May 2008
The Missng ‘i’:
Corrigenda in Ivan Vladislavić’s second edition of The Restless Supermarket
Aubrey Tearle, a retired proofreader and the narrator of Ivan Vladislavić’s 2006 novel The Restless Supermarket at one point comments, “Some say that an error of the right kind in the right place, something not too ugly, something truly devious, an error that demontrates [sic] by its elusiveness how easily we might all slip into error ourselves, might have a purpose, perhaps even a beauty, of its own” (107). An error like the missing ‘s’ in the word “demontrates” here would normally be seen as an anomaly, something that slipped past correction, an undesirable mistake that interrupts the perfect smoothness of a given thought. In fact, the occupation of proofreader exclusively functions to correct such expressions of human error. Vladislavić’s novel, set in Tearle’s neighbourhood in post-apartheid South Africa, is written entirely from his white, male, and often racist point of view. The novel itself is also, ironically, riddled with typographical errors including missing letters, dropped punctuation, and altered formatting. Within the context of South Africa, where the English language has functioned as a tool of oppression, the typo may actually have subversive potential. Following Jennifer Devere Brody, I “want to remember that writing has been a tool of colonization and power” (680), and with this in mind, I will investigate the possibilities of a story that exists just beyond or beneath Tearle’s narrative, an alternative story that the missing letter “s” in the word “demontrates” begins to tell. I read the typographical errors in The Restless Supermarket not as errors in the traditional sense, but rather as slippages in Tearle’s dominant English narrative that suggest—but never describe—a subversive utopian world for the marginalized.
Aubrey Tearle has lived and proofread in Johannesburg his whole life, and narrates a period in the 1990s when non-white citizens began to enter his visual field for the first time. These visual encounters disturb him almost as much as the errors he sees proliferating in the neighbourhood’s newspapers and street signs, and he connects them as symptoms of a degenerating society: “Standards of proofreading have been declining steadily since the nineteen-sixties, when the permissive attitude to life first gained ground, and so have standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene and medical care, the standard of living, and so on” (90). Tearle thus makes it his business to correct whatever errors he can find. At one point, for example, Tearle argues at length with the owner of the Restless Supermarket, a 24-hour grocery store that is not restless, but rather never rests—a linguistic crime that Tearle will not tolerate (93). Misspellings, malapropisms, and certain people are cropping up in South Africa, and Tearle feels it is his duty as a proofreader to uncover them.
Even while Tearle denounces the degeneracy a misspelling indicates, linguistic errors crop up within his own story. Interestingly, the typos in Vladislavić’s first (2002) edition of the book were minimal. Several critics1 have commented on the 2002 edition as a clever and ironic take on the changes to social climate and urban space in the post-apartheid era, but they do not address the typography of the book itself. Though Vladislavić has not admitted publicly to having revised the 2006 edition, the errors are clearly deliberate. The same company (David Philip) published both editions, and the second has been modified, for example with slightly more widely spaced text, to make the typos more obvious. Most commonly a letter is missing from a word: on the second page of the story, “passiontely” lacks its ‘a’ (4). Following this, we find the words “overalanced” (5), “changng” (9), “waffiing” (10), “thoroughares” (17), and so on.
At times Tearle’s comments are so ironic that it seems impossible for the errors to be unintentional. At one point he remarks: “Some professionals regard one proofreading error in five pages as an acceptable norm; I myself think that one should aim for perfection and let the norms take care of themselves” (94). There is a typo higher up on this very page (“adherng”) and the average for this edition is more like two per page. At one point, Tearle himself points out how quickly a simple added or removed letter can change the meaning of a sentence when he is watching the recently emancipated Nelson Mandela giving a speech on television, reading through his old spectacles. Tearle remarks, “Surely people realized that the lack of appropriate lenses might lead to serious errors of judgement; a single word misread—‘suspicious’ for ‘auspicious’, say, or ‘congenital’ for ‘congenial’, or ‘treasonable’ for ‘reasonable’—might plunge the country into crisis” (187). The more one looks into these “misakes” (68), the more interesting they become.
Though a considerable amount of criticism and theory has been written about textuality and the material work, especially as it pertains to different editions of the same “text” (see, e.g. Jerome McGann, Eugene Vinaver, Peter Shillingsburg), relatively little has been written about the subversive possibilities of errors in these various texts and editions. D.C. Greetham has pointed out that the question of how theory can be applied to editing is never asked because “all too frequently, textual critics have assumed that there is really no theory behind the mechanics of editing” (79). The unself-conscious text, in its most common form, is authoritative, traditional, and hierarchical, and a new approach to the edited text could celebrate (for example) errors and marginalia such that “the privilege embodied in the textual page proper is set against the repressed role of the rejected variants” (79). The editing and proofreading process must be understood as functioning within an authoritative and hierarchical system.
