Encountering ‘Confusions in Existing Arrangements’ in South African Literature: Contesting Temporality in Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System

This article theorizes the relationship between the concepts of national time and national literature in contemporary South African fiction. Contemporary South African literary criticism has largely understood South African literature as existing in the same concept of temporality as the nation-state itself. I argue here that this temporal conflation limits the possibilities for reading South African literature after the end of apartheid by reinforcing the nation-state’s institutional claims to the experience of time itself; this conflation thus inadvertently reproduces the power of the nation-state over the literary. I turn to Imraan Coovadia’s 2014 Tales of the Metric System, a novel obviously concerned with notions of standardization, rationalization and measurement, as an example of a text that disarticulates the competing claims to time itself. While it mimics the nation-state’s claim to homogenous, empty time, the novel simultaneously populates its historical national narrative with what Partha Chatterjee calls the heterogenous time of the nation, and thus suggests the possibilities for reading South African literature through multiple and contested temporalities.