Aviadoras

Like all records, the diary’s function is one of preservation. As a form of autobiographical writing, it constitutes a record of its creator’s inner life and has the potential to serve as a personal archive. In addition, the diary can also function as a form of biographical writing, in which the focus is on the diarist’s interaction with others, and his/her commentary on these individuals. Therefore, it can also serve as a record of particulars relating to the lives of others.

Since the writing act tends to focus the diarist’s attention on the immediate present, the

diary’s discourse produces “a crisis of attention to the present, a shift to a series of current events rather than narrative perceptive on the personal past” (Nussbaum 1988: 133). Diaries thus have the ability to capture the immediacy of events. They typically have a flexible structure and, as they are composed within the midst of the experience, are able to report on events as they happen, or soon thereafter. Indeed, Milla’s entries are usually penned in haste and have a strung-together style, which enables her to record important moments as they occur. Jak reveals this vigilantly ‘archival’ quality of his wife’s writing by enquiring whether she thinks she can make “time stand still when (she) write(s) such strung-together sentences”

(2006: 316). As Louise Viljoen points out, the diaries are the most spontaneous and immediate component of Milla’s focalization. She indicates that they are also the most circumspect of the narrative strategies, the remainder of which have the appeal of being uncensored, as they emerge from her stream of consciousness (2008: 12).

Similar to the archive, the diary’s unique capacity to preserve the immediacy of events resides in its ability to create what Hennie Aucamp has termed doubled time (1996: 8). It has the potential to make its author ‘relive’ past events several times over, once when they are committed to writing, and numerous times hereafter when the document is reread. After committing important information to the safekeeping of her diaries, Milla often consults them to gain a new perspective on past events, or to evoke the emotions that accompanied momentous occasions, such as her satisfaction when the child Agaat first begins to speak (2006: 518). This feature also explains why, despite the immediacy of the diary entries as a narrative strategy in their own right, Milla is transported back in time when Agaat reads the diaries aloud and is set on a path of reminiscence and contemplation reflected by her largely retrospective account.

The diarist’s commentary on his/her social environment makes the diary a good source of historically and socially specific information. When diarists/autobiographical narrators write to chronicle events, a particular moment in time, or specific members of the community or family, they are actively “making ‘history’” (Smith and Watson: 10). This type of writing can provide a reader with insight into a historical moment, a social community, and the prevailing beliefs of a particular milieu. Similar to conventional archives, the diary operates under the veneer of truthfulness and reliability. The candid and introspective qualities of an autobiographical disclosure ensure that its truth status is assumed. Thus, diaries are often viewed as trustworthy, though unofficial, documents. Nevertheless, autobiographical truth is

not historical truth, but rather “an intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of life” (Smith and Watson 2001: 12).

Like any other record, the diary can make no claims to truth, but remains a predisposed account, subject to matters of deliberate construction and notions such as exclusion and excess.

The diary’s function as an archive or a record of an individual’s life is further suggested by its potential to act as an enduring and accessible record. It is external to its creator and serves as a location where information otherwise disregarded or forgotten can be kept safe, and from where it can be retrieved later. While not normally intended for public readership, the diary has the advantage that others can access it (particularly after its writer’s death) as individuals who keep diaries are not likely to destroy them before they die. Unlike Milla’s other narratives, which remain in her stream of consciousness, the diaries are an accessible information source for those around her, and are read by Jak, Agaat, and later Jakkie. While they contain her most intimate thoughts, Milla’s diaries are not produced for her readership alone. Their importance as an information source for others is implied in that she makes a great show of writing in her little books, especially in Jak and Agaat’s presence and is careless with her notebooks by leaving them lying around, as if inviting her husband and servant to disregard her privacy and read them. Her intentions are so transparent however, that Jak identifies the diaries as the form of public display they are, and cautions her that, “[Y]ou should rather not sit & write it up in public (…) it’s like lifting your skirts & peeing in the main street” (2006: 299). It can thus be said that, despite its private nature, Milla’s diaries are accessed by at least three different readers within the story and provides an accessible record of her reflections. Jakkie is accurate in his assessment of his mother’s diaries when he believes that they contain “[e]verything that Milla de Wet saw fit to bequeath her readers”

(2006: 680). They were written in “the hope that somebody would discover it” (2006: 680).

Indeed, Milla appears to ‘invite’ Agaat to read the diaries by leaving her the key to the sideboard where the notebooks are held (2006: 602). Her actions reveal that she always intended the diaries for Agaat’s readership, since they contain a record of her childhood.

Furthermore, the act of diary writing is always underpinned by the diarist’s desire (whether conscious or subconscious) to create an enduring record of his/her life, one that will testify to the particulars of his/her existence. The diarist’s longing to preserve his/her identity is an existential effort to counteract the erasure brought by death. An individual creates a diary “om

dood te zijn, om te spreken buiten de tijd, om jezelf te doen herinnerd worden door iedereen”

(Pavese in De Martelaere 1993: 165). As a work in progress documenting moments that have already transpired in the diarist’s life, the diary is a record its writer can regularly consult to gain an overview of his/her life well before death. As a means for the individual to anticipate death, the diary acquires a ‘posthumous’ character.

