On 4 July 1996, Mark Behr delivered the keynote address at a conference in Cape Town entitled “Faultlines—Inquiries around Truth and Reconciliation.” Speaking of his own novel, The Smell of Apples, Behr said, “as an act of creation The Smell of Apples represents, for me, the beginnings of a showdown with myself for my own support of a system like apartheid. [… I]f the book's publication has assisted white people in coming to terms with their own culpability for what is wrong in South Africa, then it has been worthwhile” (1).

This formulation reveals, perhaps unintentionally, the ambivalence of what we might call confessional fiction, an ambivalence hinging on Behr's phrase “coming to terms with their own culpability.” He means, presumably, confronting that culpability; but his phrase could equally mean accommodating, establishing a comfortable relationship with it.¹ No doubt one's reading of Behr's statement is conditioned by the knowledge that he was about to confess to having been for years, while a student leader in the left-wing student organization National Union of South African Students, a paid informer of the South African security establishment; but even in less pronounced instances of complicity with the apartheid regime, the same questions arise. In particular, for my present purpose, the question arises of whether and in what sense confessional fiction “comes to terms” with white South African culpability. A correlative question is whether confessional fiction differs significantly in this respect from non-fictional confession, and if so, how. André Brink has argued for the essential continuity of fiction and history: following Hayden White, he maintains that “in the process of textualizing the event it is also narrativized: that is, the representations of history repeat, in almost every detail, the processes of fiction” (“Stories” 32).

Taking actual confessions, then, to be, with whatever omissions and distortions, “representations of history,” I want to place them next to “the processes of fiction,” hoping thereby to learn something of the narrative principles underlying and shaping both. I shall use as my nonfictional examples some of the confessions and revelations emanating from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (1996-98) and the concurrent Amnesty hearings. These have been absorbingly edited by Antjie Krog, who reported on the hearings for the South African Broadcasting Corporation; and not the least interesting aspect of her account is that it becomes, among other things, a rite of passage narrative of which Krog herself is the protagonist and author. Based on her daily attendance at these hearings, Country of My Skull, as the very title signals, is an intensely personal account of these hearings: the sufferings inflicted by one group of people (for the most part Krog's own people, the Afrikaners) on another are, for Krog, testimony to something in that country which is an inalienable part of her: “Week after week, from one faceless building to another, from one dusty, god-forsaken town to another, the arteries of our past bleed their own peculiar rhythm, tone and image. One cannot get rid of it. Ever” (37).

But Krog is a writer—admittedly better known as a poet than as a prose writer, but still acutely aware of the nature and capacity of narrative. And in the process of reporting, she also consciously shapes other people's narratives as part of her own:

“Hey Antjie, but this is not quite what happened at the workshop,” says Patrick.

“Yes, I know, it's a new story that I constructed from all the other information I picked up over the months about people's reactions and psychologists' advice. I'm not reporting or keeping minutes. I'm telling. […] I cut and paste the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell. […]”

“But then you're not busy with the truth?”

“I am busy with the truth … my truth. Of course, it's quilted together from hundreds of stories that we've experienced or heard about in the past two years. Seen from my perspective, shaped by my state of mind at the time and now also by the audience I'm telling the story to. In every story there is hearsay, there is a grouping together of things that didn't necessarily happen together, there are assumptions, there are exaggerations to bring home the enormities of situations, there is downplaying to confirm innocence. All of this together makes up the whole country's truth. So also the lies. And the stories that date from earlier times.”

“[…] What gives a story its real character is the need to entertain—to make the listener hang on your lips.”

(170-71)

“My truth” thus modulates into “the whole country's truth” by what one might call an act of narrative appropriation—not, I think, in any opportunistic sense, but in that sense that the teller necessarily shapes the tale. And that tale was, for Krog, clearly also a personal rite of passage from the relatively secure world of the liberal Afrikaner to the frightening sense of complicity with the perpetrators of the horrors recounted at the hearings: “what do I have in common with the men I hate the most?” (92) she asks herself as she listens to the testimony of the murderers of the apartheid regime.

Krog's book presents, in itself and in the narratives that it reports, absorbing instances of the process envisaged, at an early stage of the hearings, by Njabulo Ndebele: “And so it is that the stories of the TRC seem poised to result in one major spin-off, among others: the restoration of narrative. In few countries in the contemporary world do we have a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative” (27). But in a sense possibly not foreseen by Ndebele, narrative also serves as a means of reinvention for those people who inflicted the sufferings of which the victims speak. The perpetrators have their own stories, the dreadful complement to the narratives of suffering and loss, what Krog calls the “second narrative”: “After six months or so, at last the second narrative breaks into relief from its background of silence—unfocused, splintered in intention and degrees of desperation. But it is there. And it is white. And male” (56).

As Krog implies, these confessions are more artless than her own—“unfocused, splintered in intention.” Emanating for the most part not from a sense of remorse but from the need for “full and honest disclosure” which was a condition of amnesty, these accounts are “reinventions” also in the sense that they strive to cast the perpetrators of innumerable brutalities as themselves victims, misled into unthinking allegiance to a political system which they now recognize as evil. Most of these narratives are structured towards self-revelation only as a means of exoneration. By, say, J. M. Coetzee's definition, the accounts of these men may not even qualify as confessions: “A certain looseness is inevitable when one transposes the term confession from a religious to a secular context. Nevertheless, we can demarcate a mode of autobiographical writing that we can call the confession, as distinct from the memoir and the apology, on the basis of an underlying motive to tell an essential truth about the self” (“Confession” 252).

