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Writing South Africa Now: Twenty Years On is a graduate conference on South African literature that took place at the University of York, UK, in June 2014. The event is the second in a series of annual colloquia initiated by the University of Cambridge, aimed at making new critical voices within the field of South African Literary Studies heard. A selection of abridged papers has been made available on LitNet, including the following article by Esthie Hugo, "Sinister Surfaces: Contemporary South African Horror (On Stage and Off)".
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Horror, defined by Rebecca Duncan as a mode of fiction-making “obsessed with the mutilated, the splayed, the permeated body” (2014:86), is a growing trend in South Africa’s current literary scene. In this paper I want to attend particularly to how Charlie Human’s horror text, Apocalypse Now Now, animates ideas of bodies and meat while performing what Sarah Nuttall has termed “questions of the literal [and] the surface” (2012:409). I am approaching the novel via Nuttall’s concept of “surface reading” as a means of illustrating how the text enacts a “politicisation of the popular”. I want to suggest that it is by critiquing the surface effects of a growing commodity culture that South African horror texts might be read, not as a-political or degraded forms, but as texts which speak to us from a place of entangled resistance. Following this, I argue that we might read popular forms such as horror as modes which have significant implications not simply for literary criticism, but for the production of South African narratives which emerge in a world increasingly organised by global capital.
Apocalypse Now Now forms part of a greater body of contemporary South African horror writing produced by, among others, Lauren Beukes, SL Grey, Sarah Lotz and Angelina N Sithebe. Having emerged since the turn of the millennium, these works fall under the sign of what Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie have termed “post-transitional literature: a category of South African writing new[ly] invigorated and with a different relationship to the past” (2010:4). For these critics, where under apartheid the category of race was foundational, the writings of the post-transition are exploding such a previous categorisation in various ways. These include the production of narratives which are no longer “cowed by tradition” or by what “in the apartheid era drew respect” (4). Instead, Frenkel and MacKenzie suggest that the narratives of our current post-transitional years may be broadly characterised by “a proliferation of genres, concerns and styles” (4). Such a proliferation of genre is manifest in the production of post-millennial horror texts, Apocalypse Now Now being one such example. In this novel, Human employs the excessive violence of the horror mode in order to grapple with the dehumanising effects of a life lived in a contemporary Cape Town, a context in which economic deprivation is rife. Following Frenkel and MacKenzie, we might suggest that what is characteristic in Human’s narrative is a striking broadening of the parameters of what was once considered appropriate in the fraught political climate of old. Evidently, the work of Human and others is testament to a South African literary landscape which is changing.
Sarah Nuttall has recently argued that it is within this changing territory that a set of new critical shifts emerges, shifts that have particular implications for the practice of literary criticism. By describing the past 30 years of literary analysis as predominantly framed by “symptomatic readings” and “anti-apartheid politics” (2012:408) Nuttall suggests that what is becoming increasingly apparent in contemporary South African culture is a focal shift away from the symptom. She argues that what was once primarily considered “literary analysis” was a process that assumed that “texts are shaped by questions they do not themselves pose and contain symptoms that help interpreters articulate those questions that lie outside texts as their absent causes” (409). As such, any process of literary analysis would foreground the text’s “unconscious”, thereby suggesting that the most significant part of the text is that which it represses. In contrast to this focus, Nuttall calls for a “surface” methodology, a practice of interpretation which reads “both down and across, both underneath and surface” (410). Such an understanding is a sword which cuts two ways: firstly it necessitates that we consider the effects – and indeed, affects – that the visual turn (the influence of image capitalism, for instance) has had on the contemporary literary climate. Secondly, it requires that a far stronger focus be given to the surface as both a productive place of perception and as a mode of literary analysis. It does not, however, necessitate that we altogether put aside what has been termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Nuttall 2012:410). Rather, we place the symptom and the surface on equal playing fields. Such an expansion is best articulated through a surface analysis of two significant moments in Apocalypse Now Now.
The first in a series of horror fictions, Human’s narrative follows the tale of sixteen-year-old Baxter Zevcenko. Deliberately mining the plot lines of the commercial horror form, the text is put into action when Baxter’s girlfriend, Esmé, mysteriously disappears. Thus, Baxter begins a dangerous odyssey into the gruesome world of Cape Town’s supernatural undertow, a journey which morphs into a bizarre tale of learning when he is exposed to the grisly reality of bodily exploitation in various disturbing forms. When Baxter enters the Flesh Palace (the sinister location where erotica of the supernatural variety is supposedly shot) he stumbles across the following scene:
The bass rumbles through my chest and strobe lights pulsate, high-lighting naked zombies hanging in cages from the ceiling. They sway back and forth and peel flesh from their bones to throw to the human punters watching them from below. “Take it all off,” a sweaty guy in a suit shouts as we pass by him. His tie is loose and his face is flushed. The zombie obliges, peeling off muscle and tendon from her face until only bone remains. (2013:139)
Such a visceral scene presents us with the commodification of the female body taken to its very extreme: her body is literally, horribly made into fleshy “stuff” – meaty material to be thrown into the arms (or indeed, mouths) of the paying customers below. The encounter makes for a disturbing hieroglyphic of the flesh and, as such, offers us a markedly visceral critique on – among other things – the dehumanising effects of South Africa’s growing capitalist, consumer culture. This sense is made more powerful when Baxter is further exposed to the mutilated body, a human body which starts to look increasingly, unsettlingly, like meat.
