SOURCE: Chait, Sandra. “Mythology, Magic Realism, and White Writing after Apartheid.” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 2 (summer 2000): 17-28.

[In the following essay, Chait explores the use of mythology in two novels by white South African authors—André Brink's Cape of Storms and Mike Nicol's Horseman—in terms of how each author deals with the question of collective guilt in the post-apartheid era.]

The transfer of political power from oppressor to oppressed inevitably brings in its wake the appropriation and reworking of mythological material. As new governments rewrite their people's history, so too do their novelists and poets recover and re-vision the cultural identity embedded in their people's myths. For erstwhile oppressors, however, the change in self-perception may take somewhat longer to materialize. Shock, sorrow, anger at the chaos of upheaval take precedence. Only then are such perpetrators of oppression able to confront their culpability and their authors plumb the mythological depths for signs and symptoms to explain what went wrong. In the case of white South African writers, however, the changeover to black rule has been gradual enough to have allowed a gestation period in which to ponder collective guilt and, as in Germany, to search the past for answers to that inevitable question, “How could it have happened?”

In postapartheid South Africa, this recourse to myth in the works of two white writers, André Brink's Cape of Storms and Mike Nicol's Horseman, serves also as historical catharsis. Myth offers a way out, a means of saving cultural face in spite of evidence of almost a half century of white discrimination, oppression, and atrocity carried out against the indigenous people. That these two authors are able to do so, albeit unwittingly, derives from the nature of mythology itself, which, as a second-order semiological system, allows them to use signifiers as if these carry no associative weight. Brink and Nicol, through the appropriation in their texts of Greek and Christian myths respectively, achieve exoneration for white South Africa by purifying the signifiers to make them seem innocent, normal, or universal and, in so doing, fill their texts with ideological content. For, as Roland Barthes points out in “Myth Today,” mythology is part-ideology, being an historical science, and as such it moves at all levels from “the real to the ideological” (112, 142). It operates “an inversion of anti-physis to pseudo-physis,” thus making the constructed images of Cape of Storms and Horseman, with all their various embedded semiotic codes, appear natural to their readers (142). For Brink and Nicol, these codes are predominantly cultural, incorporating as they do for the South African authors, the discourses of race, politics, and religion. But the very form of their texts, as I shall show, renders real their ideologically constituted signifiers and makes their magic realism, prophesy, and the supernatural the work of the physical world and ultimately that of the very God their postmodernism denies. In myth, therefore, lies ideological contradiction and in mythopoeia, i.e., the appropriation and reworking of mythical material, the potential for absence made present.

Both writers, of course, have a long history of textual opposition to apartheid and this paper's deconstruction of their mythological texts should in no way detract from the very real contributions both novelists have made in exposing the historical excesses of the colonial and postcolonial apartheid regimes. In these two texts, however, in the process of exposing one evil, each writer succeeds also in offering inadvertently yet another—namely, the notion that essential human nature, that which the gods themselves have created, bears ultimate responsibility for the crimes of South Africa. Humans simply act out their “natural” destinies, unable to alter the “natural” order of their predetermined roles in the universe. As Barthes reminds us, “nothing prevents [myth] from being a perpetual alibi,” for it is a value, rather than a reality, and is not guaranteed by truth (123).

In Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor, Brink provides an ur-text for the myth of Adamastor, one of the Titans of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the colossus of canto 5 of Luiz de Camões's great 1572 Portuguese epic, The Lusiads.¹ In the latter, which recounts the journey of Vasco Da Gama around the Cape of Storms, the enormous Adamastor falls in love with the nymph of the sea, Thetis. Since he “knew't impossible to gain her Love / By reason of his great deformitie,” he tries to take her by force (14: 53). For his presumption in aspiring to a member of a more advanced society of gods, Adamastor is transmogrified by Zeus into the rocky promontory which is the Cape (15: 56).

