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Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André Brink1

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
p. 17-31

Abstract

In all the definitions he has given of magic realism, André Brink has insisted on magic realism’s capacity to blur the borders that separate life from death, reality from dreams, stories from History. This paper examines the relevance of such notions for the interpretation of Imaginings of Sand (1996) and Devil’s Valley (1998), two novels written after the end of apartheid.

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  • 1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered in French at the SEAC conference in Tours (November (...)

‘Why demand the truth, whatever that may be, if you can have imagination?’
(André Brink)

  • 2 Looking on Darkness was the first novel in Afrikaans to be banned by the apartheid authorities.

1The end of apartheid in 1994 opened new perspectives for South African writers. André Brink, whose fame used to rest on the stand he took against separate development,2 has chosen to experiment with magic realism, which he systematically incorporates in his post-apartheid novels The First Life of Adamastor, On the Contrary, Imaginings of Sand, Devil’s Valley, The Rights of Desire and The Other Side of Silence.

2The term ‘magic realism’ has been used to refer to a broad range of literary works, and it seems difficult to define it precisely. However, theorists agree on some of its features: first, many borders (between reality and fiction, life and death, past and present…) are blurred. It also often involves an important allegorical dimension. Magic realist works play a part in building a sense of national identity. Brink himself has defined the term in various critical works. In an article on Ann Landsman’s Devil’s Chimney, he lists the following characteristics:

Magic realism became the hallmark of literature built on the conviction that a nation needed stories in order to define its identity… stories that transform time and space into magical and elastic concepts in which time present and time past co-exist unproblematically with time future; stories that restore a sense of wholeness to the world, covering breathtaking tracts of history in one leap, embracing genesis and apocalypse in a single gesture, charging the here and now with the fiery breath of symbol and allegory, discovering the universe in a grain of sand and the long story of a country in the generations of a single family.3

  • 4 In Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democr (...)

He also defined the notion in ‘Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature’:4

This magic involves an acknowledgement of a more holistic way of approaching the world, an awareness of more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of in our philosophy, a free interaction between the worlds of the living and the dead, a rich oneiric stratum; also of ancestral – historical – commitments. (p. 25)

  • 5 Vintage (London, 1998 [1996]). All further references will be to this edition.
  • 6 Vintage (London, 2000 [1998]). All further references will be to this edition.

3We may wonder whether Brink, the novelist, practises what Brink, the critic, advocates. The heroes of Imaginings of Sand5 and Devil’s Valley6 both come to a place where they are told stories: Kristien, who lives in London, returns to South Africa to sit at her dying grandmother’s bedside and hear her family’s history. Flip enters an isolated valley where an Afrikaner family who settled there during the Great Trek still live as they did in the nineteenth century. In both cases, the protagonists are confronted with strange or supernatural events. In Devil’s Valley, one of the people Flip meets is a magician, aptly nicknamed Hans Magic. In Imaginings of Sand, Kristien’s first ancestor, Kamma/Maria, turns into anything that pleases her to protect herself from danger. Like Kamma, her daughter, Lottie, who has no shadow, can communicate with wild animals. So can Ouma Kristina, Kristien’s grandmother, who is always surrounded by birds. The old lady also claims that, when she was young, she travelled to Baghdad on a magic carpet with her lover. All the women in the lineage seem to have such powers, so that their history appears to be a mixture of mundane facts and magic.

4There is a constant intermingling of dead people with their descendants. In Devil’s Valley, Grandpa Lukas, the founder of the settlement, welcomes Flip on the day of his arrival, although he died in the nineteenth century (p. 92). His dead descendants also keep up appearing in the world of the living: Little Lukas, whose ashes Flip brought back to his parents, can be smelt from time to time (pp. 217 & 230). After she meets with her accidental death, Ouma Liesbet Prune is seen on the roof of her house (p. 245). All the dead people of the community come back for celebrations such as New Year’s Day (p. 325) or for church services: ‘The pews were crammed to capacity; not only by the living but, as far as we could establish, by all the dead of the community as well’ (p. 178). This constant presence creates a sense of ‘total’ time; past and present coexist unproblematically, as Flip realises:

For the first time I began to understand something more about the way in which the dead in this place continued to haunt the living. In a sense they are more real than the living, because the living merely pursue their own lives, but we assume the dead. It is only through us that they can work through the unfinished business they left behind. (p. 242)

5Gert Brush’s paintings symbolise this lasting presence of the dead among their descendants: as he uses the same canvases again and again to paint the inhabitants of the valley, the portraits of their ancestors can be made out in the background, like on the surface of a palimpsest: ‘All the earlier faces remained vaguely and disconcertingly visible, staring up at one as if through a bloody glass darkly’ (pp. 52-53).

