Who Is Afraid of the Mad Man?: Demythologizing the State’s Narrative of Riots in Gillian Slovo’s Ten Days and J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come

Abstract

ABSTRACT The rapid shift between order and disorder of a society offers a great opportunity to observe the public’s re-identification with their imagined community – one of those critical moments unveiling the structural cause of identity crisis and the state’s strategy of “self-healing.” By reviewing the strategies of the disturbed community to restore its law and order, this essay’s interpretation of Gillian Slovo’s Ten Days and J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come aims to argue that moralist narratives of contemporary riots have largely inherited the Foucauldian conception of “governmentality and madness.” In such grand narratives, rioters’ performance is defined as immoral and insane, but in the meantime the source of madness and its miraculous disappearance after upheavals are often understated. The endings of both novels suggest that the temporarily restored order results from the expelling of madness and its violence, rather than a serious tackling with the essential problem of the society. In this sense, the literary representations of social turmoils have exposed a paradoxical yet significant fact: while the state criticizes the disorder caused by madness, it has in effect systematically produced mad men to justify the legitimacy of the state’s political framework.