Is itching pain? How must I reply? No itching is not pain. It’s suffering, yes, but it’s like somebody who suffers an urgent call of nature. Relief is what one wants. Not comfort. Not nursing. People with an itch and people with an urgent call of nature, they belong in a farce. In a Greek comedy, perhaps? A philosopher shitting in the shadow of national monuments; a guffawing catharsis. The yearning for inconsolability is something else. That’s for tragedies. But nobody itches in tragedies.
(2006: 304)
While in colloquial speech an “urgent call of nature” refers to the body’s need to defecate or urinate, freed from this euphemism, it might be considered an urgent call for an intentional recognition stance. I argue this in the sense that the “urgent call of nature” requires an “excavation for an exposition” of the symbolic order (2006: 397). This allows for what Heyns refers to as a “surrender to the urgencies of human desires” in order to merge “with a larger order of being” (2009: 132). Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject refers to one’s reaction to an impending breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between self/Other. The abject draws one “toward the place where meaning collapses” (1982: 2). She argues that “abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (1982: 10). The abject then represents primal repression that occurs before the split between conscious and unconscious, self/Other and signified/signifier, that is, before language.
Milla’s repression of her desires is partly ascribed to the concept of salvation that her Christian Nationalism inculcates. Salvation resists the careful consideration of meaning, as it denies active agency and advocates restraint in the face of predetermined destinies that guarantee a life of completeness. The abject, on the other hand, “does not respect borders, positions [and] rules,” and therefore “disturbs identity, system [and] order” (1982: 4). The abject is associated with pre-lingual responses and is connected to fear and jouissance, rather than restraints of the symbolic order. For Kristeva, phobias such as Milla’s nervous disorder, are linked to “disappointed desires or … desires diverted from their objects” (1982: 35). Situated knowledges as embodied meaning is thus linked to the abject that challenges and resists metaphors of completeness. This serves as a further call to re-invest language and to “unthink the symbolic” order of patriarchal and so-called rational responses to the ecological crises (emphasis in original, 2005: 251).
The novel illustrates the ways in which a denial of desire and agency enables those in power to use the concept of restraint to train willing ‘soldiers’ who are prepared to defend the boundaries of self-created privilege. Therefore, the military defeats suffered by South Africa during the Border War (as the Angolan War was also known) brought home the agency of the ‘enemy’ and were considered
a decisive factor in bringing about the end of Apartheid. Furthermore, Jakkie’s assertion of active agency, by deserting the Defence Force and refusing to sacrifice himself for his father’s “pathetic National Party,” results in Jak’s death (2006: 589). Similarly, if biblical narratives had depicted Jesus Christ as resisting his Father by refusing martyrdom and the carrying of his cross, he too would have refused inherited guilty baggage which necessitates salvation.
Milla’s abduction of Agaat illustrates the ways in which concepts of salvation centralise desire, which seems symbolic of conquering narratives that define desire as a “yearning to catch up with something, to capture” (2006: 153). Kristeva says that while the “abject cannot be assimilated”
it “beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects” (1982: 1). Milla senses that her desire to take Agaat is wrong, but is unable to articulate this. This foregrounds her difficulty to attain physical and psychological independence. Thus, when Agaat resists Milla’s attempts to capture her and forces Milla to emphasise inherited conquering narratives by making her chase her and pin her down, Milla becomes angry and threatens to tie Agaat to a pole “like a baboon” until she is “tame” (2006: 670).
Covenants of Promised Lands and paradisiacal completeness blind Milla to rules of rhetoric that dictate the subservience of Others. Kristeva relates abjection to the primitive effort to separate culture “from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder” (1982: 12-13). This supports my argument that the removal of pagan animism enabled the reduction of nature to the level of the symbolic. Haraway importantly notes that innocence too easily insists on the corollary of victimhood (1991: 157), which Van Niekerk’s novel reveals as the “sickness of Grootmoedersdrift” (italics in original, 2006: 235), translated as “Granny’s passion” (2006: 6). Frantz Fanon argues that humankind attains freedom when “set free of the trampoline that is the resistance of others, and dig[s] into its own flesh to find a meaning” (1986: 11).
