Beyond the Allegory: The Grotesque Body and the Limits of Liberation in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat.

Abstract

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (translated into English by Michiel Heyns) details the subjectivity of its bed-ridden and paralysed protagonist, Milla Redelinghuys, as well as the complex relationship she shares with her caregiver, Agaat. Through reading Milla’s body in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, this article aims to explore the ways in which the text problematizes overly allegorical readings of the novel that emphasize Milla’s death as leading to Agaat experiencing rebirth. This is achieved through focusing on the ways in which Van Niekerk undermines the sense of social transcendence that Bakhtin considers indispensable to the carnival. In order to do this, I examine two instances that most closely align Milla’s corporeality with Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque: the scene in which Milla pretends to be dying in order to play a joke on her neighbour is read in relation to the idea of ‘carnival laughter’, and the scene in which she wakes up to discover Agaat sleeping on her bed is analysed through Bakhtin’s description of the ‘two-bodied image’. I conclude that these gestures towards an association with the grotesque form part of the larger project of incompletion that Van Niekerk stages in the novel.

Keywords:

• Agaat
• Marlene van Niekerk
• embodiment
• the grotesque
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• allegory

Notes

1 In her analysis of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Rita Barnard reads South Africa’s transition from apartheid as a period defined by the carnivalesque, focusing on the regenerative potential signified by carnival laughter. Similarly, Achille Mbembe’s ‘The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony’ investigates the postcolonial moment through the lens of the postcolonial grotesque.

2 This passage has been addressed extensively. See Pretorius (126–128), Van Houwelingen (98), Shannon Lee Moore-Barnes (101), Fincham (132), Reiergord (67) and Buxbaum (44–48), among others. For this reason, I have chosen not to discuss it in this article.

3 For a detailed analysis of these features, see Pretorius.

4 While they do not refer directly to Bakhtin, Rossman and Stobie’s statement that ‘Milla presents her body as an offering, in order that she might yet contribute to some communal enrichment’ (25) seems to suggest such an approach.

5 The correlation between Milla pretending to be dying and Agaat appearing to have died may be related to Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘two-bodied image’ (276) which I will discuss in more detail below.

6 See Jean Rossman (39), Nedine Moonsamy (71), Richard Block and Michael du Plessis (8), and Eva Hunter (78).

7 Unfortunately the scope of this article does not allow for an in-depth engagement with the ways in which Agaat resonates with Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism.