ABSTRACT

In recent times cultural commentators have endeavoured to gauge the reroutings in South African fiction now that apartheid is over. Under apartheid, South Africa was, in the words of Njabulo Ndebele, ‘a very public society. It is public in the sense that its greatest aberrations are fully exhibited. […] It is totally heroic’ (4-50). J. M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron ([1990] 1991), set during the waning yet most virulent years of the Afrikaner National Party, succinctly captures this lack of privacy when the protagonist Mrs Curren’s house is being ransacked by detectives. Rifling through her letters, one of the policemen tells her, ‘This is not private, Mrs Curren. […] Nothing is private any more’ (157). Similarly, challenged by Mrs Curren for losing parental authority of her activist child, Florence responds: ‘It is all changed today. There are no more mothers and fathers’ (36). Necessarily lessening the distance between artistic expression and public intellectualism, the apartheid condition forced even the most reluctant novelists to engage with the public domain. Questions of aesthetics and literature’s capacity for interiority, it seemed, were to be set aside for the more pressing needs of politics. Indeed, such needs may account for the neglect, identified by Elleke Boehmer in this volume, of the category of the aesthetic in postcolonial studies. A number of progressive critics, notably Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee, Lewis Nkosi and Albie Sachs, warned that in South Africa this led to a debased and didactic form of literature. For Ndebele, ‘[t]he entire ethos [of committed literature] permits neither inner dialogue with the self, nor a social public dialogue. It breeds insensitivity, insincerity and delusion’ (50). Critics like David Attwell and Michael Chapman, however, have shown that such a position itself represents a ‘critical orthodoxy’ (Attwell 2005: 177) that overlooks the complexities of literature that, whilst committed, at times also reveals a distinct African modernism and that is capable of combining self-reflexivity with political critique.