One way of calling this textual authority into question is through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic, which focuses on process within the text and is visible through indications of suppressed aspects of language (such as errors). These moments that break through the text are potentially revolutionary in that they rebel against the dominant (symbolic) text. The typos in The Restless Supermarket, by gesturing towards a suppression beyond the significations of the symbolic text, work very similarly to Kristeva’s “Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and ‘incomprehensible’ poetry all [of which] underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” (16). These somewhat mysterious functions in literature often play with grammar and syntax, the bastions of textual authority, and thus underscore a potential subversion of power on the textual level.
Greetham understands the linguistic error in particular as an indication of the semiotic within the symbolic (edited) text. The errors represent the “‘unexpressed’ text that tends toward anarchy in language and must thus be constrained by the symbolic medium in which most editors work” (92). The typos rupture the structure of a text, and may be “[v]iewed against the patriarchal authority of that syntax” as a “threat to that authority” (92). If the semiotic were to be embraced as a subversive way of including all of the processes and marginalia of a text, errors would be rendered meaningless. Greetham argues that within Kristeva’s semiotic, “The very concept of ‘error’ would have to be abandoned, for that is a product of the later, ‘symbolic,’ logical and hierarchical stage of language” (93). Where Kristeva and Greetham focus on a subversive feminist linguistic approach, however, Vladislavić experiments with the subversive power of the error in a specifically colonial (con)text. In this sense, the typos may indicate not (or not only) the suppressed feminine semiotic beyond the masculine symbolic text, but the marginalized voices of apartheid beyond the white colonial text. Proofreading, then, becomes paralleled with policing, and errors with resistance.
Tearle’s obsession with linguistic errors leads him to collect the ones he finds around the city and eventually compile them into a story that proofreaders can compete to correct. This story, which appears in the book as a chapter entitled “The Proofreader’s Derby,” takes place in the imaginary city of Alibia, and makes literal the connection Tearle draws between life and text. It stars Fluxman, one of a team of several proofreaders who are able correct with their proofreading superpowers whatever errors they find in the city, including “the human detritus [Fluxman] found in the margins of the city, the erroneous ones, the slips of the hand, the tramps, the fools, the congenitally stupid, the insufferably ugly. They were incorrigible, he reasoned, and doing away with them, at one painless stroke, was more humane than trying to improve them” (252). Anything that does not look right in Alibia can be corrected or, better, deleted with a simple swipe of Fluxman’s “blue pencil” (206). This fantasy is eerily reminiscent of the militant order of apartheid, especially with Tearle idealistically imagining that “ordinary citizens were sleeping easily because good order was in the hands of responsible men” (217). “The Proofreader’s Derby” is Tearle’s utopia: its nostalgia for the apartheid era translates the power of apartheid officials into the ink of the proofreader’s pen.
“The Proofreader’s Derby” does not, however, end in utopian bliss for the imaginary politician/proofreaders. Rather, the typos strike back: they become persistent, even threatening. The proofreaders in the chapter hold an emergency meeting, to which they come “dressed for battle” (242) and affirm that “they themselves were all that stood between Alibia and its ruination” (242). Despite their attacks against the unrelenting errors, the proofreaders finally admit defeat. They set things in order to as reasonable a standard as they can, and abandon “the city to a state of flawed completion” (253). All, that is, except Fluxman, who continues fighting errors one at a time in a hopeless campaign against change. Similarly, the errors in The Restless Supermarket will not be contained within Tearle’s story, but rather continue to wage war on him in his life and throughout his narrative.
As a fantasy, “The Proofreader’s Derby” provides an interesting space in the text for subversive imagination. The chapter fits Maggie Ann Bowers’s definition of postcolonial magical realism, which is a literary form that seeks “to disrupt official and defined authoritative assumptions about reality, truth and history” (95). In effect, the story of Alibia is a colonial fantasy. Bowers’s understanding of colonialism involves “the attempt by colonial rulers to define the colonized people and their nation from the colonizer’s perspective and to impose a homogeneous, authoritative historical and cultural identity on the colonized nation” (96). Similarly, Tearle’s alter ego Fluxman and his proofreading cohorts believe that they know what the wor(l)d should look like, and anyone or anything that does not fit their vision must be corrected or deleted immediately. “The Proofreader’s Derby” actually points out the anxieties of white citizens like Tearle, who wish to homogenize and stabilize (colonize?) a changing world.
