Fossicking in the house of love: apartheid masculinity in The Folly.

Gaylard, Gerald

Ivan Vladislavic has been concerned with the architectonics of power from his earliest writing. This is not surprising, given his incubation within the political pressure-cooker that was apartheid South Africa, particularly during the 1980s. As with all thinkers with integrity who have found themselves within iniquitous contexts of political hegemony and oppression, he asked how it could be that an entire population of many millions could be oppressed, either literally or imaginatively, directly or indirectly, by a flagrantly unjust system. Of course, he found part of an answer to this question in the interest that whites had in maintaining apartheid, on the one hand, and the immense power of this system backed by global imperialism and capitalism, on the other. But it seems that this in itself did not suffice as an answer for Vladislavic as he searched further and found a deeper and broader explanation in the way in which the architectonics of power relate to vision, the individual conscience and gender and sexuality.

Percy Bysshe Shelley suggested the notion of the exteriorisation of conscience as far back as the early 1800s: by this he meant that the majority of humans did not have the wherewithal to develop their own ethical conscience, preferring for external persons or systems to provide it rather than do the arduous and thankless, perhaps even impossible, work on their own. Heroes, Shelley argued, are required by most people, heroes who will show us how to live, who will provide ethics and a vision. This idea of a prosthetic conscience explains why, for instance, even within a 21st-century rationalist hypermodernity, much of Britain's population remains royalist today. As Paul Foot puts it in the classic Red Shelley:

   Apart from acting as a 'stalking horse', the monarchy had, and
   still has, an enervating effect on society. Shelley understood this
   phenomenon very well, and wrote of it several times. The common
   people lived their lives through royalty; they glorified the
   passions, loves and griefs of royalty, and as a result devalued the
   passions, loves and griefs of 'ordinary' people. (54)

In the colonies and postcolonies, South Africa in particular, whites have been particularly prone to exteriorising their consciences, partly as a result of the constitutive instability and burden of the enlightenment colonising mission which made grandiose and hypocritical promises. Some whites could not stand the hypocritically iniquitous position that this enlightenment promise imposed upon them and sought ethical succour elsewhere, most obviously in joining the struggle for change. Other whites were unconsciously troubled and found consolation in any system that promised them a prosthetic conscience: most often the church, family values, and/or the government's leader and system. Under apartheid the heroically strong leader of the Afrikaner nationalist government provided clear vision and morality to the ethically moribund apartheid system, relieving those whites who chose to believe him of the burden of conscience.

Just so in Vladislavic's The Folly (1993), where an entirely conventional petit bourgeois hardware-store owner, a certain Mr Malgas (often referred to as simply "Mr"; his wife as "Mrs"), becomes enraptured by the visionary antics of his new next-door neighbour, Nieuwenhuizen (literally "new house" in Afrikaans/Dutch). Grabe (1995) and Wentzel (2006) read Nieuwenhuizen as a homeless subaltern whose presence raises the issue of land appropriation in apartheid South Africa. My reading is more general than this, arguing that Nieuwenhuizen represents the apartheid state and its vision of construction, order and systematicity. This is initially suggested by his introducing himself as "'Father'" (22), a remarkable opening gambit that immediately establishes him as more of an archetype than an individual, an absent father who embodies a connection between the Oedipal and the paternal state, between the psyche and politics. Moreover, his origins are shrouded in uncertainty, a shroud he does nothing to clarify: "'To cut a long story short: I left my home far away and came here to start over'" (23). This evasiveness suggests precisely that Nieuwenhuizen is, or stands for, a colonial settler. This is emphasised when Nieuwenhuizen pitches his tent in the empty next-door plot and proceeds to clear the ground and lay it out with nails and string, apparently for a new "mansion" that he is planning. Malgas observes him in an initially distanced and critical voyeuristic mode:

   But his technique.... What could one say? It was flawed. He spent an
   inordinate amount of energy on purely decorative effects. Between
   blows he liked to hum a bar or two from a march and lay about him
   with the spade, inscribing fleeting arabesques and curlicues in the
   moted air. He also enjoyed twirling it like a baton, whirling it
   like an umbrella and tossing it up like a drum major's mace. In a
   different context these affectations might have served to
   demonstrate his dexterity, but strange to say here they had the
   opposite effect: the implement, moving gracefully through space,
   acquired a life of its own. Rather than guiding it, Nieuwenhuizen
   seemed to trip after it like a clumsy dancing partner, flinging his
   limbs in many directions. (46-7)

