One departs Ivan Vladislavić’s novel The Exploded View (2004) feeling that one has been made to wander, uneasily, the perimeter of an uncanny world. An undercurrent of racial tension, which flows through the entire novel, is amplified in its final scene. In this scene, set in the early evening, on a construction site of a housing development in Johannesburg, four Black men assault a white South African man. The white man is Gordon Duffy, one of the novel’s four male protagonists, a middle-aged professional billboard maker and mechanics enthusiast. Duffy has driven his pick-up truck to the construction site, which is on the shifting outskirts of the city, in search of his lost mobile phone. The phone’s ringtone is the Mission Impossible theme song. Duffy suspects that the four Black men, who are all dressed in dark leather jackets, are a gang of thieves that have been pilfering building materials from the construction site. He stereotypes the Black men’s faces as “rough equivalents of one another.”Footnote ¹ The men surround and attack him:

The scene concludes without resolution. It is narrated in a third-person point of view limited to Duffy’s mechanical perspective (hence the figurative language of hammering, drilling, and nailing). As the men loom closer, Duffy recalls that his wife, Sylvia, had taken “one of those classes where they taught you how to behave in a hijacking.”Footnote ³ Through this hanging detail, Vladislavić suggests that Duffy and Sylvia’s white South African psyche, in early 2000s Johannesburg, is characterized by “eternal vigilance” in anticipation of racial aggression and urban crime.Footnote ⁴

Sylvia has recently enrolled in boxing classes to keep fit. She wants Duffy to join her because she thinks the “macho” nature of the boxing classes would suit his personality.Footnote ⁵ He refuses to be persuaded. About a month later, he picks Sylvia up from a boxing class session and watches her box with a “ferocity” that surprises him. He feels “guilty amazement” and a “grudging” feeling.Footnote ⁶ Soon we are led to interpret his feelings about Sylvia’s boxing prowess as an indication of his insecurity about his masculinity.

Duffy’s experience watching Sylvia box also triggers the return of a recurring dream. In this dream—a dream of heroic suffering—a more skilled white male opponent pummels Duffy in a boxing fight. The dream is evidently another sign of Duffy’s insecurity about his weakening white masculinity. This insecurity is implicitly linked to Duffy’s existence in a legally desegregated South Africa, which he perceives as threatening. Suffering and refusing defeat in the boxing dream restores for Duffy a sense of heroic masculinity undermined in the waking world.

Three events—one intra-textual, one sociological, and one psychic—are therefore superimposed in the final scene of The Exploded View. The intra-textual event is the thematic repetition of masculine physical violence (a reference to a boxing scene from the film Raging Bull concludes the novel’s second story, titled “Afritude Sauce”). The sociological event is a racially and class-coded confrontation between a hapless middle-class white South African man and four Black men he has stereotyped as gun-wielding robbers. The psychic event is a surreal scene in which Duffy’s recurring boxing dream fuses with, and is refracted in, his waking life. Through this psychic event, Duffy regains a sense of himself as a macho man. Like several other uncanny moments in The Exploded View, the novel’s final scene is disorienting because it positions and narrates these three events—or frames of analysis—horizontally, while showing indirect connections among them.

In this article, my use of the term uncanny is a rough application of the theory of the uncanny Sigmund Freud delineates in his 1919 article “The Uncanny.” In addition, I draw from a system of theoretical sources—all linked to the concept of the uncanny—that includes Peter Brooks’s theory of textual repetition, Lars Engle’s idea of the political uncanny, and, to a minor extent, the situationist concept of psychogeography. My use of the concept of the uncanny is informed less by a comprehensive knowledge of the intellectual history of Freud’s article and more by an awareness that Freud’s article and Vladislavić’s novel emerge from very different historical and geographical contexts. Accordingly, I think it necessary before proceeding to outline my understanding of Freud’s usage of the term.