Within magic realism, argues Bowers, there are always two contrasting discourses at play: the real and the magical. By analogy, the tension in postcolonial texts is that existing between the discourse of the colonizer and that of the colonized.2 Magic elements, like being able to delete people with a proofreader’s pen, cause ruptures in the normative text. The authority of the world’s normalcy is shown to be actually quite fragile, and we are able to understand “The Proofreader’s Derby” as an allegory for apartheid. According to Bowers, this rupture creates two potential gaps in a postcolonial magic realist text. The “negative gap” is the conflict caused by “the difficulty of cultural expression for the colonized in the oppositional face of the colonialist power” while the “positive gap” represents a space in which that alternate, colonized perspective can be expressed (98). In this novel, the negative gap is where the voices of any non-whites (or perhaps, here, non-proofreaders) have been silenced. The spaces left by the missing letters, in turn, creates the positive gap through which we can imaginatively enter that silenced world.
As an imaginative alternative world created by our racist narrator, “The Proofreader’s Derby” is also a utopia, and as such invites further questions about colonial desire. The word “utopia” has been ambivalent from its inception: it is derived from the Greek words for “nowhere (outopia) and […] somewhere good (eutopia)” (Kumar 1). Classical utopian texts, like Thomas More’s seminal 1516 novel Utopia, often look like road maps to a better social future. Many of these texts are imagined during a time of social turmoil, and represent desire for a unified society. Utopian systems often imply homogeneity and stasis, a society based on equal work and productivity, with each citizen fulfilling his role. Diversity is the enemy to many classical utopians, “because their deepest longing was for the miracle of a coherence which could give a measure of purpose, dignity, and meaning to the empty randomness that marked and marred the life they were criticizing” (Lasky 10). Ralph Pordzik’s definition of colonialism is “the attempt to fashion the ‘other’ on one’s own terms, to restrict the autonomy and individuality of another person’s experience according to one’s own perception of the world” (21). The classical utopia forces one final set of values on every participating citizen. The diverse, often minoritised and oppressed peoples of postcolonial societies need a world that can include everyone, which means that no single person can describe that place definitively. For this reason, utopias are always, on some level, colonial.
Apartheid is particularly interesting in the context of utopia. In the years leading up to the implementation of the apartheid regime, the Afrikaners in South Africa saw that the rise of capitalism had led to Afrikaner exploitation of cheap black labour. A group of elite men (much like those in Tearle’s fantasy) discussed the problem, with some arguing that as a racial minority, Afrikaners “could never allow blacks to fully develop economically or politically because this would necessarily imply black domination of the Afrikaner minority” (Louw 29). Afrikaner elites thus suggested a system that would separate the races and cultures of South Africa so that “whites would no longer need to suppress black interests and could actually then assist blacks to develop their full potential in their separate black polities” (29). Apartheid was conceived to solve the problems of the current reality and offer a utopian future world, to the extent that the National Party in 1948 “advocated that its apartheid policy would end racial conflict” in South Africa altogether (31). This concept began as a utopian ideal, but became very dangerous when it was actualized as a reality.
Postcolonial utopias, however, tend to look a little bit different from the classical utopian concepts based on sameness. In fact, sometimes they look like nothing at all. The postcolonial utopia imagines the possibility of new worlds without telling the reader what he or she should see in that imaginary world. Pordzik, in his study on this new trend in speculative fiction, terms the novels of this genre “utopographic metafiction” because they use utopian imaginings as “a kind of ‘testing ground’” for possible approaches to future worlds, and are also self-conscious, turning “problematically into themselves,” thus destabilizing their authorly authority and encouraging the reader to think about the utopia’s structure and fill in the blanks him or herself (134). A postcolonial utopia must understand itself as problematic, but must continue to do the work of imagining a better future. It should give the reader the desire for change and hope for the future without determining the reader’s vision of that world.