It seems that this "planning", to the beat of a military march, is a metaphor for apartheid: apartheid was an imperialist form of social engineering with taxonomy, classification, mapping, cartography, planning and architecture at its centre. Moreover, once "implemented" it acquired a life of its own, leading to quixotic masquerade and buffoonery; again and again Nieuwenhuizen is described as a trickster clowning "like a marionette, with all his limbs jangling" (9). Taken to a surrealistic extreme in Malgas's viewing of Nieuwenhuizen's affected caperings, this metaphor for apartheid shows how the products of power require maintenance so that the planner becomes the puppet of what he has planned. Though Malgas recognises the waste of time and energy of Nieuwenhuizen's "techniques", he nevertheless becomes fascinated by the vision, lured by its lack of clarity, because he finds it so promising, primarily because as a drone worker he lacks any vision of his own. Malgas is able to exteriorise his conscience into this apparently visionary leader. Nieuwenhuizen promises a house of refreshing innovation that will "raise us up above the mire of the everyday, to give us perspective, to enable surveillance of creeping dangers" (75); "he was doggerel in motion" (79). The paranoia of this architectonic doggerel is apparent in its panoptical surveillance of "creeping dangers", the "swart gevaar" or "black danger" that was used to buttress apartheid ideology by the nationalist government. It is clear that this vision is far from optimistically visionary in that it is motivated by a fearful laager mentality designed to maintain exclusivity.

Yet there is another subconscious motivation for Malgas's embrace of the vision of the new house: his own subjectivity, masculinity and desire for homosociality. Nieuwenhuizen's presence relativises his masculinity which no longer seems attractive to him in this new light:

   Malgas sniffed again, and ascertained that the offensive smell was
   coming from the back of his neck! All at once he became acutely
   aware of how fresh and clean he was. There were creases in his
   shorts where creases had no business to be. There was a parting in
   his newly shampooed hair. The tops of his long socks were neatly
   folded--not once, but twice! "I've made an unforgivable booboo," he
   thought angrily, and forgave himself immediately. "The thought of
   bathing wouldn't have entered my head if she hadn't turned up her
   nose and run the water." (61)

Here Malgas blames his lack of rough, outdoors, South African masculinity on his wife who makes sure that he is fresh and clean: he feels he has been literally sanitised, and hence emasculated, by her. This marks the start of his attempt to gain, or regain, a "strong" sense of masculinity away from his wife and their marriage, an attempt which he imagines will give him a sense of homosocial community and new self-esteem. Indeed, the point here is that Vladislavic's analysis of the exteriorisation of conscience suggests that a major psychological drive is for gender solidarity, especially in insecure sociopolitical circumstances. We feel safe within consensus groupings, especially if they appear to protect us from downward social mobility. To put this same point differently, we could describe this homosociality as an "old boys' club" of money, power and control in this particular instance. As with all clubs, there are certain entrance requirements in terms of uniformity: Malgas "slipped off his garters and pushed his socks down to his ankles. He ruffled his hair. He began to feel much better" (63). He desires a connection with his uber-masculine neighbour who appears to be the very archetype of the self-made pioneer naturalist who can conquer and feel at home in any natural terrain, the very embodiment of South African masculinity which was ruled by imperialist tropes of noble savagery, the hunter, the bush-man. Here the cowboy's frontier is just next door, and Malgas rushes out to embrace it.

Indeed, one could argue, along with Stobie, that South African nationality "helps to underscore Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation as 'a deep, horizontal comradeship', a 'fraternity' (1991 [1983]: 7) or, in my term, mateship, which is ambivalent towards the femininity and queerness which it encompasses" (Stobie 2007: 131). The machismo of South African nationhood was established with colonisation and exacerbated by the violence of the Anglo-Boer war and ongoing struggles for power and dominance. The apartheid state after 1948 reinforced stereotypes of whiteness, maleness and male bonding to the extent that they became the quintessence of machismo. As Morrell notes in his delineation of the trajectory of South African white masculinity: "The desire for freedom from British influence and superiority over blacks was interpreted into a new masculinity which stressed the importance of independence, resourcefulness, physical and emotional toughness, ability to be given and (depending on your position) take orders, of being moral and God-fearing" (2001: 15). This machismo was abetted by the "Two World Wars [which] had brought the white men of South Africa together. The national obsession with sport ensured that many of the features of masculinity that start wars and make their waging possible--dogmatism, belief in divine support, willingness to take risks, capacity to ignore danger and put up with discomfort, little regard for the rights of others, the worship of the body--were carried through into the 1950s" (Morrell 2001: 15). Much homosociality happened in schools, sport and work, but it was crucially cemented in compulsory military duty which injected a high degree of violence, both physical and psychological, into its dynamics. National service for all white men was introduced by the end of the 1960s so that by "1970 South Africa was a highly militarised state with a panoply of repressive instruments to deal with those who did not agree with the direction of government policy" (Morrell 2001: 17).

