Social history, literary history, and historical fiction in South Africa

Abstract

I begin this paper by looking at the importance of narrative for the coming into being of a ‘new’ nation like South Africa, which can no longer be underwritten by the customary markers of nationhood. I suggest that narrative becomes especially important in such circumstances, and move on to a consideration of narrative in relation to the discourses of history and fiction. Looking at the oppositions set up by writers of fiction such as J.M. Coetzee to the current dominant mode of history writing in South Africa, social history, I consider the ways in which such debates foreground the appropriative nature of totalizing forms such as narrative. Moving on to the genre of historical fiction (the mode in which the discourses of history and fiction are usually considered to be at their most intimate), I argue for a new definition of the historical novel, one in which its ability to generate its historical subject powerfully enough to resist its own appropriative tendencies becomes the chief criterion of definition and evaluation. I close by extending the model of historical fiction considered from this perspective into a productive way of measuring the degree to which the discourses of history and fiction in South Africa have succeeded and failed in using the full resources of narrative to resist the closures of history and nation, and narrative itself.