Abstract
James Graham
Fables and Follies of Transition: Urban Space in Ivan Vladislavic's The Folly (1994) and Achmat Dangor's Kafka's Curse (1997)
“ My craft is blunt and simple, and much more honest. There isn't much art in straight lines. They end up as buildings, houses, bridges, edifices and other peoples dreams and fantasies. We make real their follies, not our own. That's where the integrity of my profession lies: we have no pretension to art or artifice .” (Kafka's Curse, 21)
The relationship between public and private spaces, both symbolic and fabulated as well as intimately ‘real' and socio-politically resonant, are central to Dangor and Vladislavic's ‘transition' novellas. By quite differently employing the ‘art and artifice' of magical realism, the two authors explore the contradictions and challenges of the majority-rule advency in South Africa . This paper argues that in the novellas the articulations of socio-political and cultural anxiety during - ( The Folly ) - and immediately after - ( Kafka's Curse ) - the apartheid era, are linked to perceptions of race and class that are most successfully represented through the fabulation of public and private space.
In Vladislavic's novella the relative luxury and security of a white middle-class suburban household is juxtaposed with television images of a burning shack in an anonymous shanty town. The asymmetry of private property and security is then attenuated and eventually shattered by the arrival of the mysterious transient, Nieuwenhuizen. His fantasy of constructing the ideal suburban mansion deludes the quixotic Mr Malgas into sharing his imagined world. The allegorical message conveyed by the fable is to show how quickly ‘other peoples dreams and fantasies' of rightful public and private spaces can be internalised and reproduced. It warns of the insidious nature of ideology, and how the very assumption of ‘private' space rests on a class and racial economy of exclusion and privilege.
With Kafka's Curse , Dangor offers a pseudo-realist genealogy of social migration and racial/cultural syncretism. The first, omnisciently narrated section, ‘Moving to the Suburbs,' engages with an Arabic legend of transgression and metamorphosis in order to frame the socio-cultural problems facing an Indian family as they pass into the era of transition. Successive chapters offer intimate monologues which expound the complex demands that this change puts on the family. In all sections these problems – predominantly racial and cultural - are given an illuminating counterpoint in the form or ‘nature' of the private dwellings and associated urban space which the characters move between.
On the one hand I argue that the integral role of private space to these novellas is symptomatic of apartheid-era socio-spatial engineering and ideology, whilst on the other I explore how the writers both question and shed new light on these spatial codifications by showing how individuals, families and communities from different and mixed class and racial backgrounds have, and continue, to manipulate those spaces with their own ever-changing socio-cultural practices. Whilst both writers seek to question very real social phenomena in South Africa 's history, neither writer adopts a realist mode in order to do so. I conclude by suggesting that in order both to grasp and question the complex relations between dominant public representations of space, place, race and class, both writers interrogate the construction of the private sphere, of the domestic home, in specific communities. In this sense the writers, like Dangor's Omar/Oscar, are forced to negotiate between the positions of architect and story-teller: ‘making real' the follies of others by necessarily incorporating them into the public architecture of South African self-perception, whilst exposing the contingency of such a practice in drawing attention to their own implication and limitation within the intimate places of this architecture.