6In Imaginings of Sand, mirrors serve as symbols of the presence of the dead among the living: Kamma uses one to show the Oosthuizens to her mixed-blood children, and Wilhelmina sees her ancestors in a mirror (p. 322). She even comes to sit on Ouma’s bed when the old woman endeavours to tell her story (pp. 270-271).

7In some cases, the mixing of generations symbolised by this ghost-like presence of the ancestors among their descendants has a dream-like quality: in Devil’s Valley, Henta seems to merge with her ancestor Talita Lightfoot, so much so that Flip cannot decide whom he met – and whether he met her at all: ‘I stood bewitched. I wanted her to come back, but to which name would she respond? Henta? Talita? This time I didn’t have a bunch of bluegum leaves as an alibi’ (p. 333).

8Repeatedly, dreams or visions impose themselves on Flip, who cannot decide whether they are real or whether he invented them. The confusing aspect of his dreams comes not only from their sexual nature, but from the fact that the creatures that make love to him (girls with webbed feet, a harelip, or a hairy body) leave tangible traces behind: a bunch of bluegum leaves (p. 60), a blue ribbon (p. 84), a dress (p. 155).

9Besides, when Flip arrives in the valley, he catches sight of a young woman bathing in a pool; but as soon as he notices her, she vanishes (p. 27). When he meets her again, he discovers that she is Little Lukas’s girlfriend, Emma. What disconcerts Flip is that she tells him that she dreamed the scene of his arrival. ‘But I was here. And I saw you’, he answers. In other words, he seems to have lived her dream. Later, they share other dreams: Emma at one point asks him whether he would like to ‘be with a hairy girl’ (p. 194). When Flip wants to know why she is asking, she answers: ‘Just something I dreamt. It made me terribly jealous. I wanted to pull her away from you, but I couldn’t move’ (p. 194). This indicates that she has seen Flip’s dream involving the hairy girl – but was it a dream?

10All these interactions between dreams and reality or between two people’s dreams prevent Flip from deciding conclusively whether a given event belongs to the realm of dreams or to reality. The pool scene and Flip’s subsequent encounters with Emma illustrate this point. Throughout the novel, Flip repeatedly alludes to their first encounter, wondering if it really happened, if Emma was there, if it really was her: ‘We went back to the rock pool where I had first seen her in her dream. If it had been a dream, if it had been her’ (p. 301). When he finally leaves the valley, he recalls his arrival as he passes along the empty pool:

‘This was where I first saw her…. Like a painter I recall the particulars of her body, as real and sure as these rocks. And yet she left no wet footprints, not a trace. She was and wasn’t there. I still cannot explain it.’ (p. 348)

He even doubts his own senses, when, on several occasions, people try to convince him that he remembers things that never happened: the men with whom Flip went hunting at night pretend they do not know what he is talking about when he meets them in broad daylight; young Henta does not seem to remember her previous encounter with him:

She gave no sign of remembering what had happened between us before.… What struck me, almost like a physical blow, was that she had really not remembered. Yesterday, quite simply, had never happened. For her, nothing had yet happened. She existed outside of memory, beyond the reach of history. (p. 222)

11Confronted with so many incredible events and so many denials on the part of the Lermiets, Flip ends up doubting everything he sees or hears, so that when the final tragedy happens, he wonders if he is once again a prey to someone else’s dream: ‘It can’t be true, it isn’t possible. Someone must be dreaming again. Jesus Christ, when will I get into a dream of my own for a fucking change?’ (p. 349). He even asks himself if what he saw in the Devil’s Valley was a dream, or rather a nightmare:

‘And yet I was there, I saw it, I crumbled a piece of bone to dust between my fingers. Does that mean anything? Or am I beginning to grow into my own story like a toenail?’ (p. 353)

12This gradual blurring of the border between dreams and reality reflects the unstable nature of history in Devil’s Valley. Originally, Flip came to write the family’s history:

Facts, facts were now my passion. When I was young, at the time I was still teaching history, I believed in the possibility of truth. Historical truth, so help me God. Gradually I was shocked out of this certainty, as out of most others. All that remained was my faith – tempered by cynicism, okay, but even so – in facts. I’d dig among the rubble in search of a handful of irreducible facts. I mean, this was what had brought me to the Devil’s Valley. (p. 89)

13The research he did in the archives outside the valley provided him with a substantial amount of data (pp. 12-13). Yet, soon, he has to face various difficulties. First, his equipment breaks down. His camera falls when he drops his rucksack while going down into the valley (p. 23). Later on, his recorder stops working mysteriously after a number of interviews with some of the inhabitants.

