Cultural Renewal or Exhaustion? On the ‘Postmodernism’ of Damon Galgut's The Quarry

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This article examines the relentless dysphoria which dominates Damon Galgut's 1995 novel, The Quarry. It does so in order to trouble the hegemonic, teleological metanarrative of South African literature, which claims that the ‘end’ of apartheid in 1994 initiated a period of intense and optimistic creative renewal. It reads the forms of postmodern experimentation evident in the novel not as a symptom of a burgeoning ‘new’ literature in post-apartheid South Africa, but as an expression of antagonism against the country's deeply troubled past and the restrictions it imposed on the writer's agency. The novel suggests that the socio-political imperatives of anti-apartheid literature, and the codes of realism which it generally favoured, had stymied cultural production to the extent of producing a creative dead-end, out of which ‘new’ postmodern representational strategies did not necessarily provide a way. It thus rejects a historicist sense of conclusion and suggests that the burdens of the past will continue to haunt cultural production in South Africa indefinitely.