlord, you know. Could give orders to the serfs in their own language.” 270 These explicit references to the Middle Ages point to a major dimension of farm novels, that of the relationship between masters and servants, which is here, seemingly incongruously, connected to a European past by the use of medieval lexicon in a context where the Middle Ages have no relevance. Canning’s equation between his father and a feudal overlord suggests that Gothic motifs in The Impostor are not merely a tool for exploring family relationships or Adam’s sense of guilt in the new South Africa; the novel also revisits the relationships between masters and servants through the genre of the farm novel, in which, as J. M. Coetzee explained in his analysis of Pauline Smith’s The Beadle in White Writing, the world is organized along precapitalistic lines. 271 The Impostor, of course, challenges this precapitalistic world because it is first and foremost a novel about “the mobility of capital and its impact on localities,” 272 about the way in which globalized economic interests destroy the pastoral ideals of Canning’s father with Canning’s complicity. And yet, the novel remains grounded in South African realities and can be interpreted as writing back to the local genre of the farm novel, in which the farm itself is the locus where black and white identities are represented and explored—a “microcosm” of South African society. 273 The prototype of these novels is Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. In all subsequent farm novels, the farm became a topos: “To understand how the African farm can be considered as a topos, we need to take into account the symbolical value it is imbued with, a value which is only equated by its emotional power and which remains linked to its historical role. Indeed, it is in the farm that, from the origins of this frontier society, all confrontations have happened. A small mirror-image of South African society, the farm has always been a major concern.” 274 The Impostor seems to revisit the literary topos of the farm through the confrontation between the pastoral ideals embodied by Canning’s father, which correspond to the pastoral preoccupations of the farm novel, 275 and the globalized capitalism favored by Canning himself, who betrays the ideology defined by and in the plaasroman, that is, “the restoration, amid rural poverty, of lineal memory in patriarchal, familial ownership.” 276 In this regard, Galgut’s novel is similar to other novels written by white writers, in which the farm novel is revisited and reworked to stage tensions between the global and the local. An example is Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water, in which, “to the extent that the plaasroman is updated . . . for a global era, it is through the vigilant policing of its literal and metaphoric borders.” 277 Despite that the protagonist has been exiled for

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years, and despite frequent allusions to his life in the United States, Kings of the Water is far from global, Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues; Behr, instead, uses the farm and the farm novel to reestablish a clearly South African frame of reference: “Where we might expect a post-post-apartheid (or post-antiapartheid, as some have suggested) and thereby ‘global’ South African novel to chronicle Michiel’s journey from repressed Afrikaner youth to comfortably situated cosmopolitan man, in fact his social and moral development is expressed in reverse.” 278 Behr’s novel thus mirrors the protagonist’s journey back to South Africa, and the writer seems to “transform the genre from within, without recourse to a different and differently problematic set of external values.” 279 Jackson’s argument, which lays emphasis on the irreducible South African-ness of Behr’s rewriting of the plaasroman, shows that the farm novel, and its more recent avatars, remains, first and foremost, a genre suited for representing South African identities from within. Galgut’s Impostor is no exception: even if it stages the irruption of global concerns, its rereading of the farm novel appears, above all, as the appropriate literary tool to explore identities in the so-called new South Africa from within. The novel also lays emphasis on a major aspect of farm novels: the relationship between masters and servants. 280 In The Impostor Canning’s two old black servants are rather mysterious characters, who speak little and merely hover in the background, thus corresponding to the genre of the farm novel, 281 until Grace accidentally enters the bedroom where Adam and Canning’s wife, Baby, have just made love—supposedly for the last time. Significantly, Adam does not even remember the old woman’s name: “She is so ubiquitous, so everyday and familiar, that they hadn’t considered her. Till now. She has also stopped, quite still, in amazement, at the center of the irrevocable moment. He has a curious, dissociated image through her eyes: the madam and the master’s friend, undressed on the bed, electrified, afraid. Their vulnerability is rude and primal.” 282 Here Adam ambiguously, and simultaneously, acknowledges the hierarchy which has prevented him from taking Grace into consideration while trying to see things through her eyes in a clichéd description of the scene where words unequivocally and problematically express social hierarchies: “the madam,” “the master’s friend.” But seeing them in this private moment, of course, gives Grace power over them and briefly unsettles the hierarchy, until Baby starts shouting abuse at her. Interestingly, Baby’s language, which Adam laughs at, also points to another subversion of the traditional hierarchies because it shows where she comes from. Indeed, Baby is black and even if her past is never precisely recounted, it transpires that she used to live in dire conditions and has managed to become “the madam” by meeting Canning at a time when she was working as a call girl in Johannesburg. Baby’s position as mistress of the house subverts the traditional racial hierarchies and adapts the farm novel to the new South Africa; it also enables Baby to send the two old people away after

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being discovered in bed with Adam, as he finds out when they knock on his door one day, looking for work: “The faces outside are both strange and familiar, like people in a dream. Old, tired black faces, uncertain and afraid. A man and a woman, wearing dirty, ragged clothes. But what has silenced Adam is the yellow hat, being twisted and untwisted in the old man’s hands. ‘Ezekiel!’ he says. ‘Grace!’ He has thought of them—though in truth he hadn’t thought of them—as gone, erased, disappeared. But now they have found their way to his door.” 283 The passage evinces the way in which Galgut exposes social and racial hierarchies and hypocrisies. Ezekiel and Grace are described as “strange and familiar,” which makes them the epitome of invisible servants, always present but never fully acknowledged. What makes them “strange” is also their displacement from their habitual location to his own house: taken away from their normal context, they become strangers because they have been deprived of their identity. To him, until this moment, they were not individuals, but servants: they were defined not by their personality or idiosyncrasies but only by their domestic function. What strikes Adam when they come knocking on his door is their poverty and helplessness expressed in their own words through his eyes: “The Oubaas is gone; they are alone; they have nobody to help them.” 284 By materializing on his doorstep, the two old servants seem to have come to embody his guilt: “His heart is wrung: he is part of this, part of what has happened to them.” 285 Their silent presence in his home can even be interpreted as a manifestation of the return of the repressed, as if they were accusing ghosts escaped from Gondwana, their “rightful place,” 286 which Adam tries to take them back to. But when he drives Ezekiel and Grace to Gondwana—and here, the irony of the place’s name is blatant, of course—to ask the Cannings to reconsider their decision, both Kenneth and Baby refuse to do so, as Baby explains to Adam: “They were past their time anyway. They can’t stay on—all of this is changing. There’s no place for them here any more.” 287 Baby’s argument elaborates on the notion of “place,” considering their respective positions in South African society in spatial terms. “You don’t know how I’ve fought, the things I had to do to get to where I am. If I’m over here and they’re over there, that’s because I’m stronger.” 288 In Baby’s eyes, Ezekiel and Grace are as “displaced” as Adam in the new South Africa; they belong to an older world, a “feudal” world which has disappeared, and they cannot fit any more into the disappearing world of the farm, which is replaced by a modern, capitalistic golf course. Their removal from Gondwana can be placed on the same level as the destruction of the buildings: like them, the two old people embody an old world which is disappearing. Interestingly, Ezekiel and Grace do not immediately disappear from the narrative. Before their estranged son comes to pick them up at Adam’s place, they stay with Adam for a few days, turning him into their host: “They are, by a twist of fate, his guests, and he has somehow become the servant. But he

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embraces the new role, he fits himself to it eagerly. A small measure of humiliation might lessen his crimes, in his own eyes if not in theirs.” 289 Adam’s guilt transpires in his need for atonement. But the two old people’s accusing and silent presence turns his home into an unfamiliar place: “They are always there, sitting in the lounge, looking sad and enigmatic. Occasionally a few words pass between them, but otherwise they seem to generate a fraught silence, against which even the tiniest sounds take on resonance. The creak of the couch. The window-pane vibrating in the wind. The squeaking of Grace’s shoes as she walks aimlessly about.” 290 This presence makes it difficult for Adam to stay at home: “Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes he can’t bear to sit here for another second, hemmed in by these two. They’re like a pair of attendant angels, familiar spirits, here only to keep a watchful eye on him, toting up the moral score in a ledger. At these moments he jumps up. ‘I’m going to the shop,’ he tells them.” 291 As I have already pointed out, Ezekiel and Grace seem to embody his guilt, to keep track of “the moral score,” which explains why he feels the need to go out as often as possible. Finally, when their son, Lindile, comes to pick them up, Adam has to face another form of guilt, that of living in privilege while Lindile and his parents are facing a future where they have to share a small house with other people: Ezekiel and Grace, who seem to have escaped not only from Gondwana but also from an older, disappearing, white-dominated version of South Africa also force Adam to acknowledge that his feelings of displacement have been hiding the fact that he still belongs to a sphere which is extremely privileged compared to most South Africans’ living conditions. The revisiting of the cliché of the faithful old servant chased from the farm by an ungrateful master evinces the political ambiguities of the narrator and enables Galgut to revisit the literary representation of masters and servants in South African fiction by white writers. The two chapters devoted to Ezekiel and Grace, chapters 18 and 19, seem to rework the conventions of the farm novel in the context of the new South Africa. The two old people are described through the prism of Adam’s white and prejudiced perspective. His acknowledgment of their present absence—or absent presence—when he saw them in Gondwana is reminiscent of farm novels, which usually focus on white characters and in which servants are conspicuously absent. But by having them turn up on Adam’s doorstep, and by describing them through his guilty perspective, Galgut subverts the clichés of the farm novel: the haunting, Gothicized presence of the two old people in his own house forces Adam to acknowledge his guilt and to act, taking responsibility for them for a short while. However, at the end of chapter 19, they conveniently climb into Lindile’s car, which “pulls away, disappearing down the road, driving out of his life.” 292 This ambiguously puts an end to their relationship. On the one hand, it suggests that Adam is complicit with the system and glad to be rid of them; he can now return to his own, white life while the black family will live apart from

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him. On the other hand, the disappearance of Ezekiel and Grace might be a way of staging the disappearance of the rural world they belonged to, the apartheid world of farms, “feudal overlords” and silent, devoted servants. Baby told Adam that they have no place in the new version of Gondwana; they have no place either in the new South Africa, it seems, just like the values conveyed by the farm novel, of which they seem to be emblematic. But the brief days when they have to cohabit with Adam Gothicize his house in a different way; unlike the spectral presence which embodied his individual guilt, their bodies, with their materiality—a materiality reinforced by the fact that they are repeatedly described as silent, laying emphasis on their physical, rather than verbal, presence—might embody the collective guilt of the white “overlords” and the problematic value of Adam’s nostalgia for a rural version of South Africa which may exist only in his imagination. Neo-Farm Novels and the Gothic Mode Galgut’s revision of farm novels is not an exception in recent South African literature. As Coetzee amply demonstrated in White Writing, the farm novel, and its Afrikaans counterpart, the plaasroman, have constituted a constant thread in white South African fiction since the end of the nineteenth century; the demise of apartheid has led to a number of revisions of the genre in the context of the new South Africa. The farm novel, as its name suggests, is deeply imbued with spatial issues, as Michael Chapman reminds us: [T]here developed a kind of novel known as the plaasroman (farm novel). The impetus was the crisis on the platteland in which capitalist modes of farming, initiated by monied townspeople, were threatening older feudal arrangements that had been sustained by the Afrikaner peasant farmer who traded his service for space on someone else’s farm. In mingling of romantic epiphany and German blood-and-soil mythologies, the fiction yearns for the restoration, amid rural poverty, of lineal memory in patriarchal, familial ownership. . . . Economics is elided into myth, and the plaasroman takes its ideological role in the discourse of national destiny. By the 1950s the originary, historical impetus had gelled into a set of conventions. 293

Chapman’s description of the farm novel strikingly combines spatial concerns and a lexicon reminiscent of Gothic fiction: “feudal arrangements” and “patriarchal, familial ownership” emerge as constitutive aspects of the genre. Ampie Coetzee also emphasizes the importance of land ownership in the genre: he “regards the farm novel as an utterance in the discourse about land in South Africa and he shows how land ownership in particular is closely linked to the ideology and identity of the Afrikaner class of landowners.” 294 Malvern Van Wyk Smith similarly underlines the link between Afrikaner ideology and the farm, which is “a capsule of all the racially and culturally

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exclusive myth and doctrines” of apartheid. 295 Van Wyk Smith’s main argument, Hein Viljoen points out, “is that the South African farm . . . has always had an ambivalent meaning” 296 and can be seen as “an icon of White South Africa’s fragile domicility and haunting complicity.” 297 Van Wyk Smith’s article notably chooses to examine the representation of the farm in novels by white writers, regardless of their language or origin, and his study focuses, in particular, on Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm in which he detects a “conflictual landscape.” 298 Tracing the history of the farm novel from Schreiner’s novel to more recent avatars, Viljoen notes that the evolution of the genre has reflected the context in which farm novels were written, so that during apartheid it simultaneously and, paradoxically, became “a popular light genre, exemplified inter alia by the novels of Tryna du Toit in Afrikaans” and “a vehicle of criticism of the ideological order of apartheid” 299 through parodic rewritings. Following Van Wyk Smith’s suggestion that Schreiner’s buried giant in The Story of an African Farm surfaces in a number of such revisionist novels, like Gordimer’s Conservationist or Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace, Viljoen argues that farm novels have repeatedly staged the return of a racial repressed which ends up in the restoration of the land “to its rightful owner, the black man, the buried giant.” 300 Because the farm novel is “a site rich in ideological undertones,” 301 examining the way in which the novels which write back to the farm novel stage its ambivalence may provide a significant understanding of white writers’ relation to “home.” Much has already been written about farm novels and their ideological implications. My contention, here, is to adopt a slightly different viewpoint and to underline the Gothicized dimension of post-apartheid “neo-farm novels,” which has received little critical attention. I would like to address the Gothicization of the farm novel in two main dimensions: first, in the final part of this chapter, I will examine the Gothicization of the farm itself, in keeping with the centrality of the castle in Gothic fiction. The next chapter, devoted to landscape, will show how the pastoral fantasies which were either supported or debunked by and in farm novels, Gothicize the perception of landscape in a number of neo-farm novels. The farm in farm novels can indeed be read as the counterpart of the Gothic castle in Gothic novels. Both buildings are constructed as the sites where family identity is projected. The Gothic castle and the “African farm” become “houses,” in the two acceptations of the term. This aspect, of course is not specific to farm novels. Lily Mabura, for instance, contends that “it might be argued that most, if not all, African literature, by virtue of its effort to preserve and reclaim older traditions and cultures, is imbued with Gothic trappings and demonstrates varying degrees of commitment to the genre’s topography and stock features.” 302 She insists, in particular, on the notion of topography and on the motif of the “castle setting that is sometimes sur-

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rounded by wild and desolate landscapes and dark forests,” tracing it to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and her reading of Purple Hibiscus focuses on the house, “a crucial Gothic element;” 303 she sees “the family’s two castle-like households” as “domestic sites of contestation between the past and the present.” 304 I contend that indiscriminately applying the Gothic label to “most, if not all, African literature,” as Mabura suggests, might be counterproductive because Gothic would probably be emptied of its meaning by being detected indiscriminately in all kinds of novels with such a loose definition. However, Mabura makes a crucial point when she highlights the link between Gothic houses and the articulation of the past with the present, and it is precisely in this dimension that I locate the meaning of the Gothicization of post-apartheid farm novels. The space of the farm as represented in these novels becomes, as Bertrand Westphal puts it, three-dimensional: Westphal suggests that if intertextual space is “squared” because it juxtaposes a place with its previous literary or artistic representations, space becomes “cubed” when time is taken into account and when previous representations of a given space are confronted to one another and to the history of the place in a diachronic way. 305 Space in these novels thus becomes threedimensional based on physical perception (space), previous textual representations (text), and history (time). Such an argument applies to neo-farm novels, which similarly and simultaneously, “cube” space by representing the actual South African space, revisiting its previous textual representations (farm novels) and exploring the history of the country. The Gothicization of the genre therefore also Gothicizes the history of South Africa. Shear’s reading of Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf in Gothic terms seems to illustrate this point. Shear’s main argument is that “Marlene Van Niekerk follows the pattern set by British colonial Gothic, yet she invents a uniquely South African postcolonial variant of the genre by substituting the fear surrounding the loss of Afrikaner national identity for the horrors particular to the British Empire,” so that, “[i]n Van Niekerk’s South African Gothic narrative, the haunted house reveals the haunted nation.” 306 Shear argues that the novel stages the return of a racial repressed through the representation of “incestuous relations [which are] a disturbing extension of the apartheid ideal of racial segregation,” and he compares the Benades family to Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher. 307 Triomf has also been read as an ironical rewriting, or a subversion, of the farm novel, like her other novel Agaat. 308 By combining Gothic motifs and a revision of the farm novel, Triomf offers a model to understand how neo-farm novels have endeavored to articulate time, space, and place to redefine what it means to be South African after the demise of apartheid. In these novels, the Gothic mode is a tool to subvert the pastoral illusions conveyed by the farm novel—which was already the case in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, whose antipastoral dimension has often been underlined. 309

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Similar textual strategies associating the Gothic mode with a self-conscious subversion of motifs from the farm novel can be found, for instance, in André Brink’s Devil’s Valley (1998), described by Paulette Coetzee as “an absorbing, playful journey through a fictional landscape filled with Gothic horror, grotesque humor and weird beauty.” 310 I have argued elsewhere 311 that in Devil’s Valley Brink uses the Gothic trope of haunting as a recuperative strategy. The ghost that explicitly haunts the eponymous valley is that of the founding father of the settlement, the first Lukas Lermiet, who embodies the evils of the past and the haunting nature of apartheid’s sins—in this case, the clash between an ideology based on purity and an extensive practice of miscegenation on a large scale. Guilt is at the core of Brink’s Gothicized narrative, and the final destruction of the village reads both as a parody of the apocalyptic endings often found in fictions written by white writers under apartheid and as a symbolic exorcism of the evils of the regime; the ghost of Lermiet is invoked the better to be laid down to rest definitively. As Lermiet himself tells Flip, “the problem with yesterday is it never stays down, you got to keep stamping on it,” 312 a phrasing that cannot fail to evoke the return of the repressed that is at the core of Gothic narratives. The valley, which was turned into a home by the Lermiet family—a synecdoche for apartheid, of course—and can be read as a parodic version of the farm in farm novels, is defamiliarized by the presence of Gothic motifs: haunting, the return of the repressed, monsters. It thus becomes what Lawn calls a “gothogenic zone.” 313 Recuperated as the Lermiet family’s home despite prior occupation by native inhabitants, the valley is the uncanny place par excellence, associating the trope of the homely and that of the unhomely through a symbolical reenactment of the dispossession process perpetrated by Afrikaner colonizers before and during apartheid. As is often the case with postcolonial Gothic, this uncanny place is highly symbolical of historical events: the Great Trek and Afrikaners’ conflicts with local populations over land ownership. As in Van Niekerk’s Triomf, the final disintegration of the place is reminiscent of Poe’s “House of Usher,” in which the haunted house similarly crumbles, symbolizing the end of a lineage—and, in Devil’s Valley, of an era: “once everything is consummated in time,” Lévy states about the Gothic castle, “the indispensable welcoming space vanishes, collapses, or is sold off.” 314 It can be argued that the valley’s function in Devil’s Valley is similar to that of Gothic castles in historical Gothic novels; just as “the Gothic castle can be seen as a location where [social] violence can flourish, in one sense— at least in its earlier manifestations—safely contained by its distancing in time and place, yet at the same time inextricably entwined with more contemporary history,” 315 Devil’s Valley, the isolated and terrifying locus of the Lermiet family’s history, spatially embodies a national history of violence which is thus appropriated and reenacted. Brink’s novel can thus be read as a post-apartheid reconfiguration of a Gothic motif for purposes of national

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redefinition and exorcism. Devil’s Valley thus revisits and subverts the genre of the farm novel, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, 316 as well as other South African literary genres, like the apocalyptic novel, in a playfully Gothic mode. This combination of self-conscious hypertextuality 317 with the Gothic mode enables Brink to demonstrate the intricate links between the country’s history and its literary representations and to take a stance against narrow conceptions of South African identity. It also articulates a local genre, the farm novel, with a more global mode, the Gothic, testifying to the newly cosmopolitan identity of post-apartheid South African literature. 318 Such cosmopolitan standards, however, did not constitute a new feature in Brink’s career because he was influenced by European writers and philosophers like Albert Camus or Milan Kundera throughout his whole career. 319 Furthermore, his earlier Rumours of Rain, which resembles Gordimer’s The Conservationist in many ways, 320 also relies on Gothic motifs like the return of the repressed. Brink’s Gothicized rewritings of the farm novel lay stress on the fact that, as Julie Azzam argues, the plaasroman “is a genre that must repress its historicity; it must willingly repress the historical fact of black displacement in order for its pastoral vision of South Africa to be possible.” 321 Staging the return of the historical, black repressed in Gothic terms subverts the farm novel, not only in novels written during apartheid but also in postapartheid novels. The Gothic mode, in other words, enables writers to “cube” the farm, the locus of white identity in cultural and literary representations and to challenge or subvert the ideologies conveyed by the original genre of the farm novel. Devil’s Valley is not the only post-apartheid novel published by Brink in which Gothic motifs are used to represent the link between past and present in the space of the home. Marita Wenzel has shown, for example, that in Imaginings of Sand (1996) and The Rights of Desire (2002), Brink describes fictional homes where subterranean and dark spaces play a prominent part: The houses in the novels do not merely depict lifestyles and cultural atmosphere, but also illustrate the significance of the different internal or inhabited spaces of houses or “homes.” These houses appear somber and secretive; they consist of labyrinthine dimensions, contain brooding silences, and store deep and dangerous secrets that often emerge in the form of haunting spirits, skeletons of slaves from the past. Although they reveal fascinating stories of their inhabitants, they also harbor evidence of a past that is locked away from the public gaze: stories of exploitation, slavery, the abuse and neglect of women and children. Consequently, the various spaces—chambers, caves and cellars—assume a significance and a life of their own by reviving or re-enacting personal (life)stories. These are “memories” that need to be excavated and exposed, to be exorcised by personal confrontation or public exposure through the acts of writing and telling of stories. 322

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Even if Wenzel never uses the term Gothic, her analysis underscores characteristics which seem to be inherently Gothic; the excavation of hidden memories, the return of the repressed, haunted, dark spaces, are omnipresent motifs in Gothic novels. This evinces the capacity of the Gothic mode to explore the relationship between past and present. These two novels, of course, do not directly revisit the farm novel, although Imaginings of Sand may be read as a variation on the theme because it is located in the Karoo and hinges on a family house; yet, the fact that both of them use the Gothic mode to stage the return of a repressed past—women’s memories, slavery—suggests that Devil’s Valley does not merely revisit the farm novel but, like them, Gothicizes the past to stage the excavation of memories which need to be brought to light or exorcised. Brink’s post-apartheid fiction seems to revisit motifs that have always been omnipresent in the representation of home in white writing. Reading Gordimer’s fiction and the ways in which it stages the suburban home, for instance, Barnard starts with an assertion of the link between apartheid and place in the representation of home: Apartheid, to put it in Freudian terms, operated not so much by the mechanisms of psychosis (occlusion) as by the mechanism of neurosis (repression). It makes sense, then, that the fiction of white South Africans has so often adopted the mode Lars Engle has described as the political uncanny: a mode of writing that is precisely neurotic, perpetually engaged in recording the return of the repressed, in seeking out what lies at the limits of its own epistemological frame. It is a literature hovering, as a result of its peculiar geopolitical situation, between the colonial and the postcolonial, and arguably between the modern and the postmodern as well. 323

Barnard strikingly resorts to a lexicon which reminds us of the Gothicization of space, particularly when she borrows Lars Engle’s concept of the “political uncanny”: If, as Engle has suggested, the so-called architects of apartheid (Malan and especially Verwoerd) presented their policies as a way of making South Africa heimlich for the white person, this Heimlichkeit had its uncanny double from the very start. The comfortable suburban house, in both a historical and socially symbolic sense, was inseparably connected to its prototypical and repressed other: to the house in the township, a place that has remained unseen (perhaps even now) by many, if not most, white South Africans. 324

As a consequence, the representation of white homes needs to be juxtaposed with the representation of their counterparts in fiction by white writers. In The Impostor, Adam’s visit to the township seems to rely on the same clichés as in white novels published during apartheid. When Adam is asked to deliver a mysterious parcel and has to go to the township for the first time

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in his life, the place is described as both unknown to him and familiar because even if has never been there, he is familiar with the representation of such places in the media or in the arts. “Though he sees the township off in the distance every day, this is the first time he’s actually been there. Nevertheless, the tiny houses, the burnt-out, scrappy gardens, the pot-holed roads and sputtering street-lamps: it’s all known, all familiar. He has thought of it as far milder than the townships in the city; a place without danger. But as he noses slowly along, trying to find a street name, he notices a few groups of carousing drunk men.” 325 Adam’s ambiguous feelings about the place are expressed through concessive terms like though or but, and the fact that the place is perceived as both unknown and familiar, mild and dangerous, makes it fundamentally ambiguous and shows that he feels unsettled there as a strange white man driving around. When he finds the house and goes in, the same mixture of homeliness and discomfort seems to emerge, as shown by his description of the atmosphere. “Then they stand in uncomfortable proximity, as though waiting for something meaningful to happen. The atmosphere is not quite hostile, but it isn’t relaxed either; there’s a tension with no clear cause.” 326 The tension does not relent once Adam has left, still “perturbing him.” 327 This tension is linked, of course, to the nature of the “documents” Adam is delivering—in fact, a bribe for the mayor, so that he can authorize the conversion of Canning’s farm into a golf course—but also to another tension, that which exists between his own home and its “uncanny double,” the house in the black township. However, in most neo-farm novels, the farm itself is the privileged locus where identity is explored and Gothicized and the homes of the black characters are erased from the narrative. Like the castle in Gothic fiction, the farm is a locus of power. European Gothic novels appear “to challenge the very hierarchies society deems normative: the male oppression of the female, the predominance of wealth and landed property ownership, even the haunting legacy of class tyranny. Castles fall, crumbling into nothingness, and rightful owners of property redeem their ownership by thwarting villains who have usurped their lands.” Yet, in “landmark Gothic masterpieces of the era, resistance often ghosts into counter-resistance as the subversive forces we thought we saw simply vanish.” 328 Neo-farm novels similarly stage fictional counterparts of the Gothic castle which ambiguously stand for power and subversive forces whose subversive potential is challenged or questioned. The plot of Galgut’s The Impostor seems to illustrate the ambiguities of the Gothicized subversion of the farm novel. Canning’s place, Gondwana, is constructed throughout the novel as a post-apartheid version of the farm through its continuous pastoralization by the narrator’s lyrical appraisal of the place. Yet, Gondwana finally crumbles, destroyed by Canning’s hatred for his father and by the forces of capitalistic globalization. But in the end, Canning expresses regret rather than joy, and the success of his whole enterprise is

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challenged by his apparent disappointment. It seems that he has not overthrown a tyrant but, rather, replaced him with a different one, Genov, who steals his wife from him in an ironical reversal of the traditional happy endings found in Gothic novels. Canning’s farm becomes a ruin at the end, a typically Gothic state which stands for the end of an era—but not necessarily for the better. By revisiting the narrator’s pastoral fantasies in a defamiliarizing, Gothic mode—hence, perhaps, Barnard’s labeling of the novel as “curious” 329—Galgut highlights the ambiguities of white South Africans’ relationship to place, and, particularly, to this most emblematic of homes, the farm, which is the place where personal and collective identities are rooted. But as Richard Samin aptly pointed out, the space of the farm cannot be dissociated from the landscape which surrounds it. In farm novels, the apparent harmony which prevails inside the buildings must be contrasted with the distressing affects which emerge from the landscapes around them, as in Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, in which landscapes are “quite close to that frightening beauty which characterizes the sublime.” 330 NOTES 1. Jean Sévry, “La littérature sud-africaine et ses espaces,” in “Afrique du Sud: espaces et littératures,” Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims 99–100 (1998): 18, my translation. 2. Ibid., 19, my translation. 3. Ibid., 19–20, my translation. 4. Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Edinburgh, UK: Canongate, 2005), 11. 5. Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 57. Turcotte’s “colonial” Gothic encompasses both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Instead of colonial, we may also use postcolonial to describe it, relying on Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s definition of postcolonial as that which has been “affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.” Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffins, The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 2. Rosemary Marangoly George similarly suggests that the division between colonizer and colonized relies on binary oppositions which tend to overlook the complexities of identity and do not provide a reliable basis for complex analysis: “Ultimately, I would like to see both ‘first’ and ‘third’ words implicated (albeit differently implicated) in the term ‘the postcolonial,’ rather than have it refer specifically to the non-west”, because what is needed is an analysis “where both sides are not held down by the always already assigned central and marginal positions.” Marangoly George, The Politics of Home. Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 8). 6. Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 64–67. 7. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 99. 8. As Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires remind us: “If places are no longer the clear supports of our identity, they nonetheless play a potentially important part in the symbolic and psychical dimension of our identifications. It is not spaces which ground identifications, but places. How then does space become place? By being named: as the flows of power and negotiations of social relations are rendered in the concrete form of architecture; and also, of course, by embodying the symbolic and imaginary investments of a population. Place is space to which meaning has been ascribed.” Carter, Donald, and Squires, eds., “Introduction,” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1993), xii.

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9. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 7–9; italics in original. 10. Attie De Lange et al., eds. Literary Landscapes . From Modernism to Postcolonialism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xiii–xiv. 11. Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace (Paris: PUF, 1957), 18. 12. Ibid., 59. 13. Ibid., 77. 14. De Lange et al., Literary Landscapes, xv. 15. Marangoly George, Politics of Home, 21. 16. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 146. 17. Marita Wenzel, “Houses, Cellars and Caves in Selected Novels from Latin America and South Africa,” in Literary Landscapes. From Modernism to Postcolonialism, eds. De Lange et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 145. 18. Ibid., 146. 19. Bachelard, La poétique, 33. 20. Botting, Gothic, 2–3. 21. Ibid., 128. 22. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1892]), 176. 23. Charles L. Crow, American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 121. 24. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 226. 25. Robert Tally Jr., “Topophrenia: The Place of the Subject,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 14, no. 4 (2014): 1. 26. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1974]), 93. 27. Tally Jr., “Topophrenia,” 4. 28. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 233; bracketed term in original. 29. Tally Jr., “Topophrenia,” 4. 30. Ibid. 31. Marangoly George, Politics of Home, 2. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 9. 34. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, p259. 35. Ibid., 261–62. 36. Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 36. 37. Ibid., 35. 38. Denison, “Walking Through the Shadows,” 72. 39. Maurice Lévy, “Châteaux,” Otrante. Art et littérature fantastiques 12 (2002): 9, my translation. 40. Lévy, “Châteaux.” 41. Lévy illustrates his point with a quote from Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (Toronto: Seal Books, 1976, 30; quoted in Lévy, “Châteaux”, 9), whose critical impact cannot be denied: “These books, with their covers featuring gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns, hair streaming in the wind, eyes bulging like those of a goiter victim, toes poised for flight, would be considered trash of the lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuating degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted?” 42. Shear, “Haunted House.” 43. Rita Barnard, “Rewriting the Nation,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Atwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 670. 44. Lynn Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home. Life on the Page (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 4.

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45. Ibid., 6. 46. Ibid., 39. 47. Ibid., 41. 48. When interviewed by a journalist and asked what the chances were of the book being banned there, she was quite surprised: “I had never considered such a thing. I had lived outside the country for sixteen years. And anyway, politics was not the subject of my story—it was part of the given, the ground, the fabric of the world in which I had grown up.” Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 50. 49. Ibid., 59. 50. Ibid., 71, 74–75. 51. Lynn Freed, Home Ground (London: Penguin, 1986), 273. 52. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 24–25. Marangoly George observes that Said’s distinction between filiation and affiliation relies on a binary, and artificial, distinction between nature and culture: “A necessary alteration to propositions like Said’s would be to see ‘filiations’ as those bonds that are naturalized as ‘natural’ through the discourses that differentiate them from those bonds that are naturalized as ‘artificial’ or as ‘affiliations’” (Politics of Home, 17). 53. Lynn Freed, The Servants’ Quarters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2009), 109. 54. Freed, Home Ground, 18. 55. Freed explained that she had used notes about her relationship with her mother to imagine this character. Asked to write a memoir about her mother and daughter she gave up and returned to fiction: “But I did plunder what I had written of my mother and I used it for a wild new character I was creating—a diva, marooned at the bottom of Africa, a madwoman, survivor of Auschwitz, demon mother, possessive maniac, and keeper of secrets unto the grave.” Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 207. 56. Ibid., 115–16. 57. He is first referred to as “the Syrian,” and, later, as “my husband”: “He has never asked me to take his name for the simple reason that I don’t know what it is. Nor have I asked him. What would be the point? he only tells me things when he wants me to know them. And so it has become a pattern between us: I never ask, I never thank him, either.” Lynn Freed, House of Women (London: Flamingo, 2002), 66. He becomes Naim only when he becomes their children’s father: “My husband’s name is Naim. This I find out the day my twins are born.” (Ibid., 79). Also see p. 81. 58. One may mention, for instance, the influence of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione on Walpole and De Quincey; see Davison, “Walking Through the Shadows,” 29–30, and Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 38. 59. Freed, House of Women, 7. 60. Ibid., 13. 61. In Gothic fiction, villains are traditionally foreigners, as shown by Jarlath Killeen’s notion of the “ethnic other.” Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 91. Naim’s ambiguity also makes him the typical “hero-villain” described by Davison, “Walking Through the Shadows,” 69–70. 62. Freed, House of Women, 7–8, italics added. 63. Ibid.,13. 64. Ibid., 16. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 17. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 32. 69. See Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, 35–36. 70. Freed, House of Women, 51. 71. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966 [1794]), 225. 72. Ibid., 226. 73. Freed, House of Women, 52–53. 74. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 224–27.

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75. Freed, House of Women, 58–59, italics added. 76. Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Folio Essais, 1988), 47. 77. Christine Berthin, Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83. 78. The motif of monstrosity, which contributes to linking the novel to the Gothic, emerges several times in the novel, mostly in relation to bestiality or animality. For instance, the narrator writes about Naim, “I will think of him as an enormous, dark, dangerous gull, whose prisoner I am now more surely than ever” (Freed, House of Women, 81), or about their children, “the first girl was born with a harelip, and the second was covered in dark, silky hair like an animal” (Ibid., 80). 79. Ibid., 96, italics added. 80. Ibid., 28. 81. Ibid., 165. 82. Ibid., 169. 83. Ibid., 187. 84. Ibid., 144. 85. Ibid., 91. 86. Ibid., 89. 87. Ibid., 91. 88. Ibid., 71. 89. Ibid., 89. 90. Ibid., 102–3. 91. Ibid., 103. 92. Ibid., 109. 93. Ibid, 127. 94. Ibid., 29. 95. Ibid., 47. 96. Ibid., 56. 97. Ibid., 209, italics added. 98. Ibid., 210. 99. Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 39–40. 100. Freed, Home Ground, 273. 101. Freed, The Servants’ Quarters, 29. 102. Ibid., 61. 103. Ibid., 4. 104. Ibid., 151. 105. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 106. Ibid., 20–21. 107. Cressida thus epitomizes a version of Patoine’s “empathetic reading,” which is based on the “transformation of a semiotic form” (Mr. Harding’s story) “into a somatic experience” (Cressida’s nightmares). Pierre-Louis Patoine, Corps/Texte: pour une théorie de la lecture empathique—Cooper, Damielewski, Frey, Palahniuk (Paris: ENS Editions, 2015), 210. 108. Freed, The Servants’ Quarters, 22. 109. Ibid., 25–26. 110. Ibid., 113. 111. Amy Kaminsky, “Memory, Postmemory, Prosthetic Memory: Reflections on the Holocaust and the Dirty War in Argentine Narrative,” in Layers of Memory and the Discourse of Human Rights: Artistic and Testimonial Practices in Latin America and Iberia, ed. Ana Forcinito, Hispanic Issues On Line (Spring 2014): 112. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/ 184474. It can be argued, however, that if prosthetic memory does not necessarily imply a generational difference, it may be transmitted from one generation to the next. 112. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 106–7. 113. Freed, Home Ground, 30, italics added. 114. Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 8.

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115. Ibid., 8–9, italics added. 116. Ibid., 225. 117. Lynn Freed, “Being Jewish, Looking Jewish,” Jewish Quarterly (Summer 1996): 60. 118. Freed, “Being Jewish.” 119. Freed, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 106. 120. Ibid., 101–2. 121. Ibid., 99–100. 122. In her 1959 essay, “Where Do Whites Fit In?”, Gordimer exposes the problems she faced, as a white woman, to feel at home in South Africa in the context of apartheid. In The Essential Gesture, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988). 123. Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 36. 124. Nancy Topping Bazin notes that “The reality in Springs, Gordimer's hometown, is quite different from her utopian vision.” Bazin, “Nadine Gordimer’s Fictional Selves: Can A White Woman Be ‘At Home’ in Black South Africa?” Alternation 7, no. 1 (2000): 37. 125. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 35. 126. Wenzel, “Houses, Cellars and Caves,” 148; the quote is from Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 18. 127. Elizabeth Durot-Boucé, “La vision gothique noire. Fascination et effroi,” in Rêves de monuments, ed. Christian Corvisier (Paris: Editions du patrimoine, centre des monuments nationaux, 2012), 68. 128. Lévy, “Châteaux,” 7, my translation. 129. Durot-Boucé, “La vision gothique noire,” 68, my translation. 130. Fred Botting underlines the fundamental ambiguity of Gothic fiction’s relationship to the Enlightenment and the tension between rationality and irrationality which was staged in Gothic novels, arguing that these novels “blur rather than distinguish the boundaries that regulated social life, and interrogate, rather than restore, any imagined continuity between past and present, nature and culture, reason and passion, individuality and family and society.” (Botting, Gothic, 47). 131. Durot-Boucé, “La vision gothique noire,” 65, my translation. 132. Ibid., p. 65–66, my translation. 133. Lawn, “Introduction,” 15. 134. See Botting, Gothic, 18–19, and Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 261–62. 135. Denison, Walking Through the Shadows, 70–71. 136. Berthin, Gothic Hauntings, 84. 137. Ibid. 138. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 278. 139. Lévy, “Châteaux,” 8–9, my translation. 140. “Yesterday, young women of good upbringing locked themselves behind Udolpho’s ramparts to delve into intimate terrors. Today, American housewives flee their climatized hell by avidly consuming texts poorly written by insignificant scribblers (often, to tell the sad truth, female) after efficient market studies, endlessly reproducing the same narrative patterns.” (Ibid., 9, my translation) 141. Ibid. 142. I briefly analyzed this aspect of Shark’s Egg in a previous article (“Something Hungry and Wild,” 68). The present reading is much more developed, and lays emphasis on spatial issues which were not mentioned then. 143. Henrietta Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2000), 12. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., 37. 148. Ibid., 26–28. 149. Ibid., 28. 150. Ibid., 44. 151. Ibid., 45.

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152. Ibid., 46, italics added. 153. Ibid., 47. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., 48–49. 156. Ibid., 54. 157. Ibid., 55. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 58. 160. Ibid., 75. 161. Ibid., 81. 162. Ibid. 163. Ibid., 82. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid., 83. 166. Ibid., 81. 167. Botting, Gothic, 148–49. 168. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 88. 169. Ibid., 93. 170. Ibid., 95. 171. Ibid. 172. Botting, Gothic, 148. 173. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 96. 174. Ibid., 98. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid., 100. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid. 179. Ibid., 102. 180. Ibid., 105. 181. Ibid., 106. 182. Punter and Byron, for instance, insist on the link between the female gaze and the representation of violence in female Gothic, which “tends to emphasize suspense rather than outright horror, and this is often generated by limiting the readers understanding of events to the protagonist’s point of view. It is her fears or anxieties upon which the text focuses rather than on violent encounters or rotting corpses.” Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 279. 183. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 107. 184. Ibid., 110. 185. Ibid., 111. 186. Ibid. 187. Ibid., 17. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid., 112. 190. Ibid. 191. Ibid., 113. 192. Ibid., 114. 193. Ibid., 31. 194. Ibid. 195. Ibid. 196. Ibid., 34. 197. Ibid., 35. 198. Ibid. 199. Ibid., 116. 200. Ibid., 118. 201. Ibid., 119. 202. “The pictures were out on the floor again, but it was a different jigsaw puzzle now: a map of a foreign landscape, full of ambiguous structures, highways, earthworks, foundations.

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She was building a world, cutting and pasting and touching it up, inch by slow inch, like a particularly conscientious god.” (Ibid.) 203. Ibid. 204. Ibid. 205. Ibid., 120. 206. Ibid. 207. Ibid., 122. 208. Ibid., 17. 209. Ibid., 124. 210. Ibid., 125. 211. Ibid., 126. 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid., 122. 214. Ibid., 126. 215. Famous examples include The Turn of the Screw or “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 216. Botting, Gothic, 11. 217. Damon Galgut, The Impostor (London: Atlantic Books, 2008), 6. 218. Some of the arguments developed in this section were sketchily presented in “Something Hungry and Wild,” 67–68. The present reading is much more developed and lays emphasis on spatial issues which were not mentioned then. 219. Galgut, Impostor, 7. 220. Ibid., 9. 221. Ibid., 45. 222. Ibid., 46. 223. Ibid. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid., 47. 226. Elsa Linguanti defines magic realism as “the non-disjunction of contradictory elements (myth/history, naturalia/mirabilia)—not either/or, but both/and.” Linguanti, “Introduction,” 6. 227. Galgut, Impostor, 105. 228. Ibid., 161. 229. Ibid., 162. 230. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, collection Points, 1970), 37–38. 231. Ibid., 47. 232. Ibid., 87–91. 233. Ibid., 82–87. 234. Galgut, Impostor, 238. 235. Ibid. 236. Lawn, “Introduction,” 13. 237. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 67. 238. Galgut, Impostor, 77. 239. Ibid., 67. 240. Ibid., 64. 241. Ibid., 118. 242. Ibid., 120. 243. Ibid., 121. 244. Ibid. 245. Ibid., 149. 246. Ibid. 247. Ibid.,150. 248. Ibid., 151. 249. Ibid., 97. 250. Ibid., 99. 251. Ibid., 117. 252. Ibid., 116.

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253. Ibid., 123. 254. Ibid. 255. Ibid., 135. 256. Berthin, Gothic Hauntings, 8–9. 257. Galgut, Impostor, 113. 258. Ibid., 169. 259. Ibid., 171. 260. When he discovers Baby’s past, Adam thinks that it makes her similar to him: “Adam doesn’t feel alienated from her: on the contrary, a kinship between them has been strengthened. He is not the only one whose connection to Canning is built on lies; he is not the only impostor.” (Ibid., 127) 261. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 68. 262. Claire Devarrieux, “Damon Galgut en butte aux démons de l’Afrique du Sud,” Libération, May 27, 2010, http://next.liberation.fr/livres/2010/05/27/damon-galgut-en-butte-aux-demons-de-l-afrique-du-sud_654624, my translation. 263. “This really is a new South African party,” he exclaims at the launching party of the project in Cape Town (Galgut, Impostor, 184). 264. Ibid., 138. 265. Ibid., 155. 266. Ibid., 159. 267. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 67. 268. Galgut, Impostor. 269. Ibid.,94. 270. Ibid., 95. 271. Coetzee, White Writing, 71. 272. Barnard, “Rewriting the Nation,” 668. 273. See Sévry, “La littérature sud-africaine,” 20. Also see Liliane Louvel, “Dissidence littéraire et racisme d’état: l’écriture nécessaire d’André Brink et Nadine Gordimer,” PhD Diss., Université de Poitiers, 1988. 274. Liliane Louvel, Nadine Gordimer (Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1994), 50–51, my translation. 275. Paul Rich underlines the emphasis on pastoralism in farm novels, which belong to the tradition of colonial novels in which Africa is presented as a virgin land which must be conquered, and in which he discerns “a pastoral-type tradition that can be traced back in the English novel to its eighteenth-century roots.” Rich, “Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: the Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee,” Journal of South African Studies 9, no. 1 (October 1982): 57. Rich also argues that in farm novels, an “updated naturalist conception of the rural terrain as the locus of the South African identity” can be traced Rich, Hope and Despair. English-Speaking Intellectuals and South African Politics, 1896–1976 (London: British Academic Press, 1993), 125. 276. Michael Chapman, Southern African Literatures (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2003 [1996]), 192. 277. Jeanne-Marie Jackson, “You Are Where You Aren’t: Mark Behr and the Not-QuiteGlobal Novel,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2013.776753 278. Ibid., 185. 279. Ibid., 186. 280. See Vernon February’s analysis of Afrikaans literature in Mind Your Colour: “Afrikaans literature was, and still is, to a large extent characterized by its earthiness and rurality. This is not surprising, since Afrikaans was essentially entrenched in rural areas. The farmer, for example, lived in close proximity to his squatter-labourer (ons bruinmense). It is therefore only logical that a monumental theme in Afrikaans literature should be the farm-hand and his ‘baas.’” February, Mind Your Colour. The “Coloured” Stereotype in South African Literature (London: Kegan Paul, 1981), 35. This feature also appears in English-speaking writers’ farm novels, even if the ideological value of the farm, and of the relationships between masters and servants, is slightly less imbued with love for “the soil” as in the Afrikaans version of the genre.

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281. Coetzee argues that the invisibility of black labourers is a major feature of farm novels: “Silence about the place of black labour, is common, not only to Schreiner and Smith but, by and large, to the Afrikaans plaasroman, and represents a failure of imagination before the problem of how to integrate the dispossessed black man into the idyll (or in Olive Schreiner’s case the anti-idyll) of African pastoralism.” Coetzee, White Writing, 69, 71–72). As noted previously, this also applies to farm novels written in English, starting with the first one, The Story of an African Farm, in which the black servants are regularly mentioned but never named, and merely designated by periphrases like “the Kaffir-woman” or “the Kaffirs.” 282. Galgut, Impostor, 197–98. 283. Ibid., 207. 284. Ibid., 208. 285. Ibid. 286. Ibid., 209. 287. Ibid., 210. 288. Ibid., 211. 289. Ibid., 213. 290. Ibid., 215. 291. Ibid. 292. Ibid., 223. 293. Chapman, Southern African Literatures, 192–93. 294. Hein Viljoen, “Land, Space, Identity: The Literary Construction of Space in Three Afrikaans Farm Novels,” in Storyscapes: South African Perspectives on Literature, Space and Identity, ed. Hein Viljoen and Chris N. Van der Merwe (Amsterdam: Peter Lang, 2004), 108. 295. Malvern Van Wyk Smith, “From ‘Boereplaas’ to Vlakplaas. The Farm from Thomas Pringle to J. M. Coetzee,” in Strangely Familiar. South African Narratives on Town and Countryside, ed. C. N. Van der Merwe (Stellenbosch, South Africa: Content Solutions Online, 2001), 17. 296. Viljoen, “Land, Space, Identity,” 108. 297. Van Wyk Smith, “From ‘Boereplaas’ to Vlakplaas,” 20. 298. Ibid., 27. 299. Viljoen, “Land, Space, Identity,” 109. 300. Ibid., 110. 301. Ibid. 302. Lily G N Mabura, “Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun,” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 1 (2008): 205. 303. Ibid., 208. 304. Ibid., 209. 305. “In its intertextual dimension, space was squared: it is now being cubed.” Bertrand Westphal, “Pour une approche géocritique des textes. Esquisse, ” in La Géocritique: mode d’emploi, ed. Bertrand Westphal (Limoges, France: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2000), 28. 306. Shear, “Haunted House,” 72. 307. Ibid., 77. 308. See, for instance, Caren Van Houwelingen, “Rewriting the Plaasroman: Nostalgia, Intimacy and (Un)homeliness in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat,” English Studies in Africa 55, no. 1 (2012): 93–106; Reinhardt Fourie, “Identity, Gender, and Land in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat,” English Academy Review 33, no. 1 (2016): 38–56; Meg Samuelson, “Writing Women,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Atwell and Derek Attridge, 757–78 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 309. Coetzee, White Writing, 63. 310. Paulette Coetzee, “South Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34, no. 3 (1999): 130. 311. This reading of Devil’s Valley was initially developed in “Something Hungry and Wild.” I thank the editors of Commonwealth Essays and Studies who have kindly allowed me to reuse some of this material in the present book.

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312. André Brink, Devil’s Valley (London: Vintage, 1998), 286–87. 313. Lawn, “Introduction,” 13. 314. Lévy, “Châteaux,” 7, my translation. 315. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 288. 316. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Devil’s Valley.” 317. Gérard Genette defines hypertextuality as the relationship between a new text—the hypertext—and a previous text—the hypotext—on which it is grafted in a way that does not consist in commenting upon it. Genette, Palimpsestes: l’écriture au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 13. 318. Barnard, “Rewriting the Nation,” 670. 319. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Filiation et écriture dans cinq romans d’André Brink: Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain, An Act of Terror, Imaginings of Sand et Devil’s Valley.” PhD Diss., Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, 2003. 320. See Louvel, “Dissidence littéraire”; Brian Macaskill, “Interrupting the Hegemonic: Textual Critique and Mythological Recuperation from the White Margins of South African Writing,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 23, no. 2 (1990): 156–81; Yvonne Munnick, Ecriture romanesque et engagement politique dans le roman contemporain d’Afrique australe. Brink, Gordimer, Lessing (Toulouse, France: Editions Universitaires du Sud, 1992); Rich, “Tradition and Revolt.” 321. Azzam, “The Alien Within,” 83. 322. Wenzel, “Houses, Cellars and Caves,” 151. 323. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 46–47. 324. Ibid., 48. 325. Galgut, Impostor, 102. 326. Ibid.,103. 327. Ibid., 104. 328. Denison, Walking Through the Shadows, 66–67. 329. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 68. 330. Samin, “Les Paysages du Karoo,” 44.

