Plagues in Palimpsest: Historical Time and Narrative Time in Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies, Marcus Low’s Asylum and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues

Abstract

This article takes as premise that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has left South Africans, along with the rest of the world, feeling acutely aware of their own historicity. The idea of historical self-awareness coalescing around major social and historical shifts has been expertly theorized already, but I hope to offer a reading of this phenomenon through three post-2000 South African novels that deal with the theme of plague. A reading of Ricoeur’s work on time and narrative, combined with Bakhtin’s theorization of polyvocality in the novel leads me to suggest, following Gérard Genette, Ken Barris and Ronit Frenkel, that the idea of the palimpsest in South African writings has particular potency for thinking about historical change. I propose that these ideas are skilfully fictionalized and rendered imaginatively accessible in Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies (2012), Marcus Low’s Asylum (2017) and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005).

Keywords:

• Narrative time
• historical fiction
• South African fiction
• post-transitional literature
• plague
• palimpsest
• temporality
• polyvocality

Notes

1 I have used ‘Saartjie’ rather than Sara or Sarah, in accordance with its usage in the text.