Brink's 420-year-later recreation of these events from the perspective of the giant concentrates Adamastor's colossal measurements onto one part of his anatomy. In Brink's novel, the African chief T'Kama, whose life supposedly represents the source material for Camões's Adamastor, possesses a member that expands to ludicrous proportions every time he approaches the white shipwoman he so desires. Much as he loves her whom he names Khois, meaning woman in the Khoi language, he is unable to consummate his passions. He is too large, so large in fact that he must “wrap [his penis] round [his] waist in four or five large loops, and tuck the angry head in under them for fear of becoming the cause of stumbling to others” (Cape 106-07). In reconstructing the epic account of the giant's tragedy in terms so totally sexual, Brink has reduced all difference to that single signifier, “penis,” alone.² What is more, he has presented it supposedly free of, because prior to, the connotations the reader familiar with colonial discourse knows it to carry, namely, the European fear of the sexual prowess of the black man. Both author and reader share the cultural code, however, and understand, without the signifier saying so, the semantic content that fills the empty word and makes of the black man's reproductive organ his essential being.

Brink explains his purpose in characterizing the black man in this way as an attempt to explore the historical roots of racism (Graeber, interview).³ However, the comic aspects combined with the magic realism sail rather close to the racist wind. For though the narrative unfolds through the perspective of T'Kama, the gaze in which he is held remains very much that of the white male. Neither the European woman nor Da Gama's Portuguese sailors are made to look as ridiculous. The tragicomic scene in which the naked white woman scrambles over the rocks away from T'Kama's erect “bird,” for example, registers with the Western reader—and more importantly with T'Kama himself—as fearful terror. None of the humor and absurdity of the misunderstanding adheres to her; the burlesque attaches itself entirely to the black man. When on his first night with the woman, in an attempt to impress her, he greases his body, interweaves red petals in his pubic hair, ties a white ostrich feather to his erect penis, and pulls a Portuguese plumed hat over his head, his beloved collapses into uncontrollable laughter (54). His cultural mistakes humiliate him and make him an object of ridicule, while hers—tramping on a mantis or killing a hare for food—confer power, in that the Khoi people believe her to be the carrier of death and fear her presence among them. To be fair, Brink, a self-conscious postmodernist, does attempt to control for his own white perceptions. He chooses as narrator the “spirit” of the unknown Adamastor, who looks back from the present on his first incarnation as T'Kama. Since the reader is not privy to the color of this “spirit” or his/her present incarnation or situation, accusations of bias assume slippery contours. Brink, by displacing the supposed origin in Western mythology of Camões's and Rabelais's Adamastor, reserves a caveat for himself.⁴ However, since his recreation derives from Camões's recreation of the Greek titan, the Western Adamastor inevitably casts his large European shadow on the writer's interpretation of southern African events. In any case, this ploy does not work consistently across the board. For example, it does not explain the narrator's selective interpretation of the same signifiers. For instance, the narrator wastes no time in informing the reader that T'Kama, meaning Big Bird (ostrich), refers also to his member, since “bird” in the Khoi language translates as slang for penis (19). When, however, the narrator refers to Da Gama's enormous sailing boats as “birds” as well, he makes no similar connection to male genitalia. In fact, the boat/birds are seen more as wondrous female deities who give birth to “eggs” (dinghies) from beneath their wings (16). The eggs hatch “feathered” people, who strut about the shore “stiff-legged like ostriches” (16).⁵

Ultimately, language speaks and it speaks the white author's constructedness, his Afrikaner conditioning in matters of white, male supremacy, even as he represents the black man with compassion and understanding. T'Kama, sitting next to his beloved Khois, dismisses language as just words, “sounds shaped by a throat and mouth and disappearing into silence … a chasm, an abyss” (103-04). But those words, put into his mouth and thoughts by the author, betray him as surely as they reveal Brink himself. “I was simply too big for her,” the hero admits, implying his acknowledgment of that which was clear for all to see, that they simply did not fit (62). For all their attempts at accommodation and with the best will in the world, the black man and white woman could no more consummate their love than could a lion and a kitten. Their attempts at mating, the text implies, flew in the face of nature. It was unnatural, hence the tribe's misfortunes and tribulations, its wandering through the shadows of the Valley of Death pursued by the spirits of the evil god of darkness, the terrifying Gaunab. Brink's use of magic realism further emphasizes the upending of the natural order by the pursuit of interracial jouissance. Rivers boil, thorn bushes sprout overnight, trees burst into flames (80, 59, 93). “This may be a thing of blood and years,” the tribe's medicine man warns the lovestruck T'Kama (39). It is no coincidence that this prediction comes from the mouth of one of whom the author says “there was nothing he did not know” (39). Old Khamab's familiarity with the world of the gods and ancestors makes his presaging of events like that of a Greek chorus and, together with T'Kama's own admission that “something in [him] knew old Khamab had been right” inevitably turns their struggles into a battle between the forces of good and evil, of light and dark (41). The love between Khois and T'Kama thus transcends the individual, making their passion contradictory to the will of God and therefore to nature. For in the grand tradition of the epic, which is the prose structure of Cape of Storms, god and nature are one, mankind's unity with the world a guarantee of human destiny and of humans' inability to change the path of their future. The end is foretold and, as in the epics of Homer and Virgil, structure dictates action.⁶

