South African writer André Brink is perhaps best known for his dissidence during the apartheid regime, made poignant because of his Afrikaner heritage.
His best known novels, such as Looking on Darkness (1974), Rumours of Rain (1978) and A Dry White Season (1979) were all expressions of Brink’s belief that the writer has the power and indeed the responsibility to make a difference in an oppressive and unequal society. In Brink’s own words, during the apartheid regime ‘whole territories of historical consciousness [were] silenced by the power establishment and invaded by the dominant discourse’,19 and it was the restoration of these territories that constituted the most pressing task for the dissident writer, on whom, by political necessity, the role of reporter and historian was imposed. However, with the end of apartheid in 1994 South African writers were compelled to reconsider their position, as well as their way of writing. During the apartheid years realism was the preferred mode of
Magical Realism and the Signs of Art 87
writing for the dissident writer, Brink notes, since realism made sufferings apparent to those not directly affected and ‘stimulated a sense of solidarity’.
However, with socio-political change in South Africa came a new freedom for writers: new possibilities for ‘imaginative engagement’.20 Thus in the late ‘90s Brink turned to the fantastic in his novels, notably in Imaginings of Sand (1996) and Devil’s Valley. Indeed, he sees literature taking on new regenerative powers after 1994, in order
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 needle-point where it meets past and present; and to be willing to risk everything in the leaping fl ame of the word as it turns into world.21
These words have a Deleuzian ring to them, suggesting that literature is not simply a way to report the injustices of the world, but a way of thinking, and thus creating, a new world.
This does not mean, however, that Brink decided to leave behind all the themes of his anti-apartheid literature. In fact, Devil’s Valley is very much con-cerned with the issues Brink lists as ‘silent territories’ under apartheid: the settlement of South Africa before the whites, the enslavement of the peoples of the interior, the use of the Bible as a justifi cation for oppression, the extent of miscegenation in Afrikaner society, the involvement of coloured in the Great Trek, the marginalization of women, the exploitation of the environ-ment, and Afrikaner dissidence;22 that is, the issues that lie at the core of Afrikaner national identity. Devil’s Valley, like some of the novels considered in the last chapter, is about history and national identity, and in particular deals with the attempts of a settler colony to create an identity in a strange new land.
Of course, South Africa is a special case in many ways, since, as Elleke Boehmer points out, the apartheid regime outlawed the cultural mixing and cross-fertilization informing so much postcolonial literature. Boehmer wonders if perhaps the new literature of ‘a society which has laboured under a unique situ-ation of internal colonizsitu-ation in a postcolonial world will [. . .] bypass the teem-ing dreamscapes that characterize the postcolonial writteem-ings of an Amitav Ghosh or a Ben Okri and create something quite its own’.23 Actually, as an example of the regeneration of literature in post-apartheid South Africa, Devil’s Valley does display some strong similarities with the novels of these two postcolonial authors and with other magical realist texts. We will turn to these two authors in the next chapter, but here we will look at how Brink’s use of magical realism allows him to ‘imagine the real’.24 This act of the imagination will prove crucial to read-ings of magical realism in a postcolonial political context.What is interesting here is that at a time when the ‘truth’ of the past was pursued in the name of reconciliation in South Africa, Brink uses a genre where the specifi cs of a place and time represented by realism are pitted against an ahistorical magic. As we
saw in Life of Pi, the magical sign, as a non-human becoming, is a movement towards the imperceptibility of the real and magic as well as of ‘true’ and
‘invented’ pasts.