Chapter Three

Landscapes

GOTHICIZED LANDSCAPES “Far from being a minor aspect of African literature, African landscapes provide a conceptual framework for the interpretation of African fiction.” 1 Like many other colonial and postcolonial literatures, South African writing lays great emphasis on landscapes. Before examining examples of Gothicized landscapes in white South African fiction, it is necessary to define what will be meant by landscape and what kinds of landscapes will be dealt with in the present chapter, bearing in mind the idea that landscape is closely linked to national identity. As Jochen Petzold puts it in his study of history in postapartheid white writing, “[m]ost of the texts [studied in the book] emphasize one aspect that could be utilized as, literally, the common ground on which all South Africans might meet, namely a common love of the land and its typical landscapes.” 2 Petzold’s suggestion might seem rather perceptive because landscapes have always been associated with national identity: “Inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions we still live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched, as a homeland.” 3 But Petzold’s statement may also be read as rather naïve because it seems to ignore the fact that landscapes are never neutral but can be endowed with different values by different viewers or writers, so that landscapes can hardly be described as “common ground” in such a complex nation as South Africa, where “the inhabitants, white and black, very frequently have contrasting and conflicting memories of the same place. This constitutes, however, far more than the coexistence of dissonant 95

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memories; it points to quite different perceptions of the land itself.” 4 The differences and discrepancies between these perceptions of the land are the result of varied ideological, cultural, linguistic, and spatial positioning. Like other white settlers in postcolonial states, white South Africans occupy a particular position, as Gillian Whitlock reminds us: “Post-colonial readings of ‘white writing’ in settler states need to be informed by approaches which articulate an ambivalent relation to Empire, and the position of white settlers as being both colonized by metropolitan societies, and, in their turn, brutally colonizing indigenous peoples.” 5 South African white writing must be read in the light of this doubleness. Furthermore, the perception of landscape is always mediated by a set of preconceptions induced by previous perceptions of place, as Gerald Garrard points out: If pastoral is the distinctive Old World construction of nature, suited to longsettled and domesticated landscapes, wilderness fits the settler experience in the New Worlds—particularly the United States, Canada and Australia—with their apparently untamed landscapes and the sharp distinction between the forces of culture and nature. Yet settler cultures crossed the oceans with their preconceptions intact, so the “nature” they encountered was inevitably shaped by the histories they often sought to leave behind. 6

Such a statement applies to South Africa, where the colonists’ perception of space was similarly shaped by their aesthetic tastes, imported from elsewhere, by cultural and artistic representations of other landscapes and by a number of expectations often thwarted by the reality of the land: Historically, the land in white English South African fiction has raised hermeneutic questions: how to read it and how to find a language to speak about it. J. M. Coetzee, in his book White Writing, has described how landscape writing from the turn of the century until the 1960s either continued to adopt a European lens through which to view African landscape or announced its failure to “track” the land, the refusal of the land to “emerge into meaningfulness as a landscape of signs.” After the 1960s, the question of adopting an African nationality increasingly confronted whites, and relationships to the land gave way to more overtly political concerns. 7

Landscape is therefore “not an object, but a mediation through which human subjectivity connects with an empirical reality and, to a certain extent, produces it as its objectification results from the shaping of perception. As a mediation, landscape is therefore bound to be historically variable, socially and culturally malleable.” 8 Landscape is constantly being reconstructed and reassessed and assigned new meaning by the people who perceive it; as Charles Avocat puts it, landscape is both an object and an act; it is “a synthesis, a ‘composition’ in the sense assigned to the term by painters . . . , a space

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structured by our mental categories . . ., rationalized rather than rational.” 9 This implies that it is always mediated not only by cultural or historical factors by “inherited tradition” 10 but also by the viewer’s subjectivity, which necessarily implies a perceiving I/eye. As Michel Collot reminds us, “landscape does not designate as much a given site as a way of seeing.” 11 Landscape is therefore the result of the perception of a given reality, and it articulates a subject with an object which s/he perceives: The landscape refers to the subject who perceives it. . . . Landscape analysis represents the meeting point between two completely different realities: on the one hand, one (or several) sensory image(s) corresponding to our worldview, filtered by our imagination, our psychology, our previous experiences, our aesthetic tastes; on the other hand, a tri-dimensional, objective, physical reality whose abstract and mathematical formula we look for. . . . [B]etween the two, that is, between total subjectivity and absolute objectivity, lies a landscape which is experienced, can be observed by anyone, and is both the reality of an image and the image of a reality. 12

As a consequence, there can be no neutral landscape; landscape is necessarily determined by the aesthetic, political, and ideological orientations of the perceiving subject 13 but also by the subject’s senses and body: when the subject is immersed in a landscape, “the aesthetic emotion caused by the landscape does not merely spring from a state of the soul but also, and above all, from a state of the body.” 14 It will therefore be necessary to pay particular attention to subjectivity and to the body in this chapter devoted to the Gothicization of landscapes in post-apartheid white writing. But landscapes are not merely an aesthetic, cultural, or personal construct; they also achieve collective meaning and create communities, 15 and they can participate in the elaboration of a nation’s identity. “Landscapes . . . provide visible shape: they picture the nation . . . [P]articular landscapes achieve the status of national icons.” 16 As Claire Omhovère observes, “[t]he entanglement between nature and culture is . . . so intricate that the societies which have cultivated and valued a sense of landscape tend to use a single word to refer to the perceived object and to its representation. Landscape writing is then one of the choicest terrains to observe the interplay between the world, the words we use to relate to it and the culture that ascribes a signification to this relation.” 17 This is particularly relevant in a literature which seeks to explore the past of a country since “before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” 18 In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the representation of landscape by white writers therefore becomes a privileged site to observe how the identity of the nation is being redefined and how a number of anxieties are depicted through the staging of interactions between the characters and the

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landscape. Such interactions are, Coetzee tells us, a need for the white writer: “In the words he throws out to the landscape, in the echoes he listens for, he is seeking a dialogue with Africa, a reciprocity with Africa, that will allow him an identity better than that of visitor, stranger, transient.” 19 Some landscapes have acquired particular significance for white writers in the cultural and literary history of South Africa. I will briefly identify them and examine how they have been represented before analyzing their Gothicization in some recent white South African writing. The first landscape which has been endowed with cultural and ideological value in white writing is the Karoo, which was, for European writers, “the metaphor of the African mystery which seems to challenge the legitimacy of their presence in the country.” 20 As Johan Geertsema observes: “The significance of the Karoo from an aesthetico-political perspective is that it constitutes a topos, in the context of ‘white writing’ in South Africa, for imagining Africa, and has persistently played a key role in negotiating settler identity (as well as the identity of settlers’ descendants) in Africa.” 21 Geertsema insists, in particular, on the role played by the Karoo in what he calls “the creation of a white imaginary.” 22 Richard Samin shares Geertsema’s conception; analyzing how the construction of the space of the Karoo in some literary works “constitutes an aesthetic encoding with ideological goals or, more precisely, how the landscape is conceived as a hermeneutic process aiming at legitimizing the colonial presence” 23 he shows that the Karoo becomes a “chronotope,” 24 where colonists have combined space and time to try to “construct their genealogy and to justify their belonging to the country” so that the landscapes of the Karoo become “palimpsests where layers of successive knowledge are superimposed.” 25 The landscape of the Karoo has thus become imbued with values based on its physical and geological characteristics but also influenced by a combination of aesthetic and ideological factors. As Mathilde Rogez remarks, the Karoo “is not, strictly speaking, a desert, but the white colonists saw it as such and described it as an empty space because they were looking for specific features corresponding to their own conception of what a landscape must be but did not find them there.” 26 The Karoo, in other words, was constructed in white writing as a specifically African space which did not correspond to the aesthetic conceptions of “beautiful” landscapes imported from elsewhere and from Europe in particular. What made it particularly difficult for the colonists to apprehend it as beautiful was its scale and, obviously, its dryness, which made it rather hostile for settlement. Yet, it became a privileged site to negotiate the relationship between settlers and the “dark continent,” 27 and the space where the process of settling was staged in literature, particularly in the South African genre of the plaasroman or farm novel, as shown, for instance, in Pauline Smith’s work, in which, as in most white writing, the landscape is closely associated with the farm, so that the rural landscapes of the Karoo seem to “crystallize a

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national imagination” 28 around the topos of the farm and its surrounding landscape. The other major topos I would like to examine in white writers’ appropriation of the South African landscape is that of Table Mountain, which dominates Cape Town and constitutes a towering landmark for anyone staying in or around the city. Table Mountain has been a prominent spatial representation of the sense of unsettlement caused by colonization since Camoens’s Lusiads in which the Mountain, and the Cape of Storms, was personified as a terrifying Titan sent to the end of the earth by Zeus as a punishment for having dared to love Tethys. This myth, which involves forbidden love between a black Titan and a white nymph, is described by Stephen Gray as “the white man’s creation myth of Africa, ultimately derived from classical sources and applied to explain his initial experience of the black continent. Its essence is that of confrontation across a wide distance, its motivation a desire to codify and explain, if not to engage.” 29 Louise Bethlehem also reminds us that “the specter of Adamastor has long haunted white South African cultural memory.” 30 Even if the legend of Adamastor is not revisited directly in the novels I am going to focus on, this myth shows the prominence of Table Mountain in white imagination as a place of fear and a site for negotiating settlement in the “dark continent.” Therefore, it seems necessary to examine how literary representations of Table Mountain have participated in the expression of white writers’ sense of unsettledness in post-apartheid works. SUBVERTING THE PASTORAL: GALGUT’S GOTHICIZED LANDSCAPES In The Impostor, the space of the Karoo, a central topos in South African white writing, is revisited; by Gothicizing the farm novel, Damon Galgut seems to interrogate the place of white man in this vast and hostile landscape. The narrative of Adam’s second visit to Gondwana, Canning’s farm, is a case in point; while the characters drive into the place, the landscape gradually unfolds in front of them. “Then there is the vast landscape opening around him, with its hot distances, its broken, abandoned farmsteads. And ahead of him, like something dark and secret and forbidden, that green fold in the mountains.” 31 The place seems to contain all the stereotypes of the Karoo: its scale, its climate, its contrasts, and its farms. It is also immediately Gothicized, not only because of Canning’s difficult family relationships, which I dealt with in the previous chapter, but also because it is constructed as an anomaly in the arid landscape of the Karoo and described by a simile which introduces decidedly Gothic motifs (“like something dark and secret and forbidden”). Even the mention of “broken, abandoned farmsteads” seems to

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carry Gothic echoes with their suggestion of ruin and decay evidencing the impossibility to permanently tame a timeless and hostile landscape. More generally, The Impostor revisits the pastoral fantasies which were at the core of much “white writing” about the Karoo: the pastoral provided “unsettled settlers” with a “reassuring,” “retrospective gaze” 32 enabling them to appropriate the landscape through literary imagination. As Sofia Kostelac observes, in The Impostor Adam “imagines that the pastoral setting of the Karoo will provide the inspiration he seeks, as well as a welcome relief from the avarice of the city,” but such pastoral fantasies are shattered very early in the novel, as “corruption and greed, Adam soon learns, are endemic to both country and city.” 33 Mired in loneliness and poverty in the Karoo, he is seduced by the emotional and material comforts offered by Canning, a wealthy childhood friend who is involved in a corrupt development deal set to destroy vast tract of an unspoilt Karoo Valley, ironically called Gondwana. The name signals the state of prelapsarian innocence for which Adam yearns, but it is here that he is drawn into the very world of self-promoting materialism from which he felt protected by his poetic aestheticism. 34

Adam’s poems themselves point to the limitations of his pastoral fantasies. Faced with a worrying lack of inspiration, Adam manages to overcome his writer’s block by resorting to the clichéd association of black woman and landscape inspired by Baby, Canning’s wife: “Until now, he’s been trying to write poems about the wilderness, a world empty of people, while all the time he’s needed a human being to focus on. And here at last she is, intervening between him and the landscape—not an identifiable person, but an emblematic female figure, seen against the backdrop of a primal, primitive garden. All of it is very biblical.” 35 The reader cannot help noticing that it is not only “very biblical” but also extremely stereotypical, especially because of the ideologically problematic association between the black woman and a “primal, primitive garden”—the alliteration signaling the insistent desire to revert to supposedly idealistic origins in aptly named Gondwana. Adam thus situates himself in a long line of texts associating black women and land: “The feminization of colonized landscapes can illustrate the positionality inherent in viewing/reading landscapes—and maps purporting to represent them—as both visual and written. The association of indigenous women with colonized land legitimized perceptions of both women and land as objects of colonization.” 36 Despite its highly problematic nature, the association between Baby and the landscape recurs throughout the novel and not only in Adam’s poems: when he discovers that Baby has cheated on Canning (and on him) with Genov, he thinks about it through a reference to the concomitant destruction of the farm. “His last memory of her—the cold, hard look on her face—can’t be separated

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from the turmoil that stirs in him when he imagines the bulldozers, the havoc they are wreaking out there. He has to turn away from all that, the disturbing prelude to the future. Instead he sits down to read through his poems. There, he thinks, he will find some lasting trace of her, or of how he used to feel about her, before everything went wrong.” 37 The repeated references to Adam’s feelings and thoughts reinforce the sense that the parallel between Baby and the farm is the result of his subjectivity. But the idyll is over: the poems are “bad,” 38 and Adam’s pastoral fantasies are revealed as an illusion. Significantly and symbolically it is when Adam burns his pastoral poems that the mayor of the city turns up on his doorstep; the man’s corruption and Adam’s failure as a pastoral poet are exposed at the same time. The fact that Adam imagines Baby as a kind of medium between Canning’s father and himself when he makes love to her in the dead man’s cottage participates in the ideologically problematic nature of the relationship among himself, the young woman, and the farm: “But he cannot shake off— even in these most intimate moments—the idea of a connection between Canning’s father and himself that passes through his black lover, using her as a medium.” 39 Their relationship is thus constructed as a form of indirect, and disturbing, haunting, paradoxically conveyed through the reified body of a black woman. Adam feels that Baby offers him a connection with a dubious—and guilty—past, turning him into the spiritual son of Canning’s father. Baby becomes objectified as the medium of Adam’s pastoral fantasies, the means through which he establishes a connection with the idealized landscape of Gondwana—but also with the Gothic figure of Canning’s father, thus becoming the legitimate “owner” of the farm and of the surrounding landscape, which he appropriates through language. The dead man’s ambiguity is thus transferred onto Adam, whose ideological positioning is unsettled by his problematic appropriation of both Baby and the farm, which turns him into an ambivalent figure. Baby herself is a fundamentally ambiguous figure, and she is clearly constructed by Adam, in a narration which is constantly focalized through him without ever providing any access to other characters’ interiority, as someone she may not be. For instance, when Adam notices her at the launching party of the golf project in Cape Town, he remarks: “She is another person tonight, somebody he doesn’t know. The real Baby, the one that he wants to see, is still out there somewhere, in Gondwana, or in his poems.” 40 Baby is associated with the Karoo landscape when Adam paradoxically describes the “real” Baby as the one he has fantasized in Gondwana and in his poems, while the actual woman standing in front of him is perceived as inauthentic because she does not correspond to his fantasies. Such a conception of Baby’s identity and her association with the farm is fraught with gender and racial stereotypes and leads the reader to question the way the landscape is rendered in The Impostor through Adam’s eyes.

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One scene epitomizes Adam’s temporary fall from grace and can be read as a synecdoche of the whole novel because it foreshadows the destruction of the idyll he fantasized. One of the first times Adam goes to Gondwana, he wakes up early and decides to explore the place on his own. Walking into the woods in the sunrise, he follows a path which leads him to a secluded place, a pool where the river emerges from the mountains. Shedding his clothes on the bank, “he swims out into the middle of the pool, where it’s deepest. The current is barely perceptible, a faint tugging on the skin, but he imagines it washing him clean, carrying the past away. It is like baptism, but for that you need to be fully immersed: he ducks his head beneath the surface. The mirror breaks soundlessly, then composes itself around him again—sky, trees, the river-bank leaning in.” 41 But this mystical moment—the religious connotations are explicit in the comparison with baptism and the symbolical rebirth experienced by the aptly named Adam, who temporarily feels as alone and pure as his biblical namesake initially did, in the no less aptly named Gondwana—is soon turned into an uncanny experience when Adam feels he is being watched by the forest: It’s a horrible moment. His body becomes colder than the water. Centuries of history drop away: the forest itself is staring at him—into him—with a dark face, lined and worn and old, marinated in ancient contempt. The face belongs here. Adam is the intruder, alien and unwanted; the single element in the scene that doesn’t fit. All his pagan hymns to the landscape depart, unwritten. He is about to vanish without a trace, and the shock jolts him off the rock, into deep water again. So they look at one another, the black face in the forest and the naked white man, treading water. 42

Adam’s sense of displacement is clearly expressed in racial terms and placed under the sign of the uncanny—which is, Sigmund Freud reminds us, often linked to the revival of old beliefs: “It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men . . . and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.” 43 The forest seems to be alive, a rekindling of animist beliefs in the animated nature of man’s environment which takes Adam back to ancient times and creates a strong sense of dread within him—a feature typical of the uncanny, as “[t]he subject of the ‘uncanny’ is . . . undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror.” 44 Adam’s terror appears to spring from the return of a racial repressed, the “dark face” of the forest. After a pastoral moment of (fake?) communion with nature and with what he believes to be his true self—the motif of identity being expressed quite transparently by the image of the “mirror” of water recomposing itself around him—Adam experiences the fear of annihilation (“he is about to vanish without a trace”) linked to his

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“alien” identity. This moment of sheer anxiety Gothicizes what should have been a pastoral moment of reunion with an incongruously fertile oasis in the middle of the dry landscape of the Karoo. As in the whole novel, the scene is mediated through Adam’s subjectivity, a mode of writing characteristic of the pastoral mode, since, as Greg Garrard reminds us, “[f]rom the outset, pastoral often used nature as a location or as a reflection of human predicaments, rather than sustaining an interest in nature in and for itself.” 45 Here Adam typically projects his feelings and his desire for rebirth onto a nature which he perceives as pristine and primeval. From this point of view, at the beginning, the scene is endowed with nostalgia, a classic pastoral feature, as Raymond Williams pointed out, 46 relying on an elegiac 47 perception of nature. But such an idealized perception of nature, and of the past, is challenged by the Gothicized encounter with the Other, an Other who is perceived as being fused with the forest. However, the terror created by the feeling of being looked at by the forest slowly dissolves: “Then he sees the hat. A dirty yellow hat, slanted skewly on top of the face. He knows this hat; he saw it yesterday, on the head of that old black guy, who must be as startled as Adam at this encounter. The world becomes ordinary as he enters time again.” 48 The yellow hat, a perfectly harmless and everyday object which Adam identifies as Ezekiel’s, refamiliarizes the scene, which becomes “ordinary” again after a moment of sheer terror which took Adam back in time—or so it seems. 49 Even if the scene is rather short, it epitomizes Adam’s sense of unsettledness and the frailty of his pastoral ideals in a landscape which bears the traces of a violent history of dispossession. It might be argued that the “dark face” in the forest stands for the accusing look of the colonized people: Adam’s short-lived moment of pastoral epiphany is thus haunted by a history which briefly Gothicizes the landscape, displays the shallowness, and the egotism of his pastoral fantasies and reveals that the allegedly natural and empty African landscape is in fact inhabited. This moment of thwarted revelation is echoed later on in the novel when Adam and Canning walk together to find the source of the river which flows through Gondwana. The place does not fulfill Adam’s pastoral expectations: “Adam shivers. He had expected something different: a bubbling fountain bursting out of the ground, something clear and harmless. But this place is somehow sinister. He can imagine too vividly the dark subterranean tunnels, winding deeper and deeper under the mountains, towards some echoing, ultimate womb.” 50 The source, seen through Adam’s eyes, is described as unhomely and “sinister.” Adam’s subjectivity leads him to Gothicize the landscape by imagining the “dark subterranean tunnels” under his feet: the pastoral value of the source as the origin of life is therefore reversed as the place is perceived as a tomb through the oxymoronic phrase “the ultimate womb.” This reversal of values, from life-giving source to dangerous, uncanny place, is reinforced when Canning almost falls to his death and is rescued

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by Adam: “As Canning comes up, wheezing and panting, it happens. His foot slips, he loses his grip, his eyes widen in fear. He is actually in the act of falling. The drop underneath him at this point is smooth and deep, with jagged rocks at the bottom. For an instant, time stands still. Then Adam’s hand shoots out and grabs hold of Canning’s hand; he pulls him up to safety.” 51 The reason why the place is Gothicized, and why the presence of death is made explicit, is revealed when Canning tells Adam that he has brought him to this secluded place to tell him about his plans for Gondwana. While Adam aestheticizes the place as central in the landscape (“They have a view not only down into the stony hollow in the mountains, but over the top of a ridge to the simmering plains in the distance. The world is both rising and falling around them” 52 ), Canning announces the imminent downfall of his father’s paradise, which he wants to destroy because he wants to “dismantle his dream. Bit by bit, piece by piece.” 53 Adam’s reaction shows his attachment to the place as a pastoral fantasy: “The vision of a primitive, barbaric landscape will be completely wiped out. . . . The emptiness, the spiritual vapidity, are hard to express; the word that comes to him is desecration.” 54 Here, again, Adam associates the place with “ancient times” and endows it with a sacred dimension which will be wrecked by Canning’s plans. The knowledge of the place’s future, its transformation into a deeply unnatural and unpastoral place, a golf course, alters Adam’s perception of Canning, whom he even regrets having saved from falling to his death, and of the landscape: “Adam looks out over the nearby ridge to the sun-baked plains, but now the vista has altered. He can only see what will come.” 55 The pastoral has been definitively shattered, and it is no coincidence if “[b]y the time they emerge into Gondwana again, the sun is going down, and the sky is a bloodbath of violent color overhead.” 56 The sunset, a transparent image of the end of an era, is described through images that evoke violence and death and confirm that the walk to the source has not been a moment of communion with nature but, instead, the revelation of dark secrets ready to defile the pristine, pastoral landscape of Gondwana. The conflict which is revealed is also a clash between precapitalistic values and the world of finance and investment: “I have healthy capitalist instincts too, I’ll make a lot of money out of the deal,” 57 Canning proudly tells Adam before excitingly exposing all his projects—a long list where the anaphoric repetition of “how” displays Adam’s sense of dizziness and shock. 58 The Gothicization of the pastoral thus suggests that capitalism is the repressed which returns to enable the son to take revenge on his dead father and to transform the landscape. Paradoxically, though, Canning seems to partly endorse some of Adam’s pastoral values, particularly when he keeps referring to his memories of roaming the place with his black friend Lindile, Ezekiel and Grace’s son, when they were children, much to Adam’s annoyance: “Adam is irritated by

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these constant references to a halcyon, unfallen time.” 59 But Canning’s nostalgia does not extend beyond his own time. Like Adam, he seems to detect traces of the past in the landscape of Gondwana, and he takes his friend to a little cave to show these traces to him. But once there Canning ignores the centuries-old rock paintings which Adam refers to as “Bushman art”: “The figures in the painting are stick-like but expressive, the colors still bright. It appears to be a hunting scene: people with bows and arrows, pursuing animals.” 60 To Adam, and to the reader, these traces of a precolonial past are certainly intriguing. But they do not seem to matter to Canning, who prefers showing Adam “another engraving altogether. This is a set of intertwined names cut into the rock. Kenneth/Lindile. There’s a blurred date underneath.” 61 Ironically, this inscription of this childhood friendship onto the landscape matters more to him than the archeological traces of a collective, lost past. The only nostalgia Canning can feel is for his own, individual history. “‘Before we grew up and realized how complicated the world was. It was an innocent time.’ Canning’s eyes have actually filmed over with moisture. ‘I often think about back then, Nappy. What I wouldn’t give to rewind to that time.’” 62 Canning’s self-centered nostalgia seems to obliterate the traces of the collective past in favor of a sentimental longing for his own lost childhood. Ironically, Canning does not even know what became of Lindile, who “got all political and turned angry.” 63 His relationship to these childhood memories also informs the whole novel because his decision to enact revenge over his father by destroying Gondwana springs from a conversation he had with Adam when they were both boarders at the same school, years before—a conversation Adam himself does not remember, just as he cannot remember Canning either. Interestingly, the childish engraving bearing Kenneth and Lindile’s names is mentioned again much later in the novel, when the site is being destroyed. Adam asks Canning what he intends to do about the rock, and whether he will allow it to be bulldozed, but Canning answers that “the past should stay past, especially mine,” which leads Adam to understand that “Canning is talking about his own childhood signature, not the San art. The cryptic, colourful figures don’t even exist for him.” 64 Canning’s selfish forgetting of the San art may epitomize the erasure of San history from South African history and from white representations of that history in literary texts; to him, this past does not exist. The meaning of the landscape is therefore different for Adam, who acknowledges the San past, and for Canning, who does not. The Impostor repeatedly shows that the Karoo landscape bears the traces of an ancient past. Fossils, for instance, are so abundant in a stretch of the river they visit together that Adam tells Canning that “it should be a national heritage site or something.” 65 When they fly together over the land in a helicopter, beholding the land from above, time seems to be distorted, so that the landscape is transfigured and becomes “something conceptual and ab-

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stract.” “From far up above, the land ceases to be the subject of poetry: it becomes something else, a series of formulations, a mathematical problem to be worked out” 66 as they watch it from a godlike perspective. “For just that moment he is an empty eye; a perfect witness. It comes to him that time is the great, distorting lens. Up close, human life is a catalogue of pain and power, but when enough time has gone past, everything ceases to matter. . . . History is just like the ground down there: something neutral and observable, a pattern, a shape. Murder and rape and pillage—in the end, they are just colorful details in a story.” 67 The landscape subjectively becomes a timeless place, but such an ahistorical perspective disturbingly, and problematically, obliterates the traces of a past which does matter, particularly to those who were the recipients of history’s violence, the victims of “murder and rape and pillage.” Through the timeless fantasy of his white narrator, Galgut seems to stage the problematic relationship of white South Africans to the land and to its violent history and to show that the pastoral fantasies which were Gothicized earlier in the novel point to a no less problematic erasure of the Other from the land. Yet, Adam’s fantasies are not different ideologically from Canning’s revenge when he wants to reshape the landscape, as suggested by the irony of the intended name of the golf course, Ingadi, which “means garden in Zulu.” 68 This name is doubly inauthentic because the artificiality of the golf course is combined with the fact that it “was never a Zulu area.” 69 What governs Canning’s choice to desecrate the land is money brought from abroad in a ruthless articulation of the global and the local: The mobility of capital and its impact on localities is perhaps best illustrated in Damon Galgut’s curious novel, The Impostor (2008). The work seems, at first, to revisit one of the well-worn tropes about locality in South Africa: namely, whether the landscape of South Africa’s semi-arid interior—desolate, barren, featureless, prehistoric—can be turned into poetry. . . . The plot then begins to turn on precisely the kind of destruction of the local we associate with global capitalism at its worst: a game reserve in a verdant kloof is sold off to become a golf course and resort. 70

The end of the pastoral therefore seems to be the result of the combination of personal revenge and collective forces, whose joint efforts Gothicize the landscape and turn it into an inauthentic and ruined place which cannot be invested anymore with the sentimental values it used to carry. By showing the replacement of Gondwana by a golf course, and the subsequent disappearance of a way of life, Galgut places his novel within an ideological frame which revisits the genre of the farm novel. The heroes of farm novels usually achieved a form of harmony with the land of their ancestors, as shown, for instance, by Coetzee’s analysis of C. M. van den Heever’s novels, in which an epiphanic moment usually showed the communion between the protagonist and his farm: “An eruption into words, in

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which for the first time the farm appears to the farmer in the full glory of its full meaning, and for the first time the farmer fully knows himself. The movement of the prototypical plaasroman is steadily towards the revelation of the farm as the source of meaning.” 71 In The Impostor, the process is doubly subverted: epiphanic moments are not devoted to the “farmer” himself but to Adam, who does not belong to the farm, thus creating a distance between the land and the individual. What is more, the “meaning” which emerges from Adam’s epiphanic moments of contemplation is far from showing the farm “in the full glory of its meaning” but, rather, suggests a disconnection between him and the land. Even if the motif of the loss of the farm in a newly capitalistic world can be found in farm novels, 72 the farm usually remains the repository of pastoral and familial values which are mourned when they disappear. The Impostor subverts this motif by showing a son eager to do away with his father’s legacy, thus betraying the genealogical value associated with the farm in the plaasroman, in which “we find the ancestors hagiographized as men and women of heroic strength, fortitude, and faith, and instituted as the originators of lineages (Afrikaner families). The farms they carved out of the wilds, out of primal, inchoate matter, become the seats to which their lineages are mystically bound, so that the loss of a farm assumes the scale of the fall of an ancient house, the end of a dynasty.” 73 What makes The Impostor ambiguous is the systematic use of Adam’s point of view: from his perspective, as in traditional farm novels, selling the farm—or its equivalent, Gondwana—is deeply problematic because it severs an idealized connection between the family and the soil. But Adam’s own conception of the land is also depicted as questionable, in particular through the Gothicization of his moments of communion with the land, which enables Galgut to challenge and criticize the pastoral dimension of the farm novel. The Gothicization of the relationship between the white characters and the landscape both shows the end of an era and the hypocrisy of white South Africans’ pastoral conception of the land. By showing the limitations of Adam’s elegiac construction of the land, Galgut situates himself in the antipastoral tradition which, Coetzee explains, was initiated in South African white writing by Olive Schreiner and followed up by Nadine Gordimer. 74 Landscape in The Impostor becomes the Gothic locus where Adam’s internal corruption and decay is projected, as shown by his reaction after betraying Canning by sleeping with his wife: He pictures the landscape again, plundered and deformed, sold out for money and revenge. And this image leads him now to a deeper sadness in himself: he has moved here, to the countryside, because he wanted to speak with childlike simplicity about nature, but he finally understands he’s been deserted by that voice. A great complexity has sprung up between him and the world. His

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The landscape inevitably becomes the projection of his own failures—and, conversely, his own life becomes a landscape through a web of metaphors which Adam comments on directly. The superimposition of the two processes highlights the end of an allegedly innocent, childlike, pastoral perception of nature, which has been replaced by a complex web of metaphors. Adam thus vents his nostalgia for a past which cannot be recovered. However, such a description through Adam’s eyes suggests that he believes in the existence of an unsoiled, pastoral world. His pastoral ideals have been corrupted by his exposition to Canning’s schemes, but his worldview still upholds nature as the locus where purity can be recovered, evincing, once more, the ambiguity of his relationship to pastoral, and possibly expressing Galgut’s ironical denunciation of the hypocrisy of white people (including himself?). When Gondwana is eventually turned into a golf course, its destruction is narrated in Gothicized terms: The scene has entirely transformed. On the last occasion he’d stood here, the earth had been whole and complete, but it has since been ripped open and all its innards have come spilling out. Huge piles of rubble rise in grotesque brown cones. The exposed soil is raw and primitive, showing the layers and striations beneath the surface. Men in khaki uniforms are swarming everywhere, appearing and disappearing in the endless fug of dust. Under the lowering sun, this angry, oblivious industry takes on an infernal glow. 76

The description intertwines several major Gothic motifs: the landscape is personified through the image of the innards spilling out, which reinforces the link between self and space and recalls the recurrent motif of the return of the repressed. As in Gordimer’s Conservationist, the African soil is made to reveal what was hidden in its underground layers. 77 What reemerges, here, is the past, “raw and primitive,” made manifest in its geological manifestations, “layers and striations.” But unlike traditional Gothic ghosts, which usually reappear of their own will and are not easily laid to rest, the ghosts which are summoned in The Impostor are conjured up to be killed in a form of grotesque exorcism tainted by evil (“infernal”). As in the whole novel, this passage is explicitly described as a “scene” and constructed by the viewing eye of the protagonist, who compares it to a projection of his own mind: “He stands staring in amazement. The violent energy of the spectacle is unreal, like something he’s cooked up in his brain; and there is something dreamlike, too, in how irrelevant his tiny troubles have become.” 78 But Adam’s apparent

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insignificance and disconnectedness from the scene are violently undermined by Canning’s accusations, in the same chapter. Staring together at the landscape, the two men discuss what is happening in front of them, and Canning voices his regrets at what he has set into motion: “‘Oh, this is terrible,’ he says in a small voice. ‘This isn’t what I wanted at all.’” 79 He then accuses Adam of having caused it all when he advised him to take revenge on his father, when they were still schoolboys: “Canning turns his stricken face towards him. ‘You were my hero, Adam. My whole life, since school, you’ve been my big hero. You’re the cause of all this, don’t you see? All this,’ and he gestures at the breaking and building of the landscape below, ‘all this is because of you.’” 80 This declaration sheds new light on Adam’s sense of guilt throughout the novel; initially, his guilt was associated with his incapacity to remember Canning while the other man kept on repeating that they were good friends at school and that he had made such a difference in his life. But here, the guilt is given substance, and what Adam becomes guilty of is the desecration of the pastoral landscape he allegedly admired and loved, partly because it reminded him of the landscape he had grown up in. Canning’s allegations strikingly echo Blom’s accusation after his confession, when Adam refused to be supportive of the former torturer whose dirty work helped to uphold the apartheid regime: “Everything I did, I did for you. And other people like you,” 81 Blom tells him, shifting the responsibility from himself to Adam and “people like [him].” The parallel between the two men suggests that the Gothicization of place in The Impostor is also a Gothicization of history. What is excavated and destroyed in the novel is the past of the country, which must be exorcized so that a new chapter in the history of South Africa can start. In this regard, it is quite significant that at the end of the novel Blom is killed in Adam’s place by people who mistakenly believe he lives in the house next door—the result of a lie he told Canning when he first came to pick him up at home: ashamed of the derelict aspect of his house, Adam deliberately gave him the wrong address. Canning warns him about the killers—and the encounter significantly appears on a “ghost-road,” 82 in the twilight, on the edge of a ruined bridge—again, a Gothicized kind of space where the two men can argue one last time (or so they think). “They are fused together for a moment in a furious embrace, balanced on the edge of the bridge, an ungainly quadruped emitting high, hysterical cries. But the huge landscape absorbs their frenzy like a sponge. Eventually they quieten down and separate themselves, finger by finger, becoming individual and apart.” 83 During the fight, Gothicity seems to be transferred from the landscape to the two characters, who are turned into a hybrid, monstrous creature—but the Gothicity is then transferred back to the “sponge” of the landscape so that they can revert to their normal state. This brief moment epitomizes the way in which Gothic motifs in The Impostor enable Galgut to explore individual and collective identities

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as well as his characters’ relationship to the land. When Canning tells him that he turned him in and gave the killers his address, Adam realizes the true nature of the landscape: the Gothic moment enables him to apprehend the raw and primitive nature of the landscape, its natural savagery. “Instead, he has a primitive, visceral urge to flee. Into the landscape, under the ground. He feels like a hunted animal. . . . He has at last become part of nature, which he’d wanted to sing aloud in his poems, and there’s nothing Beautiful about it.” 84 The ironical capital letter at the beginning of “Beautiful” displays the fact that this Gothic moment has definitively shattered Adam’s pastoral delusions. But it is precisely this realization which helps him to stay alive because this epiphanic moment makes him understand that Canning has probably given the wrong address to the killers. And Adam consciously chooses to let the killers go for Blom, reminiscing about the moment when he saved Canning’s life: “A hand extended on the cliff-face: a choice, entirely his.” 85 The process of consciously chosen substitution between Adam and Blom points to the similarity of their guilt despite their apparent differences—active guilt on Blom’s part and passive guilt in Adam’s case. It also worth noticing that at the end of the novel, in the section titled “After,” Adam is back in Cape Town and has resumed his life. The Gondwana episode seems to be a Gothicized pastoral (and antipastoral) parenthesis revealing that Adam does not belong in the landscape of the Karoo but, instead, is an urban white South African. The whole novel suggests that the place where Adam feels unsettled is the pastoral landscape which was idealized in farm novels but does not belong to white people. By Gothicizing Adam’s relationship to the landscape and by highlighting its racial ambiguities, Galgut operates a reversal which affects the identity of post-apartheid South Africa. The place where the white character truly belongs is the city. But the question which Galgut’s novel also raises through its Gothicization of the pastoral is, as Coetzee wrote about Gordimer’s Conservationist, “whether it is in the nature of the ghost of the pastoral ever to be finally laid.” 86 REVISITING THE SUBLIME: JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT’S SOUTH AFRICA Another trope which is revisited through the Gothicization of landscapes in white South African writing is the sublime, which, as Rogez explains, “first seemed the most appropriate genre to express the formidable character of South African nature.” 87 Indeed, the sublime emerged in the eighteenth century as a concept mostly linked to terror: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analo-

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gous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that, is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” 88 Edmund Burke’s work is based on the opposition he drew between the beautiful and the sublime; he thought the beautiful created pleasure in the viewer or reader, while the sublime created terror, and envisaged the two notions as interconnected, as Matthew Shun notices in his analysis of Thomas Pringle’s landscapes: “We must also consider that for Burke the sublime, a notoriously unstable category anyway, is by no means always experienced as ‘delightful’ and can, in the wrong circumstances, produce a terror unmediated by aesthetic distance.” 89 Burke insisted, in particular, on what he called “astonishment,” which he defined as “that state of the soul in which all its emotions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” 90 In his aesthetic conceptions, the sublime was deemed vastly superior to the beautiful. Victor Sage writes that Burke’s On the Sublime and the Beautiful “provided a vital source for much of the imagery and the rhetoric of the Gothic novel,” 91 precisely because of the emphasis on terror both in Burke’s definition of the sublime and in the appeal of the Gothic on readers. Anne Radcliffe’s repeated use of the word sublime in her fiction exemplifies the “crucial connection between sublimity and terror” 92 highlighted by Burke. The adjective sublime appears almost as a leitmotiv in Radcliffe’s work, as if she wanted to conjure up the sublime the better to convince her readers that her own text partook of this category. The passage in which the characters of The Mysteries of Udolpho discover the eponymous castle is emblematic of Radcliffe’s aesthetic conception of landscape: in her fiction, as in most Gothic novels, a landscape must be sublime. As we follow the characters’ journey to Udolpho, we notice that there are two types of landscapes: At first, the landscape is more picturesque than sublime. It is described in terms borrowed from the terminology of painting and art, with words such as forms. It is clearly referred to as a construct through the use of the word scene, which presupposes a constructing eye. The emphasis is on vertical movements, with the repeated mentions of mountains or precipices, and on the contrast between light and darkness. The landscape seems to be typical of the romantic imagination of the time with its wildness, its pines growing on wild rocks, its mountains and precipices and the flocks of goats and sheep which seem to be there only to enhance the beauties of the surrounding landscape and bring a touch of life in an otherwise nonliving environment. Such a landscape was shaped by, and reminded eighteenth-century readers of, landscapes painted by Claude Lorrain or Nicolas Poussin; it is therefore highly picturesque but does not seem to be sublime in the Burkean acceptation of the term because no terror arises from its perception. Radcliffe herself explicitly states that the landscape is not sublime: “Wild and romantic as were these scenes, their character had far less of the sublime, that had those of the Alps, which guard the entrance of Italy. Emily was often elevated, but

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seldom felt those emotions of indescribable awe which she had so continually experienced, in her passage over the Alps.” 93 But as the characters approach Udolpho, the landscape becomes sublime in what was described by C. A. Howells as “one of the purple passages of Gothic scenic description, an imaginative re-creation in prose of a typical Salvator Rosa painting, with the physical features of sublimity carefully arranged in a deliberately aesthetic description.” 94 The turning point, Howells observes, is Montoni’s announcement that they have almost reached Udolpho. The castle is perceived through its association with its owner and becomes terrifying, lonely, and Gothic. The description relies on the picturesque: Radcliffe plays with light and darkness, describing a castle “lighted up by the setting sun,” where “the light died away on its walls” and “the rays soon faded” to reach “solemn duskiness” and “obscurity,” but also with shades and colors (grey, purple) and with the contrast between misty and sharp lines as “thin vapor” contrasts with walls “tipped with splendor.” 95 But what makes the description of Udolpho sublime is its subjectivity: the eye of the perceiving subject, Emily, organizes the vision, as the repetition of the verb “gaze” clearly shows. Burke’s influence is perceptible even in the details, for instance in the emphasis laid on darkness. 96 More strikingly, the word sublime appears twice, displaying Radcliffe’s ambition in the passage: As terror is associated with the sublime, using the word sublime twice prepares the reader for the terror Emily will feel inside the castle. The example of Radcliffe’s recourse to the sublime in her Gothic novels shows the close connection among the sublime, terror, and the Gothic. This close connection explains why the sublime could become a valid category to describe South African landscapes in white writing: It provided an appropriate mode to render the terror created by the discovery of unfamiliar spaces indescribable through the aesthetic categories devised in Europe. Another reason why the sublime became an appropriate tool in this context is the scale of the South African landscapes; sublimity is indeed associated with excess and infinity: for Burke, “objects which evoked sublime emotions were vast, magnificent and obscure. . . . While beauty could be contained within the individual’s gaze or comprehension, sublimity presented an excess that could not be processed by a rational mind.” 97 Coetzee devotes a chapter of White Writing to the sublime, arguing that the African landscape offered a challenge to European eyes because it defied any pastoral representation. But Coetzee also points out the fact that, surprisingly, the sublime was rarely used by early white South African writers like Thomas Pringle or William Burchell, who both favored the picturesque in their literary—and pictorial in Burchell’s case—renditions of the South African landscape. Coetzee highlights the influence of European art, particularly Rosa or Lorrain’s paintings, over their writing and in his analysis of Burchell’s Travels (1822) he argues that Burchell used “a modified European picturesque” 98 but was faced with

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the “resistance of the [African] landscape.” 99 In other words, these nineteenth-century white writers resorted to the picturesque more than to the sublime despite the obvious limitations of the picturesque to tackle the scale and unfamiliarity of South African landscapes. Following Coetzee’s analyses, Rogez points out the fact that when the sublime was used, it was more often than not unsuccessful in translating the extraordinary features of the South African landscape because it did not allow any distance between the viewing subject and the landscape: The sublime presupposes the possibility for the subject to create a certain distance from the object, so as not to become frightened of what is represented on the canvas or on the page. Such distance is not possible in South African landscapes, and the sublime either fails or reinforces fear in front of a terrifying continent, from the beginning of colonization to the last throes of the apartheid regime, when white people did not know what fate they would meet. Finally, if the sublime makes it possible to erase even more the presence of the natives and to justify colonization, it also leaves the colonist alone in front of the immensity of the landscape and of the lonely stones. 100

Rogez’s analysis emphasizes two major issues at stake in the representation of landscapes in white writing: the overwhelming scale of the “dark continent,” in which settlers repeatedly felt they were insignificant, but also the presence of the other in that landscape, an “other” which was often, and problematically, either erased or ignored in white representations of the landscape. These aspects need to be borne in mind when analyzing the use and the limitations of the sublime in white writers’ descriptions of South African landscapes. In his study of landscapes in Pauline Smith’s writing, Geertsema observes that the sublime does feature in white writing: “Though, as mentioned before, it is true that the sublime has not been a centrally important aspect of the white writing of landscape in South Africa, its occurrence at certain important historical junctures should not be ignored, and this part of my argument considers both the possibility that an experience of the sublime occurs in ‘Desolation’ and the political function it might have.” 101 He argues that the function of the sublime in Smith’s descriptions of the landscape is to help “white Afrikaners come to terms with the otherness of Africa not only by asserting their alleged superiority to it, but also by naturalizing their position in it through a process of identification with the land.” 102 He insists, however, on the ambivalence of this process, an ambivalence he locates in the use of free indirect discourse. Geertsema’s arguments are doubly relevant to my reading of the Gothicization of the landscape in white writing—first, because when he locates the sublime in white writing he acknowledges its ambivalence; second, because he grounds this ambivalence in free indirect discourse, that is, in a mode of writing which combines the description of the

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landscape with the perspective of the characters. The main point he helps me to make, then, is the necessity to analyze perspective when examining the avatars of the sublime in white writers’ literary appropriations of the landscape. Geertsema highlights another major aspect: the political implications of the use of the sublime in Smith’s work. He argues that “[t]he aesthetic of the sublime implies a politics, one which lends itself to settlement. The failure of the imagination has the paradoxical effect of erasing the human from the landscape, but in this erasure an important objective is attained: there is a levelling of difference which tends to deny primordial, autochthonous claims to the land.” 103 Through the use of the sublime, the position of the subject as a settler is erased, and he “becomes, or comes to see himself as, native.” 104 Geertsema therefore sees the sublime as a major tool for domestication and settlement: Culture paradoxically domesticates nature in empowering it (in presenting it as powerful); the presentation of natural terrain in a sublime landscape æstheticizes it in order to subject it. And this subjection of the wilderness, its domestication as sublime landscape, clears the ground—quite literally—for settlement, for dwelling, for being-at-home, in that it asserts the superiority of the subject of the sublime over the landscape and those who inhabit it. It should therefore come as no surprise that, historically, the sublime has been implicated in the colonial politics of settlement, as a means towards the domestication of the exotic and the other. Seen in this light, the sublime is one particularly powerful way in which the relationship between settler identity and colonized space becomes naturalized. 105

Smith’s work is, of course, grounded in a given historical context, that of the 1920s, which differs in many ways from post-apartheid South Africa. Yet what Geertsema points out seems to shed light on a major function of landscapes in white writing, that is, their capacity to generate a sense of settlement. In Smith’s work, this function is particularly prominent, probably because she wrote her stories and her novel, The Beadle, while exiled in England. However, Coetzee also remarks that Smith’s pastoralism is strongly influenced by the English literary Tory tradition and he argues that she “wishfully and ahistorically transplants a model of the rural order from England to Africa,” 106 thus accusing her of using aesthetic models unsuited to the local realities and particularly to the local landscape despite the apparently localized nature of her work. What needs to be examined, then, is whether post-apartheid South African writers have, unlike Smith, managed to create a South African version of the sublime to deal with local landscapes. 107 Because the sublime can mostly be defined through the effect it has on the viewer, the emphasis has often been laid on the various features which helped create terror or awe. One aspect, in particular, has often been associat-

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ed with the sublime in its Burkean acceptation. In the eighteenth century, verticality, Fred Botting reminds us, became a prominent characteristic of sublime landscapes: “Mountains . . . began to be seen with eyes pleased by their irregularity, diversity and scale. The pleasure arose from the range of intense and uplifting emotions that mountainous scenery evoked in the viewer. Wonder, awe, horror and joy were the emotions believed to expand or elevate the soul and the imagination with a sense of power and infinity. Mountains were the foremost objects of the natural sublime.” 108 It may seem, at first sight, that the South African landscape of the Karoo, one of the most significant landscapes in white South African imagination, does not fit this definition of sublimity and calls, instead, for what Michel Collot calls a “horizontal sublime which emphasizes the horizon of the landscape” 109 to express the “sublime limitlessness” 110 of the veld. In Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, for instance, “her representation of the African farm is a relentlessly negative one with the point of view firmly fixed in the level plain, not elevated to a prospect,” 111 so that vertical sublimity seems to be absent from the representation of the landscape, which negates any possibility of elevation. But one must note that mountains do feature both in the South African landscape and in its representation, as Coetzee himself observes, noticing that in the early works by white writers which he considers, the verticality associated with the sublime was rarely transposed to the flat landscapes of the Karoo but, occasionally, to the mountains of South Africa. 112 Even Galgut’s Impostor, which mostly stages the failed pastoralization of the flat landscapes of the Karoo by its white protagonist, occasionally features attempts at verticalizing the landscape to express its scale, as when Adam and Canning climb to the source of the river: “They have a view not only down into the stony hollow in the mountains, but over the top of a ridge to the simmering plains in the distance. The world is both rising and falling around them.” 113 The following section will examine the way in which mountains and landscapes become Gothicized in Justin Cartwright’s literary appropriation of the South African landscape in two of his novels: White Lightning (2002) and Up Against the Night (2015), which both seem to revisit and subvert the farm novel by Gothicizing it. Like Lynn Freed, Cartwright writes from what might seem to be a peripheral position, that of the exiled writer (see previous chapter). And yet, like her, he has repeatedly explored his relationship to his birth country, both in his fiction and in nonfictional works like Not Yet Home (1997) or “The Lie of the Land” (2006), in which he defines the ambiguities of his own sense of “home” in a deeply divided country. He insists, in particular, on the fact that in South Africa, space is shared by people who do not value the same elements in the landscape. As an example, he explains that, when preparing for Nelson Mandela’s inauguration party, Welcome Msomi, the organizer of the celebration, wanted to

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I am precisely going to try and understand the nature of Cartwright’s personal landscape and to analyze how its Gothicization expresses a sense of discomfort in the two novels I have selected for analysis, which share a number of common features. The protagonists of White Lightning and Up Against the Night have both lived in England for years and come back to South Africa for different reasons: James Kronk, in White Lightning, comes to his mother’s deathbed, while Frank McAllister, in Up Against the Night, has been living between Europe and South Africa for years. In both cases, the novels offer a view of the country which is both South African and Europeanized, and the firstperson narrators themselves insist on their in-between position as both outsiders and insiders or as neither European nor South African. The narrator of Up Against the Night, for instance, explains that he does not feel really at home in Britain: Recently I have begun to feel that I am an impostor, not really English and never will be, although I have lived among the English happily and gratefully for many years. When I came to Oxford I intended to become English, because I did not want to be identified with the apartheid government. Now, in my onrushing middle years, the notion of home occupies me as if I must finally decide who I am, although in reality there is no urgency to make a decision; certainly nobody is waiting eagerly for my pronouncement. 115

The whole novel explores this “notion of home,” showing how McAllister tries to recreate a South African identity for himself. Kronk, the narrator of White Lightning, also introduces himself as both a Londoner and a South African, and he associates his relationship to space with his personal identity. Recounting how he went back to South Africa to attend to his dying mother, he describes his experience of walking down a farm track, entering “the past without seeing the portals.” 116 Spotting white cottages with children playing outside, he adds: “This pastorale was as familiar to me as the turbine sounds of London where I have lived for so long; where I have expended my essence.” 117 Kronk’s dual identity is interestingly expressed in both spatial and temporal terms, where the South African past becomes juxtaposed with the sounds of London in the character’s memory while he becomes reconnected to his country of birth. This link between place and memory is developed in chapter 6, when Kronk claims to remember the difficult moments in his life

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as “stretches of blankness and despair, which have taken on the appearance in my mind of roads stretching endlessly over a plain. Landscape and geography have entered my thinking, sometimes displacing ideas.” 118 The spatial metaphor used here seems to suggest an equation between the narrator’s mind and the landscape, and, more generally, a correspondence between identity and space. In Up Against the Night, McAllister constructs an equation between his memory, his mind and the landscape, but in a slightly different way, when, after using a metaphor involving lightning over the savannah to describe his relationship with his ex-wife, he adds: In some inexplicable way I believe that the African landscape exists deep within me, imprinted indelibly many years ago. My reveries often involve Africa. For instance, I remember my Tannie Marie’s farm and the huge raindrops falling on the tin roof and I remember the hail which followed, as big as golf balls, bouncing on the farm road and creating an arctic landscape which soon melted; I remember the forlorn bleating of the sheep lined up to be dunked after shearing in a plunge dip full of cloudy, pungent chemicals. 119