The motive of most of the men testifying to their own deeds before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is manifestly not “to tell an essential truth about the self”: it is to gain amnesty for themselves. As Jacques Pauw says: “They show little remorse and their only regret seems to be the fact that they have been forced to the TRC's confession table. They may say how sorry they are, but with few exceptions the only emotion they show is their feeling of desperation about their situation, which forces them to face their victims” (19).

One of the few exceptions is a young constable, William Harrington, who at eighteen, a week after graduating from the Police Training College, had been sent out to track African National Congress combatants at night. After this frightening initiation, he had gone on, inspired by the fatherly encouragement of his major, to assault more than a thousand people in less than three years:

I stand before you—naked and humble. I have decided to stop apologizing for Apartheid and to tell the truth. With this I will betray my people and I will betray myself. But I have to tell the truth. I have made peace with God and the time has come to make peace with the people of KwaZulu-Natal. To make peace with myself. It is this audience which haunts me in the back of my head. Maybe amongst you are those whom I assaulted, whom I left behind for dead in the field.

(Krog 70)

Despite a sense of “self” that is too incoherent and contradictory (“I will betray myself. […] To make peace with myself”) to constitute Coetzee's “essential truth about the self,” the young police officer's account does grope towards that reassessment, that reinvention through narrative that Ndebele hoped would be made possible by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings: for all its artlessness, the man's confession has about it the saving confusion of a nature taken unawares by emotions it has not been trained to deal with, something like Coriolanus regarding his yielding to his mother as a defeat of his soldierly virtues.

But Constable Harrington is, as I've said, something of an exception. Other confessions seem more opportunistic, the remorse out of character with the persona revealed by the facts of the narrative.² What Sarah Nuttall has said about Behr's confession applies to these “confessions” as well:

Behr's text raises questions about the purpose of confession and who its beneficiaries are. Confession typically presupposes a constellation of notions about the private self tormented by guilt and the private conscience exposed to self-criticism. However, the fact that people confess to their crimes does not necessarily imply a compulsion to confess as an escapee from a burden of guilt. For Behr, the conscience of memory may be less at stake than the fear of exposure before the TRC in the present.

(“Telling” 87)

Potentially the most interesting of the confessions to emanate from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that of Eugene de Kock, one-time commander of Vlakplaas, the notorious base of one of the most active of the police death squads operating with impunity under the apartheid government. Nicknamed “Prime Evil” by his admiring henchmen, De Kock killed a literally uncountable number of people in pursuit of what he saw as the cause of country and nation. His appeal to the imagination seems to lie in the fact that, unlike many of his henchmen and his subordinates, he does not appear to be an ordinary thug: like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, he strikes people as “equipped with moral ideas of some sort” (Conrad 88). Apart from his presence in Krog's and Pauw's accounts, De Kock's story, as told to Jeremy Gordin, has been published in book form; here, one imagines, will be an answer to the question that recurs in all accounts of the hearings: what could induce apparently ordinary people to commit deeds of such gratuitous cruelty? How does such a person account for himself to himself and others?

But De Kock's account fails to answer the questions that it prompts, because it is a non-narrative, in Krog's sense of narrative: “We make sense of things by fitting them into stories. When events fall into a pattern which we can describe in a way that is satisfying as narrative then we think that we have some grasp of why they occurred” (196-97). De Kock's narrative is simply an account of one ghastly murder after another, with no reflection on its human significance, only here and there a perfunctory attempt to suggest that there were, after all, certain constraints, that the killing was subject to a certain code. Having set fire to Khanya House in Pretoria, the headquarters of the South African Bishops' Conference, De Kock recounts: “After the fire started raging, we were watching the building when we realised, for the first time, that there were people in it. We saw clergymen helped down ladders by the fire department. It was a huge shock” (De Kock and Gordin 145).

And yet, of course, De Kock and his helpers often enough quite knowingly killed innocent people, and he reports it dispassionately enough to make the “huge shock” here utterly implausible. But this is not just to complain that this is an uninteresting book or even to remark once again on the banality of evil. Rather, it is to reflect on the nature of narrative and confession: without some recognition, some development, confession seems pointless, and the protagonist seems hardly human; the “facts” pure and simple explain nothing, understand nothing. For ultimately that is what we feel: that De Kock himself does not understand what made him into a monster, cannot even know that he is a monster. As far as he is concerned, the moral of his story, the story of his story, is that he was betrayed by his superiors—and whereas it is of course true that he was used by his superiors and then left to take the rap, it is more striking that he was so ready to be used. Pauw makes the same point by implication when he says that “[t]his system [the apartheid regime and its security network] made a killer like Eugene de Kock one of apartheid's most decorated policemen” (16)—in other words, to split a distinction Pauw may not intend, the system did not make him a killer, it merely decorated him for being one. When De Kock does express remorse it is when he is applying for amnesty, or pleading in mitigation, as Pauw comments, “after being convicted of six murders and when he faced a life behind bars” (19): “I cannot say how dirty one feels. Whatever we attempted in the interests of the country did not work. All that we did was to injure people, to leave people with unforgivable pain. To leave behind children who will never know their parents. I sympathise with the victims as if they were my own children” (De Kock and Gordin 274-75).

