Tragic Optimism: Utopia and the Apocalyptic Demise of the World in Duiker's Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams

ABSTRACT:This paper considers Sello K. Duiker's two novels Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as precursors of recent literary trends in the South African post-transitional period. It makes an argument that these two novels anticipate the recent preoccupation with utopian idealism as a response to the challenges of the post-transitional postapartheid dispensation. To this day these texts remain unrivaled in their comprehensive meditation and elaboration on utopian idealism through their depiction of varied utopian paradigms, from singularity of pastoral solitude in Thirteen Cents to multiplicity of different monastic enclaves in The Quiet Violence of Dreams. These narratives not only pay tribute to utopian idealism through a depiction of its varied forms, but they are also a critique about its limitations and pitfalls. Hence, the narratives also foreground apocalyptic demise of the world as an alternative narrative resolution that competes with utopianism as the final and decisive panacea to the social imperfections of the postapartheid dispensation. In conclusion the paper argues that both Duiker's texts are presciently prophetic not only about what is to come but also what needs to be done.