In his article, Freud conceptualizes the uncanny as a slippery, composite feeling that belongs to the category of the frightening. He distinguishes between an experiential uncanny—“the uncanny one knows from experience”—and a fictional uncanny—“the uncanny that we find in fiction.”Footnote ⁷ According to Freud, the experiential uncanny occurs as a result of “something that was once familiar and then repressed.”Footnote ⁸ It “arises either when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted appear to be once again confirmed.”Footnote ⁹ The fictional uncanny, on the other hand, subsumes and is more complex than the experiential uncanny because fiction “affords possibilities for a sense of the uncanny that would not be available in real life.”Footnote ¹⁰

Freud’s theory of the fictional uncanny is based on his analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sand-Man” (1816). Freud identifies the castration complex as one of the key elements of the uncanny present in “The Sand-Man.” He also theorizes the (fictional) uncanny as an effect generated by a “complex of motifs” exemplified in Hoffmann’s short story.Footnote ¹¹ These motifs, which include the “idea of the ‘double’ (the Doppelgänger)” and the “constant recurrence of the same thing” under particular circumstances, are the components of Freud’s (fictional) uncanny that are most significant for my reading of Vladislavić’s novel.Footnote ¹²

Vladislavić’s The Exploded View is a quartet of four stylistically similar stories, of more or less equal length, arranged laterally, as in a four-panel installation.Footnote ¹³ The novel’s form is self-reflexively unveiled in its final story, “Crocodile Lodge.” This unveiling occurs in a flashback scene in which a young Gordon Duffy peruses, with all-consuming pleasure, mid-twentieth-century American mechanics magazines owned by his father:

Duffy’s keen interest in exploded views is traceable to his father, who, it is loosely implied, is one of Duffy’s models of masculinity. Duffy’s fascination with exploded views is also connected to his desire for spatial order and his belief in the usefulness of systemic analyses for the solution of mechanical problems. The self-referential link between the “exploded views” of Duffy’s father’s magazines and Vladislavić’s systemic “exploded view” of postapartheid Johannesburg is obvious and loaded with interpretive clues. The most immediate of these clues is the self-referential expression of doubt about the usefulness of exploded views for resolving mechanical problems:

In this passage, Vladislavić marks the limits of the form of the exploded view—a small-scale view, magnified—for depicting the “exploded” (i.e., the fragmented) realities of early postapartheid Johannesburg. The Exploded View is a small-scale mapping of Johannesburg, through a postmodernist lens, at a time—the late 1990s and early 2000s—when the city was redefining its spatial boundaries and witnessing rapid urban redevelopment. In more general terms, Vladislavić narrates and indicates the limits of narrating life lived in a society undergoing reconstruction, unsteadily making sense of social reconciliation, and still throbbing with the harsh historical wounds of apartheid.

In his article “Approaching Johannesburg,” Michael Titlestad argues that metaphors used to describe the “complexities of urban habitation (cultural, social, ethnic, political and religious)” create “small maps.”Footnote ¹⁶ According to Titlestad, these small maps oversimplify “complex realities.” They silence history, using the “sweeping logic of figuration,” and they produce “lines of demarcation that are rhetorical rather than lived.” Titlestad consequently cautions cultural critics who “read” the city through a “postmodern register”—where “everything is text [and] there is nothing outside the text”—to “abandon the overview of the trope in favour of historicising the ways in which individuals theorise their daily lives: the ways in which meaning is produced, dialectically and prudentially.”Footnote ¹⁷

Titlestad’s point is important. In writing about lived experience in urban spaces, micro-historical and dialectical analysis should not be subordinated to the use of abstract figurative language or generalized metaphors. Titlestad’s argument, however, sounds almost extreme, somewhat anti-literary, if one focuses on his statement about the need to “abandon the overview of the trope.” Admittedly, Titlestad’s criticism is directed toward urban studies theorists, but the mode of thought he criticizes—the mode of trope—belongs not only to the realm of urban studies but also to the realm of fiction.Footnote ¹⁸ That being said, Titlestad’s critique ultimately calls attention to the ways “small maps” argue for limited ways of viewing reality, and he stresses the political underpinnings of form. The Exploded View responds to the methodological question of whether we can think usefully about social reality using an incomplete map or explanatory system, and without total social representation. Vladislavić engages with this question by outlining, in the form of a novel, a sparse “small-scale map” of early 2000s Johannesburg. This small map emphasizes the Freudian uncanniness of the city’s outskirts. It also highlights the city’s subdued disjointedness and systemic flux—the city’s violence, absurd tragicomedy, economic inequality, and its ghettoization of working-class Black people under the guise of “urban redevelopment.”

