Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavic's

"The Restless Supermarket"

Author(s): Mike Marais
Source: English in Africa , Oct., 2002, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Oct., 2002), pp. 101-117
Published by: Rhodes University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238965

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 Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the
Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavic ''s
The Restless Supermarket

Mike Marais

In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle,

his first-person narrator, with a hermeneutic sensibility. This is, of course,
evident in the fact that Tearle is a proofreader, albeit a retired one, who is
dedicated "to matter in its proper order" (42), and whose principal aim in
life is "to determine species of error, and to assist in eliminating them" (64).
In this endeavour, he assumes that his linguistic standards are absolute and
indisputable, rather than arbitrary and conventional and therefore
provisional and contingent.
Tearle's obsession with standards is not purely linguistic, though.
Throughout the novel, Vladislavic collapses the distinction between his
protagonist's linguistic proofreading and his social proofreading, that is, the
obsessive manner in which Tearle detects 'errors' in the world around him
as he goes about his daily business. In doing the latter, Tearle exemplifies
the hermeneutic syndrome outlined in the epigraph to Part One of the novel,
drawn from William Hazlitt: "He reads the world . . . like an edition of some
old work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it,
and correct the errors that have inadvertently slipt in." In the narrative itself,
this form of social reading is evident not only in Tearle's interactions with
his companions at the Café Europa, whom he routinely "proofreads" (41),
but also (and more obviously), in what he calls the "big 'clean-up'" (83) or
his "public-service proofreading" (107), which involves detecting language

English in Africa 29 No. 2 (October 2002): 101-17

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102 MIKE MARAIS

errors in the urban semioscape of Hillbrow and urging those responsib

amend them. As is indicated in the last sentence of the novel, wh
describes Tearle looking southward in the direction of Soweto from
Hillbrow apartment window, in his perception South African society is
manuscript in need of proofreading: "the lights were not twinkling, as li
are supposed to do, they were squirming and wriggling and writhing,
maggots battening on the foul proof of the world" (304).
In blurring the distinction between linguistic proofreading and socia
proofreading in this text, Vladislavic appears to subscribe to the basic, p
Saussurean postulate that language is not a closed, innocent and neu
system of nomenclature, but an open signifying system, which constr
meaning differentially and, accordingly, inscribes differences within t
social formation which are neither natural nor universal. Despite the fact
Tearle behaves as though there is a natural fitness between sign and refer
Vladislavic provides him with an ironic moment of linguistic insight, wh
endorses this post-Saussurean understanding of language, when the latt
remarks that what he perceives as the decline in the standard of coloni
English in South African society has been accompanied by a general slu
in "standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene
medical, the standard of living, and so on" (81). For Tearle, the linguist
order of colonial English must be recovered, and with it those differen
and values which it installs in the social formation and which he sees as
inherent and eternal. Tellingly, in this regard, his "public-service
proofreading" eventually translates into a fable he writes, entitled "The
Proofreader's Derby" (183-228), in which the protagonist, Fluxman,
through linguistic intervention, restores social and geographical order in the
imaginary city of Alibia. The irony, here, of course, is that the very
necessity of recovering an order is in itself an indication that that order is
neither natural nor eternal.
In depicting Tearle as a social proofreader, Vladislavic makes it clear that
this character is situated in language and the discourses that it generates. It
should follow that, while Tearle behaves as though his reading activity is
neutral and necessary - a process through which he measures what he reads
against a system of absolutes - the novel reveals that this activity is, in fact,
a highly conventional, culturally determined operation. It should also follow
that the novel indicates that knowledge is located not in Tearle, but in the
language and culture in which he is situated. In other words, the novel's
depiction of this character should show that he is 'in-the- world,' that the
world's forms of knowledge pre-exist him, and therefore that, rather than
being able to read the (linguistic or social) text directly and immediately, his
approach is mediated by the world's codes and conventions.

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 03

In this article, I argue that The Restless Supermarket does indeed

foreground the mediated nature of Tearle's commerce with the transitional
South African society of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I demonstrate that
his 'reading' of this society is informed, even determined, by colonialist
discourse. In fact, in its habitual exclusion, elision or homogenisation of
radical difference, Tearle's interpretive activity is the ordering mechanism
through which the latter discourse seeks to construct itself as a
circumscribed totality. The violent, totalising nature of this "ordering
gesture" (Geertsema 1999, 6) points to the problem of ethics which, I
believe, is central to the novel. If the ethical is understood to consist in a
respect for the radical difference of the other person, that is, the subject's
sense of an otherness that exceeds his/her culture's generic categories
(which, being general, are repeatable and thus always qualify singularity),1
the gesture of ordering would seem to preclude the very possibility of ethics.
My argument, however, is that, while this problem is foregrounded by
Vladislavic's use of irony self-reflexively to reflect on the ordering impulse
that informs the activities of reading and writing, the novel also stages
discourse's ultimate inability to enclose totally that which is disorderly and
open by performing its own incompletion and thereby exposing the flawed
nature of closure. In so doing, The Restless Supermarket inspires the thought
of a social order that interrupts itself even in the process of installing itself
and which is therefore ironically aware of the impossibility of constituting a
finite totality.