As an example of this internalized, remembered, African landscape, he chooses a significant example, that of the farm, a central topos in white South Africans’ imagination, thus confirming the link among space, identity, and memory. And yet, McAllister is aware that his connection to the landscape is largely the product of his imagination; it neither grants him an African identity nor makes his fellow countrymen “African”: “On Grinda I was keenly aware that I didn’t have a culture of my own and I was aware, too, that in South Africa people hold values and beliefs that are irreconcilable. Some whites have come to speak of themselves as ‘white Africans’ in an attempt to belong, but this is an affectation: very few of these people speak any African language or have any deep understanding of their black fellow countrymen and women.” 120 His fictional double, White Lightning’s narrator Kronk, shares his opinion and expresses it in similar terms: “It began to seem to me—in relation to my native land—that I could never fully share, even if I could understand, the suffering of the black and brown people. I have heard one or two white people say, in a boastful fashion, ‘I’m an African,’ but I think the brown people know that this cannot be true and that it is an affectation.” 121 And yet, Kronk’s capacity to question the legitimacy of white South Africans’ claims over the land is challenged by his ambiguities, and especially by the fact that, when he was younger, he accepted to work for Simon Chiswick, the political leader of “Britain First,” an undeniably racist character. As Kronk puts it himself in a straightforward way: After this episode, “it became known I had worked for a neo-Nazi.” 122 Kronk therefore emerges as an ambiguous figure, capable of both acknowledging black and brown people’s right to be more

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African than white South Africans and working for a man who can be described as a white supremacist. Both Kronk and McAllister are aware that memories are shaped by landscapes and, conversely, that landscapes are also shaped by memories, as Kronk puts it in White Lightning: “Now, sitting here in this small room, still redolent of my own distant past, I understand that we all make our own landscapes to conform to our own desires.” 123 This moment of realization, which acknowledges the subjectivity of landscape and the shaping capacity of vision, is echoed by a reflection, much later in the novel, about Daisy and her children and their link to their home in the sand dunes: “I have understood for some time that how we see landscapes is the product of conditioning. These windswept sand dunes and the flimsy shacks built of industrial and agricultural leftovers may be as attractive to them as the soft Cotswold hills and their luminous stone are to the Filkin-Halberts,” 124 he remarks, which emphasizes the arbitrariness of the notion of home and of aesthetic conceptions of landscapes. Interestingly, this conception of landscape as being shaped by subjectivity is also expressed in one of the two epigraphs to Up Against the Night, a sentence taken from Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind: “We read landscapes, we interpret their forms, in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.” 125 This explains why the connection McAllister feels to South Africa, “to the mountains and the landscape and the language,” 126 is felt to be “irrational.” 127 McAllister’s nostalgia for the family farm also evinces another major aspect of his link with the South African landscape: this relationship has been inherited from his family and from his ancestors. Indeed, McAllister is descended from Piet Retief, a major figure in the Afrikaner political mythology, who is used in a fairly ambivalent way in the novel: “the interests which the myth serves in Up Against the Night are ambivalent, because it is revisited in a hybrid novel, in which cultural identity is relatively unstable.” 128 Despite their differences, both White Lightning and Up Against the Night rely on similar landscapes to explore their Europeanized narrators’ complex relationship to South Africa. McAllister’s aunt had a farm, which he associates with early childhood memories and describes in the following way: “The farm was called Welgelegen, which means well-situated, although there were no obvious topographical features to justify this description; Welgelegen sat passively in miles of flat land, stranded.” 129 In this early description, the farm is associated with the flat landscape of the Karoo around it, a topos of white writing. McAllister’s memories confirm the stereotype, as when he insists on the dryness of the landscape around it, once again conforming to preconceived visions of the farm in white writing. His description of irrigation on the farm lays emphasis on the dry soil, thirstily absorbing the water:

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Fascinated, I watched the water being directed into the furrows that irrigated the vegetable gardens before being directed, by pulling up one sluice gate and closing another, to the parched fields planted with maize and pumpkins. The first tongues of the water would roll down the furrows, gathering strength as the workers guided the water to the fields, the lande. I was watching a sort of parable, a demonstration in miniature of how to make the desert bloom. As the red soil was inundated, the water would itself become tinged with red. Sometimes frogs appeared from nowhere, rejoicing in their new domains, so I thought. Dragonflies would swoop over the inundated fields, snakes would flee, and white egrets would follow to see what had been made homeless and vulnerable. The land was thirsty; it sucked up the water greedily. As with the Mesopotamian marshes, which were drained and re-flooded, there was inescapably something biblical about the return of water to parched lands. 130

The memory is filtered through the eyes of the adult narrator, and the biblical symbolism he adds to what was merely an enjoyable moment to the little boy he was then is in keeping with white writers’ representation of the land in farm novels and with his ancestor’s vision of the land as a promised land and a “paradise of savannah, low, dense acacia woodland and wild rivers.” 131 Piet Retief, McAllister reports, “was sure that God had guided him to his promised land with a purpose. God had, in his omniscience, earmarked it for his favorite son.” 132 This rhetoric unsurprisingly reflects nineteenth-century Afrikaners’ conception of themselves as the Chosen People and shows how their relationship to the land and, in particular, to the interior of South Africa, was shaped by this conception, as their justification for the Great Trek, for instance, clearly shows. 133 The ideological dimension of this terminology makes it slightly disturbing when McAllister explicitly compares his family and himself to his ancestor to describe their reaction to the landscape on a trip: “We are all being drawn in to this fairy story; it is essentially a tale of a more innocent time. In a way we have the same longings as my ancestor Piet Retief had when he set out looking for his own Eden on the other side of the wild mountains. His joy at looking down in imperial fashion from his horse onto Zululand was his epiphany—and also one of his last days on this earth.” 134 He thus highlights a continuity in the family’s relationship to the landscape, a landscape which is conveniently emptied out of its inhabitants by being constructed as an “Eden,” a place where there is room only for Adam and Eve. Yet, he also points to the phantasmatic dimension of this construct by calling it a “fairy story,” thus creating a distance between the image he constructs and its ideological value—and making his conception of landscape different from Piet Retief’s naïve and total endorsement of the Promised Land imagery. He also acknowledges the ideological dimension of land preservation in South Africa when he states that his Swedish wife, Nellie, probably does not understand “the subtext, which is to keep as much of this part of Africa pristine and free of the poor in general and squatters in

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particular. Vast tracts of land are being set aside in the name of conservation.” 135 This statement is yet another proof of McAllister’s ambiguous positioning, between a nostalgia for an idealized version of South Africa associated with childhood memories and an acknowledgment of the intricacies of post-apartheid South Africa’s political life. The notion of paradise is also subverted in White Lightning, although in an apparently different way. Kronk, the narrator, works as a filmmaker and scriptwriter, and in the early pages of the novel he remembers working on a corporate film for a resort in the Turks and Caicos Islands which is sold with the slogans: “paradise shared” and “my private paradise.” 136 But the whole enterprise is ridiculed by Kronk’s sarcastic answers to the Dutch marketing director and ends up in disaster as both the advertisement and the resort itself are ruined. Yet, this does not prevent Kronk from wanting his own private paradise, a farm he decides to buy with the money his father left him. The whole enterprise is presented as Kronk’s pastoral fantasy, shaped by his readings of Virgil’s Georgics 137 and of his father’s papers: “Now my ambitions are more modest: to create a simple garden, and restore the house, and live in a whole fashion. I don’t know what this could mean exactly, but I hope that in some way I can align myself with the land and the mountain and the sea.” 138 Even when he refers to his idealized vision of the farm, Kronk displays a form of distance perceptible in the doubts he expresses about his own choice of words or in the phrase “in some way,” whose vagueness may point to impossibility. His pastoral fantasy is later expressed in disturbingly colonial terms when he states, “in a way, I am a pioneer,” before wondering: “What would be closer to the stuff of life than an old farm, a few hens and a baboon? With plans for bees and vines?” 139 His plans for the farm are described as a “vision,” 140 which shows the subjective and phantasmatic dimension of the act of buying it and might recall the ideological implications of the farm in van den Heever’s novels, which “partakes of the metaphysical and the geographical, of desire and reality.” 141 The farm may even help Kronk to make sense of the landscape, as he states on one of his expeditions up the mountains with his baboon, Piet: “Here [in Africa] the human enterprise looks tentative; the landscape is not yet fully under control. Its wildness speaks to me, although I am not sure what it is saying; now that I’m a landowner in a minor way, I will begin to tune in to these messages.” 142 Kronk’s characteristic sense of uncertainty, of not being able to decipher the “wildness” around him, is counterbalanced by the possibility which owning land might give him of fully accessing deeper significance. The farm is therefore fantasized as the link between himself and the continent, the space where his South African identity can be grounded and negotiated. One of the reasons why the farm is constructed by Kronk as his own paradise is because of the place’s closeness to the mountain behind it; the juxtaposition of farm and mountain is an essentially South African land-

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scape, as Cartwright himself suggests in his contribution to Stephen Watson’s A City Imagined: “If you look at Afrikaner landscape paintings, Pierneef for example, you will see very early on that the homestead, nestling under an unmistakably African mountain, which is often cloaked in a kind of swirlingly numinous cloud, represents civilisation. The landscape is hostile, and must be tamed.” 143 The farm and the landscape surrounding it are explicitly described as “sublime” on two occasions in White Lightning. The first one occurs during a walk Kronk takes up the mountain. Once at the summit, he describes the landscape and, in particular, the farm which he will buy later on in the novel, in picturesque terms: Below me, shifting the gaze away from the bay and the pendulous mountains and the charged, dangerous sea, I can make out the old farmhouse clearly. The plan is obvious, although some of the walls have gone: a house, a stable block, a kitchen garden, enclosed against the limitless space of Africa which started just over the mountains. The whole, near diagrammatic outline is easily imagined from what remains, although chicken coops, a park for rusted farm implements, diseased fruit trees, the children’s playground, a round, corrugated-iron reservoir and some minor but splayed building improvements have blurred the plan. 144

The scene, mediated through his “gaze,” is described in geometric terms (“plan,” “diagrammatic outline”), with a precise composition. But as Kronk goes on walking and finds himself higher in the mountains, he claims that nature influences him: “It seems to produce a grander perspective,” which leads him to reexamine the “landscape of women [he has] known.” 145 “Encouraged by birds and flowers and scuttling things, lizards and so on, I feel an intensity as though I am close to homing in on the sublime as painters and poets used to. At the same time this vision suggests to me that my idea of the sublime is not very substantial.” 146 Here, Kronk, characteristically, simultaneously invokes and rejects the sublime, as if to suggest his chronic incapacity to durably engage with anything or anyone. Yet, the fact that the sublime is associated with the mountain shows his longing for transcendence and elevation both in the actual landscape of South Africa and in the metaphorical landscape of his existence. Significantly, the second moment when Kronk claims to experience the sublime occurs much later in the novel, once he has bought the farm he could see from above in the first instance. Sitting on the stoep in the sunset, he feels “a particular ecstasy.” 147 “Here it is easy to believe in the idea of the sublime; I have been set free: the sunsets, the warm scents, the peace, however illusory, of the old house, all require me to take stock and rejoice. I rest my bare feet on the low wall of the stoep, drink a beer straight from the bottle, and wave farewell to not-so-jolly England.” 148 Here again, the sublime is both affirmed and debunked as Kronk claims his South Africanness while mundanely drinking beer. Through this self-proclaimed

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version of the sublime, which does not spring primarily from the verticality of the mountain but from the sunset, he does not achieve transcendence but a sense of being at home. The word is therefore invoked not as a tool of spirituality but as a means of confirming the narrator’s South African identity and his harmony with the landscape and with the farm. Kronk’s urge to commune with the landscape is constantly both affirmed and negated, as also when he goes on a trip with his former lover Ulla, driving through impressive mountains at night: “I said to Ulla that I was achieving a communion with the landscape, but I didn’t really know what that could mean. My mother has perhaps achieved this communion fully, with the intervention of Piet.” 149 His incapacity to assign meaning to this yearning for spirituality is further downplayed by the comparison he makes, immediately after, between himself and his mother’s ashes, which were comically scattered by Pete, the domesticated baboon he keeps at the farm, who stole the urn from him and threw it down. 150 In White Lightning, then, the narrator’s communion with the landscape of the farm and of the mountain is always placed under the sign of a duality encapsulated in the phrase “a sort of ecstasy,” 151 which he uses to describe yet another moment of communion with the landscape and in which the qualifier “a sort of” debunks the possibility of transcendence suggested by the word ecstasy. Each time happiness or spirituality is expressed, it is systematically counterbalanced, as when Kronk comes back from dinner with Ulla and looks at himself in the mirror: “I looked strangely at peace, I thought, although I acknowledged that the soft light of the hurricane lamp gave a phoney spiritual quality to everything it touched.” 152 In Up Against the Night, the sense of communing with the landscape by owning a house in South Africa is also often invoked by McAllister. The house he owns near Cape Town, and where he lives a few months a year, is repeatedly presented as a place where McAllister feels at one with himself and with his country, an aspect which is also favored by the proximity of the sea: “I find the crashing of the waves on the beach below my house uplifting, as though they are designed particularly to speak to me, to confirm that I live somewhere wild and elemental and dangerous.” 153 Even if the sublime is not named here, the combination of adjectives like “elemental and dangerous” and of the “uplifting” quality of the place suggests that this landscape, and by extension the home which is located in the middle of it, is sublime. What also adds to the sublime dimension of the place is its close proximity to the mountain: When I am living here beneath the mountain and close to the sea, I feel alive. I have read that mountains were revered in prehistory because they were believed to be the gathering point of all sacred knowledge. And this mountain above us, always in view, always changing with the wind and cloud, has a similar effect on me. It is probably no different from the consolation believers

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who live near huge cathedrals, like Rouen or Ely, enjoy; it was the same urgent need to be fixed in the universe that caused Paleolithic man to assemble rock cairns and standing stones in Cornwall. Osip Mandelstam wrote, “I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an Ararat sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.” Me too. 154

As in White Lightning, 155 the landscape is constructed as a source of transcendence, through the explicit comparison between mountains and cathedrals. But unlike Kronk, McAllister does not subvert, challenge, or question the spiritual value of the South African landscape, to which he feels he belongs without any qualms about it. A few pages later, when he returns to Cape Town with his family and friends after his wedding to Nellie, he resorts to the same kind of rhetoric, based on the centrality of the mountain and on its cultural value: “As we come down the pass we see Table Mountain in the distance. As always, I feel myself subject to the attraction of mountains: We read landscapes, we interpret their forms, in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. We are all pleased to be going home. Our mountain, our sea, our house, are all waiting.” 156 Table Mountain becomes, in Macfarlane’s words, a “mountain of the mind” 157 and is thus endowed with a number of subjective values associated with the construction of home. The association between “our mountain, our sea, our house” recalls White Lightning, in which the narrator also spends a lot of time on the beach, and for whom swimming becomes a way of reconnecting with both his body and his country, as epitomized in chapter 18: “It would be mad to try to swim in this but I rush in. . . . I am about to be baptized. I am about to be baptized on the same day my mother has been cremated. I am about to be baptized in my native sea.” 158 As transparently announced in the ternary rhythm of the anaphora “I am about to be baptized,” swimming becomes a spiritual communion with the landscape and with himself, so that, after a violent scene during which he experiences the power of the waves, which hurl and spin and lift him, he finally stands on the beach, “ecstatic and exhausted,” 159 and for once, no textual clue suggests any distance between Kronk and his narrative or any irony. The terror of being brutalized by the sea, and the joy at overcoming the powerful waves, lead him to an experience much more akin to the sublime than when he explicitly mentions it. This sublime baptism recalls, rather, another moment, on the mountain, when the experience of the landscape led him to realize his own insignificance while thinking about his mother’s impending death and subsequent fusion with the landscape: “I don’t find these thoughts depressing. On the contrary, I recognize the freedom of accepting the necessary. For the first time in months I feel liberated. My life too will fade into the geological and physical facts, and I don’t give a fuck.” 160 Here the acceptance of his own mortality and man’s

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insignificance is made possible by the landscape; no irony is expressed by Kronk, and the only form of distancing to be found merely relies in the use of colloquial language in the final words. However, in both novels, the relationship constructed between the Europeanized narrator and the landscape is brutally destroyed at the end, as the violence of the outside world intrudes and post-apartheid South Africa is revealed as a place where violence and terror shatter white men’s outdated, or misplaced, pastoral fantasies. In White Lightning, the tension builds up slowly as some episodes in the narrative seem to challenge Kronk’s fantasy of living happily ever after on his own farm. The first episode of this kind occurs when Kronk goes running on the beach, as he often does—he is a former youth champion, who was nicknamed “White Lightning” when he briefly became “the fastest white boy in the world,” 161 the day after a clichéd sexual experience with a black woman—and finds his mother’s car vandalized. The incident is described by Kronk in spiritual terms: he explains that his “soul, settled a few minutes ago is heaving with foreboding.” 162 “A sacrilege has been committed and I must atone,” 163 he adds, suggesting that the damage is not merely material but challenges his idealization of his new South African life. The mention of “foreboding” also prepares the reader for other episodes of this kind and creates a sense of suspense. The incident stays on his mind, and explains why, on another similar occasion, as he runs on the beach, he feels that he is “running for [his] white life,” 164 even if he actually comes to no harm. Similarly, the narrator’s acknowledgment of his neighbors and employees’ fear of what lies beyond the mountain creates a sense of impending danger, even if Kronk himself claims to be immune to such irrational fears. To them, “everything African—from over the mountains—must be feared. Africa contains unpredictability, a sort of innate anxiety; for those who live down here between the sea and the mountains, Africa is threatening. . . . This is what they believe in their hearts, that Africa is a plague. It troubles them.” 165 This comment has been triggered by Luigi’s warnings against African bees; the destruction of his beehives, therefore, comes as a worrying confirmation of the bee man’s words of caution, even if the culprits are not really African bees but remain unknown to him. 166 The symbolical value assigned to the bees as a sign of settlement turns this apparently minor incident into an ill omen which announces the impending catastrophe. First, Kronk learns that the mining rights on his farm have been sold to a company with “solid connections with the provincial government,” 167 which means that his pastoral idyll is about to be destroyed by capitalistic interests, a motif which recalls Galgut’s The Impostor. Second, violence suddenly erupts in his life when his baboon, Piet, kills a child. The event is constructed as a moment of rupture, narratively first, because the sentence “Something appalling has happened” 168 constitutes a paragraph, detached from what precedes—that is, the paragraph in which Kronk recounts how, arriving at the farm, he finds

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Piet sitting in his cage, in a pool of blood—and from what follows, in which he explains the “appalling” thing which has happened: “The baboon has torn Zwelakhe’s right arm off, and the boy has bled to death. Zwelakhe—Witbooi says—was trying to give the baboon some nuts.” 169 The chapter ends abruptly on this gory note, leaving the reader aghast. The eruption of death, the death of a child in particular, turns Kronk’s dream into a nightmare and confirms the negative notes created by earlier, apparently meaningless incidents. The baboon, Piet, becomes the instrument through which the novel is Gothicized. Dan Wylie argues that “the ill-fated captive baboon Piet in Justin Cartwright’s ecologically rich novel White Lightning (2002), not to mention its whales, bees and ants” show how animals can be “more centrally moral touchstones” in recent Southern African fiction 170—an example, perhaps, of what Terry Gifford describes as “post-pastoral.” 171 The baboon, I argue, does not only display ecological preoccupations. He is also a major Gothicizing factor in White Lightning. Indeed, his relationship with Kronk is the result of Kronk’s father’s interest in animals. He is thus placed under the sign of family and cultural heritage. Kronk perceives Piet as a kind of friend; he endeavors to reestablish a lost link between the animal, which has been held captive for years, and the natural world—while simultaneously using this relationship, and his father’s writing, to try and write a film script. The relationship therefore evinces Kronk’s combination of pastoral fantasies and exploitative tendencies. The violence of Piet’s murder of young Zwelakhe does not, in fact, come as a total surprise. The baboon’s violence was already hinted at earlier in the novel, when Kronk decided to take Piet to a village where Simon P. Bekker studied baboons. The place is located in the mountains, and the landscape is described as hostile and wild: The landscape is suddenly harsh, as though what was below in the valley— wheat-fields, cows, orchards of apples—was a fanciful illustration from a child’s book. Up here the rocks lie on the landscape like tortoises. The surface of the road is itself mainly rock or pulverized rock. The road ahead flattens and enters a narrow gorge. . . . We follow this narrow gorge for a few miles in deep shade and then the valley opens again. I can see castles of rock above, the spiny aloes silhouetted on them. From here they look like snipers. 172

Gothicity is invoked obliquely through the metaphor of the “castles of rock.” The description of the landscape contains the germs of what is to follow; the landscape is “harsh,” its rocks are contrasted with the fertility of the valley below, and even the aloes “look like snipers.” When Kronk and Piet find the baboons, Piet escapes; “I have caused anarchy in the animal kingdom,” 173 Kronk comments before running after him and the other baboons. A violent fight erupts between Piet and the “battle-hardened” baboons, 174 but Kronk manages to take a wounded Piet away from the scene. The incident shows

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that his fantasy of possibly returning Piet to wild life was doomed to failure; it also shows that despite his friendship with Piet, the baboon remains an unpredictable, violent animal. The death of young Zwelakhe therefore does not come as an entire surprise, but it shatters the sense of settlement that Kronk had elaborated throughout the narrative. The consequences are, first, the return of Zwelakhe’s family to the shacks from which Kronk had taken them away. When Kronk brings things for Daisy and the children, he is welcomed not only by the people he knows but also by a man who introduces himself as the boy’s father and asks for retribution. Hit on the head by one of the attending people, Kronk has to run for his life in a reenactment of the earlier scene on the beach. He finally finds refuge in the sea and is rescued by whale watchers, looking “ridiculous.” 175 Because Kronk also needs to remove Piet from the farm, he drives him to Nooport, the village of the baboons. The drive is Gothicized by the fact that they are in “a thick wet mist, so that all sense of place is lost.” 176 The few things Kronk can make out when he passes them “have the quality of those dreams in which you never quite get the point of what’s going on.” 177 The whole experience seems closer to a nightmare than to a dream. As they drive on, “the drive between the narrow cliffs is disorienting,” 178 but they find the village. Kronk leaves Piet there and drives away. But after half an hour, he turns back: “Just before I arrive back at the village, I see Piet sitting on a rock near the road. He is bleeding from the head and back. One of his orange eyes is missing. This side of his face is deeply gashed and his lip has been severed so that it hangs in flaps.” 179 Faced with his baboon’s ghastly appearance, Kronk decides to kill him: “I take Roos’s cattle gun from the car. Piet stands shivering as I shoot him in the head on the blind side. I heave his beloved body with difficulty down the rocky slope towards the river. The mist and the scrub take it. If I could speak I would say that I, too, like so many of my countrymen, am a murderer, but the limits of my language have met the limits of my world.” 180 This seemingly dispassionate account merely displays the extent of Kronk’s anguish through the use of the adjective beloved. Kronk has been definitively unsettled by the consequences of his acts and cannot turn his guilt into language. Instead of creating a home for himself in his pastoral appropriation of his “African farm,” Kronk is finally totally alienated both from his country and from his capacity to articulate his link with the land. The “world” whose limits he has found is the fantasized, pastoral farm, isolated from the violence of post-apartheid South Africa, where people live in shacks and where children have AIDS. Significantly, unlike the rest of the novel, the final chapter, titled “London,” is not told in Kronk’s voice but in the third person, and describes how he has become a motorcycle messenger whose call sign is Kronk’s old nickname, “White Lightning.” Both his choice of profession and his choice of name evince the author’s intention to explore the sense of permanent displacement experi-

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enced by white people in post-apartheid South Africa. The plot of the novel displays a tension between a desired sense of home and an unhomeliness which brutally erupts in the shape of the violent death of a child—a death which has been foreshadowed by the black boy Kronk’s mother excised from his childhood pictures after he drowned 181 and by Kronk’s son’s death. 182 Even if the novel is not Gothic, Kronk’s pastoral idyll seems to be told in a Gothic mode in the voice of the white, guilty narrator who ends up realizing his sense of permanent unsettlement in South Africa. Up Against the Night, published thirteen years later, confirms Cartwright’s capacity to explore white anxieties of (un)settlement through a Europeanized white narrator. In this novel, it is history—personal and collective—which returns with a vengeance. Jaco, the narrator’s cousin, who is constructed throughout the novel as McAllister’s embarrassing double—yet another Gothic motif—embodies a violent past which returns in Gothic fashion when he kills the two Congolese men who have broken into McAllister’s house. As I have argued elsewhere, “the gruesome violence of the scene, which desecrates the fantasized South African home Frank had carefully chosen and built for himself, suggests that in the end, in spite of all his fantasies about belonging to the country, Frank has no place in South Africa, unlike Jaco, who can settle in the family farm thanks to Frank’s money.” 183 Just as Kronk’s pastoral fantasies are destroyed by Zwelakhe’s death in White Lightning, McAllister’s sense of settlement is shattered by the burglary and its violent, unforeseen consequences. What the burglary reveals is that his world is in fact permeable to the violence which McAllister mentions several times throughout the novel when he writes about his servant Lindiwe, whose husband was murdered, whose “house is miles away in the townships on the windy flatlands out of town, near the airport, and it is dangerous to travel there and back every day of the taxi-buses,” 184 and with whom his relationship is “fatally unbalanced.” 185 Lindiwe embodies a racial repressed which returns—and which also returns in White Lightning. While the two Europeanized narrators have been trying to ignore the reality of their country, that reality returns violently and they are expelled from their dreamworld. Like Kronk, the narrator of Up Against the Night goes back to Europe and remains haunted by his memories of the nightmarish scene when Jaco rescued him and his family from probable death, a moment which he recalls in terms which significantly repeat the exact words used to recount the Blood River massacre at the beginning of the novel: And I know that I will never be able to put behind me the memory of the torrents of blood that desecrated my beautiful house. Dark blood has been projected and fired right to the top of the walls to make awful congealed patterns. And the blood formed puddles and meres and eddies that overflowed into the landscape in trickles to become rills and streams that in turn became

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What the burglary scene reveals is the fact that, as McAllister himself pointed out earlier in the novel, “You could see this country as a kind of tapestry, intimately woven of beautiful landscapes and violent death.” 187 The landscapes of South Africa, far from providing a home for Cartwright’s white narrators, emerge as a haunted land where the racial repressed constantly returns to threaten white people’s sense of settlement and sends them back to Europe, where they do not entirely belong either. This reflects the writer’s own concerns, which he exposed in “The Lie of the Land,” expressing his ambivalence toward the duality of space in Cape Town by emphasizing the “miraculous” nature of the mountain and the “genuine sense that landscape can be a refuge from more pressing concerns,” but also his constant awareness of “the weight of the shacks on the Flats” and of the terrible living conditions of their inhabitants. 188 The tropes of invasion and contamination, which can be found both in White Lightning and Up Against the Night, reflect the harsh realities of the country, where “[t]he army of occupation is at the gates, and yet still we continue our journey of self-exploration through the old standbys of landscape, fynbos, surf and mountain.” 189 HAUNTED LANDSCAPES: THE ROCK ALPHABET AS POST-APARTHEID GOTHIC Henrietta Rose-Innes’s second novel, The Rock Alphabet (2004), also stages the relationships between characters and the South African landscape. 190 The “rock alphabet” mentioned in the title is read on the walls and stones of the Cederberg Mountains, which constitute the spatial core of the narrative. The Rock Alphabet opens on a flashback when, in 1982, Beatrice Faro, looking for her lost father, found two mysterious “wild” boys in these mountains. With this opening scene, the novel plays “on the postcolonial motif of the lost children, a motif that recurs, for instance, in Australian fiction 191 and is linked to a perception of the landscape as alien and frightening.” 192 Such similarity points to an apparent convergence in settler literatures, namely, the unsettling feeling that the allegedly empty landscape is actually home to many living creatures, among whom, of course, indigenous tribes. The fact that the two lost boys are colored is significant, of course—as well as their mysterious origin. The mystery is never solved, and they remain unparented throughout the narrative—literally so as Beatrice’s portrayal suggests that she is an unmotherly figure, ill-equipped to deal with young, feral children.

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The two boys, renamed Flinders and Jean-François—shortened into Flin and Jean—are consistently associated with the landscape which, in the absence of any parent or family, seems to have given birth to them. This association is constructed, again, from the beginning of the novel with a description stating that “[t]hey were naked, their skins the precise color of the stone,” echoed by a reference to “stone children” on the next page. 193 The two children, and particularly Fin, become embodiments of the landscape, which explains their difficulty to settle in the city when Beatrice takes them back with her. Although the novel is mostly set in Cape Town, the Cederberg Mountains remain obsessively present throughout the narrative and may be considered as the “lodestar” of the novel—a word Rose-Innes herself uses in her analysis of J. G. Ballard’s fiction to refer to a place encapsulating the characters’, and perhaps the writer’s, obsessions in a visual way. 194 Even if the characters spend little time in the Cederberg, their internal compass seems to be fixed on the mountain as they keep on returning to it, mentally or physically. The obsessive nature of the landscape is evoked in the section titled “2005,” in which Jean comes to visit Ivy in the Cederberg. While the American tourists who stopped at her guest house seem to be disappointed by the place’s wilderness, Ivy’s thoughts, instead, show her own incapacity to turn away from this fascinating place, and the internal focalization shows that the mountain becomes associated with the subject who perceives it: “Behind them, ignored, the mountain glitters in the afternoon sunlight, a mountain of gold; she can still remember that picture in Great-aunt Mattie’s picture book, the knight riding his horse up the shining slope to the castle. To Ivy, it is amazing that anyone could look away and not be drawn to the glowing cliffs, the shadowed kloof.” 195 In the following section, which constitutes the bulk of the narrative and is a long analepsis to 1996, Ivy’s first contact with the mountain does not only emphasize the place’s fascinating features but also defines it as vertical, wild, and silent, “a place of unsettling contrasts of shape, size, texture”: “further up she could see the vertical planes of tall cliffs. . . . It looked wild up there, trackless.” 196 The narrative therefore constructs an image of the mountain not only as fascinating, but also as a Gothicized, mazelike, and dangerous area, a “creepy” 197 place, where several people disappear and die. Even if the word sublime is never used, a number of features link the mountain to sublimity; its verticality is emphasized through terms which assimilate it to a fortress, as when Ivy gets lost: “A crumbly rampart leaned out over her head.” 198 The assimilation between the place and a fortress was initiated previously, when Ivy arrives and perceives the place in an almost sublime way: As she passed through the house, the mountain loomed through the windows. Every pane seemed to hold some part of its massive faceless presence. Ivy went outside again to look at it unshielded.

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Chapter 3 She was startled to find that evening had transformed the view: the light had taken on a peach-wine color, dramatic, bright but not sharp. . . . The cliffs were suddenly much higher and clearer than before: copper battlements, hundreds of meters high. 199

These lines, oddly reminiscent of descriptions found in British Gothic novels, show both the subjectivity of the landscape because the reader is constantly reminded that Ivy is the center of consciousness (“seemed,” “look,” “she was startled to find . . . ”) and its formidable quality (“massive faceless presence,” “hundreds of meters high”). Another character, Beatrice, also describes the place as “deceitful”: “No summit, no peak you can aim at. You think you’re at the top but then another mountain rolls up over the horizon like some big bloody wheel”; “You and me, we don’t belong here, do we? You and me, little Jean-François. Left behind.” 200 The sense of unbelonging which characterizes both Beatrice and Jean is confirmed when Jean himself remembers leaving the mountain after Beatrice and Flin’s disappearance when he was still a small child; he recalls having to go through a gate whose description is reminiscent of prison bars: “Jean couldn’t work out the latch but he was small enough to slip between the bars. On the other side the landscape stilled and cleared, and Jean was no longer afraid; he knew where he was.” 201 Here, the Mountain is constructed ab negativo as a dark, scary, disorientating place. The association of terror, darkness, and disorientation shows how the space of the mountain becomes Gothicized, particularly for Jean. This suggests that in The Rock Alphabet the characters’ relationship to the mountain defines and shapes their identity as it literally becomes a “mountain of the mind.” 202 The mountain is internalized by Jean as part of his identity, an aspect of himself which he both treasures and fears because it has become inseparable from his lost brother. The name Beatrice has chosen for him, “after Champollion,” 203 points to his capacity to read signs, as his fascination for the alphabet and for calligraphy shows. Jean is paradoxically endowed with “the gift of place,” 204 a natural ability to find his bearings in a landscape and also with a deep fear of the mountain, which becomes forever associated with his lost brother—a South African Peter Pan, an eternal child, as suggested by the epigraph to the novel: “He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.—J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan.” 205 The quote seems to foreshadow Flin’s reaction when Beatrice finds the boys but also places the novel under the sign of lost childhood. The main protagonists, Ivy and Jean, consistently appear as ambiguous figures who have not really left childhood: their small size, their asexual relationship, the explicit comparisons with children suggest that Flin might not be the only eternal child in the novel. Like his symbolical forebear Champollion, Jean should be

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able to read the signs left by his brother on the landscape, the “rock alphabet” which should lead to their reunion. But Jean consistently refuses to do so and chooses the comforts of civilization over the wilderness of the land. Although he is a “stone child,” he feels threatened by the rocky landscape and even refuses to go to the mountain in the main section, “1996,” sending Ivy there in his place. The process of substitution between Ivy and Jean points to a major Gothic motif in The Rock Alphabet, in which the identity of the characters is constructed simultaneously through their relationship to the mountain and their inscription onto the landscape and through patterns of doubling. The motif of doubling even contaminates the mountain itself as the Cederberg mountains are symbolically transferred to the city by Flin when he builds “Little Mountain,” a miniature version of the place where the two “lost boys” were found. Little Mountain even becomes endowed with characteristics reminiscent of its model. When Thoko and Ivy find it in the garden of the Faro house, they identify it as a “little baby mountain” but Ivy feels “a strange wrong-end-ofthe-telescope vertigo, as if she was a high hawk stooping over real valleys.” 206 Like the original mountain, Little Mountain therefore triggers a sense of displacement and vertigo and becomes associated, in Ivy’s mind, with “the little boy-ghost on the peacock carpet,” 207 that is, Jean, with whom she played, once, when her great-aunt took her to the Faro house. The uneasiness created by Little Mountain becomes explicit when the internally focalized narrative informs us that “[t]here was something she didn’t like about this miniature landscape. Something that made her want to rake the dead leaves back over it.” 208 Interestingly, Ivy is the only one to be unsettled by the miniature mountain, while Thoko, on the other hand, likes it so much that she immediately starts redecorating it. The reason why Ivy might be unsettled by Little Mountain appears a few pages later, when Jean remembers the moment when Flin created Little Mountain; Jean perceives it as “Flin’s mountain–Flin’s puzzle. Other people might get lost in it.” 209 A subjective and disorientating place, Little Mountain is, like its model, a fascinating place to be deciphered: “Now, high in his window, Jean felt a powerful urge to go into that garden, look again at Little Mountain, see perhaps a crevice or gorge that he had missed before; see, perhaps, his brother’s tiny footprints leading into some secret valley or cave, a place where the mountain cracked open to reveal its depths.” 210 But only the characters who are endowed with the capacity to read the “rock alphabet” are sensitive to its unsettling characteristics. Like Little Mountain, the real mountain is Flin’s territory. The reason why it becomes a “mountain of the mind” for Jean is because it belongs to his brother and becomes a landscape “popping and jumping with ghosts: people with animal heads and animals with human faces.” 211 The blurring of the boundaries between the animal and the human in this sentence points to a

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more generalized confusion between the reigns, as in the phrase “stone children” which is used to describe Flin and Jean and to a disturbing permeability between porous identities. The landscape repeatedly calls Jean, even when he is away from it, in his brother’s voice, as shown in the first “2005” section, at the beginning of the novel: “But outside the window, in the thin blue light, something hungry and wild is still calling. It is barely a human voice, barely a language. It comes in through the window, it climbs around in the room. Brother. Little brother. Come out.” 212 This “barely human voice,” nonverbal—or preverbal—seems to be the voice of the wilderness, the voice of the landscape, but also Flin’s voice because Flin, we are told repeatedly, always refused to learn how to speak and, instead, addressed his brother in their common, secret language. The close association between Flin and the landscape is confirmed when Jean dreams about the mountain—which therefore literally becomes a “mountain of the mind.” He first hears his brother’s voice calling him from under his bed, where it seems to emanate from the stones he carries with him in his suitcase: “Brotherbrothercome.” 213 The fusion of the words emphasizes the preverbal nature of the language and suggests that Flin embodies a sense of nonseparation from the landscape and from his brother. Once Jean has heard Flin’s voice, the mountain emerges: And the sound summoned the mountain like magic: it rose up before him in the dusty lemon-yellow light of his dreams, behind his half-closed eyes. The long hills and ridges pushing their way into his mind like rounded arms reaching in to rummage. He felt the valleys falling away, a thousand leagues of air at his feet, the stones each one a lead slug in his chest, the rocks singing in fierce strident voices, the thick slabs of the hills humping and building in a black grinding static. A mountain’s weight in his mind, every rise and hollow and cleft and peak. And behind it all a great whispering, brotherlittlebrother . . . Calling him by a name, not the name he carried now but his true name. 214

This passage exemplifies the fusion between Flin and the landscape, Flin’s voice becoming the voice of the mountain; this fusion is constructed by the text as the result of Jean’s subjectivity, as shown by the references to his perceptions throughout the description (“before him,” “his dreams,” “behind his half-closed eyes,” “he felt”). But instead of becoming a happy dream of reunion, the vision gradually turns into a nightmare, characterized by animalization and metamorphosis, from which he wakes up “crying into his pillow, afraid.” 215 Jean therefore seems to be haunted by the landscape which constantly calls him, a call he systematically refuses to heed. The haunting quality of the landscape may lead us to wonder, as Omhovère does about Jane Urqhart’s Away, why Rose-Innes chooses to turn the mountain into a ghost: “Admittedly quite a few landscapes owe their reputation to their ghosts—the Yorkshire moors or the Scottish lochs readily

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come to mind—but to what extent can the landscape itself considered a ghost? If, as psychoanalysis contends, ghosts symbolize the return of repressed contents, what suppression may a haunting landscape metaphorize? . . . If landscape-writing is to be read as a symptom, what trauma does it translate and bring to the surface of narrative?” 216 Here the answer seems quite clear: the trauma which is expressed by the metamorphosis of the landscape into a ghost, embodied—or disembodied—in Flin, is Jean’s loss of the state of primeval innocence in which he lived before being found by Beatrice, a primeval state constructed not as a prelapsarian and happy time but, instead, as a time of thirst and absence. 217 Paradoxically, Jean himself is perceived as a “ghost child” or as a “boy-ghost” when Ivy first meets him in the Faro house, when they are both children. 218 This reinforces the pattern of doubling which characterizes the relationships between the characters in the novel: “The narrative offers other doubling patterns, the most obvious being the perception of the two lost boys as antithetic doubles: the wild one, Flin, is finally claimed by the primitive landscape, while the tame one, Jean, becomes civilized. The boys therefore illustrate the Gothic tension between primitive and civilized.” 219 But Ivy is also constructed a Jean’s double, a pattern which even “informs the narration: focalization alternates regularly between Ivy’s and Jean’s point of view, offering the reader a double perspective on the narrated events.” 220 The doubling pattern is reinforced at the end of “1996,” in chapters 21 to 25, when Ivy’s trip to the mountain is told in alternation with Jean’s memories of his brother and Beatrice’s disappearance. Not only are the two stories intertwined, but there are also a number of echoes between the two narrative threads, like the mention of “a trail” 221 to designate Flin’s “rock alphabet” or Ivy’s discovery of the letters Jean carved into the table. 222 Jean and Ivy, “mice of the same litter” 223—a connection reinforced by the fact that Ivy, too, is an orphan—are both called by Flin’s voice and by the mountain. But while Jean does not manage to overcome his panic and runs back to the house, Ivy, instead, chooses to follow the trail. 224 The young woman is presented at the beginning of the novel as an unsettled character who never stays permanently in the same place; the fact that she is a “migratory bird” 225 might explain why she can follow Flin’s trail. Her journey in Flin’s footsteps begins under the sign of familiarity thanks to her knowledge of Little Mountain, which turns the space of the actual mountain “into known configurations . . . familiar. . . . .” 226 But this familiar space soon transforms into an unrecognizable place and Ivy gradually feels “disorientated,” so that the gullies become “unclear” 227 and, finally, “she ha[s] no idea where she [is].” 228 In this defamiliarized land, now described as a “broad wilderness,” Ivy feels “panic.” 229 The narrative relies on well-known Gothic motifs: loneliness and terror experienced by a lost character in a mazelike space described through internal focalization. But as in British Gothic, Ivy finds her

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way again thanks to her capacity to read signs. Significantly, the place where it happens is a small pool, “a piece of mirror in a rough frame of branch and stone.” 230 The passage revisits the Gothic motif of the alien land and offers the protagonist a space to become reconciled with her own identity by understanding the landscape around her, “as if the drop of life those cliffs had been waiting for was herself, her own body, the moisture of her mouth and her eyes.” 231 Unlike Jean, Ivy can make sense of the landscape, which leads her to a sense of belonging. The Gothicized landscape is therefore un-Gothicized by Ivy’s journey, which leads her to settle in the Faros’s small house at the foot of the mountain. Her itinerary appears as a mirror image, and a reversal, of Jean’s flight. Although he leaves the place, relieved to go back to civilization, she chooses to stay. But Jean does come back, in 2005. Two twin sections, at the beginning and at the end of the novel, narrate this return, and suggest that, thanks to Ivy, Jean might be able to eventually negotiate his connection to Flin’s landscape. The final lines point to a complexification of the doubling pattern as Ivy seems to have fused with Jean through the figure of Flin. In her final dream, she dreams of the mountain, of “bones and stones,” of a wild garden where “she goes walking hand in hand with her love, her boy, her brother. Her arm outstretched, the hand cupped, swinging gently at first, then with greater abandon. He is a flame at her side; his eye is black, his blood is copper. He whispers in her ear in a language no one has ever spoken. And behind them like a train he pulls back the surface of the world, the skin of stone and sand, to show her the secret alphabet that lies beneath.” 232 Ivy’s familiarity with a figure we can identify as Flin, the “stone boy,” a personification of the landscape, capable of peeling its “skin of stone and sand,” was prepared by Ivy’s revelatory journey into the Gothicized landscape of the mountain, where she felt “distinctly the presence of a person beside her; not matching her steps exactly but running ahead, lagging behind, doubling back and overtaking with fluid speed; no breath but a cool touch. Playful.” 233 The final word echoes Flin’s voice in sections focalized by Jean, in which he hears Flin calling him and asking him to play with him: “Come up, brother, come up. I am king of the hill here. We play all kinds of games. Come find me.” 234 This echo reinforces the doubling pattern between Ivy and Jean, who are linked not only by their similarity but by the ghostly figure of Flin. The insistence on these doubling patterns might be the result, Rose-Innes suggests, of apartheid and of the ideology she grew up in as a South African child: There is that tension and alienation, to some extent, in everything I write. (And in quite a lot of South African literature, as has been noted.) It’s partly temperamental, but it’s also very much a reflection of how we grew up in white South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I recall a generalized sense of anxiety resulting

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from state propaganda, from the violence and abnormality of the society, and from the distrust and fear South Africans felt for each other. These divisions and inequalities continue to disfigure the country. The sometimes eerie doubling you speak of is, I think, an acknowledgement of this separation, but also in the twinning is an acknowledgement of wounded kinship and frustrated desire to connect. 235

What is staged in The Rock Alphabet by Gothicizing the landscape is not, however, a sense of permanent alienation. The novel reads, instead, as a journey toward a sense of place, and leads Ivy to become more settled in the initially hostile and Gothicized mountain. The motif of rocks and stones seems particularly significant in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Indeed, in Charles Eglington’s “The Old Prospector,” Coetzee detects “a recurrent theme of South African landscape writing: that the true South African landscape is of rock, not of foliage; and therefore that the South African artist must employ a geological, not a botanical, gaze. The originator of the idea is Olive Schreiner.” 236 In South African white writing, the goal often is to show “what lies buried beneath the unpromising surface of Africa, besides lifeless metals.” 237 In The Rock Alphabet, what lies beneath the surface is a sense of settlement, a fusion with the landscape, but also a sense of history. When asked about the relationship between her writing and the landscape, Rose-Innes pointed to the “sentimental and historically dangerous attachment to the idea of an empty land, so astutely identified in white South African culture by Coetzee” and admitted that “[t]hese echoes are inescapably there in [her] writing,” which is “troubling in the context of our bloody history of land appropriation and ongoing land struggles.” 238 However, she also believes that “[a]bandoned places can represent the compelling mystique of other people’s lives. They offer the opportunity to imagine oneself into another’s space, and they do, in a way, facilitate meetings with inaccessible strangers—via their leavings, their poignant remains, the cryptic signs of their presence and occupation. These interactions are potentially fraught and strange, but also vital.” 239 In The Rock Alphabet, the white protagonist paradoxically offers the colored “lost boy” a possibility of reconciliation with the land, also finding her own identity in the process. The ghostly figure of Flin becomes a means to interrogate the complex relationships between time and place, as the history of the mountain seems to be embodied in the eternal child’s preverbal language and rock alphabet and as deciphering this complex language from the past seems to be “the condition for finding one’s place in the present.” Ivy, an archivist, is probably better equipped to do so than Jean, which explains why she can settle near the mountain at the end of the novel: “she has been through the (Gothic) labyrinth of the mountain, found the bones of old Bernard Faro, and emerged a different person—a change symbolized by a

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change in the mountain house itself, which looks ‘like home’ upon her return.” 240 Rose-Innes shuns the Gothic label probably because her definition of the term is closer to Gothic as a genre than to Gothic as a mode; she argues that she does not find theses spaces “classically Gothic, or unhomely, exactly.” “I’ve been talking about “abandoned” spaces but most of them are being used—repurposed, as you say. Much of their emotional power for me comes from the signs of hopeful re-inhabitation of spaces that might otherwise be considered desolate and inhospitable. . . . They are uncanny, haunted spaces that turn out to be familiar—if not at first to our protagonist, then to someone or something, flesh and blood.” 241 Yet, if we consider the Gothic as a mode of writing which stages the tension between the unfamiliar and the familiar and enables white writers to come to terms with a sense of place and to “repurpose” place—to use RoseInnes’s own phrasing—it seems that The Rock Alphabet offers a good example of the way in which a typically South African landscape, the Cederberg mountains, is Gothicized and appropriated to construct a new identity in post-apartheid society. As in Shark’s Egg the racial dimension is, perhaps problematically, downplayed and the emphasis is laid much more on the characters’ individual trajectories than on collective issues. Yet, the novel demonstrates how, in the postcolonial world in general, and in South Africa in particular, history is “in the mouths of ghosts.” 242 The mystery of the two boys, “a tribe of two,” 243 enables Rose-Innes to revisit the history of the country on a large scale, as shown by a passage told from Jean’s perspective: “After all, no modern people had lived up in those mountains for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. The boys had come out of the blue; as likely then for them to wander away from their homes in another century as to find their way across equally difficult, if not tougher, spatial geography. Perhaps they were stone-age boys, who was he to say?” 244 When he joins Ivy at the end of the novel, he even tells her: “Maybe we sprang from the dust,” an impression reinforced by the fact that his hand fits exactly the handprint on the rock Ivy shows him, “boy-size, old-people size. And placing his palm softly against it, it is as if his own hand shrinks to fit the template, the ancient hand; beneath his palm he feels the stone grow warm and soft. Already he can feel the fat melting off his bones, the muscles tightening, the skin of his face and hands becoming smooth. He is growing young.” 245 In a strange moment of reversed time, Jean seems to be reunited simultaneously with the landscape and with an ancient history which he ends up embodying. The spatial geography of the mountain thus comes to materialize a history which Rose-Innes proposes to recuperate—the only way, she suggests, to construct a future in post-apartheid South Africa. What makes the novel Gothic, then, is not only its constant focus on subjective landscapes but also its attention to the layers of history which coexist in a deceptively silent landscape where stones do speak if one can decipher their language.

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NOTES 1. Christine Loflin, African Horizons. The Landscapes of African Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 14. 2. Jochen Petzold, Re-Imagining White Identity by Exploring the Past. History in South African Novels of the 1990s (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), 210. 3. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 15. 4. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall. “Introduction,” in Text, Theory, Space. Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 11. 5. Gillian Whitlock, “A ‘White-Souled State’: Across the ‘South’ with Lady Barker,” in Text, Theory, Space. Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 66. Whitlock relies on Alan Lawson’s concept of “Second-World,” developed in “A Cultural Paradigm for the Second World,” Australian-Canadian Studies 9, no. 1–2 (1991): 67–68, and in “Un/Settling Colonies: The Ambivalent Place of Discursive Resistance,” in Literature and Opposition, ed. Christopher Worth, Pauline Anne Nestor, and Marko Pavlyshyn (Clayton, Australia: Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, 1994), 67–82. Lawson defines the concept, Gillian Whitlock explains, “to devise a discursive framework and a reading strategy for writings grounded in post-colonial cultures peculiar to settler societies.” (Whitlock, “White-Souled State,” 66). She argues that “particular kinds of doubleness seem to be ‘distinctively Second-world’, and are one way of thematizing the ‘second-ness of their worlds’” (Ibid., 67). Also see Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” World Literature Written in English 30, no. 2 (1990): 30–41. 6. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 67. 7. Sarah Nuttall, “Flatness and Fantasy. Representations of the Land in Two Recent South African Novels,” in Text, Theory, Space. Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 219. The quote is from Coetzee, White Writing, 9. 8. Claire Omhovère, Sensing Space. The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary EnglishCanadian Writing (Bruxelles, Belgium: Peter Lang, 2007), 25. Here, Omhovère refers to the work of Augustin Berque, which she also uses later on in her analysis of Canadian literature: “Our apprehension of external space in a composition we identify as landscape conjoins what is seen with a way of seeing it. A landscape . . . is not an object but a mediation through which the relation between human beings and their environment receives a specific sense that articulates together the perception, sensation, orientation and the signification of a given milieu for an individual, or group of individuals.” (Ibid., 56). Also see Mike Crang: “landscapes may be read as texts illustrating the beliefs of the people. The shaping of the landscape is seen as expressing social ideologies that are then perpetuated and supported through the landscape.” Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998), 27. 9. Charles Avocat, “Approche du paysage,” Revue de Géographie de Lyon 57, no. 4 (1984): 334–36, my translation. 10. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 12. 11. Michel Collot, “Le paysage africain: ancestral ou colonial?” Etudes Littéraires Africaines 39 (2015): 14. 12. Charles Avocat, Lire le paysage, lire les paysages (Paris: CIEREC, 1984), 14, my translation. 13. See Rogez, “White Writing,” 54. 14. Collot, “Le paysage africain,” 19, my translation. 15. Omhovère, Sensing Space, 35. 16. Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 5. 17. Omhovère, Sensing Space, 25. 18. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 6–7. 19. Coetzee, White Writing 7.

