Temporality and the past: recollections of apartheid in selected South African novels in English

Abstract

The study provides a theoretical account for the representation of apartheid in South African fiction. Narrative strategies employed in the post-apartheid novels The innocence of roast chicken (Richards, 1996), The smell of apples (Behr, 1996), All we have left unsaid (Case, 2006) and Thirteen cents (Duiker, 2011) reveal that depictions of the past contribute to narrative structure and the production of meaning. Genettean temporal relations, namely narrative order, duration and frequency are a systematic method to analyse the selected novels, since it enables a contrast between the narrative past as the histoire, and the narrative present as the récit. Retrospective events are constructed as memories, thereby are complemented by Bergson’s psychological and philosophical theory in the analysis and interpretation of the dualistic interaction between the apartheid and post-apartheid temporal centres adopted within the novels. The representation of apartheid may be seen as sub-themes and time as configurations of temporal zones.