Die mutasie van feit tot fiksie: die faksionele kode in 'Die jonkmanskas' van Koos Prinsloo

Abstract

Documentary realism is a marked characteristic of Afrikaans literature in the eighties. This article looks critically at the techniques used by the author of the story “Die jonkmanskas” in his attempts to present an external, factual realm within a fictional framework. The term faction is defined in this article as documentary realism, where the text, through the agency of specific narrative techniques, transforms the document, or documentary material, into a new type of narrative material altogether. Particular attention is paid to autobiographical insertions, as well as techniques of authentication of this story. A metafictional system of control, which marks the text as a typically post-modernist, self-referential one, is developed through an intrinsic network of factional cross-references.