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20. Richard Samin, “La nouvelle sud-africaine: de l’interrègne à la transition,” Etudes Anglaises 54, no. 2 (2001): 214, my translation. 21. Johan Geertsema, “Imagining the Karoo Landscape: Free Indirect Discourse, the Sublime, and the Consecration of White Poverty,” in Literary Landscapes. From Modernism to Postcolonialism, ed. De Lange et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 95. 22. Ibid. 23. Samin, “Les paysages du Karoo,” 41, my translation. 24. This term comes from Bakhtin’s analyses of the ways in which time and space are represented in literary texts (Dialogic Imagination, 84–258). 25. Samin, “Les paysages du Karoo,” 46, my translation. 26. Rogez, “White Writing,” 60, my translation. 27. Loflin, African Horizons, 2. Loflin even argues that “White writing in South Africa is also a kind of exilic writing. Doris Lessing has claimed that ‘all white African literature is the literature of exile: not from Europe, but from Africa.’” Ibid., 12; the quote by Doris Lessing is taken from “‘Desert Child,’ Review of The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens Van Der Post,” The New Statesman 56 (1958): 700. 28. Rogez, “White Writing,” 61, my translation. 29. Stephen Gray, Southern African Literatures. An Introduction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 15. 30. Bethlehem, Skin Tight, 41. Bethlehem reevaluates Gray’s use of Adamastor, of which she is rather critical. She reads the figure of Adamastor as a gendered construct against that of the Hottentot Eve: she and examines how these twin literary figures “impinge on the construction of a South African body politic” (Ibid., 39), and she insists on “the persistent imbrication of both race and gender in the anxious myth of origins that the topos instantiates” (Ibid., 41). 31. Galgut, Imposter, 89. 32. Coetzee, White Writing, 4. 33. Sofia Kostelac, “‘Imposter, lover and guardian’: Damon Galgut and Authorship in ‘PostTransition’ South Africa,” English Studies in Africa 53 no. 1 (2010): 55. 34. Ibid., 57. 35. Galgut, Imposter, 106. 36. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space. Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 10. White women also became the objects of gendered associations with the land, although in a slightly different way. See, for instance, Jennifer Murray’s analysis of Antjie Krog’s work in “‘They Can Never Write the Landscapes out of Their System’: Engagements with the South African Landscape,” Gender, Race and Culture 18, no.1 (2011): 83–97. Also see Sue Kossew, Writing Woman, Writing Place. Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (London: Routledge, 2004) and Whitlock, “White-Souled State.” 37. Galgut, Imposter, 199. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 150. 40. Ibid., 182. 41. Ibid., 80. 42. Ibid. This motif recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the jungle is often personified, described as prehistoric, and repeatedly fused with its scary inhabitants so that, for instance, when Marlow and his companions hear a loud cry in the fog, Marlow says: “to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed,” Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2006 [1899]), 39. 43. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 240–41. 44. Ibid., 219. 45. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 39. 46. “One of Williams’s key insights is that pastoral has always been characterised by nostalgia, so that wherever we look into its history, we will see an ‘escalator’ taking us back further into a better past” (Garrard, Ecocriticism, 41). The reference to the “escalator” comes from Williams’s second chapter, “A problem of perspective,” Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Vintage, 2016 [1973]), 13.

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47. Garrard distinguishes between “three orientations of pastoral in terms of time: the elegy looks back to a vanished past with a sense of nostalgia; the idyll celebrates a bountiful present; the utopia looks forward to a redeemed future,” Garrard, Ecocriticism, 42. 48. Galgut, Impostor, 81. 49. The yellow hat is be used again as a marker of Ezekiel’s identity when the two old people come to Adam’s house to ask for work at the end of the novel (Galgut, Impostor, 207); see chapter 2 of this volume. 50. Ibid., 133. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 134. 53. Ibid., 135. 54. Ibid., 136. 55. Ibid., 37. 56. Ibid., 138. 57. Ibid., 135. 58. Ibid., 136–37. 59. Ibid., 134. 60. Ibid., 98. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 99. 64. Ibid., 193. 65. Ibid., 115. 66. Ibid., 194. 67. Ibid., 195. 68. Ibid., 137. 69. Ibid. 70. Barnard, “Rewriting the Nation,” 668–69. 71. Coetzee, White Writing, 88. 72. Ampie Coetzee explains that in Afrikaans literature from the early twentieth-century, the past and the farm are idealized in a world which is less and less rural, and increasingly capitalistic: “The first farm novel, by D.F. Malherbe (Die Meulenaar, The Miller), tells about the waning of the idyll and the eventual loss of the farm and of that kind of existence.” A. Coetzee, “One Hundred Years of Afrikaans Literature and Afrikaner Nationalism,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), 329. This seems to be what happens in The Impostor, in which Canning realizes that the world has changed and that the farm belongs to a bygone era. 73. Coetzee, White Writing, 83. 74. Ibid., 63. Terry Gifford argues that even in so-called “pastoral” literature, an antipastoral strain was always present: “in fact, the anti-pastoral was embedded within the most complex pastorals from the Idylls onwards (which might caution easy rejections of outmoded representations of harmony that betray a lack of familiarity with the founding texts.” Gifford, “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral,” 22. 75. Galgut, Impostor, 143. 76. Ibid., 203. 77. In her reading of Anne Landsman’s Devil’s Chimney as a contemporary version of the farm novel, Sue Kossew observes that “as in all the farm texts surveyed, Landman’s includes the trope of a hidden violence, buried beneath the surface of civility,” Kossew, Writing Woman, 132, and compares it to Gordimer’s buried body in The Conservationist. Landsman’s novel does feature a number of Gothic motifs, even if it does not rely on the Gothic mode as much as Galgut’s Impostor or Rose-Innes’s Rock Alphabet. It has been read as a magic realist rather than a Gothic novel; read for instance Jill Nudelman, “Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney: A magical realist narrative for a new nation?” English Academy Review 25, no. 1 (2008): 112–22. 78. Galgut, Impostor, 203. 79. Ibid., 204.

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80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 170. 82. Ibid., 227. 83. Ibid., 230. 84. Ibid., 232–33. 85. Ibid., 233. 86. Coetzee, White Writing, 81. 87. Rogez, “White Writing,” 57, my translation. 88. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958 [1757]), 39. 89. Matthew Shum, “Unsettling Settler Identity. Thomas Pringle’s Troubled Landscapes,” in Postcolonialism. South/African Perspectives, ed. Michael Chapman (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 25. 90. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 57. 91. Victore Sage, ed. The Gothick Novel. A Casebook. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990), 14. 92. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 11. 93. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 225. 94. Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, 36. 95. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 226. 96. Burke insisted on darkness as one of the most potent ingredients of the sublime: “to make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary” (Philosophical Enquiry, 58). 97. Botting, Gothic, 39. 98. Coetzee, White Writing, 41. 99. Ibid., 43. 100. Rogez, “White Writing,” 57, my translation. 101. Geertsema, “Imagining the Karoo Landscape,” 97. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 99. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 100. 106. Coetzee, White Writing, 77. 107. Rebecca Duncan reads Pauline Smith’s works as examples of colonial Gothic, in which “the apprehension of socio-economic upheaval as a jagged collision of disjunctive temporalities and spatialities is encrypted in the paradigmatic Gothic trope of undead threat.” Duncan, South African Gothic, 58. 108. Botting, Gothic, 38. 109. Collot, “Le paysage africain,” 15, my translation. 110. Coetzee, White Writing, 53. 111. Simon Lewis, “Graves with a View: Atavism and the European History of Africa,” ARIEL 27, no. 1 (1996): 44. 112. Coetzee, White Writing, 83. 113. Galgut, Impostor, 134. 114. Justin Cartwright, Not Yet Home. A South African Journey (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 35. Cartwright uses the same anecdote in “The Lie of the Land,” his contribution to Watson’s A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place (London: Penguin. Kindle Edition, 2016), reversing the final phrase and stating, instead, that one man’s bushes are another man’s landscape. 115. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 3. 116. Justin Cartwright, White Lightning (London: Sceptre, 2002), 3. 117. Ibid., 4. 118. Ibid., 38. 119. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 51. 120. Ibid., 63. 121. Cartwright, White Lightning, 95.

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122. Ibid., 81. 123. Ibid., 122. 124. Ibid., 223. 125. Cartwright, Up Against the Night. The immediate context of the original quote reinforces the sense of subjectivity of landscapes: “That is to say, when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess—savageness, for example, or bleakness—and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.” Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta, 2003), 18. 126. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 63. 127. Ibid., 63, 94. 128. Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Commemorating Piet Retief: Justin Cartwright’s Up Against the Night (2015),” in The Legacy of a Troubled Past: Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st Century, ed. Bernard Cros, Mathilde Rogez and Gilles Teulié (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, forthcoming). 129. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 8. 130. Ibid., 18–19. 131. Ibid., 31. 132. Ibid., 32. 133. See Thompson, Political Mythology; Paul Coquerel, L’Afrique du Sud des Afrikaners (Paris: Editions Complexe, coll. “Questions au XXème siècle,” 1992). 134. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 148. 135. Ibid., 165–66. 136. Cartwright, White Lightning, 10–11. 137. Kronk repeatedly refers to Virgil’s Georgics. White Lightning includes a number of quotes from the book, which Kronk finds in his mother’s cottage and in which his father has made notes (Ibid., 24). It also provides Kronk with a frame of reference for his own pastoral fantasies; he refers, for instance, to “Virgil’s idea of otium” to describe his conception of his future life; a few pages later, when the bee man brings the beehives to the farm Kronk has just bought, he comments: “I see this as a symbolic act, the start of a life of pleasantness, Virgil’s amoenitas” (Ibid., 150). 138. Ibid., 101. 139. Ibid., 115. 140. Ibid., 161. 141. Coetzee, White Writing, 112. 142. Cartwright, White Lightning, 186. 143. Cartwright, “The Lie of the Land.” 144. Cartwright, White Lightning, 44–45. 145. Ibid., 45. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., 174. 148. Ibid., 175. 149. Ibid., 216. 150. Ibid., 153. 151. Ibid., 227. 152. Ibid., 208. 153. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 54. 154. Ibid., 198. 155. See Cartwright, White Lightning, 88, 113. 156. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 218. The italics in the original text materialize the quote from Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind which is also used as an epigraph to Up Against the Night. 157. “What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans—a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountain has little to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains

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are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties which they possess are vested in them by human imaginations. Mountains—like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being—are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by the forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them. But they are also the products of human perception; they have been imagined into existence down the centuries.” (Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 19) 158. Cartwright, White Lightning, 149. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid., 53. 161. Ibid., 134. 162. Ibid., 106. 163. Ibid., 107. 164. Ibid., 134. 165. Ibid., 163–64. 166. Ibid., 221. 167. Ibid., 229. 168. Ibid., 231. 169. Ibid. 170. Dan Wylie, “Literature and Ecology in Southern Africa,” in SA Lit: Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011), 366. 171. Terry Gifford describes “post-pastoral” literature in the following way: “The point is that if pastoral can be regarded as a cultural function rather than a genre of canonical texts, or a mode of discourse about nature, it is possible to conceptualize a ‘post-pastoral’ literature that includes Marx’s ‘complex pastoral’, but also bypasses the British critical dead-end for pastoral by identifying a version of continuity that is itself aware of the dangers of idealized escapism whilst seeking some form of accommodation between humans and nature”. He adds that postpastoral is not temporal but conceptual, and tries to take into account the complexity of pastoral: post-pastoral works are “works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problematics involved. It is more about connection than the disconnections essential to the pastoral.” (Gifford, “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral,” 26). 172. Cartwright, White Lightning, 184. 173. Ibid., 185. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., 240. 176. Ibid., 241. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid., 242. 179. Ibid., 243. 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid., 49–50. 182. Ibid., 56. 183. Joseph-Vilain, “Commemorating Piet Retief.” 184. Cartwright, Up Against the Night, 96. 185. Ibid., 200. 186. Ibid., 238. 187. Ibid., 132. 188. Cartwright, “The Lie of the Land.” 189. Ibid. 190. Some of the arguments exposed in this section were briefly and sketchily evoked in “Something Hungry and Wild,” 68–69. 191. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 114–19. 192. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 68.

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193. Henrietta Rose-Innes, The Rock Alphabet (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004), 11–12. 194. Henrietta Rose-Innes contends that “Ballard’s obsessional subjects were often visual: objects or elements of landscape.” Rose-Innes, “Lodestars of Fixation,” in Relocations. Reading Culture in South Africa, ed. Imran Coovadia, Cóilin Parsons, and Alexandra Dodd (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015), 107. 195. Rose-Innes, Rock Alphabet, 13. 196. Ibid., 147. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., 174. 199. Ibid., 148. 200. Ibid., 168. 201. Ibid., 172. 202. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind. 203. Rose-Innes, Rock Alphabet, 68. 204. Ibid., 43. 205. Ibid., 9. 206. Ibid., 103. 207. Ibid. 208. Ibid. 209. Ibid., 109. 210. Ibid., 110. 211. Ibid., 20. 212. Ibid., 23. 213. Ibid., 130. 214. Ibid., 131. 215. Ibid., 132. 216. Omhovère, Sensing Space, 56. 217. Rose-Innes, Rock Alphabet, 22. 218. Ibid., 75, 103. 219. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 69. 220. Ibid. 221. Rose-Innes, Rock Alphabet, 158,171. 222. Ibid., 149, 170. 223. Ibid., 129. 224. Ibid., 171. 225. Ibid., 48. 226. Ibid., 159. 227. Ibid. 228. Ibid., 160. 229. Ibid. 230. Ibid., 161. 231. Ibid., 148. 232. Ibid., 190–91. 233. Ibid., 159. 234. Ibid., 131; italics in original. 235. Riach, Graham K., “‘Concrete Fragments’: An Interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 1 (2020): 117. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/0021989418777021. 236. Coetzee, White Writing, 167. 237. Ibid., 168. 238. Riach, “Concrete Fragments,” 118. 239. Ibid., 119. 240. Joseph-Vilain, “Something Hungry and Wild,” 69. 241. Riach, “Concrete Fragments,” 118. Rose-Innes’ reluctance to use the term Gothic signals the necessity to define it in a precise way, as I have done consistently in the present study. It also echoes Sara Wasson and Emily Adler’s cautionary advice not to confuse the uncanny

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with the Gothic: “For the Gothic to form a lens through which valuable insights into a text can be made, we must recognize that the simple use of ‘uncanny’ occurrences or the appearance of phantoms do not necessarily signal a Gothic text.” Wasson and Alder, “Introduction,” in Gothic Science Fiction. 1980–2010 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 7). It is my contention that the Gothic mode emerges in white writing not merely in the presence of ghosts or the uncanny but only when these tools are used to express specific anxieties of unsettledness. 242. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 58. 243. Rose-Innes, Rock Alphabet, 68. 244. Ibid., 84. 245. Ibid., 189–90.

Chapter Four

Cities South African “Urban Gothic”

SOUTH AFRICAN “URBAN GOTHIC”: MAPPING THE CITY As I suggested in my second chapter, the Gothic genre was born out of an interest in Gothic architecture. However, as British society evolved in the nineteenth century and the population increasingly moved to the cities, the spaces of Gothic fiction reflected these changes and also became increasingly urban. While in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, castles and monasteries were the principal loci of fear, the city gradually came to be endowed with similar values and became a space onto which the anxieties caused by the evolution of British society could be projected. In that century when science and progress modified the social fabric of Great Britain, emerged “a new site of Gothic horror: the city,” with its “labyrinthine streets, sinister rookeries, opium dens, and the filth and stench of the squalid slums.” 1 In Victorian Britain, “the Gothic locus of solitude is displaced toward a labyrinth for the masses.” 2 “The city, with its dark, narrow, winding streets and hidden byways replacing the labyrinthine passages of the earlier castles and convents, is established as a site of menace through the importation of various traditional Gothic motifs and scenarios. This is not to say that the terrors duplicate those experienced by earlier Gothic protagonists: they are, rather, quite specific to the modern urban experience.” 3 The point made by David Punter and Glennis Byron here is crucial: while pointing to the invariant value of Gothic spaces, that is, their capacity to become receptacles for the projection of terror, they also highlight the historical variability of the anxieties projected onto them. This variability accounts for the plasticity of Gothic fiction, and 145

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particularly for its potential for becoming a vehicle for historically and spatially shaped anxieties. The reason why the urban could become a potential site for terror is linked to the liminality of the Gothic, which “explains why the genre is particularly attracted to the zones and sites where modern and pre-modern energies clash, such as, for example, the city.” 4 In nineteenth-century Britain, “the city served a dual function, as both a powerful representation of modernity and its horrific underside.” 5 A case in point is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the dual relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is played out and projected onto the foggy and labyrinthine city of London. The novel testifies to the evolution of Gothic spaces in the nineteenth century: the domestic space of the house is mirrored both by the labyrinthine spaces of the city and by the laboratory, where scientific progress gone awry gives birth to the hero’s double—although, of course, the relationship between the potion created by Jekyll and his transformation into Hyde is challenged and subverted by the fact that he can turn into Hyde without drinking the potion—or so he claims. Jean-Pierre Naugrette examines the prominent part played by the motif of the spiral-like labyrinth in Stevenson’s imagination and shows that the novel constructs a “poetics of the city,” “of which the labyrinth becomes the privileged metaphor.” 6 Comparing the Gothicized city of London to the Labyrinth in the myth of the Minotaur, Naugrette argues that the function of the metaphor of the labyrinth is to suggest that a monster lies in its center. 7 Relying on Umberto Eco’s definition of the three types of labyrinths in his “Postscript to The Name of the Rose,” 8 Naugrette demonstrates that the three of them coexist in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, from the linear itinerary of Utterson’s investigation to his wandering among the dead ends of a case which he does not fully understand, and to the textual labyrinth, “an open space for a plurality of readings, a network or rhizome in which Stevenson’s reader is doomed to roam endlessly.” 9 This detour via Stevenson’s Strange Case suggests that the motif of the labyrinth in Gothic fiction is a complex one, which will need to be examined closely when it is transposed to South African cities. This motif will prove to be all the more appropriate as I will examine crime fiction in this chapter, and “space in crime fiction is rhizomatic in the Deleuzian sense, that is, it consists of what Manuel Castells has described in another context as a ‘space of flows,’ a series of connected nodal points forming a large network, rather than a group of mutually exclusive spaces with no connection from one to the other.” 10 In nineteenth-century British fiction, urban terrors stemmed both from the remnants of past evils and from new monsters born from modernity: “Domestic, industrial and urban contexts and aberrant individuals provided the loci for mystery and terror. Haunting pasts were the ghosts of family transgression and guilty concealments; the dark alleyways of cities were the

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gloomy forests and subterranean labyrinths: criminals were the new villains, cunning, corrupt but thoroughly human.” 11 The final point Fred Botting makes here suggests a literary filiation between Gothic fiction and crime fiction: 12 if “criminals were the new villains,” crime fiction could become, in a number of instances, the new Gothic—as shown, for instance, by Lucie Armitt’s reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles as a Gothic novel. 13 Eco’s own Name of the Rose, whose lineage from Doyle’s fiction is signaled by the name of its protagonist, the aptly named Baskerville, also displays fairly explicitly the literary conjunction of crime and Gothic fiction, bringing together “self-consciously Gothic features like the narrative detailing the discovery of a medieval manuscript, the gloomy settings, dark vaults, mysterious deaths and the medieval architecture and history that run through it” and the motif of the investigation conducted by a monk who “as his name suggests, has powers of deduction like those of Sherlock Holmes and sets out to provide a rational explanation of supposedly supernatural terrors.” 14 Such a conjunction leads me, like Lucie Armitt, to “position The Name of the Rose alongside other key texts, such as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, as Gothic narratives provoking the question of what differentiates them from detective fiction.” 15 Armitt eschews answering her own question and offers, instead, a close reading of Eco’s novel, convincingly analyzing the various aspects of its Gothicity. Botting’s reading of the novel does not answer the question either, but his analysis may help us understand how Gothic and detective fiction are combined in The Name of the Rose: Following the clues through the dark corridors and vaults of the Abbey, Baskerville uncovers the textual and fragmented trail of signs and secret codes that both conceal and cause the crimes, arriving at the horror and the explanation in the hidden chamber of the labyrinthine library. The horror is not a bloody specter or corpse but takes the form of Baskerville’s double, an old librarian named Jorge, possessed of religious dogmatism and callous and diabolical cunning, perfect foils for the former’s intellectual pride. 16

In other words, the hermeneutic dimension of detective fiction is located in the Gothic space of the abbey and leads the detective to discover his own (Gothic) double. The novel therefore associates the motif of Eco’s first type of labyrinth, the Greek one, with a monster at its center, with an uncertainty characteristic of Gothic fiction’s simultaneous production and contestation of enlightenment values. The pattern of the quest for truth is disturbed by the revelation of a duality inherent in the seemingly protected world of the abbey. What The Name of the Rose demonstrates, then, is the way in which the Gothic mode provides a background for crime fiction: the Gothic space of the abbey and the Gothic motif of the double become landmarks for the hermeneutic journey of the monk-detective. I would like to argue, then, that

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the relationship between detective fiction and the Gothic is mostly spatial: both genres interact in the Gothic spaces where Gothic characters are created. In The Name of the Rose the Gothic space is that of the abbey, which Eco borrows from eighteenth-century Gothic novels, while in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde London is the Gothic space where Utterson’s investigation is conducted—even if, of course, the result of the investigation is far from conclusive. Such a spatial affinity between Gothic and detective fiction does not merely apply to Stevenson’s nineteenth-century Gothic novel or to Eco’s metafictional and medieval detective novel; it has also been transferred to the urban spaces of contemporary cities, which have become the locus of many detective novels. The relationship between the detective novel and the Gothic is also reinforced by their common reliance on the link between past and present and particularly on the sense that the present is haunted by the past. The Gothic often manifests the return of the past, from the medieval ghosts of early Gothic fiction to the ghosts of slavery—as shown, for instance, by Rebecca Duncan’s reading of André Brink’s The Rights of Desire and Devil’s Valley. 17 Detective fiction, on the other hand, relies on a hermeneutic impulse leading the detective to reconstruct the moments that preceded the murder so as to be able to identify the culprit. As Tzvetan Todorov suggested in his typology, crime fiction implies two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. While they are successive in classic whodunnits, they tend to be fused in thrillers or suspense novels. Although incomplete or unsatisfactory, as he himself admits, 18 Todorov’s classification emphasizes crime fiction’s multiplicity of forms as well as its reliance on the tension between cause and consequence and, therefore, between past and present. No wonder that crime fiction has tended to include Gothic elements, then, to explore causality and, above all, the weight of past events. This chapter will therefore examine the ways in which crime fiction and the Gothic are conflated in post-apartheid novels by white writers; more specifically, I will show how the space of the city becomes the Gothic site where the past of the nation is investigated and unveiled and where a writer’s exploration of belonging, or not belonging, can be conducted. 19 In South Africa, urban Gothic can be located mostly in the countries’ two largest cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town, particularly in crime fiction, whose rise on the South African literary scene has been particularly striking in the post-apartheid era, 20 as testified by the local and international success of such writers as Deon Meyer, Mike Nicol, Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes, or Jassy Mackenzie, to name but a few. The way these writers use and Gothicize the city in their works is incorporated in the framework of a history of urban representation and articulates the city in its actuality but also through “the subjective meanings applied to it not only by generations of authors, but also by generations of readers, viewers, and others whose daily

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spatial practices produce the city they inhabit.” 21 This is in keeping with Bertrand Westphal’s definition of geocriticism as the science about the “interactions between human spaces and literature.” 22 Benoît Doyon-Gosselin explains that in Westphal’s conception, “the dialectics between space and literature is based on the primacy of real space, later turned into imaginary space,” 23 which leads him to argue that geocriticism seems to favor the study of inhabited places, particularly cities, over other types of spaces. 24 The city is thus constructed and analyzed as both a real and a textualized space. The significance of the city in South African culture, and particularly in South African white writing, is linked to the history of the country since “prior to the late 1980s, South African urban geography expressed the ambitions of apartheid ideologues.” 25 After the demise of apartheid, “a complex and complicating literature of the urban has emerged.” 26 Relying on Michel De Certeau’s distinction between the cartographic and the peripatetic, Michael Titlestad discerns different ways of coming to terms with the variety of approaches to the urban in South African fiction. Interestingly, he lays particular emphasis on the anxieties expressed by some white writers in their fiction, particularly Marlene Van Niekerk in her Gothicized novel Triomf, which simultaneously revisits the psycho-geography of Johannesburg and the Afrikaner psyche, 27 and Ivan Vladislavić. The latter offers an interesting example because, as Titlestad remarks, his writing “is arguably the most sustained imaginative investigation of post-apartheid urban life.” 28 The Restless Supermarket, 29 which centers on Aubrey Tearle, a retired proofreader, explores the white protagonist’s problematic adaptation to the rapidly changing environment of the new South Africa. In the novel, the city of Johannesburg becomes a “palimpsest in terms of the layered nationalities and cultures residing in the city, as well as through representing a combined, overlapping past, present, and future in this space.” 30 Tearle’s “pastiche European city, ‘Alibia’, . . . is an eloquent expression of white transitional anxieties: that the post-apartheid order would entail nothing other than disorder, disorientation and loss.” 31 The Exploded View, 32 a four-part narrative which describes the various ways in which characters apprehend the spaces of an evolving city, similarly entails a tension between order and disorder: “Each of the four narrators experiences a moment of vertiginous disorientation when the world of swirling signs cannot be ordered in terms of the system of meaning on which he depends. A slippage occurs—and, for each, the real begins to recede beneath a tide of signifiers that have become detached from their signifieds.” 33 Although The Restless Supermarket and The Exploded View do not consistently hinge on the Gothicization of the city, the lexicon mobilized by Titlestad to describe them relies rather strikingly on Gothic motifs, thus evincing the necessity to examine the ways in which white “anxieties” are expressed in terms of “disorientation” in the context of South African cities. 34

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The emergence of crime fiction 35 in post-apartheid South Africa can be explained by the political relevance of this type of fiction, and particularly of “noir” fiction, but also by its capacity to explore personal and collective anxieties. Leon de Kock sees the explosion of recent South African crime fiction as a consequence of the social disorder which characterizes postapartheid society, a disorder which he describes as “plot loss” 36—that is, the end of the optimism which immediately followed the end of apartheid and was replaced by post-transitional anxiety. Situating South Africa in the broader postcolonial context, where social disorder has become the norm, writers, he argues, feel compelled to produce “diagnostic works” which testify to the “criminalization of the state.” 37 Such an interpretation is confirmed, for instance, by Margie Orford, who explained that her novel Daddy’s Girl was inspired by a series of actual murders perpetrated against young girls: “It seemed to me as if South Africa itself was the serial killer of these girls.” 38 Genre literature, De Kock suggests, enables writers to restore a sense of plot through a “‘solving the crime’ approach” in a society which is experienced and interpreted as plotless. 39 De Kock also remarks that the capacity of genre and crime fiction to excavate the truth is in continuity with the process initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). 40 Excavation is characteristic of the function of crime fiction in post-apartheid South Africa, as De Kock also demonstrates in an article he wrote with Jonathan Amid: “South African crime fiction in our view, investigates and engages with the most commonly recognized threat to citizens, namely ‘crime,’ excavating its origins and tracing its effects, while commenting on the nature of law enforcement and the way justice is done, or not done, in post-apartheid democracy.” 41 The motif of excavation, a defining trait of crime fiction, also resonates with the Gothic mode and its focus on the buried, the subterranean, the hidden and may provide a contact zone between the genre of crime fiction and the ways in which the Gothic mode is used by writers to negotiate the urban space of South African cities. It is through this logic that crime fiction’s definition as “a profoundly spatial as well as temporal genre” 42 takes up its full meaning; the space of the city becomes the locus where a buried past, that of the individual crime as well as that of the nation, comes to light, expressing the anxieties that resurface in white South Africans’ psyche: “Like the Cold War thrillers, South African crime fiction constantly excavates the past. Characters, plots, even crimes have their origin in the struggle era.” 43 This logic of excavation seems congruent with the space of the postapartheid metropolis which combines “visible and invisible traces” of a past which must be decoded. 44 This is particularly relevant in Johannesburg where, as Loren Kruger amply demonstrates, urban spaces have constantly been transformed by “cycles of demolition and renovation every generation.” 45

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The political and social relevance of crime fiction has been widely discussed, and sometimes contested, in recent years, as De Kock reminds us, summing up the argument in the following way: “The post-transitional genre writers are seen as copping out of the real deal, i.e. complexity and openness, for the sake of quick-sell entertainment. These supposedly cheap tricks, in addition, feed off a still-volatile society in a manner which, some might claim, borders on the unethical.” 46 De Kock convincingly answers with a hypothesis, suggesting that “‘crime’ in the ‘new’ South Africa . . . appears to be an everyday allegory for the sociopolitical terrain in a broad sense, speaking urgently to anxieties about very real conditions of social disorder.” 47 “What if the upsurge in South African “crime writing,” in all its forms, rather than selling out on intricate ‘entanglement,’ is in fact prizing open the workings of a genuinely transformed social condition? This is a condition, moreover, that is no longer just national, just ‘South African,’ but transnational in its dimensions, and global in its derivations?” 48 Two main aspects need to be underlined in De Kock’s suggestion: first, the transnational dimension of South African literature and second, the crucial role of the reemergence of the past in the success of crime fiction, as De Kock also asserts, insisting on what he sees as a literature “less liberated from the past than engaged in the persistent re-emergence of this past” and “distinguished by strong rather than weak or merely vestigial continuity with the past.” 49 De Kock’s hypothesis is all the more relevant as crime has become uncomfortably equated with South African identity: “[c]rime, with or without the scare quotes, has over the past two decades replaced ‘apartheid’ as one of the country’s most conspicuous, and contested, terms.” 50 Yet, crime fiction, as an international genre, also becomes the site where urban Gothic articulates the global and the local. 51 In other words, crime fiction is a literary space for the exploration of tensions between the global and the local, a contact zone, and as such it reflects the tensions and ambiguities of postapartheid society. Indeed, politically speaking, crime fiction may seem a rather ambivalent form, as David Schmid puts it, interrogating crime fiction’s affinity for order: “Does crime fiction have the potential to produce radical, counter-hegemonic critiques of the ways in which power is mobilized in capitalist, racist, and patriarchal social formations, or is it instead an essentially conservative, bourgeois genre that supports the status quo?” 52 Whether it supports or challenges the status quo, crime fiction provides, Amid and De Kock suggest, an appropriate tool to describe South African reality. They even seem to equate the function of crime fiction with that of the TRC itself, insisting on its restorative and investigative impact through the process of fictional crime-solving: “A number of authors, including Meyer and Nicol, have commented on the ‘normalization’ of our society through the writing of post-apartheid crime fiction after the socio-political ‘grand crime’ of apartheid itself, a way for liberal democracy to cement itself in writing.” 53 Crime

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fiction is thus seen as having replaced the political novels written at the time of apartheid: Crime fiction, too, which is a growing genre in South Africa, draws into its bloody maw a range of unfinished business from the past even as it increasingly inserts the national into various transnational networks. . . . Drawing on the conventions of a popular global genre, South African writers are filling it with local content and in the process repoliticizing the genre in new ways, rather than turning away from the political or, for that matter, from the past. 54

The political relevance of crime fiction is not only connected to the way in which it enables writers to revisit, and sometimes heal, the wounds of the past through the process of crime-solving. It is also deeply rooted in the genre’s spatial affinities, as Claudia Drawe remarks: “there is no doubt that locale is crucial in crime fiction” 55—hence, the relevance of Reijnders’ notion of the “guilty landscape,” which bears the traces of the crimes which were committed there. “The active quality that a locale acquires is inflected by events that have taken place there—indeed, have taken the place into the ambit of particularized meanings.” 56 Drawe examines, in particular, how Cape Town becomes “the city of crime” in novels by Meyer, Roger Smith, and Nicol: in these novels, she argues, Cape Town is represented as a “divided city,” “a city with clearly demarcated zones,” 57 a division which seems to reflect former divisions imposed by the laws of apartheid. It is my contention, however, that the demarcations and dichotomies Drawe identifies between the rural and the urban, the rich and the poor, but also between good and evil, are undermined by some of the writers I discuss in this chapter. Before examining some examples, I want to point out the diversity of forms taken by crime fiction in South Africa, which ranges from conformity to the conventions of a genre known for the rigidity of its codes to a rather loose interpretation of these codes in an overtly metafictional perspective. Noticing this diversity, Amid and De Kock claim their intention to read crime novels according to their conformity to what they call “pure genre,” but such a position, I argue, tends to erase some of the complexities in South African crime fiction’s handling of space and does not reflect the varied ways in which South African white writers have turned to crime fiction. The plasticity of the genre, of course, reflects the inscription of South African crime fiction in global literature because generic plasticity has paradoxically become one of its defining features: “The boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles, from pulp fiction to highly literary novels with elements of crime, from cozy mysteries with a sense of closure to fragmented narratives focusing on racial tensions, gender conflicts or the morals of violence.” 58 This has led me to suggest that the codes of crime fiction can even be found in novels which are not officially labeled as crime fiction, like Henrietta Rose-Innes’

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Nineveh, 59 which I will analyze in chapter 5 in terms of its “genre-bending.” 60 This chapter examines novels which use crime fiction in a more straightforward way to revisit the space of the South African city, particularly the two most emblematic ones: Johannesburg and Cape Town, which both become “cities of crime” in post-apartheid white writing, a way for white novelists to reexamine the spatial divisions inherited from apartheid. I insist, in particular, on the motif of excavation, which Gothicizes these “cities of crime” and turns them into spaces for collective and individual introspection. This leads me to focus on noir fiction, following Joanne Reardon Lloyd’s suggestion that “[o]ne of the most defining features of noir crime fiction is the idea of the katabasis, or the hero’s descent into the underworld. . . . Throughout Raymond Chandler’s novels featuring the noir detective Philip Marlowe, we see him constantly descending into the belly of LA’s dark cityscape at the same time as he descends into the figurative depths of his own self.” 61 “INTO THE CITY, DEEP UNDER THE CITY”: LAUREN BEUKES’S JOHANNESBURG Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall’s introduction to Johannesburg. The Elusive Metropolis starts with the assertion that the “premier African metropolis” 62 is synonymous with modernity in Africa. This connection between the South African capital and modernity shall also be the starting point for my exploration of the representation of Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s second novel, Zoo City. 63 The reader familiar with Beukes’s work should not be surprised by her interest in urban modernity in Zoo City because in her first novel, Moxyland, 64 which was set in a futuristic version of another large South African city, Cape Town, she already endeavored to denounce the uses and abuses of modernity in a dystopian world dominated by what she called “a corporate apartheid state.” 65 Both novels have been labeled science fiction, both by their publisher and by their readers; Zoo City was even awarded the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, a prize for the best science fiction novel published each year in the United Kingdom. In an interview with Cheryl Morgan, who interrogated her about the literary field in South Africa, Beukes herself explained that she probably was the only science fiction writer in the country 66—a rather debatable assertion, which nevertheless points to her acceptance of the label despite her desire to write about contemporary South Africa. Choosing Johannesburg, the epitome of African modernity, as the setting for her second novel testifies to her wish to explore her country’s future, but it can also be explained by another dominant feature of South Africa’s “elu-

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sive metropolis,” to use Mbembe and Nuttall’s phrase. Indeed, when cities are compared, Johannesburg tends to be perceived as the quintessential city of crime, to the extent that “stories of crime, of violent disruption of law and order, became Johannesburg’s defining genre of social commentary as well as artistic imagining” 67 in a place where “the geography of crime reflected not only the history of racial segregation, but also the geo-pathology of ever sharper divisions by wealth, in which the crisis of management was expressed as the inability to imagine the city as anything other than incurably divided.” 68 These two facets of Johannesburg as both the city of crime and a divided city pervade Zoo City, so that contrary to what its paratext—both authorial and editorial—seems to indicate, Zoo City is not merely a work of science fiction but shares many similarities with crime fiction, in particular the specific genre of the hard-boiled novel, or roman noir. 69 This should not come as a surprise because there are many affinities between the roman noir and science fiction. Frédéric Grao, for instance, identifies a large number of convergences between crime fiction and what he calls “anti-utopias,” that is, speculative novels describing a pessimistic vision of the future. 70 To him, the concomitant use of both genres is linked to the writer’s desire to unveil the truth about contemporary society, by joining the hermeneutic goal of crime fiction—particularly roman noir—with the social dimension of speculative fiction, which often tends to denounce the ills of contemporary society. The possibility of fusing crime and science fiction is also favored by crime fiction’s “generic plasticity,” 71 which has already been pointed out. Zoo City seems to be characterized by such generic plasticity, and my goal here will be to suggest that this novel which appears to be science fiction and has been read as such by critics and by the general public, shares many characteristics with crime fiction as well. The aim is not merely to put a label on the novel; my argument, instead, will be that reading Zoo City as hard-boiled fiction helps us to understand how and why Beukes represents, and Gothicizes, the city of Johannesburg. Crime fiction will therefore be the prism through which I will interrogate the various meanings Beukes assigns to Johannesburg. I will place myself in a multidisciplinary perspective, in the sense given to it by Thierry Paquot, who argues for the use of what he calls “‘travelling’ ideas and models” when analyzing urban phenomena. 72 I intend to show that the hard-boiled novel, a definitely urban genre, provides Beukes with literary tools to represent Johannesburg, so that the metropolis, far from appearing only as a phenomenon born from the combination of globalization and capitalism, can also bear the traces of locality and thus articulate the global and the local; as Paquot states it, the combination of metropolization and globalization induces a double process of homogenization and differentiation, a phenomenon illustrated in Beukes’s futuristic and fictional depiction of Johannesburg, which certainly does not erase the African metropolis’s locality. As De Kock points out: “Ironically, Egoli in the province of Gau-

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teng, the place of gold, is a city both unexceptional (just another post-industrial crime-ridden city) and otherworldly, or exotic, by virtue of a certain postcolonial grit.” 73 As a preliminary step to reading Zoo City in the light of its architextual hybridity, 74 I need to define what will be meant here by hard-boiled fiction. I will then endeavor to explore what meaning Beukes assigns to the city of Johannesburg in Zoo City by using, but also by subverting, the codes and conventions of crime fiction. Hard-boiled fiction is generally perceived as an extremely codified genre, and even if definitions might vary slightly depending on the period or the cultural and geographical area covered by critics, there seems to be a consensus on its recurring features. The first indispensable element needed is obviously a plot revolving around one or several crimes which must be elucidated. The second component is a detective trying to solve the crime and usually narrating his (or her) own story: “The second element, the narratorial instance, often presents itself under the guise of a detective, that is, either a witness-narrator inherited from American tradition or a homodiegetic character-narrator.” 75 The third feature can be found on the diegetic level: as Sophie Savary argues, there need to be codified scenarios which are more or less similar in all crime novels, and sometimes duplicate themselves in the guise of parallel or secondary plots. 76 To these ingredients can be added components specific to the subgenre of hard-boiled fiction. The first one is the fusion of the story of the crime and of the story of the investigation, and the concomitance of the events narrated in the novel. 77 The second, most important one regarding this discussion, is the undeniable connection between crime fiction and the city. 78 In hard-boiled novels, in particular, the investigation is closely linked to the various spaces in which it takes place. Most of these spaces are urban, as suggested in JeanNoël Blanc’s Polarville, in which the sociologist explores the relationship between crime fiction and the city and lists the typical topoi of crime fiction: vacant lots, streets, empty warehouses, industrial districts. 79 Because of its urban dimension, hard-boiled fiction is characterized by an exploration of the relationships between the various categories of people who inhabit the city, 80 with a particular focus on the lower fringes of urban populations: gangsters, the mafia, prostitutes, 81 who all gravitate around the world of crime and criminality. After such a general, and necessarily sketchy, definition, we can agree with Géraldine Molina, who explains that crime fiction is “urban on different levels and enables us to explore the issue of the city with particular acuity.” 82 By hard-boiled fiction, then, I will mean a novel in which the solving of a crime is intricately connected to the city where that crime was committed and where the investigation literally “takes place” in the metropolis. I will therefore read Zoo City as an avatar of what Sam Naidu calls the South African crime thriller novel, a genre which he defines as “formulaic,

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fast-paced, plot driven,” which “contains more action than detection, is quite violent, and usually ends with a climatic case or physical show-down.” 83 Johannesburg is described rather extensively in Zoo City, and even if the action takes place in an indeterminate near future, the city in the novel can easily be recognized by people familiar with the South African metropolis. In hard-boiled fiction, the city parts which are repeatedly described are typically isolated, marginal places: suburbs, slums or industrial areas like factories, warehouses or dumps. In Zoo City, Beukes partly conforms to this stereotype. Zoo City is an imaginary Johannesburg neighborhood corresponding to the actual Hillbrow. Its inhabitants are people called, in turn, “zoos,” “animalled people,” or “aposymbiots.” The “zoos” live in symbiosis with an animal which appeared at their side after they committed a serious crime— murder, in most cases—a phenomenon which is not immediately clear to the reader and partakes of the fantastic dimension of the novel. Even if Zoo City does not exist, it can be argued that the way Beukes’s narrator, Zinzi December, describes it bears many resemblances with literary descriptions of typically South African urban spaces: the township and the slum, which feature prominently in South African fiction in general and in books about Johannesburg in particular. A number of motifs associated with the township or the slum can be found in fictional Zoo City; for instance, it is presented as both a place of danger and a place of solidarity. In an article about the representation of townships in black literatures at the time of apartheid, Richard Samin has analyzed their ambivalence, arguing that the literary representation of townships oscillated between euphoria and dysphoria; because they were considered, and depicted, as places meant for “second-rate citizens,” 84 they were described through an accumulation of negative characteristics—darkness, bad smells, garbage on the streets—but they were also represented as places of sociability and dynamism, with a strong sense of community. Even if Zoo City was written by a white writer long after the demise of apartheid, Beukes uses these literary topoi to describe Zinzi’s place of residence and she imbues it with the same ambivalence. The resemblance with traditional representations of townships, which is not without its problems from an ideological point of view, is made manifest in Zinzi’s narrative of how she found her flat in Zoo City: “When Elysium’s security guard agreed to show me the vacant apartment on the sixth floor when I asked him, there was something comforting about the barbed wire and the broken windows, the way all the buildings connected via officially constructed walkways or improvised bridges to form one sprawling ghetto warren. It reminded me reassuringly of prison. Only here, the doors open when you want them to.” 85 The description associates a sense of poverty, dereliction and danger conveyed by the barbed wire and broken windows with a sense of community perceptible in the connection between all the buildings, suggesting a network rather than a maze. The ambiguity of the place seems to be contained in the final sen-

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tences, which oxymoronically associate reassurance, and homeliness, with prison. More generally, in Zoo City, the motifs which traditionally characterize literary representations of townships can be easily recognized in the description of the eponymous neighborhood: imprisonment, as in the aforementioned quote, but also solidarity and social relations with neighbors—for instance Mr. and Mrs. Khan and Benoît’s disreputable friends—or the chase by the police. All the descriptions of Zoo City swarm with details and realistic notations, as in the following passage: People who would happily speed through Zoo City during the day won’t detour here at night, not even to avoid police roadblocks. They’re too scared, but that’s precisely when Zoo City is at its most sociable. From 6 p.m., when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they’ve been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. Kids chase each other down the corridors. People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other’s bums. The smell of cooking—mostly food, but also meth—temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. 86

Here again, the emphasis is both on danger and criminality, as suggested by the fact that people are scared to cross Zoo City at night or by the reference to meth, which implies drug trafficking and criminality, and on sociability, as in the townships described in apartheid literature. 87 Zoo City thus emerges as an ambivalent place corresponding to frequent literary representations of the township or slum. In Zoo City, because Zinzi moves around the city looking for lost objects, and, later, lost people, Johannesburg’s diverse spaces are described with a luxury of details; both the places themselves and the routes taken to reach them are minutely depicted, perhaps a consequence of Beukes’s previous occupation as a freelance journalist. The city is therefore described through the practices of its inhabitants, following de Certeau’s emphasis on the peripatetic. Even if Zinzi is no flâneur, her wanderings through Johannesburg progressively map the city. What is more, her descriptions of Johannesburg are also characteristic of the urban and sociological dimensions of hardboiled fiction, which usually features “an urban dystopia.” 88 The young woman’s investigations take her through Johannesburg and its surroundings: she visits places of residence, gated communities, suburbs, but also places of conviviality, hotel bars or night clubs, like Odi Huron’s “Counter Revolutionary”—an ironical name indeed. A rather complete picture, or map, of the city is thus provided, with references to real places easily recognizable by readers, as in the following example, in which Zinzi walks through the city and describes various facets of Johannesburg: “I walk up on Empire through Parktown past the old Johannesburg College of Education, attracting a few aggressive hoots from passing cars. I give them the finger. Not my fault if they’re so cloistered in suburbia that they don’t get to see zoos. At least

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Killarney isn’t a gated community. Yet.” 89 Another meaningful example is Zinzi’s visit to the Rand Club, where she meets Vuyo: The Rand Club is a relic of Johannesburg’s Wild West days, when it was frequented by Cecil John Rhodes and other colonial slumlords who would sit around divvying up diamond fields and deciding on the fate of empires. A hangout for power people rather than two-bit crooks like Vuyo. . . . The patrons pushing the boundaries of their liquid lunch-hour have the same aura of clingy colonial nostalgia as the venue, with its chandeliers and gilded railings, caricature of famous members, mounted buck-heads and faded oil paintings of fox hunts. 90

This passage suggests that the city is governed by the forces of money, a situation inherited from the colonial era. 91 The idea of a generally corrupted city controlled by the forces of capitalism inherited from the past is recurrent in the novel, as in the following passage: “I met some junkie kids behind Mai Mai with a Porcupine. They’d cut off its paw to sell it for muti. They offered to do the same with Sloth. Someone’s buying. But then, someone’s always buying in this city. Sex. Drugs. Magic. With the right connections you can probably get a two-for-one deal.” 92 Significantly, it is in the context of her illegal activities that Zinzi comes to the Rand Club. These activities consist, among other things, in sending scams in which she pretends to be a poor young woman in need of money. This type of criminality, which deploys new technologies to pick victims all over the world, can be seen as a trace of the part played by globalization and capitalism in the metropolis, a phenomenon also made manifest by characters like Benoît, Zinzi’s boyfriend, a migrant worker fleeing the civil war devastating his country of origin. 93 It also shows that Zinzi, like the typical hard-boiled detective, does not always find herself on the right side of the law. Furthermore, the reference to Cecil Rhodes in the description of the Rand Club suggests that Johannesburg is, in some ways, a haunted city, a city where layers of history have left their mark on spaces and people. Johannesburg is not only the city of gold, but it is also depicted as a palimpsest city, where places condense several historical moments which collide into one space. Zinzi being the narrator of the novel, the depiction of the city is mediated through her subjectivity and also through her displacements. Following the recurrent pattern in South African crime fiction, “hard-boiled conventions are apparent. A crime-fighter embarking on a case descends into a mythic underworld where distinguishing wrong from right, or foe from enemy, is the toughest challenge. . . . Crimes are only partially solved and success is due to intuition and luck rather than to clever detection and the systematic gathering of clues.” 94 In many ways, Zoo City narrates Zinzi’s geographical and personal itinerary, an itinerary prefigured at the beginning of the novel when she goes to

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look for Mrs Luditsky’s ring. This search takes her “into the sink and down the drain,” and she visualizes the ring “somewhere dark and wet and industrial” by “snagg[ing] the thread that unspooled away from the woman and ran deep into the city, deep under the city.” 95 This journey into the underground maze under the city, into a city under the city, is reminiscent of hard-boiled fiction’s tendency to explore the lower, disreputable parts of the city, which could be designated as the “under-city.” “I found myself shin-deep in the stormwater drains beneath Killarney Mall. Not actual shit, at least, because the sewage runs through a different system, but years of musty rainwater and trash and rot and dead rats and used condoms make up their own signature fragrance.” 96 The passage seems to prefigure what happens in the rest of the novel: the mall, located at the surface of the city, appears as a metonymy for the capitalistic city dominated by money and appearances. It stands in contrast with the drains, whose underground, smelly, dirty, ugly darkness symbolizes the hidden truth which Zinzi is going to excavate. In that perspective, her displacements in, through, around, and beneath Johannesburg draw a map of the trajectory of the detective seeking the ugly truth hidden under or behind the shiny surface. The correspondence between her underground journey and her displacements on the surface also confirms Graham’s suggestion that “far from being a subversive space free from surveillance and control . . . the tunnels underneath the city are an integral part of Beukes’s metropolis.” 97 The motif of the thread mentioned in the narrative of her retrieval of Mrs. Luditski’s ring is also significant because the whole novel shows how Zinzi follows either literal or metaphorical “threads,” thus placing the novel under the sign of the labyrinthine—a motif which, as I mentioned previously, connects crime and Gothic fiction. Thanks to the motif of threads, and despite the various boundaries and borders that Zinzi repeatedly crosses in the novel—doors, gates, fences—the image of Johannesburg which emerges in Zoo City is not fragmented or nonlinear but rhizomatic and mazelike. The detective’s itinerary informs the reader’s perception of Johannesburg, connects the heterogeneous spaces of the city, assigning meaning to them, and becomes the (narrative) thread which guides readers through the urban labyrinth. Gradually, places acquire significance as Zinzi understands what happened to Song, the young singer she is trying to locate. The more Zinzi makes progress in her investigation, the more things make sense, but also the more she uncovers the violence of the society she lives in. What she finally finds out is that she has been the victim of a manipulation, since Odi Huron, the music producer who hired her through the Maltese and Marabou’s “procurements,” supposedly to find out where young Song has disappeared, is actually guilty; he is the one who kidnapped the young woman he asked her to find. Zinzi also uncovers secret murders perpetrated against socially vulnerable people: a sex worker and a homeless

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man, both typical figures of hardboiled fiction, which has a predilection for the lower classes. The killer’s goal was to take their animals from them and perform a muti ceremony aiming at ridding Odi of his own, secret animal, a massive albino crocodile that he had been hiding all along in a hidden cavern under his house. This hermeneutic process takes Zinzi to a key place, the mine dumps, where she and David find the body of a prostitute, an animalled boy-girl who disappeared from Zinzi’s street some time before: I drive out south to where the last of the mine dumps are—sulphur-colored artificial hills, laid to waste by the ravages of weather and reprocessing, shored up with scrubby grass and eucalyptus trees. Ugly valleys have been gouged out and trucked away by the ton to sift out the last scraps of gold the mining companies missed the first time round. Maybe it’s appropriate that eGoli, place of gold, should be self-cannibalizing. . . . As we get out of the car, a vicious little wind kicks up gritty yellow dust and stirs the trees to a disquieting susurrus. . . . “This is trespassing,” Dave says as I lift Sloth over the fence. “Don’t worry. I was here earlier. It doesn’t count as trespassing the second time round.” I hold the ruby fingernail gently cupped in my hand. The thread is thicker now. We’re close.” 98

