This land is us : aspects of the Plaasroman and hospitality in five post-apartheid Karoo novels.
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2011
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates five texts: Damon Galgut‟s The Imposter (2008), Anne
Landsman‟s The Devil’s Chimney (1998), Eben Venter‟s My Beautiful Death (1998) and
Trencherman (2008) and Zoë Wicomb‟s David’s Story (2000).
In addition to being written in the post-apartheid era, these five texts are all set wholly or
partially in the Karoo, a semi-desert landscape unique to South Africa. The Karoo is,
however, more than just a common setting onto which their individual stories have been
transposed. It is part of the literary imagination of each text. Within these texts are a number
of fluid interactions between the consciousnesses and the landscapes they portray. Of course,
to attempt to examine these interactions as occurring purely between landscape and
consciousness would be foolhardy. As such, this project investigates these links by
comparing the texts under investigation to the historical literary form of the plaasroman and
by scrutinising them through the theoretical concept of hospitality, as outlined by Jacques
Derrida.
According to J.M. Coetzee term „plaasroman‟ refers to the type of early twentiethcentury
Afrikaans novel which “concerned itself almost exclusively with the farm and
platteland (rural society) and with the Afrikaner‟s painful transition from farmer to
townsman” (1988: 63). This project investigates all five texts in relation to a number of the
concerns common to the plaasroman, including the idea of the farm as a patriarchal idyll, its
valorisation of near-mythical ancestral values and the pushing of black labour to the
peripheries of narrative consciousness. These concerns, along with the fact that the
plaasroman marks out the farm as a fenced off area surrounded by threatening forces, means
that it is an ideal form to include in an investigation involving hospitality
Derrida outlines hospitality, at its most basic level as “the right of a stranger not to be
treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else‟s territory” (Derrida 2007: 246). This
relationship, however, goes further than a simple binary. Both host and guest give and receive
hospitality. From Derrida‟s meditations on the subject come two forms of hospitality:
Conditional and unconditional. The primary distinction between these two kinds of
hospitality is a distinction “between a form of subjectivity constituted through a hostile
process of inclusion and exclusion and one that comes into being in the self‟s pre-reflective
and traumatic exposure, without inhibition, to otherness” (Marais 2009: 275). Unconditional
hospitality is the latter and morally preferable.
In linking the two concepts, this dissertation illustrates the degrees to which each text,
through subverting, or conforming to the conventions of the plaasroman, achieves instances
of unconditional hospitality.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.
Keywords
Afrikaners--History., Hospitality in literature., South African fiction (English) White authors)--History and criticism., Theses--English.