Pauw speculates, somewhat charitably: “At the time, though, he had already been incarcerated for more than two years, and maybe the loneliness of being locked away in a solitary cell has compelled him to come to terms with his evil deeds and the futility of his dirty war” (19). Again the ambiguous term “come to terms with” raises the issue of the function of confession: to make the perpetrator feel more comfortable with his “evil deeds,” or to bring him to some understanding of their significance? De Kock's account has its ironies—in pleading for amnesty he is appealing to qualities he utterly denied in the execution of his duties, and the system he regards as having betrayed him is in fact being entirely consistent in sacrificing him to what it perceives as its own best interests—but he is too concerned with his grievances for such reflections. De Kock is no Macbeth. He has been compared to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (Pauw 296) for the sheer lack of restraint that characterized his total surrender to the seductions of his own power. But what distinguishes Kurtz as “a remarkable man” is exactly the self-knowledge that De Kock seems to lack: “He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate” (Conrad 151).

But if many of the confessions before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lack what we might call the narrative shape of fiction, that which gives significance to experience, what of fiction itself in its dealings with white South African guilt? It seems to me that in this respect white South African fiction arranges itself in relation to two poles, what we might call confessional fiction on one end and heroic romance on the other. The latter category deals with white South African complicity by declaring an exception, creating, in Nadine Gordimer's phrase and title, a “Sport of Nature,” the white person who miraculously escapes complicity and heroically opposes the regime, often through union, sexual or otherwise, with a black protagonist. Gordimer's Hillela is a strange and unconvincing creation—in Michael Chapman's phrase, she, “in utter disregard of all bourgeois convention, sleeps (screws) her way up the African high command” (394). Although marginally less hopeful of the political efficacy of sexual intercourse, Brink's An Act of Terror is also in this tradition; and Etienne van Heerden's Casspirs and Camparis partly uses, partly satirizes, the tradition.³ A late example is Jann Turner's Heartland, which, though set in postdemocratic South Africa, replays most of the old plot devices: the farm background, the black playmate, the racist father, the generational divide, the conservative community, the rebellious daughter, the choice between duty to Afrikanerdom and the sexual allure of the young black revolutionary, the thuggish police, the Security Branch killer. Turner justifies all these plot devices by setting her story in a community so backward as to have escaped such changes as were wrought by the change of government. In this respect her novel is reminiscent of Brink's Imaginings of Sand, which also tries to create a heroine at odds with the racist society in which she finds herself: in this instance the conservative town of Oudtshoorn, on the eve of the 1994 election—itself something of a recurring trope in South African fiction of the era. It may be no coincidence that both these novels should strike us as dated: their heroic paradigms don't fit the new dispensation, and they are too stereotyped to survive their topicality.

The heroic tradition is a profoundly uncomfortable one in white South African fiction in that it tries to find in the spirit of an individual a redemptive resistance to the malaise of a nation. As executed in the works I have mentioned, the tradition produces stereotype and cliché of an order that should have been impossible to authors like Brink and Gordimer (as Heartland is Turner's first novel, it is impossible to tell what, if anything, she could do if liberated from the stereotypes of struggle she deploys so mechanically).⁴

If the heroic mode is simply too remote to the experience of most white South Africans to provide a believable basis for fiction, the confessional mode has produced a wide and varied body of literature. Of this kind of fiction, Ndebele, interestingly confining himself to Afrikaans literature, has said:

In fact, there may be an informal truth and reconciliation process under way among the Afrikaners. Its contours are taking shape in the form of such novels as Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples. Karel Schoeman's Promised Land anticipated it some years back. Jeanne Goosen's Not All of Us gave it further impetus. I am certain that there are more such narratives which have not yet been translated. Their distinguishing feature is their focus on ordinary social details which pile up into major, disturbing statements. The ordinary Afrikaner family, lost in the illusion of the historic heroism of the group, has to find its moral identity within a national community in which it is freed from the burden of being special.

(24)

The comparison with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests, of course, that these novels are in the nature of confessions made before the tribunal of history, in seeking to account for the guilt of “the ordinary Afrikaner family.” But if we assume, with Coetzee, “an underlying motive to tell an essential truth about the self” in confession (“Confession” 252), then there may be something contradictory in the very notion of confessional fiction, in that it is in the nature of fiction to explain, to contextualize that “essential truth,” to provide motives, and, if not to absolve, then at least to make that truth intelligible, and hence perhaps less reprehensible. The novel form tends to privilege the protagonist, especially where, as is often the case in the confessional novel, the narration is in the first person, frequently with a child or young person as narrator or focalizer.

Behr explains his own choice of child narrator as follows:

The child's voice could, I felt, succeed in accusing the abusers while at the same time holding up the mirrors. I hoped, and doubted, that the text would show how one is born into, loved into, violated into discrimination and how none of us were, or are, free from it. But to do so I needed a voice that would seem not to seek pardon or excuse, in a language different from the adult's which invariably contains in it whether it wants or not, a corrupt and corrupting formula, always an attempt to justify or frequently to demand absolution

(“Living” 2)

Behr is saying that the child is more likely to render without “attempt to justify” the guilt of white South Africa, thus to be more truly confessional; but the child's voice may have the advantage exactly in not needing “to demand absolution” in that it is granted absolution through the legal fiction that the child is not accountable, and the related fictional convention that children are “innocent” in a generally unspecified sense. There is, in short, a kind of absolution of form in the rite of passage novel, in its characteristic presupposition of the myth of prelapsarian innocence.

In Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken, the farm is consciously used as an image of Eden before the fall. The narrator, Kati, recalls her childhood visits to her grandparents' farm: “Everyone should have a farm like that in their childhood—too idyllic to be real outside the tangible world of a child's imagining. And it really was like that, the perfect background for a charmed and untouched childhood. The farm itself was untouched: by ugliness, unpleasantness, poverty, politics” (1). The innocence of roast chicken is the innocence of the child who has as yet no inkling of the complex power relations of the “ugliness, unpleasantness, poverty, [and] politics” that are needed to raise and slaughter and roast the chicken and bring it to her table. It's one measure of white South African guilt that it feels uncomfortable about eating.⁵ We don't dare protest that we must eat in order to live, because we know we eat rather better than is strictly necessary, and we know that quite often the food is prepared for us by people who don't eat it themselves. It is only as children that we are untroubled alike by thoughts of the animals that are killed for us or by consciousness of the labor involved in the killing and preparation.

Thus, like Richards's Kati, Patrick Winter, the protagonist of Damon Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, also recalls his childhood visits to the farm as a time of innocence. Speaking of the screaming of pigs being slaughtered, Patrick says: “When I was younger, I have to confess, their screams were beautiful to me. On those occasions I holidayed at the farm, I was up at six on Tuesday. I waited down at the bare patch of earth, ringed by little black children. With the first rays of sun coming down to the ground, wrapped in a thin silver mist, I watched pigs being carefully stuck” (28). Paradoxically, what Patrick has “to confess” to is an innocence that does not register the terror of the dying pigs. But here, too, the childhood perspective is lost; the beautiful screaming of pigs becomes a harbinger of death: “But now,” says Patrick, returning to the farm after his experiences in the Border war, “the noise was hideous” (28).

And in Behr's The Smell of Apples, the eponymic apples are obviously the apples before the fall: “Even the apples we brought to this country,” the young Marnus's father tells him, as proof of the white contribution to Africa. Like the chickens, these apples are taken for granted as white produce; to the child they are associated with the idyll of a landscape created and maintained by God. Looking out over the beauty of False Bay, Marnus's father passes on to his son the myth of the empty landscape: “And this country was empty before our people arrived. Everything, everything you see, we built up from nothing. This is our place, given to us by God and we will look after it. Whatever the cost” (124). The cost is, of course, horrendous, as the book demonstrates through its flashes forward to the Angolan war. But for the young Marnus himself the loss of innocence is registered through the changed perception of the childhood memory: “These apples are rotten or something,” says Frikkie (179), Marnus's best friend, after he has been raped by Marnus's father, the general in the South African Defence Force.

In a related pattern, Coetzee's clearly autobiographical work, Boyhood, also evokes the farm as center of a lost freedom: “Farms are places of freedom, of life” (22), the young John says; and yet later on he reflects on his own uncertain tenure in that place of freedom and life: “He may visit the farm but he will never live there. The farm is not his home; he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest” (79). As I shall argue more fully later on, what distinguishes Coetzee's memoir from the other works discussed here is that the child is from the start outcast from paradise, and thus never innocent.

What concerns me here are the consequences of this mythical pattern for the act of writing itself. Writing from outside paradise, whom does one blame for the expulsion? By the teaching of postlapsarian theology, we are conceived and born in sin; but by the logic of Eden, we fall into sin through being tempted by an outside agency. None of these novels is so naïve as to seek merely to shift the blame to some stereotypical racist villain. Indeed, in The Innocence of Roast Chicken Richards gives the young Kati just such a simplistic perspective in order to dissociate the novel itself from its naiveté: “I knew that if we had our way, and got those damned Afrikaners out of power, everything would be OK” (15). Against this is placed the statement by Neil, her teenaged brother, who has clearly developed a political conscience: “Maybe it's all our faults […] for letting things happen. […] We're to blame, me and you” (104).

Kati conscientiously cultivates this sense of communal guilt; so much so that she appropriates responsibility for the novel's climactic incident, in which a young black man, who has had to go to work for the neighboring Afrikaans farmer, is goaded through extreme humiliation to rape the mother of the farmer and in retaliation is forced to castrate himself. It is very difficult to see how the eight-year-old Kati could in any sense be held responsible for this event; but it's part of Richards's point that white South African guilt is not necessarily a matter of the actual commitment of atrocities as much as being part of a system that makes those atrocities possible and even necessary to its own survival.

At some near-allegorical level one wants to grant Richards her point, that the black man is forced to emasculate himself because of the abdication of those who should be preventing it; but at a primary level the novel still reads as an indictment of stereotypical Afrikaner racism: the drunken farmer who beats his laborers with a sjambok (riding whip) for pulling up flowers by mistake is just more accessible to blame than the terrified little girl. His very physical make-up testifies against him: “He was wearing gumboots, belted khaki shorts and a shirt. Large-bellied, he was dark and, I suppose, handsome in a big-boned way. He had piercing blue eyes under startling brows, but his hair was shorn to bristles, back and sides” (102). Given the ideological implications of a beer-belly and a short-back-and-sides, Kati's neighbor is so obviously the villain of the piece that the assumption of guilt on her part comes to seem like noble scrupulousness.

Although Richards's novel, like Behr's, insists that the child is implicated in the structures which guarantee the privileged childhood, both depend for their effect on an implicit amnesty accorded the child-as-victim. Richards's Kati becomes, in fact, almost heroic in her assumption of guilt: “And for many years I carried the full guilt of that year. I lugged the intense, silent burden of having caused everything that happened by doing something very bad, or not standing in the way of bad things—to field and divert them from us, from my farm” (1). The implication seems to be that guilt, like luggage, is something that you can carry for somebody else. The narrator's insistence, too, that she has been emotionally warped by the experience (and she is certainly unusually crabby) somehow turns her into the main victim of the affair (as for the castrated black man, he goes to prison and, we are told, “got plump” there [248]).