Milla, like her mother before her, only begins to set herself free near the end of her paralysed life of habituated restraint. Milla relies on Agaat’s literal and figurative digging into the flesh to foreground the potential for resistance to centralised structures.
Embodied objectivity is difficult to achieve through the dictates of civil or institutional duty that demands the tyranny of imposed notions of subjecthood and belonging. By thinking around dualistic thought a “Do It Yourself” (2006: 302) regeneration becomes possible, one that is capable of accommodating alternative perspectives while acknowledging one’s personal experience. This contradicts the Dominee’s Christian Nationalist dogma that people are “conceived and born in sin”
and in need of salvation outside themselves (2006: 565). Ironically, however, it is the trickster, Agaat, who is the ‘saviour’ and catalyst for ‘salvation’ of a different sort.
In a humorous rewriting of the crucifixion myth, one that Milla notes is “less far-fetched” a doctrine than the “Resurrection after three days,” the novel undermines the concept of salvation (2006: 302). Marti Kheel argues that salvation involves a restraint of errant passions, which is evident in the Church’s change in moral focus from “prudence to obedience” when passions eluded the Church fathers’ control (1993: 253). Similarly, patriarchal discourse attempts to keep private, feminised emotions from entering the public ‘reasoning’ domain, which might threaten control.95
Martyrdom is also parodied in Milla being inflicted with pruriency on her deathbed, which is described as the “Scourge of the Seven-Year Itch” (2006: 301). The seven-year itch refers to marital infidelity and reinforces Van Niekerk’s criticism of a heterosexual marriage contract, which seems to have infidelity written into it idiomatically. In addition, the number seven is powerfully symbolic in the novel. After seven years of marriage and loneliness on Grootmoedersdrift Milla abducts Agaat on the 16
The word ‘passion’ has its origins in the submissions and sufferings of the pain of a martyr, particularly those of Jesus nailed to his cross. Jak notes that Jesus is Milla’s justification for accepting her victimised status (2006: 413-414). The Dominee reinforces the concept of martyrdom at Agaat’s christening, which concludes with Agaat asking: “Where is the cross I have to shoulder?” (2006:
569). Significantly, the straps of Agaat’s servant’s uniforms form the cross on her back. Agaat’s re-narration of inherited subservience transforms her servant’s caps into a “crown of glorified cotton”
(2006: 55). This parody of the cross encourages liberation from manipulatory concepts, such as, martyrdom, salvation and innocence.
th December 1953, the Day of the Covenant (2006: 92). Seven years later on Agaat’s birthday, the 12th
little Agaat, my child that I pushed away from me, my child that I forsook after I’d appropriated her, that I caught without capturing her, that I locked up before I’d unlocked her!
July 1960, Agaat is moved out of the house when a pregnant Milla implements the policies of Apartheid in their home. It may be argued that Van Niekerk sees Milla’s betrayal of Agaat (a kind of infidelity in itself) as a radical neglect of her material world, which is evidenced in her
“inexpressible regret” over
Why did I not keep you as I found you? What made me abduct you … (2006:
540).
Pruriency is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as literally the “physical fact or sensation of itching,” or figuratively, as the “quality or condition of mental itching” (2007: 2386).
Milla’s lifelong submission to martyrdom, in relation to both religious and patriarchal discourse, is portrayed as the cause of her paralysis that concomitantly prevents her from alleviating unpleasant
95 Jak says “[y]ou may think you know all about farming, Milla, but you mustn’t come and tell me about politics”
(2006: 137).
sensations such as itching. This itch becomes a metaphor in the text that Van Niekerk employs to reveal needs that are persistently repressed. When Milla cannot scratch her metaphorical itch she attempts to undermine the Bible and its doctrine of martyrdom that encourages living with unpleasant sensations. She does so by turning to a “Do It Yourself” life-skills booklet that details relief being attained when you realise that “what you assumed to be óne sense impression with óne name, is in fact a sequence of different impressions, nameless and unnameable” (2006: 302). Milla’s description of an unpleasant sensation relates to Marilyn Frye’s analysis of oppression as a “network of systematically related barriers” that are imperceptible, not “accidental, occasional or avoidable,” and which collectively work to “immobilize, confine and restrict” freedom (2005: 72,86).
