Output details

For the sake of silence

This project explores some of the central concerns generated by the intersection of history and fiction through the practice of writing a work of historical fiction.

Ten years in the writing, For the Sake of Silence is based upon detailed field, archival, and literary research into the history of Mariannhill monastery in South Africa. It has been recognised as possibly the most complete history of the monastery written thus far, but it also deliberatively plays off the act of writing history against that of writing fiction, holding both forms up to the questions that the one poses to the other.

Certain key historiographical questions are foregrounded in this practice-led research project: how may marginalised, lost, suppressed micro histories ‘writ large’ challenge or broaden dominant historical perspectives; how can fiction contribute to a historical understanding that is constantly generated and re-generated, without being merely relative to a given historical moment or discursive strategy; how may an historical subject, taken seriously in its own right, serve as a figure for contemporary concerns; how do the ethics of otherness trouble the question of the authority of the writer; how may historical research be used in the fictionalising process to resist the imposition of ‘theme’, generating a creative challenge to direct intellectual control; how may fiction be used to foreground and destabilize the ways in which narrative operates in other discursive modes; what is the status of the historiographical, as opposed to historical, novel.

For the Sake of Silence was developed out of research undertaken during a Commonwealth Fellowship and two group research projects supported by the South African National Research Foundation. It includes an Afterword indicating how researched material was used. The novel was written in conjunction with three scholarly journal articles and two book chapters reflecting on the research and creative process.

A lengthy award-winning work based on extensive historical research combined with complex historiographical and narratological practice. It is informed by field and archival research undertaken over ten years in Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Ireland, UK, and South Africa. Primary sources included informal collections; archives belonging to organisations/religious bodies not disposed to free access; locations difficult/risky to reach geographically; unconventionally organized records; varying forms of transcription in English, German, Latin, Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa. Although presented through fiction, the insights and arguments developed could not have been achieved without wide ranging data collection undertaken in conjunction with challenging theoretical considerations.