No matter how our noble hero tempts and tests his fate, the epic form demands that the will of the gods should prevail. And the gods, Brink implies by the contortions of nature in his text, remain hostile to the mixing of black and white. Such bodies simply do not fit, the first item in the mytheme of miscegenation registers; they are purposefully ill-matched by nature, the second notes; and nature, claims the third, is but an expression of the gods' own will. What is more, the gods who control the Khoi chief's destiny are those of his own people and by representing the divinity as that of the original black population, rather than the Catholic God of the Portuguese, Brink suggests the equal culpability of both black and white in the spiritual and social realms. In fact, in The New York Times Book Review interview in which Brink talks of his concern with the origins of racial animosities in South Africa, he places the blame on both white and black characters in the book and goes on to suggest that the same holds true in the real South Africa (23). The universality of the miscegenation taboo would appear to be Brink's ideology, but when the white Portuguese sailors disappear into the trees with the Khoi women, they appease their own gods merely by baptizing the black females before ravishing them. No sign of physical mismatch registers textually in the mating of white men and black women, revealing perhaps that Brink's biases are phallocentric as well.

Epic and magic realism thus combine in Brink's mythopoeia to undercut his ostensible narrative purpose. For despite his intention of being even-handed, of allowing both sides to speak together, as he claims in his New York Times Book Review interview, he seems also to say that only by sacrificing his enormous sexuality can the black man live in harmony with the white woman (23). Only by replacing his own “T'Kama” with a more modest clay prosthesis can the Khoi hero consummate his marriage with his wife, Khois. Understanding between those of different ancestry then requires sacrifice, but the sacrifice lies only on the side of the black man. He must carry full responsibility for going against so-called nature by becoming himself the sport-of-nature that is neither one thing nor another, neither male nor female. Only then can the black man be said to “fit.”

Brink writes, of course, with the knowledge of hindsight. Historically, black South Africans have needed to deny parts of their identity in order to be seen by white South Africans as “fitting.” Scrunched up in cultural straightjackets, they have adapted and accommodated themselves to white norms. They also, however, have frequently burst out at the seams or stumbled when their own steps have proved too much for the amount of movement the jackets allowed. Brink's mythological epic offers a point of origin for such history, but by representing his interracial lovers as being physically mismatched and thereby providing a convincing physiological reason for miscegenation taboos, his text offers readers no hope for the future. Nature prevails, and though political power has shifted in the new South Africa, Brink's mythopoeia predicts only more of the same. Black and white may ultimately free themselves from interracial hatred and learn to like and even love each other in a platonic way, as did the white Khois her black husband at the height of their sexual difficulties. But the sexual act, the miscegenation, the text suggests, will remain forever the antecedent to destruction. The author's choice of T. S. Eliot's words for his epigraph would seem to corroborate his view. Eliot writes in the third movement of “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets:

This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

Only by eschewing sexual desire between black and white, Brink seems to say, can South Africans liberate themselves from future destruction and thus achieve a harmonious relationship. Every interracial sexual indulgence that produces offspring, he implies, leaves its trail of tears and misunderstandings. The child who is the product of Khois and T'Kama's prosthesis remains as evidence of their physical love and of the sorrow such love leaves in its wake. So, too, the reader may infer from the text, does the very existence of the “Coloured” people, of which the boy is the first representative, affirm the occurrence of interracial sex and its subsequent fallout. Brink's epic ends with T'Kama tied to a great boulder and dying. He has been beaten and tortured, his new prosthetic penis and that which remained of his original “bird” destroyed by the avenging seamen who shout, “That will teach you to consort with our white women!” (135). They cannot kill the black man, for he lives on in his child. His very consolation, however, in the context of the ideology that suffuses Brink's mythopoeia, reads also as warning to the reader about future calamity.

