The museum and the public:

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a 2005 issue of Art in America, David Galloway draws our attention to the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach: architect Hans Hollein's ‘postmodern extravaganza seemed more intent on showcasing the architecture than the art it contained’, he states (140). Zoë Wicomb's novel, David's story, similarly calls deliberate attention to its elaborate structures, creating anxiety about the issues surrounding memorialisation. David's story, though I argue that it is a ‘site of conscience’, simultaneously presents iconic figures and questions their validity, though she refuses to work solely on the premises used by traditional memorial structures. Wicomb also comments on the ultimate unrepresentability of the memory of terror, and the ‘unpronounceability’ of certain portions of national history. David's story could signal the genesis of a new era of literature in South Africa, but rather than severing the link between textual difficulty and exclusiveness – thereby allowing readers to arrive at the mutually constitutive relationship between the struggle to ‘read’ and the pleasure in comprehending the story – the ‘theatricality’ of the novel's structure may create such an ‘insider's story’, requiring so much knowledge of the ‘architectural idioms’, that it may prove to be inaccessible to many readers.