II

Vladislavic signals his narrator's situatedness in a colonialist discourse that

is premised on racial difference in the very first chapter of the novel, in
which Tearle describes the corpse which he has recently observed from his
window: "It lay among the rusted pipes, blackened bricks and outcrops of
old foundations that mark every bit of empty land in this city, as if a reef of
disorder lay just1)elow the surface, or a civilization had gone to ruin here
before we ever arrived" (6). The first-person narrator's use here of the first-
person plural pronoun suggests a supposedly finite totality: "we" are, of
course, 'white,' 'literate,' 'civilised' and of European extraction -
assumptions that are foregrounded in Tearle's subsequent response to a
question that he anticipates from his addressee: "What do I mean by 'we'?
Don't make me laugh" (6).
One gains further insight into the way in which this colonialist discourse
informs Tearle's reading habits in his 'proofreading' of the other characters

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104 MIKE MARAIS

at the Café Europa. In the following passage, which describes his 'readin
of Nomsa, it emerges that the skin colour and physiognomy of black or
coloured people are the principal "species of error" which he detects in t
changing clientele of the establishment, once it begins to reflect the soc
and political changes occurring in the country at large:

Her skin had a purple sheen I'd never observed on a colour chart.
The sweat stood out like wampum along her hairline. Plastic
pearls at the throat. Mouth improbably larger, lips like segments
of some sea-fruit, a creature that looked like a plant, but was
really an animal, something that would snap if you touched it.
(264)

Clearly, when Tearle encounters black people, he does not perceive the
radical difference and therefore the singularity of the individuals involved.
What he does see are culturally inscribed differences among people.2 In
other words, that which he sees is mediated and produced by a network of
differential relations in which the signifier 'white,' and its numerous
attendant terms - such as 'Europe,' 'civilised,' 'order,' 'knowledge' and
'reason' - occupy a privileged position in relation to the signifier 'black'
and its attendant terms - such as 'Africa,' 'barbarous,' 'disorder,'
'ignorance' and 'emotion.'
Vladislavic emphasises the generic (and therefore iterative) dimension of
Tearle' s response to other human beings by having Spilkin remonstrate with
him as follows: '"That's the bloody problem .... You think people need
correcting. Your obsession with raising us up to your level shows exactly
how little you think of us. It's the measure of your disdain'" (259). The
accuracy of this comment becomes further apparent, towards the end of the
novel, in Tearle's constant references to Shirlene, a young Coloured woman,
as the "improvable girl" (267). What the novel suggests in stressing the
hermeneutic aspect of Tearle's interaction with others, then, is that his
inability to respect their otherness is a function of his embeddedness in
discourse.3 His location in discourse precludes an ethical response to the
otherness of others and thus enables the cruelty that characterises his
actions. It is the reason for his failure of sympathetic imagination, a failure
which emerges in references to his dislike of sentiment (9), lack of
sensitivity (171), compassion, and his hardness of heart (172).
Vladislavic's depiction of Tearle thus indicates that this character
routinely instantiates a colonialist discourse of race in his dealings with
others. His obsessive attempts at imposing order on his society are not the

