Browsing by Author "Barris, Ken"

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    Fractious Form: The Trans/Mutable Post-Apartheid Novel
    (2008) Barris, Ken; Cooper, Brenda
    The question which I explore is to what degree, and in what way, the paradigm of anti-apartheid literature gives way to its post-apartheid successor. More particularly, I explore how post-apartheid South African novels perpetuate, displace or transmute the narrative forms and conventions characteristic of anti-apartheid writing. I therefore read the forms and conventions in certain post-apartheid novels through the lens of anti-apartheid discourse, in particular its demand for politically engaged realism, tracing continuity and change. I argue that The Good Doctor (2003) by Damon Galgut and Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws (2004) reiterate anti-apartheid conventions through devices that become anachronistic, in that they reproduce antiapartheid literary dynamics without adaptation to the post-apartheid conditions represented or implied in these texts. Formal reinvention, however, is evident in the following novels. In The Restless Supermarket (2002), Ivan Vladislavi displaces political engagement from narrative form into the speech acts of his narrator. This text thereby stages a lexical meditation that displaces the typical realist sequence of symptomatic events. Despite this innovation, there are continuities between his work and the early writing of J.M. Coetzee, which suggest that Coetzee anticipated characteristic post-apartheid narrative strategies ahead of their time. Further, the innovative magic realist forms of Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) engage with crises of transition so dire that death becomes their central metaphor. Both writers introduce the device of orature as assertions of African identity. However, Mda counterposes orature against death, injecting through it a humanising principle. In Mpeâs novel, by contrast, orature acquires a murderous agency. I trace variants of what I term "fractured form", namely form that is duplicitous, or otherwise dualistic, through a further group of novels. My premise is that the social fracture represented as content scripts the formal fracture/fractiousness in their narrative forms. An attendant property is to disrupt nationalist discourse in its dominant post-apartheid manifestation, namely the rainbow nation mythos. The texts in this group are Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee, David's Story (2000) by Z Wicomb, Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), and What Kind of Child (Barris 2006). In conclusion, the central question to which I attend has been raised by Michael Green (1997: 7), namely how a body of texts generated within the episteme of anti-apartheid can be meaningfully related to the literary paradigm that replaces it. I find that in the collective formal inventions, fractures and displacements demonstrated in this thesis, an emergent post-apartheid episteme becomes discernable.
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    The wild olive bowl
    (2014) King, Michael; Barris, Ken; Coovadia, Imraan
    Set against the political backdrop of the boycotts, arson and funerals of July 1980 in Grahamstown, this novel explores how the discovery of the dead body of a street child under the walls of St Jude’s Chapel sets events in motion that provoke the spiritual crises faced by the two protagonists. Father Philip Riley, the non-stipendiary curate at St Jude’s who had come to South Africa as a missionary inspired by Trevor Huddleston, has over the years lost any sense of his priestly vocation and his own personal beliefs. Lieutenant Daniel Broughton of the Grahamstown CID has to solve the mystery of the boy’s death, but he too has lost his idealism following a career in the South African Police that began at Sharpeville, and now hovers in a dead-end position in Grahamstown. Both these men have to come to terms with what the death of the street child requires of them. Riley has to overcome his reluctance to give the child a proper burial, and Broughton has to dig deeper than he is initially willing to, to determine how the child died. As the story unfolds, details emerge which thwart the opening attempts by both men to deflect any responsibility for the child from themselves. Riley had started life in an orphanage, and had been forced into colluding with the supervisor to cover up the cause of death of one of the orphans. He is challenged by the selfless love shown for the child by Mrs Mabata, a parishioner at St Jude’s who had tried to foster the street child. He realises that his reluctance to engage with the situation has to do with denying his own failures, based on his own life story. Giving in to pressure from a Roman Catholic priest to carry out the funeral, he discovers an inner strength to defy a police order not to conduct the funeral. The funeral goes ahead successfully, and Riley experiences moments of transcendence that allow him to re-discover his vocation. On the other hand, Broughton discovers that the street child’s involvement as an informer for the Security Police had been the cause of his death.