The Singularity of Damon Galgut's Small Circle of Beings

Abstract

SummaryThis article offers a close reading of Damon Galgut's Small Circle of Beings, a novella which attracted little interest upon its initial publication in 1988 and remains one of the most critically neglected works in his oeuvre. I suggest that the novella's neglect sheds light on some of the reading protocols which governed the reception of local writing in the late apartheid years and continue to inform definitions of what “properly” constituted South African literature during this period. I examine a number of key paratexts which attempted to legitimise Small Circle of Beings within the field of anti-apartheid writing, typically by using a “mimetic” or “historicist” conception of allegory which insisted on Galgut's ineluctable submission to his heavily politicised context. In a discussion which takes its cue from Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature, I endeavour to “resist the allegorical reading” of Small Circle of Beings in this article and provide an analysis of the novella which preserves, rather than resolves, its many indeterminacies, including its ambiguous chronotope. I suggest, more broadly, that attending to the “singularity” of a novel like Small Circle of Beings enlivens us to the heterogeneity of apartheid-era South African writing, which is often retrospectively defined in monolithic terms.