Realism, absence and the man booker shortlist: Damon Galgut's the good doctor

Abstract

The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut was widely received as a text typifying the South African tradition of politically engaged realism, and its favourable reception was based to some degree on this perception. However, the novel projects apartheid‐era literary tropes into a representation of a post‐apartheid society; in consequence, these tropes draw on conditions which are absented from the narrative. This principle of absence is systematised in that the malign intent, and indeed the facticity, of all the apartheid‐derived actions, sites and characters are represented as suppositional. This system of narrative choices is related to Michael Green's question: “How can a body of texts generated within, and in terms of dissemination and reception still held within, the episteme of anti‐apartheid… be meaningfully related to one beyond apartheid?” (1997:7). The Good Doctor, by virtue of its narrative choices, fails in its attempt to position itself as a post‐apartheid text.