“Translated from the dead”: The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives

Writing crime: Detection and legibility

Based on his own perceptions of South African fiction, Vladislavić comments that:

A lot of fiction at the moment is shot through with violent imagery […] but how could it not be? It’s a question of how one deals with these things, why you’re writing about it, what you’re trying to do with it. And whether you’re able to write about it in a way that gives people fresh insight into the situation. But to expect that hijackings and violent crime are not going to come up in our fiction all the time I think is … it would be disturbing if it didn’t. (Miller, 2006: 123)

As Vladislavić puts it, it is not surprising that violence features prominently in much of the fictional output of local authors’ work. At the level of content, it is not merely a manifestation of “writing what you know”, but also operates as a literary means of processing South Africa’s high rate of violent crime. Before considering what kind of possible “fresh insight” Vladislavić offers to the exercise of representing violence, it is crucial to consider how traditional incarnations of popular crime writing use narrative and language to contain and make sense of violent acts. The popularity of the crime novel genre with local South African publishers and readers alike seems to evince what Leon de Kock has described as “an all-consuming preoccupation” with “criminality and its detection” (2015: 1). He also asserts that crime fiction engages in “acts of exhaustive social detection” (2015: 2). This mode of literary detection — the mode in which much post-apartheid literature is written, according to De Kock (2015: 3) — becomes a way in which to manage and track a “dangerous and empirically unknowable world” (2015: 4).

Christopher Warnes (2012), drawing on the work of Dana Brand, remarks that the contemporary worldwide popularity of crime fiction can be traced back to the nineteenth-century origins of the genre (2012: 983). Brand postulates that Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective, Dupin, “extends and revises the role” of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur (Brand qtd. in Warnes, 2012: 983). Like the flâneur, the detective is “obsessed with reading the city” in order to make sense of the modern metropolis which is “menacing, dangerous, and unknown” (Warnes, 2012: 984). This detective–flâneur fosters

a spectatorial subjectivity capable of establishing epistemological and aesthetic control over an environment commonly perceived to be threatening and opaque. By reducing the city to a legible model or emblem of itself, and by demonstrating his control over his reduction, such a subjectivity assumes a paternalistic or heroic role in relation to an urban literary audience. He comforts city-dwellers by suggesting that the city can be read and mastered, despite all appearances to the contrary. (Brand, qtd. in Warnes, 2012: 984)

Warnes homes in on this “legibility as an antidote to anxiety” (2012: 984) and asserts that the figure of the detective in crime fiction is “an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty” (2012: 986), who — through a methodical approach to deciphering clues and filtering evidence — promotes “modes of knowledge and control” that become crucial resources “in the fictional management of threat” (2012: 989). Legibility ultimately brings about “closure and the symbolic restoration of the moral order”, which the criminal act had temporarily disturbed (Amid and De Kock, 2014: 53). This matter of legibility is important. In its classic manifestations, the detective narrative renders the crime legible to the reader, translating the “grammar of violence” (Orford, 2013: 222) into the “text of everyday reality” (Hühn, 1987: 456). The two side-by-side stories that characterize the popular and traditional detective novel, as famously outlined and classified by Tzvetan Todorov (1977) and later refined by Peter Hühn (1987), finds the first story — that of the crime — coming to be told through the second story: the investigation thereof. It is thus through language, where both fictional detective and reader “read the crime” to solve its mystery, that order can finally be restored. Fundamentally, the crime novel or the detective story functions through the hermeneutics of detection. The ability to detect and deduct, through a mode of sleuth-driven ratiocination, symbolizes a process by which a semiology of clues leads to the production of facts. These facts ultimately arrive at the “unassailable” truth that occasioned the commission of the criminal act. It is thus through an adequate reading of the crime (Hühn, 1987: 45), sustained by the detective’s reliance on a “hermeneutic circle” where “detection means selecting and grouping signifiers and assigning various signifieds to them” (1987: 455) that the detective is able to exhibit or uncover what was previously absent (the hidden causation of the crime), manifesting its logic into presence in the present narrative of the investigation (Hühn, 1987: 455; Todorov, 1977: 44–46). It is narrativity, grounded on the bedrock of language (which purportedly promises a dependable correspondence between signifiers and signifieds) that equips the detective with the tools to restore order. It is through the “telling the story of the crime” — at least in classic iterations of the genre — that the detective as reader, and at a further remove, the reader as detective, affords the crime its legibility. Thus, in essence, the detective needs to be equipped with a clear and stable semiology. It is through the vehicle of language, and also via the narrative formula associated with acts of detection, that the crime’s temporary disruption to the order of society is ultimately restored.

