Summary
South Africa is a country of beauty and violence. Understanding the essence of the country requires a journey into its past to dig up its variety of stories in order to present them in alliance with all the beauty and hardship and cruelty of the surroundings in which they play off. Henk van Woerden undertakes such a journey.
Van Woerden�s books Moenie kyk nie (1993), Tikoes (1996) and Een mond vol glas (1998) are based on his own past as Dutch immigrant in South Africa and his personal experience of the country�s history of apartheid. The reception of these books � and of Een mond vol glas in particular - is characterized by misinterpretation and fierce judgement. This misinterpretation and consequent, unjustified negative evaluation result from two things: failure to read the three books as a trilogy (which would add an extra dimension of meaning) and not taking into account the specific genre to which they belong.
The hypothesis proposed and validated in this study is that Van Woerden�s three books, in which his youth in the Cape and later important periods in his life are described, form an autobiographical unit: they are cyclically linked. This necessitates interpretation and evaluation based not only on an individual text, but taking into account the relationship with other texts in the cycle. H.P. van Coller�s definition of prose cycles is used to proof that the books do form a literary unit. The most important indication of a cycle in Van Woerden�s texts is the great amount of motives and themes, characters and events, which repeatedly occur and develop.
A further hypothesis states that the genre in which the cycle as a whole is described, is a form of historiography where the combined meaning has a function that rises above factual controllability. It is suggested that these books can be defined as a hybrid form of confessional literature, in which the author depicts the history of the country, recalling his personal experience of it. He does this by using fictional tools to give these autobiographically founded stories an artistic dimension.
Readers who interpret Van Woerden�s trilogy in this way, will recognize the function of the past being processed by way of giving artistic form to it.
Finally, the texts are in line with the prevailing tendencies in history writing in both Dutch and South African literature, where the subjective rewriting of history in order to tell of personal experience of events is acceptable. In other respects Van Woerden�s work is ground braking. The texts converse interestingly with numerous other texts and contribute mainly to colonial and post-colonial discourses in Dutch and Afrikaans literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-09212004-161343 |
| Date | 22 August 2005 |
| Creators | Bruwer, Aletta Susanna |
| Contributors | PROF H.P. VAN COLLER |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-09212004-161343/restricted/ |
| Rights | mixed, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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