Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries

324 Pages·2013·2.348 MB·English

by  Viljoen, Hein

Crossing Borders,
Dissolving Boundaries
CROSS
Readings in Post/Colonial
ULTURES Literatures and Cultures in English

157

SERIES EDITORS
Gordon Collier Bénédicte Ledent Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
CO-FOUNDING EDITOR
Hena Maes–Jelinek
Crossing Borders,
Dissolving Boundaries
Edited by
Hein Viljoen
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover Image
Strijdom van der Merwe, Line of Red Flags
between Wellington and Gouda (1994)
Photo courtesy of the artist (www.strijdom.co.za)
Cover design:
Inge Baeten
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3638-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0908-3
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Illustrations ix
Introduction xi

Representing the Unpresentable: Between the Secular
and the Spiritual in Gordimer’s Post-Apartheid Fiction
ILEANA DIMITRIU 1

Narrative Dynamics and Boundaries:
The Undermining of Event and Eventfulness in
The Book of Happenstance by Ingrid Winterbach
HEILNA DU PLOOY 27

Deneys Reitz and the Bounds of Self-Understanding
JOHN GOUWS 51

Challenging and Negotiating National Borders:
Sámi and Tornedalian AlterNative Literary History
ANNE HEITH 75

The Visual Representation of the Boundary
Between Past and Present: Chekhov’s The Cherry
Orchard and Suzman’s The Free State
LIDA KRÜGER 93

Earth as Home: Nature and Refuges/Living
Spaces in Some Afrikaans Narratives
SUSAN MEYER 113
Borders and Abjection in Triomf
ADÉLE NEL 135

Body, Corpus, and Corpse: Delineating Henrik
Ibsen in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale
ELLEN REES 155

Pronouncing it the Porder: Ascribing Aesthetic
Values to External and Internal National Borders
in Frank A. Jenssen’s The Salt Bin
JOHAN SCHIMANSKI 181

The Normal and the Carceral: Boundaries
in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs
TONY ULLYATT 199

The Aid of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of AIDS:
Eben Venter’s Ek stamel ek sterwe
PHIL VAN SCHALKWYK 229

Navigating the Interstitial: Boundaries
in Lady Anne by Antjie Krog
HEIN VILJOEN 251

Notes on the Contributors 279
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of collaboration between the project Crossing Borders
in and of Literature at the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus)
and the Border Poetics Research Group at Tromsø University and was partly
developed during two boundary seminars that linked north and south by
video. I am very grateful to the contributors for their enthusiastic participation
in the project and for their patience with me. A special word of thanks to
Gordon Collier, the technical editor of the Cross/Cultures series at Rodopi,
for believing in the book and for his careful editing of the text.
I also wish to thank Stephen Wolfe and Holger Pötzsch in Tromsø and
Marita Wenzel, Betsie van der Westhuizen, Ralph Goodman, Cheryl Stobie,
and Elzebet Stubbe in South Africa for participating in the seminars and
loyally supporting the project. Rilette Swanepoel, Susan Smit–Marais, Attie
de Lange, Andries Visagie, and Dolly Dlavane participated in the first boun-
daries seminar. Many thanks to them as well. Tony Ullyatt language-edited
most of the essays in the collection. For that I am very grateful. Thanks is also
due to my research assistant, Bella du Toit, for her swift help with searches
and queries and with converting the Harvard style into footnotes.
The essays were all reviewed anonymously by two peer reviewers each. I
would like to acknowledge the time and effort they gave to the project and the
many helpful suggestions they made toward improving the essays.
The project Crossing Borders in and of Literature was supported by the
National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) from 2008 to 2011 and
by the North-West University’s Research Unit: Languages and Literature in
the South African Context. The Border Poetics Group contributed financially
to the publication of the book. The support of these institutions is gratefully
acknowledged. The views, findings, and conclusions expressed in this book
are those of the authors and should not be attributed either to the NRF or to
the Research Unit.
viii CROSSING BORDERS, DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES (cid:97)
The illustrations from Commando and from Deneys Reitz’s unpublished
manuscript are used with the kind permission of the Brenthurst Library. Bengt
Pohjanen, the publisher, kindly gave permission to use illustrations from the
Tornedalian Literary History.
We could not establish who the copyright holder is of the diagrams used in
Ullyatt’s essay, but we will acknowledge any breach in any subsequent edi-
tion.
The extracts from Lady Anne are used with permission of the present copy-
right holder, Human & Rousseau. Random House South Africa gave permis-
sion to use the extracts from Down to My Last Skin.
Strijdom van der Merwe allowed us to use a photo of his striking land-art
work for the cover of the book. Thanks to him as well.

HEIN VILJOEN
POTCHEFSTROOM
OCTOBER 2012

(cid:97)
Illustrations

Figure 1: Map of Reitz’s travels (Kommando, 316) 55
Figure 2: “Under British ‘Protection’ in the Springfontein
Concentration Camp 1901,” Herinneringen van
1899–1902, MS 272/6, facing p. 604 67
Figure 3: “Lapp Prototype, relatively pure,” illustration in
The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation, ed. Herman
B. Lundborg & F.J. Linders (1926). The photographs were
taken by Gunhild Sandgren in 1925 76
Figure 4: Photograph of male models aiming at illustrating racial diffe-
rentiation: illustration in The Racial Characters of the Swedish
Nation, ed. Herman B. Lundborg & F.J. Linders (1926) 77
Figure 5: Map of Meänmaa, ‘our land’: back-cover illustration of
Pohjanen and Johansson’s Tornedalian Finnish literary history 82
Figure 6: David Cooper’s model (Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry)
adapted 201
Figure 7: David Cooper’s model (Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry) 202
Figure 8: Title page of Bentham’s Panopticon 217

(cid:97)