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Nature, Narrative and Language in Marlene Van Niekerk's Agaat

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Nature, Narrative and Language in Marlene Van Niekerk's Agaat View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) Nature, Narrative and Language in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat Shannon-Lee Moore-Barnes Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium in the Faculty of Arts at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University January 2010 Supervisor: Dr Mary West Co-Supervisor: Dr Neville Smith Declaration by Student Full Name: Shannon-Lee Moore-Barnes Student Number: 204026547 Qualification: Magister Artium Declaration: In accordance with Rule G4.6.3, I hereby declare that the above-mentioned dissertation is my own work and that it has not previously been submitted for assessment to another University or for another qualification. Signature: Date: March 2010 Contents i. Acknowledgements ii. Abstract I. Introduction: Language and Nature, Theory and Practice 1 i. The Plaasroman: From Edenic Pastoral to Nowhere Land 1 ii. Van Niekerk’s Project: Rewriting the Land Covenant 5 iii. Agaat in Translation 8 iv. Narrative Perspective 9 v. Ecosensitivity in South Africa and the World 13 vi. Ecological Feminism as Criticism 17 vii. Final Introductory Observations 19 1. Chapter One: Legacy of Master Narratives 22 1.1 Introduction: Duty, Law and Reason 22 1.2 Cause and Effect in a Noose: Oppression’s Lasso 26 1.3 The Law and the Prophets: The Day of the Covenant 30 1.4 Covenant Manipulated: Milla’s Construction of Agaat 33 1.5 Carving Culture from Nature 37 1.6 Conclusion: Paradise Lost 43 2. Chapter Two: Negotiating Inherited Narratives 46 2.1 Introduction: Granite taken for Granted 46 2.2 Privatisation: The Marriage Contract 48 2.3 Jak’s ‘System of Perfect Liberty’ 57 2.4 Enlightenment’s [T]reason 63 2.5 Conquering Narratives: Tug-of-War 70 2.6 Conclusion: Dis-ease Embodied 76 3. Chapter Three: Ritualisation of Presence in Language 80 3.1 Introduction 80 3.2 The Goddess Trembles 82 3.3 Freeing Desire in Unseasonable Times 86 3.4 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall 92 3.5 Urgent Call of Nature: Scourge of the Seven-Year-Itch 97 3.6 Conclusion: The Butterfly Liberated 103 4. Chapter Four: Vestigial Stories Embroidered 105 4.1 Introduction: Of Ecological Tricksters and Apartheid Cyborgs 105 4.2 Minister of Fennel Speaks Through the Burning Bush 108 4.3 Writings of the Whirligig 117 4.4 Embroidering Genesis on Grootmoedersdrift: Carnival of the Animals 123 4.5 Conclusion: An Aria for Two Female Voices and Farm Noises 130 5. Conclusion: Fertile Terrain 132 6. Bibliography 137 The landscape and the language are the same, And we ourselves are language and are land. - Conrad Aiken 1977: 67 i. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my supervisors Mary West and Neville Smith; especially to Mary for her understanding towards my project and her much appreciated attempts to guide me through my labyrinthine imaginings. Thanks also to Ronnie Bowker for reading and commenting. Thank you to my wonderful friends and family for all they have done to encourage my writing and for the time they have allowed me to complete this work. Particularly I want to thank my very special friends Rambo and Skye for keeping me constant company while patiently waiting for our daily walk. I want to express my continuing gratitude to my mother for her love and support that enriches my life every day, as well as thank my father for listening calmly. To my life partner, William Pinnock, thank you for recognising my ideas, for the hours (“always the hours”) invested in our discussions and your presence throughout our friendship—life seems more beautiful when you are near. ii. ABSTRACT Conrad Aiken’s observation that the “landscape and the language are the same, and we ourselves are language and are land,” depicts the material terrain we inhabit as necessarily informing the language we speak. An important corollary to Aiken’s observation is language itself writes the land. I argue that the binary division between culture and nature, as well as the attempts to universalise languages, abstracts discourse from necessary situated knowledges, alienating the land from the language it embodies. The severing of culture and nature as implied by Aiken’s observation is indicative of humanity’s progressive isolation from the land through language, as well as from their embodied natures. Remoteness results in what Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat (2006) terms a “poverty disease” (2006: 251). Michiel Heyns confirms that the character Agaat relates this barrenness of spirit to her “diagnosis of spiritual ills through human dealings with the soil” (2009: 132). I illustrate the novel’s revitalisation of language as an act of ecological recuperation that alleviates dis-eased consciousnesses by potentially recognising, valuing and responding to situated knowledges revealed in land narratives.1 My argument therefore uncovers the challenges that