Abstract
Chris Warnes
Villains and Clowns: Abject Masculinities in Coetzee, Galgut and Vladislavic
Broadly, this paper aims to explore aspects of white masculinity in South Africa through reference to three recent novels: Coetzee's Disgrace , Galgut's The Good Doctor , and Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket . Socio-political change in South Africa is frequently measured quantitatively in gendered and racial terms. Understood in its historical moment, the fact that each of these novels is authored and narrated by (or focalized through) a middle-aged white male character invites a reading of them as literary responses to the deliberate and necessary devaluation of white masculinity in South Africa in the post-apartheid period. Each novel, it will be argued, represents white males who abject themselves before history. But where Coetzee and Galgut clothe their protagonists' failings in the accoutrements of modernist high seriousness – ennui, alienation, despair - Vladislavic chooses a different path, stripping away gendered and racial scripting through postmodern self parody. The difference between these two writerly options is nowhere clearer than in each novel's descriptions of sex. Coetzee's and Galgut's protagonists are white men with little or no scruples who use historical privilege and institutional power to satisfy their sexual appetites. The suggestion that this sexual voracity is being critiqued as male colonial hubris is clearly present, but the critique ends in impasse in both novels. Vladislavic, by contrast, productively mines a vein of comedy that runs through the South African cultural imagination. The Restless Supermarket is slapstick in the sense that it can be located at the intellectual high end of a tradition that includes Leon Schuster and Joe Mafela. But Aubrey Tearle embodies ‘slap-stick' in a different sense – he is limp, flaccid, slack, playing the clown to Coetzee's and Galgut's erect villains.* The paper speculates on why slapstick humour has proved so popular in South Africa, before considering in detail the ways in which Vladislavic's postmodern comedy enables a productive negotiation of the discursive and narrative possibilities of abjection.
The colloquialism ‘slap' (pronounced ‘ slup' ) is defined in the Dictionary of South African English as “limp” or “slack”.