Guilt and forgiveness in selected post-apartheid texts

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Introduction

‘Forgive me or kill me!’ This melodramatic appeal comes from Gideon le Roux, one of two characters in Athol Fugard’s Playland (1992: 44)). The play was one of the first post-apartheid literary texts to raise the need for forgiveness in South Africa. Written in 1992, well after FW de Klerk had announced the advent of democracy on 2 February 1990, it is set a month before this watershed, at the turn of the decade: New Year’s Eve 1989.

The faces of guilt

It is by now a truism that the past, and the crimes of the past, must be faced. On the delusion of impunity (‘the expectation that one can glide through/ history unpunished and rewrite one’s own biography’) Vaclav Havel writes: Whoever fears to look his own past in the face must necessarily fear what is to come. Lies cannot save us from lies. (In Ackermann,1996:47)

The limits of forgiveness

Two strong arguments for the limits of forgiveness have been advanced by Simon Wiesenthal and Jean Améry, both Holocaust survivors. Wiesenthal, who became known as the ‘Nazi hunter’ in his pursuit of Nazi war criminals after World War II, might be expected to take an uncompromising stand on the need for justice. But his autobiographical account of a haunting choice in The Sunflower (first published in 1969) is thoughtful, nuanced, and humane, raising the ethical dilemma vested in the question of vicarious forgiveness and the difficult question of the unforgivable crime.

Forgiveness

Since Hannah Arendt (1989), Derrida (2001) and Ricoeur (2004) relate the ethics of forgiveness to its religious source, Biblical teaching on forgiveness will be examined before their views are discussed.

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Abstract
Chapter One Introduction
1.1: The faces of guilt
1.2: The limits of forgiveness
1.3: Forgiveness
1.4: Guilt and forgiveness in selected post-apartheid texts
Chapter Two ‘The truth of wounded memories’: Writing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
2.1: ‘Touching the leper’: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died that Night
Chapter Three
3.1: The Pastoral Solution? A note on the plaasroman
3.2: Bearing the Sins? J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Chapter Four
‘It was my … hanslam’: Agaat as a pastoral evocation of guilt and (possibly)
forgiveness
Chapter Five
‘Mercy! You sound like a woman’: Mark Behr’s
Kings of the Water
Conclusion
Bibliography