Sol plaatje, the eighteenth century, and south african cultural memory

As if both to acknowledge and to compensate for the lack registered by these three spokesmen for settler cultures, recent South African writers have gone back, in distinctive ways, to engage with or exploit the eighteenth century. In 'n Oomblik in die Wind (1974)/Aw Instant in the Wind (1975) and Houd den Bek (1981)/A Chain of Voices (1982) Andre Brink suggested how little of the Enlightenment had settled in South Africa. Brink's fictive rewriting of Afrikaner history has gone along with a critical project which has tried to sustain what Paz called "critical philosophy" here. In theoretical essays Brink has contributed to the debate on the Enlightenment roots or anticipations of modernism and postmodernism.1 J.M. Coetzee's more sombre re-vision of the Enlightenment begins with Dusklands (1974), a novel which may be read, again in the words of Paz, as "Romanticism's spiritual and emotional reaction against the critical spirit and its achievements" (980). In Foe (1987) Coetzee engaged with Defoe and the truth claims of prose fiction, interrogating the "bourgeois revolution's" account of itself. Whereas Paz writes that Spanish America's "modern history . . . has been unique" and its "eccentricity . . . disastrous," Coetzee, like Derrida, has implied that the