At Home with Ivan Vladislavić: An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City

265 Pages·2023·6.971 MB·English

by  Gerald Gaylard

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
AT HOME WITH IVAN
´
VLADISLAVIC
AN AFRICAN FLANEUR GREENS
THE POSTCOLONIAL CITY
Gerald Gaylard
At Home with Ivan Vladislavić
At Home with Ivan Vladislavić is the first comprehensive analysis of
the works of Ivan Vladislavić. Bringing a flaneur’s “internal GPS” to
postcolonial Johannesburg, Vladislavić established a critical sense of home
via an intimate knowledge of geography and history. This sense of
belonging can have positive ecological effects as we tend to protect what
we know. The flaneur’s deep word hoard also helped him to develop a
minimalist style, which was not only a means of living sustainably in the
city, but in its humour and close attention to detail a way to make greening
the city more of a joy than a duty. In this way, Vladislavić created a culture
of sustainability.
Gerald Gaylard is a Professor of English at the University of the
Witwatersrand. Author of After Colonialism: African Postmodernism
and Magical Realism (2006) and editor of Marginal Spaces: Reading
Ivan Vladislavić (2011), he has published primarily in the area of post-
colonial culture, literature, and aesthetics.
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Edited by Lidia Wiśniewska and Jakub Lipski
At Home with Ivan Vladislavić
An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City
Gerald Gaylard
Posthumanity in the Anthropocene
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Esther Muñoz-González
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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Literature/book-series/RSCL
At Home with Ivan
Vladislavić
An African Flaneur Greens the
Postcolonial City
Gerald Gaylard
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Gerald Gaylard
The right of Gerald Gaylard to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gaylard, Gerald, author.
Title: At home with Ivan Vladislavić : an African flaneur greens the
postcolonial city / Gerald Gaylard.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge
studies in contemporary literature | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022047431 (print) | LCCN 2022047432
(ebook) | ISBN 9781032332918 (hardback) | ISBN
9781032332925 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003318996 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Vladislavić, Ivan, 1957---Criticism and
interpretation. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PR9369.3.V57 Z68 2023 (print) | LCC
PR9369.3.V57 (ebook) | DDC 828/.91409--dc23/eng/20221021
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047431
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047432
ISBN: 978-1-032-33291-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-33292-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31899-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003318996
Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Contents
Ivan Vladislavić’s Biography vii
Historical Formalism: A Methodology xi
Introduction 1
PART I
Monuments and Resistance 37
1 Missing Persons 39
2 The Folly 59
3 Propaganda by Monuments 69
PART II
An African Flaneur 89
4 The Restless Supermarket 91
5 The Exploded View 114
6 Portrait with Keys 137
PART III
Ecologies of Home 153
7 The Loss Library, A Labour of Moles, and
Milnerton Market 155
vi Contents
8 Double Negative 168
9 101 Detectives 186
10 The Distance 211
11 The Story Continues from Here … 225
Bibliography 233
Index 247
Ivan Vladislavić’s Biography
Figure 00a.1 Ivan Vladislavić in his current study, Killarney, Johannesburg
(courtesy Minky Schlesinger).
Born in Pretoria in 1957, Ivan Vladislavić is of mixed origin. In interview
with Warnes, he points out that “The name is Croatian. My grandparents
on my father’s side were Croatian immigrants. My father was born in South
Africa. And on my mother’s side my background is Irish and English, with a
dash of German. I’m second-generation South African, on both sides”
(273). This mixed ancestry may help to explain the open-minded writer he
was to become. Moreover, his father was a motor mechanic, which may
viii Ivan Vladislavić’s Biography
be the origin of his visual sensibility and cartophilia. These were to be
background influences on his fiction, encouraged by an English teacher
at high school, Gavin Wilmot, who recommended note-taking, and
encouraged his early precocious reading.
Moving to Johannesburg, where he has resided more or less
continuously since 1977, Vladislavić enrolled for a BA Honours degree
in English at the University of the Witwatersrand, from which he graduated
in 1979. The Afrikaans Department introduced him to the continental
theory of Barthes and Saussure, and sensitivity to signs and semiotics, to the
intricate relationships between words, is a signature of his work. This
Department also introduced him to South African fiction, and he was
inspired by studying contemporary works with John Miles, a novelist he
admired, as they were published. Nevertheless, he maintains in the Warnes
