You Equals Not-I : Avowal, Disavowal, and Second-Person Narration in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist. AcknowledgmentI wish to thank David Attwell for his input on a draft version of this essay.Disclosure statementI confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.Notes1. Hereafter A. When referring to the Afrikaans original, I will give it as A Afr.2. Excluded here are the “Prologue” and “Epilogue”.3. “Not all critics are sensitized to what one ‘does’ (or effects) in the literary field, or how one ’sounds’ amidst the hubbub, they only care about what one ’means’ by a reference or an image” (Van Niekerk, “Interview”). The same sentiment occurs elsewhere: “My hypothesis is that the true ethical importance of a certain caliber of artwork lies not in the ‘messages’ that could be extracted from it, but in the autonomy and singularity that makes it ‘stand on its own’ through nothing but its own internal conceptual complexity and formal cohesion” (Van Niekerk, “Literary Text” 1).4. A notable exception is Forter’s excellent chapter, mentioned below.5. My approach aligns with Rothberg’s (23): “ … in the aesthetic realm, revealing the conceptual contributions of these materials entails reading them closely: their most powerful contributions to conceiving and responding to implication emerge not primarily from their content but from their form”.6. “Antagonym” describes a word that contains opposite or antonymic meanings. It belongs to the same class of words as enantiosemes, contranyms and autonyms.7. See Fludernik (288) and Richardson (19).8. It is worth mentioning here that Hedley Twidle rightly calls you “immersive” (50) when speaking of the present-tense second-person passages in Hugh Lewin’s Apartheid memoir, Stones Against the Mirror. He is also right to call them “confrontational,” though it should be added that this is only because of autobiographical writing’s implicit use of the past tense. In Twidle’s example (“You decide to blow up an electricity pylon. It’s an obvious target in your campaign of protest against an unjust system.”), there is no inherent confrontation of the you in these sentences, but only from the vantage point where we see the older Lewin writing against his younger self.9. For example: “sy is besig om hom vorentoe te druk” (“she is busy pushing him forward”).10. Beckett (in Ackerley and Gontarski 569) stressed the priority of sound over sight in That Time: “To the objection that visual component too small, out of all proportion with aural, answer: make it smaller, on the principle less is more.”11. It is in this spirit of mastery that the terminally-ill narrator of Van Niekerk’s novella, Memorandum, performs certain “spiritual exercises” (30, my translation) directly recommended by his reading of Foucault’s Technologies of the Self.12. For the most incisive discussion of the ambivalence of “good” or “goodness” in Agaat, see Sanders. And given the unflattering depiction of Milla’s Christianity, what Vincent Pecora (92) has said of J. M. Coetzee seems true, too, in Van Niekerk’s case: her “perspective is both a furious attack on and an inescapable reproduction of the Dutch Reformed Calvinism of [her] tribe”. It’s worth noting also that Van Niekerk has disparaged “critics [who] are under the spell of the exegetic allegory-mongering magic performed by the old theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church” (“Interview”).13. For the most sustained discussion of Coetzee’s “middle voice,” see Clarkson, particularly Chapter 1.14. For an excellent discussion of the ethical ambivalence of the phrase (“come to terms”) in the context of TRC-inspired fiction, see Heyns, “Whole Country’s Truth”.15. I follow David Herman’s (381) still-definitive categories for the narrative you.16. See, for instance, Van der Vlies, Heyns and Barnard.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRick de VilliersRick de Villiers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. He is the author of Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (EUP 2021). For more information, visit www.rickdevilliers.com.