(E)scatalogical Visions in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

Abstract

It is over 20 years since Marlene van Niekerk published Triomf ([1994] 1999, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball), a satire of the poor white Benade family, who have been bedazzled by apartheid ideology. This iconoclastic satire was published originally in Afrikaans in 1994, the year of the first democratic elections in South Africa. This article offers a close reading of “Peace on Earth”, a chapter that desublimates significant sacred icons in Afrikaner cultural mythology and offers a critique of the intricate workings of ideology. Notably, this critique relies upon the abjection of the male Afrikaner’s body, in particular that of Treppie Benade. Treppie, the satirist, is found sitting upon the “throne” (toilet) as he purges himself of the lies and illusions of apartheid ideology through a lengthy scatology. This article begins by situating the novel in terms of its commentary on the apartheid government’s attempt to rehabilitate the abject of the Afrikaner volk: poor white “trash”. It highlights excrement as a master trope of the satirist before analysing the allusions to Judeo-Christian iconography and (e)scatology (invoked in the Great Trek narrative) in terms of their resonances with Louis Althusser’s and Slavoj Žižek’s concepts of ideology. Further, I explore Treppie’s faecal tapestry in terms of an immanent sublime, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian sublime. In conclusion, I consider Treppie’s final words and orientation at the end of the novel, and the implications of his Dionysian approach to an uncertain future.

Keywords:

• Marlene van Niekerk
• Triomf
• satire
• ideology
• Nietzsche
• Dionysian
• sublime

Notes

1 See Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton’s Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump (2020), the first text to offer a transnational history of white nationalism, highlighting the rise of white supremacy and its return to global mainstream politics in the present day.

2 Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd is often referred to as the “architect of apartheid” (South African History Online 2020). He was Minister of Native Affairs between 1950 and 1958, and thereafter Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 to 1966.

3 Kak, literally denoting faeces but also an Afrikaans expletive, is translated as “bullshit” in the English version (Van Niekerk [1994] 1999, 86).

4 Lara Buxbaum offers a more comprehensive consideration of the elements of Bakhtinian carnivalesque in Triomf. She comments on how Pop’s death and Treppie’s “disempowerment” and “disability” in the end present a “challenge to any official version of events, denying a smooth transition to another nationalist project”. In Buxbaum’s reading, all possibilities of “renewal and rebirth” associated with the carnival are “quashed” (2014, 226). This view is supported by lines from Treppie’s “ice cream truck” song, in which he sings their fate of “dissolv[ing] like ice cream in the dirt” (Van Niekerk [1994] 1999, 11). While the novel does not profess the “renewal” of any form of nationalism, I will argue that there is a hint of some future orientation in the final lines of the novel.

5 This particular extract from the novel reflects a view of ideology that leaves little room for autonomous thought or action, or resistance or subversion for that matter. Treppie’s comment in this extract counters the Gramscian view of ideology and hegemony, which imagines a more dialogical relationship between civil society (individuals) and state apparatuses. While the latter may coerce submission, the former must provide “spontaneous consent” (Gramsci 2004, 637). It is clear, though, that Treppie’s satire of the nuns’ blind obedience is evidence of his subversion of the status quo.

6 The multinational mining company Anglo American Corporation was arguably one of the “biggest economic beneficiaries of apartheid”. It capitalised on the anti-apartheid disinvestment campaign of the 1980s by taking control of 85% of the companies and 60% of the wealth of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange by the 1990s (Ashton 2011).