In Vladislavić’s case, the postcolonial utopia is found in the spaces left by missing letters, faulty spacing and erratic punctuation that break through the dominant narrative to suggest alternatives. The most common of the missing letters in this text is ‘i’. If we understand these missing letters as representing missing persons, then we can understand the personhood of the excluded non-white citizens as overwritten in this narrative by the dominating white ego. While lower-case ‘i’s go missing from words like “containng” (127), “tickng” (134), and “cryng” (177), a capital I is occasionally inserted inappropriately, as, for example, in the word “oId” (164), where the lower-case ‘l’ is actually a capital ‘I’. The white I, namely Tearle’s, dominates the narrative, silencing the (lower-case) voices of difference. Tearle indulges in nostalgia for the systematized past that validated his capital I and obscured the lower-case ‘i’s of the people he felt were merely errors in his ideal Johannesburg landscape. As a first-person narrator, Tearle’s self literally overwrites the text.
As a result, Tearle finds lower case ‘i’s threatening. When Tearle is in a hospital waiting room, he sees the lower-case ‘i’, representing “information,” in a position of prominence, and it creates a great amount of anxiety for him. He muses,
i. For ‘information’. Why didn’t they use a capital? That minuscule ‘i’ suggested that the information was not very important. […] I knew what the dot was, of course: a tittle. But what was it doing there? The question had never presented itself to me in exactly this form. Why should ‘i’, of all letters, have that detached fragment floating above it? I went through the alphabet in my head. Just ‘i’ and its neighbour ‘j’. All the others were solid citizens. (317)
The detached ‘i’, small, nearly invisible, separated from itself, is different from the other “solid citizens” like himself and the other letters of the alphabet. If letters can be citizens, then so can errors. Tearle begins to understand these errors as having lives—and agendas—of their own. For example, if an error were to take up residence in the dictionary, a space coded only for correct words, it would have “the capacity to generate its misleading progeny in an infinite number of places. […] It may settle down in respectable company and become naturalized as a citizen of good standing, until not even the most discriminating neighbour knows its shady past” (108). Even the encroachment of something as small as a tittle or iota can threaten Tearle’s carefully systematized world.
Those tittles have great power, for Tearle, and, if allowed to organize, could create a nightmare fantasy of guerrilla dots that could blind the other upstanding “citizens” unsuspecting of their attack:
Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a mere trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured. (90)
The typos begin to represent dissenters, and Tearle appears to fear that the tittles and iotas will begin to organize and protest against his carefully protected system. This passage is, in fact, printed twice in the novel, once in “The Proofreader’s Derby” and once in Tearle’s own narrative, suggesting that his anxieties about errors cross over from his nightmare fantasies into his real life. Tearle fears the obscuring power of these nightmare citizens—the possibility that by making themselves visible, they will make the things he understands invisible. Boundaries will become permeable, and white spaces may become blackened by misplaced ink spots.
Missing ‘i’s are also interesting because of their homonym, ‘eyes.’ Tearle’s friend Spilkin accuses him of being afflicted with monoblepsia, a condition, Tearle discovers in his Concise Oxford Dictionary, “in which vision is perfect when one eye is used, but confused and indistinct when both are used” (268). Tearle sees perfectly when only his ‘I’ is concerned. But when faced with the perspective of another ‘I’ his vision is doubled; he becomes confused and his story becomes erratic—full of errors. Significantly, “Spilkin” is spelled with “two i’s,” indicating an ability to see three-dimensionally, while “Tearle” is spelled “with two e’s” and no ‘i’s at all (54). A second definition of monoblepsia that Tearle conveniently leaves out is that of “ a variety of color blindness in which only one color is perceived” (“Monoblepsia”).3 The dissolution of apartheid is not something Tearle is able to understand or assimilate into his system precisely because he has only one working i/eye or perspective. In order to understand others (and perhaps see the world in colour), one must first be able to see from their point of view.
The Restless Supermarket is not the first work in which missing letters come to represent (to borrow from the title of one of Vladislavić’s other books) Missing Persons. In The Restless Supermarket, all kinds of letters from ‘a’ to ‘z’ have gone missing, and their absence becomes more and more conspicuous as the narrative goes on. Georges Perec, a Jewish French writer whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, has also experimented with the technique of making letters conspicuously absent. He wrote La Disparition, translated into English as A Void, a novel that completely eschews the use of the most common letter in French (and English) usage: ‘e’. Warren Motte suggests that the missing ‘e’ presents an absence, especially that left on Perec’s life and the life of many others after the Holocaust:
The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père [“father”], mère [“mother”], parents [“parents”], famille [“family”] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. (4)
Nor can he write “eux,” the “other.” The systematic exclusion of the ‘e’s comes to signify the millions of Jews that were killed in the Holocaust, again drawing a parallel between editing (out) and policing. Perec is able to tell a very e-motional story without the ‘e’s, in a way that allows him to speak to the problem of absence without permitting its presence.
