Writing under pressure: A post‐apartheid canon?

Abstract

Many critics have noticed a shift in emphasis in South African fiction from the public sphere of politics and protest during apartheid to the private sphere, post‐apartheid, to reflection and self‐questioning. Nevertheless, I argue, novelists are maintaining the principles of what I will call “engaged” writing, suggesting that the public/private dichotomy needs reformulating. Representations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) serve as my example because, as contemporary novelists have shown, the TRC problematically collapses this dichotomy by bringing truth and confession into the public domain.

Keywords:

• post‐apartheid
• public/private
• commitment
• TRC narratives

Notes

1. In his recent work on Coetzee, Attridge argues for the singularity of literature that necessarily involves a move away from reading texts allegorically – here, read “politically” (J.M. Coetzee 15). This position, however, minimalizes the meta‐allegorical processes at work in Coetzee's fiction that accommodate both the work's singularity and its politics.

2. Rushdie's invitation to join Coetzee at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, in 1988 to discuss censorship was withdrawn shortly before the fatwa was imposed on him, following the publication of The Satanic Verses. He was replaced on stage by Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee. In the debate that followed, Coetzee championed Rushdie's right to free speech but later rescinded his position.

3. Meira Cook (75) and Laura Moss (86–87) make a similar point about the blurring of fiction and public testimony.