The fact that the body is found in the mine dumps reinforces the idea that present-day corruption is constructed as a consequence of the haunting past of eGoli, the “city of gold,” as Louise Bethlehem’s observation about the mine dumps as “a locus of spectrality in the Johannesburg imaginary” 99 suggests. Quoting from Sarah Gertrude Millin’s The South Africans (1926), Bethlehem links the mine dump’s spectrality not only to the history of Johannesburg but also to the history of its textual representation. By placing the dead body of the sex worker in the mine dump, which is accessed by trespassing, Beukes seems to metaphorically and spatially represent the weight of Johannesburg’s past as “the city of gold,” drawing on “a signature topos in post-transitional Gothic imaginings.” 100 As in S. L. Grey’s Downside trilogy, the space of the mine is “the site of accumulated histories of ruination; it is a zone in which the injurious effects of layered pasts and presents are laid bare in Gothic terms,” 101 “and Beukes references this heritage explicitly.” 102 Interestingly, in Zoo City this association even affects the description of the light, both in this passage and in the whole novel; indeed, the light is systematically described in various shades of yellow and charged with mineral particles that cannot fail to evoke the history of the city, as in the incipit of the novel, which rather filmically opens with an image of the city’s skyline: “Morning light the sulphur color of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window.” 103

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More generally, Zinzi’s itinerary through the city of gold, prefigured by the search for Mrs. Luditsky’s ring, takes the young woman to underground places and is informed by a spatiotemporal dialectic between the surface and the underground, and the present and the past. Her investigation does not only expose Odi Huron’s guilt, it also reveals that Johannesburg, the “elusive city,” is a metropolis “produced by what lies below the surface.” 104 The truth that Zinzi uncovers leads her back to Odi Huron’s house, where she finds out that the swimming pool communicates with a cavern hidden under the house where Odi’s albino crocodile, the proof of his guilt, is kept. The description of what happens when she plunges into the depths of the cavern swarms with terms connoting the tension between the surface and what lies hidden below it. First, when the crocodile emerges out of the pool and takes Benoît with him, it is described as “a shadow swell[ing] up from the bottom of the pool.” “Something sickly white and huge with scales explodes from beneath the surface, snaps its jaws shut on Benoît and slides back into the water before he can draw breath to yell.” 105 Here, the Gothic trope of monstrosity associated with the yet unidentified crocodile is combined with that of the tension between the underground and the surface. Zinzi feels compelled to follow, to try and save Benoît from the monster: I dive into the pallid gloom lit up by the underwater light. There’s a hole at the bottom of the deep end, a tunnel wide enough to steer a truck through. I swim into it, following the curve down into pitch darkness, like swimming into the heart of the Undertow. The pressure in my ear gear-shifts from a dull ache to a screaming drill bit in my head, but then the tunnel curves up again, like the Ubend of a sink, into water that’s brutally cold and black. I can hear distorted music through the water and a slapping sound. Lungs burning, I kick up to the surface and break through into the cool air of an underwater cavern. 106

Zinzi’s narration, Bethlehem remarks, “is given over almost entirely to the haptic as a consequence of her immersion,” 107 with an emphasis on touch and texture rather than vision. But above all, Zinzi’s itinerary illustrates the necessity to “go under,” to dive beneath the “pure surface” 108 of the grotto to allow the hidden truth to emerge. Here the “underground” takes on contradictory values: first, it is associated with the haunting, hidden past of apartheid, embodied in the albino crocodile, which is brought to the surface by detective Zinzi. 109 The subterranean scenes therefore “indicate how the novel continually makes plastic . . . the city’s overlaying histories and the deep, structural interconnections that exist between its phenomenally disjointed spaces,” 110 so that the narrative “excavates the layers of history embedded in—but often partially erased from or distorted by—the city’s built environments.” 111 But Zinzi herself, a “zoo girl” belonging to the lower classes of Johannesburg’s population and living on the margins of the city, also manifests the capacity of the underground to produce positive values: Beukes’

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fictional Johannesburg, and her heroine’s journey toward the truth, thus illustrate Mbembe and Nuttall’s contention that the underground “is the repository of possibilities for invention and utopian dreams. In Johannesburg, the underground was the symbol of the powerful forces contained in the depths of the city.” 112 Zinzi’s itinerary allows Beukes to articulate post-apartheid anxieties and represent the transformations at work in Johannesburg through a tension between the underground and the surface, a metaphor that is particularly relevant in a metropolis which is built on a network of mines. The duality between the underground and the surface is echoed and reduplicated in other pairs of opposites, whose complex relationships draw a map of contemporary Johannesburg: the dualities between human and animal, nature and culture, nature and the city, all reverberate onto one another and complexify the classical, and sometimes simplistic, motif of the investigation. Johannesburg is thus Gothicized, but this Gothicization does not merely reveal the evils of a dark past haunting the city but also lead to a rather positive ending suggesting possibilities for Zinzi and her remaining friends. The “zoos” can be read as a metonymy for Johannesburg, both as a place and as a community which carries the guilt of apartheid, spatially and in more abstract ways. But the figure of Zinzi offers a form of redemption; at the end of the novel, she goes in search of Benoît’s family: “Celvie. Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. It’s going to be awkward. It’s going to be the best thing I’ve done with my miserable life.” 113 This suggests that her itinerary has transformed her, that she emerged from the depths of Johannesburg and of Odi Huron’s house a better person than she initially was. Her transformation metonymically hints at the possibility of a future for the body politic of Johannesburg in particular, and of South Africa in general, and for South African literature. Indeed, in Zoo City the detective’s itinerary becomes imbued with a metafictional dimension. While Zinzi reads the urban landscape in search for the truth that lies below the surface, the reader has to conduct his own investigation and to decode the various “documents” playfully incorporated by Beukes into the fabric of the novel: a fictional website, the abstract of an imaginary article about “aposymbiots,” or a profile of Odi Huron supposedly written by a journalist, to mention just a few examples. The investigation process is therefore mirrored at several levels, so that determining the architextual category of the novel is only one of the various games played by Beukes with her reader. Zoo City illustrates the idea that Johannesburg, like all cities, is a multilayered construct involving a multiplicity of reading acts and of representations: “A city is simultaneously a system of maps, of real and imaginary geographies, and a signifying place. It is a system of texts and images which everyone can appropriate to diverse extents.” 114 In times of change and uncertainty, the various layers of meaning that make up the fabric of the city need to be examined, bearing in mind the notion that while Johannesburg is changing, the perspectives different sub-

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jects project onto the city change as well. 115 We thus need to remain aware that Beukes’s portrayal of Johannesburg bears the trace of a specific historical moment, a moment of anxiety about the future that is based on the knowledge of the past. In the end, space and time must be articulated so as to fully grasp the significance of Beukes’s literary map of Johannesburg. Combining a Gothicized version of the hard-boiled novel with speculative fiction enables her to subvert the codes of both genres, thus finding a unique way of writing about South Africa’s “elusive metropolis.” The use of a female protagonist also enables her to reconfigure “the hegemonic hard-boiled image of urban space, characterized as it is by the complex heroism of the individualized, white male protagonist.” 116 Zinzi therefore becomes Beukes’s tool to subvert and revisit the codes of both genre and gender. Above all, as Bethlehem has aptly pointed out, Beuke constructs a horizontal network which challenges the verticality of the power relations revealed by Zinzi’s immersion under the problematic space of the white suburban home. Zoo City, the fictional representation of Hillbrow, substitutes a space of “conviviality under the principle of complicity” 117 for the metonymies of contagion initially constructed around the figures of the “animalled” characters living there. Ultimately, Beukes’s Gothicized rendering of the underground spaces of Johannesburg seems to make way for a democratic horizontality which is not without its problems but offers a way out of the power play explored in Beukes’s futuristic version of Johannesburg. Such complexity suggests that Beukes does not merely conform to the codes and conventions of hard-boiled fiction. Indeed, “what lies below the surface” is mediated through the futuristic figures of zoos and their animals and through the magic phenomenon of the Undertow, the mysterious and frightening force that both makes animals appear and takes humans back when their animal is killed. Duncan reads it as a “potent symbol” of the “void as a signal trope in postmodern Gothic narratives.” 118 “If Beukes’s Undertow suggests a hollowness subtending her world of rainbow-tinted capitalists, then this hollowness metaphorizes the collapse of the grand narrative of post-apartheid liberation.” 119 The plot therefore springs from the speculative, fantastic dimension of the novel, which crosses generic boundaries while its heroine crosses the boundaries between the various parts of Johannesburg. The city itself is the element which makes the conjunction of these various genres possible, because like the hard-boiled novel, science fiction has a predilection for urban landscapes. In “Lauren Beukes’s Post-Apartheid Dystopia,” Bethlehem contrasts Beukes’s stratified version of Johannesburg in Zoo City with the futuristic version of Cape Town featured in Moxyland, arguing that the latter “refuses the dialectic of surface and depth that has dominated literary—as well as sociological or historiographic—constructs of the South African city.” 120 She reads Moxyland as a novel which, unlike Zoo City, chooses to remain on the

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surface and to explore this aspect of urban life—perhaps because, unlike Zoo City, Moxyland is located in a more obviously futuristic version of Cape Town, a city with a completely different identity. Shane Graham’s comparison of how Zoo City and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Nineveh deal with the two tropes of invasion, contamination and infestation on the one hand, and subterranean spaces on the other, seems to confirm this opposition: “Some of the oppositions . . . might simply be a product of the two very different cities they depict. As Mbembe and Nuttall point out, Johannesburg is a city built on holes in the ground, and the interaction between surface and depth, and its tolerance for newness and the foreign, are crucial parts of the city’s origins and its identity. Cape Town, by contrast, is built on the solidity of a mountain and has the force of three-and-a-half centuries of history behind it.” 121 The difference between the two cities must be explored further, to check whether Cape Town’s so-called solidity actually leads to different modes of Gothicization in white writers’ post-apartheid crime fiction. BENEATH THE SURFACE, BEYOND SOUTH AFRICA: MARGIE ORFORD’S GRAMMAR OF VIOLENCE In Stephen Watson’s A City Imagined, nearly all the contributors insist on the prominence of the mountain in the identity of Cape Town. Even if the identity of the city is not characterized by the same tension between surface and underground as Johannesburg, the omnipresence of the mountain creates a tension which brings into play a similar dialectic between past and present, based on a similar verticality—as signaled by Watson’s image of the geology showing on the surface of the mountain. This means that despite the obvious differences between Johannesburg and Cape Town, fiction set in Cape Town can also be read in the light of excavation, of the resurfacing of hidden things from the past, in crime novels by white writers. The palimpsest, an image I used in the previous section to understand Beukes’s Gothicization of Johannesburg in Zoo City, may therefore also provide a tool to understand the Gothicization of Cape Town in recent crime fiction, in which the past consistently resurfaces. Martine Berger argues, for instance, that Meyer’s novels are grounded in space, 122 while Geoffrey Davis insists on the resurgence of the past: “Since Meyer’s novels are set firmly in the period of transition from the old to the new South Africa, between the apartheid and post-apartheid societies, the pasts of the characters assume particular importance. They all have roots in the earlier apartheid society.” 123 Meyer’s novels seem to be located in the specific spatiotemporal configuration of the post-apartheid moment, where the Gothic trope of the return of the historical repressed provides an apt background for crime stories unearthing not only individual but also collective guilt. The prominence of this spatio-

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temporal conjunction in crime fiction is confirmed by Marla Harris’s contention that “[l]ike the Gothic, crime fiction as a genre necessarily looks backward in order to solve crimes, but here that investigation acquires a particular urgency, as these writers deploy the genre implicitly, and often explicitly, to try to identify the source(s) of contemporary social problems in South Africa’s history.” 124 Harris sees the rise of crime fiction in South Africa as a consequence of the concomitant rise of terror, relying on Robert J. Young’s argument that “although fiction has the ability to (re)produce terror in its readers, it also can provide those readers with coping strategies to liberate them.” 125 This leads her to describe Jassy Mackenzie and Margie Orford’s use of space in their novels as Gothic: “To read Orford and Mackenzie’s novels is to enter a Gothic cityscape permeated with fear and paranoia . . . It is never clear whether the greater danger lies inside or outside” in “an urban setting haunted by vampirish villains.” 126 Her reading of Like Clockwork 127 shows the Gothic potential of Orford’s fiction; the novel, as signaled by Clare Hart’s Persephone project in Daddy’s Girl, 128 “involves a metaphorical journey, like that of Demeter to Hades and back except that the underworld that Clare traverses is Cape Town.” 129 The mythical dimension of the journey, modeled on Persephone’s, a motif I already traced in Lynn Freed’s House of Women in chapter 2, must not downplay its Gothic implications. Like Zinzi’s itinerary in the fictionalized version of Johannesburg in Zoo City, Hart’s trajectory also involves crossing a subterranean space and reemerging after having laid bare an uncomfortable truth. Here, Rebecca Duncan’s reading of Gothic post-apartheid writing in terms of “mourning” and of unearthing “irreconcilable fragments and bones and ghosts” seems particularly appropriate. 130 The Gothic potential of space in Like Clockwork has been analyzed by Caitlin Martin and Sally-Ann Murray, who read, in particular, the part played by the underground space of the tunnels as a Gothic motif. Orford, they explain, “chooses specific places and locations, which can convey a sense of suspense and even a Gothic atmosphere of the uncanny or the haunted (or haunting). Consider . . . the warren of tunnels running under Sea Point that Orford uses as Otis Tohar’s storage area for the abducted girls before he kills them.” 131 Even if Martin and Murray do not give precise examples, a careful reading of Like Clockwork confirms their analysis. For instance, when Hart locates the probable place where the killer hides the girls on a map of the old drainage system, the narration offers a detailed description of the network of tunnels before turning to Hart’s expedition, which is unsurprisingly recounted in Gothicized terms combining debris, darkness, bestiality, and internal focalization: “The entrance stank of human excrement. She held her breath and stepped over the filth. The darkness closed in on her. She switched on her torch. A rat, its eyes gleaming red, scuttled past her. She forced herself to keep going, bearing right all the while, towards the boathouses. And praying her instinct was right.” 132

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The novel’s plot, which revolves around the serial murders of young women, leads Hart and her coinvestigator Riedwaan Faizal to discover where the killer hides his victims, an underground cell whose space is constructed as Gothic through the twin motifs of imprisonment and subjectivity. A case in point is Theresa Angelo’s perception of the place through the use of consistent internal focalization in the chapters recounting her ordeal. Significantly, the projection of the girl’s dread onto the enclosed space of the cell is initiated by an equation between mind and place: “Then the noise that had penetrated her unconscious mind started up again. The mournful bellow of the foghorn vibrated deep into the recesses of her mind. It sought out and found crevices of consciousness beyond the drug that had held her inert for hours. It penetrated the most hidden places of her mind and activated again the basic impulses to stay alive.” 133 Orford describes Theresa’s slow awakening through a series of spatial metaphors, perhaps proleptically announcing the processes of excavation and revelation which lead to the rescue of the girl before Tohar has had time to murder her. The cell itself has all the attributes of the Gothic: it is “not only dark but also cold,” 134 with “rusted bolts” 135 and thick walls, and is constructed, through Theresa’s point of view, as a place where “panic,” 136 “dread,” and “revulsion” 137 or “repugnance” 138 are experienced by the victim-to-be in front of her future killer’s violence. Even Theresa’s rescue borrows from a repertoire of Gothic motifs: She first fumbles with the keys before managing to open the door after having hit Tohar with a stone, then stands “still in the dank tunnel, trying to orientate herself in the dim light filtering from the stone chamber behind her” 139 before “feeling her way down the dark tunnel” 140 toward Hart’s voice. The labyrinthine dimension of the place is reinforced by the “cold rush of air that seemed to indicate a smaller, subsidiary passageway.” 141 Once the two women have discovered “in horror” 142 that Tohar seems to have disappeared, they escape through the subterranean passages. In classic Gothic fashion, Hart drops her torch: “Theresa’s heart felt as if it would burst as the darkness enveloped her, sharpening her terrible sense that they were not alone in those tunnels.” 143 Even if the two women finally find their way out and can be rescued, one can only agree with Martin and Murray that these passages testify to the Gothicization of crime fiction in Like Clockwork. The novel’s Gothicity is further reinforced by Tohar’s identity as a foreigner, which can be read as a variation on the theme of the foreign Gothic villain who threatens young, helpless, female characters. It also testifies to the articulation of the global and the local in Orford’s fiction, in which the space of the modern city is threatened and Gothicized by the forces of global capitalism. 144 These forces permeate the South African city and link different kinds of spaces; hence, Martin and Murray’s analysis of Orford’s novels as a rhizomatic kind of fiction, where different, and sometimes heterogeneous spaces, are connected by the itineraries of the investigators.

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Martin and Murray do not restrict their “Gothic” reading of Orford’s fiction to Like Clockwork; they also highlight the fact that “Orford makes excellent use of similarly Gothic spaces in other novels, among them the derelict swimming pool in Daddy’s Girl. Such sites not only contribute to atmosphere and narrative frisson, they suggest the seeping contours of institutional decay, the increasing dissolution of comforting mores, and the threat of crime.” 145 Apart from Blood Rose, 146 in which Hart travels to Walvis Bay in Namibia to investigate the gruesome death of a homeless teenage boy, all of Orford’s novels are deeply grounded in Cape Town, and the city consistently becomes the Gothicized locus of her crime fiction. In Water Music 147 as well, “Orford’s storytelling has a strong hand in the Gothic, and features a castle with a mysterious foreign owner; tunnels beneath the city; secret locations; an ominous mountain “retreat” called Paradys (Paradise); references to Bach and Mozart and characters that are classically trained musicians; as well as an icy Cape winter setting with mist, rain and fog.” 148 In Gallows Hill, 149 the eponymous hill is revealed to be not only the site of a mass grave for slaves, but also the place where an anti-apartheid activist from the 1980s was buried, a murder which resurfaces in the post-apartheid moment and testifies to the connection between South Africa’s past and its present—a motif explicitly signaled by the novel’s epigraph, the well-known assertion from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 150 De Kock reads this motif of disinterment, or excavation, as “pointing to the politically sanctioned evils of earlier layers of history (colonial rule, then apartheid).” 151 It is not only individual but also collective guilt which resurfaces in the “guilty landscape” of the city, 152 leading to a form of exorcism. Such excavation of past and present evils illustrates Orford’s conception of crime fiction, which she does not see as a form of escapist literature but, rather, as a genre which enables her to tackle moral issues: “It is oldfashioned and decidedly un-postmodern to be thinking of writing in terms of morality. . . . And yet, I would argue, crime fiction, despite, or perhaps because of, its penny-dreadful origins, can be one of the most comfortingly moral forms of literature.” 153 This conception of fiction as not only diagnostic, but also moralistic and perhaps, even, restorative, as suggested by the adjective comforting, may be extended to crime fiction as a whole in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. The investigative dimension of crime fiction, in which detectives look for the perpetrators of crime to punish them, might be read as a way of identifying the members of the social body who constitute a threat to the community. Orford’s moralistic intentions account for the possibly metonymic value of her investigators, Hart and Faizal, a white woman and a colored man, in her novels. Their relative diversity turns them into representatives of the “new” South Africa, who can probe the wounds of the past and denounce present evils. In Like Clockwork, for instance, the investigation conducted by the pair enables Orford to explore the

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condition of women and children in South Africa and to condemn the violence perpetrated against them. This feminist, and social, dimension is not limited to Like Clockwork. Elizabeth Fletcher detects the same social and political agenda in Daddy’s Girl, which she reads as feminist crime fiction articulating a form of literary resistance to very real violence: “A novel like Daddy’s Girl holds in tension the escapist generic elements of romance, adventure and suspense along with the more political project of a focus on the oppression and abuse of women and children in South Africa, and an assertion of (some) women’s agency.” 154 I argue that the Gothic mode is the tool used by Orford to achieve the articulation of these individual and collective dimensions, while the innocent victims staged in her novels become metonymies for a collective violence inherited from past oppression. Fletcher’s point that Orford focalizes, in particular, on the violence against women and children, is explicitly presented by Orford herself as a major aspect of her fiction. It seems that she not only writes back to patriarchy or coercive systems of oppression but also to the very genre of crime fiction which she has chosen as a vehicle for her social criticism. Significantly, the transformation of the male-dominated genre of crime fiction is described by Orford in the light of her female protagonist’s displacements throughout the urban spaces of Cape Town: “The city is experienced differently by women. Her presence on its streets—fictional and real—means that she is threatening to a masculine order, which is therefore endangered. It is an interesting place to write from, though it is one that throws up all sorts of tension around form and realism.” 155 Orford’s awareness of both the conventions of crime fiction and the power relations inherent in gendered “practices” of the city evince the political and social relevance of a genre which is, in her novels, far from escapist. Her analysis of Hart’s position also seems to illustrate Schmid’s discussion of the position of female characters in crime fiction as a “combination of awareness and resistance” 156 rather than mere passivity or victimhood. The Gothic mode provides Orford with a literary tool for verbalizing the ambivalences of her female heroine as she walks, runs, and drives through Cape Town. Significantly, in Like Clockwork, Hart herself leads a “double life” as both a police profiler and documentary film maker. This leads her to simultaneously investigate the murders of young girls and the phenomenon of prostitution in Cape Town. The two investigations finally merge because the serial killer turns out to be one of the financers of the prostitution network Hart investigates in her documentary film. Orford herself used to be a journalist—like Meyer and MacKenzie 157—so that her novels are explicitly conceived as a tool to inform readers while entertaining them. What is being investigated is not only a murder, but also South African society as a whole: “The writing of crime fiction seemed to offer a way to contain my own fear and to make sense of the obliterating

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chaos of violence. . . . The focus of my novels has been on the intimate effect—emotional as well as physical—of pain that is individual as well as social, a consequence of moral failure and violence. . . . Crime fiction, it has been argued, is a negotiation of social anxiety.” 158 The social relevance of crime fiction is emphasized by Christopher Warnes who, countering Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s accusations against the so-called lack of ideological commitment of crime fiction, insists, instead, on “the notion that an integral function of crime fiction is the negotiation of social anxiety” 159—a direct echo of Orford’s own words. The bodies of the victims become the “landscapes of crime” 160 where collective violence is metonymically inscribed. Orford herself describes her own method of probing the collective through the individual in her crime novels as a “grammar of violence,” which she uses to explain the mechanisms of crime in South Africa; this violence is “something that cannot be immediately converted into language, a language with a grammar that gives it sense and meaning. . . . It is only in fiction that I could begin to find the voices of the brutalized and the dead, and, in representing these voices, attempt to decipher their grammar.” 161 Orford thus defines what she calls “the grammar of crime fiction” 162 which provides her with a form to represent the unrepresentable, the traumatic violence which hides beneath the veneer of South African society. To her, “[t]he crime novel ‘accompanies’ a corpse to its end, to its final truth. It tries to find a way to decipher the grammar of the violence suffered, in order to avenge the wrongs done to the once-living person.” 163 This notion of a “grammar” does not merely apply to crime fiction as an apt form to fit the “grammar of violence” underlying South African society. It can also be transposed to Orford’s Gothicization of space, and particularly urban space, in her crime fiction. The Gothic mode provides her with another, different “grammar of violence” to express the deep anxieties generated in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. The motifs of pain, violence, and disorientation are recurrently combined and projected onto the space of Cape Town to express a sense of collective “plot loss,” 164 which is, however, counterbalanced by the ordering tendencies of crime fiction, bringing back a form of resolution and meaning in an otherwise meaningless society. I argue, then, that Orford’s novels rely on two contradictory and complementary “grammars of violence”: the “grammar” of crime fiction, with its documentary and ordering capacities, is pervaded by the “grammar” of the Gothic mode, through which disorder and disorientation become part and parcel of the detectives’ trajectories. Martin and Murray’s contention that Orford’s fiction challenges the sense of disorientation associated to South African literature but, instead, “works ‘to connect’ areas often considered disparate, to create insightful (re-)orientations of space, place and embodiedness” 165 indirectly accounts for this tension, focusing mostly on crime

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fiction’s restorative capacities rather than on the Gothic mode’s disorienting effects. The anxieties expressed by these two grammars of violence have to do with the rapid transformation of space in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly with the way in which it is being globalized: Orford “develops narratives that consider how crime spaces are changing, extending trends and tentacles into new areas of development, where ‘the crime and the criminal’ are defined ‘in explicitly systemic terms’, rather than merely malevolent or psychopathic individualism.” 166 What constantly, and threateningly reemerges, is not merely the past, but also the internationalization of crime as she seeks “to place South African crime within an historical and global context.” 167 Crime fiction enables her to explore this tension between the local and the global, thanks to its protean nature and capacity to stage contradictions and explore the oscillations between different poles: “The detective novel is generically, structurally, and historically suited for creating precisely the kind of dynamic interplay between the modern and postmodern, the material and the metaphysical, the investigation of truth and of investigation itself, the local understanding within a postcolonial and transnational world demands.” 168 The reason why crime fiction can provide an appropriate tool to explore the tension between the global and the local is because this tension is a direct consequence of modernity, as Orford herself notices: “The genre of crime fiction, with its set limits and containments, seems to me as much part of modernity, a key thread of the urban fabric as crime itself. . . . And just as the form of the modern, alienated city has spread across the globe, so has crime fiction.” 169 Orford observes that the birth of the literary detective is concomitant with that of “brutal, modernist cities—the Gotham cities, the ‘krimicities’, as Mike Nicol calls them, evoked by crime writers who set their books in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, New Orleans and Cape Town.” 170 Interestingly, among the real-life examples she mentions, she includes Gotham city, a typical example of how urban Gothic was transposed to the universe of comic books. 171 “It is into these streets,” Orford continues, “that one slips the lonely hero(ine), the Aristotelian moralist, to walk the streets on our behalf, to investigate the darkness and put it to rights. In a sense, the hero(ine) of crime fiction is a prosthetic eye/I who can look at the medusa-head of crime, the psychic drive behind violence and fear, and not be turned to stone.” 172 Orford notably phrases the place of murder in crime fiction “in Freudian terms” as “the compulsive return to an originating trauma, the return of the repressed, the pattern of compulsive behavior” 173—but these Freudian terms also evoke the mechanisms of the Gothic mode, this other grammar of violence pervading the space of the city. In Orford’s fiction, then, Cape Town is mapped by the detectives’ itineraries. Their investigations excavate individual and collective crimes, past and present, thus

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simultaneously Gothicizing the city and offering a form of order or restoration through the two contradictories grammars of violence which underlie urban spaces. Cape Town emerges as a Gothicized city, where racial and social violence constantly resurfaces and threatens the rainbow-tinted ideals of post-apartheid South Africa. “IN THIS CITY OF BOMBS AND PAIN”: MIKE NICOL’S CAPE TOWN Mike Nicol’s crime novels are also deeply grounded in Cape Town. Nicol’s literary career started with “serious,” “high-brow” novels before he decided to turn to crime fiction, a decision which is examined, and severely criticized, by Titlestad and Polatinsky, who consider that crime fiction is too popular and too simple a form and that it evacuates the complexities and tensions of post-apartheid society. Comparing The Ibis Tapestry (1998) with Payback (2009), they argue that [w]hereas The Ibis Tapestry is concerned with the limits of redress in the face of the politics of transition, Payback strives for the comforts of a formulaic entertainment that turns on a wry and worldly acceptance of a corrupt postapartheid society. . . . A “writerly” novel (in the terms Barthes elaborates in S/ Z), which compels the reader into active engagement, which makes the reader an agent of historical meaning, is replaced by a “readerly” one, in which all that is required is passive consumption. Readerly texts, one must recall, are always in the service of the status quo. 174

Titlestad and Polatinsky’s emphasis on the “consolations of genre” 175 offers, however, “an arguably limited reading of both Nicol and South African crime fiction in general,” 176 to say the least, since South African crime fiction has not seemed to shy away from the complexities of the transitional, and post-transitional, moment, as my analysis of Beukes’s and Orford’s novels in the previous sections has attempted to demonstrate. What is more, Nicol’s crime novels do not entirely fit the supposedly satisfactory plotsolving formula associated with simplistic definitions of crime fiction, as the ending of Killer Country, 177 the second volume of Nicol’s revenge trilogy, amply demonstrates: Mace Bishop’s wife, Oumou, is killed in her own house, which seems to contradict the orderly and plot-solving tendencies of crime fiction. In an interview with Joe Muller about Black Heart, 178 the third volume of the trilogy, Nicol himself first seems to evade the issue of the political, or rather, he seems to choose not to choose: “As for making a political statement, well, that depends on how your read the novel. I’ve always felt that crime fiction does two things simultaneously: it can be escapist reading and political commentary, you get out of it whatever you

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want.” 179 But a few lines down, he adds: “And, yes, I was making a political statement: I have become pissed off with our grubby politics and politicians.” 180 However, this clearly contradicts what Nicol says in the same interview about Killer Country: “Political novelist? No ways, Jose.” 181 His own position, then, appears to reflect the tension between the two poles of crime fiction, escapism and political involvement. Like Beukes’s Zoo City Nicol’s novels seem to inscribe themselves within the tradition of the hard-boiled novel. De Kock observes the similarity between the Revenge trilogy and Roger Smith’s crime fiction, describing both writers’ style as “neo noir.” De Kock highlights the conjunction of “genre ‘stock’ derived largely from mid-twentieth-century America, on the one hand, and neo-colonial social detritus in the global south, on the other,” a conjunction which is, he argues, “one of the more remarkable features of postapartheid writing in fictional detection mode following postpartheid’s ‘end of history.’” 182 De Kock interestingly describes the collision between the world of the oppressed and wealthy suburbs in terms of “the return of the repressed” and sees it a symptom of “the moral co-implication—a kind of codependency between victims and perpetrators” 183 in Smith’s fiction. This argument also applies to Nicol’s trilogy, in which the boundaries between “good” and “evil” characters are often shifty: all of the characters seem to be at least partly guilty, including Mace Bishop and Buso, whose past and present misdemeanors often come to the foreground. Nicol himself explained his choice of protagonists by a desire to explore the grey zones of postapartheid society: “And where best to find such characters but in the ranks of our new guardians, the privately paid security forces which try to keep us safe. Here was the new interface between good and evil, a hotly disputed terrain that challenges the state’s ability to safeguard its citizens even while it (the security company) does just that. This no man’s land of the privately contracted guardian seemed to me to contain the moral dilemmas which crime fiction should confront.” 184 On the other hand, Bishop himself also emerged in Nicol’s imagination as an architextual figure, inspired by previous literary genres: Mace is an action man but to what end? In addition Mace is operating in a revenge tragedy where, convention has it, so much gets smashed up. Ever since I read the revenge plays of the Elizabethan playwrights—Webster, Tournier, Kyd et al—I was hooked. Here was the way I understood life. Of course with the Elizabethan revenge tragedy comes plenty of blood, horrific violence, sensational events, ghosts, and a bloodthirsty climax. What more could you ask for? When, many years later, a friend gave me a copy of the Icelandic saga, Nyal’s Saga, where constant cycles of revenge lay waste to individuals and families, I thought, yeah, now we’re cooking with gas. Hence Mace. 185

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The dual sources for Bishop evince the complexities of Nicol’s crime fiction, which does conform to the conventions of the genre but simultaneously combines them with more literary concerns and universal motifs—here, the notion of revenge, and the suggestion that the “trilogy” is also a “tragedy” based on the return of the past. Because revenge necessarily brings together past and present, as in Orford’s fiction, the return of the repressed involves the return of the past in the Revenge trilogy. The whole trilogy revolves around the complex relationship between Bishop and Buso and Sheemina February; the “revenge” which is enacted in all three volumes is Sheemina’s: claiming she was tortured by the two former arms traders, who left her with a maimed hand and deep resentment, she comes after them in a relentless and sophisticated way as she navigates the spheres of power in post-apartheid South Africa. In Killer Country, Nicol “wanted to create the impression that Sheemina February was at home in this city of Cape Town, that she could work the system. And, she does.” 186 De Kock reads Sheemina February as deeply problematic, detecting in the use of a black “femme fatale,” both victim and predator, by a white male writer “the possibility of dubious racial and gender typecasting.” 187 Seeing Sheemina February as a type in South African culture, De Kock shows that she “has all the nous, power and motivation of the neo-noir heroine and a more specific historical agenda.” 188 She thus becomes a symptom, “a phantasmatic externalization of the psychic ‘double life’ of post-apartheid. That is to say, Shemina [sic] might be seen to embody—or externalize—the duplicitous manner in which post-apartheid is perceived to operate.” 189 But Nicol’s use of Sheemina February is doubly problematic because it seems to downplay the fact that in post-apartheid South Africa women remain victims of violence rather than perpetrators, and because it seems to rely on “a problematic sense of gender as dichotomized.” 190 De Kock therefore offers two readings of the Revenge trilogy, either “as an all-too-handy projection of white displacement and the insecurities such marginalization creates” or as “a more embracing account of responses to, and feelings about, the postapartheid set-up.” 191 Although one can only agree with De Kock’s analysis of the trilogy’s ambiguities, a crucial point regarding this discussion lies in his analysis of the relationship between Bishop and Sheemina February, an ambivalent mixture of erotic attraction and violent hatred. Examining the textual construction of the relationship through a few key moments in the trilogy, De Kock observes that Sheemina February is explicitly figured “as the return of the repressed in a history of oppression not fully avenged, both in psychic and in physical terms.” 192 In that sense, Nicol’s choice of crime fiction can be explained by the capacity of the genre to “explore the vexed relationship between detection and statehood, which alternatively creates and vitiates legal and ethical frameworks, and between detection and national,

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cultural, ethnic or racial identity.” 193 Offering a close reading of the opening scene of Black Heart, the third volume of the trilogy, De Kock analyzes it as a “Gothic post-apartheid scene, gussied up in garish neo-noir tones” 194 and examines the complex political entanglements staged not only in this specific passage but also in the whole trilogy. Such political entanglements, I argue, may come from the fact that these are not three stand-alone novels, but a series, and seriality is linked to political relevance as “seriality may become a useful tool for a sustained investigation into contemporary society and its problems.” 195 My analysis of the social relevance of the Revenge trilogy is based on an examination of the way in which Nicol’s crime fiction Gothicizes the city of Cape Town, particularly through the motif of excavation. As already pointed out, crime fiction is an urban genre, so that Jean-Noël Blanc even argues that in hard-boiled fiction the city is a fully-fledged character which “becomes a protagonist [of the novel] and is finally conjugated in the first person.” 196 Marginal spaces, in particular, reveal the social evils that affect the city. Cities in crime fiction take specific shapes, with a number of coded places that are also commonplaces. 197 These places—the deserted street, the sinister neighborhood, the vacant lot, the derelict house, the shabby hotel, the empty factory, the warehouse—usually revolve around the notion of marginality. Examining the city in crime fiction, then, forces us to examine its margins, that is, suburbia, defined in a broad way as the marginal spaces around the city: the suburbs, of course, but also derelict or vacant places. Of course, the topography of South African cities differs from the models examined by critics who read European or Northern American fiction; South Africa is “a country where architecture and urban planning are inextricably connected with politics and culture,” 198 and these “politics” were, for decades, based on segregation and spatial divisions. The post-apartheid moment has meant redefining and reconfiguring the perceptions of space because, as Jennifer Robinson puts it: “South African cities are born, as perhaps no other urban spaces are, of the kinds of spatialities Lefebvre refers to as ‘abstract space’, or ‘representation of space.’” 199 Apartheid shaped cities into apparently geometric spaces which need to be transformed. Such a transformation occurs, of course, in an international context where cities have increasingly turned from places to networks and from topographies to topologies. 200 Fiction, it can be argued, has become part of the process of reconfiguring South African cities after the demise of apartheid, by helping to define new modes of exchanges between the center and the periphery, between the city and the suburbs and also between suburbs. Among South African cities, Cape Town seems to be slightly apart because of its geological and topographical realities; it has often been described as an “island city,” 201 stuck between oceans and mountains. This particular topography, with the City Bowl at the center and different kinds of suburbs,

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among which there are subtle differences and hierarchies, around it, makes Cape Town an ideal city of crime, as Martine Berger explains: “The topography of Cape Town, between oceans and mountains, with a variety of neighborhoods brought together in a space which is quickly driven through thanks to a dense network of urban roads and motorways, makes it an apt background for the dramatization necessary to the plots of crime fiction.” 202 It is against this background that Nicol’s Revenge trilogy must be read. The goal of this section will be to examine the ways in which the three novels combine imagination and social representations in an urban context to “make the text confess what urban imagination it is a vehicle for.” 203 The starting point of this investigation will be, as in the previous sections, the key idea that crime fiction is based on itineraries. The itinerary is, Muriel Rosemberg argues, “the inevitable topos of crime fiction, whose hero roams through the urban labyrinth.” 204 Rosemberg’s use of the topos of the “urban labyrinth” signals, once again, the generic affinities between crime and Gothic fiction, which both rely on this trope to stage the disorientation of their characters. Nicol’s Payback, 205 the first volume of the Revenge trilogy, clearly relies on the topos of the itinerary. Mace and Pylon, the two protagonists, own a security firm and spend most of their time driving their clients around, or driving to and from different places. These displacements are systematically described in a precise way, in a manner that some readers critically describe as a means of catering for international audiences by providing them with local color and making them “see the sights” of the city. This, of course, is not entirely untrue, as suggested by the novel’s paratext. The cover of the Old Street edition of the novel, for instance, displays a stylized picture of Cape Town, a sentence by South African writer Deon Meyer praising Payback as featuring “wonderful dialogue, white-knuckle pace, and lots of authentic Cape Town color,” as well as the capitalized phrase: “A Cape Town thriller” above the novel’s title. These paratextual elements clearly aim at selling the novel to international audiences by guaranteeing not only the excitement of genre fiction but also the exoticism of South African scenery. But the emphasis on the protagonists’ rides throughout Cape Town also have two other major consequences: First, the constant emphasis on cars and car rides gives Nicol’s writing a cinematic quality, creating a fast-paced rhythm of juxtaposed landscapes reminiscent of the alternation of shots in action movies. This cinematic quality is not specific to Nicol’s writing but is part of the inscription of his novels within the genre of crime fiction, as suggested by Sophie Savary, whose reading of Spanish crime fiction located in Barcelona also lays emphasis on this aspect: The use of cinematic techniques when landscapes or cityscapes are featured leads to a mimetic representation of a landscape in movement, which is one of the structuring patterns of urban imagination, and to a quick variation of

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The second consequence of such an emphasis on cars and driving in Payback is that these rides almost systematically involve driving between two suburbs or between the city center and the suburb. In that sense, such itineraries illustrate Samuel Bordreuil’s suggestion that in modern cities cars have transformed the urban fabric because they have given people the capacity to “displace their lines of displacement,” 207 thus creating new relationships between the center and the periphery. These changes, he argues, have led to profound modifications of the urban fabric, which has evolved from a “starshaped” kind of organization, with branches connecting the center to various points in the periphery, to what he calls “patches” or “archipelagos,” independent spaces whose interconnectedness does not necessarily depend on the center. 208 All the driving around in Payback, and in the other novels of the Revenge trilogy, does not only enable Nicol to give international audiences a tour of the city and its most picturesque suburbs, but it also creates a form of connection between formerly disconnected places, “islands” in the island city. As an example of the function of car journeys in Nicol’s crime fiction, we can mention a car chase which reads like a tour of Cape Town’s suburbs, “[a] ll the way along High Level, down Fresnaye into Queen’s onto Victoria, slowly along the coastal curves through Clifton, through Camps Bay . . . until the road opened under the Apostles, then narrowing the distance. Mace let him come up, figuring not too many options in his hand”: 209 the accumulation of place names and prepositions gives the whole description a dizzying and realistic tone, grounding the passage in the space of Cape Town. The description also includes references to the sea, and to the “black and raw” 210 weather, which both contribute to the “local color” announced by the novel’s cover—paradoxically turning Cape Town into an archetypal “city of crime” where, against tourist expectations, it seems to rain all the time. More generally, in Payback, Bishop’s itineraries become the fictional tool through which the topology of Cape Town is constructed and the city is mapped. But the detective’s itinerary is not merely spatial, but it also becomes figurative because the novel retraces Bishop’s social itinerary as he tries to move up the social ladder. Significantly, this social ascent is materialized by his move from the suburbs to the City Bowl. Initially, he lives in Lavender Mews with his wife, Oumou, and his daughter, Christa: “Lavender Mews: neat white duplexes, BMs, SUVs, station wagons lining the pavements, toys left out on the front lawns, flowers bright in the flower beds. A

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street of identical townhouses, theirs in the middle of the row. A box between boxes, Mace thought of it. Spruce and clean and sanitized. Except their house had no flowers and the grass needed mowing. The sort of detail he didn’t see. The sort of home neither of them wanted.” 211 The description reads like a catalog of clichés, so that the place emerges as a stereotyped version of suburbia characterized by uniformity and conformity conveyed by the accumulation of plural forms referring to similar cars, houses, and implicitly, people. Bishop’s house itself is not a home but a “box.” Dissatisfied with the anonymity and standardization of suburban life, Bishop convinces his wife Oumou to buy another house and to move out despite that she does not like the home he has picked up, a Victorian house, because of the “bad feeling” 212 she perceives in it—thus preparing the reader for what will happen later on in the novel. But in spite of his wife’s reluctance, Bishop sticks to his choice to give their lifestyle an overhaul. Get out of the security complex in the suburbs and into the city. If you were going to live in Cape Town, you lived in the City Bowl. The peninsula suburbs were too House and Garden, the seaboard out of his price bracket, both sides, the Atlantic and False Bay. He wanted some of the city’s life: the sirens, the lights, the wail of the muezzin’s call to prayer, the cotton days of fog. And to be below the mountain, to feel its heat. What he liked about the city was the whacking great mountain in its middle. Anywhere you looked, the mountain loomed. 213

Here again, the text seems to incorporate all the clichés about touristy Cape Town, including the looming mountain over it, whose presence is recurrently mentioned by writers in Watson’s Cape Town. A City Imagined as the key feature in the city’s identity. Dave Cruikshank, the real estate agent who serves as an intermediary in the transaction, also insists on the authenticity of the house Bishop and his wife are buying: “Genuine, my son. Old Victorian. That’s what you’re buying here. History. Vintage Cape Town. Gracious living. What you say, love? You getting the picture here? Seeing how things could be in the not too distant?” 214 Bishop and his family’s move therefore implies a displacement from a “suburban” suburb, corresponding to the negative clichés of suburban life, to a “gracious” suburb below the mountain. Spatially, it involves moving from the periphery to the center, but also moving up, both literally, to be closer to the mountain, and metaphorically, to be in a more genteel vicinity—seemingly contradicting the title of the first section of the novel, “Going Down,” accompanied by the mention “In this city of bombs and pain . . . (Anonymous victim).” 215 But Bishop’s move to supposed gentility is contradicted later on in the novel when Christa, his daughter, is kidnapped in the Victorian house. Interestingly, the kidnap scene opens the novel, proleptically, although it will only occur about a hundred pages later. As a consequence, the reader is not aware of what he is reading about when he first comes across this scene, in what is

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explicitly presented as a prologue: “They sat for two hours waiting. Three men in an old white Toyota looking out at the sodden street. No one to notice them. No one about in this dark suburb above the city. In some of the houses lighted rooms in the upper stories. The houses behind high walls. Below they could see the city’s tall buildings drifting through the trees.” 216 The scene is constructed along vertical lines laying emphasis on oppositions between “up” and “down,” both in the space of the city (“this dark suburb above the city,” the city’s tall buildings”) and of the houses, with their “upper stories” and “high walls.” Other oppositions pervade the text: movement contrasts with stasis, light with darkness, and, of course, implicitly, good with evil. The three men in the car, the reader soon realizes, are getting ready to crash into the house: “They stood looking at the Victorian house. No burglar bars over the front windows. Same thing as leaving the door unlocked.” 217 The house is thus described as vulnerable to danger coming from the city below. Ironically, while the men listen for any kind of movement or danger, all they can hear is “the television, bangs and sirens of a cop show” 218—perhaps an intermedial comment on the genre of the novel. The men’s intrusion is constructed as the eruption of violence in a quiet, suburban family scene, “mother and daughter lying on the bed. The woman with her eyes closed, the girl under the duvet, watching television.” 219 Because the woman and the girl are named by the gangsters, 220 the reader will be warned that the genteel “dark suburb” is not a safe place. The prologue becomes a source of dramatic irony when Bishop and Oumou buy the Victorian house, as the reader will be bound to agree with Oumou’s bad presentiment when visiting the place with her husband. The prologue creates suspense, but it also immediately introduces a crucial idea: the absence of safety in Cape Town, which becomes a “city of crime,” where even the genteel Victorian house in the City Bowl can be a site of danger and violence. The fact that it is to a warehouse, a commonplace of crime fiction, that Christa is later taken by her kidnappers and found by her father, reinforces the sense of connection between the various spaces of the city which is created, I have argued, by the constant driving around of the protagonists. After the tragic episode of Christa’s kidnapping, the family move house again, still in the City Bowl. But much later in the novel, the Victorian house reappears. As suggested previously, the novel’s, and the trilogy’s, plot revolves around Sheemina February’s revenge. Bishop notably suspects her of being behind Christa’s kidnapping, an idea which is sustained by the fact that the kidnappers did not pick the house randomly but knew their victims’ names. In the final part of the novel, “Payback,” Sheemina February asks one of her henchmen, Mikey Rheeder, who also has a reason to take revenge on Bishop, to kidnap him and take him to the cellar of his former Victorian house—which she has bought, and which is now on the market again as she wants to sell it because, she says, it is “too suburban.” 221 Sheemina is really

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anxious that Bishop be killed in his own former home. Bishop is therefore taken back to the place where his daughter was kidnapped and where the novel started. Structurally, it means that the novel is framed by two episodes of violence occurring—literally taking place—in the same suburban house. Once there, Bishop is locked downstairs in the cellar. Significantly, this cellar is a testimony to the antiquity of the place, as Sheemina herself explains: “I found out . . . that this was the cellar of the first house built here, probably a one-roomed farmhouse.” 222 The cellar is also described as a typically Gothic space which resembles the cell where the girls were taken to in Orford’s Like Clockwork. Even the narrative technique is similar: the place is described through Bishop’s eyes when he awakens after having been drugged to oblivion by an injection, as the reader finds out on the following page in a flashback: “Mace opened his eyes, the only movement he made. . . . The smell was of damp, distemper. The paint job was recent but it couldn’t hide the smell. A familiar smell as the room was familiar. Not a room, more a cellar, his eyes taking in the stonework and the beams. A cellar like there’d been in the Victorian, cold as that too. Silent as that.” 223 Gradually, Bishop realizes where he is: “He waited, blinking, letting the throb settle. Saw then the handcuff on his left ankle, the chain running off the bed to the iron pin in the wall.” 224 The cell is unsurprisingly dark, cold, underground and equipped with instruments of detention and, possibly, torture, in the best Gothic tradition—which might account, perhaps, for the repeated references to the house as “Victorian,” a tribute not only to the history of Cape Town but also to the literary genres which are incorporated into Nicol’s crime novel. The fact that Sheemina February has asked Mikey to take Bishop to that place also implies a significant move downward, a reversed image of the upward movement to the genteel suburb undertaken by Bishop and his family at the beginning of the novel. The cellar appears as revealing both the flip side of the house and the flip side of the suburb—which is thus endowed with characteristics inherited from its etymology of “sub urbs,” that which lies under the city. An underground locus where hidden violence resulting from the apartheid past, namely from Bishop and Pylon’s alleged abuse of Sheemina February when she was accused of being a traitor to the anti-apartheid movement, surfaces into the post-apartheid moment. The cellar also reveals the underlying violence that pervades all spaces, urban and suburban, in Cape Town. The prominent function of this revelatory process is to show that in post-apartheid Cape Town, separateness does not hold, and violence is everywhere. In other words, what Payback reveals through the various itineraries staged in the novel is the porosity of all spaces: Suburbia is not a place apart, but it is connected to the violence which pervades the city. As in all cities in crime fiction, as Jean-Noël Blanc puts it, “elsewhere does not exist. Even when characters move, they go to a place that is identical to the one they come from. They circulate, but they do not move.” 225 The other two novels

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of the trilogy elaborate on the Gothicization of both city and home, particularly Killer Country, at the end of which Oumou, Bishop’s wife, is killed at home by Spitz, one of Sheemina February’s henchmen in a scene that both repeats and transforms Bishop’s ordeal in the cellar in Payback. Spitz significantly goes up to Oumou, having to stop “twice on the climb to keep his breathing easy, his pulse down” 226 before reaching Oumou’s studio, “a nice, private space,” 227 where they kill each other. The “nice, private space” is thus invaded by a violence from outside and from below, and home is not safer than the streets of the city. The murder turns Bishop and his daughter into “dead souls in the house, wandering the rooms” 228 as they try to come to terms with the sudden violence which has shattered their lives and unhomed their home. The Gothicization of the city in the Revenge trilogy therefore also involves the Gothicization of home because private and public spaces become sites for the excavation of past sins which affect not only the culprits but also their families—again, in the best Gothic tradition, in which the sins of the fathers are usually visited on their children. The transformation of both Bishop and Christa into sad ghosts also points to another mode of Gothicization which pervades the trilogy: haunting. Sheemina February herself is not merely construed as a femme fatale, but also as a kind of vengeful, obsessive, perverse ghost who unleashes hitman after hitman onto Bishop and his family in a seemingly disproportionate way. The haunting dimension of Sheemina is actualized at the end of Killer Country when Bishop and Christa have their photograph taken by a German tourist on the mountain, only to discover Sheemina in the background of the picture: “He looked closer at their faces, the glint on Christa’s teeth. The smile not in their eyes. Then took in the background: above, a sky of wide and dying crimson. Behind them a terrace and parapet wall. Standing at the wall, a woman in a long coat. A woman with a black glove. Sheemina February.” 229 The juxtaposition of Bishop and Christa’s bereft faces after Oumou’s death with Sheemina’s silhouette in the background points to her responsibility in their sorrow but also, more generally, to her almost mythical status in the novel as nemesis. Even if Sheemina is eventually killed by Mart Velaze in Black Heart, she remains a powerful figure of vengeance and a ghost of the past. She thus contributes to the Gothicizing of the city in the trilogy, which constructs a rather grim vision of Cape Town where both center and peripheries are affected by endemic violence so that the city becomes a network of violence, a violence which has been inherited from the past. The motif of the past reemerging, haunting the present, is materialized in the novels by the bones excavated by Ducky Donald and Dave Cruikshank’s renovation project. These bones which resurface show that there used to be a graveyard on the spot where the two men have chosen to build their urban development project. In Cape Town, history, then, is everywhere; the past haunts the present, boundaries do not hold, and the “city of crime” is written in the