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 05

actions of an autonomous subject, but the expression of this discursive

formation's territorial desire for closure, its impulse to construct itself as a
finite, bounded totality. By means of his ordering gestures, Tearle initiates
the movement of closure through which this discourse ceaselessly seeks to
reduce all otherness to its order.
Importantly, though, The Restless Supermarket does not argue that the
subject's implication in discourse completely obviates the possibility of an
ethical response to others. As I have already intimated, Vladislavic is at
pains to make the ironic point that the order which Tearle attempts to
impose on society is unable totally to enclose what is disorderly and open.
So, for example, it emerges clearly from the novel that the apparently finite,
monolithic totality that is constituted by Tearle's "we" is, in fact, open. This
is particularly evident in the text's use of a dual temporal structure in its
depiction of transitional South African society. The first narrative line, with
which the novel opens and concludes, is set in December 1993 (see 8, 31,
56), whilst the second opens in July 1987 (see 45). The interlacing of these
two temporally distinct narrative lines results in a series of juxtapositions,
many of which foreground the fluidity of the composition of the clientele of
the Café Europa. For instance, soon after Tearle describes the "lassitude"
and unruliness of Errol's group (36), who are part of the new clientele of the
Café Europa and representative of the nascent 'post-apartheid' social
structure, there follows a flashback to his first meeting with Spilkin, whom
he considered cultured, sophisticated and, of course, 'European,' at the Café
Europa in July 1987 (41). Such juxtapositions historicise the "we" that
Tearle routinely invokes, and suggest its contingent and provisional nature.
Accordingly, the reader detects the irony in Tearle's declaration that
"Changing with the times is not for us. Staying the same is our forte" (9).
Far from being a fixed and finite totality, Tearle's "we" is an imaginary
community whose foundation is in discourse rather than material reality.
Even Tearle himself has occasion to wonder whether the harmonious
whole that he assumes in his use of the plural pronoun actually exists. While
at the zoo and observing the caged specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, he
feels threatened: "I felt - I had to stop myself from quaking - that we were
in mortal danger. We were on the verge of extinction, I realized, and the fact
seemed chillingly explicit. But what did I really mean? Who were 'we'? The
human race? People of good sense and common decency? The ragtag
remnants of the Café Europa? Was it a royal 'we'?" (154). By the end of the
novel, Tearle is totally isolated, believing himself to be the last person "of
good sense and common decency" in South Africa. The ultimate irony in the
novel's depiction of Tearle's being-in-the-world, then, is that even as he is

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106 MIKE MARAIS

shown to be in-the-world, a world which has shaped him, that wor

shown to be in transition. In another rare flash of insight, for exampl
Tearle, who has earlier been called a "crank" by Spilkin (268), reflec
follows: "I am not the crankcase, I am the crank itself. I have been moul
into a shape that was once useful, but is useful no more" (282).
Thus, while the novel emphasises the ordering gesture which inform
Tearle's social intercourse, it also indicates that this gesture is una
entirely to enclose what is open. Clearly, the success of Tearl
significantly named alter ego, Fluxman, in restoring order in Alibia, in
Proofreader's Derby," merely underscores Tearle's failure to do s
Hillbrow. The novel therefore seems to suggest that closure is alw
incomplete and irreducibly flawed - an intriguing suggestion whic
further apparent in the prominence of the trope of death in the text. In
Restless Supermarket, it is evident from the outset that death stands i
opposition to form and order, hence Tearle's association of the corpse h
sees in Prospect Road with "a reef of disorder" that lies "just below
surface" (6). And, since Tearle describes himself as a repository of lang
and form, it is obviously significant that, when he imagines his own dea
he should see it as a "precipitate efflux of vocabulary and idiom" (24). T
link between death and a dissolution of linguistic and conceptual boundar
becomes even more apparent in "The Proofreader's Derby," where Fluxm
comes across a floating corpse:

He was prepared for savaged flesh, for puncture holes and

lacerations, but not for the chaos that met his practised eye, the
jumble of sprockets and yellow vinyl and rubbery connective
tissue, the ooze of blood and lubricating gels, the tangle of wiring
beaded with solder. He rolled the bobber over, shuddering at the
touch of gizzard flesh and bristles, the crab apple of the eye, the
broken springs, the oily feathers, the webbed fingers, the shattered
lenses, the sockets filled with ground glass and riverweeds.
Beyond repair, he thought desperately. A cacophony of
categories, a jumble of kinds, an elemental disorder, wanton and
fatal.

(189)

Death, as Tearle comes to realise after he receives the news of Merle

Graaff s demise, is "the greatest decline in standards of all" (242).
Tearle's encounter with death, then, is precisely an encounter with the
limits of his powers of comprehension and therefore the limits of his culture.
Death is that which cannot be reduced through comprehension to the knowing
subject, since it cannot be adequated with a system of a priori concepts and

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 07

ideas, that is, with the already-known. In its irreducibility and absolute
exteriority from culture and history, death thus disrupts the world of the
subject who attempts to know it. It constitutes an irruption of infinity into
the supposedly finite totality of this world. Differently put, death is that
which points to the excess and incompletion of closure, the remainder which
always exceeds adequating consciousness.
As a metaphor of excess, the trope of death is ultimately
indistinguishable from the image of the Restless Supermarket in the novel.
When, for example, in "The Proofreader's Derby," Fluxman and his
proofreaders are depicted as visiting the Restless Supermarket, what they
encounter is precisely the "elemental disorder" that is earlier associated with
death:

The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable.