14The main difficulty, though, is that all the sources are oral. At the beginning, the inhabitants of the valley simply refuse to talk to him, but even after Grandpa Lermiet, the patriarch, has convinced his descendants to answer Flip’s questions, they endlessly reinvent history, so that he cannot decide where truth lies: ‘Every word spoken in this place is a bloody new invention. This is how the writer of Genesis must have felt’ (p. 45). When he tries to recapitulate what he has found, all he can do is acknowledge his own failure. Instead of building a coherent and unified history, he only manages to gather contradictory stories:

‘Statements, testimonies, accounts, or just a damn handful of ravings?…. But with no substance at all, just bloody inventions and tall tales. How can I get this to make sense?’ (p. 9)

He gradually discovers that the Lermiets make no clear distinction between what really happened and what has been invented. Gert Brush, the painter, tells Flip the story of Smith the smith, whose father could not sleep until he died because of a spell cast by Hans Magic’s father. When asked whether he believes this, he answers:

‘I’m not saying it’s true. I’m telling you what the people say. Not all of them either, because you’ll hear so many stories in this place you can never be sure what really happened’. (p. 139)

Progressively, all the contradictory versions add up and form a heterogeneous whole, an undecipherable cacophony, like the voices in Ben Owl’s head. The confusion between real and imaginary is total.

15This is not very different from Ouma Kristina’s conception of history in Imaginings of Sand: at the beginning, she claims that she ‘can remember things that never happened’ (p. 4). Again, the stress is laid on the constant reinvention of the past, which enables the present to justify and ground itself. Commenting on his own work, Brink writes:

  • 7 Brink, ‘Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-Apartheid Narrative’, in Sarah Nuttall and (...)

It seems to me that in situations such as this what matters are not the specifics of the inventions (a woman changed into a tree, etc.) but the fact that they are resorted to at a given moment in an individual’s life, or at a specific historical juncture.7

16Because it shows the permeability of the border between history-writing and storytelling, magical realism lays bare the processes of reinvention and forgetting at work in historiography. In Devil’s Valley, Flip witnesses this reinvention of the real: after Piet Snot’s death, everybody gathers in front of the boy’s house. Flip, who holds Jurg Water responsible for his son’s death, tells him what he believes. The two start fighting and have to be separated after a free-for-all. When Lukas Death, who acts as a judge in the valley, finally arrives, they all start telling their own story and recreating what happened:

By the time Lukas Death arrived, everybody was talking at the same time. Those who’d come in last had the most to say. I couldn’t make head or tail out of all their versions. (p. 312)

If those who arrived last, and are therefore the most unlikely to have witnessed the scene, have the most to say, what must Flip think of the stories he was told day after day? By foregrounding this constant reinvention of the past, Brink shows how history was rewritten under apartheid, as it is under any kind of regime, hence the necessity to predict the past, to reinvent it in order to ground the present and the future: in Imaginings of Sand, when Ouma tells her that ‘nothing is just a story’, Kristien deduces:

  • 8 The same idea is developed by Brink in An Act of Terror (Vintage [London: 1991], p. 659), in which (...)

I need time to grasp what she has said; I’m beginning to catch a glimmer of why she felt this urge to bring me back to her. To foretell the past, the way prophets foretell the future. (p. 175)8

17In Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand, Brink re-reads the South African past to reestablish all that has been erased – or at least covered – by the founding myths of Afrikanerdom:

  • 9 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 15

Just as surely as certain sexual relationships were proscribed by apartheid, certain experiences or areas of knowledge were out of bounds to probing in words.… Behind these, loomed larger, greyer areas: whole territories of historical consciousness silenced by the power establishment and invaded by the dominant discourse in order to make them inaccessible to other voices. These included the distortions of the ‘right’ to the land... abuses in the name of Christianity (using the Bible to instil an acceptance by the oppressed of their fate); the extent of miscegenation between staunch Afrikaners and their slaves or servants; the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the interior; strategies to ensure and perpetuate the marginalization of women in both black and white societies; the involvement of ‘Coloured’ people in the Great Trek; the rape of the environment in the process of ‘taming the wilderness’; the tradition of Afrikaner dissidence…9

Brink shows that the myth of the terra virgina, according to which South Africa was empty when the white settlers arrived, was a lie meant to justify the colonizers’ right to the land. In Devil’s Valley, Grandpa Lukas tells Flip that, although his family pretend the place was empty when they discovered it, it was not:

‘When we trekked in here… this whole valley was full of enemies … [T]here were Bushmen and Hottentots all over the place. We had to get rid of them to clear a spot for ourselves.’ (p. 285)

Brink also demythologises the appropriation of black women by the colonizer and its biblical justification: in Devil’s Valley, Grandpa Lukas renamed his second wife Bilhah:

  • 10 In Afrique du Sud. Naissance d’une nation plurielle, Dominique Lanni writes that during the Great T (...)

