Finding Ivan Vladislavić – Writing the city

Finding cities: Old and new

What is the city? Everywhere cities expand. Everywhere knowledge production expands. There is an increasingly expanding literature on cities, as well – on writing the city, reading the city, even capturing the city. In social sciences, for example, cities are seen at least in part to elude the categories and forms of intellectual capture conceived for this purpose a century ago. Of course we all read, and we all quote, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, Marshall Berman – these are Western classics. Yet the megacities – from Shanghai to Manila to Mexico DF, São Paolo, and Johannesburg – seem to escape this battery of earlier images, built for smaller, probably more orderly European cities. Thus, for example, influential fora like Monocle enthuse for cities like the hometown of Thesis Eleven, Melbourne, where ‘liveability’ is central to the list of criteria provided, a CEO’s schedule of safety, good schools and coffee and public transport and low pollution rates, but in terms of megacities and new cities the action is elsewhere.

Likely these smaller cities – Melbourne, Toronto, Copenhagen, and so on – will thrive, or at least continue to survive. But the broad sweep of humanity is shifting to cities elsewhere, cities or megacities in the making, and these indeed are elsewhere. The European city optic seems to occlude these developments, or at least to construct other cities as other, as difficult, dangerous, despicable (Beilharz, 2014).

Johannesburg ¹ has its writers, first among them today Ivan Vladislavić, the subject of the present paper and enthusiasm. There are others on this path: Charles van Onselen in history, William Kentridge across the arts, writers like Marlene van Niekerk in Triomf, Mark Gevisser in Lost and Found in Johannesburg and Phaswane Mpe in Welcome to Our Hillbrow. In social sciences Nuttall and Mbembe delivered a kind of manifesto for taking Jozi seriously ten years ago (Nuttall and Mbembe, 2008; and see earlier Beavon, 2005; Chipkin, 2001; Vladislavić and Judin, 1998). Others, like Lindsay Bremner (2010), Edgar Pieterse on Cape Town (Pieterse, 2008, 2010), Noëleen Murray et al. (2007) and Sally-Ann Murray (2009), have also heralded cities like Jozi and puzzled over its implications for the way in which we write, read, and seek to capture the city intellectually. The elementary, logical point is that the putatively dysfunctional city also functions, in its own various ways, even if these fail to register on the standard European optic afforded by notions of well-funded liveability.

Sociologists may need to step up to these tasks. Not that all is lost. There are echoes in the tradition of critical sociology, including Bauman’s en passant engagement with Somerset West near Cape Town as a case study in Liquid Modernity (2000). Our interest here, however, is in the capacity of city writing to illuminate sociology. Yet the most remarkable contribution to the social science of Johannesburg in recent times also needs to be recognized. It includes the massive collection edited by Harrison, Gotz, Todes and Wray: Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg After Apartheid (2014) (and see the special issue of Thesis Eleven on Jozi, to follow). This important book by Harrison et al. discusses densification, public transport, modes of living including backyards, etc., with a degree of detail and sophistication that recalls the Chicago School and out-performs it, not least in the use of extensive visual analysis in the form of multiple cartographies (no metaphors here: these are maps). The Australian parallel here would be in the work of Peter Newman’s Centre for Urban Sustainability at Curtin University. Changing Space, Changing City is a handbook, a compendium: finally, its detail overwhelms, or points in particular policy directions.

Our aim is less directly to contribute to the scholarship on Johannesburg than it is to bring publicity to the work of Vladislavić, even as Johannesburg is one key focus of his writing and his literary achievement. It is tempting to wonder if the innovation is not also elsewhere than in social sciences, as in creative non-fiction (and as we shall see, this begs the question of the status of work like that of Vladislavić – what is it? fiction, or …?). In a not so distant parallel, some of the most powerful city writing about places like Perth comes from creative writers such as Anna Haebich (1988, 2000), David Whish-Wilson (2013), Kim Scott (2000, 2011) and Steve Kinnane (2003) (and see the special issue of Thesis Eleven on Western Australia, 135(1), 2016). Indeed, there are some uncanny resonances of experience and timbre across the Indian Ocean, in 20th century white attempts at social engineering, mining towns and the regulation of racialized space. As is often the case, the sideways glance is telling, as is the enthusiasm for a more innovative than conventional social scientific form of enquiry, engagement and writing. We are still in need of the eagle, or the cat’s eye, as well as the detail.