The typos in The Restless Supermarket also tell a story of exclusion through a technique of exclusion, this time in terms of racial oppression in South Africa. The absence of certain (diverse) letters indicates the blackening of this white text. In her paper on Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Jennifer Devere Brody argues that typography creates spaces in which to reclaim the blackness of a text. She argues, “the role typography plays in eliciting and soliciting (black) sensations and sensations of blackness—in moving us to respond to the calls (as in hailing) of black ink” (681). Punctuation variations, specifically ellipses, create moments of “(inter)actions” with the text that may indicate a “link (or leak) between black ink and embodied forms of blackness—of being black and black being” (681). Like the missing letters, ellipses lend a space for reading trauma and conspicuous absence into the story of The Invisible Man, invisible because he is black in American society. Brody writes, “The ellipses, as I am reading them here, form a corollary between the different and yet analogically related experiences of silence and invisibility” (691). Just like the missing letters in Perec’s and Vladislavić’s texts, the absence interrupts and subverts the dominant text. Brody continues, “The ellipsis appears to de-compose the page and speech: as such, it labors to contradictory ends. It marks a strategic deletion that produces not only deleterious effects (lack); but also, and simultaneously, affective desire (excess)” (687). Just as it presents itself as missing, the ellipsis or omitted letter opens up the possibility for more meaning, in that it “can be read as a site that invited improvisation: one might even say that the ellipsis as a present figure of absence is paradoxically more meaning-full, rather than meaning-less” (687). There is a world of possible meaning where the words or letters are missing from the text, and, though that world is never described, the possibility spills over with potential in the imagination of the careful reader.
This spilling over suggests linguistic possibilities that the normative text does not allow for. The fullness of meaning in the spaces left by the errors or ellipses suggest a certain unpredictable fertility that a more structured (or perhaps better edited) text would prevent. Steve McCaffery has called these potentially rich ruptures in the normative text moments of “libidinal intensity” (“Language” 153). Libidinal intensities, like the typos in this novel, “are oppositionally related to the fixity of the written; they are decoding drives that seep through and among texts, jamming codes and pulverizing language chains; they are liberative of the energy trapped inside linguistic structures” (153). Typographical errors are in some ways the perfect enactment of this interruption of the dominating code of grammar. Tearle’s world, and his story, is sterile and fixed. He claims he has a “frozen heart” (Vladislavić 33) is often referred to as “dry” (e.g. on page 98), and has awkwardly courteous relationships with the women he desires sexually. The lack of fertile desire in his life is channelled back into the story through the libidinal, uncontained world of the typos. “Libido,” McCaffery argues, “is not a producer but flows and spills and breaks in an unmediated outlay of blind power. […] Libido is a pure, intransitive desire” (155). Where “The Proofreader’s Derby” is Tearle’s fantasy, the typos create their own fantasy that is always present with and subversive of Tearle’s, making what is absent present again in undefined and fertile imaginative worlds.
In another essay, McCaffery playfully experiments with the libidinal possibilities of the typo itself. His essay consists of two columns, both of which explain how a typographical error can work in the same way as the atom’s clinamen—the sudden, unpredictable swerve of the smallest common denominator in a molecule that causes it to change direction dramatically. One column of the essays is grammatically and typographically correct, while the other shifts gradually into increasing textual chaos. At one point, he quotes from Lucretius, in the ‘correct’ column asking how it is possible that
…the atoms are
Arranged to hold together, and with what others,
And how they can move each other or be moved,
So that the same atoms, shifted a little, create
Both fire and wood? (20)
In the performing, error-filled column, the excerpt becomes:
…the atoms are
Arranged to holp to get her, and wish what others,
And hot they can move each other or be mowed,
So tham the sale atmos, shifted a little, crease
Both fine and wood? (20)
The second column comes to make something like its own sense, but, more importantly, it also introduces a great number of new signifiers that can create meaning on several levels when compared with the first column. Here, we can begin to think of desire on the part of the swerving particles, with atoms helping “to get her” and being “mowed” rather than moved because they are so “hot.” These minor erroneous moments can change the meaning of a passage fundamentally, and draw to the surface meanings, here libidinal meanings, that were heretofore suppressed. The errors that are embedded in The Restless Supermarket undermine its narrative, exhibiting a desire that a grammatically correct world cannot fulfil. The errors, then, begin to look like a group of radical (t)errorists with their own agendas that are determined to bring grammatical oppression out in the open. They become almost polymorphously perverse, libidinous, sensual, desiring to take us over and topple both readers and words into the semiotic process that rebels against the symbolic text’s strictures. The word wants its full range of connotations and associations that it has a right to outside of the oppression of the sentence. It wants more than its grammar can give.