“Lost detectives”: Language and the anti-detective

It is, then, quite telling that the main detective in Vladislavić’s story, “101 Detectives”, Mr Joseph Blumenfeld — who attends the 101 Detectives: Sub-Saharan Africa convention — fails spectacularly at finding a language through which to engage his vocational exploits of detection. He wonders: “What kind of detective am I? Eardrum or tympanum? Gullet or oesophagus? Pussy or pudenda? A Detective needs a language almost as much as a language needs a Detective” (Vladislavić, 2015: 34). ³ The avowal of language as an integral element in the pursuit of “truth”, becomes one of the many occasions where Vladislavić’s story begins to unstitch the seams of certainty that hold the hardboiled genre together. The story is riddled with synonyms and puns: “Private (eye) function” (32); “A down-at-heel-gumshoe” (36); “Norwegian salmon? Guatemalan devilfish. Herring” (37). This wordplay works risibly to chafe the generic conventions of the classic detective narrative. A proliferation of synonyms dogs Blumenfeld’s quest to ascertain what kind of detective he thinks he might be: he is a “Penniless” detective, but also “Penurious. Impecunious. Parsimonious” (36). This inability to fix and locate a single semantic site of meaning, signals the story’s broader challenge against Cartesian stability and consistency in both identity and sociality. Certainty, in this text, is anything “but” — incidentally, also the last word of the story, as well as the narrative’s chief concern: a conjunction which augurs no connection, merely hanging in the air like a dangling modifier. As seen in many of his previous works — A Labour of Moles (2011) being the most prominent example — this story becomes an exercise in confronting the paradox that language presents in its dual processes of the deferral and proliferation of meaning. Like the Derridean concept of différance, which denotes two meanings in French, namely “to differ” and “to defer”, language does not simply present seemingly taut connections between signifiers and signifieds (Derrida, 2004/1977). Wordplay is an example of the way in which linguistic semiologies can be subjected to a complicated matrix of difference, where meaning can be at once deferred, or complicated by a chain of semantic plenitude (Derrida, 2004/1977).

Profusion also meets its opposite, when at times, even the simplest of words fail Blumenfeld. On multiple occasions he, through focalized narration, inserts “what” as a placeholder for more precise meaning: “huffing on their smartphones and polishing them on the linings of their what?” (44; emphasis in original); “He unfolded the wings precisely. There was still time to find the what?” (46; emphasis in original); “A what in the snuffbox?” (46; emphasis in original). Feeding into the need to reimagine himself — his “brand” of detective – he ruminates over what kind of copy should appear in his new business card: “Joseph Blumenfeld. Bespoke Detective. Esquire? Nope, old hat. Your Boutique Agency for pop-up surveillance. For made to measure security solutions. For artisanal what?” (44; emphasis in original). This faulty patois borrowed from the millennial hipster movement satirically exposes the ways in which language is mercurial and can be laughably fashioned to accommodate consumerist fantasies. However, language is also slippery, ambiguous and subject to the ineffable… what? Blumenfeld notes with substantial anxiety that “His language was acting up and it scared him” (40).

The idea of language as a vehicle in the detective novel, to secure, lock down, to render manifest and summon truth is called into question here. Blumenfeld draws upon the polyvocality of detective taglines and slogans to find a language in which to inhabit, to summon forth a new identity, a new truth:

He looked for words. For a precise phrase to make something happen. Here he comes now. No. Here come [sic] trouble. Who the hell speaks like that? What have we here. No, it was all wrong. Fuck me George. Better. Sonofabitch. One word. That’s the ticket, trick, technique. Few words as possible. Fuck. Hey. Yo. But no one came. (41; emphasis in original)

Perhaps this linguistic failure is symptomatic of a larger crisis:

This lack of knowing, or rather this lack of a need to know, made him feel like less of a Detective. And the feeling rankled because he was unsure what kind of Detective he really was to begin with. (31)