Enter Vladislavić. Just now elevated to the role of Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Witwatersrand and winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction from Yale University, Vladislavić has spent many decades writing and editing (and the latter is indicative, for his prose is at once precise and creative; it cuts and it pushes). A shortlist of these achievements, short stories and long, are as follows: Missing Persons (1989), The Folly (2015 [1993]), Propaganda by Monuments (1996), blank_Architecture, apartheid and after (1998, with Hilton Judin), The Restless Supermarket (2014 [2001]), The Exploded View (2004), Willem Boshoff (2004), Portrait with Keys: Joburg & What-What (2006), Flashback Hotel (2010), TJ/Double Negative (2010, with David Goldblatt), Double Negative (2011), The Loss Library (2012), A Labour of Moles (2011), Ponte City (2014, with Michael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse) and 101 Detectives (2015). (Note here the collaborations or co-productions with artists, architects, photographers, itself a sign both of the capacity to innovate in surprising ways and of the presence of the image, alongside and through the word.)

What response has this body of remarkable work called out? There is some very good secondary literature on Vladislavić, including that by Sally-Ann Murray (2009) and a special issue of Scrutiny2 (2006) on The Exploded View. But beyond Gaylard’s collection Marginal Spaces and Kirby Mania’s doctoral dissertation on Vladislavić as a regional writer (2013), responses are scattered: there is no comprehensive summary of his work, a gap we hope to later fill, after posting this present paper as a flag on the Jozi koppies. ²

For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on two favoured texts in order to seek to convey something of his achievement and our enthusiasm. These are The Restless Supermarket and Portrait with Keys. The Restless Supermarket is perhaps closer to the absurd, and echoes the earlier The Folly, with its own resonances in Beckett (see the article by Vladislavić in this issue of Thesis Eleven). For there are indeed some apparently universal themes here, including the infamous ‘nothing happens’, which is a different pace to Portrait with Keys, where a great deal happens, as is the nature of everyday life in a dynamic alternative metropolis such as Johannesburg captured by Vladislavić in kaleidoscopic form.

Vladislavić: Life in the restless supermarket

The title of The Restless Supermarket announces its absurdity, the problems of translation and mis-translation, and the pursuit of order and precision in a world out of control, to wit: Joburg facing the end of apartheid. The mis-translation of ‘restless’ indicates both a world without rest, and the pun of a superette whose regime is 24/7 but whose mishap is carelessness rendered into the English language and reflecting the chaos and misunderstanding which characterizes everyday life in a city like this. Modern life, after all, is restless and yet seeks out rest. Open All Hours. The title also signifies the fact that, for Vladislavić, every word is chosen with care, as also in Portrait with Keys, which anticipates the South African obsession with security, itself a paradox asking to be unlocked. And in The Restless Supermarket and with its hapless inhabitants, we are asked, indeed encouraged, to laugh at the mixed futility and creativity of it all.

The Restless Supermarket concerns the decline of the West or of the old regime. Its locale is the perfect setting of the Café Europa, where the white refugees from the Old World are hiding as the revolution is announced outdoors in the streets. So this is, among other things, a narrative of white diaspora or expulsion over the right to the city before 1994. As the narrator’s black friend, Shirlaine, says to him in passing, ‘go to Rosebank!’ Go where you belong, to the white enclaves, and give the old part of the city, Hillbrow, Ponte City, back to us! The narrator, Aubrey Tearle, is pathetically but touchingly out of place and out of time. Tearle steps out of the second part of the book, but leads the first and third, holed up in the Café Europa. The second part opens up like the Apocalypse or the Deluge, by mechanisms to which we shall return. This other world is an alibi for the Café Europa. It features on the café walls, as the fantasy world or fabula of Alibia. In the second move of the book the mural (or its setting) becomes real, just as the world after apartheid becomes real (and yet, in some ways, the Café Europa also remains intact, as a ghost, as apartheid, and in its white post-apartheid enclaves of Rosebank and Sandton).

The prose of The Restless Supermarket floats on detail, on the vernacular and the absurd. It fits what Jan Morris calls ‘detailism’ in Vladislavić. For Vladislavić is an everyday life writer, and in this sense the literary detail is everything, as in the word-painting identified so much earlier by Ruskin. Here the end is nigh: ‘we’ve had our chips’; ‘our days are numbered’; ‘the wurst is yet to come’; or (in The Folly) ‘it’s on the fritz’. There is no shortage of jokes here, and no shortage of German jokes (though surely the currywurst is as hybrid as they come, extra Zwiebel). Vladislavić, or his narrator Tearle, make much of the South African obsession with poultry, evoking the barnyard humour of Hollywood cartoons but also the possibility that food, and food outlets, become a kind of special signifier in a place where food is both everything and nothing, for different parts of the population and its demographics.

