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Book Review

Graham K. Riach, The Short Story after Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023)

Mathilde Rogez
p. 251-255
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Graham K. Riach, The Short Story after Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023)

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1In this dense and rich study, Graham K. Riach investigates short stories by five South African authors (Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes) and demonstrates how their use of the genre’s specificities might afford (a word borrowed from Caroline Levine) opportunities for readers to consider the issues South Africa still faces after apartheid, in a manner that is itself peculiar to that genre. Through a formal rather than historicist lens, he explores the “intersections” between “formal and extra-formal concerns” (2), the fraught and “dynamic” (7) “relationship between word and world” (5), and the role played by readers.

2The originality of Riach’s approach is stressed from the start: his focus is strictly on the “diminutive genre” (2) of the short story, which has indeed often been overshadowed by the novel, the other main genre of narrative fiction, favoured by most critics of South African as well as post-colonial literature, despite the major tradition of short story writing in the country. Other genres are alluded to, like poetry and the lyric, but more often not considered, like the essay, films, or plays—yet this in no way detracts from the great and many qualities of the book.

3With this generic and formal focus, the monograph proves extremely useful for specialists of the short story and for readers of South African (and more largely post-colonial) literature alike, in that it provides deep reflections on the genre, while considerably enriching the way in which post-apartheid, and even earlier South African fiction has so far been read. The introduction surveys debates on the genre of the short story and new and political formalism, in general and in post-colonial and South African literature in particular, while more theoretical discussions also appear at regular intervals, such as that of spatial form in the last chapter, which specialists of the short story will no doubt enjoy. Non-specialists of South Africa will also benefit from the numerous contextualisations to understand political or social issues as well as landmarks in the country’s literary scene, even though periodisation is a risky exercise, as authors “write in full knowledge of [a] past” whose enduring presence is still so violently experienced every day (3). The book does not allow Riach the scope to discuss the term “post-apartheid” itself, a debate on which it is nonetheless felt he could have provided references for further reading; at other times more notes for the non-specialists would have been useful, for instance on “born-frees” (4). Most other times, however, his thoroughness and care for details mean that even more specialised readers discover insightful comments, particularly in his footnotes. Those reading this book from a local perspective will therefore, from its first to last chapter, relish Riach’s choice of original angles to analyse the representation of the endurance of multifaceted inequalities in a wide-ranging variety of stories, and his meticulous reading of fascinating authors with yet extremely diverging stylistic strategies. It is hoped it will also help draw more attention from all kinds of scholars to the numerous and talented South African short story writers more generally.

4What is offered by this study is thus a different glimpse into the nation and its predicaments, too often envisaged, after Jameson, through the prism of the novel. From the introduction, one cannot but think of Njabulo Ndebele’s call to “rediscove[r] the ordinary,” indeed mentioned in the chapter devoted to Mpe but also useful to assess Rose-Innes’s miniaturisation of the world, or of Vladislavić’s own keen eye for the nondescript. Riach first argues that Gordimer, a towering figure in the field, disturbs temporality to allow for an implicit assessment of South Africa’s past and present, and a continued (self-)reflection on the issue of literary commitment; then, he shows how Vladislavić’s very versatile yet often understated stories act as “apophatic” counterpoints to the grand monuments they focus upon, to reflect on appropriate modes of memorialisation. This resonates with Rose-Innes’s interest for space and the mutual interactions between landscape and inscape, and place and space, which form the fifth and final chapter. Riach emphasises how she besides chooses settings which are too often overlooked and yet central in South African society: the mall, the beach and the hotel. There, race and class, it seems, cannot yet, as they could not before 1994, be disentangled, something Riach convincingly demonstrates as well in his reading of class (too often disregarded by critics) in a selection of short stories by Wicomb in chapter three. Wicomb’s cycles are perhaps more easily compared to Mpe’s “brooding” stories, to which chapter four is devoted, despite the fact that the latter’s “stylistic vortices” (206) contrast sharply with the former’s deft use of ellipsis.

5This brief summary deliberately does not follow the order of the book: Riach clearly takes pains to write transitions between each chapter, author, topic, and set of stories (sometimes by insisting on their stark differences, as when he shifts to Mpe’s very singular collection, unique in its kind) and to provide elsewhere frequent links between comments and chapters; but one of the remarkable qualities of his study is that it further allows for different pairings, some he suggests, others triggered in the readers’ mind as they pursue the connections he invites them to make. For instance, in Vladislavić, monuments to the past are often literally debunked, grotesque shadows and empty pedestals, yet indeed ironically put to new use (one thinks of the fountain in Wicomb); or their underlying structures, resting on the persistent legacy of apartheid, can be seen still looming just under the surface of Mpe’s characters’ traumatised psyche. Yet again, Riach is keen to point out how Mpe eschews any logic of hopelessness and doom as he aptly insists on the (also positive) polysemy of the word “brooding”: he offers a more optimistic reading of the echoes the collection creates between the stories, something the genre itself thus specifically allows, contrasting them with Mpe’s novel on similar characters and violent plot. There would be as enlightening, and perhaps as heartening, conclusions to draw from a comparison between two Capetonian writers among his selection, Wicomb and Rose-Innes. They also happen to be women: another element to put to Riach’s credit is the light he is careful to cast on writing by women (three out of the five authors here selected), or by other regrettably understudied authors, such as Mpe.