These stereotypes were, of course, not confined to whites, though they perhaps found their apogee there. Ouzgane and Morrell trace the history of black masculinity in South Africa via Drum magazine, from a relationship-orientated identity with family and the domestic particularly dominant up until the 1950s:

   Over the course of the 1950s, this began to change, so that by the
   1960s it was a man's relationship with his colleagues and bosses
   that were privileged.... At the same time, by the middle of the
   1960s, a man was represented as having little or no domestic
   obligations beyond that of financial provider. By the middle of the
   1960s, Drum was producing images of males that established manhood
   primarily through relationships with apparently independent and
   autonomous interactions with non-kin men outside rather than inside
   the home.... (2005: 11)

This suggests that if homosociality is a complex phenomenon, embracing the gamut from conflict to work relationship, acquaintance, platonic friendship, heterosexuality, homoeroticism and homosexuality, then it was convolutedly complicated within apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, striated by imperialism, racism and class. Within given social groupings, there was often a high degree of normative bonding between men which was required to maintain otherwise fragile identities and identifications. This exacerbated bonding hence tended towards the reactionary. Within The Folly there is perhaps a homoerotic element to this male bonding between Malgas and Nieuwenhuizen, suggested in the following episode:

   He put everything down again and wiped a porthole in the misted
   glass of the window above the sink. Nieuwenhuizen's fire waved its
   small hands in the far corner of the plot next door. An intimate
   relationship between the flames and his own palm circling on the
   glass came unbidden into Mr Malgas's mind and caused a shameful
   pang in his chest.

      "Mrs!" (5)

Moreover, Mr Malgas "found a small, hard certainty, which he strung on the scale of intimacy between Nieuwenhuizen and himself: communion" (92). Even if there is no homoeroticism in this "intimate relationship", this "communion", there is an anti-feminine, anti-female, element to it, especially apparent in Malgas's "shameful pang" just before he summons his wife in seigneurial patriarchal fashion. As Sedgwick argues, homosociality often involves this anti-female element. Malgas comes to regard his wife as an annoying barrier to his bond with Nieuwenhuizen and there are references to her as a "rib", as in a spare rib (1985: 65).

This male bonding also requires a pecking order within itself. As with so many relationships, one loves more than the other. Malgas abjects himself in craven worship before Nieuwenhuizen's superior vision:

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be. I can't see the new house yet, but it goes without saying that you can. And I'm eager to learn. I have a great hunger and thirst for knowledge of the house. If necessary I'm prepared to start at the bottom and work my way up. You'll teach me everything you know, and in the mean time I'll fetch and carry the tools and so on." (83)

The reference to fetching and carrying is an echo of the notorious apartheid division of labour whereby blacks would be "hewers of wood and carriers of water" in Verwoerd's infamous statement. What we have here is the abject Sancho Panza following his heroic Don Quixote, with all of the humour of anachronism satirising his outdated and self-obsessed quest: "In the light cast by the cowled globe Nieuwenhuizen acquired the stature of a giant, striding across immense, uninhabited plains, while Malgas, shambling after him, brought his master's mallet crashing down on nails as tall as flagstaffs" (85). The light of Nieuwenhuizen's vision of social engineering distorts everything in its glow, warping perspectives so that he appears in Malgas's eyes as an imperial giant "striding" across the myth of the virgin land, blind in his colonising zeal. This is a satire of the apartheid vision which recanted and refined the ideology of the enlightenment colonial era:

