Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

Writitig .Yoz~th IW~M Sole
ican identities and cultures which represent 'a challenge to writers of fiction, a
mative way of addressing a rapidly transforming world' (55); furtherinore, it is
e hopes will result which will supply 'an occasion
ings' (47). Polyphonic utterance is positively viewed,
luralising spirit now possible in literature. Horn, Boehmer, Brink, Pechey and
ree that there is the potential for a multi-voiced South Africa to move forward
spirit of heterogeneity and transculturation free fi-orn iiationalist (and,
mably, other tnaster-narrativising) reconstructions.
'Opening the silences' that beset apartheid South Africa is an opportunity to
abilise centre and margin; to inculcate and fashion a new society free of prejudice
chies. Pechey approaches hyperbole in his discussioii of these possibilities:
e the rising crime rate and the possibility that South Africa might merely be
entering the latest of its neo-colonial phases, the country 'still bids fair to be the
Gesellschaftsw~inder of the late twentieth centmy' (59); Ndebele's stories may
'transform the victory over apartheid into a gain for postmodem knowledge' (58), and
These essays are therefore filled with a utopian spirit which occasionally
els somewhat mean-spirited pointing out that the
orld community means that we are now merely one of
bal system overdetermined by unequal and often
serve a polemical as much as a scholarly purpose. The editors, and a prepondera 's acute observation that, for some time to come,
their contributors, appear to subscribe fully to the hegemony current in the
two opposites, the ideal world and the real world, are going to fonn the basis of a
strong articulation' (1 83) in the work of younger writers will probably be borne
At worst this utopian tendency verges on a romaiiticisation of the 'unutteredl
tterable' (so to speak) spaces available for resistance and potential counterhis
is especially noticeable in the way in which the discourses and
tions of indigenous and oral societies and non-Western epistemologies are
onstiucted, especially on the part of some of the white critics who seem to subscribe to
stronger notion of 'othering' than Attwell. These become an 'other' space beyond the
ut central to the desire of-Westernlwhite critics: places where
sive and traiisforrnative couiiter-urges lour beyond limits. At its most extreme,
a tendency (visible here in Horn) to place all his objects of approbation within
realm, and then elide them within a discussion ranging freely from one to the next.
hus sees no problem in blurring discussions of orality, myth, political silencing and
their resistaiice to, and inco~n~nensurability with,
In line with current trends, there is also a vigorous debunking ofthe realist and
etic modes of expression with which, it is suggested, anti-apartheid literature was
urated. Such a persistent reiteration of horrendous 'facts', Brink tells us, 'blunts the
mind' (2 1). 'History' is perceived as a tyrannical form of discourse in South Africa, that
claims a representativeness and a connection to truth it does not rightfully possess. 111
such a scenario, 'fiction' and the uses ofthe imagination are given enormous subversive
and transformative power; for, according to Horn, they can 'enter the space of the