As far as Behr's actual confession of collaboration is concerned, Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee have suggested that one of the consequences, by implication not wholly unplanned, may be that Behr has earned “praise for the fact that he had made this admission, and therefore turned himself into a victim-hero: his bad consciousness as a student and his subsequent silence is denied, and he enters history as one of the ‘good’ white South Africans, entitled to membership of the new nation by means of his confession” (Introduction 2-3). And indeed, in Behr's own formulation, he was relatively passive in the process that turned him into a spy: he says that he hoped his novel “would show how one is born into, loved into, violated into discrimination and how none of us were, or are, free from it” (“Living” 1). One of the incidental effects of this perspective is to subsume individual agency in communal guilt and to efface the difference between unconscious complicity and deliberate collaboration. And the novel itself dramatizes the process by which a young boy is co-opted into the system to the extent that he eventually tacitly condones his father's rape of his little friend. Here the specifics of literature work against the general thesis: the universal guilt, when particularized in the form of an affecting account of how the young Marnus is drawn into an evil system largely through love, comes to seem like a theoretical abstraction against the boy's dilemma.

In Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, the protagonist has a nervous breakdown while fighting in the border war against the South West African People's Organisation, after and presumably as a consequence of shooting a young SWAPO soldier. A year later, partly recovered and attending the independence celebrations of the new Namibia, he identifies with the assassinated white SWAPO activist Andrew Lovell (fairly clearly modeled on the actual Anton Lubowski) and ponders his own relation to the dead man and the dead man's killer:

Can one be what one kills?

The possibility blinded me. Was I that murderer (whose name now escaped me) whose face I had seen on the screen? Were there two selves in my round, tiny skull: Andrew Lovell and the man who had shot him?

Turning to his mother, he says:

“I didn't mean it. […] I was just defending myself.”

“What?”

“I didn't know what I was doing.”

(152)

This interchange with his mother has Patrick on the verge of another breakdown as he contemplates his own part in the struggle. Once again we are aware mainly of the conflict in the young protagonist, and his guilt comes to seem like war neurosis, inflicted upon him by others.

The rite of passage novel characteristically privileges its protagonist and sees him or her as interacting with a coercive society in which guilt is incurred through entry into a culpability always already there and thus in a sense externalized and de-individualized. To this pattern Coetzee's Boyhood is an exception in its refusal to grant the protagonist a sense of remorse, an occasion for confession. Perhaps this is because he does not split his character in two according to the pattern outlined by Nuttall and Coetzee:

One typical mode of autobiographical writing practised in South Africa at the moment is to write life-stories that proclaim one's liberation from the bonds of the past. Another, perhaps produced more often by white writers, is the adoption of the mode of the confessional [which …] is constructed around the narration of a self which is in some ways “split.” The narrating self in these texts typically aims to effect a distance from an earlier, politically less enlightened or in other ways unacceptable, version of the self.

(Introduction 4)

By contrast with the novels discussed so far, which do try to create this distance, Coetzee's memoir is perfectly cold blooded about his own complicity in the events and structures he describes and does not seek to establish moral distance by implying or even encouraging horror or revulsion. (This may be one reason why he avoids the first-person narrative with its confessional bias.) He tells the story of Eddie, a seven-year-old “Coloured” boy who came to work for Coetzee's family but who ran away and had to be punished; the punishment was meted out enthusiastically by Trevelyan, their young English lodger: “So Trevelyan, who was English, was the one to beat Eddie. […] How does Trevelyan, then, fit into his theory that the English are good?” (74). More interestingly, how does the young Coetzee, ambivalent even about his own Englishness, fit into his own theory? It is one of the strengths of the memoir that Coetzee does not try to do so. The young boy does indeed register some human loss in the punishment and expulsion of Eddie, but it is not a loss that turns the boy into either a victim of his own guilt or a perpetrator of Eddie's pain; his complicity is a simple fact, as is Eddie's resentment of him: the young John “knows that Eddie is thinking of him. In the dark Eddie's eyes are two yellow slits. One thing he knows for sure: Eddie will have no pity on him” (77).

Coetzee records dispassionately the boy's involvement in his own little world and doesn't ignore what is unattractive about it. His treatment of little Eddie is of a piece with his treatment of his parents and his brother; Coetzee knows that the child is never innocent. There is no self-absolution here. The price Coetzee pays for this is that his persona is a self-absorbed little creature whom it is quite difficult to pity. The description of the young John gloating over his father's hangover is chilling in its repudiation of the man:

He steps closer. His eyes are growing accustomed to the light. His father is wearing pyjama pants and a cotton singlet. There is a red V at his throat where sunburn gives way to the pallor of his chest. Beside the bed is a chamber-pot in which cigarette-stubs float in brownish urine. He has not seen anything uglier in his life. […] Since the day his father came back from the War they have fought, in a second war in which his father stood no chance of winning because he could never have foreseen how pitiless, how tenacious his enemy would be. For seven years that war has ground on; today he has triumphed.

(159-60)

To Coetzee, then, this war, which he calls in The Master of Petersburg a war of “the old against the young, the young against the old” (247), precedes and possibly supersedes the war between white and black, and this makes the child as much a perpetrator as a victim, a sharer of as well as a contender for the privilege of the father. There is little mercy or compassion here, and no self-pity. There is not even the guilt that would prompt to confession; there is only the implication that innocence is always already fraught with experience.

