The Imaginator: Perspective and Possibility in Ivan Vladislavić’s “The Tuba” Rilette Swanepoel Seeing and Perceiving Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction often centres on how characters relate to their environments and, more particularly, on how they perceive cultural artefacts, such as monuments, statues, fine-art objects and architecture. He describes the visual aspects of these artefacts in minute detail. Such artefacts frequently serve as motifs in his short stories and novels, and he regularly employs them as markers of ideology and of change. As the author of several texts on South African fine arts, 1 this preoccupation with the visual comes as no surprise. The author’s work suggests a link between the ways in which characters view concrete reality, including cultural artefacts, and their world views. Experimention with perspective is characteristic of his oeuvre. He presents readers with the views of children (“The Prime Minister is Dead” [1989] and “Tsafendas’s Diary” [1989]), megalomaniacs (Niewenhuizen in The Folly [1993] and Tearle in The Restless Supermarket [2001]) and even, in one story, the perspective of a statue (“We Came to the Monument” [1989]), as he points to the important role of perspective in the generation of meaning. Perspective in Vladislavić’s fiction as a tool to bring a storyworld into being, however, has received little critical reflection. Many critics and scholars, such as Wood, Helgesson, Thurman and Peters, 2 have investigated the games that Vladislavić plays with language. In my view, the games the author plays with perspective are equally intriguing. Given the South African context that forms the backdrop to all his fiction, it also comes as no surprise that one particular cultural artefact, English in Africa 41 No. 1 (May 2014): 109–126 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v41i1.7