Abstract
Narrating worlds into being: Narrative construction and the ethics of representation in Etienne van Heerden’s Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng
This article examines how Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng (“The world of Charlie Oeng”, 2017) by Etienne van Heerden presents narrative world-making as a process that is simultaneously epistemologically indispensable and ethically problematic. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics together with Thomas Pavel’s theory of fictional worlds, I argue that the novel dramatises the construction of a story world as a mode of knowledge production dependent upon selection, ordering and imaginative configuration. Narrative configuration emerges as a precondition for understanding the other, the past and the self, while at the same time remaining an activity inevitably shaped by historically situated perspectives and discursive formations. In doing so, the novel contributes to broader international debates in narrative theory concerning the relationship between storytelling, interpretation and the construction of social reality.
The novel foregrounds this problem by presenting a narrator who attempts to reconstruct Charlie Oeng’s world from fragmentary testimony, archival material and imaginative supplementation. Its mise-en-abyme structure – in which the narrator writes a novel bearing the same title as Etienne van Heerden’s novel itself – emphasises the mediated nature of narrative world-making and prevents narrative coherence from being mistaken for epistemological certainty. Pavel’s concepts of the density and accessibility of fictional worlds illuminate how detailed description and references to a recognisable historical reality generate the impression of a coherent world, while the novel simultaneously exposes the interpretative labour through which such coherence is produced.
The article further demonstrates that narrative world-making has significant ethical implications because representations of the other are always mediated through historically structured relations of power and inequality. Charlie Oeng’s world is constructed through discourses that determine who is authorised to speak, whose perspective is privileged and who assumes the role of interpreter. Yet the novel also suggests that the risk of misrepresentation cannot be avoided simply by withdrawing from narrative engagement. As Ricoeur argues, self-understanding is achieved precisely through participation in narratives by means of which human experience acquires meaning.
The article concludes that Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng presents narrative world-making as a practice requiring both imaginative engagement and critical self-awareness. Fiction does not provide unmediated access to the world of the other, but it does create the possibility of understanding both other persons and the past while remaining conscious of the provisional, interpretative and mediated character of all acts of representation.
Keywords: metafiction; narrative ethics; narrative identity; Thomas Pavel; Paul Ricoeur; story worlds; Etienne van Heerden; world-making
- This article’s featured image was created by Valentin Ivantsov and obtained from Pexels.