If the farm as trope has come to be ironical in the modern South African novel, it can never unambiguously signify even the qualified pastoralism of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) or Pauline Smith's The Beadle (1926). The irony is particularly strong in Afrikaans fiction, with its tradition of the farm novel as the bearer of the rural values that Coetzee has called “patriarchal capitalism” (“Farm” 69). Indeed, part of the horror of the revelation of the existence of the death squad at Vlakplaas and other similar farms was in the fact that these were farms, once productive agricultural units, that had come to be used exclusively for the business of killing and burying human beings. De Kock himself provides us with a useful corrective to the farm-as-idyll stereotype in his recollection of his own childhood holidays on the farm: “We seldom had school holidays in the true sense of the word; I started working on farms when I was 12 […]. We worked from dusk to dawn because mechanisation had not yet reached the farm where I spent my time” (47).

Van Heerden, after his own masterly farm novel, Toorberg (1986), opens his Kikoejoe on an ironic modulation of Karen Blixen's opening to Out of Africa: “Ver in Afrika, aan die voet van die berg, lê 'n vakansieplaas” (Far in Africa, at the foot of a mountain, there is a guest farm [1]).⁶ The story is set in 1960 on a guest farm in the Karoo, the Hotel Halesowen: the farm, being no longer self-sustaining, has to take paying guests to survive. The inheritance, as part of a family trust, weighs heavily on the recipient, the narrator's father, who feels trapped on the farm, while his brother pursues a successful Broederbond-driven career in the Civil Service, and his sister travels the world researching genealogies. The narrator/focalizer, the ten-year-old Fabian, is for much of the time merely an observer, indeed a spy, venturing out at night to eavesdrop on the guests and residents of the farm, recording dispassionately the events and attitudes he encounters. His main contribution to the action is in smuggling books to Reuben, the chief steward and main support of Fabian's distraught mother, who finds comfort in her endless tots of brandy. The family's racist attitudes—the father's white supremacist views, the mother's amiable patronizing of Reuben—are simply registered, neither approved of nor condemned, but we have a sense of a dispensation that is doomed, of a community that is clinging to its own bankrupt values with no alternative other than exile. Fabian's aunt, the cosmopolitan lesbian Geert, tells him: “Fabiantjie, jy moet uit, uit hierdie verstokte, verstikkende Karoo, uit hierdie stowwerige land, uit Afrika” (Little Fabian, you must get out, out of this stultified, stifling Karoo, out of this dusty country, out of Africa [127]).

Like Coetzee's John, Fabian is not an overtly confessional figure. He accepts his complicity in this system as he accepts everything else about his childhood, as something that he was born to, that he played his own part in, according to his opportunities and the guidance given him: “Die volgende jaar sal Verwoerd uit die Statebond wegbreek, en ek sal—soos al die ander kinders in ons skool—'n goue Republiekmedalje en 'n klein Republiekvlaggie by die skool kry” (The following year Verwoerd will break away from the Commonwealth, and—like all the children in our school—I'll be given a golden Republic medal and small Republic flag at school [36]). If there is guilt here, it is, like the golden medal, something that is bestowed upon him, not as an individual but as a member of a particular community. Indeed, the most strongly registered guilt is that of the adult narrator for judging his own childhood:

Want om vanuit vandag, soos ek hier sit, die gebeure van daardie jare te rangskik, is om 'n meerdere posisie in te neem.

Jy kyk terug, jy beoordeel met die insig van latere jare, jy veroordeel so maklik, jy kan die deernis so vinnig deur die vingers laat glip en jou mense niks meer maak as figurante of marionette nie.

(13)

For to arrange the events of those years from the perspective of today is to assume a position of superiority.

You look back, you judge with the insight of later years, you judge too easily. You can let the compassion slip through your fingers so quickly and make your characters nothing but walk-on figures or puppets.

This judgement is, of course, in the first place a literary judgement, a writer assessing his own treatment of his characters, but it is precisely in this respect that narrative is evaluative of experience and ultimately of itself: “Dit is tog waarin die geheue uitmunt: verraad teenoor die verlede en húlle met wie jy die verlede gedeel het” (After all, that is what memory is best at: betrayal of the past and of those with whom you shared the past [133]). Oddly, what this most recalls is Constable William Harrington at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission grieving for his betrayal of his past in declaring his guilt in the present.

For, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, what contemporary South African fiction is most concerned with is the past, that past with which all white writers have such a troubled relation.⁷ An early example of such a fiction-as-exorcism is Jeanne Goosen's Ons Is Nie Almal So Nie (1990), the very title of which (We're Not All Like That) establishes, albeit ironically, the urge to dissociate oneself from the injustices of apartheid. Set in the early years of the Malan regime, the novel recounts, through the unblinking eyes of its child narrator, Gertie, the effects on a white working-class family of the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Separate Amenities Act (1953). The child registers these events only as they impinge on her small world, circumscribed by her mother's job as an “usherette” in a cinema and her father's asthma: she has no opinions, serving only as reflector of the adult attitudes around her. Recounting the invasion of the “white” section of a train by a group of blacks protesting the Separate Amenities Act, she simply renders the vocabulary and attitudes of the adults around her, the conscience-stricken mother as well as the unrepentantly racist father:

Toe die trein by Kaapstasie instroom, was die poelies reg vir hulle. Soos die kaffers afklim, is hulle een vir een deur die poelies gevang en met die Black Meraai tronk toe geneem. Daar was baie poeliese en die kaffers kon niks doen nie, want die poelies het rewolwers gehad.

“Eintlik is dit darem 'n disgrace, Piet,” het my ma gesê toe sy klaar gelees het.

“Vir wat 'n disgrace!” het my pa uitgeroep. “Dis kaffers en die goed word by die dag astranter. Hulle moet hulle op hul plek hou. Maar Malan sal hulle én die hotnots vasvat.”