   The long shadow of Nieuwenhuizen's forefinger brushed over the
   smooth heads of the nails, weaving a web of diaphanous intent in
   which Malgas was willingly ensnared and cocooned. Nieuwenhuizen's
   hand, moving now with the delicate poise of a spirit-level, now
   with the brute force of a bulldozer blade, levelled terraces and
   threw up embankments, laid paving and plastered walls. With a
   touch, his skittery fingers could open a tracery of light and air
   in a concrete slab, and through it his papery palms would waft a
   sea breeze laden with salt and the fruity scents of the orchard.
   Apricot, blueberry, coconut-milk. He made it seem so simple. (86)

Here Nieuwenhuizen not only is an architect, he also can summon up nature itself with his conductor's baton, so powerful is his alchemical mystic vision. Malgas describes Nieuwenhuizen to his wife thus:

Mr replied firmly. "The new house ... materializes. It's a manifestation."

"He's having visions."

"Of course, one has to be receptive."

"Goes without saying."

"Then it's like this--although words don't do it justice: a paintbrush with a tousled head swooshes across a blank screen, and swooshes back again, scattering gold-dust and glitter, and 1-2-3, a multi-storey mansion appears, in full colour." (115)

Malgas is readily complicit with these conjuring tricks because he is so lacking in imagination and vision himself. He exhibits a classic case of introjection, the psychological mechanism via which an internal lack is projected such that an external presence apparently fulfils the lack. To put a Lacanian spin on this, Malgas introjects or ingests the symbolic order. It also suggests the inherent insecurity of colonialism which had to create a safe laager against the blacks, against "going native". Such centripetal laager forces invariably caused othering and hegemony, violent forms of identity and social organisation that bully other identities, other masculinities. So insecurity and anxiety lead towards the exteriorising of conscience, towards othering, towards violence. Indeed, Malgas could be seen as compensating for his straitened circumstances living rough as a camper in the extravagance of his vision of the mansion he is building. His "gold-dust and glitter" vision of white wealth is itself a metaphoric laager in that it involves the mapping of class onto race. Mister too wants to be part of producing this empty postmodern, fictional, vision of riches. Although virtual, this vision does produce a fragile sense of self-worth.

Nieuwenhuizen's amateurish charlatanry should have been apparent to Malgas, but he misses every sign, even the most Disneyesque ones that scatter "gold-dust and glitter" with the flourish of a paintbrush. He attaches no significance to Nieuwenhuizen's inability to tie knots properly in his house plan layout: "he squatted down and attached the end of the string to the head of a nail, tying several knots of different kinds--Mr Malgas spotted a clove-hitch and two grannies--and tugging hard to make sure they held.... Again and again, Nieuwenhuizen stooped, looped and knotted, and Mr Malgas, catching glimpses of grand columns and entablatures between the lines, muttered, 'Yes! Yes!' and struck his palm with his fist" (97-8). Yet, "Interestingly, although he had learned to see the new house, and understood that this accomplishment was somehow connected with his love for the plan, the exact relationship between the two continued to elude him" (116). The exact relationship between vision and realisation is that Malgas is so keen for homosociality, so desperate to assuage his feelings of inadequacy compared to Nieuwenhuizen, that he will envision anything to make him feel better. Malgas's macho determination to see, to manifest, the vision has an increasingly negative affect on his relationship with his wife. His, now apparently inadequate, love for his wife is sublimated into his love for his vision. Certainly his wife is controlling and rather characterless in the text, a domestic cipher even, as Vladislavic makes Malgas and masculinity the focaliser. Her femininity is evident in her divination of the future of Nieuwenhuizen's house in her own Disneyfied trompe l'oeil domestic minutiae:

   Mrs absent-mindedly picked up her china shoe, the one with the gilt
   buckle and the wineglass heel. She fogged the buckle with her
   breath and buffed it with the sleeve of her cardigan. She was about
   to return the shoe to its place on the mantelpiece when without
   warning it hiccuped and spat dust over her knuckles. "It's an
   omen," she said. (101)

"The omen" that she divines from the oracle of the domestic mundane is that her husband is being seduced away from her by his own insecurity, by his own desire to feel "mateship" and camaraderie with the community of macho males. Her omen proves to be accurate and Nieuwenhuizen challenges Malgas's sexuality in his apparent inability to dominate his wife:

"Out of the question. It's now or never. You'll have to take the day off."

Malgas' mind was racing. "Mrs will give me a mouthful if I don't go to work."

