Re-writing history: André Brink’s An Act of Terror (1991) and On the Contrary (1993)

Abstract

This article analyses the two different approaches to history and its representation demonstrated in Brink’s novels An Act of Terror (1991) and On the Contrary (1993) in terms of a response to the controversial influence of postmodernism on the historical novel in South Africa today. Although the first of these two novels, An Act of Terror, hints at the complexities of representation in historiography and fiction, it ultimately chooses against a postmodernist view of history, preferring to interpret and represent history in terms of an over-arching metanarrative and a stable subject because it facilitates effective political action. The article then argues that the second of these novels, On the Contrary, can be read as an affirmation of the postmodernist view o f history, especially when seen as an example of that variant of postmodernist historical fiction called “uchronian fiction” (Wesseling, 1991). Because uchronian fiction (the result of a cross-fertilization between historical fiction and science fiction) reconstructs the past in such as way as to propose possibilities for the transformation o f future societies, On the Contrary can also be read as a politically responsible novel, thus confirming the view that postmodernism has a political dimension.