Crime, Reality and Nonfiction in Post-Apartheid Writing1 “If You Can’t Find the Right Story, at Least Get the Story Right”

Abstract

Current South African writing is characterised by the rise of both genre fiction and creative nonfiction as ways of responding to a widely perceived sickness in the body politic, where the plot, metaphorically speaking, is thought to have been lost, and there is a premium on uncovering actual conditions. The real issue, for writers, is to find the right story, or at the very least to get the story right. This article takes a view of South Africa’s reconstituted public sphere after 1994 and finds it riddled with symptoms of criminal pathology. Crime writing’s generic inclinations come conveniently to hand, since the crime story typically sets out to pinpoint the ‘culprit,’ or, in the crime narrative’s implicitly wider terms, the sources of social and political perversity. This article sees such acts of writing as works of social detection; the underlying context that gives rise to them may be related to both immediate pressures on the ground and more extensive transnational conditions. The diagnostic works of crime writers refract a real but perverted transformation in which the postcolonies of the late modern world are awash with criminality despite a heightened preoccupation with law and (dis)order. In particular, the “criminalisation of the state” is hardly peculiar to South Africa, but rather a common feature of postcolonial polities, of which the post-apartheid state is but a belated example. Post-apartheid writing constitutes an investigation into, and a search for, the ‘true’ locus of civil virtue in decidedly disconcerting social conditions, in an overall context of transition. In the course of this article, two main operating principles in post-apafrtheid writing in general are discussed, namely ‘overplotting’ (crime writing; creative nonfiction); and ‘underplotting’ (“fiction’s response” to the abovementioned conditions).