"That's neither here nor there." (101)

Malgas has internalised anxiety and low self-esteem to the extent that he is easily manipulated. When asked by Nieuwenhuizen if he can see the vision of the house of the future, he replies '"I can 't,\.. in a broken voice. 'We Malgases have never been good at this kind of thing'" (105). Internalised lack requires an external prosthetic vision: "the more he tried to be like Nieuwenhuizen, the more acutely he felt his absence, and had to ache with the loss" (107). His wife's response to this is censorious, though her insecurity and lack of overt power are only explored via behind-the-scenes sniping of this sort:

"It serves you right.... He treats you like a dog and I'm not surprised, the way you run after Him with your tongue hanging out. Now stop snuffling and go to work." (106)

Malgas rejects this and now channels his eros for his wife into his new relationship with Nieuwenhuizen: "This signalled some new phase in his life, of that he was sure, and finally it came to him: companionship" (122), a phase of the sublimation of domestic sexuality into a relationship with his new house, his new masculinity, his new vision.

If this is correct, it is a devastating critique of apartheid: apartheid involved the buttressing of a protective laager masculinity that involved homosociality, to the point of homoeroticism. Does this mean that Vladislavic is homophobic? This seems unlikely given that the focus of Vladislavic's analysis is power rather than sexuality per se, so that homoeroticism in this particular relationship is subtly hinted at rather than overtly lampooned. Indeed, eros is generally not foregrounded in his fiction and The Folly is no different in that its concern with relationships is subtle. Moreover, a similar analysis of apartheid was apparent in gay writer Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples published two years after The Folly in 1995. Shaun de Waal suggested something similar in These Things Happen (1996) "set in a southern Africa on the cusp of transformation" (back cover blurb) in which a gay character is magnetically attracted to a heterosexual male because "he was so huge and so butch" (43). Despite his realisation that no relationship is possible between them, he nevertheless wanted "to cultivate the friendship" (43) because this gives him access to the world of masculine camaraderie. Other texts of relevance here might include Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), Andre Carl van der Merwe's Moffie (2006) and Tatamkulu Afrika's Bitter Eden (2008), all of which focus on the forging of male bonds within the pressure-cooker of war.

It seems that the immediate ramification for Vladislavic of macho camaraderie in The Folly is its destructive effect upon all relationships: Malgas's relationship with Nieuwenhuizen is hierarchical and fawning, his relationship with his wife declines, all are affected, including the wife: "her loneliness and lack of self-esteem pressed in upon her and her health declined" (125). Indeed, in a sense this is a traditional love triangle story involving transfer of affections, jealousy and destruction. Moreover, one might say that a major ramification of apartheid homosociality was that it tended to make positive relationships and forms of homosociality invisible. The destructive hierarchy of the apartheid vision is apparent at the end of the novella when the precise power dynamics are laid bare. According to Nieuwenhuizen, Malgas gets ideas above his station as the Sancho Panza sidekick:

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Nieuwenhuizen said angrily. "The

architect? The landlord?"

Malgas sniffed and looked at his hands.

"This is my house," Nieuwenhuizen went on. "My namesake. You're just a visitor ... not even that, some sort of janitor--a junior one, with no qualifications and precious little experience, and damned lucky to have a broom cupboard all to yourself. What were you when I discovered you and took an interest in your welfare? A DIY good-for-nothing, that's what, a tongue-tied nobody. What I say around here goes, is that clear? Look at me when I'm talking to you. Crumbs! To think that you'd turn on me like this, after all I've done for you. It hurts me, it really does." (133)

Nieuwenhuizen is a bullying father. Indeed, that this kind of patriarchy involves sado-masochistic pecking orders is suggested by Ouzgane and Morrell when they point out that African patriarchies typically exercise "power over women. And this can be extended to the power to control the lives of other men as well" (2005: 7). When Malgas sobs at the destruction of the house of cards that never was, Nieuwenhuizen upbraids him for his "feminine" feeling: "It's not in the heart, you clot, it's in the head.... This clinging to one thing is unseemly in a breadwinner. What's in a house? There's plenty more where this one came from" (135).