In all of these different ways, the typos in The Restless Supermarket point to a utopian space that breaks through these various forms of linguistic and colonial authority. According to several utopian theorists, utopian imaginings can also be revolutionary insofar as they are “actions—a kind of ‘action dreaming’—in the name of ideal values: neglected or betrayed in the present, once enjoyed in the past, or yet to be fulfilled in the future” (Lasky 9). Because utopias engage fundamentally with the world they are born from, they can incite change by inviting readers to imagine a different world: “The existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bonds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence” (Mannheim 179). The typos in the Restless Supermarket, then, are not merely representatives of unrealizable desires for an alternate reality, but rather revolutionaries that can “break the bonds of the existing order.” Vladislavić points out that the end of apartheid does not mean the end of racism and exclusion in South Africa, but that more revolutionary thinking is required before real, positive change can take place. If the fantasy of Alibia/apartheid is a nostalgic dream of the past as an outopia (no place) then imagining what is beyond the typos creates the possibility for a real, alternate future for South Africa as an eutopia (good place).
Whether or not we as readers choose to engage with The Restless Supermarket’s semiotic postcolonial utopian imagination via its errors, however, we are required first to understand the symbolic text, its grammar. In order to become aware of the alternative world of the typos, we must first proofread the text and locate its slippages. Inescapably, all people, not just retired proofreaders in post-apartheid South Africa, require systems to read, understand, and communicate. Most often, our brains will correct for the missing parts of a word, allowing us to pass over inconsistencies by assuming it is the word we expect. If we do notice an error, we must ignore it or correct it mentally in order to understand the sentence. Greetham reads this tendency as a desire for the comfort and stability of order, reminding us that “Freud specifically likens this process to a reader’s ignoring a ‘misprint,’ so strong is the desire for uniform harmonious narrative” (88). In our everyday reading practices we rarely stop on an error and think about why it might be there. Similarly, due to the general invisibility of our values, social systems often do not come under scrutiny until some oppressed or silenced group speaks out. By mentally correcting and ignoring each error that we read, we take part in and take for granted the linguistic system that in many ways shapes our social lives.
As readers, we also must become aware of our ‘i’s and eyes as we read what is in the text and infer what is not in it. This ironic self-awareness makes a reader complicit in the text’s judgments.4 We must create a system for understanding the narrative and organizing it, and we impose that system on the text. We may very well sit back and judge Tearle for his love of order and his desire to impose that order on a chaotic post-apartheid South Africa, even while we are ordering the text into our own interpretations. Tearle certainly seems like a cranky old man with no imagination and no tolerance for change and difference, but even the most conscious readers fall into his linguistic trap. As someone who obviously cares something for linguistic continuity, I admit that when I first noticed these errors, I thought they were accidental and, incensed, considered returning the book to the bookstore for a more correct edition. In the novel, there is an episode where Tearle’s friend “Spilkin complained so bitterly about the typographical errors in a book he had just purchased that [Tearle] was persuaded to look into it” for himself (94). Tearle proceeds to spend “the next week proofreading this corny farrago, meticulously as you please, and then mailed it to their head office in London” with a note of remonstrance (94). I, on the other hand, proofread The Restless Supermarket and then wrote an essay about the typos I found.
It is certainly Vladislavić’s aim to involve the reader and create an often-uncomfortable alignment with Tearle through multilayered irony. With many levels of self-consciousness, the reader cannot land on any perspective of complete distance and judgment. Vladislavić admits, “I try, in my work, to keep an ironical movement going. Otherwise, you’re defeating that particular purpose by simply establishing a new vantage point from which you can then judge everything in this orderly way, put everything into its category” (“An Interview” 121). Indeed, it is precisely because Tearle is so obsessive about perfection that we begin to notice the imperfections of the book and proofread along with him. Choosing any single way of understanding something means making absent any other perspectives that may be at play. Meaning, then, becomes the opposite of what Tearle—and the reader—desires it to be. It is unstable, and its value is located with both the writer and the reader through the process of interpreting.