One could say about Brink's postapartheid promise as revealed through this deconstruction of his mythological text that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. For when reduced to its bare bones, his perhaps unconscious message has little to distinguish it from that of his colonial forbears. But even on the level of the intended, his categorization of both sides as bearing equal responsibility for the sexual misunderstandings would seem in the face of historical facts about sexual power in the context of white supremacy an attempt to spread the blame. If both sides are equally to blame, whites are relieved of the terrible burden of having to face alone their children's question, “How could this thing have happened?”

Mike Nicol, too, resorts to spreading the blame. In his attempt to explain the inexplicable, however, he looks to Christian myth, to the Book of Revelation itself, and implies that South Africa's apartheid history, which he assumes the reader knows, constitutes a playing out of the Apocalyptic myth itself. Nothing else, he implies, can make sense of man's inhumanity to man, human cruelty that, in the face of difference and need, confronts the reader with the inscrutability of the shadow self. Apartheid South Africa itself does not feature; it is an absence made present, a future already told in the Scriptures. In effect, Horseman merely sets the scene for this prophecy fulfillment, crossing continents and generations that bring the action only so far as the latter part of the nineteenth century. What is important in this build-up to Armageddon, however, is that everyone is implicated. No one escapes condemnation in the perpetuation of evil and violence that precipitates the heavenly showdown. Even the church stands accused. The author points the finger at the Christian church, which he suggests exported from a superstitious Europe to southern Africa its notions of sanctioned cruelty and punishment in pursuit of a pure soul. An angry and vengeful God, responding to such violence thus sends forth his emissary, his horseman, Death, as he vouchsafed to do according to the writings of the author of the Fourth Gospel, John (Revelation 6: 7). His avenging horseman, around which Nicol reworks the biblical myth, is no more than a brutalized youth who, having assumed unwillingly the mantle of Daupus, meaning death, carries his slaughter to Africa, to that one-quarter of the world apportioned to him as the Fourth Horseman by the Christian God himself. “Kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts,” the youth speaks the words of his destiny and in so doing echoes the prophesy said to have been God's words revealed to John.⁷ He believes he cannot escape his fate, though he tries, even going so far as to attempt suicide by throwing himself from the high tower window of the monastery in which he is imprisoned (53). But “there can be no undoing” of the heavenly contract, the cowled overseer tells the boy, “no other way” for him to be in this life (49). His destiny is set.

The myth of the Apocalyptic Horseman has long attracted ideologues, most of them in countries far removed from the Hill of Megiddo, site of the promised Armageddon, in Palestine (Revelation 16). The myth's appeal lies in the figurative language and nonspecificity that makes it malleable and open to interpretations not only of place and time, but also of the nature of evil itself. In the very polysemy of myth, however, lies also its danger. For even as the language of myth conveys the intended ideology, it also betrays those ideologies of which the writer is constructed and which may even contradict those intended. Nicol's Horseman, as interpreted above, offers the author's personal reply to his own anguished questions about man's inhumanity to man, which he expressed in his contribution to André Brink's SA 27 April 1994, an anthology of writers' responses to the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as President. In his entry, entitled “Voting at Camel Rock,” Nicol asked, “Why did history always have to be so bloody? Why did it take corpses to get to a day like today? And when you got there, why did it all seem so inevitable?” (96). He repudiates in that essay what he claims is the usual answer, “Just because,” but, in fact, in his reworked Revelation myth, he ultimately offers its equivalent. For what is “just because” in the light of Revelation if not “God's will”? Ultimately, for Nicol, fate, which in the context of his mythopoeia he interprets as “God's will,” holds the only possible explanation for the crimes of South Africa. Anything else is too painful to imagine. Against the background of atrocities revealed through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Nicol's appropriation of the Apocalypse offers South Africans an acceptable answer, one in keeping with the religion whose interpretation led them astray in the first place.

