David Mann’s short story collection Once Removed is inventive, and in tune with what it means to be a young artist in a contemporary struggle for literary self-identity, writes Kris Van der Bijl.

Once Removed
David Mann
Botsotso, 2024

In the title story of David Mann’s short story collection, the unnamed narrator explains his aim in photographing mundane objects by claiming to be seeking a degree of ‘melancholic realism’, a term he has stumbled upon and which he seems to use retrospectively in relation to his work. 

This narrator explains, then, that the objects and spaces he captures—‘a stalled construction site; a bed, half-made or […] a discarded CD lying face-up on the pavement’—bear significance, even if only because of his own intentions. Something is foregrounded here that runs through Mann’s collection as a whole: not the dull ‘art is in the eye of the beholder’ truism, but, instead, perhaps as a kernel which aids in supplying a cohesive approach to the overall work, and gestures toward its place on the larger stage of South African writing and art. 

I take Mann’s mention of melancholic realism as part of the tongue-in-cheek jabs he himself takes at artists, writers, photographers, musicians and critics throughout his book. He has hinted in interviews that he agrees the term resonates across the collection. It reveals his intentions—almost to the point where it is pernicious to his overall project. 

This observational framework aside, Once Removed is nominally a collection about artists living in South Africa. An almost clichéd cast of characters inhabits the thirteen stories: critics are choleric, artists are late for their viewings, photographers want to capture the ‘essence’ of South Africa, and enfants terribles drink quarts of beer and plan revolutions. All, in a word, ordinary—not to say vanilla—and perhaps just what good South African writers need to return to. 

Take, for instance, Mann’s opening story, ‘Resistance’. It follows an art critic named Michael, who is invited to an art gallery that is showing photographs of various protests that have taken place around South Africa in recent years. Buzzwords like ‘reactionary’ and ‘protest as performance’ fill his head. He is slowly being sucked into a visual display, fixated on a toyi-toying man, when an assistant touches his shoulder and pulls him back. There is a protest outside, she says, and it is moving with violence towards the gallery. Michael panics at the now real destruction around him, before soon realising that ‘his limbs are twisted metal’, like the mangled cars outside. He regains consciousness after fainting and leaves the gallery. But all outside has returned to normal. 

This is not the only story where art and subject become one. In ‘Burden’, the protagonist finds a sculptor called ‘the upright man’ and becomes The Upright Man, like something out of an MR James horror story. Gazing upon a sculpture, his body becomes fixed in the statue’s pose. Like a good artist, the pain of his aesthetic conundrum fuels his purpose, and he is subsumed, becoming nothing more or less than the figure he studies. ‘Burden’ begins with a short epigram from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: ‘for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life’. The poem suggests the power of art by capturing the moment when the greatest need for it is revealed. Put simply, as the protagonist in ‘Burden’ learns, art transforms.

Once Removed’s focus on people engaging with art allows the reader to see reactions to the art, and these subjective responses take the place of the object itself. Mann sketches these scenes as ordinary occasions, which become almost ritualistic. In the story ‘Common Ground’, the quotidian space is Khumo’s ‘dusty student digs in Observatory, Cape Town’, where everyone has gathered to form ‘a radical, experimental and interdisciplinary art collective’. What a commonplace, although every BA-linked twenty-something believes such gatherings to be poignant and unique.

One could call moments like this ‘iconic’, in that they are familiar, and they recur throughout the collection. Tourists ask their guides whether they will see real crocodiles at a Cape Town theme park (‘The Park’); the family of an artist that the government is trying to honour find out that the same government has misplaced the money they were promised (‘The Burning Museum’). Mann uses such tropes as the grammar of a stark, clear iconography of aesthetics that decries the imagining of a future that is distinct from the past. For me, this is the melancholic realism that the title character in ‘Once Removed’ stumbles upon. 

Mann’s work accordingly seems to celebrate the banal, with its scenes of people just trying to live their lives. But it is in the absence of extraordinary characters, particularly deliberate in stories like ‘Nothing to be Done’, that we appreciate how the rapture of greatness proves too often to be just out of reach. Mann’s collection provides an aesthetic charge for the result: melancholia, which approaches Lord Byron’s definition, as the ‘telescope of truth’. 

Once Removed feels rare. Often, South African writers who take the MA creative writing track throw their thesis-cum-novel at their supervisors and later potential publishers as a kind of manifesto of their novel-to-be. Mann’s short stories are inventive, and in tune with what it means to be a young artist in a contemporary struggle for literary self-identity, yet his writing is calm and self-assured. The world of Once Removed passes the baton to the reader to be as melancholic or as blithe in their everyday lives as they choose. The reader, the critic, may be the one in need of true reflection here.

• Kris Van der Bijl js a writer from Cape Town. He holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. His writing has appeared in the likes of Wasafiri, Brittle Paper and New Coin Poetry Magazine.