Abstract
In his farm novel (“plaasroman”), Dwaalpoort (2010), Alexander Strachan creates a unique myth in which human and non-human animals feature as antagonists or as partners. This article is a study of the relationship between humans and animals in Dwaalpoort within this mythical substrate applying recent insights from human-animal studies. The repetitive myth of man, whore, and antelope (or man, woman, and nature) is studied with a particular focus on the human characters and Mhlophe, an albino hartebeest. As an uncanny, ghostly antelope, Mhlophe seems to represent the primal spirit of nature that observes from the gorge in Dwaalpoort the coming and going of human generations with a certain inexorability and omniscience. In the footsteps of his literary predecessor, Etienne Leroux, Strachan apparently tries to create a contemporary myth signalling that despite clear rifts between modernity and the past, events in the present still retain the marks of an enduring mythical content. To account for the complexities presented by mythmaking in the novel, this article engages with theoretical insights by Hans Blumenberg (1983 and 1990) and Charl-Pierre Naudé (2023) about myth.
Furthermore, guided by insights from Jacques Derrida’s study, The beast and the sovereign (2009), the article offers a discussion of the confrontation between the mythical hartebeest and two characters with a legal background, Ludwig and Jurgens. Derrida found that non-human animals in the Western canon occupy a position outside the law, a position that they have in common with the sovereign ruler. The beast and the sovereign consequently share a certain likeness. Derrida’s identification of the overlaps between human power figures, the law, the divine, and the animal makes it possible to understand more fully the interaction between Mhlophe and the characters with a legal background in Dwaalpoort. The confrontation between Mhlophe and the human characters becomes a struggle between equals and becomes part of the “zooanthropotheological” equalisation between humans, animals, and the divine in the novel.
About his novel, Strachan noted that the text deals with land dispossession, land reform, transfer of ownership, and the end of an era. In the end the black inhabitants of Mine Own take over the farm. Mine Own represents the future, while Dwaalpoort symbolises the past, according to Strachan. He sees it as an apocalyptic novel about how people respond to end times (in Brümmer 2010:11).
Reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004), and Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2006), translated into English as Trencherman (2008), Dwaalpoort represents a farewell of sorts to an era of white supremacy that was once tied to land ownership and farm life. The owner of Dwaalpoort, Rentia, has already ceded a portion of the family farm to the black community in nearby Mine Own without demanding any compensation. Nevertheless, Dwaalpoort should not be interpreted simply in terms of white against black. Thanks to the broader historical, mythical, and transcultural perspective that Strachan has incorporated into his text, the present situation of characters Rentia, Henning, and Bullet on Dwaalpoort is not so singularly and definitively permeated by a sense of finality. The mythical substrate of the man, the whore, and the enigmatic Mhlophe transcends the boundaries of time and prevailing cultural or racial divides. The suggestion is that the same patterns will repeat themselves and that the cultural particularities of the moment are of passing interest due to perpetual reoccupations of the myth. New conflicts will continually arise, but the primordial and enduring presence of the white hartebeest as guardian of Dwaalpoort and his ritualistic interactions with the whore and the man, in whatever future guise, will be repeated ad infinitum.
The apocalyptic ending of the novel, suggested by the fire that sweeps through the farm, the unexpected return of the peacocks, as well as the incident where Mhlophe tramples the judge Jurgens van der Beul to death, does not signify a final termination of the farm’s existence. As stated at the very beginning of the novel, Mhlophe will, as he has for centuries, continue to watch over the human dramas unfolding on Dwaalpoort. The apocalyptic ending of the novel is accompanied by a cyclical element: as can be expected of any mythical narrative, the same rituals will be performed repeatedly on the farm.
The interaction between humans and animals in the novel is also part of a process that is noticeable between whites and blacks. Mr. Nkosi’s sons from Mine Own join Bullet to work with him and Anne dances with the people from Mine Own during their nocturnal revelry. In Dwaalpoort, there is not the same kind of anxious awareness of loss and decline among the white characters as in a novel like Eben Venter’s Trencherman or J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In Dwaalpoort, there is greater acceptance that life will continue, and a space is made for both white and black within the mythical substratum of the novel. Strachan’s novel is an intriguing innovation in the light of the dystopian literature that white writers have published in South Africa since Disgrace. The comfort of the broader transhistorical perspective in Dwaalpoort contrasts with the bleak outlook that repeatedly characterises contemporary Afrikaans prose. The novel expands the somewhat myopic focus on the immediate context by looking further in time and space than just the here and now.
The question remains whether Strachan’s choice to turn to myth, as did his modernist predecessors, is indeed the appropriate way to transcend established colonial discourses about Africa. As Mbembe (2001:1) indicates, the discourse about Africa is almost always embedded within a framework of a metatext about the animal. Within this discourse the continent and its people are depicted as signs of what is strange and monstrous. Africa is thus portrayed as an alluring depth that remains perpetually elusive and can never be grasped. Mbembe (2001:4) is also critical of the role attributed to myth and fable within Western discourse on Africa. According to this perspective, myth and fable are considered the basis of any conception of origin and time in African communities. Time is captured within the immobility of “it-has-always-been-there”, hence the importance of repetition and cycles. Instead of individuals acting within this discourse, there are rather entities that act as prisoners of magical signs within an enchanted and mysterious universe. The power of invocation and evocation replaces the power of production. As indicated in this article, it is possible that the focus on white human characters may provoke the interpretation that they themselves become participants in mythical Africa. The novel does not, however, free the characters from the dominant discourse about the animal, the magical, and the fabulous, but it does provide a place for everyone within this entrenched discourse about Africa.
On the one hand, Strachan’s creation of a new myth involving the man, the whore, and the hartebeest is a reaffirmation of creativity and originality as an apparent escape from both postmodernist recirculation and the recurring bleakness of dystopian future expectations in Afrikaans prose. The postcolonial and ecocritical strain in Dwaalpoort is not so much a transcendence of the colonial discourse that often depicts the black native in terms of animality, but rather seeks a vision of interconnectedness and entanglement between black and white people, and ultimately, a connection of all these people with animals. On the other hand, this attempt to create a new myth as an expansion within the literary climate in Afrikaans since the late 1990s remains anchored in the persistent discourse that represents Africa in mythical terms. The ongoing tension over land ownership and the division between black and white in South African contemporary reality is transcended in the fictional framework of the novel but is shifted to the realm of myth with the animal as the guiding figure. It may not be too far-fetched to claim that the encompassing authority of the mythical hartebeest becomes simultaneously the contraction and displacement of more than just one divide, including the continued tension between black and white and the unequal gender relations between men and women in post-apartheid South Africa.
Keywords: Afrikaans fiction; apocalyptic fiction; archetypes; Dwaalpoort; farm novel; ghosts; hunting tales; law and literature; myth; mythical animals; postcolonial land claims; Alexander Strachan
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans
Mens, dier en miteskepping in Alexander Strachan se Dwaalpoort (2010)