Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture

6. Inheritance in Question: The Magical Realist Mode in Afrikaans Fiction

6 Inheritance in Question: The Magical Realist Mode in Afrikaans Fiction Sheila Roberts What I hope to do in this essay is take some of the liberty provided by magical realism’s broad and sometimes conflicting hermeneutics to address the ways in which this mode has been employed in some recent Afrikaans fiction. My discussion of novels and stories in this malleable mode (also touching on fantasy and allegory) produced during the 1980s and through the past decade—the most violent yet hopeful transitional moments in South African politics—might serve to clarify the purpose of a South African drift away from the naturalist pastoral mode to the use of manylayered textures of surrealism and its shifting meanings. Some of the works, such as Etienne van Heerden’s Toorberg and Kikoejoe and Marita van der Vyver’s Entertaining Angels, I would posit, are responding with anxiety, yet optimistically and humorously to political change. They reject governmental sanctioned forms of history and memory in their creation of new stories, new memories or in a reworking of the old ones. Such novels, in effect, challenge the fixity of any received ideas, truths and systems—even as they construct a new foundation for historiography and myth-making Their characters express guilt and dread for past decades of damage, yet at the same time insist that acknowledged remorse plus cheerful self-confidence in the future will be the means to restoring peace to the land for all South Africans. 87 In other words, these fictions, as well as the low-keyed novels of Karel Schoeman, such as Another Country, Die Uur van die Engel and Hierdie Lewe (to which I can only give marginal attention within the confines of this paper), all written before or during the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, present testimonies on new variations of historical truth, personal memory and moral meaning. Working metatextually and ‘‘magically,’’ with imaginative arabesques of plot and characterological improvisations, some of these novels reach their own moment of reconciliation, however open-ended. In Toorberg, for instance, that moment demonstrates how powerful and generationally established Afrikaner landowners may begin restoring South Africa to its ancient indigenous peoples through acceptance of a repatterning of their common history. Another Country provides a sombre prescription, lit up by moments of epiphany and clairvoyance, on how to live by sharing and how to die without shame in the CountryTo -Be. Marita van der Vyver’s character Griet in Entertaining Angels would add that what the country also needs is more happy-ending stories and, in the interaction of all people, more comedy and laughter. As Griet would ask, When last did anyone read a funny Afrikaans book? In his essay ‘‘Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,’’ Stephen Slemon asserts that ‘‘In none of its applications to literature has the concept of magic realism ever successfully differentiated between itself and neighboring genres such as fabulation, metafiction, the Baroque, the fantastic, the uncanny, or the marvelous, and consequently it is not surprising that some critics have chosen to abandon the term altogether ’’ (1995:407). As phrased in my first paragraph, I am fully aware of the shifting meanings of the concept. Be that as it may, for my own purposes I choose to use the term magical realism specifically for those texts where the author presents us with a material world, familiar and recognizable, most importantly to us the readers, as well as to the characters who inhabit it, but a world able to support the inexplicable and strange. In the many genres Slemon mentions, a world strange to the reader may not be uncanny to the characters peopling it. In magical realism, those elements of the uncanny, the supernatural or the fantastic that interweave themselves seamlessly through the mundane fabric of the characters’ lives do not surprise them or us. Some phenomena may be annoying or startling, but the prosaic foundational world remains the same—ghosts, nocturnal beasts, dreams, the sixth sense 88 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture and optical illusions being no more than proof that the material has multiple ways of revealing its meanings to us. ‘‘[W]hat lies beyond the known does not necessarily lie beyond the real’’ (Fink 1998:17). In other words, the antinomy between reality and fantasy is underplayed by presenting super- or preternatural events as if they did not contradict reason or the sensual evidence of...