Enter Aubrey Tearle. Tearle, whose resemblance or otherwise to Vladislavić has generated some anxiety, is a proofreader. Not quite an editor: he is the orthographic policeman of the old order, of old words and worlds. He seeks to put the world, or word, to rights, spends his passing time mentally correcting errors on shopfronts or in advertisements, in newspapers and in death notices. ‘Knowing you enriched our livers’ … ‘Loved by al, missed by many’ … ‘I will always remember your simile …’ (2001: 68). ‘Till we meat again … Our heart felt thanks … Safe in God’s cave … The father of refrigerator services … Pissed away after a long illness …’. His purpose in life is to set the world to rights, facing it naked save for a clean eraser and a newly sharpened HB and possessed of the magical aura of the deletion sign. But his world is subject to deletion, or at least to re-placement. The whiteness of Hillbrow is going, gone, re-placed by vulgarity and carelessness in speech, dress, and in modes of being. So this much is very interesting, not least because the world here under erasure is English, it seems, rather than Afrikaner. The world of Afrikaans indeed persists, not least via the media of its language.

This is an Aryan world where things are turned upside down. The race-order of apartheid, surely, but more: there is a kind of ontological reversal or inversion going on.

Manchmal geht alles verkehrt – which Toppelmann [the sausage salesman] did [!] into English as ‘On several occasions, everything is going wrong’ – [hopeless translation! PB/SS] ‘and it alarmed me in the same way. Could there be a more disquieting concept, one more filled with dreadful fascination, than ‘anti-clockwise’? (2001: 143)

So much by way of background to life in The Restless Supermarket. Its project, or the project of Aubrey Tearle, is what he pursues as The Proofreaders’ Derby (watch that apostrophe!), whose purpose is the imaginary restoration of order and the old world, and whose impact is washed away as the landscape morphs, and Europa passes into Alibia. Thus does the narrator shift from Tearle to the man of Flux midstream. Vladislavić enjoys playing with words, and perhaps especially with names and persons. The builder of the phantom house in The Folly is called Nieuwenhuizen. In one of his short stories, Vladislavić follows Elvis in Johannesburg, and in another takes in the Fritz Lang launch of the new Ford Kafka. For this is also a Kafka-world, and the world of Godot. In one passage the comic figure of ‘Empty’ Wessels reaches into his pocket and takes out a carrot (2001: 241). Vladislavić writes this as though it were a stage direction, courtesy of – nod to Mr Beckett. Elsewhere Fluxman becomes a racialized Didi, or Gogo. This exchange follows:

‘Be gone, before I delete you.’

‘Or a job, master. I can carry the master’s bag.’

‘If I required the services of a porter …’ Even as he spoke, Fluxman felt the weight of the rucksack [History?] dragging at his shoulders. What had the rascal called him? Master.

‘Some change, then?’

‘I have nothing for you. Absolutely nothing.’ (2001: 192–3)

Social life is absurd, or at least it is elusive. As we have observed, the motifs of European modernism are powerfully evident here, for the South African and Johannesburg stories are also necessarily entangled, European, in this imperial, historical sense, where boundaries elude, and everything is indeed mixed up – African, North American, German, Dutch, English, Afrikaans, Jewish, Greek, in this volume. Babel, it seems, but at the same time something else: ‘absurd nomenclature, popular orchestras. (Absurd, from the Latin surdus, deaf, dull)’ (2001: 43). For the European absurd may be one thing, three or four men on a bleak blotscape in Waiting for Godot, but it may also be another when it relocates into the colonies or postcolonies, including both South Africa and Australia, where the obvious question presents itself: what on earth are we doing here? (answer: looking for gold). The absurd may then be postcolonial, but it is also universal – it travels, not least to the new worlds. Which is to query, in advance, the terrain of Portrait with Keys and its reception, as singularly or peculiarly South African, specific to Johannesburg, in the tradition of place-writing or spirit-of-place writing evoked by or associated with D H Lawrence. This form of writing may be colonial or postcolonial, but it is also imperial, modern and modernist. Viewed in a different register, it may reflect something about a type of city, perhaps especially as edge-cities, less in the sense that Joel Garreau (1992) had it for North America than viewed geographically, where edge is peripheral, and yet these city-forms are also seriously both metropolitan and cosmopolitan.

