The paper attempts to examine the authenticity and authority of the speaking subject in two contemporary South African novelists, looking closely at autobiographical ‘truth’ to prove that the enterprise of self-construction yields fictions of the self. Starting with the truism that fiction itself rests upon the impulse toward the Word or the impulse toward silence as in an interplay of self-creation and self-annihilation we dissect a male novelist’s claim “truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing while speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing”.
Next I focus on a woman post-colonial novelist who resurfaces the diversity of experience: oppression, depression, powerlessness, degradation, thus defining agency and rights from a new point of view in digressive, mosaical narratives bringing to the fore a resistant otherness. Both a deracinée and a political refugee as a post colonial writer she concerns herself with the constructed nature of identity in a distorted, haunted, dislocated world. In her view dislocation is not an impoverishment but an enriching of cultural specificity, with far-reaching implications for the way in which individual and collective human rights are contextualized.
The paper tackles the intricate and fluid notion of identity. The I-You relation, the poetics of reciprocity takes various forms, in some of the novels it seems to draw on the failed dialectic of master and slave, while others involve questions of authorship. I conclude on South African literature as the kind of literature one would expect people to write from a prison, questioning whether it is still “a literature in bondage… with feelings of homelessness and yearnings for a nameless liberation”