Random, minor connections bind together, in a formal sense, the four distinct stories that comprise The Exploded View. The novel contains many strategically located thematic and descriptive repetitions. The formal function of these repetitions, like the random connections between events in the novel, is to create a sense of a whole—a single canvas split into four dynamic zones, which the reader assembles into a discontinuous totality. The repetitions also cumulatively establish different moods in the novel. These moods include even-keeled social satire, unsettling mystery, and physical violence. Thinking with Peter Brooks’s theory of textual repetition, outlined in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), it can also be argued that the repetitions in The Exploded View create interruption. As a result of these textual repetitions, the experience of reading the novel is an experience of doubling back and simultaneously moving forward. To read it is to traverse a “text of compulsive recurrence”—the kind of text that, according to Peter Brooks (via Freud), belongs to the class of the “literature of the uncanny.”Footnote ¹⁹

The fictional text of compulsive recurrence is apt for depicting, in a generalized sense, postapartheid South Africa. One thinks of the complex communal mood that broadly defines life lived in this space. This mood, induced by the difficult and delayed end of legal apartheid in 1990, and the subsequent emergence of the neoliberal postapartheid state, strongly informs the thematic concerns of postapartheid South African literature. In South African Writing in Transition (2019), Rita Barnard refers to feelings of “waiting, stuckness, disappointment, and nostalgia” that predominantly define this complex communal mood.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, according to Barnard, the subject of “temporality” or historiography—“the way we live and imagine the relation between past, present, and future”—is foregrounded in the South African public consciousness as a result of such a mood.

To linger with the subject of repetition, one of the major recurring images of The Exploded View—if not its most central image—is the image of a crack.Footnote ²¹ This image, a symbol of a controlled, incomplete explosion, evokes the title of the novel and the novel’s fragmented form. The image is also a visual metaphor that connotes, within the semantic context of The Exploded View, disorder, uncertainty, distortion, and the blurring of different realms of reality. In repeated moments in the novel, its four central characters (all of whom possess professionalized ways of analyzing social reality) experience a psychic crack, or a psychic crisis, that disrupts their habits of cognition.

In the opening story of The Exploded View, titled “Villa Toscana,” the image of a cracked windscreen is one of the first striking images Vladislavić dangles within the reader’s field of vision. Les Budlender, a thirty-seven-year-old white South African statistician and census official, is driving on the outskirts of Johannesburg. He is ruminating on the statistics of informal sector employment when a Black male street vendor attracts his attention:

Black African immigrants, especially Nigerians, appear in other parts of The Exploded View. They are associated in the South African collective unconscious (broadly defined) with alterity, anxiety, and criminality.Footnote ²³ Budlender’s reaction to the vendor suggests that he is anxious about the increasing presence of immigrants in postapartheid Johannesburg. The passage depicts him as a closeted racist and xenophobe. He is conscious of inhabiting a Johannesburg where older apartheid-era forms of social classification, especially race, have become complicated by the increasing prominence of other axes of identity, such as the national identities of Black African immigrants. Budlender feels threatened by a postapartheid-era system of ethnic classification that eludes the grasp of his “statistical” mind. His exchange of racist jokes with his friend Warren (presumably another white South African man) is an indication of a racist anxiety both men feel about living in a postapartheid South Africa. The Exploded View does not explicitly pass corrective judgment on the racist and xenophobic viewpoints of these characters and those of its other major characters. What the novel does is to concentrate unspectacularly on the problematic persistence of these viewpoints and to frame them as disruptive fissures that complicate postapartheid narratives of national unity.

