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Quest and Creativity in Marlene Van Niekerk's Triomf, Agaat And Orion, Ram’s-horn and Labyrinth: Quest and Creativity in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum Jean Rossmann Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Studies) in the School of Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. November 2014 Supervisor: Professor Cheryl Stobie Declaration Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Graduate Programme in English Studies (School of Arts) at the University of KwaZulu- Natal, Pietermartizburg, South Africa. I, Jean Rossmann, declare that 1. The research reported in this thesis, except where otherwise indicated, is my original research. 2. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 3. This thesis does not contain other persons’ data, pictures, graphs or other information, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other persons. 4. This thesis does not contain other persons’ writing, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other researchers. Where other written sources have been quoted, then: a. Their words have been re-written but the general information attributed to them has been referenced. b. Where their exact words have been used, then their writing has been placed inside quotation marks, and referenced. 5. This thesis does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet, unless specifically acknowledged, and the source being detailed in the thesis and in the References sections. ________________ __________________ Jean Rossmann Prof. Cheryl Stobie _______________ __________________ Date Date ii Acknowledgements I should like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Cheryl Stobie, for her continued guidance and support in the process of this study. A special thank you to my colleagues in the English Department at UKZN (Pietermaritzburg) for your encouragement, practical assistance, and feedback provided at our departmental seminars. You have all been my mentors and guides. I am grateful to all the “chance encounters” that have contributed to the process of this study: anonymous referees, conference delegates, academics and fellow students. I am especially grateful for the camaraderie of my good friends, Claire Scott, Debbie Turrell, and Sergio Teixeira. Your friendships are like oases for the soul. Thank you to the special people whose presence lives in my heart – my mother, my grandmother, and Rogier. You gave me such happy hauntings throughout this journey. Finally, thank you to all my family; and, most especially, to Tim – my love and my sanity. iii Abstract This study of Marlene Van Niekerk’s three novels, Triomf, Agaat, and Memorandum, explores the motifs of quest and creativity, and their association with the spiritual and numinous. Notions of self-creation, the imaginative re-creation of reality and the relationship between creativity, self-awakening and revelation are explored in an analysis of Van Niekerk’s novels. This thesis considers the encounter with alterity as a catalyst for undoing the boundaries of the self that leads to “profane illumination” and transformation. Van Niekerk’s characters confront alterity on numerous levels: their own abjection, death, the racial other, and the experience of alterity in artistic creation. It is worth noting that the characters who form the focus of this study – Mol, Treppie, Agaat, Milla, Jakkie and Wiid – are story-tellers and myth-makers, and that their creative use of symbol, myth and metaphor stimulate self-transformation. This study illuminates the relatively unexplored domain of the mystical and spiritual in Van Niekerk’s novels. This focus emerges within the context of a renewed interest in the spiritual within the humanities. Van Niekerk’s writing resonates with an integralist conception of spirituality that includes aesthetic experience, magic, and a sense of the sacred as embodied and demotic. The concern with immanence and non-dualism in Van Niekerk’s novels is typical of postmodern spirituality, and resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on art and the Dionysian worldview. For Nietzsche art is spiritual, turning the individual into a creator and “transfigurer” of existence. Through the lens of Nietzsche’s writings on the artist- philsopher, I explore the motif of a spiritual-ethical and aesthetic quest toward a greater openness to alterity, to the world, and toward cosmic interconnectedness. Chapter One offers a reading of Triomf, focussing on the antithetical perspectives of Treppie and Mol, and their ontological quests. I explore Mol’s abjection in terms of Luce Irigaray’s writings on female mysticism, looking at Mol as a burlesque Mary/Martha figure. I explore Mol’s mystical quest, her compassion, and her affinity with alterity, which allows her to become the creator of her own cosmology. Conversely, I explore Treppie’s quest toward becoming an artist-philosopher. In the conclusion to this chapter I examine the implications of Treppie’s and Mol’s cosmic gaze and their different ontological outlooks. iv Chapter Two, which offers an analysis of Agaat, begins by exploring Milla’s presentation as the pharmakon (sickness and cure) and her quest for incorporation into a new social order. In this chapter the quest motif is framed in terms of the Lacanian la traversée du fantasme (traversing the fundamental fantasy), a circuitous journey into the unconscious that reveals the fantasy that underpins and structures our reality. I argue that Agaat figures simultaneously as Milla’s “fantasy” and her guide, assisting Milla to open her eyes and acknowledge her paradoxical abjection and idealisation of Agaat. Chapter Two concludes by exploring the interrogative function of the frame narrative, in which the frame narrator summons the reader, with his Wunderhorn and allusions to poetic inspiration, on a quest of creative production. Chapter Three foregrounds the labyrinthine structure of Memorandum and how this correlates with the quest motif. I also explore Memorandum’s allusions to the nekyia (the Homeric term for the descent into Hades) and its association as a metaphor for poiesis, the processes of creative production. I further relate Wiid’s nekyia to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). Wiid’s quest, like Zarathustra’s “going under,” is a twofold quest for his true self and a creative language of his own. I argue that Wiid’s embrace of “Mania” (goddess of death and figure of absolute alterity, a feminine evocation of Nietzsche’s Dionysus and a creative- intuitive ontology), leads to Wiid’s transformation and apotheosis as an artist. Finally, through the lens of Gaston Bachelard’s writings on the creation of poetry and Nietzsche’s writings on art, I discuss how Wiid’s poetic reverie makes self-reflexive comments on the act of reading and writing, and challenges conventional understandings of love and connection. In conclusion, I explore the open dialectic of Van Niekerk’s novels and consider the ethical imperative in Van Niekerk’s narrative quests: the art of thinking and quest/ioning – poetically. Key words: Marlene van Niekerk, Triomf, Agaat, Memorandum, poiesis, Nietzsche, Dionysian, quest, creativity, spirituality, dialectic, abjection. v Contents Declaration ................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iii Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Triomf ................................................................................................................ 19 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 19 1.2 Martha(martyr)dom: A Philosophy of Compassion and Sacrifice ................................. 24 1.2.1 “She went and lay herself down. Housecoat and all.”: (Perverse) Compassion ..... 24 1.2.2 Abject Mother: Mol’s (Un)hole-iness ..................................................................... 27 1.2.3 Madonna of Humility and Orion, “Man of Stars” ................................................... 29 1.2.4 An Active Mystic: Productive Contagion and Hospitality ...................................... 31 1.3 Treppie’s Trepanations: Fridge Philosophy and Excremental Visions .......................... 35 1.3.1 Excrement: The Satirist’s Master Trope .................................................................. 35 1.3.2 Excremental Existentialism ..................................................................................... 37 1.3.2 Treppie’s Trepanations ............................................................................................ 41 1.3.4 Excremental Ecstasy and the Dionysian Sublime ................................................... 53 1.4 “No more North”: An Alternative Transcendence ......................................................... 57 Chapter Two: Agaat ................................................................................................................. 60 2.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................
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