6Riach does so by combining, syntagmatically across chapters, his generic, formal approach, and his thesis that this prism makes it possible to discern the way this art form mediates between readers and the world, and, paradigmatically, an extreme attention to each author’s and each story’s specific rendering of singular topics and themes. There are pages of beautifully crafted and subtly illuminating close reading that shed new light even on better studied texts like Gordimer’s. While the first part of the chapter devoted to Wicomb may perhaps be deemed to articulate slightly less clearly the class question with an aesthetic of ellipsis, the potential mediation of artworks, within and through the short story, is very convincingly examined in the last piece from her collection The One that Got Away. The notes here provide a wealth of information, and delineate fascinating paths to follow, as do several notes and comments in the chapter on Vladislavić. They make up for some rather less elaborate ones for instance on space and place, or malls, in the last chapter, which one cannot help finding slightly less well proof-read. It is the only chapter where typos could be found, and sometimes its conclusions on the sensuous experience of the story sound just a little too schematic. Still, Riach’s study is both so theoretically erudite and delicately attuned to the texts, with in that same last chapter an impressive sensitivity to words, sounds, and rhythm, on a small scale, connected with spatial and structural cadences on a larger scale, that it itself invites readers to participate in further readings of other texts, as well as ponder on the world thus depicted.

7In so doing, Riach’s book achieves what he hopes short stories themselves “might allow” (8, italics in the original), which is no small feat. The modal is essential here as Riach is wary not to reduce the very varied texts he analyses to a straightforward reflection or allegory of the world: he prefers drawing on Jameson’s conception of the analogon to delineate “a possible way of understanding that is shaped by an artwork” (191), provided readers are sensitive to it and to its generic, formal and stylistic specificities, to the world it is inscribed in, as well as to their own, constantly shifting, situatedness. Notwithstanding his insistence both on the perpetuation of the structures of inequalities (whether in terms of race, or of access to education, public services, private and public spaces, etc.) and the risk texts and authors still run of being assessed (solely) in terms of their political or social commitment, Riach can be praised for the potential agency he grants readers, even beyond the readings critics themselves provide: key words under his pen are “participation” (203), “acts of reading” (7) may involve and the “co-production” of meaning (a word used several times in the book) which might thus result from such a type of engagement with the short stories.

8In that respect, however, as well as given the mention of some key notions like “embeddedness” in the introduction (4) or “entanglement” in the conclusion (204), it is rather striking that some studies should not be mentioned, like Sarah Nuttall’s Entanglement, or the more recent work of French literary critic Alexandre Gefen which, although not yet available in English, is nevertheless quite groundbreaking and must, or should, be known, abroad. Available in English are the many articles by French scholar of South African literature Mélanie Joseph-Vilain who, like other French scholars who publish in English in French journals Riach otherwise cites (like Commonwealth, Essays and Studies, or the present journal), surprisingly does not get a mention, even when he laments the supposed dearth of articles on Rose-Innes.

9To be fair to Riach, one can never be fully comprehensive, and yet the scope and depth of his study, however focused on comparatively few texts, as well as the variety of sources he manages to bring to bear on his analyses, are highly commendable. Riach, indeed, very lucidly and remarkably humbly, stresses that his work is clearly not a survey of the post-apartheid short story but an invitation, even a form of training (some passages could certainly be used in class), through a selection thus closely read, to expand research on other such stories, stylistically different, linguistically more varied too. As a matter of fact, also deserving high praise is his awareness of the material conditions of writing, publishing, and accessing short stories, including “the effect of paratexts . . . and the variant versions” which often characterise the genre (207) and which he skilfully incorporates in his own readings of Vladislavić, Wicomb, and Rose-Innes. Another great strength is how the book is thought-provoking to its compelling conclusion, which seeks to open perspectives for the future of the short story in South Africa and internationally, for trained writers and readers, in the context of the global rise of creative writing courses. Riach’s study is, in short, “a tiny way into a huge subject” (Amy Hempel, quoted on the first and last pages), but certainly an extremely valuable one.

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Mathilde Rogez, « Graham K. Riach, The Short Story after Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023) »Journal of the Short Story in English, 83 | 2024, 251-255.

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Mathilde Rogez, « Graham K. Riach, The Short Story after Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023) »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 83 | Autumn 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4628

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Mathilde Rogez

Université de Toulouse – Jean Jaurès

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