The novel’s second reference to Budlender’s cracked windscreen is immediately followed by one of its most uncanny moments.Footnote ²⁴ This is the moment when Budlender, driving by a “squatter camp” opposite a new housing development, happens on a racially unidentified man “reclining” in a large black rubber tube:

The sudden, almost surreal, vision of the naked figure stretched out in the tube troubles Budlender more than his cracked windscreen. Budlender’s immediate response to the figure, most likely a black-skinned man, is a mixture of fear and anxiety. Following this anxious first response, Budlender imagines narrating the encounter at his workplace the next day “and laughing about it.”Footnote ²⁶ Vladislavić’s decision not to directly describe the man as “Black,” either in the sense of his skin color or his racial identity, is odd. He instead calls attention to the man’s black skin through the visual diversion of the black rubber tire, the man’s “seal-slick” belly, and the blackened fringe of veld. Vladislavić’s chromatic matching in this scene—the dominant color in the scene is black—is a way of suggesting that the man’s dark skin intensely registers in Budlender’s psyche. The charged combination of a rubber tire, a black-skinned figure, and a blackened fringe of veld might also arguably evoke the infamous history of necklacing in apartheid-era South Africa. In spite of this peculiar evocation of history, however, nothing in the passage directly points to a lynching, and the scene should not be read as one. The man in the tube is alive. He is described as “waving,” “twisting in the tube and craning his neck,” and there is no reference in the passage to burning or fire. Contrasting this tube-man moment with the earlier street-vendor moment (both moments involve the recurring image of the cracked windscreen) involves an uncanny doubling back that characterizes the process of reading The Exploded View.

The recurrence of moments addressing the subject of blurred personhood further contributes to the uncanny atmosphere of The Exploded View. As mentioned earlier, Freud identifies in his article on the uncanny a number of specific “motifs that produce an uncanny effect.”Footnote ²⁷ Various moments in The Exploded View call to mind the idea of the doppelgänger, one of these specific motifs.Footnote ²⁸ Even though these moments appear in the opening and closing sections of the novel, they are most heightened in the novel’s second and third sections.

In one of the doppelgänger moments from the novel’s second section, Mazibuko, a Black South African Reconstruction and Development Programme council official, introduces Egan, a white South African, to two Black men. The men are described as “both bearded” and “both wearing black leather jackets”:

Egan, a white liberal type, is visiting Johannesburg on behalf of a sanitary engineering consulting firm in which he is a partner. His encounter with the two Black men occurs because Mazibuko draws him into an unexpected tour of a newly built low-cost housing project. During the tour of the housing project, a Black tenant, Mrs. Ntalka, who is dissatisfied with the poor quality of her living quarters, confronts Egan. Mrs. Ntalka mistakes Egan as an authority capable of resolving her housing problems on the basis of his race and his authoritative demeanor.

Egan strongly feels he is not professionally responsible for resolving the problems of Mrs. Ntalka’s accommodations. He is a sanitary engineer, not a plumber. To avoid the awkwardness of looking like a white man who is dismissive of a Black person in postapartheid Johannesburg, Egan pretends to be who he is not. He ends up being annoyed by what he sees as Mrs. Ntalka’s melodramatic complaints, but he holds his tongue because he feels constrained by the racial optics of the encounter. He is peeved and intimidated by a politics of politeness, which he associates with reconciliation discourse. He is insecure about being perceived as a racist in postapartheid Johannesburg, so he adopts a go along to get along attitude. Over the course of the novel’s second section, this false tolerance is gradually unraveled and revealed for what it is.