‘God knows what her real name was… I christened her Bilhah. I mean, how can a man sin with a woman’s body if she doesn’t have a name from the Bible? Abraham and Isaac and Jacob also had to make do with what they could get, didn’t they? It’s straight from the Word of God’. (p. 285)10

In Imaginings of Sand, Kristien’s first known ancestor is also given a new name by the Afrikaner family she lives with:

Maria was a name the whites gave her, much later. In the beginning she was Kamma – the word the Khoikhoi, the People-of-People, had for water. (p. 175)

  • 11 According to Dominique Lanni, in the early days of the Cape colony, men developed a self-justificat (...)

In Devil’s Valley, miscegenation is assimilated to the ‘original sin’ and the coloured children born in the community have to be stoned in the best biblical tradition:11 ‘And from time to time when someone is born among us who bears the mark of original sin, he has to be removed from the congregation of the Lord’ (p. 158), says Brother Holy.

18To demythologize Afrikaner identity and its supposedly religious grounding, Brink elaborates a meta-myth, a strategy that was defined by Roland Barthes in ‘Le mythe aujourd’hui’:

  • 12 ‘La meilleure arme contre le mythe, c’est peut-être de le mythifier à son tour, c’est de produire u (...)

Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth? All that is needed is to use it as the departure point for a third semiological chain, to take its signification as the first term of a second myth.12

Barthes gives the example of Bouvard et Pécuchet, in which the two eponymous characters epitomize ‘a certain kind of bourgeoisie’, their discourse being ‘already a mythic discourse’. Flaubert superimposes a third semiological chain on it:

  • 13 ‘La rhétorique de Bouvard et Pécuchet va devenir la forme du nouveau système; le concept sera ici p (...)

The rhetoric of Bouvard and Pecuchet becomes the form of the new system; the concept here is due to Flaubert himself, to Flaubert’s gaze on the myth which Bouvard and Pecuchet had built for themselves: it consists of their natively ineffectual inclinations, their inability to feel satisfied, the panic succession of their apprenticeships, in short what I would very much like to call (but I see storm clouds on the horizon): Bouvard-and-pecuchet-ity. As for the final signification, it is the book, it is Bouvard and Pecuchet for us. The power of the second myth is that it gives the first its basis as a naivety which is looked at.13

Similarly, by juxtaposing and adding the contradictory versions of the Lermiets’ history, Devil’s Valley functions as a signifier of Afrikanerdom. Flip’s reading of it lead him to expose the fabricated mythology of apartheid.

19To reread ‘official’ history, Brink uses those people whose voices were silenced by dominant discourse. As Linda Hutcheon puts it in The Politics of Postmodernism:

  • 14 Routledge (London/New York, 1989), p. 51.

We may indeed get few postmodern narrative representations of the heroic victors who have traditionally defined who and what made it into History. Often we get instead both the story and the story-telling of the non-combatants and the losers: the Canadian Indians of Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear or Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers; the women of Troy in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra; the blacks of South Africa or America in the work of J.M. Coetzee, André Brink, Toni Morrison, or Ishmael Reed.14

20Brink, who tried to give voices to the coloured and black people in his previous novels (Looking on Darkness, A Chain Of Voices, The Wall of the Plague…) recently expressed his desire to explore the point of view of women as well:

  • 15 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 23.

‘What interests me particularly at the moment is the link between woman and history: woman as a presence largely excluded from official South African discourses; and history as canon .… history, in fact, reimagined as herstory’.15

In Devil’s Valley, Brink reinstates the women’s point of view through Dalena’s version of the family history in which women play a leading role. In Imaginings of Sand too women are the real owners of the family’s identity and stories. The genealogy that appears at the beginning of the book symbolises this reversal: unlike the genealogies Brink used in previous novels, this shows a lineage of women in which surnames are omitted, as if the author wanted to show in the very first page of his novel that men are of little importance in this family.

21Brink also mixes traditional Afrikaner tales and Khoisan legends. In Devil’s Valley, Flip discovers that the Lermiets’ oral tradition incorporates Khoisan legends, although they deny this: in Liesbet Prune’s version of the story of Adam and Eve, the Fall is caused by Adam who chooses the fig instead of the apple because he saw Eve ‘standing with her legs wide apart on a branch high up in the tree’ (p. 171), an episode borrowed from a Khoisan legend. The mythological system that results from this hybridisation is doubly ‘second’ as Brink build a new, syncretic one that expresses what ‘official’ historiography did not concerning the hybrid nature of the community:

  • 16 ‘Stories of History’, p. 42.