the novel directs at an unreformed and universal Western2 rationalist discourse that continues to appropriate nature as resource for a hierarchical culture. To this end I use critiques of colonialism that reveal culture’s assimilation of the Other,3 especially the work of Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway and Nicole Brossard. I use these critiques to analyse self/Other oppositions that Western culture constructs and patrols to maintain a defensive culture of domination. I show how nature and all those feminised and marginalised by Western discourses that hierarchise culture have been consistently overlooked and under-represented by those who purport to ‘control’ the environment and privilege the symbolic language as the carrier of culture. Agaat provides fruitful terrain for the reflection of marginalised voices; voices that confirm the environment and language as necessarily both feminist and social justice issues. By combining this literary analysis with a wider eco-theoretical enquiry I position my study in an interdisciplinary field of investigation. This is in response to the damaging consequences of the inherited and fragmentary nature of specialisation. In addition, by detailing literary and feminist 1 My preference for the hyphenated usage of the word ‘dis-ease’ signals the equation between discomfort or unease and disease or sickness. 2 While I am concerned over emphasising words such as Western and Apartheid by capitalising them, I have decided to retain this form so as not to diminish the magnitude of the effect these discourses have had on global and regional communities. 3 When referring to Others I, like Karen J. Warren, capitalise the term. Warren defines Others as all earth Others subjected to “unjustified domination-subordination relationships” (2005: 252). responses to Western patriarchal discourse and its impact on nature, I show the ways in which literature negotiates the possible re-conceptualisation of our collective cultural imagination. Van Niekerk’s novel offers a sustained critique of the oppressive Western conceptual frameworks that have dominated Others through hegemonic constructions. Furthermore, I investigate what this writer might offer as an alternative to systems of social, political and ecological control and the violence it inflicts. Key Words Marlene van Niekerk Agaat South African plaasroman Situated knowledges Remoteness Intentional recognition stance Powerful infidel heteroglossia Trickster and Apartheid cyborg Others/Othering I. Introduction: Language and Nature, Theory and Practice i. The Plaasroman: From Edenic Pastoral to Nowhere Land In Agaat (2004, trans. 2006) Marlene van Niekerk is largely preoccupied with the farm and farming, and how language and narrative construct notions of nature, land, farming and community. This is evident in the chosen epigraphs of the book, one of which is the Handbook for Farmers in South Africa. In this dissertation I examine Van Niekerk’s work in re-imagining our material terrain. Agaat has been seen to take “the plaasroman by storm … and in some ways it deconstructs all those things that are sacred to [it]” (Heyns in De Kock, 2009: 138). De Kock asserts that this rethinking of C.M. van den Heever and the nostalgic plaasroman in general, is consciously set up through the intertextual references to other farm novels listed when Agaat subversively knocks them off a bookshelf (2006: 14).1 He says that “Van Niekerk, and now Van Niekerk and Heyns, have ransacked the South African pastoral and reworked it with a complexity that few South African novels in any language have yet achieved” (2007: 18). I am particularly interested in examining the implications of Van Niekerk’s reworking of the pastoral and the plaasroman to discover what it might mean in eco- theoretical terms. In order to assess the significance of Agaat in South African literature it is important to situate the novel in the history of the plaasroman in particular, and more generally writing that treats the subject of humanity’s response to the material world. J.M. Coetzee’s examination of the plaasroman (farm novel) in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) details how bucolic nostalgia for an Afrikaner return to the land might be traced back to W.J. Keith and the “‘urban-rural dissociation of sensibility’ of the 1880s” in England (1988: 75).2 This dissociation, a result of economic and technological changes spurred on by the rapid urbanisation of the rural population during the Industrial Revolution, signalled the dying way of life of the rural community. In contrast, Coetzee argues that in the United States, pastoralism was different because there was no European peasantry and land was plentiful. Coetzee goes on to detail how literature of the land flourished most prolifically in the German Bauernroman,3 peaking in the years 1929-1938 when 1 Titles listed include works by Edward Abbey, William Faulkner, Etienne Leroux, Dalene Matthee, Nadine Gordimer, Elsa Joubert and Olive Schreiner. Further, reference is made to J.M.
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