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Gothic mode by a writer who is aware of the palimpsest-like quality of the place: “There is this about the city I live in: the buildings hold us; the streets shape our lives. Here, smell is memory and the bones are beneath our feet. The soil is human.” 230 Both Cape Town and Johannesburg thus emerge as places where the past lies just under the surface, haunting the post-apartheid moment and can be excavated at any moment. The haunting quality of post-apartheid spaces is what I turn to in the next chapter, which in which I examine what I call “nonplaces.” NOTES 1. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 21–22. 2. Max Duperray, “Londres, la ville comme syndrome,” in Les imaginaires de la ville. Entre Littérature et Arts, ed. Hélène and Gilles Menegaldo (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 150. 3. Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 28–29. 4. Killeen, Gothic Literature, 12. 5. Ibid. Also see Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6. Jean-Pierre Naugrette, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: dans le labyrinthe,” Tropismes 5 (1991): 26, my translation. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Umberto Eco distinguishes between three versions of the labyrinth: the Greek version is a linear itinerary modeled on Theseus’s journey to the center and back, in which the figure of the monster gives savor to the journey; the second one, the mannerist version, is described as a kind of tree, with roots, dead ends, and only one exit point, in which you need an Ariadne’s thread to find your way thanks to a process of trial and error; the third version is the network, or rhizomatic labyrinth, where each path can be connected to another path: there is no center, no periphery, no exit point because it is potentially infinite. Eco, Apostille au Nom de la Rose, trans. Myriem Bouzaher (Paris: Grasset, 1987), 64–65. 9. Naugrette, “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” 33, my translation. 10. David Schmid, “From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction,” in Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fiction, ed. Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 11. 11. Botting, Gothic, 123. 12. Jonathan Amid and Leon De Kock also point to the literary filiation between Poe’s detective stories and “Vidocq and the British tradition of the ‘Gothic novel.’” Amid and De Kock, “The Crime Novel in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Preliminary Investigation,” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 19, no. 1 (2014): 53. 13. Lucie Armitt, Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 84–91. 14. Botting, Gothic, 171. 15. Armitt, Twentieth-Century Gothic, 56. 16. Botting, Gothic, 172. 17. Duncan, South African Gothic, 106–17. 18. Tzvetan Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” in Poétique de la prose (choix) suivi de Nouvelles recherches sur le récit (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 19. 19. In his “Afterword to a City,” Stephen Watson explains that in writing about Cape Town he “was trying to compensate for the degree to which that city, like the rest of South Africa at the time, afflicted [him] with a sense of homelessness,” pointing to a tension between belong-

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ing and unbelonging characteristic of his relationship to the city. Watson, A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place (London: Penguin, Kindle Edition, 2006). 20. It is worth noting that crime fiction already existed in South Africa much before postapartheid (or post-transitional) literature, as shown by Elizabeth Le Roux, who counters Mike Nicol’s assertion that “[d]espite the vibrancy of thriller and crime fiction elsewhere, not much has happened in South African crime fiction over the last five decades” and argues, instead, that “he, like many other academics and commentators, appears to downplay what came before— and to some extent afterwards, until the 1990s.” Le Roux, “South African Crime and Detective Fiction in English: A Bibliography and Publishing History,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 2 (2013): 136. She confirms, however, the “explosion” of crime writing since the 1990s, and links it to both local and global factors (Ibid., 145–46). 21. Loren Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City. Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11. 22. Westphal, “Pour une approche géocritique,”17, my translation. 23. Benoît Doyon-Gosselin, “Pour une herméneutique des espaces fictionnels,” in Topographies romanesques, ed. Audrey Camus and Rachel Bouvet (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 67, my translation. 24. Ibid. Also read Rachel Bouvet, “Topographier pour comprendre l’espace romanesque,” in Topographies romanesques, ed. Audrey Camus and Rachel Bouvet (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 82. 25. Michael Titlestad, “Writing the City After Apartheid,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 676. Also see Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 5. 26. Titlestad, “Writing the City,” 678. 27. Ibid., 680–81. Also see Shear, “Haunted House”; Gaylard, “The Postcolonial Gothic”; Duncan, South African Gothic. 28. Titlestad, “Writing the City,” 681. Ivan Vladislavić’s interest in the urban also led him to coedit Blank (1998), a collection of essays reassessing urbanity in the new South Africa. The essay he contributed to the collection, “Street Addresses, Johannesburg,” illustrates Titlestad’s point that Michel de Certeau’s theories have offered a transversal way of examining South African post-apartheid cities (Ibid., 678). It consists in a series of vignettes whose juxtaposition provides a meditation on Johannesburg, based both on his own walks throughout the city and on his personal memories and experience of the place. A case in point is the ninth vignette, “Walking Goodbye I: ‘Hercules Cacti,’” in which he recounts how he accompanies his friend Chas, who is leaving Johannesburg for Cape Town, “on his goodbye walks, revisiting, recalling, and relinquishing the parts of the city he expects to miss despite himself. The city, we always agree, is no more than a mnemonic. Where do we go? Here and there. What do we talk about? This and that. What do we see?” Vladislavić, Blank_ Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Judith Hilton and Ivan Vladislavić (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 309. For an analysis of Vladislavić’s urban, and intermedial, aesthetics, read Mathilde Rogez, “Portrait of the Artist as a Flâneur in Johannesburg? A Study of Ivan Vladislavić’s Work,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 57–66. 29. Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001). 30. Anne Putter, “Movement, Memory, Transformation, and Transition in the City: Literary Representations of Johannesburg in Post-Apartheid South African Texts,” Kritika Kultura 18 (2012): 159. https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/article/download/KK2012.01811/ 1435. 31. Titlestad, “Writing the City,” 682. 32. Ivan Vladislavić, The Exploded View (Johannesburg: Random House, 2004). 33. Titlestad, “Writing the City,” 686. 34. In the section devoted to Afrikaans fiction, Titlestad analyzes Eben Venter’s representation of Johannesburg in Horrelpoot (2006), a rewriting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as a “Gothic vision of doom” which “calls white readers to confront the literary manifestations of their paranoia” (Ibid., 691, italics added). Again, even if Titlestad’s focus is not on Gothic or Gothicization, his choice of words confirms the fact that the Gothic mode is a subterranean, but omnipresent, motif in white South African fiction. I have chosen not to analyze Venter’s novel

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because it was written in Afrikaans and my scope only includes novels written in English (see first chapter). 35. I am using the term crime fiction in the sense defined by Sam Naidu in his survey of crime fiction in South Africa, that is, “as an umbrella term. It refers to all fictional literature which represents crime. The primary focus, though, is on the two main sub-genres being written and read in South Africa today: the crime thriller novel and the literary detective novel.” Naidu, “Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical Introduction,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 2 (2013): 127. Some of the arguments presented in this chapter were developed in my “Cartographies génériques, spatiales et identitaires en Afrique du Sud: Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes, Henrietta Rose-Innes,” Etudes Littéraires Africaines 38 (2014): 69–82, although the focus was clearly on genre and not on space. 36. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 3. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Margie Orford, “The Grammar of Violence. Writing Crime as Fiction,” Current Writing. Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 2 (2013): 227. 39. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 7–8. 40. Ibid., 8. For a discussion of the TRC and its link to buried histories which can (Gothically) return, see Duncan, South African Gothic, 91–94. 41. Amid and De Kock, “The Crime Novel,” 59. 42. Schmid, “From the Locked Room,” 1. 43. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 129. 44. Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 13. 45. Ibid., 15. Kruger’s own project is defined in terms of excavation: “Working against the willful amnesia that has passed for memory in Johannesburg, this book excavates the history of the city and builds new links among recurring themes and forms in the literary, visual, and built representations of the urban imagination, in this city and in others with which it invites comparisons. The project sketched above and others discussed below remind us that, even in twelve decades, Johannesburg’s answers to Lynch’s question (What time is this place?) multiply across temporal and spatial coordinates, as they produce after-images and echoes from halfremembered periods and buried strata.” (Ibid, 19, italics added) Kruger unambiguously associates time and place and offers to recuperate a cultural history whose traces lie hidden in plain sight, in the space of contemporary Johannesburg as well as in its fictional representations. Interestingly, Catherine Kroll’s reading of Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf as South African Gothic also relies on the trope of excavation because Triomf is “a town built atop black Sofiatown, which was bulldozed in the 1950s to construct housing for poor whites.” Kroll, “Bodies of Evidence,” 98. 46. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 35. 47. Ibid., 45. 48. Ibid., 36. The term entanglement refers to Sarah Nuttall’s work. For a discussion of the tension between the global and the local in South African literature, also read Leon De Kock’s other works, in particular “South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 263–98; “Does South African Literature Still Exist? Or: South African Literature Is Dead, Long Live Literature in South Africa,” English in Africa 32, no. 2 (October 2005): 69–83; “The End of ‘South African’ Literary History? Judging ‘National’ Fiction in a Transnational Era,” in SA Lit: Beyond 2000, ed. Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011), 19–49. 49. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 58. 50. Ibid., 61. For a broader analysis of the place of crime in South African society, read Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, The Truth About Crime. Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 51. Nels Pearson and Marc Singer, “Introduction: Open Cases: Detection, (Post)Modernity, and the State,” in Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, ed. Nels Pearson and Marc Singer (London: Ashgate, 2009), 12. 52. Schmid, “From the Locked Room,” 8. 53. Amid and De Kock, “The Crime Novel,” 56. 54. Samuelson, “Writing Women,” 114.

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55. Claudia Drawe, “Cape Town, City of Crime in South African Fiction,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 2 (2013): 186. 56. Caitlin Martin and Sally-Ann Murray, “Crime Takes Place: Spatial Situation(s) in Margie Orford’s Fiction,” Scrutiny2 19, no. 1 (2014): 42. 57. Drawe, “Cape Town,” 195. 58. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, “Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives,” in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mülheisen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 2. 59. Joseph-Vilain, “Cartographies génériques.” 60. Matzke and Mülheisen, “Postcolonial Postmortems,” 5. 61. Joanne Reardon Lloyd, “Talking to the Dead. The Voice of the Victim in Crime Fiction,” New Writing 11, no. 1 (2014), 105. 62. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, “Introduction: Afropolis,” in Johannesburg. The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1. 63. Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (Nottingham, UK: Angry Robot, 2010). 64. Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (Nottingham, UK: Angry Robot, 2008). 65. Lauren Beukes, “Kinking Reality,” filmed 2012 at Webstock, New Zealand, video, 34:33. https://vimeo.com/38462185. 66. Cheryl Morgan, “Interview with Lauren Beukes,” filmed in 2010, Salon Futura #1, video, 8:30. http://vimeo.com/14011971. 67. Loren Kruger, “Filming the Edgy City: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Form in Postapartheid Johannesburg,” Research in African Literatures 37, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 146. 68. Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 151. For a detailed analysis of the place of crime in post-apartheid Johannesburg, read Lindsay Bremner, “Crime and the Emerging Landscape of Post-apartheid Johannesburg,” in Blank_ Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Judith Hilton and Ivan Vladislavić (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 49–63. 69. The phrase roman noir can be used to refer to Gothic novels, but here it will be a synonym of hardboiled fiction, as in William Marling’s The American Roman Noir (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). 70. Frédéric Grao, “Polar et anti-utopies: deux genres littéraires expérimentaux,” in Les Œuvres noires de l’art et de la littérature. II, ed. Alain Pessin and Marie-Claire Vanbremeersch (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 51–76. His definition of anti-utopias is strongly reminiscent of what Margaret Atwood calls “ustopias.” Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011), 66–96. Utopias and dystopias will be discussed in chapter 5 in this volume about “non-places.” 71. Natacha Levet, “Le Roman noir contemporain: hybridité et dissolution génériques,” in Manières de Noir. La Fiction policière contemporaine, ed. Gilles Menegaldo and Maryse Petit (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 81. 72. Thierry Paquot, “Cultures urbaines et impératifs comparatistes,” in La ville et l’urbain: l’état des savoirs, ed. Thierry Paquot, Michel Lussault, and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Paris: La Découverte, 2000), 387. 73. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 99–100. Also see Sophie Didier, “La fiction spéculative sudafricaine: une littérature de genre au service d’une critique de la société sud-africaine contemporaine,” EchoGéo 42 (2017): 1–9. 74. In Genette’s classification of the different types of transtextuality, that is, of possible relationships between texts, architextuality refers to a text’s generic belonging (Palimpsestes, 12). De Kock’s description of Zoo City points to the novel’s unique blend of different literary genres, from speculative fiction to noir, which enabled Beukes to reach international audiences (Losing the Plot, 199). 75. Sophie Savary, “Comment des polars barcelonais modèlent l’imaginaire de la ville,” Géographie et culture, “Le roman policier,” 61 (2007): 83, my translation. https://journals.openedition.org/gc/2635. 76. Ibid., 84. 77. Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” 13.

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78. Muriel Rosemberg, “Introduction,” Géographie et culture, “Le roman policier,” 61 (2007): 3–5. https://journals.openedition.org/gc/2574. 79. Jean-Noël Blanc, Polarville: images de la ville dans le roman policier (Lyon, France: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991). 80. Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” 13–14. 81. Savary, “Polars barcelonais,” 85. 82. Géraldine Molina, “Le Paris des Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec de Jacques Tardi. Une ‘ville noire’?” Géographie et culture, “Le roman policier,” 61 (2007): 61. https://journals.openedition.org/gc/2617. 83. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 127. 84. Richard Samin, “Townships sud-africains et littérature: le sémantisme de l’ambivalence,” Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims, “Afrique du Sud: espaces et littératures,” 99–100 (1998): 67. Samin borrows the phrase from Mattera’s Memory Is the Weapon (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987), 26–27. 85. Beukes, Zoo City, 66. 86. Ibid., 141. 87. Sévry, “La littérature sud-africaine,” 22. 88. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 128. 89. Beukes, Zoo City, 19. 90. Ibid., 45. 91. Louise Bethlehem, “Scratching the Surface: The Home and the Haptic in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Elsewhere,” Scrutiny2 20, no. 1 (2015): 13. 92. Beukes, Zoo City, 316, italics added. 93. The novel was inspired, among other things, by the unprecedented flux of migrants coming to Johannesburg. See Beukes, “Kinking Reality”; Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City; Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Un post-humain post-apartheid? Moxyland et Zoo City de Lauren Beukes,” in Post Humains. Frontières, évolutions, hybridités, ed. Elaine Després and Hélène Machinal (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 165–77. 94. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 129. 95. Beukes, Zoo City, 17. 96. Ibid., 18. 97. Shane Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City,” Safundi 16, no. 1 (2015): 72. 98. Beukes, Zoo City, 302. 99. Bethlehem, “Scratching the Surface,” 14. 100. Duncan, South African Gothic, 151. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid.,169. 103. Beukes, Zoo City, 7. 104. Mbembe and Nuttall, “Introduction,” 21. 105. Beukes, Zoo City, 341. 106. Ibid., 342, italics added. 107. Bethlehem, “Scratching the Surface,” 15. 108. Ibid. 109. See Joseph-Vilain, “Cartographies génériques” and “Un post-humain post-apartheid.” 110. Konstantin Sofianos, “Magical Nightmare Jo’burg,” Safundi 14, no. 1 (2013): 115. 111. Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things,” 75. 112. Mbembe and Nuttall, “Introduction,” 22. 113. Beukes, Zoo City, 366. 114. Sabine Breuillard, “Invention de Harbin,” Les imaginaires de la ville. Entre littérature et arts, ed. Gilles and Hélène Menegaldo (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 39, my translation. 115. Samuel Bordreuil, “La ville desserrée,” La ville et l’urbain: l'état des savoirs, ed. Thierry Paquot, Michel Lussault, and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Paris: La Découverte, 2000), 180. 116. Schmid, “From the Locked Room,” 16.

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117. Bethlehem, “Scratching the Surface,” 15. 118. Duncan, South African Gothic, 168. 119. Ibid., 169. 120. Louise Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes’s post-apartheid dystopia: inhabiting Moxyland,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 5 (2014): 526. 121. Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things,” 76. 122. Martine Berger, “Le Cap en noir ? La Mother City dans les romans policiers de Deon Meyer,” EchoGéo 28 (2014): 1–27. 123. Geoffrey V. Davis, “‘Old Loyalties and New Aspirations’: The Post-Apartheid Crime Fiction of Deon Meyer,” in Life is a Thriller: Investigating African Crime Fiction, ed. Anja Oed and Christine Matzke (Köln, Germany: Rüdiger Köppe, 2012), 55. 124. Marla Harris, “‘You Think It’s Possible to Fix Broken Things?’: Terror in the South African Fiction of Margie Orford and Jassy Mackenzie,” Clues 31, no. 2 (2013): 123. 125. Ibid., 124. Harros refers to Robert J. C. Young, “Terror Effects,” in Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (Oxford: Wiley, 2010), 325. 126. Ibid., 125. 127. Margie Orford, Like Clockwork (London: Atlantic Books, 2006). 128. Margie Orford, Daddy’s Girl (London: Corvus, 2009). 129. Harris, “You Think It’s Possible,” 125. 130. Duncan, South African Gothic, 91. 131. Martin and Murray, “Crime Takes Place,” 44. 132. Orford, Like Clockwork, 284. 133. Ibid., 247, italics added. 134. Ibid., 286. 135. Ibid., 287. 136. Ibid., 286. 137. Ibid., 287. 138. Ibid., 289. 139. Ibid., 301. 140. Ibid., 302. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 303. 143. Ibid., 304. 144. Martin and Murray, “Crime Takes Place,” 48. 145. Ibid., 45. 146. Margie Orford, Blood Rose (London: Corvus, 2007). 147. Margie Orford, Water Music (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2013). 148. Jonathan Amid, “Margie Orford’s South African Gothic,” SLiPNet, September 19, 2013. http://slipnet.co.za/view/reviews/margie-orfords-south-african-gothic/ 149. Margie Orford, Gallows Hill (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2011). 150. Ibid. 151. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 49. 152. Martin and Murray, “Crime Takes Place,” 42. 153. Margie Orford, “Writing Crime,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 22, no. 2 (2010): 186. 154. Elizabeth Fletcher, “Margie Orford’s Daddy’s Girl and the Possibilities of Feminist Crime Fiction,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25, no. 2 (2013): 208. 155. Orford, “The Grammar of Violence,” 226. 156. Schmid, “From the Locked Room,” 15. 157. Marla Harris compares Orford and Mackenzie and highlights this aspect of their work: “Perhaps it is no coincidence that they, like Meyer, also are journalists, with an interest in research and investigation and, consequently, a keen awareness that the stories that circulate in the media often raise more questions than they answer.” Harris, “You Think It’s Possible,” 123. 158. Orford, “The Grammar of Violence,” 220–21.

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159. Christopher Warnes, “Writing Crime in the New South Africa: Negotiating Threat in the Novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38, no. 4 (2012): 984. 160. Martin and Murray, “Crime Takes Place,” 42. 161. Orford, “The Grammar of Violence,” 223. 162. Ibid., 225. 163. Ibid., 226. 164. De Kock, Losing the Plot. 165. Martin and Murray, “Crime Takes Place,” 36. 166. Ibid., 47. Also see Schmid, “From the Locked Room.” 167. Orford, “The Grammar of Violence,” 229. 168. Pearson and Singer, “Introduction,” 12. 169. Orford, “Writing Crime,” 188. 170. Ibid. 171. See Alex Fitch, “Gotham City and the Gothic Literary and Architectural Traditions,” Studies in Comics 8, no. 2 (2017): 205–26, and Round, Gothic in Comics. 172. Orford, “Writing Crime,” 189. 173. Ibid. 174. Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky, “Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45, no. 2 (2010): 269. 175. Ibid., 270. 176. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 125. 177. Mike Nicol, Killer Country (Brecon: Old Street, 2010). 178. Mike Nicol, Black Heart (Tiverton: Old Street, 2011). 179. Mike Nicol, “An Interview with John Muller about the Revenge Trilogy,” Sunday Times Book Live, 2011. http://mikenicol.bookslive.co.za/an-interview-with-joe-muller-about-the-revenge-trilogy/ 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid. 182. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 105. 183. Ibid., 107. 184. Nicol, “An Interview with John Muller.” 185. Ibid. It is therefore no wonder that Mike Nicol’s novel Power Play (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015), a follow-up on the Revenge trilogy involving Christa Bishop, Mace’s daughter, is in fact a noir transposition of Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus in post-apartheid South Africa. 186. Nicol, “An Interview with John Muller.” 187. Leon De Kock, “Off-Colour? Mike Nicol’s Neo-noir ‘Revenge Trilogy’ and the PostApartheid Femme Fatale,” African Studies 75, no. 1 (2016): 99. De Kock explains his use of black for a colored character in the following way: “‘Black’ in this article is used in the inclusive South African sense developed in the lead-up to democratic transition and in the country’s popular ‘struggle’ formations; in this usage, ‘black’ denotes ‘coloreds’ (in the South African usage . . .), people of Indian and Asian descent, and any others of non-European origin, in addition to black people” (Ibid., 110 n3). 188. Ibid., 101. 189. Ibid., 103. 190. Ibid. 191. Ibid., 104. 192. Ibid., 106. 193. Pearson and Singer, “Introduction,” 10. 194. De Kock, “Off-Colour,” 107. 195. Jean Anderson, Caroline Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti, “Introduction,” in Serial Crime Fiction. Dying for More, ed. Jean Anderson, Caroline Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. 196. Blanc, Polarville, 34, my translation. 197. Jean-Noël Blanc calls them “lieux convenus,” a pun on “commonplace” in French (Ibid., 61).

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198. Kristin Feireiss, “Foreword,” in Blank_ Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Judith Hilton and Ivan Vladislavić (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 5. 199. Jennifer Robinson, “(Im)mobilizing Space—Dreaming of Change.” In Blank_ Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Judith Hilton and Ivan Vladislavić (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 165. 200. See Michel Lussault, L’homme spatial. La construction sociale de l’être humain (Paris: Seuil, 2007). 201. Berger, “Le Cap en Noir,” 18. 202. Ibid., 17, my translation. 203. Blanc, Polarville, 16, my translation. 204. Rosemberg, “Introduction,” 4, my translation. 205. Mike Nicol, Payback (Brecon: Old Street, 2009). 206. Savary, “Polars barcelonais,” 86, my translation. 207. Samuel Bordreuil, “La ville desserrée,”176, my translation. 208. Ibid., 176–77. 209. Nicol, Payback, 385, italics added. 210. Ibid. 211. Ibid., 38. 212. Ibid., 29. 213. Ibid., 27. 214. Ibid. 215. Ibid., 1. 216. Ibid., 3. 217. Ibid., 5. 218. Ibid. 219. Ibid. 220. Ibid., 6. 221. Ibid., 366. 222. Ibid., 376. 223. Ibid., 415. 224. Ibid. 225. Blanc, Polarville, 82–83, my translation. 226. Nicol, Killer Country, 365. 227. Ibid., 368. 228. Ibid., 371. 229. Ibid., 373. 230. Mike Nicol, “The City I Live In,” in A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson (London: Penguin, Kindle Edition, 2006).

Chapter Five

Non-Places

NON-PLACES IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: SPATIAL AND GENERIC LIMINALITY Until now, this volume has examined relatively stable spaces: the home, the landscape, and the city, even if the focus has been on the way these welldefined places tend to be destabilized through the Gothic mode in postapartheid white writing. What I consider in this final chapter is a somewhat less clearly defined entity, which I have chosen to term the non-place. My main goal is to lay emphasis on liminality and transiency and to examine the various ways in which thresholds and border-crossings have provided white writers with a literary space to explore the contact zones between genres. I will thus explore the interaction between spatial liminality and generic drifting in a few representative novels by white writers. Such generic drifting might be construed as a literary tool to reflect the complexities and the rootlessness of post-apartheid South Africa. What shall emerge from this examination is a common preoccupation with boundaries and how they are crossed because, as John Clute puts it, “all stories are not only signposts that tell you where you are, but also crossroads: hoverings of the liminal.” 1 Having consistently defined Gothic as a mode which can be incorporated into all kinds of novels, I will therefore make explicit what has been implicit in the previous chapters, that is, the way in which the Gothic mode not only is a tool for white writers’ complex apprehension of South African spaces but also can help examine the notion of genre and its implications in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Place and genre are intricately linked in fiction because fictional places are created through the combination of geographical and generic criteria to define their “topicity”: “whenever geograph-

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ical inscription is problematic, generic inscription takes over and reading is eventually displaced on known ground.” 2 In their overview of South African crime fiction, Jonathan Amid and Leon De Kock ask the following question: “Does genre now hold the key to the way that the nation is imagined and allegorized?” 3 The question I am asking in this chapter is, rather, does genre hold the key to the way that space is imagined and allegorized? Amid and De Kock’s analysis relies on the following principle: We believe that the larger project of critically assessing and evaluating crime fiction in the South African context could profitably use the principle of novelistic adequation as a way of separating “pure genre” (or “mere entertainment literature”) from what one might call reflexive, complex and multiform works in which genre is brought into collision with social conditions in such a way that an ironic, third space of interpretation is achieved—of genre going against itself, opposing the inherent tendency towards closure in the strict generic selfdetermination of “pure genre.” 4

Again, I can only agree, and I suggest that the question can, and must, be extended to other genres: How are genres blended and hybridized to account for the complexities and ambiguities of South African reality in white writing? How does the Gothic mode contribute to this hybridization of genre? Such a question must be placed within the frame of the “genre snob debate concerning the cultural status of South African crime fiction: is it ‘highbrow’ or ‘low-brow’; is it credibly representative of a turbulent and crimeridden society, or is it just sensationalist, escapist, marketable entertainment limited by generic conventions?” 5 Chris Thurman also discusses genre in terms of both marketability and academic recognition, arguing that the debate about De Kock’s supposed reappraisal of Mike Nicol’s crime fiction and the responses to it “in fact reinscribed distinctions between the ‘literary’ and the ‘popular,’ the ‘serious’ and the ‘lite,’ the ‘high’ and the ‘low.’ It ought not to be the task of literary scholars to categorize books according to these divisions; . . . anyone familiar with post-Leavis debates about canonicity must view such categories as dubious.” 6 Such will not be my point either: the goal of this chapter will not be to assign books to generic categories but, rather, to interrogate the ways in which, and the reasons why, many novels cannot be defined as belonging to a single genre, focusing on their representation of space(s). As Roger Luckhurst suggests in his examination of Gothic science fiction, “Writing on genre has been obsessed with borders, the risk of invasion and protocols for de-contamination. This is particularly the case with genres perceived as having low cultural value. For abjected or ignored genres, defences have been mounted by narrow definitional work that usually preserves . . . a tiny cadre of fictions that fulfil a circumscribed political purpose

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for the genre. The rest? The rest can go to hell.” 7 Such a preoccupation with boundaries can only resonate in the South African context, where policing the borders and defining boundaries were at the core of the country’s political life for decades during apartheid. But Luckhurst further discusses genre literatures’ concern for boundaries in the following terms: “In the past decade, however, criticism has emerged that resists fixed spatial categories for genre. Instead, it has thought of genre as a continuously unfolding process that is generated not by ‘pure specimens’ but which advances through ‘crossbreeds and mutants.’” 8 Such a statement resonates with Michel De Certeau’s assertion that boundaries “have the function of founding and articulating spaces”: “There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.” 9 Boundaries therefore are necessary both in the literary and in the spatial fields. This is why a reflection on boundaries and on liminality may prove useful in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where redefining and crossing boundaries has been particularly significant and difficult. 10 In his examination of Gothic science fiction, Luckhurst points to the emergence of “hybrid texts” 11 in the wake of Gary Wolfe’s notion of the postgenre fantastic, that is, “recombinant genre fiction: stories which effectively decompose and reconstitute genre materials and techniques together with materials and techniques from a variety of literary traditions, even including the traditions of domestic realism.” 12 Interestingly, Luckhurst’s reading of Gothic science fiction is grounded in spatial analysis, and more specifically in what he calls “zones,” which are “weird topologies that produce anomalies, destroy category and dissolve or reconstitute identities” with a capacity for meta-critical commentary because “they remark on their own dissolution of the law of genre.” 13 It seems significant that Luckhurst’s discussion should start with a reference to Mary-Louise Pratt’s seminal work in Imperial Eyes 14 and “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 15 in which she defines the colonial encounter as a contact zone where unexpected exchanges may occur and from which “anomalous or chaotic,” hybrid works emerge. Contact zones are defined as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery and its aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” 16 Postapartheid South Africa constitutes, of course, one of these contact zones, where cultures “meet, clash and grapple with each other” in the aftermath of decades of oppression. My contention is that in this context, literature itself becomes a contact zone where genres also “meet, clash and grapple with each other.” This is precisely what is examined in this chapter. More precisely, I argue that the Gothic mode is one of the ways in which genres are hybridized in post-apartheid white writing to both express cultural anxieties and create forms which reflect these anxieties, particularly the space-related ones. In the fictional works I examine, literature itself becomes a contact

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zone where genres tentatively meet to redefine the boundaries that were erected under apartheid. The relevance of the Gothic mode in a context where boundaries are problematic shall not surprise us because, as Eugenia DeLamotte reminds us, “Gothic terror has its primary source in an anxiety about boundaries,” 17 particularly the boundaries of the self: “Two fears dominate [the] Gothic world, the fear of terrible separateness and the fear of unity with some terrible Other. They are embodied in two classic formulas of the ghost story: the heroine’s terrifying discovery that she is all alone and her subsequent discovery that—horror of horrors!—she is not alone.” 18 The Gothic mode, in other words, can become a mode to explore spatial and personal boundaries; while they wonder what distinguishes spaces between them, writers also ask: “‘What distinguishes the ‘me’ from the ‘not-me’? Where, if they exist at all, are the boundaries of the self?” 19 What also seems crucial in Luckhurst’s analysis of Gothic science fiction is his contention that what he calls the zone is not only a non-place but also what we could call a “non-time,” relying on Bruno Latour’s emphasis on the “non-modern” and on polytemporality in We Have Never Been Modern: “We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again,” 20 Latour rather provocatively states. Latour links the emergence of such nontemporality with a crisis in modernity and the concomitant collapse of the binary divisions which it established to classify the world; in the wake of this collapse, a number of hybrid objects challenge modernity’s categorizing impulse and find themselves in an “increasingly populated excluded middle, a Zone we might say.” 21 We may also argue, if we displace the discussion onto the literary field, that genre-bending becomes a privileged tool for the postmodern, rather than the nonmodern, world. Gothic itself, “a modern genre, a construction of the Enlightenment’s fabrication of a dark prehistory,” 22 is displaced by genre-bending. Luckhust’s concept of the zone, however, only seems to function in the context of the genre he discusses, Gothic science fiction. This is why I deem it necessary to rely on a different kind of space, the non-place, which I am going to define before examining its treatment in post-apartheid white writing. French anthropologist Marc Augé defines what he calls non-places in relation to modernity or, rather, supermodernity: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places.” 23 In Augé’s conception, non-places are “non-symbolized” 24 spaces associated with displacement. He contends that displacement prevents any authentic relationship between traveler and landscape because of the impermanent nature of their contact; as a consequence, “the traveler’s space may

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thus be the archetype of non-place.” 25 In other words, non-places are spaces which cannot be assigned meaning by the viewer because of the distance between the spectator and the spectacle. Augé sees the emergence of these non-places as a direct consequence of “supermodernity” and regards them as sources of “solitary contractuality.” 26 He also insists on the “two complementary but distinct realities” designated by non-places: “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces,” 27 relations which are mediated through “words or even texts,” 28 so that “individuals are supposed to interact only with texts.” 29 Augé chooses the motorway as the epitome of these nonplaces, because it is “doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all the principal places to which it takes us; and it makes comments on them.” 30 Other examples include trains, planes, or big supermarkets where people can experience “the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing”; “the space of non-places creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.” 31 Augé’s non-places are also resolutely grounded in the instant and as such, they are ahistorical: “what reigns there is actuality, the urgency of the present moment.” 32 “In the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home”—hence, the distinction between modernity, where “everything holds together,” and supermodernity, which is cut from the past and from the “elsewhere.” 33 Interestingly, Augé finally defines the non-place as “the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society.” 34 Although fairly convincing on a number of levels, Augé’s definition of non-places is deeply pessimistic and denies the contemporary non-places he describes any capacity to connect to either the past or other places. His emphasis is decidedly on solipsism and desensitization. Michel Lussault’s concept of the “hyperplace,” on the other hand, was conceived as a response to Augé’s pessimism and offers a more positive reading of the new types of places generated by (super)modernity. 35 Examining the new spaces created by globalization, Lussault identifies a series of interrelated concepts: first, the hyperplace is defined as a concentration of diverse people sharing a specific affinity while being gathered in a place connected to the world and to locality. The archetype of the hyperplace, which is used as an example in his first chapter, is Times Square in New York, which meets the five criteria necessary to define a hyperplace: first, intensity, because thousands of visitors gather there every day; second, hyperspatiality, because of all the screens which connect Times Square to the world (smartphones, giant screens); thirdly, hyperscalarity because Times Square is constantly connected to the world, life never stops; finally, experience and spatial affinities because many people can share their experience of the place. Iconic hyperplaces involve shopping malls, airports, stations, amusement parks, and cultural places. Unlike Augé, Lussault sees these

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places as places of exchanges and connection, where locality does not disappear but becomes articulated to the world via hyperspatiality and hyperconnectivity. In other words, while Augé’s non-places are cut off from both the past and the world, Lussault’s hyperplaces are defined by their dual dimension, both local and global, both spatial and hyperspatial. Generally speaking, Lussault’s take on modernity and globalization emphasizes connection and creativity. His reading of supermodernity does not eschew the issues raised by globalization, as his concepts of the alter-places, counter-places, or neoplaces demonstrate, 36 but he chooses to construct a theory of place which articulates the global and the local and to acknowledge the possibility for supermodern individuals to find a place in the globalized world. Lussault is perfectly aware of the political implications of definitions of place, as his previous work amply demonstrates; his concept of the “place struggle,” which, he argues, has replaced the “class struggle,” 37 seems particularly fruitful in the South African context. This chapter will think of non-places neither in the pessimistic sense attributed to them by Augé nor merely as avatars of Lussaut’s “hyperplaces,” which seem to be too restrictive to account for the complex rendering of space by South African white writers. Another definition of the non-place which might be more productive is that which is developed by Georges DidiHuberman in Génie du non-lieu, 38 in which he analyzes the works of Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani. Didi-Huberman examines the complex relationships among place, time, and haunting. 39 In the first chapter, he describes a place that does not exist anymore, Parmiggiani’s studio, which has burned and is therefore presented as a non-place: a place which is present despite its disappearance, gone but persistent. 40 This leads him to elaborate on the idea of the trace and to analyze Parmiggiani’s studio as a haunted place. The final chapter of Génie du non-lieu, “Maison hantée” (“Haunted house”), develops a reflection that goes beyond Parmiggiani’s work and examines the concept of haunting, defined as a disappearance which leaves traces, as in Parmiggiani’s Delocazione, which are based on an aesthetic of traces. Parmiggiani’s work leads Didi-Huberman to define what he calls genius deloci, or “genius of the non-place” to analyze the way in which the Italian artist’s works turn into absent ghosts. 41 This also leads him to analyze “the reciprocal power of haunting on place (it brings it into motion, brings it to delocazione) and of place on haunting (it reconfigures it by providing it with a physical field of action). Haunting as a place (it becomes something more than a spirit) creates place as haunting (it becomes something more than space.)” 42 Didi-Huberman thus distinguishes between space and place, arguing that space becomes place and acquires meaning when it is haunted; this is, in fact, the genius of the non-place. As Corinne Bigot observes, Didi-Huberman’s analysis is grounded in a specific work but “invites us to a broader reflection on marks and traces, which he asks us to think of in dialectical terms. . . . With its

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references to Rilke or Poe, the text provides us with another way of looking at space and places in literature, like Roderick Usher’s house and other places in Gothic novels . . . , first haunted and then destroyed . . . and whose disappearance only increases their haunting power.” 43 The literary relevance of Didi-Huberman’s concept of the genius deloci leads me to define non-place first as a haunted place, a place which bears the traces of previous occupation and is inhabited by ghosts—a condition, de Certeau reminds us, which is far from exceptional: There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon. But like the Gothic sculptures of kings and queens that once adorned Notre-Dame and have been buried for two centuries in the basement of a building in the rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, these “spirits,” themselves broken into pieces in like manner, do not speak any more than they see. This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on “Just between you and me.” 44

In the third chapter of South African Gothic, titled “Writing Phantoms,” Rebecca Duncan analyzes what she calls “post-transitional” South African writing in terms of hauntology and spectrality, arguing that these tropes have provided writers with a way to deal with the presence of the past in the postapartheid moment: “Gothic is invoked and inhabited in these texts as the writing of excess, and is brought to bear on what exceeds—lies beyond or beneath—the truth of the historical record, with the result that the blind spots and failing points in the archive are retrieved and made to haunt the present, but only in obscure and partially legible forms.” 45 This emphasis on the spectrality of the Gothic mode leads me to suggest that the non-place might be a useful concept to examine these haunted, Gothic literary spaces. But the prefix non- in non-places also points to another major aspect, which cannot be totally dissociated from the first: the idea of a place which does not exist, either because it does not exactly fit with actual spaces or because it does not exist yet. In other words, the non-place can also be described in terms of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, which he defines in relation to utopia: Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within

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Foucault’s utopia and heterotopia both designate places which do not exist in reality, either because they are “unreal spaces,” like utopias, or because they are “outside of all places,” like heterotopias. They are therefore, literally, non-places. I will also consider this second acceptation of the term, examining the interactions among Gothic and heterotopia and utopia. Such a reflection must be connected to Duncan’s emphasis on the “heterotopian function of the Gothic text,” “its reflection both of the world as it ‘should be’— ordered, in the postcolonial context, into zones of new and old, past and present—and its simultaneous apprehension of a more complex sense of reality, in which experiential truths exceed the organizing potentials of these and other categories.” 47 Before examining generic interactions enacted in the Gothic mode, we need to define more precisely the concepts of utopia and heterotopia. A useful tool may be Margaret Atwood’s concept of the ustopia, which she defines as a word she “made up by combining utopia and dystopia—the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because in [her] view, each contains a latent version of the other.” 48 Atwood’s ustopias are “not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind.” 49 “Not-exactly places”: Atwood’s phrase reflects the intended purpose of this chapter, which is to examine all the spaces which cannot be defined, either because they do not exist or because they are haunted. Another distinction which must be made is between the dystopian and the apocalyptic, following Benjamin Kunkel’s examination of these two genres. Kunkel distinguishes between the dystopian and the apocalyptic because these categories refer to different and even opposed futuristic scenarios. The end of the world or apocalypse typically brings about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a sinister perfection of order. In the most basic political terms, dystopia is a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the world is a nightmare of anarchy. . . . What the dystopian and the apocalyptic modes have in common is simply that they imagine our world changed, for the worse, almost beyond recognition. 50

In the apocalyptic, life is reduced to the basic necessities of survival, and the ideological content less consistent than in the dystopian. [T]he diversity of apocalyptic triggers hardly conceals the basic sameness, from work to work, of the apocalypse itself. In almost every case, . . . large-

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scale organization, including the state, has disappeared: the cumulative technological capability of century upon century has collapsed to the point that only agricultural know-how, if that, is retained; and the global society we know has shattered into small tribal groups, separate families or couples, and helpless solitary individuals. 51

As a consequence, these works of fiction stigmatize “any group larger than the family as oppressive and evil.” 52 Yet, “these apocalyptic narratives are by no means stories of joining or founding political communities dedicated to averting or surviving civilization’s collapse. On the contrary, they are stories of love, the strongest of antipolitical forces, as Hannah Arendt once said.” 53 A novel which could help us explore the tension between the dystopian and the apocalyptic is Deon Meyer’s Fever, the English translation of Koors, published in Afrikaans in 2016 and in English in 2017. 54 The novel is generically hybrid: it presents itself as the “memoirs of Nicolaas Storm, concerning the investigation of his father’s murder,” as stated in the novel’s subtitle. The uninformed reader may therefore expect it to be a variation on crime fiction, like all of Meyer’s previous novels, which have earned him international fame. However, Fever turns out to be entirely different. A first-person narrative, it takes place in an unidentified future, after a worldwide catastrophe has wiped out a large part of mankind. Even if Nicolaas Storm endeavors to explain the conditions in which his father was killed, the bulk of the narrative recounts in a detailed way how the survivors of the near-apocalypse manage to find sustenance in their dire new conditions and how Willem Storm creates a settlement near an abandoned dam. On the surface, Fever may therefore be identified as belonging to the apocalyptic genre as defined by Kunkel. However, the novel does not entirely meet Kunkel’s criteria—especially because the ending reveals a dystopian logic rather than an apocalyptic one because we learn that the fever which killed so many people was in fact the result of “Project Balance,” a man-devised plan aiming at ridding the earth from its most dangerous predator and destructor: mankind—or at least, most of it. The novel therefore seems to challenge Kunkel’s distinction between the dystopian and the apocalyptic. It also challenges other generic boundaries as it seems to play with a number of other literary genres in relation to its specifically South African dimension. Indeed, in its description of a country divided by wars Fever revisits a number of literary tropes which resonate both with the history of the country and with the literary genres which emerged in it. Paradoxically, even if the novel is clearly dystopian, it is firmly grounded in the actual geography of South Africa, as suggested by the map which opens the novel and is supposed to help readers to trace the characters’ journeys. Fever therefore both inscribes itself within an international trend of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction and remains locally grounded. Its apocalyptic dimension also partakes both of the local and the

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international because it inscribes it in a global trend of apocalyptic fiction but may also be read as revisiting the South African genre of white apocalyptic fiction, whose most famous example is probably Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981), at the end of which the white heroine runs toward a helicopter which might bring either deliverance or death—an ending which seems to be consciously reworked by Meyer as Nicolaas Storm chooses to remain with Sofia and is retrieved by the helicopter she is in. In the article he devoted to apocalyptic fiction in South Africa in 1984, André Brink explains that the genre provided a literary tool through which white writers could “express their intimations of the Apocalypse in terms of the racial conflict which determines every aspect of life in the country, from the public and political to the moral and most private.” 55 Even if, of course, the political, social, and cultural context seems to have radically altered in post-apartheid society, “White identity in South Africa has long been associated with apocalyptic fear—fear, not of environmental collapse or of devastating global warfare, not of a catastrophic industrial accident or a disastrous epidemic, but of a violent revolution to upend the racial inequity on which the country has been built. This fear, used to great propagandistic effect by the apartheid government, seems to retain some purchase in the democratic era.” 56 White writers, Thurman suggests, have tended to rework the genre despite the demise of apartheid. In Meyer’s apocalyptic novel, however, racial conflict seems to be relegated to the background, and the narrative explores, instead, the tension between characters in terms of religion and politics rather than race as Willem Storm’s ideals increasingly clash with Pastor Nkosi’s. Meyer’s novel therefore retains a collective, social dimension, going against the grain of what Kunkel describes as the individualistic tendency of both dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, which both “defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them.” 57 Such a statement is subverted in Fever, where the family, far from being the locus of unconditional love or a safe refuge from the crushing forces of the apocalypse, is revealed as a nest of tensions and conflicts, both between father and son but also, more crucially, between father and mother, as the mother finally reappears and is revealed to be a member of the organization who initially implemented the virus as a way of operating a selection among men. The mother’s return stages the return of the dystopian in the apocalyptic scenario, and disorder is revealed as having been caused by an aspiration to a new world order. Interestingly, the political agenda here illustrates Atwood’s concept of the ustopia, which merges utopia and dystopia, conceived of as two sides of the same coin. Of course, such a scenario must be read, in the South African context, as a critique of apartheid and its aftermath, as all the characters are carefully resituated in the preapocalyptic world and as space is crucially redistributed. The novel also seems to revisit some of the tropes of the “settlement novel” 58 and of the farm novel, but also of the “coming-of-age

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novel” or even the border novel when Nicolaas becomes a soldier. The apocalyptic, or the dystopian, prisms are only two ways of reading a novel which is in fact a literary hybrid combining a large number of both international and South African genres. Yet, these prisms provide the more efficient way of looking at the novel because the other genres seem to be used only to the extent that they make the apocalyptic, and later the dystopian, work. Interestingly, when Kunkel tries to trace the literary affiliations of the dystopian and the apocalyptic, he makes the following distinction: “Dystopia, generally speaking, is a subgenre of the Gothic or horror novel, in which the hero or heroine discovers a barbaric truth (the nature of society) lurking beneath a civilized façade, and incurs the traditional Gothic-novel penalties of madness, isolation, ruin. . . . The apocalyptic narrative, on the other hand, derives genetically from the historical romance or adventure story.” 59 Because, as I have tried to show, Fever blends the apocalyptic and the dystopian, it also blends the different genres from which these are derived. In Fever, I argue, each genre has a different function: the apocalyptic lays emphasis on the redefinition of individual identities and the necessity of cooperation, while the dystopian offers a harsh critique of South African society. In other words, the aspects of Meyer’s novel which resort to the Gothic mode are linked, unsurprisingly, to the sharing of space. Meyer’s turn to speculative fiction in Fever might be accounted for by the genre’s close association to allegory; 60 in most, if not all, instances, speculative fiction does not so much speculate about the future as about the present. Meyer’s undated narrative therefore seems to be much more about the sharing of space and resources in present-day South Africa than about the country’s future. I have just used the term speculative fiction, rather than science fiction, to refer to Meyer’s Fever, in the wake of Atwood’s distinction between the two genres: What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, bloodsucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travels and such— things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. 61

Both genres have become widespread in South Africa, as Thurman has remarked: “There is a surprising amount of science-fiction or speculative fiction in South Africa which, like its counterparts elsewhere, often incorporates cutting-edge thinking about present-day ecological problems and possible consequences well in advance of more traditional genres. It also embodies a subversion of the commonly expressed perception that ecocriticism tends to

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valorize realism, to focus on “natural” factuality over myth, allegory and the generation of mentalités.” 62 Dan Wylie does not distinguish between speculative and science fiction here because both genres have tended to verge on the allegorical in the South African context. Yet, before discussing the ways in which science and speculative fiction have been used in post-apartheid white writing, I would like to briefly revert to the link between Gothic and science fiction. In their definition of “Gothic science fiction,” Sara Wasson and Emily Alder state that “the category ‘Gothic’, like ‘science fiction’, is notoriously slippery,” adding that “Gothic science fiction is arguably an oxymoron” because for some critics, like Darko Suvin, the Gothic is “fantastical while science fiction is rational.” 63 Yet, other critics see “science fiction and Gothic as firmly yoked,” 64 particularly in texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Suvin’s distinction has been increasingly challenged by the evolution of the Gothic as a mode. Furthermore, “the second reason science fiction and Gothic may seem mutually exclusive is their contrary relationships to time” 65 because Gothic tends to project anxieties onto the past while science fiction projects them onto the future. But this binary opposition, like the fantastical-rational one, has been challenged in recent decades, which “have seen complications of such neat differentiations,” 66 particularly in steampunk or cyberpunk. The crucial point Wasson and Alder make to define Gothic science fiction is the hybridity of both genres since their inception; even in the eighteenth century, Gothic fiction was hybrid, “incorporating and transforming other literary forms as well as developing and changing its own conventions in relation to newer modes of writing.” 67 Similarly, “the genre of science fiction is hybrid, invoking characteristics from pulp fiction, detective fiction and urban fantasy.” 68 Both genres, characterized by their adaptability and flexibility, are conjoined by their interest in “otherness and monstrosity.” 69 Such conjunction can be found, for instance, in the figure of the zombie. In the South African context, this figure has been successfully adapted by S. L. Grey’s Downside Trilogy 70 narratives which “delve, literally, beneath the surface of the postapartheid nation into a bizarre underworld below the foundations of Johannesburg,” 71 reworking the Gothic motif of the subterranean whose presence I already traced in chapter 4. Interestingly, the first volume of the trilogy, The Mall, locates zombification in what Lussault terms a hyperplace, the eponymous mall, which becomes the locus where “[t]he body-as-meat . . . grimly registers . . . a continuity between the divisions in the country of the present day, and those that defined South Africa’s past.” 72 Duncan’s analysis is crucial in showing how the figure of the zombie in recent South African fiction testifies to a “global taste for the gruesome” 73 and exemplifies the possibly intermedial influences which have led to the rise of Gothic science fiction. She highlights, in particular, the influence of Romero’s horror film Dawn of the Dead on Grey, 74 an influence which can

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be explained, I argue, by the political relevance of Romero’s film which, among the 1970s’ horror films, “is the most obviously concerned with race, ethnicity, and class.” 75 Romero himself stated that zombies “are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world,” 76 pointing to the political relevance of his horror films, in which the zombies “manifest the fate of the modern human figure—as Virilio and Serres imagine it: the socially abjected, the economically outcast, the homeless, workless, wretched, materially bound casualties of technocapitalist innovations.” 77 Such political relevance also characterizes Grey’s fiction, “a grisly attack on neo-liberal capitalist society, the stratifications of which, the narratives grimly insist, produce dehumanization and exploitation,” motifs which resonate “with the institutionalized violence enacted by the South African state during the long years of apartheid.” 78 The use of Gothic science fiction in the Downside trilogy therefore articulates a criticism of global capitalism with much more local concerns linked to the history of South Africa and demonstrates that Gothic science fiction combines science fiction’s concern with the future with the capacity of the Gothic to excavate the past. Sophie Didier argues that The Mall “plays on the tenuous limit between real and simulacrum à la Baudrillard in contemporary suburban South Africa” and reads the novel as a critique of the consumerist evolution of South African society. 79 The end of the novel, in particular, which pushes the idea of inversion to absurdity, reads as a grim criticism of consumerism and global suburbia: “We created a fantasy word for ourselves inside there, but this is the real world, outside, down below. The traffic jams, the flashing, seductive neon. That other place never existed; we can never escape.” 80 The political dimension of Grey’s novels, behind the apparent use of genre fiction, testifies to the capacity of Gothic science fiction to express and explore anxieties linked to modernity and progress, which explains why “[t]he Gothic mode is often deployed in science fiction preoccupied with the threatening nature of technology,” 81 as in Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland, which I analyze in detail in the next section of the chapter, or in Louis Greenberg’s Green Valley. 82 In Greenberg’s dystopian novel, the ironically named Green Valley is constructed as the ultimate non-place, a city-within-the-city whose inhabitants have chosen to live in full-time virtual reality. Its inhabitants, we gradually understand, can only experience reality through the mediation of technology, retreating to the comforts of virtual pleasures rather than having to face the real world. The novel blends genres: it is at once a detective story because Lucie Sterling, the protagonist, investigates the deaths of children who, she realizes, come from the supposedly impenetrable Green Valley; a thriller, because we follow Sterling’s search for her own niece; and of course, science fiction because the plot entirely relies on technological possibilities which are not available yet. The societal implications of Greenberg’s dystopia are fairly obvious: it explores our reliance on technology and questions the easy comforts provided

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by virtual worlds through a dialectics between surface and depth. But the novel also has a more directly political subtext: the (fictional) city Sterling lives in is divided into two supposedly impenetrable entities, Stanton and Green Valley, which are separated by a very real wall. But the boundaries between the “real” city and the “virtual” one gradually dissolve when the young woman realizes that the dead children whose deaths she has been investigating come from inside Green Valley, and when she finds out who has been taking them out—someone, it turns out, who wanted to save them from nightmarish technology. Sterling’s investigation thus leads her to unveil the violence underlying the supposedly ideal world of Green Valley—definitely not the “good place” 83 she thought it to be. It also leads to the dismantlement of Green Valley which becomes, in the final chapter, a tourist attraction. “Stanton city council was instituting a ticketing system, hastily erecting two more paid gantries before the wall was gone, Green Valley razed, and there was nothing left to see.” 84 Beyond the obviously futuristic and dystopian dimension of the novel, Green Valley can therefore be read as an (urban) allegory about apartheid. The non-places staged in the novel may be interpreted as futuristic rewritings of the spatial divisions of apartheid—which implies that Greenberg’s non-places are much past-oriented as future-oriented. Dystopia, it turns out, can also be a way of revisiting the past of South Africa, as I shall demonstrate in my reading of Beukes’ Moxyland. However, before turning to Moxyland, it is necessary to underline the political ambiguity of both Gothic and science fiction, which can either be subversive or conservative, and have no fixed political agenda: “Rather than imagining escape from hegemony, Gothic science fiction can also readily be pressed into the service of reactionary ideologies, particularly when xenophobically describing ‘others’ as threatening aliens, yearning nostalgically for an (imaginary) era of wholly ‘intact’ human bodies, romanticizing a preindustrial age or depicting humanity as under threat from malign forces that justify forceful state intervention.” 85 Such political ambivalence, or versatility, explains why genre-bending in white writing can display a variety of attitudes toward the new South Africa, so that each novel needs to be read closely, without imposing rigid generic grids on it. My analysis of the way in which Beukes and Henrietta Rose-Innes have explored non-places in the following sections of this chapter will take this political ambivalence into account. First, I will examine Beukes’ Moxyland as a representative example of the first kind of non-places I defined as the technological, ustopian nonplace, where alternative versions of the worlds are explored. This world will therefore be considered as a Foucaldian utopia, a projection of a world which does not exist. The second example is Rose-Innes’s Nineveh which stages, I will argue, the second type of non-place that can be found in post-apartheid white writing, that is, the haunted place. I will suggest that both novelists transform or uproot the city of Cape Town in different ways, either by turn-

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ing it into a futuristic dystopia or by highlighting its fundamental instability. In both cases, the city becomes a non-place rather than a place, which is a way for white writers to express an anxiety of unsettledness in post-apartheid South Africa. DYSTOPIA: LAUREN BEUKES’ CAPE TOWN AND GOTHIC TECHNOLOGIES IN MOXYLAND Moxyland, Beukes’s first novel, takes place in the near future, in a globalized South Africa. The main characters live in a futuristic version of Cape Town where people can circulate freely only if they have a mobile phone, which is used as an ID, a payment method, and a policing tool: people breaking the law are immediately located, identified, and punished; when found guilty of serious offences, they become “disconnect” [sic]. Being “disconnect” deprives them of almost all citizens’ right, but also has more practical consequences: it prevents them from finding food, accessing public transport, and even entering their own homes. The not-so-distant future described in Moxyland is therefore highly technological, and technology is clearly associated with power control, as shown by Louise Bethlehem, who reads the novel in the light of Foucault’s “disciplinary power.” In the novel, she argues, “the technology facilitates a certain configuration of social relations that produces the highly repressive spatial order.” 86 One of the most compelling aspects of the novels, she argues, “lies precisely in its imagining of the triangulation between sovereignty, spatiality and technology,” 87 which she analyzes from a decidedly political perspective. My own analysis of Beukes’s use of technology in Moxyland will be oriented in a slightly different way. I will argue that it does not only place the novel in the “science fiction” category, but also participates in the Gothicization of space and of her writing. Let me state immediately that Moxyland is not a Gothic novel proper, but it resorts to themes and narrative strategies that connect it to the Gothic: it resorts to the Gothic mode rather than to the Gothic genre. My contention will be that the Gothic mode enables Beukes to challenge a number of boundaries so as to express anxieties related to the post-apartheid condition. Placing technology at the core of her novel enables Beukes to simultaneously challenge the boundaries between “reality” and “fiction,” the boundaries of the subject, generic boundaries, and the boundary between “good” and “evil.” I will suggest that the fundamental ambiguities the novel reveals about technology express a deep anxiety about the future in general and the future of South Africa in particular. Technology will be used as the prism through which I will interrogate the “new South African” condition described in Moxyland.