Throughout the story the reader is offered a detective that is the very opposite of the assured, in-control sleuth that dominates pop cultural representation. Moreover, it is a story devoid of a corporeal crime that can be solved — perhaps the transgression, if any, is of a metaphysical kind. Blumenfeld is a detective embroiled in his own existential crisis: “What kind of Detective am I? … Am I that kind of Detective?” (34). For readers attuned to detectives that will deliver a stable ratiocination, mediated through the language of reliable detection as a means by which order can be restored to the mysterious and uncertain world, this story subverts this cheap comfort. Instead, language is shown to be shifty and equivocal, misleading and contingent. It is anything but dependable or reliable. Language cannot deflect or “contain” a threatening reality; instead language reflects it, being both produced and authored by ontological uncertainty and ambiguity. Similarly, Bennett Kravitz, writing about a “conspiracy of language” in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy — in many ways, the literary progenitor of “101 Detectives” — notes that “language can neither supply the key to reality nor make sense of the world” (2013: 50). Rather, “because of its elusive nature”, language “conspires actively against us by obscuring the meaning of things” (Kravitz, 2013: 50).

The relationship between language — the narrativizing of crime and violence — and the restoration of order are hallmarks of gumshoe fiction; yet in Vladislavić’s story this is destabilized. Blumenfeld is merely one of a hundred other detectives making up a convention that sounds less like a “sleuth of detectives” (if that may serve as a collective noun), and more like the awkward lovechild of Paul Auster’s nihilistic detectives and Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. Alternatively, could Blumenfeld be enrolled in coursework, reading Detective Studies 101 in order to pinpoint a methodology that will serve him in his future exploits in the field (but not a hotel)? However, that Blumenfeld’s faulty detection takes place in the absence of a crime is significant. In this context, crime is abstracted from methodology: crimes and infractions are insinuated purely through narrative tone — recognizable solely through the parody of genre, rather than in narrative content. Detection seems to occur for its own sake, entirely divorced from a crime, and also perhaps from what Mark Seltzer describes as the “pathological public sphere” (1997: 4). And then finally, social diagnosis and detection as a means to cure the pathological body politic, is playfully flaunted in “101 Detectives” through Blumenfeld’s rejoinder that “there is more to life than Detection” (36).

This signals a disruption of the “consolations of genre” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 270) afforded by traditional detective fiction, which usually makes capital out of the “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (2010: 269). Accordingly, “101 Detectives” stages a post-apartheid rendering of what has been called the anti-detective mode. This self-reflexive, meta-fictionally rich genre upsets and derides the “politics of generic style” (2010: 259), which “disturbs” the reader, “unsettl[ing] our expectations” (2010: 265). Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, in their introduction to The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999), define the anti-detective story (what they term the “metaphysical detective”) as follows:

A metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions — such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader — with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 2)

In distinguishing between the traditional and the anti-detective genres, Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory observe that

the detective and the anti-detective, then, seek different answers which suggest the differing epistemological assumptions of the ages in which they were produced: One looks to eliminate the temporary disruption of an ordered universe, the other for an arbitrary fictional pattern that will not explain away mystery but will enable him to live with it. (McCaffery and Gregory, 1979: 40)

Where does this leave the reader in a work of anti-detective fiction? Ostensibly, like the traditional detective, the reader tries to connect narrative dots and work backwards from the scene of the crime in order to construct a coherent sense of the textual landscape. If the anti-detective tale features the frustrating “(de)feats of detection” (Black, qtd. in Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 10) that subvert fantasies of closure and control, does this transform the reader of a text into an anti-reader? Does the reader then share in the ignominious business of a “failure to identify individuals, interpret texts, or, even more to the point, solve mysteries” (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 10)? Since the technology of reading is indivisible from the hermeneutical act, are readers in the anti-detective text presented with jumbled textual fragments that disintegrate before a fictional pattern can emerge? How does this affect the broader project of legibility, which the conventions of crime fiction and the detective novel usually render evident? To what extent does the form of the fragmentary, experimental short story, when paired with the anti-detective mode, attenuate the prospect of narrative coherency and closure — those “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 269) usually manufactured by the traditional detective narrative?