The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate,
indefatigable jumble of tins, jars, bottles, packets, boxes, bags, all
mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being
simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and
indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as
they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible
compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like
trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock or one brick in a
striding wall, although such things gave no inkling of the frenetic
movement, the ceaseless and senseless changing of places with
which the products had been charged.
(221-22)

In the novel as a whole, the trope of death and the recurring image of the
Restless Supermarket are an integral part of Vladislavic's ironic presentation
of Tearle's ordering gesture, since they are a constant reminder of the limits
of Tearle's world. In pointing to that which exceeds the apparent immanence
of his consciousness, they question the assumed totality of his world and
indicate that it is continually breached by the limitlessness implied by its
limits. Accordingly, these tropes draw the reader's attention to the excess of
closure and therefore to closure's radical incompletion.

Ill

What is one to make of the novel's ironic presentation of Tearle's ordering

gesture? What ethical conclusions may be drawn from the text's
foregrounding not only of the way in which this character's social

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108 MIKE MARAIS

commerce instantiates a historically specific discourse, but also of

discourse's failure to enclose that which is 'disorderly'? It is, of cou
possible to argue that Vladislavic's purpose in The Restless Supermarket
simply to expose the relativity of the supposedly absolute standards to w
Tearle adheres and which, in determining his perceptions, render
incapable of respecting others and an altogether unlikeable character. In f
such a reading would appear to be supported by Vladislavic's use of irony
reveal the provisionality and contingency of Tearle's standards. Seemin
irony in the novel enables the reader complacently to distance himself
herself from Tearle and deride his apartheid-era aberrations. The probl
with this reading, however, is that it limits the text's appraisal of
subject's implication in discourse to the apartheid period in South Afri
history whereas, as I hope to demonstrate in this section of my article,
Restless Supermarket historicises the act of reading by in turn render
ironic the ironic distance which it inscribes between the reader and Tear
In the process, it extends its deliberations on the subject's implication
discourse and the ethical implications of the flawed nature of closure to
(South African) reader's own being in time, that is, to the post-aparthe
present.
It is already evident from the preceding discussion that much of the
novel's irony is produced by the disjunction between Tearle's views and
those of Vladislavic and the implied reader. In other words, the irony
emanates from the difference between what the text's fallible narrator,
Tearle, says and what remains unsaid, but is nevertheless implied. In part, at
least, my analysis to this point of Tearle's implication in the social context
of apartheid South Africa is a reconstruction of the 'unsaid,' a reconstruction
in which I find myself endeavouring to establish a degree of equivalence
between Vladislavic and myself. In other words, in resisting Tearle's appeal
to a communality that stems from an assumed set of shared values, standards
and beliefs in his assumption that I form part of the community referred to in
his use of the first-person plural pronoun, I have oppositionally positioned
myself together with the author and have constructed another 'we,' premised
on another shared set of assumptions and beliefs. In the process, I have
intimated my confidence that 'we' are, as Wayne Booth would have it in his
study of the relationship that obtains between writer and reader in texts
which make use of irony, "moving together in identical patterns" (1971, 13).
Moreover, my assumption of this identity has enabled me to show how
Vladislavic's use of irony as a distancing technique provides the necessary
perspective from which to see the provisionality of Tearle's standards and
the degree to which they predetermine his interpretation of the social context
in which he is embedded - that is, to see how Tearle's interpretive activity