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The futuristic world described in Moxyland is meant to create anxiety and to warn us against the totalitarian tendency of our globalized world. But what is so scary about this not-so-futuristic world is precisely its disturbing familiarity. The events that lead to the death of two of the four first-person narrators are made possible by technologies that seem totally familiar to us, first and foremost the mobile phone, which is turned into a weapon, sending electric shockwaves, and which can turn an individual into an outcast in just one second. In the best Gothic tradition, terror in Moxyland arises from a familiar object which is transformed into something strange and unfamiliar. This tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar is reinforced by the erasure of the South African identity of the city in which the action takes place, a barely recognizable version of Cape Town that might be any large twenty-first-century city. This defamiliarization of space partakes in the blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction but also between present and future. In Moxyland, Cape Town seems both totally familiar because real place names make it possible to locate most of the action in real-life Cape Town, and completely unrecognizable. This makes Moxyland a good example of the category of sci-fi “ustopias” defined by Atwood, ustopias that are “always concerned with contemporary social patterns,” “about now, and our projections, our fears, hopes and desires. Utopia is about our wish-fulfilment, fantasies, and dystopia is about what we secretly think might happen instead.” 88 From that point of view, Moxyland is more speculative fiction than science fiction. 89 Another major way in which the boundary between familiar and unfamiliar, but also between what is real and what is not, is redefined and challenged is linked to the part played by the Internet and by virtual worlds in the novel. The first example is the relationship between Tendeka and skyward,* which only takes place in the virtual world of Pluslife, a game that is clearly modeled on the real online game Second Life. In that world, the characters shape their identity and environment according to their wishes—Tendeka’s house, for instance, is ecofriendly, reflecting his political agenda. In that sense, Beukes’s novel seems to consider cyberspace as a significant aspect of the space of the city—which partakes in the Gothicization of the urban because, as Isabelle Van Elferen points out, cyberspace itself has Gothic features rooted in its liminality. 90 Van Elferen proposes what she calls a “cyberspace hauntology,” based on Jacques Derrida’s definition of hauntology in Specters of Marx: “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.” 91 Van Elferen argues that cyberspace works like “an inverted Gothic labyrinth” because “if a labyrinth destabilizes notions of location, cyberspace is a Gothic space par excellence,” “a vectral

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non-timespace.” 92 Including cyberspace and the interactions which happen there within the fabric of the fictional world therefore partakes in the Gothicization of Moxyland. However, in the novel, this supposedly virtual non-timespace is not merely virtual because it is through their respective avatars that skyward* and Tendeka plan the acts of terror Tendeka and his group perpetrate. Tendeka’s assertion that “here you can actually have an influence on the world” 93 displays the blurring of the boundary between the real and the virtual worlds, but also shows how powerless he feels in the real world. Paradoxically, both Pluslife and skyward* enable Tendeka to have an actual impact on the real world. Technology is therefore not merely synonymous with disembodied escapist happiness; it also leads to the very real violence of terrorism—a motif which resonates strongly in South Africa and confirms the fact that Moxyland is not merely about the future, but also about the present, and even about the past because terror and terrorism featured prominently in both South African life and its literary and artistic representations during apartheid. Tendeka might therefore be a kind of ghost from the past, the figure of the terrorist which has haunted white fiction for decades, as playfully suggested by Toby’s dismissive comments calling him a “Struggle revivalist” 94 or a “Mr. Steve Biko-wannabe.” 95 Another character, Toby, also illustrates the way in which technology blurs the boundary between the “real” and the virtual in Moxyland. Bethlehem describes him as “a flâneur for the digital age, his interiority a mere reflex of the screen that he wears. The ‘smartfabric’ of his ‘BabyStrange chamo coat’ broadcasts images but also records them for his video blog.” 96 Toby’s coat is both a screen and a recording device which he uses to try and become famous on the Internet: A gamer, he wrenches the category of “skin” out of its South African overdeterminations and into the lexicon of digital culture. His coat hints at this retooling. Its “smartfabric” transmits images . . . but also harvests them for his video blog. . . . Toby’s prosthetic sheath replays the surface-to-surface economies of urban space in the novel. It is a variant on the billboards that serve the informational relays of the city, and that will serve as sites of resistance on the part of the disenfranchised as the plot unfolds. The Cape Town of Moxyland is a skein of intersecting planes, flows, circuits and skins: organic and manufactured, digital and analogue, visible and invisible. It welds sovereignty—and spatiality—to technologies of governance. 97

Bethlehem convincingly analyzes the way in which technologies becomes means of control for the repressive state in Moxyland. However, I would also like to focus on a different aspect of Toby’s activities, which connects the real and virtual worlds. As Bethlehem notices, Toby is a gamer. When he needs money, he accepts receiving a salary to play

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games in people’s places to help them evolve faster in their virtual worlds. The first game is the eponymous Moxyland. The fact that the name of the game has been chosen as a title for Beukes’s novel despite its relative unimportance in the plot suggests a desire to emphasize the symmetry between the virtual world of the game, which is supposedly meant for children but where violence lurks behind every entry point and where “Moxy is always watching,” 98 and reality. Toby is also asked to play a hybrid game which is emblematic of the way virtual worlds overlap with reality in Moxyland. Fallen City Scorpions Elite 99 turns the world into hyperreality, in which simulacra replace reality. 100 Unlike Moxyland, Fallen City Scorpions Elite is not merely a video game; it is also played in real places. As “Agent Buzzkill,” Toby has a mission to fulfill. This mission consists in locating and subduing terrorists and disarming a bomb. Ironically, this supposedly virtual game leads him to a tube station where actual terrorists carry out a real terrorist action. A dizzying mirror effect between game and reality is thus created, especially as Toby has connections with the real-life terrorists. Technology backfires, and virtual worlds appear to be much less virtual than they seemed. Interestingly, the blurring of the boundary between “virtual” and “real” realities can be literally seen in the novel. Game instructions and online conversations between characters are signaled visually by the use of different fonts or of bold letters, as in the following passage, at the beginning of a chapter narrated by Tendeka: “Sent Messages Folder / — 17/09 23h09. Toby. Not answering UR phone. Did U get msg switching the meet. Damn SAPS. SIM denied entry @Don Pedros. Here it is again. RendezV @ 19 lwr main wdstock instead. Unimore Packing co warehouse. Call 4 directions if U need. No rush.” 101 The contrast between the passage and the rest of the text is made visually perceptible to the reader by the use of a font different from the one used in the rest of the novel, by the use of SMS parlance, and by the layout, with a blank space on the left of the page. Other examples of textual heterogeneity signaling the juxtaposition and interpenetration of real and virtual worlds include long online chats between Tendeka’s avatar in Pluslife and skyward*. One of these exchanges finishes with the following message from skyward*, who comments on Tendeka’s imminent terrorist acts: “it’s going to be beautiful. the city is a communications system. we’re going to be teaching it a new language.” 102 These lines can read both as a metafictional comment on the novel itself, in which narration itself is technologized and as a comment on the way in which the novel constructs the city as a network, a topology rather than a topography. 103 But far from simply evidencing the part played by twenty-first-century technology in Moxyland, Beukes’s repeated use of a multiplicity of “documents” can also be interpreted as a recourse to the classic Gothic strategy which consists in including various types of text—diaries, newspaper clippings, letters—within the narrative, as, for instance, in Bram Stoker’s Dracu-

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la. Such textual multiplicity contributes to making the boundaries between various levels of “reality” uncertain and suggests that reality itself is a “text.” This strategy also affects the individuals that people these overlapping worlds. The best example is Kendra, who becomes a simulacrum of sorts. Moxyland is not only speculative fiction, but it is also, undeniably, science fiction. The first chapter of the novel, told in Kendra’s voice, describes how she is “branded.” The “branding” Kendra accepts, a technological and experimental procedure, consists in being injected nanoparticles that “improve” her. The scientific dimension of the process is made explicit: It is performed in a lab, by a doctor, with a syringe, and involves an official signature with a “bio-sig pen.” Kendra is told that her body’s reaction is “probably the last time [she]’ll ever get sick.” 104 In exchange for this improvement, the soda brand which sponsors her, “Ghost,” appears in green, glowing letters, on the skin of her wrist: “This is her skin. The double swirl of the Ghost logo in mint and silver shines luminously from cells designerspliced by the nanotech she’s signed for.” 105 As a consequence, she becomes addicted to Ghost and has to drink some several times a day—a minor inconvenience compared to the positive effects of the technology, she is told. Here the conjunction of Gothic and science fiction in Moxyland seems to be illustrated: “Bodies are repeatedly invaded, penetrated, slashed, possessed, snatched, manipulated and controlled in the horrors that link Gothic and science fiction.” 106 By accepting to be a “ghost girl,” Kendra relinquishes part of her freedom of choice and becomes “controlled” by the brand. This implies that in Moxyland the technology which improves Kendra clearly has a posthuman dimension. By being branded—pun probably intended by Beukes—Kendra is transformed from the inside and her identity is redefined. Bethlehem argues that “[t]he commercial sign will not so much be inscribed on an antecedent surface, as thicken the legibility of that surface. . . . Throughout the novel, the observing gaze will alight on surfaces which do not conceal an occulted interiority just out of reach, as it were. Here as elsewhere, Moxyland will persistently defer the gratification of the depth charge.” 107 I argue, instead, that, even if the focus appears to be on skin and surface, through this individual redefinition, the question of the limit of the individual body is raised. Like the machines described by Donna Haraway in her Cyborg manifesto, that “have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed,” 108 Kendra’s posthuman identity raises disturbing questions about the boundaries of the individual, the boundaries between nature and technology, but also about artistic creation and social boundaries. The reason why Kendra has been chosen as a brand ambassador is the fact that she is an artist. Paradoxically, as a photographer, she works with oldfashioned material, mainly a nondigital camera and films which must be printed in a dark room. This makes her an outsider in the digital society she

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lives in, thus creating a tension between the technological identity her branding gives her and her refusal of technology in her artistic practice. Such a contradiction, in turn, raises questions about her ethics: Why accept the branding procedure when she consistently refuses technology as a photographer? Her ambiguous relationship to technology is reinforced by the fact that, even if she works with nondigital material, her relation to her camera can be described through the prism of technology. Her camera is repeatedly described as an extension of her body; her primary reaction when she faces a shocking situation is generally to grab it and take pictures. The camera is therefore constructed as an extension of her body, a kind of third eye, and a technological apparatus which enables her to domesticate a disturbing reality—she herself calls it her “everyday filter on the world.” 109 In other words, her camera becomes a prosthetic eye—all the more so as photography and photographs help define her identity. This is made explicit, for instance, by her “Self-portrait,” described as her favorite piece in the group exhibition she is preparing: “It is a print from a rotten piece of film. Two meters by three and a half. It came out entirely black.” 110 This photograph seems proleptic as it prefigures the final obliteration of Kendra, who becomes a true “ghost” at the end of the novel. In that sense, Beukes’s choice of photography is not neutral; photography is a form of technology related to hauntology, as suggested by Roland Barthes’s choice of the word spectrum to designate what is being photographed—“an articulation of death and spectacle.” 111 Choosing photography as Kendra’s artistic medium might therefore be read as a Gothic strategy pointing to the spectrality of identity. Before being branded, Kendra was already, in a way, a “Ghost girl,” an outsider haunting the technologized city. The black print used as Kendra’s “self-portrait” also raises the question of how reality is represented and how various technologies can create imitations of reality. From that perspective, Kendra’s definition as a ghost girl can be read in another light: Kendra herself might be a simulacrum. Her hyperreal image does not only replace the real one; it prefigures and shapes it. It is certainly no coincidence if Kendra describes her own posthuman nature by comparing it to photography and to “hyper-realism.” 112 As a posthuman being, she is also a simulacrum that replaces reality but is soon, paradoxically, eliminated from it. More generally, photography, as a visual technology, is the apt artistic metaphor to connect Moxyland to Gothic because of the Gothic genre’s connection to visual technologies. 113 But if we return to our idea of science fiction, the character of Kendra also testifies to the evolution of the Gothic mode. In Moxyland the “monster” ceases to be a figure of horror and abjection but becomes, instead, a “metaphor of change and possibility, a model to be imitated and affirmed rather than abhorred.” 114 Perceived as a monster by Tendeka, who tells her “You’re

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a fucking lab rat. A corporate bitchmonkey! You make me sick!” 115 Kendra simultaneously becomes the object of Toby’s envy—an ambiguity which illustrates the two faces of the contemporary Gothic monster, both repulsive and seductive. Her ambiguity, her position as both a sellout and an artist, reflects a deeper ambiguity perceptible in the novel: the blurring of the boundary between good and evil, which is at the core of Gothic. Gothic monstrosity is about reaffirming boundaries. The monster is the one who helps reaffirm boundaries in a given cultural system, particularly in contexts of cultural change: “monsters show us how a culture delimits its own boundaries, how it sees itself; what it respects and desires is revealed in these portraits of scorn and disgust.” 116 But in Moxyland, the cultural system itself is unstable or unidentified. In the globalized world of the novel, it seems that technology and capitalism, and not national belonging, are the bases of collective identity. Kendra therefore emerges as a paradoxical monster because she is the product of that system: her branding makes her more an insider than an outsider, but she is expelled, or erased, from it at the end of the novel, which turns her into an example of the unwanted monster eliminated at the end of the narrative to reaffirm the boundaries of collective identity. This ambiguous status might be linked to her identity as an artist, or it might be a trace of the absorption of monsters in contemporary culture, where Gothic is becoming mainstream and where spectrality has become the norm. Or she might conform to Fred Botting’s suggestion that in postmodern societies “monsters no longer render norms visible; they are the norm.” 117 Indeed, the fact that she becomes a brand ambassador and is used by Communique in a campaign of viral marketing because she is considered as “cool,” as someone whom people might want to imitate—by buying Ghost—suggests that her “ghostification” makes her the desirable norm. A monster, but a desirable one. But the ending of Moxyland implies that she is eliminated when she gets sick because the company does not want to take any risk. In other words, she is not only posthuman, 118 she has also become less than human as she is treated like the object she has become by being branded—an objectification she herself highlights at the beginning of the novel: “Trying not to think that I’m included in that definition now—just as much proprietary technology.” 119 In that sense, her posthuman status made possible by technology, makes her the hybrid combination of two classic Gothic characters: the young, innocent heroine and the monster. Such a combination precludes any possibility of a happy ending because as a monster she has to be eliminated. To fully understand Kendra’s monstrosity, we also need to contrast her with Lerato, another character, who appears as her double in many ways. In the end, Lerato appears as the real “monster” because of her total lack of feeling for anyone else than herself. She helps the terrorists but is finally reintegrated within the system and promoted, thus managing to get the best of both worlds. The opposition between Kendra and Lerato suggests

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that in Moxyland the boundary between normality and monstrosity is constantly redefined, and preconceptions are challenged. Such instability is a source of discomfort for the reader, who has trouble identifying the “good” and the “evil” characters. This sense of discomfort is reinforced by the final revelation that the terrorists are in fact manipulated by somebody from within the power structure, the unidentified and ironically named skyward*. Skyward*, as Lerato finds out too late, is not a terrorist at all: “Because the IP address for skyward* comes back to Communique’s corporate pipeline. To this building.” 120 This implies that the villain in the story might not be a character, or a group of characters, but capitalism itself and technology. The conjunction of capitalism and technology is embodied by Dr. Precious and by Andile, the man who “sold” Kendra to Communique. These two characters are relatively minor ones and seem to be mere representatives of a dehumanized system where technology and capitalism have overcome everything else. The Gothic figure of the “mad scientist” has thus undergone a major metamorphosis: The mad scientist is not a mad individual whose hubris is finally punished at the end of the novel as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. 121 Instead, it is unregulated capitalism itself which seems to be both archvillain and mad scientist. The monstrous nature of the “system” explains another Gothic aspect of the novel: the fact that the characters seem isolated, cut off from their families. Parents are either dead or absent—or dysfunctional, as in Toby’s case, which is typical of Gothic fiction. “There are few families in Gothic fiction. Mothers are long dead, often before the start of the novel, and fathers rarely stay the course. Parentless children are left to roam the wild, gloomy landscapes without protection or property and often without the secure sense of themselves that comes with proper name and position.” 122 In Moxyland, the characters are either self-created (or rather self-recreated) or recreated by technology. In Gothic fiction, the absence of parents made the heroes vulnerable to villains. The absence of the young heroine’s parents enabled villains to capture her and force her to get married. In Moxyland, the traditional Gothic family pattern is transformed: First, the young heroine, Kendra, is not forced to marry a man, but a company—and she does it willingly. The objectification already perceptible in Gothic fiction’s predilection for forced marriages where women are commodified by the paternal order is thus literalized, as Kendra becomes reified through the use of technology, as suggested by the term branded. The second alteration of the Gothic in Moxyland lies in the nature of the villain. Technology is the means used by the “evil father,” that is, the company, to assert power over the individual. No happy ending, no recovery, is possible. The ending can be read as a parody of the final restoration of order in Gothic fiction. “Order” prevails from the company’s perspective as its

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power is reinforced—but Kendra dies. Yet, and this is another element which partakes in the blurring of the boundary between good and evil, the ending is ambiguous because of the viral contamination of Toby by the Ghost nanoparticles: “As the novel draws to a close, the surface economies it projects increasingly pivot on forms of viral replication and, indeed, of contagion that are far from merely digital.” 123 Toby, an ambiguous figure who navigates between outside and inside the system, is turned into a posthuman being too, probably after having had sex with Kendra. The question which remains at the end of the narrative is therefore what he will do with this new posthuman identity: has he been reified, like Kendra, or will this technological improvement, which blurs the boundary between nature and technology, be the starting point of a new behavior? On another level, this contagion also means that technology survives the individual in which it was initially planted. Monstrosity has become contagious, sexually transmitted, and because of—or thanks to—that, the “monster” has not been totally evacuated at the end: Kendra is dead but not the technology which had been planted inside her. This adds to the ambiguity of the narrative regarding technology and its relationship to good and evil. Incidentally, it might also be read as a vampiric undercurrent in the novel because the technology was injected into Kendra’s blood and migrated to Toby’s body. Through this vampiric undercurrent, the idea that emerges is that technology and capitalism are equated with a contagious disease which is not easily eliminated and which it is not merely a technological phenomenon but a living entity. I would like to go back, then, to the beginning, and to the uncanny. In Limits of Horror Botting relies on Mladen Dolar’s idea that “the uncanny ‘constantly haunts’ modernity ‘from the inside’”; he states that the uncanny registers “social and political transformations” and “becomes an effect of a disturbed present, a present affected by massive upheaval and transformation.” 124 It can be suggested that the Gothic strategies used by Beukes do express anxiety. But below the surface of a narrative explicitly exploring anxieties about a globalized future, there might lie a deeper anxiety about the identity of the South African nation. Kendra, the branded individual whose identity is challenged, modified, and finally destroyed by technology, might be a synecdoche of the entire South African nation, whose identity has been radically modified in the last two decades by its reentry into a globalized world after years of apartheid and partial boycott. My final argument, then, is that technology is a screen which hides the real nature of the anxiety expressed in the novel. As Beukes herself states in “Moxyland’s Stem Cells,” the book also “grew out of the legacy of apartheid.” 125 Beyond the positive aspects of the new South Africa lies a more or less hidden fear of dissolution. The gory description of Tendeka’s final melting, literally dissolving and flowing out of the boundaries of his body, 126 indicates a fear of technology and a criticism of capitalism gone mad, but it might also be read as giving

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literary shape to a deeper fear about the dissolution of South African identity in a globalized world. And yet, the novel articulates this Gothicization of capitalism with a historically grounded critique of apartheid society; as Bethlehem has remarked, the function of cellular phones, which police the borders and locates the citizens, is similar to that of passbooks during apartheid: “A kind of digital passbook, the armed cellular phone renders infringement and retribution simultaneous. . . . That the passbook ghostwrites Beukes’ representations of a segregated corporate-apartheid state is no coincidence. Moxyland draws much of its humor and some of its frisson from the friction it maintains with the apartheid past.” 127 The novel even rewrites literary genres associated with the apartheid era because its plot “playfully restages the novel of resistance whose ‘rhetoric of urgency’ constituted the dominant of apartheid-era literature” and as Beukes’s “treatment of resistance is better seen as congruent with the strategies of the comic book.” 128 Moxyland does not merely explore a dystopian future but also revisits a dystopian past as well, particularly in the Lerato subplot, which “introduces historical continuity into the temporal rupture created by the futurism” of the novel, which is “saturated with the ghostly traces of South Africa’s traffic in bodies.” 129 That Bethlehem expresses Moxyland’s relationship to typically South African literary genres and motifs and generic instability in spectral terms shall not surprise us. It testifies to the Gothicity of recent white writing, in which genre is often used and subverted by resorting to ghostly tropes. Moxyland thus transforms Cape Town into a non-place, a ustopian, Gothicized version of the city which displays the destabilization of identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Beukes’s following novel, Zoo City, also testifies to this hybridization of genres and Gothicization of place, between the global and the local, as I have shown in chapter 4. De Kock compares Zoo City to Rose-Innes’s Nineveh, arguing that they both emphasize their protagonists’ “unhomeliness”: both “are literally unhomed at the conclusion of their stories, although this state is a mere continuation, if an intensification, of their initial positions. The conditions of their lives underscore generational drift and uprooting amid scenes of social decay that are amped up to a degree that borders on the carnivalesque.” 130 De Kock’s comment lays emphasis on the link between generic instability and the characters’ “unhoming,” thus highlighting the way in which the defamiliarization of the space of the city expresses a sense of uprooting which also destabilizes the genericity of the text. De Kock adds that “Zoo City, like Nineveh, is a book that shakes up the realistic elements it convincingly presents; it is a fabulated remix that transports the reader into an altered register of speculation, a ‘what if’ that posits defamiliarized, fresh nuances of being in postapartheid city spaces.” 131 It is precisely the link between “fabulated remix” and post-apartheid city spaces which I explore in the next sec-

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tion, which analyzes how Rose-Innes also turns Cape Town into a nonplace—not a dystopian version of the city, but a transient and haunted one, in which the characters’ sense of “unhoming” reflects white South Africans’ anxieties in the Gothic mode. GENERIC AND SPATIAL THRESHOLDS: HENRIETTA ROSE-INNES’S BORDER-CROSSINGS Rose-Innes’s Nineveh seems to Gothicize the space of Cape Town. Shane Graham’s reading of the novel, for instance, emphasizes its staging of various anxieties about “hidden depths” linked to “the themes of infestation and buried pasts” 132 in a way which is reminiscent of my analysis of urban spaces in chapter 4—which is not surprising in a novel which is not exactly detective fiction but does play on the code of detection: Katya does not investigate a murder, but she has to follow a lead to find the “culprits” who invade Nineveh. 133 Graham shows, in particular, how the various subterranean spaces Katya, the main protagonist, uncovers and crosses, unsettle her perception of space and her own identity. Although Graham never uses the term Gothic, his reading of Nineveh decidedly evokes the Gothic mode in its emphasis on the hidden and the subterranean in relation to anxiety and unhoming. The association between Katya’s anxiety and a desire to “police borders and keep things in their place” 134 evokes, in particular, the tension between the personal and the political in the Gothicization of the city which was analyzed in chapter 4. Graham concludes that “insofar . . . as RoseInnes’ novel reflects contemporary anxieties over the encroachments of global capitalism and its technologies of surveillance and control, it also reveals to us the blind spots and interstices that inevitably disrupt those technologies in an unsustainable and entropic world system,” 135 adding that “the cultural anxieties that drive Nineveh are not about entrenched inequalities and panoptical social control, but about invasion and infiltration, entropy and disintegration.” 136 Yet, I would like to show here how Nineveh goes beyond the Gothicization of space through a logic of excavation and emphasizes, instead, motifs linked to border-crossings which displace both the anxieties expressed in the novel and the genres which are incorporated into it. This reading will involve a comparison with other novels by Rose-Innes and a detour via the world of fairy tales—an echo of De Kock’s description of the novel as “fable-like.” 137 My goal is to explore Rose-Innes’s sense of “earthbound alienation,” a phrase she used to describe her own fascination for J. G. Ballard’s writing. 138 The trope which seems appropriate to read Rose-Innes’s “Gothic poetics” 139 in Nineveh is that of “crossing.” 140 Crossing is a complex and contradictory process, which both connects and separates two entities—two places,

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two people, or two moments in time—and takes on a particular resonance in South Africa because apartheid was a system entirely based on frontiers and boundaries—racial, social, and spatial. Since its demise, the country has been trying to redefine itself. As Michael Chapman puts it in his introduction to SA Lit beyond 2000, “African society, indeed South African society, is not monolithic. The categories require new definitions.” 141 In this context, many writers have been concerned with attempting to find new forms of “literal and figurative mapping, of space, place and memory,” 142 as I have suggested in the previous chapters. In their attempt to map new identities for themselves and for the country South African writers have often been led to emphasize border-crossing, both at the thematic and literary levels. Indeed, crossing boundaries is part of the process of finding an identity for oneself and for one’s country. In Nineveh, and more generally in Rose-Innes’ novels, crossing becomes a complex process, in turn literal and metaphorical, successful or incomplete. The complexity of the process is also reinforced by the protean nature of what is crossed: thresholds, borders, or boundaries, of course, but also broad spaces, tunnels, or buildings. Taking this complexity into account, I would like to examine how some of Rose-Innes’ novels, in particular Shark’s Egg and Nineveh, articulate crossings, both literal and metaphorical, and identity, to show that she privileges spaces of transition and in-betweenness, not in the optimistic mood caused by post-apartheid liberation but to express anxieties about the present state of South Africa—although not in a completely pessimistic way either. This will lead me to show that these novels cross the boundaries between literary genres to explore and redefine white South African identity in post-apartheid South Africa. My starting point will be Shark’s Egg, a novel I have already examined in chapter 2 to show how it stages unhomely homes. The novel focuses on Joanna/Anna, first a girl, then a young woman, and on her relationships with Leah, a former school friend who reappears in her life once she is an adult, and with Alan, the man she loves. As I have already shown, the relationship between Joanna and Leah shapes the novel, as Leah progressively takes Anna’s place, dressing like her and replacing her in Alan’s affections. The final scene, which shows Anna choosing to withdraw and abandon Alan to Leah, who incidentally “looks just like [her],” describes the crossing of an invisible line, the tearing of a membrane: “Closing the door on Leah and Alan, she severed with only the smallest tearing pain the membrane that stretched between herself and them.” 143 She thus becomes an outsider, but this position is described as a source of liberation because Anna feels “jittery, startled, hopeful” and starts running toward an unknown but bright future epitomized by the “glittering day.” 144 Interestingly, the ending is a reversed echo of the opening scene, which involved the eponymous shark’s egg found by Joanna on the beach and prized open once at home: “Inside, the embryo is

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still alive, a perfect little shark no bigger than a new tadpole. It gapes and thrashes its tail, at last expires. Her mother wraps the whole thing in toilet paper and throws it in the rubbish. Joanna is shaken, and for days feels deeply guilty. But also powerful: she has killed a shark.” 145 By crossing the protective membrane of the egg, Joanna has transgressed another major boundary, the one which separates life from death, which explains why she feels so uncomfortable with her own gesture. Despite this, she identifies with sharks, and because her mother tells her that they have to keep on moving because if they stop swimming, “they sink and die. It’s sink or swim for sharks,” “Joanna keeps moving—in the bath, eating her supper, even when she lies down to sleep—so that she will not sink and die. Playing alone in the big garden, she swims like a shark across the lawn, scaring up the birds/ . . . She thinks: I am like that. They are like me. She thinks: I will never stop moving.” 146 It can be argued that at the end of the novel, she is symbolically reborn after crossing the membrane, as shown by her final “running, the gradient pulling her faster and faster, flying.” 147 Metaphorically, Anna has also gone through the looking glass, by tearing herself apart from Leah. Crossing the mirror is therefore a form of liberation: she has asserted her identity. Conversely, because the initial scene led to the death of the shark embryo, it can also be suggested that she has, in fact, crossed the boundary not toward life but toward death. This undecidability characterizes most of Rose-Innes’s novels. Nineveh seems to stage a similar process of ambiguous self-discovery. The main protagonist, Katya, whose job it is to eradicate insects and pests from gardens and homes, accepts to work for Mr. Brand, a rich investor, to help him get rid of the goggas (an Afrikaans word for “bugs”) that have been plaguing his gated estate. The whole novel is placed under the sign of porosity and explores, as Graham points out, the twin motifs of “subterranean caves and excavations” and “fear of invasion and contamination,” which “converge” to express a number of anxieties. 148 In the novel, clearly, boundaries are first asserted before being gradually revealed as porous. Even going into Nineveh at the beginning involves crossing a boundary: “Two giant lanterns are supported on bulky gateposts, but their light does not extend far into the gloom. Beyond the gate, the walls and the road and the trail of lights disappear. It’s impossible to tell what lies on the other side. . . . She has a powerful sense that there really is nothing there, that the street-map did not lie when it showed a blank. That they’ve reached the edge of the map and are about to drop off.” 149 Clearly, here, what is emphasized is a sense of mystery and impenetrability, which surprises Katya because of the immediate environment of the compound: Zintle had mentioned that the land was reclaimed. Katya wonders how much of the wetlands they had to drain, how many thousands of vertebrate and

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In both examples, the sense of crossing boundaries and the sense of porosity are conveyed through Katya’s perspective, suggesting that what is involved in these crossings is also her own place in Nineveh, where she explicitly wants to belong. But in the end, she finds out first that she does not, in fact, belong—a sense of unbelonging which is expressed through the Gothic lexicon of “fortress” and “battlements”: “Behind it, Nineveh looms like an ice fortress. Approach is everything, she thinks: how different this landscape seems if you come to it from the outside, through a village of shacks. How things change, according to the routes one takes to them. She can hardly believe she belongs behind those battlements.” 151 Despite being perceived by Katya as a “fortress,” Nineveh cannot resist intrusion—an intrusion which has been organized, she finds out, by her own father, Len, who used to work for Mr. Brand and has been living in the basement of her apartment block since the beginning. Katya thus discovers the place’s porosity, epitomized in the nine tiles she bought from the girl and which had been smuggled out of Nineveh: “They have travelled mysteriously to get here: passing through the walls of Nineveh and back again. This place is not as impermeable as she had thought. There are channels, trade routes out and in. And now she has made herself part, in a small way, of these illicit transactions. As if she’s stolen these things herself.” 152—Here, like previously, porosity is associated with a sense of mystery, so that the porous space of Nineveh becomes the locus where Katya can project a sense of unplaceable guilt onto it, as suggested by the final comparison. Just as Shark’s Egg centered on Anna’s gradual dissociation from Leah, Nineveh can be read as the narrative of Katya’s coming to terms with her father, who is also constructed as a double throughout the novel. Even if Katya is a woman and Len a man, she feels uncomfortably like him, an impression which is conveyed through internal focalization, again as in Shark’s Egg, but not exclusively through Katya’s own point of view. For instance, when Katya finds herself with her sister and talks to her, Alma reacts in the following way: “it’s their father’s voice that Alma hears when Katya speaks like that.” 153 When Katya is with Len, she looks at him and “sees herself: aged, desexed, capering. It’s an old, familiar mirror and a cruel one. Dad.” 154 But what happens in Nineveh enables Katya to reaffirm the boundary between herself and her father, so that she stops seeing herself as his female double: “when Katya looks at him she sees an old man, far more wounded than she will ever be. Scars form a kind of barrier between them

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now: out in the open, on the skin, clear for anyone to see.” 155 Here, the process of separation between daughter and father is expressed in spatial terms, the scars becoming a “barrier” between them, “on the skin.” The text relies on motifs which resonate ambiguously in post-apartheid South Africa, as Len’s difference if being reasserted by his “skin,” thus erecting a “barrier” between them. But the boundaries between father and daughter also involve other kinds of crossings: noticing the gender politics at play in the novel, Ken Barris argues that both Katya and Len emerge as gender-fluid figures; “Len is a trickster: although intensely male, he is also equally generative of chaos,” 156 thus challenging the notion of “the planned city as an expression of a masculine order.” 157 Katya, on the other hand, seems to be rather gender-fluid, as her reflections about the effect wearing her uniform has on her: “She becomes cockier, more aggressive, but in the passive way of a servant. Also more stylized in her movements and her words: acting out the role of a working man. It’s heady. But peel off her boiler suit and she’s soft again, a lamb, a girl.” 158 Nineveh therefore “constructs zones of instability invested in both gender and architecture as a complex and productive seam, and in which mechanistic and organic worlds (not to mention views of the world) collide with productive violence.” 159 The other side of Katya’s self-affirmation involves the necessity of letting go of her home, a process which is initiated early in the novel when she leaves her city house, which is itself not a stable, safe home but a place gradually destroyed by cracks probably caused by the demolition site on the other side of the road. Katya also eventually leaves Nineveh and settles in the van she uses for work: “She drives, she drives. There is no rush now, no particular place to go. No permanent address. Katya’s sleeping in the van these days.” 160 Such unsettledness is paradoxically presented as the best way to come to terms with Cape Town, a city characterized by its transient nature and by the porosity of borders, with a similarity between the transiency of collective and individual identities: Everything’s in motion, changed and changing. There is no way to keep the shape of things. One house falls, another rises. Throw a worn brick away and someone downstream will pick it up and lay it next to others in a new course in a new wall—which sooner or later will fall into ruin, giving the spiders a place to anchor their own silken architecture. Even human skin, Katya has read, is porous and infested, every second letting microscopic creatures in and out. Our own bodies are menageries. Short of total sterility, there is no controlling it. 161

The ending of the novel again associates the motif of identity with fluidity or restlessness, and, as in Katya’s perception of her father, skin and space seem to be equated, suggesting, once again, that spatial readjustments also affect personal identity.

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Both Nineveh and Shark’s Egg seem to end in a similar way: The female protagonist, having separated herself from a threatening double and left what was her home until then, finally seems to break free from what held her in the same place. This capacity to unroot oneself in a rather positive way at the end of Nineveh is described by Barris as the “energy of the margins,” which enables Katya to feel “uniquely equipped to rescue the situation” 162 and to come to terms with her own uprootedness. Her sense of permanent displacement, which maps the city, provides it with an identity. Like footsteps in de Certeau’s conception of the city, Katya’s wanderings “give their shape to spaces. They weave places together” and “form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ They are not localized; it is rather that they spatialize.” 163 In that sense, Cape Town, in Nineveh, becomes the archetype of the city, that is, “an immense social experience of lacking a place—an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.” 164 Cape Town can be described as a city in flux, 165 which comes both from its past and from its more recent history, as Damon Galgut explains in “My Version of Home”: “part of the local population is always in flux, always passing through. So some of the volatility, the sense of impermanence, from the old days has lasted”; as a consequence, “[i]n many ways the mountain is Cape Town’s most permanent feature; everything else is in a state of flux and flow. Not even the sea has stayed where it was.” 166 It is quite significant that Rose-Innes also chose to dwell on places of impermanent settlement in her contribution to Stephen Watson’s volume about Cape Town as seen by its writers. Titled “Five Sites,” the chapter includes descriptions of the makeshift homes people make “in unlikely places—where there should be no homes. . . . I’ll call them ‘sites’ because they remind me or archaeological sites: places that vanished inhabitants once marked out as theirs, that mutely present the physical evidence of lives.” 167 Rose-Innes’s minute descriptions of these “sites” are intertwined with her definition of what the city of Cape Town means to her. Her choice is justified by the fact that to her, Cape Town “has softer, more porous edges than most urban areas—edges that allow the odd solitary soul to be absorbed, to disappear. Such sites can be confusing, disorientating. They extend the city into the fringes of the world, but they also bring the wildness closer to home, blurring the transition.” 168 Such a choice emphasizes Rose-Innes’s taste for places characterized by flux and impermanence and explains why Cape Town emerges as a place characterized by transiency and porousness in Nineveh, as she herself explained in an interview with Katie Reid: “Yes—Nineveh is about flux. Not uni-directional change, but the need to accept that the world (especially the urban environ-

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ment) is unstable; that disorder is inevitable and not something necessarily to be feared. Those concerns are, of course, informed by our historical experience in South Africa. Central to the ideology of the old regime was the belief in, and the urge to enforce, rigid and unchanging categories.” 169 The sense that Cape Town is a city in flux in post-apartheid years can also be found in some of her other novels, like the more recent Green Lion. 170 Interestingly, Rose-Innes points to her fascination for Ballardian “vistas of man-made ruination” in her reading of Ballard’s work: “I’m not sure why these empty places captivate me, but I am by no means alone in this: a fascination—even a relish—for Gothic urban decay is a feature of our current cultural landscape.” 171 The fact that she associates such motifs with Gothicity reinforces the point I am trying to make, that is, the idea that Rose-Innes’s fictional spaces are Gothicized, as also suggested by the combination of the motifs of transiency and ruination in Nineveh. Nineveh is constructed by the narrative as a non-place, “so very new that it doesn’t exist yet—not in the Cape Town Street directory, and not on the maps in Katya’s head.” 172 It “exists in a parallel universe, where nothing is quite as it seems. Some slightly future Cape Town, perhaps, one that Toby, being young, instinctively inhabits.” 173 The place therefore seems to be a synecdoche for the sense of flux or transiency associated with Cape Town and becomes a non-place within a non-place. Nineveh’s destiny unsettles Cape Town’s identity as it becomes a “maze” and “a ruined city” 174 when the existence of the “lowceilinged underworld” in its subterranean parts takes over and destroys it. It may be argued that she also writes about a country in flux, a country where categories are constantly redefined and where identity needs permanent adjustment. That Katya’s job is pest-relocation is certainly significant in the South African context, where the term uncomfortably evokes the not-sodistant past of apartheid, when thousands of black and colored people were relocated to townships and peripheral areas around the cities or to artificially designated “homelands”—but also the more recent relocation or eviction of communities carried out by the Red Ants, a private security company specializing in clearing “illegal invaders” from properties. Nineveh, a “sterile” space with boundaries that supposedly cannot be crossed but finally crumble after an invasion can be read as a rather obvious metaphor for apartheid and its demise, but also as a way of writing back to apocalyptic novels, in which the fear of invasion featured prominently. Rose-Innes explicitly articulates the motif of relocation with the definition of identity, as when Katya has to rescue Mr. Brand from the hole he has fallen into: “What she sees before her is a situation she recognizes. A situation for which she is trained. It is a problem of too many categories of things colliding, of things in wrong places. It requires some sorting, some relocation. Humane, inhumane, whatever.” 175 The concept of relocation is here extended to people and clearly has to do with reassigning a proper place to those who have crossed boundaries

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they should not have—Mr. Brand having been defined, a few pages previous, as someone who, unlike Katya and Len, is not aware of the porosity and frailty of built walls and boundaries: One thing about having a belief in the fixed nature of things, in walls and floors: it gives you a certain disadvantage. Mr. Brand, for all his sold confidence, in fact, because of it, cannot look beyond the obvious, cannot see past the evidence of the concrete world. He can’t consider that perhaps the walls are false, or that the floorboards might conceal strange depths. Despite his rage, he would not think to punch through a wall: it would not occur to him that walls are breachable. In Mr. Brand’s world of certainties, such an inbetween place is hardly possible; it barely exists. 176

Unlike Mr. Brand, Katya herself is consistently depicted as having a taste for the in-between, the transient, the impermanent. When she first goes to Brand Properties, for instance, we learn of her taste for “parking garages, their inbetween feel. No matter how glossy the shopping precincts that lie above or below, the parking garage is always a brute dungeon of raw, concrete. Not a wild space, but not civilized, either.” 177 Parking garages are therefore perceived by Katya as Gothicized “dungeons,” but their “brute” quality becomes reassuring rather than frightening, and the place’s in-betweenness is thus endowed with positive connotations, preparing the reader for Katya’s gradual uprooting. Places constantly compose and recompose themselves in front of her eyes, which becomes a source of anxiety for her, as stated previously in the narrative: “Things change; the pieces move around. She doesn’t like it. She’s troubled by change.” 178 Rose-Innes thus expresses an anxiety characteristic of her generation about the fast pace of change in post-apartheid South Africa, an anxiety which she feels is absent from young people’s minds, as shown by the stability and resourcefulness of Katya’s nephew, Toby, or by the little girl with skinny plaits in Shark’s Egg. As Graham K. Riach remarks in his reading of Homing, “In Rose-Innes’s work, the interaction between landscape and inscape takes on its most compelling form in the repeated staging of homecomings and home-leavings”: In Rose-Innes’s stories, these movements appear as literal journeys out and back, up and down, but they come to take on the character of a recurring Freudian fort-da, moving from safety to danger and back, or from a position of comfort to discomfort and then returning. These deep-rooted dynamics between safety and threat are central to understanding Rose-Innes’s work, and take on a particular urgency when understood in the context of a South African literary imaginary, which has long been shaped by competing claims to the land. 179

The instability also marks the crossing of time spans and the tension between past and future displayed in the book of photographs of Cape Town Katya

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finds, which depicts a city characterized by permanent change: “Each person snapping the shutter had been trying to fix the city as it was, but there is no fixing such a shifting, restless thing as a discontented city.” 180 Graham contends that “Nineveh shows us the psychological effects of this constant state of impermanence and flux on city dwellers.” 181 It also paradoxically suggests that Katya is at home in Cape Town because on the one hand “her own roots are so shallow,” 182 and on the other, “the roots of the city, after all, do not run deep. A few meters down, and there you have it: raw mud, elemental.” 183 Katya’s rootlessness is expressed through a Gothicized tension between surface and depth, but also between civilization and wilderness: “She summons again that sense of downness—of space under the surface—that the filthy hole across the road has opened up inside her. Depth, which the city conceals with its surface bustle. You forget what’s underneath. A sudden vision of the deeps beneath the city, alive with a million worms, with buried things.” 184 Cape Town is thus depicted again as a city characterized by its verticality and by a tension between surface and depth, a feature which is therefore not specific to Johannesburg but also seems to characterize the other large South African city. This tension Gothicizes the city, which seems to be haunted by the underground world Katya feels beneath her. Cape Town becomes a non-place, haunted by sometimes very material ghosts which Katya has the ability to perceive. This ability, which evinces a capacity to connect to different times simultaneously, already characterized Joanna/Anna in Shark’s Egg, as shown, for instance, by her reaction after Robbie Du Plessis’s epileptic fit: “Joanna saw death behind him as he walked: a grey shadow creeping up to flick some fatal switch at the back of his head. She wanted to touch him now, hold his skull in her hands, place herself between him and danger. Because she was a shadow too, and could see things invisible to others: ghosts lounging in the corridors, darkness inside the sunlight.” 185 “A shadow too,” she is also described, a few pages later, as a ghost: “Less than a mouse, less than a bird: I am a ghost, a pair of eyes only.” 186 To perceive ghosts and superimposed temporalities you need to be a ghost yourself 187 —just as, in Nineveh, to perceive the rootlessness of the city, and its “hauntology,” you need to be uprooted and haunted. The instability of identity is also emphasized by the blurring of the boundaries between various categories of being, as in the following example from Nineveh, in which Katya “feels half-frog, half-girl, lapping at the moisture in the air, so dense and rich. Her frog skin is wet and alive. She bounds over to the giant gates on frog legs, clutches the bars with frog fingers, throat pulsing with excitement. Home!” 188 Katya’s hybrid identity, half-human, half-animal, is also contained in the nickname her father gives her: Katyapillar— which sheds new light on the opening of the book, in which Katya and Toby relocate caterpillars and may explain why, when they are called again at the end of the novel because the caterpillars have returned to Mr. Brand’s former

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house, “As Katya and Toby and the caterpillars head on out onto the highway, she has the feeling that all of them have pulled off a great escape.” 189 The seeming equation between Katya, Toby and the caterpillars, which are stylistically put on the same level, suggests a similarity between them, blurring the boundaries between the animal and the human kingdoms, an impression which was also conveyed previously in the novel when Katya reevaluated her relationship with her father in the light of their recent interactions: “For the first time in her life, she wonders: is it her father who plagues her, or is it she who plagues her father? Perhaps all this time she’s been the one: the pest, the infestation, the thing he cannot winkle out or shake off or eradicate. The one that keeps on turning up again, spoiling things. And look at this pain she’s brought him now.” 190 Another example is Alan in Shark’s Egg, who is repeatedly animalized when described through Anna’s eyes, as in the following passage about his skin: “The flesh of some densely muscled animal: a horse, a shark.” 191 The use of metaphor erases the process of comparison, as if Alan really was a horse or a shark—a significant image because Joanna herself identifies with sharks, as already mentioned. Rose-Innes’s style itself also reflects an emphasis on crossing in the rather systematic use of similes, a figure of speech which does not erase the “crossing” process between the tenor and the vehicle, perhaps the trace of her desire not to set a binary opposition between the elements which are compared. Through both similes and metaphors, the space which separates the two words connected by the figure of speech is crossed and a new, hybrid entity is created. Crossing thus becomes a creative process. Interestingly, many of Rose-Innes’s metaphors or similes involve a crossing of the boundaries between species or types, and more generally between nature and civilization. For instance, Katya’s perception of Toby is repeatedly conveyed by animal or vegetal images: his teeth are “like a puppy’s,” 192 he has “spidery limbs”; 193 when they go to Newlands forest, “she thinks again that he is like a young tree,” that he “has a kind of springy resilience, like green wood. And there is the vegetable greenness of the veins beneath his skin, his slightly sappy body scent. I’m a vegan now, he told her recently. Perhaps that’s why he’s growing so fast: photosynthesis.” 194 The vegetal imagery is particularly recurrent in Katya’s perception of Toby; here it shifts from simile (“like a young tree”) to metaphor as he seems to actually become a plant—a metaphor which recurs a few pages later as Katya thinks that “[h]e is a new plant butting up from the soil, pushing her aside: her own roots are so shallow.” 195 In the process, Katya herself is equated with a plant, and the boundaries between the human and the vegetal are imaginatively crossed. The transiency of Cape Town, the sense of impermanence and porosity consistently constructed throughout the narrative, seem to pervade its inhabitants, whose identity becomes unstable and porous as well. These themes are taken up again in Green Lion, Rose-Innes’s next novel, which was conceived