In the antipodes, it is less than immediately clear what the parallels to this kind of writing are or might be. There are some resonances in New Zealand Gothic (e.g. Braunias’ 2013 Griffith Review), and we have observed parallels in literary work in Western Australia, such as that of Kinnane (2003), Whish-Wilson (2013), Scott (2000, 2010) and Haebich (1988, 2000), and elsewhere in art like that of Gordon Bennett. There are some stronger echoes in what might be the most idiosyncratic work of Peter Carey, The Strange Life of Tristan Smith (1994; Beilharz, 2015). And there are powerful echoes in the work of others, like William Kentridge, who proclaims that ‘The absurd is a species of realism’ (Kentridge, 2010) and in the projects of Vladislavić’s collaborators David Goldblatt and Joachim Schönfeldt, and his collaborations with Hilton Judin and others on the blank_Architecture, apartheid and after project. And differently, with or on Willem Boshoff.

If there is a kind of ‘detailism’ in Vladislavić’s work, then it pertains perhaps especially to the visual. He is a watcher: of street life and the interiors of life, of their absurdity and their resilience. This shows in his writing, but also in his forms of co-work and his choice of co-workers – Goldblatt, the architects – and the lateral forms of these decisions to cooperate. This dialectic of word and image is one defining attribute of Vladislavić’s work. Another striking feature of his writing, perhaps more subtle, is the persistence of the material substrate in his work. We have alluded to the presence of food as a theme, its insufficiency, its over-supply in particular toxic takeaway forms, and its asymmetrical distribution in general in South Africa. Like housing, food is a powerful icon of social division and the racialized distribution of life chances in enclaved cities such as Joburg. But more, as Shane Graham (2011) twists it, Vladislavić is equally interested, in effect, in words and things. There are places where power and culture intersect. Writing in the collection Marginal Spaces, Graham quotes Vladislavić in interview, in words that go back 15 years but could have been spoken yesterday:

As people write about the making and re-making of South African cities, the question of what’s changed and what hasn’t becomes urgent. What the project [of editing the anthology blank_] confirmed for me is that the actual physical structures of apartheid are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to erase, and that we’re going to be living with those structures for a very long time. (2011: 225)

And if, finally, there are hard walls, fences and structures which constrain human actors, then there are also the profoundly heavy cultures, rucksacks which they carry. This much is already clear in the interview quotation above: the structures of apartheid persist because their well-established mentalities do, and vice-versa. There are ghosts in the rooms, and in the mines of Johannesburg, the kind of ghosts identified earlier by Marx and by Freud. For Joburg is also the topsy-turvy world of these thinkers, where, as in Portrait with Keys, it makes sense to say (in one sense) that people’s homes are armed. Plainly ‘home invasion’ is no mere metaphor, as Gevisser painfully reminds us in Lost and Found in Johannesburg; and yet these armoured homes also invade and close off public space, and the prospect of a more generalized kind of civility or civic culture. Such are the inescapable implications of the fields named by Fanon, that we cannot escape either the practices or the mentalities of colonialism, or apartheid. Such are the lives of our ghosts, of continuity and repetition, in South Africa as in the frontiers of Australia. What might it take for us to move on? Creatures of memory, we also need, in their context, to make sense of past and present as best we can and to remain open to the possibility of other futures alongside the standard visions of dystopia and decline.

Portrait with Keys

And then there is the today of Johannesburg. How does Vladislavić lead us into this labyrinth of fragments, in Portrait with Keys?

In Johannesburg, the Venice of the South, the backdrop is always a man-made one. We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places. (2006: 94, fragment #68)

There are two themes we want to focus on in Portrait with Keys. These are the ‘architecture’ of the book, and the deployment of the idea of memory throughout its pages. The architecture of Portrait with Keys is one of its unique features. The ‘Itineraries’ beginning on page 205 outline an index to the ‘previously published cycles and suggests some other thematic pathways’. There are 138 fragments (or vignettes) and 29 thematic pathways listed alphabetically in the ‘Itineraries’. Structurally, the work is completely different to The Restless Supermarket, and defies the kind of narrative summary which can be offered for that earlier book. We suggest that there are at least five possible ways to read Portrait with Keys, with these cycles developing the narrative throughout the book. Themes and ‘characters’ are picked up throughout the book which can be followed through in different fragments. The different itineraries are a way of ‘seeing’, experiencing and understanding everyday life in Johannesburg. The five ways (and possibly there are more) of reading include the following:

as a book from beginning to end;