I get the impression that with Imaginings of Sand another shift may be occurring, towards an intimation that something may in fact have happened, but that we can never be sure of it or gain access to it, and that the best we can do is to fabricate metaphors – that is, tell stories – in which, not history, but imaginings of history are invented. Myth may have preceded history, but in the long run it may well be the only guarantee for the survival of history.16

The blurring of borders also suggests that, while reality feeds on fiction, fiction feeds on reality, but also on other fictions. Faced with the elusiveness of the polysemous term ‘magic realism’, Jean-Pierre Durix chooses to use it only to designate novels that resemble ‘canonical’ magic realist texts. He writes:

  • 17 Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism, Macmillan/St Martin’s Pr (...)

It might be appropriate to reserve the label to those texts that share strong similarities with García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Shame. These novels, which have a strong realistic basis, depict large communities in the process of making their own history in the face of strong imperialistic resistance. The main characters are larger than life and veer toward the allegory. But this ‘serious’ concern is evoked in problematic terms which involve mock heroism as well as heroism. ‘Magic realists’ are clearly sophisticated in the use they make of metafiction, intertextual reference, an interweaving of the ‘realistic’ and ‘fantastic’ modes but also of an implicit questioning of the polarity on which such terms are based.17

22The intertexts in Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand are not only cultural or political but also literary. Devil’s Valley can be read as a playful transposition of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the South African context. Brink himself stresses the influence that Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez had on the writing of this novel:

  • 18 ‘Sur le plan de l’écriture, mes modèles ont désormais pour nom Márquez, Vargas Llosa. En lisant les (...)

As far as writing is concerned, my models are now Márquez and Vargas Llosa. When I read the Latino-Americans, I became aware of how usefully I could now use traditional devices to tell stories, for instance the Blacks’ oral tradition, or, closer to myself, the Boer tradition. During our own hundred years of solitude, the first Boers who had ventured into the interior of the country entertained themselves by telling each other stories. In these stories, as in the Blacks’ oral tradition, there is always a blurring of the border between the dead and the living, past and present, ancestors and their descendants. They very often deal with ghosts, apparitions, or spectres. I borrowed from these two great traditions the themes and method I used in my new novel.18

  • 19 The Novel. Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino, Macmillan (London, 1998), pp. 231-252.

It is significant that, in The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino, Brink dedicated a whole chapter entitled ‘Making and Unmaking’ to One Hundred Years of Solitude.19 Playful allusions to Márquez often occur in Devil’s Valley: ‘Lermiet’, the family’s name, is a reference to the isolation of the community, to their ‘hundred years of solitude’. The family epitomises the whole South African nation. The novel stages the transgression of taboos, particularly incest and the related fear of giving birth to monsters (children with pig-tails in One Hundred Years of solitude). What is more, Brink’s use of language, specifically the playful nicknames that enable people to tell the members of the Lermiet family from one another, is strongly reminiscent of Márquez’s strategy in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which nicknames were also given to all the Aurelianos and Josés born in the Buendía family.

  • 20 See Wendy B. Faris’s article, in which she argues that magic realist texts are the descendants of T (...)

23Imaginings of Sand can also be read as a hypertext of Arabian Nights, a major influence in the magic realist sphere.20 To avoid being raped by Adam Oosthuizen, Kamma, the ‘founder’ of the lineage, resorts to a strategy similar to the one devised by Scheherazade to stay alive:

When the huge Boer took hold of Kamma, she started singing to him, the songs she’d picked up from the tribe since childhood, the way other children collect pebbles or birds’ eggs or feathers. Songs about the Moon and the Dawn, about the Chameleon and the Hare and Death, about the Water Maidens and the Dusky-feet that walk in the dark, about the girl who made the Milky Way by emitting sparks from her sex when she made love with the great hunter-god Heitsi Eibib, about Tsui-Goab the god of red dawn. Adam Oosthuizen was so enchanted by the cadences of her voice that he fell asleep; and nothing further happened. (p. 179)

  • 21 It also points to Brink’s desire to restore the female voices that were erased from historical reco (...)

Moreover, Ouma tells her granddaughter that, when she was younger, she went to Baghdad with her lover and met Sindbad there – not the famous one, but one of his relatives. She also indicates that Arabian Nights used to be her favourite book (pp. 109-110). Imaginings of Sand also includes embedded stories, Ouma’s tales, which suggests that the old lady is the novel’s Scheherazade: she too tells stories in order to stay alive. While Scheherazade does this literally, Ouma wishes to survive metaphorically through the stories she passes on to Kristien. The fact that the young woman was named after her grandmother (p. 3) is not pure chance:21 ‘Kristien’ is not exactly the same as ‘Kristina’, but the two are closely related. This suggests both the continuity of the family line and the constant evolution of identity.

