Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation interrogates Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney. The novel \nis narrated by the poor-white alcoholic, Connie, who imagines a story about \nBeatrice, an English colonist living on a farm in the Little Karoo. Connie, who is \na product of the apartheid era, interweaves her own story with that of Beatrice’s \nand, in this way, comes to terms with her own memories, her abusive husband and \nthe new South Africa. \nConnie deploys the genre of magical realism to create a defamiliarised farm \nsetting for Beatrice’s narrative. She thus challenges the stereotypes associated \nwith the traditional plaasroman and its patriarchal codes. These codes are also \nsubverted in Connie’s representation of Beatrice, who contests her identity as the \nauthoritative Englishwoman, as constructed by colonial discourse. In addition, \nBeatrice’s black domestic, Nomsa, is given voice and agency: facilities denied to \nher counterparts in colonial and apartheid fiction. Nomsa’s relationship with \nBeatrice is also characterised by subversion as it blurs the boundaries between \ncolonised and coloniser. In this regard, the text demands a postcolonial reading. \nConnie, in narrating Beatrice’s and Nomsa’s stories, reinvents their invisible lives \nand, by doing so, is able to rewrite herself. In this, she tentatively envisions a \nfuture for herself and also potentially ‘narrates’ the nation, thus contributing to the \nnew national literature. \nThe nation is inscribed in the Cango caves, whose spaces witness the seminal \nepisodes in Beatrice’s narrative. In these events, the caves ‘write’ the female \nbody and women’s sexuality and the text thus calls for an engagement with \nfeminism. The caves also inscribe South African history, the Western literary \ncanon, the imagination and Landsman’s own voice. Hence, the caves assume the \ncharacteristics of a palimpsest. This, together with the metafictive elements of the \nnovel, invites an encounter with postmodernism.
Author: Jill Nudelman
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2224597307