"Translated from the dead": The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić's 101 Detectives. (March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Manià, Kirby
• Other Names: Soldati-Kahimbaara Khulukazi guest-editor.; Fasselt Rebecca guest-editor.; Sandwith Corinne guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 55:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 61
• Page End: 76
• Publication Date: 2020-03
• Subjects: anti-detective fiction -- crime fiction -- Ivan Vladislavić -- language -- legibility -- 101 Detectives -- post-apartheid South Africa -- reading -- short stories -- violence; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989418787334
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

In light of the contemporary popularity of crime fiction, true crime, and crime television, avid consumers of these kinds of narratives like to think of themselves as amateur detectives — schooled in the discourse of observation and deduction. Readers of crime fiction become accustomed to a kind of formula, comforted in the knowledge that the mystery will be resolved and the perpetrator apprehended. However, this article investigates how a number of stories in Ivan Vladislavić's 101 Detectives challenge the conventions of legibility in representing crime in post-apartheid South Africa. The mediations of language, reading, and writing as modes of detection are shown in these short stories to come up short. Instead, and through the stylistic and formalistic frame provided by the anti-detective genre, acts of detection are defeated, closure is deferred, and order is not restored. Writing crime and violence reveals a matrix of structural violences in the postcolony, experiences that cannot be "translated from the dead". The article argues that while violence and crime are not unrepresentable per se, the degree to which they can be "managed" or "contained" by language or fiction is limited.