24Ouma Kristina also uses narrative strategies that are clearly borrowed from Arabian tales. When she does not know how to end a story, she simply says: ‘Then an elephant came and blew the story away’. She uses phrases clearly reminiscent of the Spanish idiom ‘era y non era’ (a translation from the Arabic ‘kan ya makan’, as Brink reminds us in The Novel): ‘Once upon a time, there was a girl called Rachel; and then one day she wasn’t any more’ (p. 108); Kristien aptly re-uses this in relation to Ouma (p. 344). It also appears in Devil’s Valley to refer to Emma’s shifting presence: ‘She was and wasn’t there. I still cannot explain it’ (p. 348).

25Thus, magic realism enables Brink to integrate his novels into a literary family, at the same time as his characters’ stories make them part of their own family. Both processes run parallel, each shedding indirect light on the other: the thematic questioning of family and nation as ‘imagined communities’ is mirrored by a metafictional staging of the process of text-reception: to endorse the myths that account for the founding of a community means to become a member of this community, be it a nation or a family. As Rushdie says in an interview,

  • 22 ‘Nos vies et les personnages que nous créons ne cessent de changer. Nous sommes faits de milliers d (...)

Our lives and the characters we create keep on changing. We are made of thousands of stories. Stories make us what we are. Nothing remains the same, that’s why there will always be novels, so irrepressible is our need for fiction. What is family, if not a sum of stories, old and new? (p. 32)22

  • 23 See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Harvard (...)

This sounds like an echo of one of the epigraphs to Devil’s Valley: ‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms (Muriel Rukeyser)’. In the novel, the Lermiets are Lermiets only if they lend credence to the family’s myths: dissenters leave or die. In the valley, myths have a pragmatic function: through myth-reading, group members indicate that they belong to the community, partially give up their individuality, and willingly suspend their disbelief. The building of family identity through the acceptance or rejection of stories reflects the process of establishment of an interpretive community.23 Before Flip’s arrival, the Lermiets used to function as a family by apparently accepting the version of their history that was passed on to them, regardless of alternative versions:

  • 24 This is reminiscent of Julian Barnes’s analysis of history as fabulation, in a radically different (...)

With the lies of stories – all the lies, all the stories – we shape ourselves the way the first person was shaped from the dust of the earth. That is our first and ultimate dust. Who knows, if we understood what was happening to us, we might not have needed stories in the first place. We fabricate yesterdays for ourselves which we can live with, which make the future possible, even if it remains infinitely variable and vulnerable, a whole bloody network of flickerings, an intimate lightning to illuminate the darkness inside. And what lies at the root of it all is not this one’s crime or that one’s sin but the involvement of a whole community. And now I, too, had been drawn into it. (p. 287)24

26Yet, progressively, Flip discovers the existence of ‘sub-communities’ (the women, the Smous) who do not subscribe to the family’s myths but who remained silent before Flip’s arrival in order not to destroy the community. When their tales surface, the members of what used to be an interpretive community no longer authorise one another; they all claim their idiosyncrasies and the community – that is, the Lermiet family – disintegrates, hence probably the apocalyptic atmosphere of the novel.

27In Imaginings of Sand, on the contrary, we witness Kristien’s gradual integration into an interpretive community, that of the women of her family. At first, she is incredulous: she has already heard Ouma’s tales, the bedtime stories she was told in her childhood. Now the old lady presents them as true and Kristien gradually learns to accept them as such:

The stories Ouma Kristina has told me: old ones, new versions of old ones, new ones; but what used to be stories has suddenly begun to coalesce into a history, hers, ours, mine… the truth masquerading as so many sad lies; immaculate conceptions and revenge rapes; the fantasies of a frontier world, all larger than life, the exaggerations of a mind on the threshold of death, or a vision of some deeper, darker truth? Does it matter, does it make any difference? I have listened to her, I have written it all down, I’ve appropriated it, claimed it as my own. (p. 126)

As she becomes conscious of their symbolic value, she realizes that their truth is that of founding her identity as a woman and as a South African, which probably explains her decision to stay at the end of the novel.