We have created our own ‘map’ of Vladislavić’s book. In a sleepless moment we wondered whether all the fragments had been cross-referenced to the themes. We created a spreadsheet (see Table 1, available on Thesis Eleven website) that lists fragments 1–138 against the themes. Each of the themes is also cross-referenced to a short, medium or long route, for this is indeed a kind of city travel book. We discovered that all the themes are indexed (so that nothing is missing from the index), and that there are a number of crossovers. Plotting the itineraries/themes was a thought-experiment. At least one path which we might take is to read some themes together, as we have suggested above. But which themes? For example, if we examine ‘security’ we can see that it is connected to ‘street addresses, Johannesburg’ x 3, ‘walls’ x 2, ‘Branko’ (the narrator’s fictive brother), ‘underground’ x 3, ‘artists’ books’, in particular ‘Sophie Calle’, ‘liars and thieves’ x 2, ‘accidental island’, ‘engaging the gorilla’ x 4, ‘object lessons’, ‘body language’, ‘self-storage’ x 2, ‘safe and sound’ x 5, ‘closer together’, ‘beggars and sellers’, ‘ghosting through’ x 2, ‘water’, ‘city centre’ x 4, and ‘falling’. ‘Security’ is a significant entry, as it is a high priority in South Africa, particularly in Johannesburg, a key to the city.

We can also identify a number of ‘themes’ that we think could be included – animals/nature; collecting (such as lost books, objects, Mario’s artwork); food; housing; Minky, his partner; memory. These are significant themes which could also be traced. We choose these themes as they can be seen repeating in other works, for example, in The Folly and The Exploded View.

Vladislavić is attracted to classification, order, archiving. He works out of an archive. The itineraries are incomplete, in the sense that he could have included others. He invites readers in effect to create their own itineraries. Portrait with Keys works like a map. Readers can (and have) followed these itineraries, book in hand, as they wander around Joburg. If we were to follow the itineraries now, they would necessarily be different – we would see, hear, touch, smell different things, worlds, lives to those in Vladislavić’s recordings/writings. The city changes, new memories are made, old memories overwritten/overlaid – all these creating our own urban palimpsests, specific to time, place and experience, moment.

How to characterize this work? As mentioned, Jan Morris writes that Vladislavić is ‘a detailist’, with a repeated motif of ‘subterraneanness’. These two images capture Vladislavić’s work aptly. The level of detail recorded is only possible through an acute and attentive watchfulness and habitual note taking. He says of himself that he is ‘an obsessive keeper of notebooks’. His recording of everyday goings-on provides an archive to which he returns Joburg-style to ‘mine’. This ‘mining’ of memories is particularly important to Portrait with Keys. Vladislavić’s use of his notebooks allows him to layer or collage stories and events; they are returned to and reused, repurposed. Over the years he has collected disparate newspaper articles, pamphlets, catalogues, observations and many other kinds of ephemera, including a series on ‘the gorilla’ which included news clippings about Max the gorilla, the victim of a criminal shooting in Johannesburg Zoo, and catalogues on the Gorilla steering wheel lock. These many separate pieces come together ‘in the congruence or clash between … these elements’ to create a fragment or narrative thread. As Vladislavić ruminates, ‘My notebooks are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules’ (2006: 126).

Portrait with Keys is also concerned with memory and the memories of specific places, sites, objects, and relationships in Johannesburg. The associative connection between places and memories becomes a structuring device. From this the themes/itineraries are brought to light and a layering or multiplicity of narratives emerges. Some sequences can only be developed because of the passing of time, for example, the story of the Ndebele mural on a neighbour’s front garden wall – Vladislavić watches the mural being painted and then after some years, when the house is sold, new owners paint over the mural. This close everyday observation over a number of years produces layering – a palimpsest of stories and of the city of invention and reinvention, renewal, denial, papering or painting over.

Early on in the book, at fragment #14 Vladislavić says that he and his companion Chas agree that ‘the city … is no more than a mnemonic. Where do we go? Here and there. What do we talk about? This and that. What do we see?’ (2006: 31) … What-What, What-Not. Everything, and nothing.