Devil’s Valley, as Mélanie Joseph-Vilain says, can ‘be read as a playful transposi-tion of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the South African context’.25 Devil’s Valley shares the themes of migration, settlement and isolation, family and incest, natural disaster and war with García Márquez’s novel. What is important here, however, is the mention of context, for Brink’s novel is distinctly rooted in South African history and geography, just as García Márquez’s novel is in Colombian. The central family in Brink’s novel are the Lermiets, who broke away from the Great Trek 150 years ago and settled a remote and isolated valley in the Swartberg range of the Karoo region, where they have remained with minimal contact with the outside world. In contrast to García Márquez’s novel, Devil’s Valley is narrated in the fi rst person by the protagonist, an ageing, disil-lusioned crime reporter named Flip Lochner, who sets out to fi nd out the truth about the settlement and its history. Through Lochner’s narration, as Lorna Sage notes in her review of the novel, Devil’s Valley ‘stages a ritual resurrection and reburial of the Afrikaner past’.26 On the one hand, the community embod-ies the archetypal Afrikaner myth of origins: an independent-minded and resil-ient people that despite adversity and hostility settle part of the virgin land of Africa and make it their own, building a righteous community heeding the word of the Bible. On the other hand, Lochner’s experience of the community, even before he arrives in the valley, indicates the instability of this myth.
A drunken encounter with a young member of the Lermiet family who has unusually ventured into the outside world leaves Lochner with ‘the fucking shards and tatters and loose ends of stories. A smous [pedlar] returning with exotic wares from the farthest corners of the world. A girl with four tits. A child with goat’s feet. A large naked woman on a bed crawling with cats. And some-thing about a magician who could track you down to the very end of the earth’.27 Thus from the very beginning the novel pits an ordered, in Deleuze’s terms organic, narrative of settlement and community against an array of disordered stories, or, the crystalline signs of magic.
Devil’s Valley could be seen simply to perform the customary transaction of
‘historiographic metafi ction’: by exposing the processes of history-making it reveals that all history is based on stories, which are all equally fi ctional. Flip Lochner wants to write the ‘true’ history of the Devil’s Valley settlement, to capture and defi ne it, but as he questions the inhabitants of the valley he is given a multitude of contradictory tales, and realizes that there are no written records to verify any of them. Indeed, as Ute Kauer notes, the novel follows Flip’s growing understanding that there simply is no recoverable ‘true’ history, and that even if he collects all the stories of the valley, they will not cohere into an ordered whole.28 Kauer suggests that Flip ultimately learns to see this not as a loss but as a utopian possibility, a way to recover the lost voices of history.
Joseph-Vilain, however, views these alternative stories as destructive; they
Magical Realism and the Signs of Art 89
question not only history, but also notions of family and nation – ‘imagined communities’ that rely on stable myths for cohesion and sanction, or in our terms, the State. She notes how ‘the Lermiets are Lermiets only if they lend credence to the family’s myths: dissenters leave or die’.29 Indeed, once the silenced voices of the community, in particular the women, speak up, the family and the whole community starts to disintegrate.
It is true that the many alternative and contradictory stories undo the idea of a single, truthful version of history, as well as expose such a history’s centrality to the concepts of family and community. However, the magical events of the novel are different to any version of history, and take us in a different direction to that indicated by the idea of ‘historiographic metafi ction’. Brink, in Mapmak-ers, states that ‘whereas society tends to enslave language the writer strives to liberate it’,30 and in the inventive freedom he found after the apartheid years, he was able to fully explore this thesis. Each of the multiple stories of the Devil’s valley is an attempt to order and defi ne experience. However, as they multiply, the success of this attempt becomes less rather than more possible, as they are contradictory and confusing. In contrast, the magical events escape order and defi nition completely. As such they belong to a different regime of meaning, one where origins and truthfulness are not important, where the divergent and different can coalesce into a whole without unity.