(55)

When the train steamed into Cape Town, the police were ready for them. As the kaffirs got off, they were caught one by one by the police and taken to prison in the Black Maria. There were lots of police and the kaffirs couldn't do anything, because the police had revolvers.

“Actually it really is a disgrace, Piet,” my mother said when she'd finished reading.

“Disgrace, what!” my father exclaimed. “They're kaffirs and the creatures are getting more forward by the day. They have to be kept in their place. But Malan will sort them out, them and the hotnots.”

The child, not capable of discriminating between the attitudes expressed, serves merely as an impassive recorder; the narrative relies on the reader's own moral responses—but a response conditioned in a complex way by the narrative as a whole, which establishes a much closer rapport with the mother than with the father and the racial attitudes he represents. By the same token, the reader comes to be identified with the mother's clumsy attempt to reach across the barrier of race; as their next-door “Coloured” neighbors move out as directed by the Group Areas Act, she tries to present them with a cake she has baked:

My ma stap om na Gregory se ma se kant toe met die koek. “Ek het net gou gekom om vir julle ietsie te gee om julle nuwe plek mee te vier,” sê my ma en hou die bord met die koek na die vrou.

Gregory se ma kyk na haar en sê: “Ons het niks nodig nie, dankie, Mevrou.” Toe draai sy haar gesig en kyk voor haar by die venster uit.

Die man bly net so sit agter die steering.

Sy vrou sê vir hom: “In godsnaam, ry net dat ons hier kan uit!”

Hy sit die enjin in reverse.

My ma hardloop agterna met die koek en skree: “Ons is nie almal so nie!” maar die vrou draai die venster in haar gesig toe. Hulle ry weg sonder om een maal na ons te kyk, Gregory en sy ma en pa.

(122)

My mother walks around to Gregory's mother's side with the cake. “I've just come to give you a little something to celebrate your new place,” says my mother and holds out the plate with the cake to the woman.

Gregory's mother looks at her and says: “We don't need anything, thank you, Mrs. van Greunen.” Then she turns her face and looks out of the window in front of her.

The man stays sitting just like that behind the steering wheel.

His wife says to him: “For god's sake, just drive so that we can get out of here!”

He puts the engine in reverse.

My mother runs after them with the cake and shouts: “We're not all like that!” but the woman closes the window in her face. They drive off without looking at us once, Gregory and his mother and father.

The mother's desperate repudiation of her share in her group's guilt is also, by implication, an attempt at exoneration extended to the author and reader: the act of writing the book, and also of reading it, establishes author and reader at a distance from the attitudes voiced by the father—but then also shut out behind the window contemptuously closed by Gregory's mother. The tableau of the mother desperately trying to present a cake to an ex-neighbor who contemptuously spurns it works at one level as a metaphor of the ineffectual remorse of the Afrikaner, helplessly enmeshed in spite of herself in her people's guilt; on another, tougher level, it satirizes, by implication, all remorse as an empty gesture in the face of the dispossessed, “a little something to celebrate your new place”—their new place miles out in the newly created group areas.

Ons Is Nie Almal So Nie (Not All of Us) owes something of its originality to the fact that it is a very urban novel, with a working-class cast: traditionally, the Afrikaans novel deals either with the urban middle class or with the rural farming class. Goosen shows the reader a disinherited Afrikaner milieu in which the traditional values have been replaced by, on the one hand, the popular culture of Hollywood musicals, and on the other hand the paranoid racism of the newly empowered National Party. The much-vaunted religious values of the Afrikaner yield to the spiritualists, clairvoyants, and charismatic charlatanism to which the mother is driven for consolation and support after the death of her husband; the novel ends on the terrifying spectacle of the mother babbling in tongues at a religious revival, adrift, searching to recover the certainty of the old values that have become contaminated.

Marlene van Niekerks's Triomf is in a sense a continuation of this record of decline, in that the degeneration of the Afrikaner is here even further advanced: the “child” is the epileptic forty-year-old Lambert, the son of one or another of his mother's two brothers, whose sexual experience has been limited to his own mother. This close but hardly loving family, the inbred triumph of Afrikaner nationalism, face the year 1994: Lambert is turning 40 on April 26, the day of the first democratic election. Treppie and Pop, his two fathers/uncles have promised him a woman—his first outside the family—to celebrate the occasion. Triomf is thus a parodic rite of passage novel, Lambert's belated initiation doubling the country's painful accession to democracy. Lambert achieves some kind of anagnorisis in discovering who his real father is or might be; but instead of bringing about insight and maturity in the protagonist, the discovery produces only catastrophe in that Lambert kills Pop by accident, wounds his mother and sometime sexual partner with a knife, breaks all of Treppie's fingers, and breaks his own leg in kicking at the dog—all this on the day that their house is painted a glorious and pristine white through a misunderstanding of the marketing methods of the paint company.

Here, too, the characters have no innocence: they are living on the ruins and shards of the dispossessed black township, Sophiatown, that dispossession constituting the triumph of statecraft after which the new white housing estate and the novel are named.⁸ But nor do they have any sense of guilt: the confession is positioned, as it were, outside the narrative: these are the children of apartheid, conceived and born in a sin that nobody wants to take responsibility for, though the visits of the National Party canvassers signal an anxiety on the part of the about-to-be-displaced ruling party that they once again need this vote fodder. For the rest, the Jehovah's Witnesses visit in a futile attempt to convert these lost souls to some form of spiritual awareness (Lambert ogles the female Witness, his erection disconcertingly visible to all).

