Secular improvisations: the poetics of invention in Ivan Vladislavić'sThe exploded view

Each of the four protagonists in The exploded view (2004) attempts to negotiate the field of post-apartheid signs, material objects and ideological possibilities and limits. In this article we analyse the limited capacity of each protagonist to make sense of the transforming world he inhabits. We characterize this limited capacity to make meaning by relating the four narratives comprising the novel to certain theoretical moves in the work of Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu respectively. We conclude that Vladislavić develops a sense of the ineluctably contingent nature of the quotidian based in a secular epistemology. That is, his protagonists experience simultaneously the failed promise of transcendence and their agency as dramatically qualified in the postcolonial context in which they live.