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 109

functions as an ordering gesture, an act of closure, in the society depicted in

the novel.
The trouble with my reading of the novel is, of course, that I have
exempted myself and my assumptions and beliefs from the move of irony. In
other words, I have assumed, together with Booth, that irony is stable and
normative and, accordingly, that it ends with an easy congruity between
author and reader5 - that it merely juxtaposes sets of beliefs within a given
and stable context and, in its affirmation of the 'superior' set, results in an
"amiable" interpretive community (Booth 1971, 28). By implication, I have
not contemplated the possibility that, once engaged, the move of irony
becomes infinite - that, in Soren Kierkegaard's words, "Irony in the eminent
sense directs itself not against this or that particular existence, but against
the whole given actuality of a certain time and situation" (1968, 271). From
the latter, it follows that, as Gary Handwerk avers, "One need not always
accept the invitation to continue ironic interpretation, but it is always
there" (1985, 8). It is therefore necessary to consider whether, in The
Restless Supermarket, irony is indeed confined to Tearle, or whether this
end-point may be one that I - and like-minded readers - have arbitrarily
imposed on the text.
The relevance of Kierkegaard's notion of the infinite movement of irony
to The Restless Supermarket becomes evident when one considers the way
in which the use of irony in this text lays bare the act of reading itself. Even
as Vladislavié's irony historicises and relativises Tearle's hermeneutics, and
thereby distances reader from character and implicitly aligns the former with
the author, it emphasises the nature of the activity in which the reader is
engaged. After all, in requiring the reader to relate the said to the unsaid,
irony consciously involves the reader in the process of inferring meaning in
addition to and different from what is stated. It follows that irony not only
distances the reader from Tearle but, in foregrounding the hermeneutic
nature of the activity in which the former is engaged, identifies him/her with
Tearle. It therefore allies the reader of 'the novel with the reader in the novel
and, in so doing, makes the former aware that his/her reading is also
informed by a set of codes that are not stable and absolute but deeply
provisional and discursively constructed.
Significantly, in this regard, Vladislavic deliberately places the reader in
the position of proofreader of his novel by planting what Tearle terms
"corrigenda" (61) in the text. Thus, for instance, the reader encounters
numerous false etymologies - such as Tearle's account of the etymological
derivation of fartlek (59)6 - and numerous solecisms - such as those in the
following sentence: "The streets were littered with crutchers, rhinocerous

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110 MIKE MARAIS

products, muslin fundamentalists, celeried employees and their pardne

bonsai boababs, dawgs" (227). Moreover, the fact that the version of "T
Proofreader's Derby" with which the reader is presented is not the
"riddled with corrigenda" (303), but the "corrected version" referred to
the novel's conclusion (303), in no way distances the reader from Tearle,
proofreader. If anything, it strengthens the alignment, since the reader
reads "The Proofreader's Derby" as a palimpsest, that is, with a view
locating evidence of the "corrigenda" which have been corrected. When s
encounters phrases like "pita-bread with hummus" and "wont
dumplings" (223), s/he deduces that the "corrigenda" which have here b
corrected are 'humus' and 'wanton.'7 Such strategies, in addition to
obviously ludic verbal conundra of certain names (Alibia, Europa, t
Restless Supermarket, Tearle, Spilkin, Graaff, Fluxman), ensure that the
of reading establishes the reader's commonality with Tearle.
The trope of irony in the novel thus doubles back on itself and rend
itself ironic since, in aligning the reader with Tearle, it indicates that
former's hermeneutic activity is itself culturally determined. By extens
this meta-ironic turn questions the stability and certitude of the contract t
the reader establishes with the author in the course of the textual encounter
a contract which is largely an effect of the reader's hermeneutic enterp
and which, contrary to what Booth maintains, does not involve a simpl
antiphrastic substitution of the unsaid for its opposite. In removing "t
semantic security of 'one signifier: one signified'" (Hutcheon 1995,
irony lays bare the uncertainty of the reading process and foregrounds
indeterminacy of the unsaid - the fact that the unsaid is always differ
that is, not only other, but more than, the said. Accordingly, irony in
novel confronts the reader with the realisation that the contract which e
between him/herself and 'Vladislavic' is a result not only of the inferen
meaning, but also of the attribution of values and beliefs to the author. S
whatever Vladislavic thinks and believes is only evident in the differen
relation between said and unsaid, his views are and can never be luminou
present.
Another implication here is that the reader's reading of the novel is
informed by the same desire for order and closure that informs Tearle's
reading. Just as Tearle routinely attempts to fix the order which he creates
by invoking an absolute standard, so too the reader's desire to ascribe
meaning to 'Vladislavic' is an appeal to an absolute standard, that is, to the
author as transcendental signified and therefore guarantor of meaning. In the
novel, the move of irony ironises this desire and frustrates the closure
toward which it tends, that is, the closure of the "amiable" interpretive

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 111

community, which enables the reader to believe that s/he is perfectly self-
contained, divorced from irony, change, and the context in which s/he is
situated. Instead of allowing the reader complacently and self-indulgently t
distance him/herself from Tearle, the move of irony in the novel historicise
the reader's values and beliefs by exposing the congruity that in fact exists
between him/her and Tearle.
This historicisation of the reader's values and beliefs is, of course, aided
by the fact that the novel's meta-ironic turn also renders ambivalent the
text's humour. While the objects of the reader's laughter had initiall
appeared to be Tearle and the apartheid past, it now becomes clear that, i
directing his/her laughter at this character in the past, the reader is directing
it at himself/herself in the present of reading. S/he, his/her peers, and his/h
time become the objects of a radically ambivalent laughter which reveals
that the past is not closed but part of an incomplete present which, as it
moves into the future, becomes all the more inconclusive.8