Egan’s “inability” to differentiate between the faces of Ramaramela and Marakabane has an uncanny effect in the Freudian sense earlier described. His confusion also, of course, echoes Gordon Duffy’s perception of the faces of his attackers as “rough equivalents of one another.” This uncanny effect is augmented later in the novel’s second part when, during an evening out with five Black men (including Mazibuko, Ramaramela, and Marakabane) at an African eatery, Egan is distracted by the wooden mask–themed décor of the restaurant. After an awkward dinner experience with the five Black men, in which he feels culturally isolated, Egan’s feelings of insecurity are awakened by the restaurant’s decor. Observing the masks, Egan feels a “peculiar sense of being watched, as if a crowd of hungry tribesmen were staring at him while he tried to eat, gawking as if they had never seen a white man before”:Footnote ³⁰

Egan’s anxious contemplation of the masks is the climactic point of a disappointing night. He begins the night with the five Black men confident in his ability to interact convivially with them as a “racially mixed party” of “equals.”Footnote ³² Dressed in a madiba shirt, he looks forward to a night of Black South African cultural experience. As the evening progresses, however, his confidence soon wanes as he begins to suspect that “nothing important [is] being discussed with him.”Footnote ³³ He is uncomfortable with interracial humor between himself and the men because he is unsure “whether it [is] for his benefit or at his expense.”Footnote ³⁴ The semi-opaque nature of the men’s verbal gestures, including their use of indigenous African languages, especially Sotho, which Egan does not understand, further aggravates his feelings of powerlessness, discomfort, and uncertainty.

Egan’s inability to transparently read the intentions of his Black interlocutors, his discomfort with postapartheid interracial humor, and his fragile frustration with what he considers a societal obsession with race all contribute to his becoming anxious in a Black environment. He becomes increasingly insecure about his status as a cultural minority at a dinner table with five Black men. His suspicion leads him to sense “something conspiratorial in the air”— “he would almost have said in the décor”—that arouses feelings of “insecurity, anxiety, [and] even a guilty conscience” about his exclusion. Eventually, as a means of catharsis, and as a mechanism of emotional defense, he displaces his bitter feelings about the group of Black men onto the mask-themed décor of the restaurant.

Vladislavić’s capacity for sharp social satire is visible in this episode. The episode’s absurdly comic mood is driven by its creeping racial tension and Vladislavić’s unsentimental eye. Fairly intoxicated with alcohol, Egan soon becomes anxious about the masks that decorate the wall. His association of the faces of the Black men with the mask-themed décor of the restaurant recalls a moment from the first section of the novel. In this moment, Budlender is sitting in front of his television set when he observes that a continuity announcer, “a young [Black] man with muscular arms,” is wearing a “beaded hairdo that [makes] him look like a ritual object.”Footnote ³⁵ Egan’s confusion worsens as the night out approaches its end:

This moment—Egan experiencing a new version of an old white South African nightmare—indicates that Vladislavić is conscious, at some level, about his novel’s depiction of uncanny social encounters in postapartheid Johannesburg. With regard to the subject of the uncanny, Egan’s disorientation is particularly striking because it is tied to a melding of different levels of reality: filmic and nonfilmic reality. This blending of filmic with nonfilmic reality—the reel and “the real”—roughly matches Freud’s conception of the uncanny effect, which “often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred.”Footnote ³⁷

Egan’s fear of Black multitudes belongs to the same category of racist feeling as Budlender’s anxiety about the proliferation of Black immigrants in postapartheid Johannesburg. Furthermore, for Freud, “the repetition of the same thing,” and situations involving an unintentional return—in this case, the return of a repressed “old” white South African nightmare—invokes a “feeling that recalls the helplessness … experience[d] in certain dream-states.”Footnote ³⁸ Given the occurrence of thematic repetitions in The Exploded View, it is not surprising that the expression “an old white South African nightmare” could, with reasonable accuracy, be used to describe both Budlender’s encounter with the apparition of the black-skinned man in the rubber tube, from the novel’s opening section, and Duffy’s experience with the four Black men, from the novel’s closing section. The Exploded View can therefore be read as a postapartheid examination, using a series of character studies, of the persistence of white South African “nightmares” produced by racist fear, anxiety, and insecurity.