In subverting the conventions outlined by Merivale and Sweeney, such as narrative closure as well as the role of the detective as “surrogate reader”, Vladislavić tenders a number of intriguing experimental disruptions to form in this collection of short stories. Under the heading, “Special Features”, at the bottom of the book’s contents page, are two sections: the “Dead Letter Gallery” and “Deleted Scenes”. Turning to the “Deleted Scenes” section is akin to enjoying the bonus material added to a DVD. This signifies something very interesting: the borrowing from digital technologies to revise and update literary practices. Arguably, short form fiction defers the comforts of closure. Vladislavić achieved something similar in The Loss Library by exploring unfinished narrative fragments — what he calls “unsettled accounts” (2011: 7) — and offering them for publication in their par-baked form. In this way, The Loss Library plays with literary possibility by gathering the raw edges of various vignettes sourced from Vladislavić’s notebooks and then pursuing where these “failed stories” would take both author and reader (2011: 9). The result is a modest renovation of the frontiers of fiction. The “Deleted Scenes” of 101 Detectives achieves a homologous result, shifting perceptions of narrative finality. The presentation of “deleted scenes” to a reader of detective fiction is akin to revealing a lack of narratorial reliability — as is evident through Blumenfeld’s focalization in “101 Detectives”. All the clues have not yet been revealed to the reader, and there is more to the plot than the main narrative arc suggests. This look behind the scenes of the texts’ construction thus effectively destroys any trust the reader might have in the narrator to present all the facts and restore order in the end. This postmodern technique works to disrupt conventional reading habits: beyond formalistically resisting plot closure, the “Deleted Scenes” is a writerly strategy that insists that there is no total or final experience in the act of reading a text (Barthes, 1974). Its inclusion suggests that a story is never quite finished, and is always in a state of revision. Applied to a collection where the title story is devoted to the figure of a detective speaks volumes about how ratiocination through language is doomed to fail. This impish device, arguably more comfortably housed in a short story collection than a novel, defies the generic diegetic formula applied to detective and crime fiction. Inverting the central tenets of the genre, the stories selected for analysis do not attempt to deduce and solve, but rather open up their narratives to divergent plot and interpretive possibilities.

If we are to take the anti-detective as a figure that reads against the grain, does the anti-reading modus operandi of the anti-detective mode extend beyond the titular story of Vladislavić’s collection? The added material in the “Deleted Scenes” section unsettles interpretive finality and forces the reader to read again — rather than inferring anti-reading as a form of negation or nihilism, it signals the need to read against one’s initial reading. It may then seem rather contradictory that a writer whose work is celebrated for a minimalist and precise style (see Gaylard, 2005, 2011; Morphet, 2011) can in the same breath be said to show how language is unreliable as a mode of containment. What may provide a clue, however, is how other stories in the collection confront the act of reading and the production of legibility. Both “The Fugu-Eaters” and “The Reading” feature intertexts, or meta-texts, that double back on what to make of the project of reading and language-making in the anti-detective genre.

“Best kept alone”: Reading and legibility

In the very first story of the collection, “The Fugu-Eaters”, the reader encounters policemen, Bate and Klopper, who are ensconced in a hotel room in the middle of a stakeout. The non-linear and fragmented narrative switches between two asynchronous settings: the hotel room, and a farm, where a bonfire of evidence is ordered to be set ablaze by Klopper’s superior, the Captain. The complexity of these two temporalities and settings within a single short story facilitates the sense of discomfort perpetrated by the anti-detective mode. The title of the story, “The Fugu-Eaters” refers to an intertext provided by a Reader’s Digest article on the fugu — the poisonous pufferfish consumed in Japan as a delicacy. Bate reads the article to Klopper to pass the time in the hotel room. Bate explains to Klopper that fugu has to be prepared by carefully trained chefs, who — after many years of experience — know how to remove the toxic organs. However, mistakes are often made, and every year people in Japan lose their lives to the fish.

The two tales are juxtaposed with no overarching continuity or connection. In piecing the narratives together, is the reader, like Bate — who appears to be the inferior “detective” (actually a sergeant, as he makes great pains to point out) — primed as the one hundred and second detective, learning the ABCs of the gumshoe trade? Bate, conscientiously, tries to fall back on his training (and we might think we could learn something useful from this, too):

A scrap of his training floated into his mind: Surveillance. In certain circumstances, you see better out the corner of your eye. Something to do with the rods and cones. There was something about listening too […] you heard better […] with your mouth open. The cavity of your mouth created a sort of echo chamber. (15)

After deciding that it would be prudent to follow these instructions, Bate (who is a bit of an empty vessel), turns his face away from Klopper, his mouth gaping open like a comic puffer fish. As such, he embodies the meta-textual Fugu. In response, Klopper naturally demands of Bate, “‘What the hell are you doing now?’” (16) The reader wonders too. Methodology seems of little use to Bate — and reader — in deciphering the complex contingencies of the world. The Reader’s Digest fugu fish reading — which works as a meta-text to the story — while seemingly innocuous (the image of open-mouthed Bate still fresh in the mind), drives home a more menacing prospect. The more we reflect on the different meals being consumed in the story (whether the Neapolitan ice cream and “Russian and chips” in the hotel room, or the farm braai), the more we realize that all of them have toxic potential (14). What is suggested is that Bate and Klopper’s stakeout might have deadly consequences.

