‘As I Lay Dying’: Facing the Past in the South African Novel after 1990

Abstract

The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), André Brink's Imaginings of Sand (1996), and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006). The stories of these old women are told at the discursive intersections of memory, gender and race, and individually and together they revise the story of South Africa before, and for, the advent of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the pseudo-autobiographical form of these novels, the essay examines the role of memory in the narrative construction of self and identity, the self as discursive subject, and collective memories in relation to contesting nationalisms. The essay concludes with a more extensive discussion of Agaat, which exemplifies many of the issues discussed in the first three novels. Oliver Sacks's notion of a ‘neurology of identity’ provides a conceptual framework for reading the relationship between the main characters in Van Niekerk's novel as a South African instance of colonial mimicry, mockery and menace.