To the question with no acceptable answer, the realization of the prophecy serves two interrelated functions. In the first place, Daupus as the Fourth Horseman, God's tool of revenge bringing down death and destruction on southern Africa, acts in response to past misdeeds, not present. The bloody years of mayhem that follow this avenging messenger constitute the actualization of the deity's punishment for past breaking of his rules and betrayal of his trust. Since the culprits responsible for causing his fury predate apartheid South Africa, the blame for the materialization of the strife at the southern tip of the continent can be attributed to previous generations (superstitious hordes, Christian clerics, and profiteering schemers). It is they, and not the creators and perpetuators of apartheid themselves, who bear ultimate responsibility for the horror that follows. The latter simply pay the price of their predecessors' sins, thus in effect becoming victims themselves, a position Afrikaners and their Dutch Reformed Church long have claimed in the face of world condemnation. What is more, in reaping the wages of others' sins, they acquire sacrificial status in that they transcend their victimhood, becoming noble and, like Jesus Christ, suffering for the sins of mankind. In the second place, since the apartheid apocalypse is predetermined, in other words, it is the actualization of the will of God and the realization of His revenge made flesh, South Africa's white oppressors cannot be held responsible for the state of the country, for they simply act out their fate. It is “god's will,” as their form of Calvinism long has maintained in defense of that country's racial inequity. Nicol's encoded signifiers thus ironically reinforce earlier Afrikaner mythology that claims the “white tribe” as a chosen people following God's will, in this case even as they play out his revenge.

In his narrative incorporation of the will of the gods into the horrifying Hades-like destruction that follows in the horseman's wake, Nicol thus removes accountability from the hands of contemporary murderers, plunderers, and rapists. In his representation of the myth, he implies that all the perpetrators of the violence that follows merely do the work of God and fulfill the Apocalyptic promise, for they and the one chosen by the “cowled overseer” purge the world in preparation for the Second Coming and the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was kill,” the death-dealing horseman, Daupus, misquotes the Scriptures. Thus, Nicol unwittingly frees violence' perpetrators of personal responsibility for their crimes so that they seem merely to play out fate over which they have no control. Actors in a tragedy, their destiny is preordained and no matter their good intentions, they can no more alter events than can Daupus.

But mythopoeia allows an even further corollary to white freedom's removal from blame. The trail of devastation Daupus creates invites retaliation, retribution, and vengeance. The brutalized youth brutalizes others who brutalize in return so that, in the final analysis, everyone is in on the act, doing the “work of God” and maiming and killing in Daupus's place. Madach explains to Daupus the trickiness of the signifier “vengeance,” pointing out how “it goads, it irritates, it won't be put aside until the deed is done. And then instantly it is an illusion, an emptiness, a nothingness” that “carries no satisfaction, no triumph,” but instead makes you feel that once again you've been betrayed and again must have vengeance (15). Thus does revenge beget revenge, betrayals further betrayals. The notion, suggestive of the universality of evil and thus the very banality of South Africa's particular white brand of horror, further relieves whites of responsibility for their apartheid crimes. European savagery thus becomes merely a “natural” human response to brutalization by the dark other, and vice versa, making violence “normal,” and cruelty, rape, and bloodshed the “natural” reactions of humans. What is more, since black violence also constitutes merely a “human” response to white aggression, all South Africans, both black and white, are thus liberated from the consequences of their acts. Taken to its logical conclusion, Nicol's ideology suggests that everyone is responsible, and therefore nobody is. Such revenge is merely “natural”; in other words, it derives from the source of nature itself, that ultimate avenger, the betrayed God who seeks to wreak His revenge. Nicol, in taking revenge's reading from nature, thus makes God his touchstone for universalizing the particular. Revenge both starts and ends with God, thus laying the rap for the violence of South Africa on Christianity's heavenly Father Himself. It is He who, according to the vouchsafed word, starts the vicious circle in which an empty eye-socket demands the eye of someone else in reparation. In killing not only His enemies but his own son, God sets the precedent for physical violence and His creatures take from Him their cue. In this closed circle, the will of God sets the tone, and however much humans may struggle to change the direction of their fate, they are doomed.

Like Brink in The Cape of Storms, Nicol uses the epic form to involve the gods as endorsement of fate, and hence of South African history. Just as Brink's redrawing of the classic epic Adamastor allows him to equate the will of the gods with the tragedy that befalls T'Kama, so too docs Nicol's mythopoeia work to the same effect on his characters. A totality exists within the enclosed world of gods and men, as it did in the Greek world, and within that enclosed circle, as Lukács points out in his The Theory of the Novel, everything “ripens to its own perfection and by attaining itself, submits to limitation” (34). Thus does Daupus ultimately succumb to his fate and fulfill his predetermined role. His few attempts at decency—for example, his rescue of Lizzie's “daughter” Fanny from sodomization, his sacrifice of his only possession, his gun, for his friend Madach's surgery (87, 110)—count for nothing in the bigger plan. His ontological path restricts him within its preordained limits.

