"Men in the middest": Ingrid Winterbach se Die boek van toeval en toeverlaat en Frank Kermode

Abstract

Both Ingrid Winterbach's most recent novel Die boek van toeval en toeverlaat (The Book of Happenstance, Human & Rousseau) and Frank Kermode's still relevant theoretical work The Sense of an Ending (1967), grapple, from different viewpoints but in surprisingly likeminded ways, with the universal problem of time / temporality. This article attempts a comparison of Winterbach and Kermode in terms of their exploration of modern man's (sense of) living in the "middle", in the "in-between", where the end is no longer (experienced as) imminent, but as perpetually immanent. With regard to this universal existentialistic predicament, Winterbach and Kermode offer perspectives that not only subvert established paradigms and (interpretive) consensus, but indeed also undermine the paradigmatic as such, and they bring all this to bear, specifically, on narrative, with a distinctive interest in the (un)masking of (narrative) "secrets".