Reading, because it involves this interpretation, is a fundamentally social act. As the typos resurface every couple of pages, readers are given the choice of either contemplating or ignoring them. This choice is a part of the space in which invisible voices may begin to be heard. W.D. Ashcroft explains, “A written text is a social situation. That is to say, it has its existence in something more than the marks on the page, namely the participation of social beings whom we call writers and readers, and who constitute the writing as communication of a particular kind, as ‘saying’ a certain thing” (58). Within this social act, the participants can never be fully present to each other. For this reason, “the central problematic of studies of writing is absence” (60). Vladislavić, then, could never represent the marginalized voices being suppressed within an English narrative. He may only refer to their absence, and offer up that absence in all its fullness.
The possibility of play and diversity is not exclusively accessible between the lines, however. There is already a space in Tearle’s Johannesburg for imagination and play in the first few pages of the novel, in which a group of people from the street join in on a joke around a pink plastic elephant. Tearle is thrown into a carnivalesque5 scene of laughter and fun that gestures towards the real-world possibilities of a diverse multilingual world. The scene unfolds with a group of men shouting and laughing as a salesman costumed in “the pinstriped suit, the shirt tails hanging out behind, the tie drooping on his chest like a slice of pizza” (3) pretends to make love to a plastic elephant, the mascot of the nearby liquor store. Even “the Queen of Sheba stagger[s] out of the alley” and joins the fun (5). Tearle begins to hear the many voices and languages that come into play. The men laugh and speak in their own dialect, alienating the narrator when he does not understand the word “tawty” because “it’s in none of the reference works and no one will enlighten me” (4). The crowd goes on, “speaking in indigenous tongues” (6) while “[m]ultilingual sobbing” is heard, and “[f]our-letter words fly, the whole dashed alphabet” (6). The sheer volume of diverse discourses unfolds in a ritual of laughter to which Tearle has no access.
As a result, Tearle turns away from this scene, imposing his singular, first person, grammatically correct, English voice onto the narrative. He decides he has “seen enough” (6), judges the scene as “chaos” (6), and leads the reader away from the street and into the Café Europa, where most of the action in the book past this point happens. In effect, Tearle grammatically colonizes the opening scene. The multilingual party is made invisible to us, tamed and silenced in order to more comfortably accommodate the structured grammatical tale that Tearle wishes to tell. In order to more authoritatively erase the earlier scene and force a sense of community around his single voice, Tearle disdainfully asserts the primacy of himself and his white, English community by reminding his readers of who he is, and who we should be if we want to read his tale: “What do I mean by ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh” (7).
Significantly, Tearle silences this multilingual chaos by telling his story in a very correct form of English, which is only one of 11 official South African languages. During apartheid, Afrikaans was the language of the oppressor. It was institutionalised as the language of South African superiority; for example, children were prohibited from speaking any other language at school. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, English was becoming more common in political and social situations as a language that each of the many diverse linguistic and cultural groups in South Africa could understand.6 Due to this universalization, however, English threatens to usurp Afrikaans as the new language of oppression. With Tearle’s interruption of the opening scene of The Restless Supermarket, he effectively colonizes and silences the chaotic multilingual party that threatens to enter his story by meticulously proofreading it into correct English.
Of course, the party has its revenge. As Tearle insists on proofreading his world, the narrative effectively undoes itself. The diverse, multilingual scene that Tearle represses at the beginning of the novel resurfaces invisibly through the text in the spaces left by the missing letters and other errors. Kevin Platt suggests that disruptions in a text, as embodied by an opening scene like this one, errors, or marginalia, are “moment[s] of disorientation,” often marked by laughter or tears, in which revolutionary possibilities can be imagined outside the dominating narrative (22). Here we return to Kristeva’s “Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and ‘incomprehensible’ poetry,” which she believes mark sites of process and the revolutionary semiotic (16). The magical, libidinal fantasy suggested by the typos creates imaginative gaps that individual readers can choose to occupy (or, in a postcolonial context, not).
We must keep in mind, however, that the ordered text remains dominant. The ‘correct’ story is the one we read, and Tearle’s perspective is the one we have access to and can understand and judge. New South Africa does not yet exist, and its alternatives have yet to materialize into “a better life for all” as the African National Congress party advertised in their 2004 election campaign (Louw 182). Vladislavić knows that defining a place in the negative—post-apartheid—does not give us any access to what it can be in the positive sense. What system is left to follow? The alternative society offered by the errors in the book remains necessarily imaginary.