When Klopper, in the juxtaposed narrative (that is, the one set on the farm), reflects on the events that lead up to the bonfire, the reader feels safe in the assumption that the bundle removed from the bakkie is a dead body (after all, what is a detective story without a victim?):

When they untied the groundsheet Voetjie didn’t bat an eyelid, and Klopper guessed that he’d already sniffed out what was concealed underneath it. The two of them dragged the bundle off the tailgate, stretched it out on the ground next to an overgrown irrigation ditch, and piled logs over it. It was like building a campfire, Klopper thought. (13)

Earlier, we have been warned by the Captain that: “‘What’s buried can always be dug up again’ […] ‘But what goes up in smoke is gone for good’” (12). In a South African context, this excerpt strikes a nerve. With history as a reading aid, the reader cannot help but think of places like Vlakplaas. However, instead of a body, what is being burned is a body of evidence: dockets and statements, leather-bound duty books and logbooks, bundles of invoices and receipts. Our readerly detection has been shown to come up short. Klopper, the Captain, and Voetjie then proceed to make a smaller fire next to the bonfire to cook their chops and wors. Mollified by their casual attitudes (except perhaps when it comes to the Captain’s second-class treatment of Voetjie), we, as reader, are relieved to discover that the bundle is not a cadaver.

However, despite the subversion of expectation through deft narrative teasing and understated humour, we know that via the hints provided by the fugu fish intertext, things are not quite what they seem, and Bate and Klopper are still dangerous men with violent intent. In the “reading again” required by anti-reading in the anti-detective mode, this becomes apparent in the “Deleted Scenes” section of the collection. The deleted scene counterpart of “The Fugu-Eaters”, called “Best Kept Alone”, obliquely reveals that the man that Bate and Klopper are waiting for is not going to meet a happy end. Is the man across the street a perpetrator or victim? Bate’s surname takes on fresh significance — is he the lure, the bait, to reel in the deadly fish? Or are Bate and Klopper the ones that will be serving up the deadly meal? The story was written in 1997, around the time of the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings. ⁴ This context is not explicitly addressed in the story, but it nonetheless haunts the corners of the page. ⁵ In light of this, the Captain’s erasure of a body of evidence could possibly be just as incriminating as the disposal of a rotting corpse. What indeed are they trying to cover up and hide? It is a chilling realization. Through immolation, the evidence of (what must constitute) their wrongdoings has been rendered illegible. This is a poignant critique presented obliquely in Vladislavić’s story. The violence here, the pathology, is not public, nor legible — it is now unseen. A decimated body of evidence, records which could have incriminated by virtue of their inherent capacity for readability, have been destroyed. There is no longer anything to be read. The past is made silent.

These detectives/policemen are agents of the apartheid state — they are not in the business of restoring order; instead, they are the architects of disorder. We anticipate in our reading that they are the ones about to commit an atrocity, the perpetration of a criminal act. After all, the stakeout does not bode well for the man on the street. Thus, within the broader frame of 101 Detectives, this particular manifestation of the anti-detective story takes on a different timbre. Whilst the story “101 Detectives” roguishly challenges the conventions of the traditional detective narrative through a postmodern defamiliarization of linguistic certainty, “The Fugu-Eaters” subverts the genre at the plot level by precluding the comfort of resolution. The result is a menacing one. Like the fugu fish of the story’s intertext, these men are “best kept alone” — away from the rest of their species as they will only cause harm. Both the ending of the main story and its accompanying deleted scene have Bate and Klopper continuing to hover over the inevitability of their violent act, which for the reader, is always yet to begin. The reader anticipates a moment of violence which does not take place on the page, thus rendering this plot detail literally illegible. Yet, the intimation of Bate and Klopper’s potential violent deed extends beyond the fictional parameters provided. Accordingly, Vladislavić’s narrative cannot “contain” or “make sense” of what is likely bound to happen: the act itself escapes the bounds of his fiction. In this way, Vladislavić is able to suggest — through his use of apartheid-era cops — that these supposed custodians of law and order are in fact its biggest threat. The structural and political dimensions of this story dovetail with this forestalling of narrative closure. The ambiguity of this story’s ending, coupled with its accompanying deleted scene, thematically and formalistically finds the narrative teetering on the precipice of the violent act’s moment of rupture. In its display of the anti-detective mode, “The Fugu-Eaters” unsettles its reader by sustaining an ongoing sense of peril, offering no cathartic resolution to “manage” their fear of the impending “chaos of violence” (Orford, 2013: 230).