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of by Rose-Innes as the second volume in a “loose trilogy” 196 which started with Nineveh and will continue with Stone Plant. Even if the novel is bleaker, it also emphasizes the porous boundaries between nature and the city, which are characteristic of Cape Town according to Rose-Innes herself, who claimed her interest in its “overlapping zones: between urban and wilderness (the mountain, and sea); rich and poor, old and new. I am interested in exploring these in-between spaces.” 197 She also underlines the sense of danger inherent in these in-between zones where wilderness and so-called civilization overlap and where “muggings and attacks happen frequently now” so that she doesn’t “feel safe exploring these places alone. . . . Dreams of retreat into idyllic wilderness crumble when the wilderness turns out to be not as uninhabited as imagined, nor as gentle.” 198 Interactions between urban and supposedly “wild” spaces are thus construed as both characteristic of Cape Town and a source of possible danger and discomfort. The city therefore becomes a contact zone between nature and culture, which “inverts the usual relation between the built environment and the environs that the natural world has built. It continues to offer something which almost all other cities in the twenty-first century have lost—a home in which human beings do not have to suffer the exile of being a species so dominant that they have obliterated all but the signs, the scars, of their own presence. Even in the midst of its downtown streets, the stone world has not yet become completely other. Nor—still more addictively—has the green world become other here.” 199 Watson calls this interface between the urban and the natural world “an anti-world, the shadow of a realm that is neither distant nor fallen—or not yet. It is built not only by thousands of wild flowers and reed grasses, by sky and weather, but also by a certain quality of light.” 200 Under the influence of this anti-world, and of the southeaster, “all of Cape Town loses its anchorage and becomes a place as unfinished as it ever was in its colonial beginnings . . . and almost unique in its power to afflict its citizens with a homesickness even while they continue to live there.” 201 Rose-Innes’s Gothicized and fluid version of Cape Town therefore seems to reflect the sense of homelessness, or uprootedness, shared by its inhabitants, and the ambivalence of the city, which is “at best ambivalently urban, given the topography of the city and the aesthetic forces of its natural environs, and ambivalently modern, given its geospatial isolation and economic history.” 202 Such emphasis on “seams” and liminality is reflected in the very form of Rose-Innes’s novels, whose cross-generic nature I am now going to analyze. Indeed, the narrative strategies implemented by Rose-Innes enable her to cross the boundaries between realism and the fantastic, between the novel and the romance, turning her work into a unique kind of South African Gothic where defamiliarization and border-crossing express individual and collective anxieties. Rose-Innes herself emphasized this generic porosity:

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Chapter 5 I think Nineveh falls into a grey zone, where I don’t completely recognize the moment when it passes into speculative from non-speculative. It’s set in a recognizable Cape Town but not an altogether real Cape Town. Certain things are invented—the plague of insects for example, or the underground cabins beneath the swamp and the estate—these gesture towards fantastical fiction. But I like to keep on that line of uncertainty between the real and unreal. 203

Relying on what he calls “Rose-Innes’s world of the ‘urban pastoral,’ juxtaposing the city and country space and modifying their respective values,” Barris examines the role played by the seam, that is, the locus “where both poles provide space for imaginative reinvention” under the sign of “semiotic vibrancy, or fluidity” 204 in Nineveh. Barris challenges, in particular, the binary opposition between surface and depth, arguing that in the palimpsest-like, urban pastoral space, “past and present coexist as partner terms of an ambiguity, rather than as the opposed ends of any given string of time.” 205 The copresence of past and present through the Gothic surfacing of hidden, subterranean beings standing for a repressed past creates a tension which is not only spatial but also temporal. This tension is materialized in the hybridization of the novel which, as Rose-Innes argues, is neither speculative nor nonspeculative. I would suggest that if we focus on the perception of space by the characters, the transformation of Cape Town into a cross-generic entity can be understood not only through an emphasis on the Gothic mode but also through a recourse to the form of the fairy tale. Like fairy-tale heroines, Joanna/Anna in Shark’s Egg and Katya in Nineveh go through initiatory experiences which involve crossing malevolent and symbolical places to emerge with a new identity. 206 In Shark’s Egg, the crossing takes on a rather obvious pattern of death and rebirth in the chapter titled “Darkhouse.” In Nineveh, Katya’s itinerary seems to be informed by a similar pattern of emerging from a transformative, unfamiliar space after “a strange journey through a low-ceilinged underworld” 207 characterized by its labyrinthine and transient quality: “She sees: the place that once seemed so stable is not steady at all. It is rushing, swirling, all its bricks and tiles and phony lions flushing out. Nothing can be contained. And as the substance of Nineveh unravels, the swamp winds it up like a yarn into a ball. Knitting new patterns, weaving Nineveh into the shacks and the city beyond.” 208 The journey therefore reveals the porosity and frailty of the “fortress” and suggests that the world which was constructed throughout the narrative is, in a way, unmade—perhaps a metafictional device reminding the reader of the fictionality of Nineveh. Once Katya and her father emerge on the beach, after crossing the swamps, they find themselves in a world which becomes familiar again: “The beach is beyond Nineveh’s witching zone. They have broken through. Katya looks around, and the regular topography reasserts itself: here is Noordhoek beach, and there the familiar hump of the

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mountain with the houses and the road at its base. They have re-entered normal time and space and gravity, deposited on the shores of an ordinary planet. Like spacemen, they are weak and stunned from their journey.” 209 Like the dark forest or the witch’s castle in fairy tales, Alan’s house in Shark’s Egg and Nineveh in the eponymous novel are places where the main character loses herself before finding a new identity. Interestingly, even if in Nineveh Katya has to redefine her relationship with her father, the focus is not Oedipal in any way as in Bettelheim-inspired readings of fairy tales. 210 Rose-Innes herself described the relationship in political, or allegorical, rather than personal terms: You could read the relationship with Len as the old South African trope of the past re-emerging in the present. I certainly think that that does color the story. That sense of the past being unsuppressable does have a particular South African relevance. The father’s life and Katya’s life straddle the political shift in South Africa. He is a creature of the old South Africa and she is a creature of the new. . . . Her father represents the past, her past specifically, that she cannot suppress. 211

This may account for the fact that at the end of the novel, Len “is not quite what he was.” “Len is no longer fierce. This last battle has exhausted him, it seems, and when Katya looks at him she sees an old man, far more wounded than she will ever be.” 212 More than an Oedipal figure, Len can be read as a synecdoche for the “old” South Africa, who thrived on violence—as testified by the marks and scars he left on his daughters’ bodies—and is in the process of disappearing. Even his capacity for adaptation and boundary-crossing may point to the fact that he is the embodiment of the “interregnum” 213 rather than a product of the new South Africa. Yet, Katya is explicitly compared to a little girl when her father comes back into her life: “She is a child, a five-year-old. She is tiny, and she is heavy enough to drop right through these floorboards and into the mud.” 214 Criticizing psychoanalytical readings of fairy tales, Pierre Péju argues that reading them merely as Oedipal stories offers a narrow perspective. He focuses on the character of the little girl, for whom Oedipal tensions are almost meaningless, to argue that fairy tales are much richer. Katya can be compared to the young heroines of fairy tales Péju describes in La Petite Fille dans la Forêt des Contes: “The little girl in the forest of tales is a fictive being which shows that if the ‘feminine’ is, of course, stuck between the great figures of the mother, jealously feminizing, and of the husband-Prince Charming, it still has at its disposal an escape route, whether it is called forest, heath, wilderness, desert, roaming or madness.” 215 Péju also argues that the main difference between male and female characters in fairy tales lies in the way they relate to place. To him, the male principle is linked with an itinerary, a journey with a clear destination, as

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opposed to the female principle, which has to do with getting lost, being involved in the intensity of the journey. In other words, male characters cross the forest or such initiatory place with a goal, whereas for female characters what matters is the crossing itself. 216 It seems that this conception of crossings as the central interest of the journey for female characters corresponds to the narrative patterns of Shark’s Egg and Nineveh, at the end of which both heroines find themselves in a state of transiency and uncertainty felt to be a source of freedom: In the folds of great tales, something testifies to the existence of absolutely unOedipal desires: the desire to be an orphan; the desire to leave and roam; the desire to be neither a father nor a mother; the desire not to get married; the desire to be alone; the desire to be several beings, or several things, or to belong to several genders or reigns simultaneously; the desire to be part of a gang or a pack; the desire to communicate with all the forces in the world. 217

The latter idea, in particular, might explain the emphasis on metamorphosis which underlies Rose-Innes’s novels and which I have already mentioned: Above all, fairy tales make us acquainted with continuous communication between all species and kingdoms, between men, animals, machines and things, between the big and the small, between the visible and the invisible. Everything speaks, and everything speaks to everything else. It is a matter of generalized influences by contiguity, and metamorphoses also partake in this process of permanent crossing between shapes. 218

Péju’s analysis of what he calls “permanent communication” and “permanent crossing” can help us to understand Katya’s state when, after emerging from Nineveh, she returns to normal life: Through the glass, she sees the shimmering surfaces of the mall. But her reflection lies across this vision like mud on a polished floor. The image in the cool glass is not one she recognizes. It is a wild thing she’s looking at, disgorged from some swampy depth, bedraggled and scratched and smeared. Her uniform is completely saturated with mud, her face pasted with weedlike strands of hair. She can smell herself, too: that ditchwater odor that she first sniffed, days ago, in the pit of the excavation opposite her home. She’s transformed, like something that’s lain under the earth in larval form through a long damp season, waiting to emerge. 219

Having crossed the initiatory space of Nineveh, she emerges as a kind of human gogga, ready for the transiency of “life-in-the-van.” Metaphorically, through this fairy-tale-like experience, she also becomes the embodiment of post-apartheid South Africa, where the city becomes as multiple and fluid as herself, the cityscape reflecting her inscape as she realizes that each character she has met during her journey lives “in a subtly different Cape Town,”

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“zones where the world is taking form; where things get mixed up and wander from their positions; Ninevehs.” 220 The plural form, here, indicates the impossibility to assign any fixed meaning to the city, whose multiplicity 221 is revealed by the mixture of realism and fairy-tale-like elements in the novel. Rose-Innes herself has often argued that her narratives were often rather plotless; for instance, in her discussion of Ballard’s fiction, in which she explains the influence his work has had on her own fiction, she focuses on some spatial images, like the empty swimming pool: Similar images of distinctly Ballardian abandonment surface often in my writing, in the service of my own “invisible.” I fear I may also have a somewhat Ballardian deficiency when it comes to those stand-bys of the creative-writing course: plot, characterization, dialogue. . . . Not that my writing is Ballardian, but I have certainly absorbed his attraction to the potent, cryptic object, and especially to vistas of manmade ruination. I’m not sure why these empty places captivate me, but I am by no means alone in this: a fascination, even a relish, for Gothic urban decay is a feature of our current cultural landscape. 222

What has been argued here, instead, is that a plot underlies Rose-Innes’s spatial writing: this plot is the motif of the crossing, which becomes a metaphor for problematic South African identities as well as an apt image for Rose-Innes’s own blending of genres. Interestingly Luckhurst’s discussion of Gothic science fiction starts with Ballard “and his obsession with liminal zones of the dissolution and radical extinction or reinvention of subjectivity, a plot he restages over and over again.” 223 This assertion might shed light on Rose-Innes’s writing, which also resorts to a form of Gothic, or Gothicized, (science) fiction. Her literary “crossings” involve the inclusion of satirical, and even comic, moments, within the fabric of her literary hybrid. One example of such generic hybridization would be the sex scene with Mr. Brand, which is told in a rather dark-comedic manner: Katya brings a rare frog she has found in Nineveh—her “VIP”—to show it to her employer and suggest he hires her permanently to look after the estate, but soon they start making love: “at some point in the ensuing fumble and grope he rolls on top of her and his elbow catches the edge of the table and tips the box off. The catches are loose, the frog springs free. A vaulting leap, straight at Mr. Brand’s face.” 224 The slapstick comedy, here, is obvious—but the scene immediately becomes gruesome as Mr. Brand “backhands the frog in flight” and kills it. 225 This scene encapsulates many of the aspects which have been discussed here: the mixture of tones and genres; the social and satirical undertones—the frog belongs to an endangered species, the Table Mountain ghost frog, and its presence points to the motif of ecology and local environmental politics; the species-fluid motifs which recur throughout the novel— just after leaving, Katya will feel “half-frog, half-girl, lapping at the moisture

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in the air, so dense and rich. Her frog skin . . . wet and alive”; 226 the darker undertones. Such generic hybridity testifies to the way in which in Nineveh generic crossings simultaneously express an anxiety of belonging and an acceptance of unbelonging. Ultimately, these generic crossings, and in particular the reworking of a number of conventions from fairy tales, help RoseInnes not only to redefine South African identity but also to explore what it means to be a woman, emphasizing the unavoidable absence of fixity of any identity. Crossing becomes the main characteristic of identity, both collective and individual. As Graham puts it, Katya’s “abnegation is also a kind of acceptance of the permeability of boundaries of every sort, from the skin of one’s body to the borders of one’s nation.” 227 To put it differently, Nineveh seems to successively Gothicize and de-Gothicize the space of the city to construct an identity whose fluidity is not experienced as a source of anxiety or dread but as potentially creative—just as Rose-Innes’s genre-bending leads to the creation of a new type of writing which borrows from the codes of detective fiction, dystopia, the political novel, or the fairy tale but cannot be assigned to any fixed category. She herself explained in an interview that her “primary aim in writing is to create a kind of alternative universe: a sense of transformed reality that does not cross the boundary into fantasy but which manages to give the known that kick of otherness, and which helps one understand the world in a different way. (An early love of sci-fi can give one a lifelong yearning for other planets.)” 228 Rose-Innes’s non-place, therefore, becomes a tool for both social and literary exploration enabling her to express white anxieties in the new South Africa as “Nineveh shows us the psychological effects of this constant state of impermanence and flux on city dwellers.” 229 “[I]nsofar, then, as RoseInnes’ novel reflects contemporary anxieties over the encroachments of global capitalism and its technologies of surveillance and control, it also reveals to us the blind spots and interstices that inevitably disrupt those technologies in an unsustainable and entropic world system.” 230 This chapter has thus demonstrated how non-places could become the literary loci of white writers’ anxieties, reflecting the “present conditions in which the compelling issue is the disorientingly fluid, insecure state of contingency that immerses citizens of post-2000 South Africa, one that offers scant anchorage within a rampantly self-serving society,” 231 as De Kock writes about Beukes’s Zoo City, Rose-Innes’s Nineveh, and Eben Venter’s Wolf, Wolf. In these fictional non-places, the Gothic mode provides writers with possibilities to represent the unstable spaces of contemporary South Africa, particularly cities, as shown by the centrality of the motif of the maze in Nineveh, Zoo City, and many other novels by white writers. Another motif which does not directly imply the representation of space but also testifies to the vitality of the Gothic mode is that of monstrosity, a

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Gothic trope which recurs in recent fiction by white writers to examine the complexity of post-apartheid identity and revisit the racist agenda and othering motifs favored in apartheid literature. The hybridity favored by RoseInnes, for instance, could be examined in this light, as well as, obviously, Beukes’s Broken Monsters. An example of the way in which Gothic space and monstrosity can be combined is Diane Awerbuck’s short story “Mami Wata” in Cabin Fever. The story starts in a seemingly realistic mode, with two characters, a boy and a girl, walking on a path and reaching a dam. The internal focalization by the unnamed girl, shows her watching the boy jump in the water over and over again. The girl’s anxiety pervades the narrative as she worries about what might lie beneath the surface: “She thought, People have drowned here. She could see it as if it had already happened.” 232 Under the dam, she feels, are ages-old, threatening, natural forces, so that it is “impossible to imagine men with machines excavating this place, making space where before there was matter, sinking pylons and pillars to feed the holidaymakers and retirees multiplying like algae over the town below.” 233 As in Rose-Innes’s fiction, the boundaries between species and kingdoms are blurred through similes and metaphors: people are compared to algae while the jetty has “old bones.” 234 The girl’s uneasiness when she joins the boy in the dam is also expressed through a personification: She swims, “avoiding the skeleton of the old pylons that poked out, rusty and jagged.” 235 Here, ruination and death seem to haunt the dam despite the boy’s merry behavior. Suddenly, a monstrous face appears under the water, perceived through the girl’s internal focalization: “The face that swam briefly up to hers had no lips, no nose or eyes. The small silvery scales that covered it were peeling back, like a second-hand snakeskin handbag, and the hair floating out from the skull was stained rusty red from the tannins in the water.” 236 This scary, subjective vision of horror clearly belongs to the realm of the monstrous with its hybrid, unhuman face and animal features. Its hybrid status is reinforced by the incongruous comparison with an object, the “second-hand snakeskin handbag,” and the monstrous figure is construed as belonging to the landscape through the rusty red color of its hair. The monster in the water is ambiguous because it can be interpreted as either an actual submarine creature or the projection of the girl’s anxiety, already expressed previously in the story. The ending of the story similarly relies on ambivalence; as the girl falls asleep, the landscape metamorphoses: “the jetty was leaning out further, slowly splitting its sides.” 237 The girl gets up in the middle of the night, following “a watery track soaked reddish into the woods,” finds out that the boy’s sleeping bag is empty and hears “faint effortful dragging sounds outside.” 238 In the final paragraph of the story, the monstrous creature the girl met in the dam is described carrying the boy away: “The scales on its tail twinkled like quartz in the moonlight. The boy’s eyes were blank. When it reached the jetty the last planks disintegrated under its monstrous skittering

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weight and the creature plopped back into its element, replete. The splinters floated away on the current.” 239 Even if the story is more fantastic than Gothic, it relies on a number of stylistic devices strikingly similar to the Gothic mode in its equation of creature and landscape, a variation on the eponymous myth of Mami Wata, an African water deity who supposedly abducts people to bring them to her underwater realm. 240 But beyond this, Awerbuck’s use of the figure displays the way in which the monstrous provides a mode for expressing anxieties linked to place. Exploring the intersections of Gothicity, monstrosity, and subjectivity in post-apartheid South African might be another, fruitful project for further research on post-apartheid Gothic. NOTES 1. John Clute, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (Cauheegan, WI: Payseur and Schmidt, 2006), 62. 2. Audrey Camus, “Espèces d’espaces: vers une typologie des espaces fictionnels,” in Topographies romanesques, ed. Audrey Camus and Rachel Bouvet (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 40, my translation. 3. Amid and De Kock, “The Crime Novel,” 61. 4. Ibid., 63. 5. Naidu, “Crime Fiction,” 126. 6. Chris Thurman “The Long and the Short of It: Reflections on ‘Form’ in Recent South African Fiction,” Kritika Kultura 18 (2012): 192. https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/ article/download/KK2012.01813/1437. 7. Roger Luckhurst, “In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness,” in Gothic Science Fiction. 1980–2010, ed. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 22. 8. Ibid. The quotes are from Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 16. 9. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123. 10. The notion of boundary in the present chapter will not be equated with that of border, or frontier, which resonates in a particular way in the South African context, where it can evoke the infamous “border wars” waged by the apartheid regime. These border wars gave birth to a local genre known as grens literatuur, as Mathilde Rogez reminds us in her reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, in which she compares South Africa and the United States. Rogez, “Variations on a Frontier: J. M. Coetzee’s Novel Dusklands in Context,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 41. 11. Ibid. 12. Gary Wolfe, “Malebolge, Or the Ordnance of Genre,” Conjunctions 39 (2002): 415. 13. Luckhurst, “In the Zone,” 23. The phrase “the law of genre” is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s article bearing the same title, in which Derrida discusses Maurice Blanchot’s text “La folie du jour” in the light of the notion of genre. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avita Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. 14. Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 15. Mary-Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40. 16. Ibid., 34. 17. Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 14. 18. Ibid., 22–23.

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19. Ibid., 23. 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvester, 1993), 75. 21. Luckhurst, “In the Zone,” 32. 22. Fred Botting, “Zombie Death Drive: Between Gothic and Science Fiction,” in Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010, ed. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 38. 23. Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 77–78. 24. Ibid., 82. 25. Ibid., 86. 26. Ibid., 93–94. 27. Ibid., 94. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 96. 30. Ibid., 97. 31. Ibid., 103. 32. Ibid., 104. 33. Ibid., 109–10. 34. Ibid., 111–12. 35. Michel Lussault, Hyperlieux: les nouvelles géographies politiques de la mondialisation (Paris: Seuil, 2017). 36. Lussault defines alter-places as places where a new way of life is advocated, counterplaces as places where globalization is criticized, and neo-places as places where the local is emphasized over the global (Ibid.). 37. See Michel Lussault, De la lutte des classes à la lutte des places (Paris: Grasset, 2009). 38. Georges Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise (Paris: Minuit, 2001). 39. Didi-Huberman’s reflection on haunting also leads him to reconsider Amy Warburg’s work in his following book L’image Survivante (Paris: Minuit, 2002), in which he defines concepts such as “phantom-images,” “pathos-images,” and “symptom-images.” 40. Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu, 13. 41. Ibid., 126. 42. Ibid., 136, my translation. 43. Corinne Bigot, “Compte-Rendu de lecture: Génie du non-lieu: air, poussière, empreinte, hantise de Georges Didi-Huberman,” Séminaire FAAM, 6 May 2011. http:// faaam.parisnanterre.fr/spip.php?article76. My translation. 44. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. 45. Duncan, South African Gothic, 96. 46. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” trans. from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49. https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault. heteroTopia.en/. 47. Duncan, South African Gothic, 35. 48. Atwood, In Other Worlds, 66. 49. Ibid., 75. 50. Benjamin Kunkel, “Dystopia and the End of Politics,” Dissent 55, no. 4 (2008): 90. 51. Ibid., 93–94. 52. Ibid., 94. 53. Ibid. 54. Deon Meyer, Fever, trans. K. L. Seegers (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2017). I explained why I have chosen to focus on South African fiction written in English, and not in Afrikaans, but this novel seems to be such a case in point to examine the interpenetration of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction that I am consciously, and just for once, contravening my own rule. 55. Brink, “Writing against Big Brother,” 190. 56. Thurman, “Apocalypse Whenever,” 64.

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57. Kunkel, “Dystopia,” 95. 58. Annalisa Oboe describes the genre in the following way: “a) a group of people (either English or Boer), related to each other by family ties, friendship, political opinion, nationality, are forced to abandon the land of their birth and to make a new start in the South African interior. Like the Jews from Egypt, they flee from oppression and/or poverty and, on their departure, dream of a better future of freedom and plenty; b) the beginnings of the settlement of the new territory entail a sojourn in the wilderness, where the pioneers experience all sorts of hardships and adventures. . . . c) the overcoming of these difficulties through epic struggles coincides with the realization of their dreams, or with their eventual (almost certain) fulfilment in a not-too-distant future. The wilderness is transformed into the promised land, the land of their hopes that slowly takes the shape of the South African soil, where the roots have been planted for the generations to come.” Oboe, Fiction, History and Nation in South Africa (Venezia, Italy: Supernova, 1994), 66–67. 59. Kunkel, “Dystopia,” 96. 60. Thurman, “Places Elsewhere,” 99. 61. Atwood, In Other Worlds, 6. 62. Wylie, “Literature and Ecology,” 367. 63. Wasson and Alder, “Introduction,” 2. 64. Ibid., 3. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 4. 67. Botting, Gothic, 14. 68. Wasson and Alder, “Introduction,” 4. 69. Ibid., 5. 70. S. L. Grey is a pseudonym. The books published under this name are the result of a collaboration between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg. 71. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror,” 92. Also see Duncan, South African Gothic, 149. 72. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror,” 97. 73. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror,” 98. 74. Sophie Didier also reads The Mall in the light of intermedial aesthetics, arguing that the novel is sequenced like a video game. Didier, “La fiction spéculative,” 6. 75. David Roche, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s. Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To? (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 53. Interestingly, Roche also analyzes the ways in which horror films play with genre and remarks that in Dawn of the Living Dead, “the emphasis on the mall’s architecture does . . . represent a mundane version of Gothic space” (125): “the characters initially need a map to navigate through the labyrinthine mall, before they attempt to transform the building into an impregnable fortress, replete with secret passageways (the airshafts) and a partition wall concealing the corridor leading to their apartment” (126). 76. Quoted in Botting, “Zombie Death Drive,” 36. 77. Ibid., 50. 78. Duncan, “Contemporary South African Horror,” 98–99. 79. Didier, “La fiction spéculative,” 5, my translation. 80. S. L. Grey, The Mall. Downside #1 (London: Corvus, 2011), 310. 81. Wasson and Alder, “Introduction,” 10. 82. Louis Greenberg, Green Valley (London: Titan Books, 2019). 83. Ibid., 295. The phrase “good place” used by Lucie directly points to Greenberg’s intention to explore the ambiguities of utopias (literally, “good places”). 84. Ibid., 307. 85. Wasson and Alder, “Introduction,” 15–16. 86. Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes,” 527. 87. Ibid. 88. Margaret Atwood, “Genesis of The Handmaid’s Tale and Role of the Historical Notes,” in The Handmaid’s Tale: roman protéen, ed. Jean-Michel Lacroix, Jacques Leclaire and Jack Warwick (Rouen: Publications de l’université de Rouen, 1999), 11.

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89. Such an interpretation is confirmed by Beukes’ own opinion about her novels being “SF” or not: “I didn’t set out to write science fiction, I read a lot of science fiction but I didn’t sit down and said OK now I’m going to write a science fiction novel . . . I wrote about the stuff which made me angry and upset and I wrote about the stuff that I saw happening around me, to the extent that when my editor said to me ‘listen you’ve really got to put a date on this’ I didn’t want to, because as far as I was concerned that stuff was happening right now. It’s about a corporate apartheid state, it’s about cell phones used for social control, it’s about governments that can shut down your internet without any warning, I mean, how likely is that stuff?” Beukes, “Kinking Reality.” 90. Isabella Van Elferen, “Dancing With Spectres: Theorizing the Cybergothic,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 100. 91. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of the Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, Routledge, 2006 [1994]), 202. 92. Van Elferen, “Dancing with Spectres,” 102. 93. Beukes, Moxyland, 58. 94. Ibid., 11. 95. Ibid., 13. 96. Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes,” 524. 97. Ibid., 526–27. 98. Beukes, Moxyland, 137–38. 99. Ibid., 189. 100. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 101. Beukes, Moxyland, 106. 102. Ibid., 156, capital letters omitted in original. 103. Lussault, L’homme spatial. 104. Beukes, Moxyland, 15. 105. Ibid., 31. 106. Botting, Gothic Romanced, 145. 107. Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes,” 526. 108. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 152. 109. Beukes, Moxyland, 81. 110. Ibid., 90. 111. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard / Seuil, 1980). 112. Beukes, Moxyland, 38. 113. See Robert Miles, “Introduction: Gothic Romance as Visual Technology,” in “Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era,” ed. Robert Miles, Romantic Circles (December 2005). http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/gothic/intro/miles 114. Fred Botting, Limits of Horror. Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 46. 115. Beukes, Moxyland, 31. 116. Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 13. 117. Botting, Limits of Horror, 11–12. 118. For a discussion of her posthuman status, see “Un Post-Humain post-apartheid,” in which I discuss, in particular, the idea of a form of viral or contagious posthumanism in the novel. About contagion, also see Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes.” 119. Beukes, Moxyland, 8–9. 120. Ibid., 310. 121. For a discussion of the figure of the mad scientist, see Hélène Machinal, ed. Le Savant fou (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 122. Botting, Limits of Horror, 134–35. 123. Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes,” 530. 124. Botting, Limits of Horror, 7.

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125. Beukes, Moxyland, 374. 126. For a more detailed account of the implications of this scene, see my analysis of bodies in “Corps et corporalité dans Moxyland de Lauren Beukes,” in Les frontières de l'humain et le posthumain, ed. Marie-Eve Cléroux and Jean-François Chassay (Montréal: UQAM, 2014), 80–81). 127. Bethlehem, “Lauren Beukes,” 528. 128. Ibid., 528–29. 129. Ibid., 530–31. 130. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 198. 131. Ibid., 199. 132. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 67. 133. Joseph-Vilain, “Cartographies génériques,” 80–81. 134. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 70. 135. Ibid., 71. 136. Ibid., 76. 137. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 205. 138. Rose-Innes, “Lodestars of Fixation,” 108. 139. Duncan, South African Gothic, 159. 140. I choose the notion of “crossing” rather than Barris’s “seam” because of its dynamic implications. While the seam is primarily a place, crossing is both a place and a process. Interestingly, Barris uses strikingly Gothic terms when he reads Diane Awerbuck’s story “The Keeper” (Cabin Fever and Other Stories. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011). He argues that the white narrator’s “anxiety at the imminent disruption of the built environment” (“‘Every Place Is Three Places’: Bursting Seams in Recent Fiction by Diane Awerbuck and Henrietta RoseInnes,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 26, no. 1 [2014]: 64) is linked to “the casual horror of excavation” (“The Keeper,” 119)—a horror born from the juxtaposition of different historical moments onto the same space. This space appears to be haunted by the narrator’s grandfather, who was a prisoner in a concentration camp in the very same place he is watching. The sense of impermanence of built things becomes a consequence of “storied time” and points to an anxiety of unsettlement characteristic of white writing. 141. Chapman, “Preface,” 12. 142. Shane Graham, South African Literature After the Truth Commission (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. 143. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 126–27. 144. Ibid., 127. 145. Ibid., 8. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., 127. 148. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 65. 149. Henrietta Rose-Innes, Nineveh (London: Ardvaark, 2011), 60. 150. Ibid., 70. 151. Ibid., 124. 152. Ibid., 126. 153. Ibid., 162. 154. Ibid., 180. 155. Ibid., 233. 156. Barris, “Every Place,” 68. 157. Ibid., 66. 158. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 17. 159. Barris, “Every Place,” 66. 160. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 234. 161. Ibid., 235–36. 162. Barris, “Every Place,” 68. 163. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 164. Ibid., 103.

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165. For a discussion of the notion of “flux” in relation to cities, see Olivier Moreillon, Alan Muller, and Lindy Stiebel, “Introduction,” in Cities in Flux. Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts. Festschrift in Honour of Professor em. Dr. Therese Steffen, ed. Olivier Moreillon, Alan Muller, and Lindy Stiebel (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2017), 7–8. 166. Damon Galgut, “My Version of Home,” in A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson (London: Penguin, Kindle Edition, 2006). 167. Henrietta Rose-Innes, “Five Sites,” in A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson (London: Penguin. Kindle Edition, 2006). 168. Ibid. 169. Katie Reid, “Q&A: Henrietta Rose-Innes. New Voices from South Africa at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,” Africa in Words, 23 August 2013. https://africainwords.com/2013/08/23/qa-henrietta-rose-innes-new-voices-from-south-africa-at-the-edinburgh-international-book-festival/. 170. Henrietta Rose-Innes, Green Lion (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015). 171. Rose-Innes, “Lodestars of Fixation,” 109. 172. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 59. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid., 210. 175. Ibid., 216. 176. Ibid., 213–14. 177. Ibid., 38–39. 178. Ibid., 31. 179. Riach, “Politics of Space,” 26. 180. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 96. 181. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 68. 182. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 31. 183. Ibid., 34. 184. Ibid. 185. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 14. 186. Ibid., p. 17, italics in original. 187. In Shark’s Egg, Leah’s reappearance in Anna’s life is also described as the return of a ghost (72), which may confirm the hypothesis I ventured in chapter 2 about the two young women being the two facets of the same person. 188. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 71. 189. Ibid., 225. 190. Ibid., 213. 191. Rose-Innes, Shark’s Egg, 47. 192. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 12. 193. Ibid., 13. 194. Ibid., 23–24. 195. Ibid., 31. 196. Riach, “Concrete Fragments,” 119. 197. Reid, “Q&A.” 198. Rose-Innes, “Five Sites.” This perception of Cape Town’s liminal zones can be compared with P. R. Anderson’s description in Cape Town. A City Imagined, which also insists on the interaction between the forests, the mountains and the city. P. R. Anderson, “On Common Ground,” in A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson (London: Penguin. Kindle Edition, 2006). 199. Stephen Watson, “Afterword to a City,” in A City Imagined. Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson (London: Penguin, Kindle Edition, 2006). 200. Ibid. 201. Ibid. 202. Barris, “Every Place,” 69. 203. Geoff Ryman, “Henrietta Rose-Innes,” Strange Horizons, “100 African Writers of SFF. Part Six: Cape Town—The Writers,” 2017. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/henriettarose-innes/.

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204. Barris, “Every Place,” 60. 205. Ibid., 61. 206. Riach observes that “[m]any of Rose-Innes’s short stories and novels use spatial means—a climb up and then down, or a voyage out and back—to resolve narrative material, but the seeming resolution of these gestures is rarely as conclusive as it might at first appear.” Riach, “Politics of Space,” 22. 207. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 218. 208. Ibid., 219. 209. Ibid., 221. 210. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1976). 211. Ryman, “Henrietta Rose-Innes.” 212. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 232–33. 213. Interregnum is a notion which was defined by Antonio Gramsci and used by Nadine Gordimer as an epigraph to July’s People. It designated the period of transition between two historical moments, and was often used in the context of the last decade of apartheid, as Brink explains in his article about apocalyptic fiction: “There seems to reside a peculiar fascination for the novelist in exploring a situation of en attendant: that precarious territory in which one finds oneself in transit from the old familiar world to the cataclysm which will bring one into the new.” Brink, “Writing against Big Brother,” 192. 214. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 181. Other references to childhood include “Rats in a rat trap, squashed flat”, a rather dubious nursery rhyme which reconnects father and daughter at the end of chapter 12 and becomes the title of chapter 13. 215. Pierre Péju, La Petite fille dans la forêt des contes. Pour une poétique du conte: en réponse aux interprétations psychanalytiques et formalistes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. Nouvelle edition), 139, my translation. Péju uses an untranslatable pun: the original reads “ligne de fuite,” which both means “convergence line” and suggests the possibility of escape (“fuite”); I have chosen to translate it as “escape route”. 216. Ibid., 143, my translation. 217. Ibid., 120–21, my translation. 218. Ibid., 177, my translation. 219. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 222. 220. Ibid., 235. 221. Rose-Innes herself insists on this aspect of the novel in two different interviews: “Nineveh is a hopeful book, although not everyone has read it that way. It’s about acknowledging and even celebrating all varieties of habitation of our shared urban space, human and non-human, even if it comes in forms that are unpredictable, uncontrolled, and unwelcome. Certainly in the insect-overrun, swampwater-flooded housing estate that is Nineveh, the ‘empty land’ has never been empty at all—it’s just being used in ways that no one planned, and that are initially invisible to the city’s conventional powers,” Riach, “Concrete Fragments,” 119. She also explained: “I do think what must have had an effect on me was growing up in a society in which you are constantly aware of multiple and very different life experiences around you all the time. And of sometimes being a non-comprehending observer of the intersections of different lives— in a city like Cape Town, which is still very segregated in terms of how much people actually have to do with each other in their everyday lives. One is aware of multiple different cities coexisting in the same place, which I think is something I write about all the time. I do think that as a writer, my mode is watchful awareness and the sense of not having an omniscient understanding of all the complexities going on around me.” Ryman, “Henrietta Rose-Innes.” 222. Rose-Innes, “Lodestars of Fixation,” 108–9. 223. Luckhurst, “In the Zone,” 24. 224. Rose-Innes, Nineveh, 169. 225. Ibid. 226. Ibid., 171. 227. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 77.

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228. Ashraf Jamal, “Ashraf Jamal in conversation with Henrietta Rose-Innes,” LitNet (2006). http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id=2921& cause_id=1270. 229. Graham, “Entropy of Built Things,” 68. 230. Ibid., 71. 231. De Kock, Losing the Plot, 205. 232. Awerbuck, Cabin Fever, 11. 233. Ibid., 12. 234. Ibid. 235. Ibid., 13. 236. Ibid. 237. Ibid., 14. 238. Ibid. 239. Ibid. 240. See Alex Van Stipriaan, “Watramama/Mami Wata: Three Centuries of Creolization of a Water Spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe,” Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 27/28 (2005): 323–37.

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Permissions

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Copyright Lauren Beukes 2010. Reproduced with permission of the author. Extracts from WHITE LIGHTNING (Copyright © Estate of Justin Cartwright 2002) with permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of Justin Cartwright. Reproduced by permission of Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Limited. Extracts from UP AGAINST THE NIGHT (Copyright © Estate of Justin Cartwright 2015) with permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of Justin Cartwright. Reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Shark’s Egg by Henrietta Rose-Innes. Copyright Henrietta Rose-Innes 2000. Reproduced with permission of the author and Kwela Books, via the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency Ltd. The Rock Alphabet by Henrietta Rose-Innes. Copyright Henrietta RoseInnes 2004. Reproduced with permission of the author and Kwela Books, via the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency Ltd. Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes. Copyright Henrietta Rose-Innes 2011. First published by Umuzi in South Africa 2011, by Aardvark Bureau in the United Kingdom in 2016, and by Unnamed Press in the United States in 2016. Reproduced with permission of the author, via the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency Ltd. Excerpts from READING, WRITING, AND LEAVING HOME: LIFE ON THE PAGE by Lynn Freed. Copyright © 2005 by Lynn Freed. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from House of Women by Lynn Freed (Flamingo, 2002). Excerpts from The Impostor by Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books, 2009). 253

Index

Afrikaans. See Afrikaners Afrikaners, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 77, 79, 80, 106, 113, 119. See also Brink, André; Coetzee, J. M.; farm novel; settlers apocalyptic fiction, 16, 17, 80, 196–199, 219, 231n54. See also Afrikaners; speculative fiction Atwood, Margaret, 85n41, 184n70, 196, 198, 199. See also dystopia; utopia Azzam, Julie, 9, 10, 15, 80 Awerbuck, Diane, 228, 234n140

208–209, 210–211, 213–217, 219–220, 221–222, 223, 227, 228, 230n10 Brink, André, 16, 17, 80–82, 148, 198, 236n213 British Gothic, 4–6, 10, 19, 23n40, 23n42, 31, 34, 40, 41, 44, 48, 51, 53, 67, 83, 110–111, 114, 145–146, 200, 206. See also Radcliffe, Ann; Shelley, Mary; Walpole, Horace Byron, Glennis, 8, 11, 34, 80, 89n182, 145. See also Punter, David

Bachelard, Gaston, 30–31, 51, 57 Barnard, Rita, 1, 35, 80–81, 82, 83 Barris, Ken, 216, 218, 224, 234n140 Berthin, Christine, 42, 53, 70 Bethlehem, Louise, 25n79, 99, 138n30, 160, 161, 163, 203, 205, 207, 210, 212, 233n118 Beukes, Lauren: Moxyland, 153, 163, 202, 203–212; Zoo City, 153, 156–163, 184n74, 212, 228 Blanc, Jean-Noël, 155, 174, 175, 179, 187n197 Bhabha, Homi, 3, 8, 29 Botting, Fred, 12, 17, 24n64, 31, 64, 88n130, 114, 146–147, 200, 208, 209, 210, 211 boundaries, 10, 12, 15, 17, 26n97, 30, 44, 88n130, 131, 152, 159, 163, 180, 189, 190–191, 197, 200, 203–205, 206, 207,

Cape Town, 148, 152, 153, 163–164, 164–168, 170, 173, 174–181, 204, 205, 212, 213, 218–219, 220–221, 222–223, 224, 226–227, 235n198, 236n221. See also Beukes, Lauren; Cartwright, Justin; Nicol, Mike; Orford, Margie; Rose-Innes, Henrietta; Table Mountain; Watson, Stephen capitalism, 17, 26n99, 72–74, 77, 83, 105–106, 124, 139n72, 151, 154, 158, 160, 166, 200, 202–203, 207, 208–212, 228. See also globalization; modernity Cartwright, Justin: Up Against the Night, 13, 115, 116–119, 122–123, 127–128; White Lightning, 115, 116–118, 120–122, 123, 123–126, 128 Chapman, Michael, 25n85, 72, 77, 213 Coetzee, J. M., 10–11, 14–15, 20, 26n104, 35, 72, 77, 92n281, 96, 97, 107, 110, 255

256

Index

112, 114, 115, 120, 135, 230n10. See also farm novel; landscape; pastoral; settlers; unsettledness Comaroff, Jean and John, 11, 12, 183n50 de Certeau, Michel, 2, 149, 157, 182n28, 190, 195, 218 De Kock, Leon, 11, 150, 151–152, 152, 154, 167, 172, 173, 183n48, 184n74, 190, 212; and Jonathan Amid, 150, 151, 152, 181n12, 190, 213, 228 Denison, Sheri Ann, 25n81, 34, 83 disorientation, 29, 44, 126, 130, 131, 133, 149, 169. See also labyrinth; unsettledness doubles. See duality duality, 39, 43–46, 51–53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 70, 109, 116, 127, 131, 132–134, 146, 147, 152, 161, 168, 172–173, 216 Duncan, Rebecca, 8, 11, 15, 19, 148, 160, 163, 164, 195, 196, 200 dystopia, 196–199, 200, 204, 231n54. See also Atwood, Margaret; speculative fiction; utopia Edwards, Justin, 12, 26n97 entrapment, 39–42, 43, 52, 54, 130, 156, 164–166, 178 excavation, 81–82, 109, 150, 153, 158–159, 161, 164, 166–167, 170, 174, 179–181, 183n45, 200, 213, 215, 226, 228, 234n140. See also haunting; memory; subterranean; uncanny exile. See expatriation expatriation, 19, 35, 36–37, 42, 46, 50–51, 72, 114, 115, 138n27. See also Cartwright, Justin; Freed, Lynn family, 12, 14, 35–36, 37, 39, 39–50, 68, 69–71, 72–75, 79, 80, 104, 106–107, 118, 119, 125, 127, 128, 131–132, 133, 179–180, 198, 210, 216, 221, 225 farm novel, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19–21, 29, 72–83, 91n280, 92n281, 98, 106, 120, 139n72, 139n77, 198. See also Afrikaners; Coetzee, J. M.; Gordimer, Nadine; pastoral; Schreiner, Olive; settlers; Smith, Pauline

Foucault, Michel, 4, 22n19, 195, 196, 203 Freed, Lynn: and Jewishness, 37, 47, 48–51; Home Ground, 36, 37, 39, 46, 47, 49; House of Women, 37, 39, 39–46; Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, 35–36, 39, 46, 49–50; The Servants’ Quarters, 37, 46–50 Galgut, Damon: “My Version of Home,” 218; The Impostor, 65–77, 82–83, 99–110, 115, 124 George, Rose Marangoly, 31, 32–33, 84n5, 86n52 gender, 15, 31, 34, 39, 42–43, 53, 60, 64, 89n182, 100–101, 138n30, 138n36, 162, 167–168, 173, 216, 225–226 ghosts. See haunting globalization, 12, 72, 83, 105, 151, 154, 158, 166, 170, 183n48, 193–194, 200, 204, 209, 211, 212, 213, 228, 231n36. See also capitalism Gordimer, Nadine, 10, 15, 16, 25n82, 27n127, 51, 77, 80–81, 82, 88n122, 88n124, 107, 108, 110, 139n77, 197, 236n213 Gothic literature. See British Gothic; postcolonial Gothic Graham, Shane, 161, 163, 213, 215, 220, 227–228 Grey, S. L., 160, 200, 232n74 guilt, 12, 64, 66–68, 71–72, 72, 75, 80, 101, 109–110, 126, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 172, 209–210, 216 haunting, 8, 9, 12, 17, 47, 48, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62–63, 65–67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 80, 99, 101, 102, 108–109, 128, 131–133, 136, 146, 148, 150, 158, 160, 161, 164, 180–181, 194–195, 204–205, 208, 209, 212, 221, 231n39. See also excavation; memory Heidegger, Martin, 31, 32 horror, 19, 22n33, 47, 50, 53, 89n182, 102, 111, 114, 145, 147, 191, 200, 207, 208, 228 Howells, Coral Ann, 34, 40–41, 111–112 imprisonment. See entrapment

Index Johannesburg, 148–149, 150, 153, 153–155, 156–163, 183n45, 200. See also Beukes, Lauren; Grey, S. L.; Van Niekerk, Marlene; Vladislavić, Ivan Karoo (landscape), 29, 65, 82, 98, 99–110, 115, 118 Khoisan, 17, 80, 104–105, 135–136, 138n30 Kristeva, Julia, 42, 53 Kruger, Loren, 150, 153, 183n45 labyrinth, 34, 41–42, 51, 52, 81, 135, 145, 158–159, 164–166, 175, 181n8, 204, 219, 224, 228, 232n75. See also disorientation; unsettledness landscape, 5–6, 14, 57, 59, 95–136, 152, 163, 167, 168, 175, 192, 210, 216, 220, 228. See also pastoral Lawn, Jennifer, 6, 7, 52, 53, 80. See also postcolonial Gothic; Rudd, Alison; Turcotte, Gerry Lévy, Maurice, 5, 6, 34, 51, 53, 80 Luckhurst, Roger, 190–192, 227 Lussault, Michel, 174, 188n200, 193–194, 200, 206, 231n36 Macfarlane, Robert, 118, 123, 141n125, 141n156, 141n157 Mackenzie, Jassy, 148, 164, 168, 186n157 magic realism, 17, 66, 90n226, 139n77 memory, 7, 8, 31, 47–48, 48–50, 71, 72, 77, 81–82, 87n111, 95, 97, 99, 104–105, 116–117, 118–119, 123, 127, 141n125, 180–181, 182n28, 183n45, 213. See also excavation; haunting Meyer, Deon, 151, 152, 164, 168, 175, 197–199 modernity, 10, 58, 146, 153, 170, 192–193, 200, 211. See also capitalism; globalization; technology monsters, 208–209, 210, 228 mountains, 40–41, 99, 102, 103–104, 111, 114–115, 118, 119, 120–125, 128, 141n157; Cederberg, 128–133, 135–136; mountains of the mind. See Macfarlane, Robert; Table Mountain, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65, 99, 120–123, 164, 177, 218, 235n198

257

Murray, Sally-Ann, 27n127; and Caitlin Martin, 164–167, 168–170 Naidu, Sam, 150, 155, 157, 158, 171, 183n35, 190 Nicol, Mike, 151, 152, 170, 171–180, 182n20; Black Heart, 171, 180; Killer Country, 171, 173, 179–180 Payback, 175–179 Power Play, 187n185 Nuttall Sarah, 28n148, 95, 96, 183n48; and Achille Mbembe, 153, 161, 163 Omhovère, Claire, 97, 132, 137n8 Orford, Margie, 150, 164–170, 179, 186n157; Blood Rose, 167; Daddy’s Girl, 167; Gallows Hill, 167; Like Clockwork, 164–168, 179; Water Music, 167 pastoral, 14, 15, 19, 20, 26n116, 72–74, 78, 79–80, 83, 91n275, 92n281, 96, 100–110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 124–125, 126–127, 138n46, 139n47, 139n74, 141n137, 142n171, 224 plaasroman. See farm novel Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 31–32, 79, 80, 90n215, 194 postcolonial Gothic, 6–7, 128. See also Lawn, Jennifer; Rudd, Alison; Turcotte, Gerry Punter, David, 2, 8, 11, 17, 34, 80, 89n182, 145; See Also Byron, Glennis race, 13, 15, 17, 18, 51, 71–72, 72–77, 77, 80, 82, 92n281, 95, 98, 100–101, 102, 104–105, 113, 117, 134–136, 138n30, 167, 173, 187n187, 198. See also farm novel; Khoisan; settlers Radcliffe, Ann: The Mysteries of Udolpho, 34, 40–41, 41, 110–111 repressed (return of the). See uncanny Riach, Graham K., 18, 220, 236n206 Rogez, Mathilde, 20, 98, 110, 113, 182n28, 230n10 Rose-Innes, Henrietta: “Five Sites,” 218, 222–223; Green Lion, 219, 222;

258

Index

Nineveh, 152, 163, 202, 212–214, 215–228; “Poison,” 16, 17; The Rock Alphabet, 128–136; Shark’s Egg, 53–65, 214, 216, 220, 221, 224–225, 225, 235n187 Rudd, Alison, 7, 12, 128. See also Lawn, Jennifer; postcolonial Gothic; Turcotte, Gerry Said, Edward, 3, 37, 86n52 Samin, Richard, 20, 83, 98, 156, 185n84 Schmid, David, 146, 150, 151, 162, 168, 187n166 Schreiner, Olive, 10, 14–15, 20, 72, 77, 79, 83, 92n281, 107, 115, 135. See also farm novel; settlers; unsettledness Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 53, 200, 210 science fiction, 153, 190, 199–202, 203, 207, 208, 233n89. See also dystopia; speculative fiction; technology settlers, 6–7, 9, 18, 25n82, 26n104, 29, 34, 49, 80, 95–96, 98–99, 100, 101, 102–103, 113–114, 128, 137n5, 143n241, 197–199, 232n58. See also farm novel; unsettledness Sévry, Jean, 29, 72, 157 Shear, Jack, 12, 34, 79, 182n27 Smith, Pauline, 72, 98, 113–114, 140n107. See also farm novel; settlers; unsettledness Soja, Edward, 3, 4, 22n19 spectrality. See haunting speculative fiction, 199, 204, 224. See also science fiction; dystopia Steyn, Melissa, 17, 18 sublime, 14, 110–115, 120–123, 129–130, 140n96 subterranean, 51, 52, 53, 81, 103, 108, 139n77, 146, 158, 161, 163, 164–166, 178–179, 200, 213, 215, 219, 220, 224, 226, 228. See also excavation; uncanny suburbs, 174, 176, 176–179, 200

Table Mountain. See mountains. technology, 17, 158, 200–204, 205–211, 213, 228. See also capitalism; dystopia; globalization; science fiction; speculative fiction Thurman, Chris, 11, 17, 18, 190, 198, 199 Titlestad, Michael, 149, 168, 171, 182n34 Todorov, Tzvetan, 67, 148, 155 township, 82, 82–83, 127, 156–157, 219 Turcotte, Gerry, 4–5, 6, 29, 84n5. See also Lawn, Jennifer; postcolonial Gothic; Rudd, Alison uncanny, 8–9, 15, 17, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 52, 58–59, 61, 64, 65, 80, 81–82, 82, 102–103, 127, 128, 132, 135–136, 139n77, 143n241, 164, 170, 173, 179, 211. See also excavation; haunting; subterranean; unsettledness Unheimlich. See uncanny unsettledness, 7, 9, 26n104, 29, 33, 34, 35, 42, 60, 65, 71–72, 83, 99, 100, 101, 102, 110, 126, 131, 133, 144n242, 202, 217. See also disorientation; labyrinth; settlers; uncanny utopia, 195–196, 198, 202, 232n83. See also Atwood, Margaret; dystopia; speculative fiction vampire, 58, 59, 164, 210 Van Elferen, Isabella, 4, 12, 204 Van Niekerk, Marlene, 79–80, 149, 183n45 Vladislavić, Ivan, 149, 182n28 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto, 5, 9, 23n40, 31, 44 Watson, Stephen, 164, 177, 181n19, 218, 223 Wenzel, Marita, 31, 51, 81–82 Westphal, Bertrand, 78, 148

About the Author

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain is professor of postcolonial literatures and head of the research team “Individu et nation” for the TIL Research Center at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France. She has published articles and book chapters on South African, Nigerian, Caribbean, Guyanese, and Zimbabwean literatures.

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