interview that his work is as much sparked by events and processes in the
world as by his own experiences or his reading of Dickens, Stevenson, Eliot,
Beckett, Kafka, Borges, Schulz, Barth, Barthelme, DeLillo, Kundera, Miles,
Breytenbach, et al (276). His time at Wits was formative in that it was then
that he became acutely aware of his politically oppressive context. It was
also inspirational in that he fell in with a bohemian crowd, including Lulu
Davis, niece of writer and editor Lionel Abrahams, whose “Circle of Eight”
writing group Vladislavić joined. At this time, he moved into a digs with
Ivor Powell, future Weekly Mail art writer, and Chas Unwin, theatre
director, journalist and painter. He became friends with a number of
artists, with whom he would later work, including Jeff Lok, Neil Goedhals,
and Joachim Schönfeldt (O’Toole “Uncommon Criticism” 17). Drafted
into the army after university, he did two years service in Kroonstad and
Pretoria. It is interesting that he has not, so far, published directly on his
military stint; watch this space.
As an antidote to the South African Defence Force, he travelled with his
girlfriend to London, Europe, and the United States in 1982, which
exposed him to the international art world. When he returned after 18
months, he worked briefly for an advertising agency, and then landed a job
as editor at Ravan Press, having been recommended to Mike Kirkwood by
Lionel Abrahams. He was to move on to become assistant editor of
Staffrider and compiled the commemorative Ten Years of Staffrider
(1988) with Andries Oliphant. It is no exaggeration to say that he is
South Africa’s preeminent editor today, having edited and been involved
with prominent works by Antjie Krog, Tim Couzens, Achmat Dangor,
Jonny Steinberg, Charles van Onselen, Kevin Bloom, and Peter Harris,
amongst others. He has also edited several titles under his own name,
including blank_architecture, apartheid and after (1998) with Hilton Judin,
and T’kama-Adamastor (2000) a book of essays on a painting by Cyril
Coetzee hanging in the Wits Cullen library. More recently, he has edited
Ivan Vladislavić’s Biography ix
works by photographer Mikhael Subotzky. He has been employed regularly
as a manuscript reader by publishing houses.
Though he had begun publishing short fiction in magazines and journals
like Sesame, The Bloody Horse, Staffrider, TriQuarterly, English Academy
Review, and Stet during the 1980s, it was his first collection of short stories,
Missing Persons, which fully introduced South Africa to his unique brand of
satirical humour, linguistic precision, and theoretical sophistication in 1989.
This won the Olive Schreiner Prize, whilst 1993’s The Folly, a novella of
ideologies and their surreal ramifications, won the CNA Literary Award.
Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996) suggested some of the
absurdities of South Africa’s transition to a democratic state, and two of the
stories, “Propaganda by Monuments” and “The WHITES ONLY Bench”,
were awarded the Thomas Pringle Prize. Vladislavić’s early fiction gained
him recognition, then, eventuating in the reissuing of Missing Persons and
Propaganda by Monuments by Umuzi in 2010 in a compendium volume
called Flashback Hotel: Early Stories. In 2001 The Restless Supermarket
extended Vladislavić’s analysis of post-apartheid South Africa through
the lens of its pernickety protagonist, Aubrey Tearle, garnering the novel
the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The Exploded View (2004) comprised
four interlinked stories that satirised the cosmopolitan ambitions of
Johannesburg’s urban milieu. During this year he was the inaugural
writer in residence in the Creative Writing Programme at the University
of the Witwatersrand.
The following year, Willem Boshoff, a pictorial examination of the
work of that conceptual artist, was published. Indeed, Vladislavić has
been active in the art world, publishing a number of pieces on William
Kentridge. However, he has worked with musicians as well as with visual
artists. In 2001, he wrote the libretto for Lucia Ronchetti’s short opera
BendelSchlemihl, a rereading of Adelbert von Chamisso’s story Peter
Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814). Ronchetti’s 2009 Rumori da
Monumenti, one in a series of compositions about cities commissioned
by the Siemens Arts Programme, incorporated extracts from Portrait
with Keys. The first South African performance by the Ensemble Modern
took place at Johannesburg’s Linder Auditorium in May 2010.
Portrait with Keys came out in 2006, garnering accolades and the
Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction for its closely observed
walking of Johannesburg’s streets. 2010 saw the publication of a novel
Double Negative as a companion piece to a retrospective of photography
by David Goldblatt named TJ, embodying Vladislavić’s ongoing ex-
perimentalism and innovation. A number of his works have been
translated into German, Dutch, Italian, and so on. 2015 was a good
year for Vladislavić: he won Yale’s Windham Campbell award for fiction
and became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the