If Tearle represents nostalgia for the apartheid regime, we can see that he remains a presence in Johannesburg by the end of the novel. His more open-minded friends berate him for his strictness, choosing to forgive him for his racist viewpoints. His reformation is not a great or obvious one, though he may have learned something through his ordeal. Clearly things are changing in the Johannesburg of The Restless Supermarket, and yet Tearle’s monologic voice remains dominant by the end of the novel. He is stabbed in the chest during the chaos of the final chapter, titled “The Goodbye Bash,” when a party turns violent. He discovers, however, that he is unhurt: “the blade had gone straight into the heart of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary” (307). When the dominating voice of this text is finally attacked by violence, it is shown to be invincible, saved by the tool of that monologic voice—a dictionary of the English language that is ever-present in our narrator’s pocket. The novel ends without any definitive sense of positive change. Tearle may have learned something, but he is still alive, still believing his old beliefs. Vladislavić points out that the end of apartheid does not mean the end of racism and exclusion in South Africa, but he does try to create a space for revolutionary thinking that can lead to positive change.
In this sense, the reader becomes the most important part of the undescribed postcolonial utopia. The typos offer themselves as spaces through which a different text or world can be glimpsed, and it becomes the reader’s responsibility to imagine that potential reality. In Ali Erritouni’s words, “When the novelist baulks at prescribing for the reader an alternative reality, she recognizes and enables the reader’s right to determine the substance of that reality” (77). The very fact that the second edition is different from the first testifies to the openness of texts like this that are often perceived to be static. The fact that there can be a new edition that emphasizes the possibilities of errors rather than erasing them raises questions that encourage the reader to think about the changeable text. For all these reasons, we as readers, writers, and editors must learn to leave some space for error or, perhaps, alternate spellings.
Notes
Works Cited
Ashcroft, W. D. “Constitutive Graphonomy: A Post-Colonial Theory of Literary Writing.” After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing. Ed. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Sydney: Dangaroo, 1989. 58-73.
Asselin, Steve. “Losing Sight of Apartheid: Vision and Narrative in The Restless Supermarket. ENGL 421: African Literature. Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, 2006.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
Bowers, Maggie Ann. “Postcolonial Magical Realism.” Magic(al) Realism. London: Routledge, 2004.
De Vries, Fred. “Joburg’s ambiguity mirrored in Portrait.” Business Day [South Africa], 9 Sept. 2006: 11.
Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Graham, Shane. “Memory, Memorialization, and the Transformation of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket and Propaganda by Monuments.” Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (2007): 70-111.
Guidotti, Valeria. “Magical Realism Beyond the Wall of Apartheid?” Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English. Ed. Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Casotti, and Carmen Concilio. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.
Helgesson, Stefan. ‘Minor Disorders’: Ivan Vladislavić and the Devolution of South African English. Journal of South African Studies 30.4 (2004): 777-786.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
Louw, P. Eric. The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid. Westport: Praeger, 2004.
Marais, Mike. “Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket.” English in Africa 29.2 (2002): 101-17.
McCaffery, Steve. “Language Writing: From Productive to Libidinal Economy.” North of Intention. Toronto: Nightwood, 1986. 143-58.
McCaffery, Steve. “Zarathustrian ‘Pataphysics.” Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001. 15-30.
“Monoblepsia.” Dorlands Illustrated Medical Dictionary. 2004. Mercksource.com. 15 April 2007. <http://www.mercksource.com/pp/us/cns/cns_hl_dorlands.jspzQzpgzEzzSzppdocszSzuszSzcommonzSzdorlandszSzdorlandzSzdmd_m_18zPzhtm>
Motte, Warren. “Reading Georges Perec.” Context 11 (2002): 4-5.
Platt, Kevin M.F. History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Slemon, Stephen. “Magical Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Magical Realism: History, Theory, Community. London: Duke UP, 1995.
Vladislavić, Ivan. Interview with Stacey Knecht. The Ledge. 15 April 2007. <http://www.the-ledge.com/flash/ledge.php?conversation=47&lan=UK>
—. Interview with Mike Marais and Carita Backstrom. “An Interview with Ivan Vladislavić.” English in Africa 29.2 (2002): 119-129.
—. The Restless Supermarket. Claremont, S. Afr.: David Philip, 2006.
—. The Restless Supermarket. Claremont, S. Afr.: David Philip, 2002.
2 For more on magical realism in Vladislavić’s works, see Guidotti; for more on postcolonial magic realisms, see Slemon.
5 For more on the carnivalesque, see Bakhtin. Platt adds an interesting perspective on revolutionary texts in terms of moments of laughter and tears in literature.
6 For more on the linguistic shifts during and after apartheid, see Louw (181), and Gilbert and Tompkins (168).