While inside the Flesh Palace, Baxter sees a group of politicians “delicately sucking the marrow out of dismembered pinkie fingers” and several members of the national cricket team sipping “congealed blood from Martini glasses” (114). He attempts to leave and instead meets a group of women sitting next to a conveyor belt “chatting and smoking as they dissect human corpses and shove internal organs into packets” (151). When confronted about her sinister job description, one of the women replies, “Are you going to pay me twenty-five rand an hour, as well as overtime?” (152) before she dispassionately squashes a bloody human heart into a plastic packet and proceeds with the gruesome system as before.
Rebecca Duncan has argued that works of contemporary South African horror (Lauren Beukes's Zoo City in particular) present us with literary representations of the ways in which “post-apartheid South Africa’s neo-liberalist programme has done relatively little to reconfigure the socio-economic geography of the county’s past” (2014:90). Significantly, while she suggests that the persistence of the racially inflected conditions of deprivation which obtained under apartheid still persist into the present, Duncan writes that it is against a markedly disturbing economic segregation that South African horror texts “develop a morbid fascination with human flesh, with its fragilities and permeabilities, its capacity for pain and its undeniable materiality, which is set up in tension with its sentience” (90, my emphasis). In other words, it is by presenting us with the grisly renderings of bodily disintegration within a brutal economic vulnerability that South African horror texts launch “a Gothicized critique of post-apartheid neo-liberalization” (Duncan, 91). In Human’s narrative we encounter particularly gruesome reference to the mutilated body, and in doing so, witness an evocation of what Duncan has identified as a moment in which the "human-turns-to-matter": “of the person, not as lively, unique, sentient body, in which experience, agency and materiality intersect, but as penetrable, perishable stuff” (91). By evoking such excessive, disturbing images of bodily exploitation, and by placing these within the power of a cold, indifferent system, Human’s text presents us with the effects of a fictionalised Cape Town in which human bodies are literalised as meat, as surfaces. The body is simply meat placed into plastic casings to be sold to a hungry consumer market.
Following this, we might suggest that the novel offers us a gruesome critique on the value of human life in South Africa today. Put another way, despite the perpetuation of post-colonial discourses such as the “Rainbow Nation”, contemporary South Africa presents us with the creeping commodification of life itself, where personhood seems to be “downgrading, losing its human value” (Duncan, 92) and as such finds its gruesome release in Human’s novel, in its evocation of the person-become-meat.
As I have shown, the novel draws heavily on notions of “thingness”, or on what Nuttall has termed “an invocation of the literal, the surface” (409). Following Nuttall, if we read, not solely downwards from image (mutilated body) to its symptomatic referent (extreme poverty inflected by a racialised history of injustice) we could also read across: tracing a line from poverty as a very real, literal condition (one that is informed, but not solely, by a racialised past) to bodily disintegration and objectification as its most extreme case. In other words, we read the text along the surface of its signs, reading the body, not as an object in need of in-depth, psychoanalytical decoding, but as a (Deleuzian) literalised, mutilated, meaty-thing. Seen as such, Human’s narrative points to a fearful reality observed by anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, who inform us that since the insurgence of democracy in South Africa, the trade in and market for human body parts and organs has escalated exponentially (1999:286). The Comaroffs write that the preoccupation with the occult is intimately connected to South Africa's post-apartheid situation, where human bodies are being sold as part of “a gruesome trade nested comfortably within the orbit of everyday commerce, circulating human organs to whoever ha[s] the liquid cash to invest in them – they are after all, a materialized form of cultural capital” (286). Such disturbing descriptions speak to an equally distressing, violent present where human labour and lives are dispensable, for sale, cheap.
We live in a country where individual fortunes have long been built on the lifeblood of others, a context in which, despite our history of segregation, the yawning chasm between the rich and the poor grows ever larger. South African horror texts work within a history of violence and take critical cognisance of this disturbing contemporary context simultaneously. As such, Human’s novel constitutes one example of the ways in which post-transitional South African horror texts animate what Frenkel and MacKenzie have termed “a broadening of concerns and styles that reach both backwards and forwards” (2010:7). In other words, these texts make for “an entanglement, a point of difficulty and release” (Nuttall 2013:431). Through a macabre obsession with the dehumanising effects of a growing capitalist culture, Apocalypse Now Now not only evinces the ways in which the surface may be utilised as a critical rubric for political engagements, but, in doing so, illustrates how horror itself is one potent form by which to critique the fraught social and political climate of post-transitional South Africa.
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Bibliography
Comaroff, J and J Comaroff, J. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist, 26(2):279–303.
Duncan, R. 2014. Contemporary South African Horror: On Meat, Neoliberalism and the Post-Colonial Politics of a Global Form. Horror Studies 5(1):85–106.
Frenkel, R and C MacKenzie. 2010. Conceptualising “Post-Transitional” South African Literature in English. English Studies in Africa, 53(1):1–10.
Human, C. 2013. Apocalypse Now Now. Cape Town: Umuzi Press.
Nuttall, S. 2012. The Rise of the Surface: Emerging Questions for Reading and Criticism in South Africa. In Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa (ed A van der Vlies). Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
—. 2013. Wound, Surface, Skin. Cultural Studies, 27(3):418–37.
>>>>Back to the conference's index page for more papers.
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