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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:André Brink and the Implications of Tragedy for Apartheid South Africa
Author:Diala, IsidoreISNI
Year:2003
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:29
Issue:4
Period:December
Pages:903-919
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:apartheid
literature
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
About person:André Philippus Brink (1935-2015)ISNI
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305707032000135888
Abstract:Many critics acknowledge the particular difficulties of interpretation presented by an abiding paradox at the heart of André Brink's novelistic practice, delimiting his professed political aims. Thus, while some regard Brink as a representative dissident Afrikaans novelist seeking a resolution to institutionalized Afrikaner racism in South Africa through the writing of anti-apartheid fiction, others consider the contradictions in his work as a subconscious implication in the structures he passionately critiques. Yet others regard his work as merely 'performing dissidence', in other words, straining to be seen as resisting apartheid, while consciously reifying apartheid hegemony. This article contends that Brink's fixation within the matrix of the tragic is at the heart of his art and its political limits. For by transforming the powers of a mutable oppressive regime into relentless, implacable metaphysical forces, Brink presents apartheid as fate and reduces social action against it to the inconsequential, having only symbolic relevance. While engaging with European theories of (modern) tragedy and the possibilities of their negotiation and operation in a postcolonial context, the article also examines Brink's significant abandonment of tragic metaphysics in his postapartheid fiction. Ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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