Whose ‘Lost Ground’? Facets of Outsiderhood

Abstract

The article considers the concept of ‘home’ and its experiential application in relation to Michiel Heyns’s novel, Lost Ground. A prize-winning novel in South Africa, Lost Ground has taxed interpretation. Is it a detective novel, a novel of ‘gay’ relationships, or a novel of oblique rather than direct political observations on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa? I argue that the novel is all the above, but tangentially. More centrally, I argue that Lost Ground explores commitment and non-commitment to both a home place and a place of exile; that Heyns is too subtle a novelist to promote an either/or response to a situation which, at least in the narrative, subjects despair to a muted redemption. If the protagonist does not find a home on his ‘home visit,’ neither does he find equanimity in his thoughts of a return to London. Yet, his experience in his brief return to the town of his earlier life grants him fresh insight into his own vulnerability.

Keywords:

• Michiel Heyns
• Lost Ground
• South African novel
• home/exile
• insider/outsider

Notes on Contributor

Ileana Dimitriu is a professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. She has published widely on postcolonial and South African literature from a comparative and intercultural perspective. Her publications include large editorial projects, novels in translation and the monograph, Art of Conscience: Rereading Nadine Gordimer.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The “home visit” as cultural concept has been coined in the fields of cultural geography, mobility and destination studies, where it is now widely used to indicate a recently established research niche, referred to, variously, as “return visits” (Duval 2004); “personal memory tourism” (Marschall 2017); VHF (“visiting home and familiar places” (Pearce 2012); or “memory tourism” (Sturken 2011).

2 In order to “provide a rich understanding of the experience of returning ‘home’” (2012: 1040), Philip Pearce has researched the returnee’s “emotional quality of the pre-trip, on-site and post-trip”, based on research in affective neuro-science, cognitive memory, identity and time perceptions (2012: 1030).

3 South African literature of the last two decades has produced several remarkable novels that reflect the complexities of return whether permanent homecomings or temporary return visits. Writers as varied as Nadine Gordimer in None To Accompany Me (1994) and No Time Like the Present (2012), Zakes Mda in The Heart of Redness (2000) and Mongane Wally Serote in Rumours (2013) have incorporated the trope of the exile’s permanent journey home to contribute to the construction of a new South Africa. Ivan Vladislavić in Double Negative (2011) has grappled with the tenuousness of a return homecoming by a self-exiled expatriate who had fled military conscription in the 1980s. The protagonists’ efforts to reconnect are described in a subtly ironic tone as they embark upon a search for traces and promptings of their former selves. The temporary home visit by first-generation expatriates is also described in novels such as Agaat (2006) by Marlene van Niekerk, The Rowing Lesson (2007) by Anne Landsman, October (2014) by Zoë Wicomb and Green as the Sky is Blue (2018) by Eben Venter – to name but a few. These are elegiac novels in which the protagonists return to be with a dying parent or sibling.