28Imaginings of Sand stages a post-apartheid integration process (the novel is set during the week of the first democratic election in 1994), whereas Devil’s Valley metaphorically describes the disintegration of apartheid and its values. By telling us two family (hi)stories, these novels epitomise what South Africa used to be, and what it might become. In Brink’s opinion, this focus on family and genealogy constitutes the very essence of African magic realism, as he recently declared:

  • 25 Antjie Krog, ‘The Writing of Desire’, interview, Daily Mail and Guardian, za@play (August 30 2000): (...)

‘I’d say that the important difference between African magic realism and that of other continents is that it has this link with the forefathers, it directly influences how we live with one another.’25

  • 26 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 27.

Both novels reread, or rather recreate, South African mythology, and go back to the origins of the nation – at least since it was colonised by Europeans, hence their cyclical – or rather spiral – nature: in Devil’s Valley, as in Imaginings of Sand, the last words echo the first, but fiction has come to existence in between, both as an eternal return and an eternal renewal, both ‘truth’ and ‘lie’: fiction is only words, but words have the power ‘not simply to escape from the inhibitions of apartheid but to construct and deconstruct new possibilities; to activate the imagination in its exploration of those silences previously inaccessible; to play with the future on that needlepoint where it meets past and present; and to be willing to risk everything in the leaping flame of the word as it turns into world’.26

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Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered in French at the SEAC conference in Tours (November 2001).

2 Looking on Darkness was the first novel in Afrikaans to be banned by the apartheid authorities.

3 André Brink, ‘A Real and Magical Devil’, Leadership, 16-2, 1997. http://www.leadership.co.za/issues/1997august/articles/chimney.html

4 In Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa. Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995, CUP (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 14-28.

5 Vintage (London, 1998 [1996]). All further references will be to this edition.

6 Vintage (London, 2000 [1998]). All further references will be to this edition.

7 Brink, ‘Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-Apartheid Narrative’, in Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, OUP (London and Cape Town, 1998), pp. 29-42, p. 40. This reminds us of Leonard Thompson’s analysis of political mythologies: ‘Myths are historical phenomena. Myths originate in specific circumstances as a product of specific interests, and they change with the changing interests of successive generations and successive regimes’ (The Political Mythology of Apartheid, Yale UP [New Haven & London, 1985], p. 8). Thompson also quotes from Henry Tudor, who wrote in Political Myth: ‘Myths are, therefore, believed to be true, not because the historical evidence is compelling, but because they make sense of men’s present experience. They tell the story of how it came about’ (p. 20).

8 The same idea is developed by Brink in An Act of Terror (Vintage [London: 1991], p. 659), in which Thomas, the narrator, tells the story of his ancestors to understand his own: ‘In Greek, I read it somewhere, the word for truth, aletheia, is not the opposite of lie as one would expect, but of lethe, forgetting…. Truth is only what has been remembered, salvaged, from that territory of oblivion. It is the bungled word that emerges at the far end of a line of whispering children. And it is in the name of this truth that I must invent those who invented me. Others consult fortune-tellers to predict their future for them: I am trying to predict my past’.

9 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 15

10 In Afrique du Sud. Naissance d’une nation plurielle, Dominique Lanni writes that during the Great Trek, the black woman servant was a sexual additive for her master, but that, in order to avoid excommunication, Afrikaners developed a justificatory rhetoric paradoxically based on religion: ‘Ce sont les personnages bibliques qui justifient la conduite sexuelle des Afrikaners et métamorphosent le péché en vertu’ (Editions de l’Aube [La Tour d’Aigues, 1997], p. 38).

11 According to Dominique Lanni, in the early days of the Cape colony, men developed a self-justificatory discourse, once again based on biblical notions: ‘L’expression du sexe suscite la formulation d’un discours: le sauvage est propice à une relation pécheresse. Par la pénétration des femmes khoï, les colons blancs rejouent la scène du péché originel. Face au discours accusateur formulé en Europe par les pontes de la Compagnie Néerlandaise des Indes Orientales à leur encontre, s’affirme pour les colons la nécessité de recourir à un discours apte à justifier plus qu’une dépravation, une distorsion de l’écriture divine ainsi que des fins de l’usage du corps: punition de ce phénomène de jouissance, l’expulsion du corps métis’ (p. 11, emphasis mine).