Gordon Duffy, like Egan, also processes his fear of Black South Africans using a cinematic simile. Referring to the Black men about to attack him, he thinks: “I should throw them into the dark like a character in a film.”Footnote ³⁹ Both Duffy and Egan experience an oneiric blurring of their conscious and unconscious realities, and Duffy’s nightmare is as uncanny as Egan’s: “He [(Duffy)] shifted his weight from one foot to the other, testing the mechanics of escape like someone in a dream, trying to run away but making no progress. Running in molasses.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Dreams, especially descriptions of characters’ dreams, are one of the recurring motifs in The Exploded View. Footnote ⁴¹ The following passage from the novel’s opening section, featuring Les Budlender, is one of the more important interpretive keys for navigating the shadowy world of the novel:

This passage contains some of the characteristics of the Freudian uncanny that have been discussed so far, particularly the unintentional return and the blurring of conscious and unconscious realms of reality. The passage also includes a cinematic simile, and it makes reference to the “dreamlike.” The verbs drifting, sliding, slipping, fading, all of which connote the uncertainty of a dreamlike filmic world—the novel’s “dreamscape,” as Shameem Black terms it—are especially striking.Footnote ⁴³ Other parts of the novel’s dreamscape are its recurring references to a simulacra world—toys, “toy towns,” and toylike people (Budlender sees the Black street vendor as “like a toy,” and Egan imagines Mazibuko as looking “like a wind-up toy.”)

This dreamscape is especially visible in a moment when, while watching television, Budlender wonders whether “all the people he saw on television, the newsreaders, the pop singers, the talk-show hosts and the continuity announcers, were suspended in an empty space, waiting for an appropriate world to embrace them.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Budlender also wonders why everything happens “so quickly” and “so incompletely” on postapartheid South African television:

In his article on the uncanny, Freud suggests that “severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm … feet that dance by themselves … all of these have something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited … with independent activity.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Apart from being, in a sense, a symbolic representation of an “exploded” view, the aforementioned passage exhibits a tension between uncanny detached body parts and an insistently imposed collective “rhythm.” This collective rhythm is the Simunye, rainbow-nation, we are one, tune. The tension between an uncanny exploded view of fragmented parts and an insistently imposed vision of unity is, as Vladislavić suggests, characteristic of early 2000s postapartheid South Africa.

In the two passages discussed previously, Budlender is on the verge of experiencing a psychic crisis, which, as earlier suggested, is experienced by all four major characters of The Exploded View, albeit to different degrees. Budlender’s psychic crisis can be usefully understood in terms of the concept of the “political uncanny,” proposed by Lars Engle, in his article “The Political Uncanny: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer.” Engle suggests that white anti-apartheid South African writers can be read as adopting a “mode of writing” that he terms the “political uncanny.” The concept of the “political uncanny” is a redefinition of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which reframes it as a “powerful explanatory concept to invoke in dealing with writing about political and ethical stress.”Footnote ⁴⁷ According to Engle, such a reframing of the concept of the uncanny allows for an understanding of the concept in relation to political life.Footnote ⁴⁸

Engle understands the political uncanny as being perceptible during “moments of breakdown that occur when an interpretive scheme encounters a particular object or event that it cannot satisfactorily interpret.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The political uncanny therefore involves a disorienting form of interpretive blockage or a disruption of subjective certainty: “dramas of reflexivity, in which a disturbing self-discovery forces, or at any rate threatens, a new understanding of subjectivity that will be less comforting than what it replaces.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Taking into consideration the nature of the affective crises experienced by the major characters of The Exploded View, Vladislavić can be situated within the “tradition” of white South African writing written in the mode of Engle’s political uncanny.

Vladislavić, however, extends this aesthetic “tradition” with significant modifications. The most striking of these modifications is perhaps his suggestion—through the narrative of the Black South African visual artist Simeon Majara—that the postapartheid political uncanny is as much a Black mode of experience as it is white (some of the specifics are, of course, different). Majara’s narrative is related in the third section of The Exploded View, titled “Curiouser.” Majara is a private-school-educated reassemblage artist who is famous for putting on spectacular art shows. He has an obsessive interest in historical atrocity, specifically historical narratives about the oppression of Black peoples. Majara profits from the artworks he creates from these narratives by exploiting a white liberal conscience and without deeply considering the ethics of commodifying his source material.