Milla’s diaries thus constitute a type of death narrative, or autothanatography, defined as

“autobiographical texts that confront illness and death by performing a life at a limit of its own, or another’s, undoing” (Smith and Watson 2001: 188). While Milla’s diaries are compiled some time before her illness, after which she does not (and indeed cannot) continue writing in them, they have the appearance of autothanatography in that they are presented to the reader in the historical present of the novel. An important feature of a deathbed narrative is that it is dialogic, even when it appears to be monologic. The writing subject’s narrative is open to being ‘read’ by an outsider, and is dependent on an interloper for constructions of meaning, with the result that the dying person’s account “may be completed by another after the subject’s death” (Egan in Smith and Watson 2001: 188). In Milla’s case, this is especially accurate, as her diaries are not destroyed the way she intended, but remain as the seemingly irrefutable record of her life and her manipulation of Agaat’s life story. Agaat not only reads Milla’s diaries aloud, thereby exposing their inaccuracies, but also serves as co-author through her corrections, deletions, and annotations of the diaries’ content. The information contained in the diaries reveals the irony of Milla’s present as her life is ‘undone’ by her illness and Agaat’s vengeance, similar to the manner in which she first erases and then reshapes Agaat’s identity to her own preference. According to Susanna Egan, the autothanatographic account intensifies the rendition of lived experience, the immediacy of crisis, and the revealing processes of self-understanding (Egan in Smith and Watson 2001:

188), which form part of the dying process. Indeed, Milla experiences all of these emotions in that the account of her past intensifies her experience of the present, and she is gradually led to confront herself and gain self-understanding through Agaat’s intervention.

While the diary operates under an assumed truth status, like the archive it is subject to processes of structuring and is governed by matters of exclusion and excess. While it has a haphazard appearance, Milla’s writing is subject to careful styling, and is guided by the intentional omission of certain events and the excessive reporting of others. The intentionally styled appearance of the diary is partly because, while private, its security cannot be ensured

or adequately policed and it exists under the constant threat of outside readership. This perceived threat generates a “vast machinery of psychological analysis and explanation”

(Nussbaum 1988: 136) in the writer, with the effect that the diarist generally experiences complete disclosure of the self as inherently dangerous. Owing to constant vigilance on the writer’s part regarding what is safe and unsafe subject matter, diaries are often characterised by a contrived and self-conscious style. They either omit matters deemed inappropriate for public scrutiny, or make use of deliberate ambiguity. The deliberately styled appearance of the diary may be attributed to the writer’s desire to create a candid and trustworthy narrative.

This manifests in the application of techniques such as chronology, the (re)arrangement of key events to best effect, accuracy and completeness, evaluation of the self and its experiences, and the attainment of closure by ‘closing off’ events. These techniques are also characteristic of fiction and thus draw the diary into the realm of a purposely styled narrative.

Reading back “everything that [she has] written so far in these booklets” (2006: 201) one evening, Milla is dismayed that their content “wouldn’t make much sense to an outsider who doesn’t know the circumstances” (2006: 201). She puts the diaries through multiple drafts in an attempt to make her writing meaningful and accessible to others. Jakkie notices that his mother edited the diaries in an attempt to structure their content. He notes, “there were corrections in her handwriting with dates, days and even mónths, yéárs later than the original entry. As if she’d had trouble rendering the whole truth in just one version” (2006: 680). This insight is important because it suggests that there is the possibility for many different ‘truths’

or versions of Milla and Agaat’s history and that the dying woman’s account is but one such version. Dismayed by their lack of aesthetic appeal, Milla even considers writing in English, in the hope that “domesticities will sound better to me in a world language” (2006: 202).

Here, Milla’s comments reveal the author’s metalingual scepticism. It is significant that Agaat was originally written in Afrikaans (an endangered culture both in post-apartheid South Africa and the globalised world), but that subsequent translations have elevated the novel to the global literary arena. Milla’s commentary thus reveals the author’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of English’s privileged position in the world, and its ability to elevate the most ordinary subject matter into poetry. Among the many corrections she makes to the diaries, Milla considers the deliberate application of “pace, texture & wry moments” (2006: 202) to their contents in order to have them “read like a thriller” (2006: 202). Even the heartfelt dedication written in the front of the diary is put through multiple drafts and it takes “three attempts before [she is] satisfied” (2006: 202) and can copy it neatly into the front of the first

diary. While she does not pay attention to the rules of grammar and syntax, she is concerned with finding the most precise words to express important events. She delays writing the dedication to Agaat, simply because she cannot find the right words do so. Nevertheless, despite her careful attention to the writing process, Milla is aware that her emotions do not

“sound heartfelt on paper” (2006: 202). This too, may be interpreted as the commentary of the implied author, who is concerned with producing a novel that is aesthetically pleasing and engaging.