“Reader, open your eyes”: Trauma and translatability

While only two of the stories, “The Fugu-Eaters” and “101 Detectives”, present literal embodiments of detectives or police in their respective narratives, other stories in the collection hint at hardboiled themes through motifs or through episodes of intimated, and sometimes abject, violence. The “Deleted Scenes” counterpart to “The Reading” presents formalistically an annotation entitled “Locked-Room Mystery” (197). This single paragraph starts by describing how the snow in the empty square outside the Literaturhaus “lay crisp and even” (197). The translator, Hans Günther Basch, thinking of his “dog-eared Ellery Queen on his bedside table”, equates the scene of blank snow outside with “the enduring appeal of the locked-room mystery” where either the presence or absence of footprints would be telling indicators of how best to answer the riddle (197). However, he concedes that “A locked-room murder did not always happen behind closed doors, of course. More often than not, it was out in the open and in full sight of the world” (197). This observation is telling in that it revises one’s reading of the accompanying story. We are forced to read again. In it, the reader — not the reader of the text, but the woman who reads from her novel at a literary event — is not murdered, but is subjected to a different kind of violence “in full sight of the world”.

In this narrative, a young writer’s tragic experiences are not shown to be ineffable, as many scholars have argued before. For instance, Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985) argues that trauma is ultimately unspeakable; that endurance of extreme pain unmakes language. Instead, in the young writer’s reading, her experiences are stoically effable (“without a trace of self-pity”; 118) but, what is significant is that they are not legible to others — whether in her native language or in translation. Instead, her experiences, while articulable, are not actually translatable. Her translator, Basch, muses, “It was as if she had told the story and kept it to herself at the same time. As if she had concealed it precisely by sharing it” (118). “The Reading” presents a moment in the collection where the sly and postmodern satire so typical of the other stories (and ones published in previous collections) recedes into the background to make way for an affectively charged postcolonial statement.

In “The Reading”, set in the Literaturhaus somewhere in Germany, a young Ugandan woman, Maryam Akello, reads from her novel, Sugar, in her native Acholi. It is telling that although it has been translated into English, French, and now German, her novel has not yet been published in the original. No one except her guardian, Florence Lawino, can understand the reading. ⁶ The audience incline their heads politely and remain still, poised in the performative pretense of listening, but do not or rather cannot meaningfully engage. The narrative point of view moves across the room, shifting from listener to listener and then to the translator of Sugar (or Zucker as it is called in German), Basch. Significantly, the only person’s point of view we are not granted access to is Akello’s. It is telling that she intends to read from the English translation, but is encouraged by the German academics to read in Acholi because it

was an opportunity for her to use her own language… to speak in her own voice. It was important for the audience too, hearing the cadences of the original would open their minds to another world. She would be free to speak in English afterwards, of course, when she took questions from the floor. (114–15)

Instead, by reading in her own language, she is rendered silent and voiceless — her tribulations fall on deaf ears. The attendees think about their own mundane complaints and anxieties. By way of illustration, a budding poet capitalizes on Akello’s impenetrable monotone to fashion out his own skein of verse, while the events coordinator finds herself preoccupied by the vulgar squeaking noises made by attendees’ rumps on plastic seat covers. After Akello sits down, and without waiting to listen to the translation, a number of patrons hastily leave; one has already “decided he’d had enough listening for one day” (123). When the translator stands up to read from the German version of Sugar, we as readers once removed (and incidentally accessing the entirety of the story in English — another European tongue mediating and silencing Akello), anticipate that the horrific events experienced and described by Akello will rupture the audience’s first world complacency. But still this does not happen. Sugar is about Akello and her sister’s abduction by Joseph Kony’s infamous Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and describes their plight as they are carried off into slavery in Sudan. Her story is one that diminishes any sense of or striving for hope: unparalleled brutality that encompasses deprivation, beatings, rape, and the eventual, merciless execution of her sister, Anya. Understandably, the translator cannot help but succumb to the tears welling up inside him as he reads about the tragic events that beset Akello. However, the audience continues with its uninterest until Basch starts to sob. The audience is now suddenly more intrigued by this spectacle: the translator’s outburst mortifies the reading’s organizers who hurriedly try to shut down the event, and have the cameras recording the reading switched off to avoid further embarrassment. The astonishing reaction to Basch’s breakdown (which is a reasonable response in light of Akello’s experiences, although her calm forbearance should give the reader pause) is awkwardly heightened when we learn that one man in the audience is trying to hide the stirrings of an erection. At the beginning of the story, the Literaturhaus audience is told by Professor Horst Grundmann that Akello’s story must be heard because there is a “… need, in our post 9/11 world, to celebrate difference and support dialogue, to create networks of understanding and solidarity” (110). Yet the story is ultimately about failed dialogue, about silences and indifference. No network of understanding is created in this sickly body politic. It stands as a trenchant and moving critique of the lip service paid to the postcolony; a discourse that is revealed to be pococurante. The story exposes a failure to engage meaningfully with the subaltern and, through the tragic but stoic guise of Akello, Spivak’s treatise that the subaltern cannot speak is ever so slightly revised. Akello can speak. It is just that no-one listens. Her reading, as well as Basch’s, falls on deaf ears. Her trauma is makeable in language, but ironically unreadable. Her story cannot be “Translated from the dead” as if, Basch notes, “death itself were the language, the source of language…” (119).

