Ex-Centric Hermeneutics in Stephanus Muller’s Nagmusiek

Abstract

In this review article the author reads Nagmusiek – Stephanus Muller's monumental metafictional biography of South African composer Arnold van Wyk – as an extended allegory on the geopolitics of academic writing. She argues that the book articulates, through its unusual physical apparatus, narratological techniques and metafictional hermeneutic deconcealment, a valuable theory-in-praxis of the aporetics of peripheral writing. In so doing, Muller materializes Walter Mignolo's notion of ‘epistemic delinking’ in radically original and risky ways.

Keywords:

• decolonial hermeneutics
• delinking
• peripheral writing
• biography
• Arnold van Wyk
• South African art music
• geopolitics of academic writing

Notes on contributor

Willemien Froneman writes about South African music and co-edits the journal SAMUS: South African Music Studies. Her work has appeared in Cultural Geographies, Popular Music, Ethnomusicology Forum and Critical Arts.

ORCID

Willemien Froneman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7596-8866

Notes

1 The allusion is to Sanskrit scholar Richard Gombrich, but the usual disclaimers for fiction apply.

2 Stephanus Muller, Nagmusiek, 3 vols. (Johannesburg, 2014), iii, 30. Translated from the original.

3 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 210–11.

4 See Žižek, Living in the End Times (London, 2011), 52. ‘[T]he universalism of a Western liberal society does not reside in the fact that its values (human rights, etc.) are universal in the sense of holding for all cultures, but in a much more radical sense, for individuals relate to themselves as “universal,” they participate in the universal dimension directly, by-passing their particular social position.’

5 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 81.

6 Chris Walton, ‘Something of the Night’, The Musical Times, Winter (2015).

7 Juliana M. Pistorius, ‘Nagmusiek [Night Music]’, Fontes Artis Musicae, 62/2 (2015), 130.

8 Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Social Text, 15 (1986), 69. See also Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, Social Text, 17 (1987), 3–25; Julie McGonegal, ‘Postcolonial Metacritique', Interventions, 7/2 (2005), 251–65.

9 A. Suresh Canagarajah, A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (Pittsburgh, 2002), 30.

10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000),

11 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 10.

12 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 18. Translated from the original.

13 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 10–11.

14 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 18.

15 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 92. Translated from the original.

16 Walter Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of de-Coloniality’, Cultural Studies, 21/2–3, 453; 464.

17 Mignolo, ‘Delinking’, 485.

18 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor, 2003), 21.

19 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 248.

20 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, (1989) available at <https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10252/1/TSpace0167.pdf>

21 J.M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel in Africa’, Occasional Papers of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 17 (1999), 17.

22 Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo, ‘On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Trans-Modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy’, Encounters, 1/1 (2009), 17. Mignolo, ‘Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing’, 137.

23 Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 19.

24 Mignolo, ‘Delinking’ 452.

25 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 234.

26 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 271.

27 Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, 66.

28 McGonegal, ‘Postcolonial Metacritique’, 253.

29 Karel Schoeman, Die Laaste Afrikaanse Boek: Outobiografiese Aantekeninge. [The last Afrikaans book: autobiographical notes] (Cape Town, 2002).Translated from the original.

30 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 83. Translated from the original.

31 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago, 2012), i, 79.

32 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 394.

33 Muller, Nagmusiek, i, 612. Translated from the original.

34 Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought (London, 2013), 162.

35 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 513.

36 In line with the notes on audience above, it is perhaps no coincidence that this particular chapter is readily accessible, and indeed, addressed to English-speaking readers, although they will have to forego Muller's caricatured typology of South African academics.

37 Stephanus Muller, ‘Arnold van Wyk’s Hands’, Composing Apartheid (Johannesburg, 2008), 281–9.

38 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 379.

39 Muller, Nagmusiek, iii, 393.

40 Available at <http://www.netwerk24.com/Stemme/Murray-La-Vita/murray-la-vita-gesels-met-stephanus-muller-20160115>. Translated from the original.