Whatever stories the inhabitants of the Devil’s Valley tell, they all conform to a particular order – the linear, convergent order of society, that which is expressed in the realism of the novel. As an eyewitness account, Lochner’s narration provides us with the requisite details for the ‘reality effect’, giving us some background history on the Great Trek, describing how he came to fi nd himself in the remote valley, and furnishing us with vivid visual descriptions of the place. Like Macondo, Devil’s Valley is a strictly segmented place: ‘Probably thirty or forty houses altogether, arranged in two uneven rows, all of them whitewashed and built to the same basic plan [. . .]. Every backyard had its shed and its haystack and a longdrop, while most sported an old-fashioned stone well’ (DV 35). At the centre of the settlement lie the church and the cemetery, while its boundaries are the bluegum forest and the cliffs surrounding it. The convergent series of the genealogy of the inhabitants – ‘Lukas Seer begat Lukas Nimrod, and Lukas Nimrod begat Lukas Up-Above, and Lukas Up-Above begat Strong Lukas, and Strong Lukas begat Lukas Bigballs, and Lukas Bigballs begat Lukas Devil, and Lukas Devil begat Lukas Death, and Lukas Death begat Little-Lukas’ (DV 105) – is not only a force for community cohesion through its air of Biblical inevitability, but also ensures that each member has his own rightful place. Occupations are passed from father to son or mother to daugh-ter, and nicknames seal the fate of the inhabitants: there is Brother Holy the preacher, Smith-the-Smith, Jurg Water the diviner, Poppie Fullmoon the mid-wife, Gert Brush the painter and so on.
The novel’s realist order could be read, Joseph-Vilain suggests, as an allegory of apartheid – a society strictly stratifi ed and determined by racial lineage.31
This society is challenged by the alternative stories that Lochner unearths from the inhabitants. The stories shatter the myth of racial purity, as well as the myth of the Devil’s Valley as an unsettled promised land waiting for the chosen people, and the myth of the people’s strength, courage and righteousness, that is, the myths that also underpinned apartheid. Lukas the Seer, the founder of the colony, is said to have been led by God to the valley, defeated the Devil himself, and established a pure line of descendants. However, the patchwork of stories that Lochner hears indicate that in fact, when Lukas arrived, the valley was settled by a native people who he used and subsequently abused, that he was forced to stay due to losing a leg, that his fi rst wife was responsible for most of the hard work in the early years and that he took a second black wife. These stories surface as the direct contradictions of the villagers’ grand myth, and it is no wonder therefore that the community begins to fall apart.
However, as we follow Lochner’s attempts to trace these stories to their origin, we fi nd not an alternative past, but a living magic. Faced with an imme-diate, present magic, the contradictory past suddenly appears less crucial to the community. The dead, including Lukas the Seer himself, wander the settlement and interact with the living population. To Kauer these ‘ghosts’ are simply the reincarnations of the silenced and forgotten alternative stories: ‘what the ghosts and mythological fi gures in Brink’s novels demand is to be recognized, to be part of cultural memory’.32 Joseph-Vilain, however, discovers that the novel does more than lay bare the processes of historiography, noting that in his search for truth, Flip ‘witnesses [the] reinvention of the real’.33 In fact, because the ghosts are magic, they are divergent from the alternative stories or ‘cultural memory’
of the community. Rather than representations of the past, these magical signs are the creation of something new in the present. As such, just as the magic of Life of Pi, they certainly do reveal all stories, present or past, to be ‘inventions of the real’. However, they are less crucial as an exposition of the fi ction at the heart of all historiography, than as a revelation of the conditions of the pres-ent. Flip himself exclaims, ‘Every word spoken in this place is a bloody new invention’ (DV 45). In the face of magic, it is no longer just impossible to tell true and imaginary pasts apart; it is impossible to know what is real and what is magic in the present.