When this visionary construction inevitably collapses,

   Malgas was struck dumb. He fell down in a stupor, and the new house
   fell down with him, at last. Crash. (142)

Unlike Don Quixote, this vision does not have enough integrity to survive its own internal contradictions, let alone confrontations with resilient realities. At the heart of these internal contradictions is the disjuncture between aggressive competitiveness and community. Whilst white male identity and sexuality in apartheid era South Africa appeared to be depressingly intractable, the irresolvable internal contradictions of both the system and its gender/sexuality were to eventuate in the fall of that social system, and in Vladislavic's hands these contradictions become absurd, ludicrous. So the antidote to the sick political eros of apartheid homosociality lies in Vladislavic's humorous surrealistic iconoclasm. This is characteristic of Vladislavic's fiction generally, which features satirical deflation of power-mongering of any sort. Moreover, what gives this humour particular purchase in this novella is Vladislavic's determined fossicking into the neglected regions of the psyche, delving subtly into sexuality, desire and relationships. Indeed, possibly Vladislavic's most characteristic writerly trait is this balancing act between formalism and spontaneity, analysis and satire, sober clarity and laughter. Burrowing into unspoken, hidden archives, tracking obscure truths, delving into regions beyond the obvious and rational, allows Vladislavic to show the sometimes obscure connections between macro social systems and the psyche, which often lead to laughter. By leading his readers into surrealistic metaphor that is funny he is able both to deconstruct the empirical mindset that fostered social engineering and defuse the anxiety that such a loss of systematicity involves. Moreover, in typically self-reflexive fashion, he can avoid slavish following of the father-author, forcing readers into responsibility for themselves and their own visions: readers are not able to exteriorise their conscience and become a Malgas. What could be a more sickeningly appropriate response to an oppressive social system that lingered for decades, causing immense suffering, than laughter? Indeed, Vladislavic's writing suggests that the ludic at least carries, if not actualises, the potential for change and healing, so it is no mistake that he names this text The Folly. This title may be a reference to Erasmus's famous medieval EncomiumMoriae, or The Praise of Folly, which laughs at human foibles, lampoons the pomposity and pretentions adhering to careers, ideologies and behaviours in advancing a carnivalesque view of the world. Erasmus claimed that "my aim was to ridicule absurdities, not to catalogue sins" (1989 [1509]: 5), a succinct description of Vladislavic's art. Insurrectionary laughter not only deconstructs the hegemonic and monumental but simultaneously supports what Mary Shelley called the "domestic affections" (1992 [1818]: 56). This humour is most apparent in the novella in Mrs Malgas. The silent watcher of the men's shenanigans, her perspective is what we are left with towards the end as the visionary extravaganza is deconstructed, peals of laughter resonating out from her into the immensity of the blue highveld sky:

   The arrival of the removers annoyed her (she felt left out, of
   course) and she considered phoning the police. But watching the
   four of them stumbling around, breaking things and tripping over
   one another, and listening to their chorus of thuds and curses, had
   a surprising effect on her: she began to find them amusing. It's
   not funny, she told herself and stifled a giggle. Just then
   Nieuwenhuizen dropped a barbell on his foot, and although he
   laughed it off and said he felt no pain, Mr started whimpering on
   his behalf. The removers tittered behind their caps. It's
   laughable, Mrs corrected herself, and laughed out loud. She laughed
   and laughed; she hadn't laughed so much in years. (143)

References

De Waal, Shaun. 1996. These Things Happen. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker.

Erasmus, Desiderius. 1989 [1509]. The Praise of Folly and Other Writings: A New Translation. Trans. R M Adams. New York: Norton.

Foot, Paul. 1980. Red Shelley. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Grabe, Ina. 1995. "Voices in Contemporary South African Narrative: An Exploration of Narrative Strategies for Dealing with Current Socio-Political Issues." Journal of Literary Studies 11(2): 29-37.

Morrell, Robert. 2001. "The Times of Change: Men and Maculinity in South Africa." In: Ouzgane, L and R Morrell (eds) Changing Men in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press: 3-37.

Ouzgane, Lahoucine and Robert Morrell. 2005. "African Masculinities: An Introduction." African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York: Palgrave: 1-20.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shelley, Mary. 1992 [1818]. Frankenstein. London: Penguin.

Stobie, Cheryl. 2007. Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Vladislavic, Ivan. 1993. The Folly. Cape Town: David Philip.

Wentzel, Marita. 2006. "Liminal Spaces and Imaginary Places in The Bone People by Keri Hulme and The Folly by Ivan Vladislavic." Literator 27(7): 79-96.