“The Reading” explores a different kind of violence to those invoked in the previous stories. On the face of things, there is a glib assuagement of guilt where the affluent Global North gives “Writers under Fire” a platform to speak truth to power. Yet, beneath this façade, structural violences embedded in the fault lines that determine the First World’s relationship with Africa continue to be perpetrated. Akello becomes a stand-in for all poor, suffering Africans, an opportunity for the audience to use her as a manuscript for their own colonial fantasies — flattening continental complexity into worn stereotypes. One woman dons a safari suit (purchased not in Uganda, but Cape Town); the priapic young gentleman dismisses the human tragedy at the core of Akello’s narrative by first wondering whether there are wildlife reserves in Uganda, and then, later contemplates whether the waves in Zanzibar are suitable for surfing: “Perhaps he would ask her during question time. She was from that part of the world” (128). Africa is a country, after all! Akello is reduced to a “brave girl … pretty too” (123) and is objectified in a horrifying return of neo-colonial appropriation — she is a commodity to be marketed and traded for European profit:

To himself, Theo noted that people in Europe were tired of stories like this, sad as they were, and wondered whether his friend Rolf [the commissioning editor from Kleinbach] might not find it easier to market someone who gave the impression of being less resigned to her fate. (123)

Akello’s “floury” (111) reading prompts Professor Ziegler to think about American playwright Edward Sheldon and how, when his arthritis rendered him immobile, he invited his night nurses to read to him in a “blank monotone that allowed him to apply his own emphasis” (112). She figures Maryam Akello is this “kind of reader” (112):

But without knowledge of the language [Acholi], it was impossible to add a single bright thread of your own to her white linen. In fact … you could not even be sure it was linen. Or white. (112–13)

Vladislavić makes capital out of Ziegler’s prioritizing of form over content. One is invited to read “white” in both a tonal and racial sense. It prefigures a frame of reference, a form, which effaces content. It is a prickly industry to unpack the way in which language both mediates and obscures our ability to connect — whether that engagement is through reading, listening, translating, or (re-)writing. The ethics and complexities of “translat[ing] from the dead” (119), the finding of the right/write language to speak about violence is shown, sadly, to be a “(de)feat of detection”. The grammar of violence speaks the postcolony, but it is not a language readable to others.

“The Reading” challenges language’s ability to render crime and violence legible to others, to contain and manage threat. Akello is able to write her story of violence and represent the narrative of her wounded body, but the degree to which her story can be truly “read” by the audience is limited. Unlike the faulty and inconsistent language used by Joseph Blumenfeld, Akello’s is direct and affecting. However, her book falls flat as a way to track a “dangerous and empirically unknowable world” (De Kock, 2015: 4). It is thus a fantasy that the writing and the reading of crime can offer an antidote to the pathological public sphere. Akello is granted agency in the conventional sense, by being an active participant as a writer in her own right. She performs her own reading. However, her wounds and her trauma — despite her ability to relate her subjection to violence through literacy — lack translation; they are unreadable to the others gathered to “listen”. The so-called legibility of violence is thwarted because of its inability to be translated by others, on a superficial level into German from English (and, in turn, from the original Acholi), and then on a deeper, more semantic level, in terms of her audience, as future readers, lacking the ability to “decipher what they were witnessing” (137). The audience’s proficiency in readerly detection is tragically forestalled. At the end of the story, the attendees focus on the spectacle of Basch’s secondhand pain, rather than its source: Akello. Akello’s trauma remains undeciphered. Rather, she is subjected to the perpetration of another kind of violence “in full sight of the world” (197), where her inscription has been summoned from the language of the dead and, as such, is illegible to the living.