Van Niekerk shows that relief from oppression is dependent on Milla’s acknowledging these unpleasant sensations as a result of a network of power manipulations that might be altered through re-signifying familiar doctrine. This involves turning away from abstracted, transcendental and restraining meanings contained in the word ‘passion,’ to an embedded self-acknowledging meaning contained in prurience.96
Tragedy conceives of evil in terms of guilt; its mechanism of redemption is victimage, its plot moves inexorably toward sacrifice and the ‘cult of the kill.’
Comedy conceives of evil not as guilt, but as error; its mechanism of redemption is recognition rather than victimage, and its plot moves not toward sacrifice but to the exposure of fallibility. (1994: 68)
Thus, if Milla cannot scratch her own itch she determines she will need to rewrite the “Book … from front to back” in order to dodge “arrow-headed letters” straying “from a text” (2006: 303). Here Milla reveals not only the power of biblical discourse, but also the violence that tragic covenants of salvation inflict. Joseph Meeker argues that tragedy “as a literary form and as a philosophical attitude” seems to be an “invention of Western culture, specifically the Greeks,” and is “conspicuously absent, for instance, in Oriental, Middle Eastern, and primitive cultures” (1996:
157). Stephen O’Leary defines the difference between tragedy and comedy as a choice of frame:
This excerpt not only supports Meeker’s argument that tragedy is an unrealistic view of ecological evolution, but suggests that a change in literary mode has the potential to transform an event.
As I argue, Milla wants to re-write the “unconsidered” meaning contained in her diaries, but is impeded by her “yearning for inconsolability” or to be a suffering martyr (2006: 11,304). To prevent herself stagnating further than she has without speech and actions, Milla longs for the maps of Grootmoedersdrift so that she can place her world inside her (2006: 40,80,105,399). Agaat relieves Milla’s tragic disposition through demonstrating that the “earth like heaven is not abóve us,
96 Michiel Heyns, in The Reluctant Passenger (2003), has Andrew Conroy ask whether people have learnt to distinguish between passion and prurience – “from the Latin prurire, to itch.” Conroy refers to passion as the “great goat-bleat of the modern age” that has been commodified into “a holy duty, an ennobling state, a higher mode of being” (2003: 306-307). Conroy’s death seems to be due to his inability to distinguish between these two concepts.
but inside us” (2006: 399). Agaat’s nursing of Milla enables her to challenge Milla’s alienation from nature and foregrounds that Milla, on dying, will return to the earth of Grootmoedersdrift, which Milla eventually acknowledges as heaven (2006: 555). Van Niekerk is harnessing the metaphoric potential of physical constipation as a side-effect of repression, of being “force-fed” (2006: 681) a particular discourse that she cannot swallow and digest. This is evident when Agaat bribes Milla into relieving herself before unveiling the maps of Grootmoedersdrift. Agaat requires a “poop for a peep,”
a “panful for a panorama of Grootmoedersdrift” (2006: 397). Agaat reminds Milla of the power of conquering narratives and thus alleviates Milla’s blocked constitution by allowing her to hear the Other side of the story. By resisting the status of tragic victim, Milla changes the definition of her life’s performance from “drama” to “farce” (2006: 304). This transition in literary mode marks Milla’s butterfly-like metamorphosis, from the tragic depiction of noble creature sacrificed for her beliefs, to the comic depiction of fallible absurdities, depicted farcically as “an urgent call of nature”
(2006: 304). The recognition of Milla’s repressed desires enables her to resist Dr Euthanasia Leroux’s attempts to define her life only in terms of “illness and suffering” (2006: 238).