IV

Instead of being aberrant, then, Tearle's ordering gesture is exposed as an

inevitable consequence of the human subject's being-in-the-world, of that
subject's location in a cultural context which inevitably locates it. This is the
most important implication of the novel's rendering itself ironic the ironic
distance which it initially installs between the reader and Tearle. It is
through this meta-ironic and deeply self-reflexive turn that The Restless
Supermarket contrives that the act of reading perform the embedded
subject's desire for a unitary closure. On this performative level, then, the
novel makes it clear that the issue of closure which it raises in its
representation of Tearle does not simply pertain to a bygone and
conveniently repudiated era: the reader, too, is in-the-world and the need for
closure which s/he enacts in his/her reading of the text extends to his/her
'reading' of this world. The desire for closure informs each subject's every
action in the world. And, as the text's depiction of Tearle demonstrates, the
phenomenon of a total social order is always a possible corollary of
closure's need for completion. Apartheid is thus not simply a problem of the
past: it is a possible present or future.
If closure's totalising drive is an inevitable part of social being, how may
one prevent this act from constituting total social orders? Even as it poses
this question, the novel seeks to answer it in its argument on the
incompletion of closure. I have already indicated that this is an argument
that is broached in the text by the trope of death and the image of the
Restless Supermarket, which question the apparent totality of the world

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112 MIKE MARAIS

formed by Tearle's ordering gestures. Moreover, I have shown that

argument is developed by the novel's historicisation of the act of reading
use of irony to frustrate the closure toward which the reader's reading of
novel tends. I shall now examine the way in which The Restle
Supermarket further extends this argument in its refusal to exempt itself,
the ordering gesture which constitutes it, from the irony that it direc
against both Tearle and the reader. In showing that this text is a perform
of an order that interrupts itself in the very act of constituting itself, tha
that it enacts its own incompletion, I will contend that it provides an inst
of an order that is ironically aware of the impossibility of constituting i
as a totality. In so doing, the text inspires the idea of a social order simil
endowed.
By drawing attention directly to the description of Fluxman and the
proofreaders' attempts to impose order on the Restless Supermarket, the
of the novel self-reflexively projects writing as an ordering gesture, that
an activity dominated by the desire for completion, and thereby aligns
author, Vladislavic, with Fluxman, Tearle's alter ego. It follows, then, t
the text ironises the ironic distance that it has established between not o
the reader and Tearle, but also between the author and Tearle. At this po
it appears that the levels of irony in operation in the novel are multi-lay
and more complex than I have argued thus far. Τα recapitulate: i
undermining the distance which initially seems to characterise Vladisla
relationship with Tearle, the novel's use of irony makes the obvious po
that the structuration of the text proceeds from the perspective of a wri
subject who is in-the-world. However, even as this identity betw
Vladislavic and Tearle is posited, further levels of irony install fr
distance between Vladislavic and Tearle by exposing the difference betw
the total nature of the order that Tearle assumes possible and the nove
incompletion, the latter emerging in its self-conscious foregrounding of
irreducible tension that exists between the order of representation and w
lies beyond this order.
This is so because, as I have argued earlier, the image of the Rest
Supermarket is, in part at least, a representation of radical contingency
death - of that which is unrepresentable in language and narrative for
And, in its patent absurdity, this image is a representation which annou
its ironic inadequacy to that which it purports to represent. The relation
exists between it and the unrepresentable is thus, by its own admission, n
relation of correlation or adequation, but of non-relation - a relation wh
can only ever indicate the infinite distance between the image and
which it attempts to represent. Through this image, then, the novel insc

