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Beyond the Allegory: The Grotesque Body and the Limits of Liberation in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat .
Abstract
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (translated into English by Michiel Heyns) details the subjectivity of its bed-ridden and paralysed protagonist, Milla Redelinghuys, as well as the complex relationship she shares with her caregiver, Agaat. Through reading Milla’s body in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, this article aims to explore the ways in which the text problematizes overly allegorical readings of the novel that emphasize Milla’s death as leading to Agaat experiencing rebirth. This is achieved through focusing on the ways in which Van Niekerk undermines the sense of social transcendence that Bakhtin considers indispensable to the carnival. In order to do this, I examine two instances that most closely align Milla’s corporeality with Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque: the scene in which Milla pretends to be dying in order to play a joke on her neighbour is read in relation to the idea of ‘carnival laughter’, and the scene in which she wakes up to discover Agaat sleeping on her bed is analysed through Bakhtin’s description of the ‘two-bodied image’. I conclude that these gestures towards an association with the grotesque form part of the larger project of incompletion that Van Niekerk stages in the novel.
This article examines how Milla, the Afrikaner protagonist of Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Agaat, engages with others’ empathy toward herself. Theorizing empathy as a multivalent engagement with others’ experiences, I argue that Milla attempts to variously invite, avoid, and manipulate others’ empathy as she negotiates the anxiety of being misunderstood, the sense of vulnerability in being understood, and the dependence of her self-image on others’ opinions. Illustrating the fraught experience of encountering empathy toward oneself—a neglected topic in studies of empathy—the novel shows that empathy is neither always welcomed nor received passively by potential empathizees. Further, I suggest, the contrast between Milla’s approaches to empathy as empathizer and empathizee ironizes her struggles by indicating her proclivity for controlling empathic interactions. Demonstrating how power relations inform empathy, Agaat complicates the popular notion of empathy as a straightforward gateway to reconciliation by highlighting its characters’ ambivalences about receiving empathy.
In this article, I look at the ways in which Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat re-orders the ideas of stewardship and land ownership in the South African plaasroman by invoking notions of cartography. I argue that cartography is particularly important for postcolonial theory because writers may project spaces other than, or position themselves in the spaces between, those endorsed by dominant cultures. This is particularly significant for feminism. I argue that the story of mapmaking is important both in Jakkie's frame narrative and in the central narrative dominated by Milla de Wet and her servant Agaat. Together the female protagonists' participation in mapmaking and their use of the alphabet chart through which Milla originally taught Agaat language enables them to escape phallogocentrism. This process of liberation climaxes in their joint involvement in Agaat's embroidery. By embedding Milla's and Agaat's stories in the story of maps, van Niekerk brings about 'a new relationship to the land, to other people and to the tradition of Afrikaans literature' (Gerrit Olivier, "The Dertigers and the Plaasroman: Two Brief Perspectives on Afrikaans Literature").
The aim of this article is to explore the power relations portrayed through the bodily spatial interaction of the characters of Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerk's 2004 novel, Agaat. This interaction is analysed according to the theory of Thirding-as-Othering posited by Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja in terms of the body in space. The body in space is interpreted through agency which is exemplified in the intimacy of the relations of these two bodies through the actions of bathing, giving birth, and the physical aspects of the process of "civilising" the child character of Agaat. Through an analysis of three sets of incidents and scenes which illustrate the physical inhabitation of space through agency, the power relations between Milla and Agaat are exemplified and discussed. The analysis culminates in the conclusion that the relationship between Milla and Agaat is a cyclical power play that does not come to any pure form of dominance or submission because of the inhabitation that they enact through each other. With agency being tantamount to inhabitation and assertion of power, Agaat has the ultimate power on the farm through Milla, as Milla's body is othered by her illness and finally her death.