The tragic view, according to Meeker, depends on the belief that humans exist in a state of conflict with powers that are greater than themselves, and this encourages a conquering mindset to defend human mastery in the face of destruction. Comedy, however, is less concerned with abstracted cultural morals, and instead focuses on our capacity for survival. Comedy more readily minimises aggression, while encouraging diversity, and fundamentally seeks to establish equilibrium.
Therefore, Meeker argues the “comic mode of human behaviour represented in literature is the closest art has come to describing man (sic) as an adaptive animal,” which resists monolithic passions (1996: 168). Meeker argues:
In the present environmental dilemma, humanity stands like a pioneer species facing heroically the consequences of its own tragic behavior, with a growing need to learn from the more stable comic heroes of nature, the [other] animals. (1996: 164)97
Agaat’s rituals might be viewed as a celebration of the renewal of biological welfare despite metaphysical despair, as they enable her to respond to situations with an “energetic” step (2006:
677), rather than Milla’s paralysing tragic abstractions which only result in parody. Survival does not need to depend on the fittest conquering the weakest, as too many narratives have led us to believe, but on the evolutionary capacity for adaptation and accommodation. I suggest Agaat is imbued with macabre humour in order to recognise human fallibility and negotiate a legacy of martyrdom, which is detailed in the grotesque realism of the nursing of Milla’s paralytic body.
97 Meeker’s statement is particularly apt in the face of the outcome of the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change. The organisers of 350.org said “our leaders have been a disappointment, and the talks have ended without any kind of fair, ambitious, or legally binding global agreement.”
It may be argued that a comic modernist sensibility is enabling, allowing one to change oneself rather than the environment. It certainly appears that Van Niekerk’s treatment of Milla is imbued with this spirit. Van Niekerk’s macabre parodies undermine Apartheid through incorporating what Bakhtin describes as the carnivalesque: those forms of unofficial culture that resist official culture through laughter, parody and grotesque realism (2001: 1187). This seems similar to Haraway’s “powerful infidel heteroglossia” by means of which she theorises “the complications of language, the frustrations of communicating experience, and the necessity of negotiating rather than policing boundaries that are becoming increasingly unstable” (2001: 2268).
Religious rhetoric is one such example of the policing of boundaries. It reinforces Milla’s victimised status that paralyses her agency, making her dependent on Agaat for the “laxation of [her]
sensitive system” (2006: 399). Agaat undermines God as the saviour figure of guilty people and instead suggests a deformed figure of linguistic regeneration and liberation in His place. Haraway argues that in order to challenge the politics of grammar, we require monstrous linguistic figures that expose nature as a trickster with agency, which offers the potential to live “without defended subjects” (1991: 3). In other words, Van Niekerk emphasises that subjecthood can no longer be defined by “master subjects, nor alienated subjects, but—just possibly—multiply heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents” (Haraway, 1991: 3). Here Van Niekerk demonstrates accommodating narratives rather than conquering ones.
For Milla to resist her existence being defined, like Jak’s, as “a Leon Schuster farce,” she needs to acknowledge the damaging consequences of inherited narratives, which she has defended with her life (2006: 155). The abject marks what Kristeva calls “primal repression” or archaic memory (1982: 12) and refers to that moment in our psychosexual development when we establish boundaries between human/animal and culture/nature. By listening to and accommodating the profuse and urgent calls of nature, Agaat enables what Milla refers to as “a Revolution of the Shitting Classes” (2006: 396). Van Niekerk’s graphic description of Milla’s relief from the Scourge of the Seven Year Itch reveals the destructive consequences of Milla’s life under a strict symbolic order.
However, in including the abject, Agaat’s treatment promises relief, making Milla recognise that there is always another side to the story. The symbolic disintegration of Milla’s abstracted cultural metaphors of completeness is expressed figuratively to the tune of “crapulent opening chords” (2006:
304,398). This culminating farcical moment heralds an urgent call of nature, which freed from the euphemism, offers symbolic relief from civilisation in both its repressive and protective guises.