12 ‘La meilleure arme contre le mythe, c’est peut-être de le mythifier à son tour, c’est de produire un mythe artificiel: et ce mythe reconstitué sera une véritable mythologie. Puisque le mythe vole du langage, pourquoi ne pas voler le mythe ? Il suffira pour cela d’en faire lui-même le point de départ d’une troisième chaîne sémiologique, de poser sa signification comme premier terme d’un second mythe” (Roland Barthes, ‘Le Mythe aujourd’hui’, in Mythologies, Seuil, [Paris, 1970], p. 222.
Translated by Annette Lavers at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/g/DRBR/myth.html>

13 ‘La rhétorique de Bouvard et Pécuchet va devenir la forme du nouveau système; le concept sera ici produit par Flaubert lui-même, par le regard de Flaubert sur le mythe que s’étaient construit Bouvard et Pécuchet: ce sera leur velléité constitutive, leur inassouvissement, l’alternance panique de leurs apprentissages, bref ce que je voudrais bien pouvoir appeler (mais je sens des foudres à l’horizon): la bouvard-et-pécuché-ité. Quant à la signification, c’est l’œuvre, c’est Bouvard et Pécuchet pour nous. Le pouvoir du second mythe c’est de fonder le premier en naïveté regardée” (pp. 222-223, transl. Annette Lavers).

14 Routledge (London/New York, 1989), p. 51.

15 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 23.

16 ‘Stories of History’, p. 42.

17 Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism, Macmillan/St Martin’s Press (London/New York, 1998), p. 146.

18 ‘Sur le plan de l’écriture, mes modèles ont désormais pour nom Márquez, Vargas Llosa. En lisant les Latino-américains, j’ai pris conscience du profit avec lequel je pouvais utiliser les procédés traditionnels pour raconter des histoires, par exemple la tradition orale noire ou, plus proche de moi, les traditions propres aux Boers. Pendant nos cent ans de solitude à nous, les premiers Boers qui s’étaient aventurés à l’intérieur du pays se divertissaient en racontant des histoires. Dans ces histoires, comme dans la tradition orale noire, il y a toujours une perméabilité entre les morts et les vivants, entre le passé et le présent, entre les ancêtres et leurs descendants. Il s’agit très souvent de spectres, de revenants, de fantômes. J’ai puisé dans ces deux grandes traditions les thèmes et la méthode de mon nouveau roman.’ (Tirthankar Chanda, ‘André Brink en quête d’un avenir pour les lettres d’Afrique du Sud’, L’Humanité, 11 septembre 1999, https://www.humanite.fr/andre-brink-en-quete-dun-avenir-pour-les-lettres-dafrique-du-sud-213738, translation mine.

19 The Novel. Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino, Macmillan (London, 1998), pp. 231-252.

20 See Wendy B. Faris’s article, in which she argues that magic realist texts are the descendants of The Arabian Nights (‘Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction’, in Lois Zamora Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris, eds, Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community, Duke UP [Durham/London, 1995], pp. 163-190).

21 It also points to Brink’s desire to restore the female voices that were erased from historical records, since it playfully alludes to a novel which had a huge influence on Brink: ‘Do you know Kristin Lavrandsdatter, by Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novel from the 1920s, which re-imagines the Nordic sagas in terms of a woman’s point of view? That has really inspired me’, he said to John Higgins in a recent interview (‘What You Never Knew You Knew: An Interview with André Brink’, in Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 8, n° 1 [1999], pp. 7-15, p. 14). Similarly, Brink’s own approach in Imaginings of Sand could be described as a re-imagining of South African history in terms of a lineage of the women’s point of view.

22 ‘Nos vies et les personnages que nous créons ne cessent de changer. Nous sommes faits de milliers d’histoires. Les histoires nous construisent. Rien ne demeure en l’état, c’est pour cela qu’il y aura toujours des romans, tant notre besoin de fiction est irrépressible. Qu’est-ce qu’une famille, sinon une somme d’histoires anciennes et nouvelles ?’ (emphasis and translation mine). Quoted by Jacqueline Bardolph in ‘Les Enfants de Rushdie: quel réalisme, quelle magie? » in Xavier Garnier, dir., Le Réalisme merveilleux, L’Harmattan (Paris, 1998), pp. 19-34, p. 32.

23 See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Harvard UP (Cambridge, Ma./London, 1980).

24 This is reminiscent of Julian Barnes’s analysis of history as fabulation, in a radically different context: ‘The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that bum for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm, We think we know why we’re here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? – we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history’ (A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Picador [London, 1989], p.242.

25 Antjie Krog, ‘The Writing of Desire’, interview, Daily Mail and Guardian, za@play (August 30 2000): www.mg.co.za/mg/books/0008/000830-brink.html

26 ‘Interrogating Silence’, p. 27.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André BrinkCommonwealth Essays and Studies, 25.2 | 2003, 17-31.

Electronic reference

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, Magic Realism in Two Post-Apartheid Novels by André BrinkCommonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 25.2 | 2003, Online since 07 April 2022, connection on 07 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/11795; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/1247s

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About the author

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain

Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I)

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain teaches at the Université Aix-Marseille I. She is currently writing a doctoral thesis on five of André Brink’s novels.

By this author

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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