The city is central to Vladislavić’s conduct of memory – the streets, the buildings, the people, the signs that are used to trigger memories in order to tell the stories. In an interview with The White Review, Vladislavić says:

I’m interested in the layering of memory and place. I’ve quoted Lionel Abrahams on this question before … [what Abrahams describes as] a ‘topsoil of memory’ which ‘makes him feel more alive, more at home … so questions about memory and place are in the foundations of the book’. (Steyn, 2012)

Vladislavić is playing with his own memories, but also with ours. He follows this practice in other books too, as in The Restless Supermarket, or Flashback Hotel. Andreas Huyssen (2003: 7) writes that the city is an urban palimpsest: ‘we have come to see cities and buildings as palimpsests’, and indeed the figure of the palimpsest has become a standard trope in city writing. As Claire Launchbury and Cara Levey (2014: 1) suggest, ‘A study of the urban palimpsest must not only include discussion of the cities themselves, but the way in which the city and its spaces and places are written, reinterpreted and reframed’. Sixty years ago Gaston Bachelard wrote on an earlier amble in The Poetics of Space (1994 [1958]) of the ‘imagination of space’, wherein it is always possible to imagine the city differently; city memories are multi-layered, dynamic, poignant and funny. All of these kinds of dimensions are present or apparent in play in Portrait with Keys. One of the most poignant sequences is #31 about homeless people who live on the streets and use the covered underground water meter spaces, which are quite small, as ‘cupboards’. They store and order their things much like we do in a wardrobe or cupboard. Homemaking, nesting, is an unavoidable human impulse.

This imagination of space is implicit in Portrait with Keys but is also made explicit by Vladislavić throughout the book. As mentioned above, the theme of ‘memory’ is missing from the Itinerary index, but here is a possible first take on developing the itinerary – including #14, 66, 123, 131, and 133. This would be a short route. By fragment #133 Vladislavić explicitly shares his thoughts about memory:

It is the privilege of writers that they are able to invent their memories and pass them on between the covers of a book, to make their memories ours … Lionel Abrahams has written about the significance that certain stray corners of the city assume through personal association, places where we feel more alive and more at home because a ‘topsoil of memory’ has been allowed to form there. Louise Masreliez is concerned with the ‘private niches’ memory creates in the public space of the city. The image aptly suggests the small and fugitive nature of the association (a ‘niche’ may be as fleeting as a mood or atmosphere).

Both writers present memory in intriguingly concrete terms. Whether as topsoil or niche, whether substance or receptacle, memory is endowed with a hand-warmingly physical quality. This most intimate faculty, residing in the heart or the mind, in the softest organs, might yet carve out or fill a space in the material world. So we allow parts of ourselves to take root and assume a separate life. These marks, the places where our thoughts and feelings have brushed against the world, are not just for ourselves. We are like tramps, leaving secret signs for those who come after us, whom we expect to speak the same language. Our faith in the music of this double address, in the echo chambers of the head and the street, helps to explain why apartheid deafened us to the call of home. (2006: 187–8)

Conclusion: Writing sideways

Oliver Laing in To the River suggests that

Landscapes, we all agree these days, are palimpsests laid down in layers over the centuries. While this is undoubtedly correct, it’s also true that some eras work in pencil and others in indelible ink. (2011: 177)

How might we then place Vladislavić, at least for this moment? Is Vladlislavić primarily a place writer, flaneur of Joburg, or a modernist of universal impulse in local guise, or …? Clearly there is a strong experimental aspect or attitude to his work. Structurally, The Restless Supermarket surprises especially by its shift of narrative from the Café Europa to Alibia and back, where Portrait with Keys moves around its object in a way that is, so to speak, photographic, or closer to the image of sociological impressionism. The accumulation of small stories works like a travel book or photo essay. And these are only two of his writerly strategies: each of his other works follows another path.

There are epistemological questions here, if not answers. How do we know cities? By the light of occasional sparks in the dark. As the more conventional social scientific approach to cities reminds us, the devil is in the detail. Yet we also arguably need something more like sociological impressionism, or everyday life-writing, some kind of compass of the senses to read cities. Vladislavić pushes this to the extent that he not only queries kinds or genres of writing, but also the practice of writing or working with the visual in general. As he writes of the conceptual artist Willem Boshoff:

The viewer of Willem Boshoff’s art is better understood as a reader. Boshoff is a writer. Not only is much of his sculpture and installation centrally concerned with language and books, but he has also written concrete poetry and dictionaries … [these are] passages in a discontinuous text. For three decades, he has been researching, writing and annotating a long shelf of books. (Vladislavić, 2005: 6, emphasis added)

Ten years after Portrait with Keys, there are new layers to the palimpsest, or indeed it may now be that the palimpsest image cannot keep pace with the volume of traffic and reinvention that is daily laid over it. Vladislavić’s writing is mobile, as well as mnemonic. It travels, and travels light. It brings light, and leaves us wondering. Perhaps it is writing sideways.