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 1 3

an ironic tension~between what it says and what is always more than it says
and thus unsayable. By implication, the novel's ironic self-representation of
its ordering gesture foregrounds the insufficiency of its closure. In other
words, the text describes itself as the site of its own excess - it describes the
excess of an involvement with an alterity that is beyond totalisation and
thereby interrupts itself as it constitutes itself.9
This emphasis on its inability to construct a unitary closure or totality is
further evident in the novel's self-reflexive appraisal of its linguistic
medium. Language games, such as "Wellington in plimsolls," in which the
characters "think of eponyms and their progenitors and put them
together" (88), render absurd the notion that there is a natural fitness
between sign and referent. In the text, such paronomasia exposes the
conventionality of the link between signifier and signified, and thereby
foregrounds the fact that meaning is generated by the relational structure of
language, rather than any real world to which the sign refers. In addition, the
novel repeatedly shows that Tearle's obsession with etymology, that is, his
quest for originary meaning or a founding moment which will stabilise the
meaning of words, merely takes him to the words from which the words
whose meanings he wishes to trace and stabilise derive.10 Contrary to his
expectations, then, his quest for a foundational presence indicates that the
signification of words resides in the relationships in language. This is further
evident in the fact that the 'authority' which he continually invokes in his
bid to stabilise meaning, namely the second edition of The Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Current English, in itself testifies to the fluidity of meaning
since, as he himself amusingly reveals, between 1929, the year of
publication of its second edition, and the time of narration, the Concise
underwent no less than seven editions (292).
Through its self-reflexive appraisal of the nature of its medium, The
Restless Supermarket points to its lack of foundation in presence and thus
interrupts itself even as its movement of closure attempts to posit a unitary
totality. Along with the description of the Restless Supermarket, this
meditation on language invests the novel with a form that indicates the
failure of presence and, in so doing, the text acknowledges the ultimate
impossibility of the ordering gesture which constitutes it as text. Differently
put, then, the novel foregrounds the aporetic dimension of writing, that is,
the fact that the act of writing is required to achieve what it cannot.
By extension, too, the novel's interruption of its form comments on the
ateleological nature of closure. Closure, as Simon Critchley reminds us, is
only ever the act of bringing something to completion and never the

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114 MIKE MARAIS

completion of the act of closure itself (1992, 61). This is so because the
of closure, which is always an attempt at delimiting or circumscrib
something, in its very imposition of a limit inevitably succeeds in delimi
not only the area inside the closure, but also the area outside of the closu
There is thus always a 'rest' or remainder to the enclosing act, which ren
the act incomplete and requires that it "be rigorously distinguished from
concept of end" (Critchley 1992, 61). As the title of Vladislavic's n
intimates, it is this 'restless rest' which points to the failure of comple
delimitation and circumscription, and to the ultimate impossibility of
ordering gesture.
But, if the ordering gesture is ultimately impossible, what is one to m
of The Restless Supermarket's existence as a material object? After all,
novel is: it indisputably exists between two covers, a registered book with
ISBN. The physical fact of this novel - a novel which argues for its ow
impossibility - develops its argument on closure with the subtle rider
the impossibility of complete delimitation renders inevitable the ac
delimitation. Closure is not only disabled, but also enabled - required eve
by its excess. It is for this reason that Tearle's obsession with ordering
depicted as an obsession on the presentational surface of this novel.
ordering gesture is called for by the very disorder which disables the or
constituted by his ordering gesture. That which is the movement of closu
condition of impossibility is therefore also its condition of possibility.
follows that the inadequacy of representation not only means th
representation can never be total and therefore never end, but also rend
inevitable and ceaseless the urge to represent. In Maurice Blancho
terminology, the literary work "works" because of its relationship
radical excess which "unworks" it (1982, 46). The work is enabled by
incompletion.11
Instead of saying that The Restless Supermarket enacts its o
incompletion, it would therefore be more accurate to say that it enacts t
fact that it is neither totally complete nor totally incomplete. It exists
ateleologically, in a liminal state, that is, a state of permanent transiti
This novel performs the fact that it cannot end because it is incomplete
that it cannot not begin because of this incompletion.

Through this performance, Vladislavic's text indicates that, while we

(himself included) all share with Tearle the desire for unitary closure
concomitant on our being-in-the-world, we may recognise the flawed nature

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 1 5

of the order constituted by our ordering gestures. Standing in contrast to

Tearle's conception of a finite totality as it does, the novel's enactment of its
liminal state inspires the thought of a social order which recognises that it is
because it is always and inevitably incomplete. The novel inspires the idea,
that is, of a community of eirons which constantly interrupts its enclosing
gesture through a recognition of the excess of closure.
Despite my allusion, here, to Richard Rorty's notion of an ironic
community (1989), what the novel suggests is more in line, albeit loosely so,
with Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of an inoperative community, that is, a
community which "unworks" itself as it comes into being (1991). Nancy
explains as follows: "Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot
has called 'unworking,' referring to that which, before or beyond the work,
withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with
production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation,
suspension" (1991, 31). Thus conceived, community founds itself in a
recognition of the excess of closure, the alterity of an absence, rather than
nostalgia for a lost plenitude of presence. Because of this relation to
"worklessness," it questions the very possibility of its own foundation. It
restlessly "unworks" itself and can therefore never be complete. By
extension, such an inoperative community questions all foundational acts: it
ceaselessly interrupts all attempts at totalisation by resisting teleologies of
nationalism, conceptions of community as a fusion of beings and
representations of community as a unifying organic whole among whom all
difference is levelled. Indeed, such teloi are antithetical to the inoperative
community's ironic recognition that, in the political, closure is without end -
that transition is not an interregnum, a period in which the old is dying and
the new struggling to be born, but necessarily an ateleological condition.
The notion of community at stake in a collective which grounds itself in
a recognition of the excess of closure is therefore not calibrated on "being-
in-common" (Nancy 1991, 27), but on singularity. After all, an exposure to
excess is an exposure to precisely that which has been generated by the
generic categories of the collective and over which the latter consequently
has no control. The collective cannot make what exceeds it work by
reducing it to an object, a property: what exceeds our jurisdiction is not and
can never be ours. By implication, an encounter with excess is an exposure
to a radical singularity that singularises. Through the collective's loss of
control in such an encounter, that is, through the "unworking" of its generic
categories, /, as a singular being, am placed in relation to another
singularity. In an inoperative community, the notion of community thus
opens in a relationship which exists only in the passage from the one to the
other.

