OPSOMMING
7. Reading notes, around texturality
1.7.2 On readerly lupification, or: Reading like wolves (Towards a conclusion)
As much as the protagonist of Venter’s novel cannot escape the fixating spectres of national and filial belonging, so too is Venter oftentimes made to be read-for filiality; I track some of these filial lines (through biography, nationality, genre, and – almost – meat-eating) and their implications for my own reading of Wolf, Wolf, in part 2.10.
In an attempt to circumvent this, I posit aspects of my reading of the novel as a type of readerly lupification, a literary ‘denning’ around a Deleuze-Guattarian wolfing. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is replete with references to wolves (in similar – and different – ways to which the Venter oeuvre is packed with canids) and, by their own admission, is underlain by an intense curiosity as to its very “modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. […] The wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing”
(1980:239). ‘To wolf’ becomes a verb, an action, a process, and their later exploration of packs
25 Seeing Wolf, Wolf as punctum in an oeuvre which offers multiple potential points of immersion (Strydom, 2019), enables us to project more nuanced framings (backward) onto at-times problematic essentialism and unproductive caricatures in Santa Gamka (2009, untranslated) and Brouhaha (2010, untranslated); as well as addressing (forward) critique that frames Groen soos die hemel daarbo (2017; published in English as Green as the sky is blue in 2018) as unreconstructed neo-colonialist fantasia.
and multiplicity builds on the understanding of what the wolf comes to do, not (only) what it means (Holland, 2013:25). It also invites consideration of the extent to which humans resemble packs, like wolves, or herds, like cattle (ibid.).
Throughout the current study, I use the terms ‘dogs’ and ‘wolves’ as metonyms – or, perhaps more associatively, as sign cyphers26 – for readerly-scholarly ways of plugging into the text, into the epitextual lattice around the text/oeuvre/author, or into the oeuvre. For me, there is a clear difference (even though slippage is, at times, productively addressed) between reading like a wolf (for the olfactory; in cubilication; ferally-into-pack) and reading like a dog (along the visual, filial, as a companion to the text); the same bifurcation informs my use of adjectives such as
‘dogged’ and ‘lupine’. And, in order to un-resemble the textual dogs that so often signal affective suture in Venter’s narratives from my view of dogs-as-markers-of-filial orientation, I refer to the former as ‘canids’27. Related to this bifurcation, I surface (but do not conceptualise into cypher) a third way of relating to the assemblages in this study: a jackalling, which I base on a ‘losse groepering’ of Wolfie (the configuration of white-queerness in Venter’s novel that acts as entrant into the patriarchal intimate domicile), the affective hurl of Ek stamel ek sterwe’s
“tweegatjakkals” (Venter, 1996), and a handful of other vosse and jakkalse in Venter’s oeuvre.
Granted, while a grouping of such conceptual looseness evades being pinned down, it is still productive – perhaps, as a jackalling signals a prodding loose of fixed categories, even more so for its ephemerality.
26 For a discussion of the larger question of how materiality is significated into meaning, and the role of icons and indexes (with specific social functions and effects), see N. Wallis (2013).
27 As so much of this study cannot shake itself loose from the movement (continuous) or the effect (sweaty, like the middle third of a 10km Parkrun) between two quite ideologically muscular language sets (Afrikaner-Afrikaans and South African English), I find it productive that ‘canids’ translates, juicely, as Lycaon
pictus/wildehonde/jagtershonde/jagterswolfhonde.
As I write in later sections, Venter’s use of canid tropes opens up a Deleuzian zone of
indeterminacy that allows different types of reading as ethical practice, allowing for the affective material through which to reconfigure a readerly being-in-the-world “associate[d] with kindness of heart” (in W. Schleidt and M.D. Shalter’s phrasing (2003:59) of the wolf, canid, jackal). Such an assemblaged kindness comes close to counteracting the brutal intimacy (Venter, 2013:23) that filial readings of the novel (my own, Strydom, 2018, included) may surface.