When reading Marlene van Niekerk's novel, Agaat ([2004] 2006. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball), one initially takes exception to Jakkie de Wet's satire of his melancholy mothers in the frame narrative. However, I will argue that Jakkie's perspective in the frame narrative requires closer investigation as it proves to be an essential and cunning narrative tool utilised by Van Niekerk to disrupt the powerful mythologies presented in the mother-daughter story. Although we remain somewhat distanced from Jakkie by an initial allegiance to the redemptive fictional narrative, his detached ironic voice introduces a necessary caveat to the liberatory potential of Milla's fantasy of reconciliation. Furthermore, he questions the extent of Agaat's capacity for subverting Milla's dominant discourse and becoming a vitalising force for Afrikaner culture. Jakkie introduces a dialectic that questions certain founding narratives or mythologies of redemption evident in Milla's narration. As the ironic dissenter who switches positions and allegiances, his function is to break the frame of the narrative. Frank Kermode claims that master plots are comforting and are often difficult to dispute because they constitute ‘the mythological ‘structure’ of society (in Abbott. 2002. The Introduction to Narrative. 44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) It is not surprising then that Jakkie's role in the frame tends to be sidelined in critical discussions of the novel, as he unnervingly interrupts the authority of Milla's master plot of redemption. As a postmodern eir n Jakkie plays a similar role to Socrates in Plato's Dialogues and uses irony to play ‘upon his interlocutors' discourse in order to draw it out, to develop its possibilities in a dialogue destined to end in aporia’ (Lang. 1988. Irony/ Humour: Critical Paradigms. 38. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins).
In Agaat (2006), Marlene van Niekerk presents the future of Afrikaner culture in a new matrilineal and racially hybrid genealogy. This matrilineal genealogy occurs through the self-sacrifice of the white matriarch, Milla de Wet. Van Niekerk disrupts and subverts dominant patriarchal, patrilineal and racial epistemes upon which the plaasroman is based by leaving the farm, not to Milla's son and putative male heir, but to the coloured housekeeper, Agaat. The allusive prose passage that is the focus of this article is written in the style of a prayer or lament with its mournful meditation on the onset of disease and decay in the soil and farming stock that Milla regrets not having saved from abuse and denigration. The lament becomes an appeal for a beneficent successor to care for and “breathe” life back into the soil. In this article we shall explore how Milla is presented as an Earth Mother, through the invocation of the Demeter-Persephone myth, supplicating for rebirth and renewal. Here the Earth Mother figure is described as sick and fallow, and yet awaiting a catalyst for regeneration. In this passage Milla presents herself as a pharmakos, ritual sacrifice or scapegoat, whose purpose is “to restore harmony in the community, to reinforce the social fabric” (Girard 2005: 8). Milla's question and plea, “who will chew me until i bind” (van Niekerk 2006: 35), and the recurring motif of cannibalistic sacrifice in the novel, can be read as a metaphor for the desire for social reconciliation and cohesion in contemporary South Africa.
Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004) can be read as a postcolonial farm novel which pays particular attention to the role of women, the representation of Coloured farm workers as well as issues relevant to landownership in South Africa. In Agaat the question of landownership is foregrounded when Agaat, a coloured woman, becomes the owner of the farm Grootmoedersdrift and when Jakkie, the only son of the white woman farmer Milla de Wet, returns to Canada to resume his work in ethnomusicology. Agaat presents a problematisation of the influence wielded by landownership on the identity of the farmer, as Milla, who dearly loves her farm, also claims the farm to achieve her emancipatory objectives as a woman. Furthermore, Jakkie's willing relinquishment of his claim to landownership contributes towards a problematisation of the identity formation of the Afrikaner farmer and his/her descendants in the farm novel. In contrast with the situation in the older farm novel, for Jakkie, landownership is no longer a defining identity marker. This article on landownership and, particularly, the relation between landownership and the identities of both Milla and Jakkie de Wet in Agaat, also assesses the contribution of Marlene van Niekerk's novel to the development of the Afrikaans farm novel within a postcolonial context.
This article explores representations of time and temporality in two contemporary South African novels in order to examine the salience of the Derridian contretemps in relation to contemporary South African society. As defined by Jacques Derrida, the contretemps is an experience of time and space that is essentially “out of joint” and is often used to represent anomie in a particular context. My close-reading of Imraan Coovadia's High Low In-between (2009) and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) thus reveals how the contretemps is employed to not only provide a sense of time gone awry, but also to outline how these narratives explore the contretemps as a potentially ‘new’ temporal modality for contemporary South Africa.
In Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (2009), Sarah Nuttall proposes a fresh way of approaching current South African cultural goods, including literature, a way that contains an element of healing for South Africa’s damaged society. Nuttall argues for “a politics of the emergent in South Africa [that] looks [for] the potential, both latent and surfacing, for imminent change” (158). A key concept that Nuttall uses to control and sustain her argument is, as the title of her book announces, that of “entanglement:”
In her 2004 novel, Agaat, Marlene van Niekerk revisits the traditional plaasroman in order to rethink one of the most problematic and troubling characteristics of Afrikaner whiteness in South Africa: the assumed ownership and domestication of the African land. While Agaat has been described as ‘feminist’, ‘postcolonial’ (Prinsloo and Visagie 72–77), and even ‘anti-nationalist’ (Devarenne 642), I argue in this article that the novel should also be read as a type of ‘complicitous critique’ (Warnes 121) – a work that reflects nostalgically, yet critically, on Afrikaner nationalism and political power. I locate the roots of Afrikaner nationalism (and the way it is elaborated in the novel) within the plaasroman: a genre that conceptualized the ‘domesticated’ African landscape as a mythical Afrikaner ‘home’. It is to this tradition that Agaat writes back as Van Niekerk explicitly questions the legitimacy of the narrative of Afrikaner belonging: the novel maps the ways in which Milla, the white female protagonist, nostalgically establishes her subjectivity and identity in relation to her farmland. Paralysed by Motor Neuron Disease, however, she is imprisoned in the intimate space of the home, and thus barred from fully inhabiting her farm and home. In this way, the author produces a vision of ‘home’ that fosters feelings of alienation and unbelonging – for both Milla and her coloured servant, Agaat. Furthermore, I argue that the novel ‘rediscovers the ordinary’, and registers a vision of the quotidian that is uncomfortable and unhomely, so that the two central characters come to share experiences of ‘home as homelessness’ (Ndebele ‘A home’ 28). For Van Niekerk, revisiting the past finally becomes a revisionist intervention that does not simplistically reassert ‘old or redundant definitions and institutions’ (‘Afrikaner’ 141), but rather thinks critically about home, connecting the personal and the everyday with the public and political.
The power struggle between Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) is one based in language. While the matriarch's perspective dominates the novel, thereby presumably silencing Agaat, the servant-cum-nurse employs alternative methods of communication, or mimetic gestures, to undermine Milla's point of view. Through verbal and non-verbal measures, Agaat attempts to counteract the dying woman's story. While these communicative measures rely on their finely nuanced and insidious attributes to function, they contain an essential ambivalence, as the controlling white woman never understands the full implications of her rejected child's communication.
Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (translated by Michiel Heyns) returns to the genre of the plaasroman and draws on the pastoral tradition and the biblical pastoral in particular. The relationship between the farmer Milla de Wet and her spurned foster daughter, now servant, Agaat Laurier, is reviewed when Milla lies on her death bed. This raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, which are discussed in relation to readings of Ricoeur and Derrida, and the prophet Nathan's parable to David, the shepherd‐king.
Van Niekerk's novels are characterised by the special attention that is drawn to the use of language. This article focuses on the ways in which the mimetic possibilities of language are investigated in her novels. The restriction on communication, on knowledge of the self, knowledge and understanding of the other and of the world as a result of the fact that this knowledge and communication are determined by language is central in this investigation. Eventually it is pointed out how van Niekerk tries to reach beyond these restrictions of language by making use of narrative and metaphor.
This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.
Epochal Weaving”: Metaphors of Narrative and Metafiction in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat’. MA thesis
- David Reiersgord
To see another person’s face … To touch another person’s hand”: Bodies and intimate relations in the fiction of Marlene van Niekerk
- Lara Buxbaum
Die familiesage as volksverhaal: Afrikanernasionalisme en die politiek van reproduksie in Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat
- Du Plessis
- Irma
Die “einde” van die romantiese kunstenaar? Gedagtes by die interpretasie van Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat
- Gerrit Olivier
‘Miscegenations: Race, Culture, Phantasy’. JASAL, The Colonial Present, Special Issue
- Mark Sanders
Rabelais and His World
- M M Bakhtin
A Treacherous Subject: An Introduction
- Richard Block
- Du Plessis
The Novel as Cultural and Historical Archive: An Examination of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat’. MA dissertation
- Alyssa Carvalho
“Epochal Weaving”: Metaphors of Narrative and Metafiction in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat
- David Reiersgord
Miscegenations: Race, Culture, Phantasy
- Mark Sanders