Van Niekerk draws on some powerful Afrikaans myths: the reenactment of the Great Trek, here paralleled by the trek to the city, the urbanization and disinheritance of the Afrikaner working class. The dignity of poverty is here mercilessly satirized, in a family that is as undecorative as it is indecorous, immoral, and feckless. The diet of Coke, Klipdrift brandy, polony, and white bread is deliberately set against the meat-eating neighbors who can afford T-bone steaks, and by implication against that glorification of meat that is such a strong element in Afrikaner tradition (Eben Venter's wonderful satire on the farm novel is called Foxtrot van die Vleiseters [Foxtrot of the Meat-eaters]). Lambert's birthday gift, a “coloured” prostitute, delivers a devastating judgement on him and his clan: “You bastard! Look at you! Look at this place! Who the hell do you think you are, hey? You're not even white, man, you're a fuckin' backward piece of low class shit, that's what you are. Useless fuckin' white trash!” (382).

Triomf is a tentatively transitional novel in that it traces the transition from the “old” South Africa to the “new” in terms of a family that is clearly not going to change radically, although there is some resigned, hardly voluntary, acceptance of the changes around them. Pop, the bone-weary mother-sister-mistress of the family, reflects on their new neighbors, now that the previous occupants, a culturally more advanced lesbian couple, have moved out:

Oorkant woon mos ok nou swart mense. En hulle is okay, wat. Plant net mielies daar op die sypaadjie. Treppies sê dis 'n baie goeie ontwikkeling. Hy sê hy wens daai twee dilly dykes wil 'n slag kom kyk by hulle ou huis en 'n voorbeeld vat. Want in hierdie tye kan 'n mens nie bekostig om kunsmis te koop vir sweet peas nie.

(449)

We have black people across the way now. And they're okay, what. It's just that they plant mealies there on the pavement. Treppies says it's a very good development. He says he wishes those two dilly dykes would come and have a look at their old house and take an example. Because in these times you can't afford to buy fertilizer for sweet peas.

The whole novel is a mordant recognition of the flimsiness of the fabric of Afrikaner nationalism, the weak base on which it is built. And the presence—and eventual departure—of the “dilly dykes” (presumably an ironical reference to the author and her companion) across the way, with their plants and their music, reminds us of the abdication of “culture” as social and political force in the face of such destitution.

It would seem, then, that the problem for the white South African writer is how to find a perspective on South Africa that is not merely abject. The lugubrious “confessional” mode of The Innocence of Roast Chicken, even the more thoughtfully handled moral paralysis of The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, and the hopelessly compromised ironies of The Smell of Apples represent one stage of “coming to terms” with the past. A more robust assessment of the past, a tougher kind of confession, is embodied in the works by Coetzee, Van Heerden, Goosen, and Van Niekerk discussed here. It is possible that this latter mode, with its surprising element of comedy and farce, will liberate these writers from the past.⁹ Essential as it has been to “come to terms” with that past, the challenge for literature, as for the rest of non-literary South Africa, will be to erect habitable structures on the foundations of remorse.

Notes

1. But compare André Brink's use of the same term: “One might even say that unless the enquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are extended, complicated and intensified in the imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future” (“Stories” 30).

2. Even more blatant are the “confessions” which, because they are not made to the TRC and are not intended to achieve amnesty for the confessant, are simple boasts—such as that of Ferdi Barnard, paid killer for the Civil Co-operation Bureau: “It's true, I killed him […] David Webster. […] He flew through the air and landed on the pavement. I saw it, because I shot him. I did it. […] It was all the tea parties and shit. That's why we killed him. I pulled the trigger, I shot him” (Pauw 9).

3. For a comparison of Brink and Van Heerden, see Heyns, “Overtaken by History?”

4. See Hunter, “Moms and Moral Midgets,” for the argument, from a feminist perspective, that fiction needs to render, “instead of stereotyped images, visions both particularised and wide-ranging enough to create a more authentic view of white, English-speaking women under apartheid” (37). She cites, as examples of the relatively few such novels, Gordimer's postapartheid novel, None to Accompany Me (1994), Alison Lowry's Natural Rhythm (1993), E. M. Macphail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Jane Rosenthal's Uncertain Consolations (1993).

5. Damon Galgut's early story, “Small Circle of Beings,” also places its narrator in troubled relation to an environment in which some people must be exploited so that other people may eat, and in which one's view of the landscape is conditioned by one's possession of it: “Our territory ends here and the neighbouring farm begins. It's a pleasant place to stand, giving a view of cultivated lands arranged in patterns discernible only from here, so high. Labourers work there among the trees, picking the fruit as if to feed an endless hunger. But it isn't theirs” (Small 7).

6. All translations in this essay are my own.

7. Two recent novels by Brink, Imaginings of Sand and Devil's Valley, both entail an uncovering of the past; Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney is similarly based on a dialogue between past and present.

8. Van Niekerk has said about her characters: “I don't think one of those people in the book is portrayed as innocent. […] Neither in their political consciousness nor in their sexual activity. They are all guilty. Because they have all, for various personal reasons, contributed to their fate. These people bought into the weak romanticism of Afrikaner nationalism, just as they buy into the weak romanticism of TV ads” (qtd. in de Waal 5).

9. This statement is problematic insofar as it seeks to pronounce on Coetzee, whose Disgrace, which appeared since the writing of this essay, hardly enacts a “liberation from the past.” However, it could be argued that, for all its bleakness, Disgrace deliberately avoids a confessional mode, seeking instead to come to terms with the diminished possibilities bequeathed by history and one's own part in that history.

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