But how does Daupus know this? How does he know his future is inescapable? And how can Nicol read such predetermination into his own narrative? After all, the closed world of the Greek gods remains only in the poetry books, that totality with its transcendental essence long ago replaced by our twentieth-century immanence. Today, the circle is broken and a chasm exists between the world and self that now places us in charge of our own destinies. But in the time period between the classical world and ours, the church with its paradoxical notion of irredeemable sin and impossible, yet certain redemption recreated the closed circle of a predestined future. Lukács points to the integrated world of Giotto, St. Francis, and Dante as example of a world once again made round by the church (37). Thus, in Horseman, we find the old monk in the monastery, “tormented by lust and the desires of sodomy” as he watches the youth at his toilet, praying expectantly to God for mercy even as he shuffles “for a better view when the youth obscure[s] his parts” (43). It is the church, Nicol implies, that usurps God's position on earth and acts on His behalf. It speaks for the deity, becoming itself the Word. This is the same European church that in the chronologically compressed life-span of Nicol's protagonist jumps centuries to become the many evangelical houses of God removed to the dark continent to save the souls of “heathens” even as their bodies are sold into slavery. From one of these houses develops the Dutch Reformed Church whose relationship to the Afrikaner mimics that same totality of being experienced by the Greeks. For those of the Calvinist persuasion, the church transforms the structure of the transcendental loci, assuming its authoritative arm and drawing its puppet-like control of its creatures into the realms of ecclesiastical power.

While Nicol's depiction of the cruelties inflicted by the church and in its name places the burden of guilt on religion, it is language itself, he suggests, that provides the means by which myth is both constructed and realized. Until the youth is recruited to fulfill the mythical words of Revelation and is named Daupus, he goes without a name and is simply what we today would see as the problematic product of a brutalized background. Only “words, those we speak and those we write […] make us real,” the school-teacher tells him: “without them we would be nothing” (31). But if the church controls the words, including the words of God, the text suggests, it has the power to create not only reality to its own benefit, but our notion of God's reality as well. As itself “the Word” because the keeper of the Word, the church rather than any god controls human life and destiny. For that reason, Nicol implies, the church ultimately carries also the responsibility for whatever havoc its words may reap. And what it reaps at the southern tip of Africa is its words made flesh. Language has run away with religion. It has become a victim of its own language and language speaks it.

It also, of course, speaks the author. In any deconstruction of a text the author can be complicit and Nicol bears this out. In his mythopoeiac deconstruction of Revelation, even as he blames the church for its betrayal of a quarter of the world's population, he uses it to make sense of mankind's violent excesses. The Apocalypse in mankind's hands becomes South Africa's excuse. The horror and tragedy of this century justify the biblical words as self-fulfilling prophecy and reconfirm the church in its position as keeper of the true Word. Yet Nicol's text suggests the prophecy as literary construction and the church as perpetrator, if not instigator of history. In his thematic emphasis on betrayal that elicits further betrayal, he implies through the youth's dream of his own death at the hands of his father that the primary betrayal is that of the original father, God Himself. Death, the ultimate betrayal, represents both “a triumph and a revenge” for God, the hooded presence tells the young Daupus as the youth cowers in the bowels of the monastery (49). God revenges himself on us for our sins while simultaneously rejoicing in the triumph of our return to the original oneness, beyond language, that He represents. With death, “language ends,” the hooded presence reminds him, “[…] there are no words” (46). However, the oneness or nothingness beyond language on which the author bases his criticism of the church and his attribution of the Apocalypse is itself the product of the church's words. Yet when he writes of betrayal begetting betrayal, revenge begetting revenge, his implication of the “natural” and therefore the universal once again plays on the notion of an Ultimate or God. It is the way we are made, our “essential nature,” that makes us react in like way. As part of the original betrayer, made in his image, we too betray. Our “essence” is His, God's, Nicol unwittingly perhaps assumes, if we follow his reasoning to its ultimate end.

