The Longer Future: Representations of Historical Contingency in Contemporary South African Literature

Abstract

Many cultural and literary theorists have noted how post-apartheid nationalism relied on progressive appraisals of history, producing an archive that has consistently allied itself with the future, to the detriment of the past. Yet as I aim to illustrate in this article, representations of historical contingency in contemporary literary output serve as expressions of vulnerability in this regard – an indication that the national and literary imaginary has lost the ability, or the need, to read the past according to progressive historical modalities. Through a close reading of Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat, Imraan Coovadia's High Low In-between and Anne Landsman's The Rowing Lesson, I illustrate how disillusionment proves tragic for certain characters, leading to an apocalyptic rendition of historical events. These characters, however, are portrayed as merely reactionary, casting events in a deliberately dystopian light in order to justify their convictions about a future apocalypse. Yet in these texts there are other characters who provide comic renditions of the apocalypse and thus appropriate historical contingency to form part of a different historical modality that can accommodate both failure and progress.