DERECHO A UNAS GARANTÍAS LEGALES Y A UN PROCEDIMIENTO

Milla’s lyrical passages are the most challenging narrative form in Agaat. These fluid stream of consciousness narratives are akin to poetry and appear mostly in the third position (after her deathbed narration and flashbacks) in each chapter, with the exception of the final chapter, where they appear last and depict Milla’s semi-conscious state before death. They chart the development of her illness from her diagnosis, through the various stages of the syndrome’s progression, to her death. The seemingly inchoate passages appear in moments when Milla temporarily loses consciousness (often due to a lack of oxygen) and their level of surface coherence diminishes as her illness progresses, becoming almost incomprehensible in the moments just before her death.

These passages may be termed intermezzos, with full understanding of the term’s multiple meanings as: a) an interlude b) a short piece of music that is performed between longer movements of an extended musical score, and c) a short musical composition, usually for a solo pianist. These sections signify an interval, or break from the coherent, logically presented story contained in the rest of Milla’s account. On a metafictional level, their importance as musical terms point to their structural composition. These sections are far shorter than the rest of Milla’s extended narrative, and their content is guided only by Milla’s consciousness, and are so the product of a single mind. The other forms of Milla’s extended account are all either influenced by, or concerned with, Agaat. The coloured woman not only edits and/or rewrites the diary entries, but also determines the order of their presentation to the reader. In addition, the matriarch’s deathbed accounts and flashbacks are both preoccupied with Agaat’s behaviour and appear to prioritise her subjectivity over that of Milla. Consequently, the intermezzo-sections are the only narrative platform that is concerned exclusively with Milla’s thoughts and feelings.

The lyrical passages have a fluid, and distinctly dream-like quality, perhaps of wish-fulfilment

expressed as a hallucinatory experience in the course of Milla’s sleep, or her momentary lapses in consciousness. Also embedded in these narrative moments, are excerpts from Milla’s diaries that depict moments from her past. The inclusion of extracts from the diaries may be explained by the fact that the diaries (reread to Milla by Agaat) are often in Milla’s mind, so that her subconscious is burdened with the implications of her writings. Hein Viljoen argues that Milla’s intermezzos are also indicative of “wat Julia Kristeva die semiotiese element van taal noem, wat ritme, intonasie, gebaar en melodie vooropstel” (2005: 175).

Hence, the intermezzos are a space to portray those experiences, such as the contemplation of death, for which language is essentially inadequate. This technique offers insight into the deepest recesses of Milla’s psyche, and is an effective technique used by the author in her presentation of the dying woman’s character.

Stylistically, these passages display an experimental style and are distinguished typographically from the rest of the text using italics. The excerpts from Milla’s consciousness incorporate many techniques associated with poetry, such as strong imagery, a disregard for the traditional rules of syntax, lyrical flights of the imagination and departures from rationality, and the use of free association and sensory perceptions. These poetic devices depict the dying woman’s chaotic stream of consciousness, and highlights that the intricate workings of the human mind do not prescribe to principles of logic and coherence. On a metafictional level, the use of poetry also suggests the author’s lyrical bent as a published poet of two early collections of poetry, Sprokkelster (1977) and Groenstaar (1983).

Stream of consciousness is utilized to signify a character’s “general psychic processes”

(Hutcheon 1984: 26) and to express the “particular creative [psychic processes] in the manufacture of [his/her] fictive universe” (Hutcheon 1984: 26). Used in the intermezzos, the stream of consciousness technique demonstrates that Milla’s consciousness is in a state of anxiety and confusion. Many of the poetic devices used in these ‘lyrical flight’ passages have implications beyond the aesthetic, such as the psychological processes of free association and symbolisation in the dying woman’s mind.

As the closest approximation of the disorderliness of Milla’s free-flowing thoughts and of her unedited stream of consciousness, these passages are written in direct interior monologue.

This technique presents a character’s consciousness to the reader with negligible author

interference, and with no auditor assumed (1972: 25). The “elements of incoherence and fluidity” (1972: 27) in these sections are emphasised stylistically by the use of imagery, and syntactically by a complete lack of punctuation, a specific subject matter, or sound links between unrelated thoughts. The least mediated of the four narrative techniques used by the author; Milla’s intermezzos are stylistically similar to the portrayal of Molly Bloom’s ruminations in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and similar passages in the fiction of the modernists Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. The use of this form of interior monologue at the end of Agaat is particularly effective, as the reader is by now familiar enough with Milla character, for her jumbled stream of consciousness to be informative and intriguing. It is significant that instances of direct interior monologue (such as those constituting the lyrical intermezzos) are mostly embedded in Van Niekerk’s novel towards the end of most chapters, and only once the situation of the dying woman and the nature of her illness have been communicated to the reader.

The intermezzos indicate that Milla’s consciousness cannot be concentrated for very long in its processes and oscillate rapidly between subjects. Instead, her thoughts are guided by psychological free association, which involves the “power of one thing to suggest another through an association of qualities in common or in contrast, wholly, or partially – even to the barest suggestion” (1972: 43). The dying woman’s free association is controlled by three factors: her memory, as its basis, her senses, which guide it, and her imagination, which determines its elasticity. As she slips into death, she recalls the very beginning of Agaat’s story, when she found the child in a fireplace. In her delirium, Agaat resembles a creature with a “forehead of flame eyes of soot mouth from which glowing coals crumble roaring flames” (2006: 672). In the final moments before death, Milla’s consciousness is influenced by her sensory awareness of Agaat’s presence, but she finds it impossible to distinguish between her own body and that of Agaat. This signals her profound identification with the coloured woman and confirms their strong bond, while the apparent fusion of their bodies recalls Agaat’s position as Milla’s first child. The matriarch’s last thoughts depict an imagined conversation between herself and Agaat, in which she asks, “where are you agaat?”

(2006: 673), and the latter answers “here I am” (2006: 673). In Milla’s imagination, Agaat becomes her guide in death, she is “a mouth that with mine mists the glass in the valley of the shadow of death” (2006: 673). The matriarch’s last awareness is that there lies “in [her] hand the hand of the small agaat” (2006: 674) and she is comforted by this. Consequently, the novel ends with the suggestion that the women have attained reconciliation.

Milla’s final intermezzos strongly reminds of the closing moments of Eben Venter’s Ek stamel en sterwe (1996) [My Beautiful Death (2006)]. Here, the dying protagonist’s faltering consciousness is represented through unravelling linguistic constructs, with all thought eventually disintegrating into meaninglessness. Stylistically, Milla’s last thoughts are represented in a similar way. In this manner, Agaat exhibits a richness of intertextual allusion, as the author incorporates themes and techniques used in other works of fiction into the fabric of the novel.