Thus, the circle returns to its beginning, for the human mind, even that of the postmodern author, cannot escape its own linguistic enclosure. Ultimately, we are all complicit. We are also, Horseman suggests, all guilty. As Madach tells the youth about the man he bayonetted to death, even if his victim did not personally bear responsibility for the murder for which Madach killed him, he was nevertheless guilty because he lived at the same time of the crime and didn't say anything (18). Nicol, like Brink, of course, did say something. In fact, each author, but especially the older writer Brink, has written voluminously on the subject of violence and oppression in South Africa. By turning to the gods, however, and enlisting their aid in their individual reworkings of the mythical texts, they have unwittingly undercut their own criticism, exposing one evil while concealing society's real evil by making it seem “natural.”

Notes

1. Adamastor barely rates a mention in the first chapter of Pantagruel as one of a long genealogy of giants who begat one another. However, his appearance in the Portuguese national epic, Os Lusíadas (The Lusitanians), by Luiz de Camões, allows him more status, for Camões places him as one of the titans who rebel against Zeus. This Renaissance epic, published in Lisbon in 1572, consists of 10 cantos that recount the exploits and achievements of the short-lived Portuguese empire. Canto 5 describes the journey of Camões's relative, Vasco Da Gama, whose flotilla of ships stops at the Cape of Storms on its way to the Indies. Here, Da Gama meets the natives and also “the ugly Monster,” Adamastor, who tells his tragic love story and his metamorphosis into the rock of the Cape and throws a curse on ships sailing the waters around him.

2. In a July 1993 New York Times Book Review interview, Brink claims that in Cape of Storms he explores the historical roots of racism through two myths. So excessive and overpowering is his treatment of the sexual one, however, that the second, that of Africa as the “heart of darkness,” barely registers.

3. Although Camões's Adamastor is not specifically described as black, his epic has been interpreted by white South Africans as inferring color. For South African poet Roy Campbell, for example, Adamastor represented the black other. In his poem “Rounding the Cape,” he wrote of the indignities and atrocities heaped upon Adamastor's back by the white population, “heedless of the blood [they'd] spilled.” The ultimate line of the poem reads “And night, the Negro, murmurs in his sleep.”

4. Lawrence Lipking, in his insightful article on the collaboration between poetry and nationalism, “The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,” points out that by recreating Rabelais's Adamastor as part of the Zeus mythology of the Western world, Camões makes his story understandable to Portuguese readers and “affirms the inevitable logic that underlies history” (217). The gods of the Western world are in charge even of the southern tip of Africa and Tsui-Goab, Gaunab, and Heitsi-Eibib don't have a chance, especially since, as Lipking notes, the Portuguese “also hold in reserve a more powerful god, who has always kept pagans in their place” (217).

5. This simile would seem itself a strange choice, as if Brink had forgotten that he had informed the reader previously of the Khoi word for ostrich (Big Bird) being “T'Kama,” which in turn, in slang, connotes “penis.” From the context of the description of the Portuguese sailors in their Renaissance frills, like feathers, and their stockinged legs, the narrator intended to signify by “ostriches” the feathered birds alone. Had he meant to imply “big penis,” the simile would suggest that they only walked as if they possessed such attributes, but since T'Kama views them completely clothed, he cannot have any idea of their genital size.

6. Like epics, both Cape of Storms and Horseman begin each chapter with summaries of the narrative action. The latter also begins with drawings.

7. In Revelation 6.7 of the Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition, John's text reads: “When he [the Lamb] opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. 109-59.

Brink, André. Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

———. Interview. “Let Everyone Speak at Once.” New York Times Book Review 15 July 1993: 23.

Camões, Luiz de. “The Lusiads, Canto V.” Trans. Sir Richard Fanshaw. Southern African Verse. Ed. Stephen Gray. London: Penguin, 1989. 1-26.

Campbell, Roy. “Rounding the Cape.” The Penguin Book of South African Verse. Comp. Jack Cope and Uys Krige. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1968, 26.

Graeber, Laurel. “Let Everyone Speak at Once.” New York Times Book Review 25 July 1993: 23.

Likping, Lawrence. “The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism.” PMLA 111 (1996): 205-21.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.

Nicol, Mike. Horseman. New York: Knopf, 1995.

———. “Voting at the Camel Rock Café.” SA 27 April 1994. Comp. André Brink. Cape Town: Queillerie, 1994. 96-98.