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116 MIKE MARAIS

The thought of community prompted by The Restless Supermarket's

performance of its incompletion is therefore of one that creates th
conditions of possibility for a respectful response to the alterity of other
Since such a community is premised on the radically differential relation
singularity, its members would be incapable of the violence th
characterises Tearle's routine interactions with others. In terms of the
proofreading metaphor that Vladislavic uses in his novel, they would not
deem people in need of 'correction' since they would not be able, that is,
possess the ability, to conceive of the world as a "foul proof in need of
correction. In its interruption of its formal order, that is to say its respect for
difference, Vladislavic's novel thus inspires the thought of an ethical
community.

NOTES

1. The understanding of ethics in this article is broadly related to Emmanuel

Levinas's ethical philosophy (see, for example, 1991.) For Levinas, the precondition
for ethics is a relationship in which the subject is unable to foreclose on the
otherness of the other and therefore recognises and respects the other's radical
difference.
2. The notion of radical difference that is here at stake should, of course, not be
confused with culturally inscribed difference - the latter is the discursive and
therefore generic means through which the subject routinely forecloses on the
otherness of the other, its radical difference.
3. It should be noted that The Restless Supermarket's apparent conception of
hermeneutics as a process in which the subject routinely subsumes alterity within
his/her discursive paradigms must be distinguished from, say, Hans Georg
Gadamer's understanding of hermeneutics as an endeavour which, ultimately, leads
to a respect for alterity.
4. My understanding of irony has been greatly enriched by Johan Geertsema's
impressive and pioneering thesis on the relation between irony and otherness (1999).
5. See Gary Handwerk (1985, 7) for a discussion of the assumptions that
underpin Booth's understanding of irony.
6. I am indebted to Stefan Helgesson for pointing out this instance of a false
etymology.
7. This understanding of the palimpsestic dimension of "The Proofreader's
Derby" emanates from a discussion I had with Carrol Clarkson.
8. Stefan Helgesson drew my attention to this aspect of the novel's humour. He
also feels, and I am inclined to agree with him, that the "inoperative community" to
which I refer later in this essay is a community that is "unworked" by laughter.
9. I am indebted, here, to Geertsema's study of irony. Geertsema's basic
postulate is "that irony allows us not to misrecognise the (reductive) representation

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 THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET 1 1 7

of the other for the other. Irony interrupts the representation of the other and draws
attention to its representational status" (1999, 1).
10. See Carrol Clarkson (1999) for an insightful discussion of etymology and the
quest for originary meaning.
11. For a particularly fine discussion and elaboration of this Blanchotian
paradox, see Geertsema (1999).

WORKS CITED

Blanchot, Maurice. 1982 (1955). "Mallarmé's Experience." The Space of Literature.

Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 38-48.
Booth, Wayne C. 1971. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Clarkson, Carrol. 1999. "Dickens and the Cratylus" The British Journal of
Aesthetics 39.1: 53-61
Critchley, Simon. 1992. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Geertsema, Johan. 1999. "Irony and Otherness: A Study of Some Recent South
African Narrative Fiction." Doctoral thesis, U of Cape Town.
Handwerk, Gary. 1985. Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan.
New Haven and London: Yale UP.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1995. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and
New York: Routledge.
Kierkegaard, Soren. 1968. The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to
Socrates. Trans. L.M. Capei. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991 (1961). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.
Trans. A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991 (1986). The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor,
Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: CUP.
Vladislavié, Ivan. The Restless Supermarket. Claremont, Cape Town: David Philip,
2001.

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