Henrietta Rose-Innes and the politics of space

Abstract

In “Falling”, a short story from Henrietta Rose-Innes’s 2010 collection Homing, there is a productively unresolved tension between the aesthetic demands of spatial form and the spatially segregated nation of post-apartheid South Africa. I track why spatial politics remain central to understanding contemporary South Africa and its literature, and set this against W. J. T. Mitchell’s expanded conception of Joseph Frank’s theory of spatial form, in which divergent understandings of literary spatiality are combined. Using “Falling” as an example, I then analyse how different modes of space operate in Rose-Innes’s fiction, and discuss how her formal concerns intersect with the politically charged space of Cape Town, where the story takes place. In particular, I argue that her characteristic use of spatial means to imperfectly resolve narrative material can be read as a literary negotiation of the unresolved issue of post-apartheid spatial distribution. These cadences offer partial catharsis, but also reveal where formal resolution and lived reality come into conflict.