Majara’s narrative unfolds during the closing event of his well-attended art show named Curiouser, in which he makes use of mass-produced curios. He uses the same curios (wooden masks) to decorate the walls of the African eatery where Egan, from the previous section of the novel, experiences his “nightmare.” Majara dubiously obtains these curios—six crates in all—from a supposed Malawian, without deeply considering the social process by which he obtains the curios and the working conditions under which the curios were produced. He refuses to seriously consider the individuality of each mask as a work of art and the erased human labor that produced each mask. The climax of Majara’s narrative occurs when one of the guests at his closing show, a woman named Amy, prompts him to consider this erased labor:

The symbolic marking of this moment as involving a psychic crack, or a degree of political uncanniness, for Majara, is performed through the arresting expression “three small firecracker explosions” (italics mine). What explodes in this moment? What cracks in Majara’s ethical system become visible? In her analysis of this moment, Shameem Black rightly notes that Majara “refuses to accept [Amy’s] Marxist reading of his postmodern work.” According to Black, Amy’s Marxist reading frames Majara’s repression of the “economic history of the masks” as “an act of simple exploitation.”Footnote ⁵² To reinforce the point made earlier about the relevance of the concept of the political uncanny for reading The Exploded View, it is useful to highlight, at this point, one of Engle’s descriptions of the concept. Engle writes:

Majara’s reaction to admitting a more politically complex and ethical frame of thought about the masks is a kind of “shying away.” Even though Black argues that Majara “nonetheless gestures at a disguised admission of guilt when, after his encounter with Amy, he titles an imaginary installation ‘Crime Scene,’” it can also be argued that Majara’s “disguised” admission is a means of evading the political uncanny. Majara sinks back into his old, familiar, safe habit of thought: repressing the political or ethical pressures surrounding his practice of art. As a fictional document that does not avoid the explicitly political, The Exploded View self-reflexively sets itself up against an approach to practicing art like Majara’s. At the level of the textual, Majara’s incorrigibility contributes to an overall atmosphere of irresolution that builds over the course of The Exploded View. This atmosphere of irresolution is solidified in the novel’s closing scene.

In his article on The Exploded View, Stefan Helgesson notes that it is possible to read the novel as inviting an association between the psyches of its main characters and the psyche of urban space (in a metaphorical sense).Footnote ⁵⁴ From this assertion, it is possible to proceed to another, which is that Vladislavić simultaneously applies the concept of the uncanny to both geographical and psychological space in The Exploded View. In particular, Helgesson writes, “as with urban space, so with the psyche of the characters: they are incapable of asserting stable boundaries in their life-worlds.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The characters of The Exploded View recurrently stray into what Engle calls “lasting” “uncanny pockets” of the mental and geographical spaces they inhabit. Engle’s claim that “any strong explanatory system creates uncanny pockets at its edges, areas of threat whose power to disturb will be proportional to the emotional allegiance given to the system by the person holding it” is striking because of its use of a spatial metaphor.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another way to describe Vladislavić’s simultaneous application of the idea of the uncanny to both geographical and psychological space is to say that, in a more explicit sense than Engle, Vladislavić spatialiazes the concept of the uncanny. Vladislavić writes about Johannesburg’s landscape with an emphasis, rendered through fiction, on the city’s uncanny fringes.

In conclusion, Vladislavić’s uses of the concept of the uncanny in The Exploded View—especially at the level of the political, the spatial, and the historical—all powerfully lend themselves to a reading of the novel’s method of engaging with social reality as partly psychogeographical. Alastair Bonnett describes the situationist concept of the “psychogeographical” as “associated with creative, intimate and historically attuned explorations of hidden places and narratives of place.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Bonnet further observes that, in psychogeography, drifting “involves an unstructured wandering through the landscape, allowing oneself to be drawn consciously and unconsciously toward those sites and scenes that heighten one’s experience of place and disrupt the banality of everyday life.” It is in this sense that The Exploded View can be read as a psychogeographical exploration of the uncanny edges of early 2000s Johannesburg. The novel drifts and urges its readers to drift too—on a fractured surface of Joburgian reality.