Conclusion

While it might be noted at this juncture that the collection (when taken as a whole) lacks a cohesive context — and, in some cases, even a recognizable context — the allegory, the pointed satire, and the playful experimentalism maintains a certain consistency in tone throughout. While at least three stories are not set in South Africa — Germany in “The Reading”, Oklahoma City in “Hair Shirt”, and Mauritius in “Lullaby” — this should not dissuade readers from appreciating Vladislavić’s taut glocal insight. He demonstrates the ability to subject his content to the crucible of immediate, pressing South African realities and, more broadly speaking, contemporary postcolonial African experiences derived from living in a globalized world. Even in those stories set in the US or Germany, either South African or African characters turn the experience of the transnational into poignant commentary on the local or the conditions of the Global South. Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006) is widely recognized for its hallmark disruptions to genre and form; however, the short story collections, Missing Persons (Vladislavić, 1989; Vladislavić, 2010), Propaganda by Monuments (1996), and The Loss Library (2011) could be seen as even more radically experimental in narrative and technical terms, given their proclivity for allegory, surrealism, and the bizarre. It would seem then — to any reader familiar with Vladislavić’s literary corpus — that his most radical form-rending moments spring from his short stories. In this sense, 101 Detectives appears to carry on the tradition established in the earlier collections. What this argument also points to is the particular resonance of the short story for the anti-detective mode itself, staging as it does the figure of the anti-detective who is “never able to unravel the conundrum” or “bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion” (Kravitz, 2013: 45, 47).

Vladislavić’s treatment of writing, crime, and violence, particularly via the experimental platform provided by the anti-detective mode and the form of the short story — albeit mirroring the exigencies of a violent country (and world) — allows him to “give people fresh insight into the situation”. 101 Detectives explores this particular turn in writing violence, trauma, and crime. A collection of short stories suggests a loose affiliation of intensive fragments: when taken as an ensemble, individual, disparate stories do not lend themselves to be read as clues that create completeness or finality. With the addition of the allusive “Deleted Scenes” section, the stories make capital from states of disorder and incongruity by foregrounding the contingency of both language and narrative. Neither language nor narrative function successfully as modes of containment. Read in this way — although only a few specific stories explicitly present the modes of anti-reading and anti-detection in the content of their narratives — the overarching form of the story collection could be taken as emblematic of the formalistic devices and style associated with the anti-detective mode.

101 Detectives engages in a reading of discomfort. While many of the recent popular novels written in the crime or detective genre, from the likes of Deon Meyer and Alexander McCall Smith to Margie Orford, provide for the “negotiation of social anxiety” (Orford, 2013: 221), Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction troubles and upsets the “comforts of a formulaic entertainment” (Titlestad and Polatinsky, 2010: 269). Despite the ascendency of allegory, surrealism, and satire in his work, it may just be that Vladislavić’s writing of crime and violence, through the anti-detective lens and via the short story form, proffers an approach comparable with the phenomenology of its experience. This writing then poses a riposte to Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s claim that “contemporary South African crime writing is inclined to reduce the complex questions regarding the elusive nature of historical truth to generic devices” (2010: 259). 101 Detectives, as a writerly collection of texts, challenges the conventions of popular crime fiction (and the other conventions of writing violence, more broadly), thus embracing what Titlestad and Polatinsky call the “complexities of (permanent) transitional politics” (2010: 270). Through postmodern and formalistic techniques that subvert Cartesian stability, that deconstruct the putative immutability of language and challenge our reading practices to upset closure, a complex exploded view is produced that not only resists simple classification but also raises questions about the ability as well as the ethics of rendering criminal acts, or violence more broadly, as inherently legible. Danger is not mediated or managed by language but is shown instead to lack decipherability — it is beyond ratiocination and catharsis. The stories discussed in this article call for reading against the formula, but nonetheless reveal the incapacity of language through literature to restore order to an otherwise anxious, chaotic, and violent society. Language as a mode of detection falls short in achieving mastery over a threatening world. The stories in 101 Detectives, discussed herein, render violence illegible in language. Reading and ratiocination provide no certitude or moral authority as an antidote to the rupture it causes.