Fiction's Truth and Memories of Modernity

Memories of Modernity in South Africa connote two parallel tendencies in literature and other forms of mediated fiction – probably in the arts in general. On the one hand an attempt to link back to an idealized pre-apartheid past. A past often depicted and interpreted as an early form of modernity which is brutally interrupted. The second tendency, closely connected to the first, is the attempt to come to grips with the alleged parenthesis of apartheid: the investigation of the recent past with its first momentum coinciding with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The urge for reconciliation seems to overshadow the quest for truth. The Christian redemption theme, combined with the fictional structure of the very proceedings, has served almost as a matrix for artistic and literary expression in the transitional period