The dead of the Devil’s valley are indistinguishable from the living from the very opening of the novel when Lochner meets old Lukas the Seer, who is still tending goats on the mountainside even though, as Lochner later fi nds out, he has been dead for many years. However, it is not only the dead that are indiscernible from the living in Devil’s Valley; Joseph-Vilain notes that in the village ‘the confusion between real and imaginary is total’.34 As Lochner enters the valley he sees a naked woman with four breasts bathing in a rock-pool, a vision that he reports as vividly real:
A long black mane that ripples in shiny wet waves all the way to the bulge of her buttocks. In the interests of truth I must specify that her body is a bit on
Magical Realism and the Signs of Art 91
the thin side to my taste. If this had been my fantasy I’d have fi lled her out a bit [. . .]. But this is the point: it’s not a dream, she is real. (DV 26)
The next moment the woman, as well as the rock-pool, are gone, yet Lochner insists, as a realist eye-witness narrator: ‘She was there. I can recall every damn detail’ (DV 27). It later turns out that Emma, a young woman keen to escape the colony who Lochner befriends and falls for, had dreamt of bathing in the rock-pool that same afternoon. Joseph-Vilain sees this as a blurring of the bor-ders between reality and dream, which to her ‘refl ects the unstable nature of history in Devil’s Valley’.35 In fact, it is the present of the narrative that is unstable.
Joseph-Vilain also refers to Flip’s nightly sexual encounters with mysterious, animal-like women, which would appear to be dreams, if it were not for the tangible objects they leave behind; to the porcupine-hunt that he participates in which is then denied by the other men of the village; and the encounter with the adolescent temptress Henta Peach in the bluegum woods which Henta seems to have forgotten the next day. Continually in the novel, both Lochner and the reader are unable to tell what is real and what is not, in the here and now.
This blurring of the boundaries of the real and the imagined is the moment of the emergence of magic as a Deleuzian crystalline sign – a sign which means that ‘we no longer know what is imaginary or real’ (C2 7). The implications of the crystalline sign go beyond the simple relativization of history, according to Deleuze, because such indiscernibility does not simply imply the subjectivity of truth. Rather, the crystalline sign ‘poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents’ (C2 127). The magical elements of Brink’s novel are not simply part of the alternative stories or subjective ‘truths’ of the inhabitants, in fact, the two are radically different. The inhabitant’s stories pose variants of the past and appear contradictory, while the magical events are sites where such contra-dictions are no longer an issue. The magic does not resolve these contradic-tions, but rather allows us precisely to gain the ‘superior viewpoint’ of art, which is also a ‘thousand various noncommunicating viewpoints’ (PS 166).
The established myth of the community recounts how Strong-Lukas single-handedly repelled government agents sent to the valley to tax the community.
Lochner then hears an alternative story from Dalena, the wife of Lukas Death, that Strong-Lukas’s daughter, Mooi-Janna, sacrifi ced herself by seducing the government agents, and thus allowed her father and his men to overcome them by surprise. Her father, to save his own reputation and the family’s honour, then killed her. Kauer suggest that this is the recovery of the silent women’s voice:
Dalena telling Mooi-Janna’s lost story.36 This may well be so, but the magic in the episode is a different matter altogether. The magic crystalline sign lies not in the alternative story as such, but in the strange fact of the girl’s four breasts.
These breasts are what makes her irresistible to the government soldiers, and allows her to take her tragic action. They are also an image that haunt Lochner throughout his stay in the valley, after he sees the woman at the rock-pool. The
woman both is Emma dreaming herself at the pool, and isn’t Emma, who does not, we learn at the end of the novel, have four breasts. The woman at the pool, therefore, at the same time, both is and isn’t Mooi-Janna’s ghost. We can now recast the multiplication of possible meanings that we previously noted as an effect of the magic of magical realism, as the opening up of zones of impercep-tibility between these alternative meanings.
It is, paradoxically, the very difference of the magical sign from the order of realism that makes it imperceptible from the real. The four breasts initially appear as a meaningful sign to Lochner, a vision of the mystery he wants to solve. They may also be interpreted as the sign of the hidden miscegenation
It is, paradoxically, the very difference of the magical sign from the order of realism that makes it imperceptible from the real. The four breasts initially appear as a meaningful sign to Lochner, a vision of the mystery he wants to solve. They may also be interpreted as the sign of the hidden miscegenation