Parts of this study traces28 what such assemblaging does in/to the scholarly reading: For example, I see Wolfie not as a narrative figure, but as a modality Jack temporarily becomes, so to constitute a line of flight or bifurcation from the father (and the Afrikaner-patriarchal in
general) and progenitorial duty. As “[b]ecoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary”, write Deleuze and Guattari (1987:238), instead they emphasise alliance: “Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation […] Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance.” (1987: 238). Accordingly, through the Wolfie entrant (read alongside how vosse and jakkalse deploy and signal elsewhere in the Vente oeuvre) assemblage, duty is shown to be imaginary, even when its codification is so normalised in Afrikaner culture29. On the other hand, alliance – such as temporarily between Matt and Jack – allow for some forms of becoming, particularly through Jack’s becoming-wolf- Wolfie entrant. But this holds true for the reader too. And for reading strategies. And for how we
28 I base my conceptualisation of ‘tracing’ (at times, I also refer to this as snuffel/uitsnuffel) on the methodology, presented by A. Mitchell in Tracing Wolves. Materiality, Effect, and Difference (2018), to construct a civic-State animal-human lens that becomes an ethicality.
29 Or, rather: when its codification is so normalised in the type of Afrikaans culture presented in the novel; a specific variant of affluent, patriarchal-capitalist Afrikaans/Afrikaner culture, very specifically geo-located, which is often left unprodded in reception of Venter’s work.
interact with the stickiness that is genre30 or with the/our field-system31. And for how we look at the surface of the (academic) text. The novel’s passages on cubilication and experimental ferality allows for a moving away from an anthropocentric view, to consider other ways of conceptualising more integrated ways of belonging. I take the ‘form’ of lupification (first
encountered in Schleidt and Shalter’s work) into the notion of a readerly strategy that reads-for oppositionality; as an erotic wolfing, that carries such potential to recode our conceptualisations of intimacy with the text, as it reroutes affect into more productive (as opposed to merely
reproductive) ways of being-in-the-world: “In order to escape the psychoanalytical, familial delimitation of desire, Deleuze and Guattari also theorise a different conceptualisation of bodies that rests less on organisation by species or genus and more on the connection of affects – the plugging together of desiring machines. While there is a direct link between social production and sexuality, the very point of rethinking what desire and bodies can do is to reroute desire away from the reproduction of sexuality in its existing familial structures towards its more productive connections.” (Beckman, 2013:139, my emphasis)
30 In The Materiality of Remembering: Freud’s Wolf Man and the Biological Dimensions of Memory (2010), T. Kwon speaks to how the textuality and temporal subject-place-ness of fiction and academic style overlaps, and how both
“call to attention how science and literature are dynamically synthesised, and the manner in which the mode of remembering functions in the study’s dialectic” (2010:213).
This correlates with two notions surfaced later in the current study: Firstly, P. van Schalkwyk’s drawing of attention to how Afrikaans scholarly writing on literature resembles the literary stylistics – though, one would assume, then also (or not?) its fictive potentiality; secondly, how memory, academic affect, and textuality combine in the nostalgia of writing on the genre of the plaasroman. (As memory, and especially the biological flows of memory, memory-making, recalling, and remembering, are centralised in several Venter texts, there would be value in a fuller study on the materiality of remembering.)
31 In addition, I was influenced by J. Koch and P. Zajas’ “tracing of reflections” (2011) in Uit de donkere dagen van voor linguistic turn oftewel wat J. M. Coetzee in de bekentenis van Willem Termeer zag en wat hij daarmee deed, as well as how they (in the same article) see traces of duality (verlies and verwerving; schade and inbezitname) that offered much-needed nuance in the theorization of the plaasroman, circa 2011:
de Zuid-Afrikaanse beheptheid met het land – men denke alleen aan het in de plaatselijke literaire traditie bijna endemische gebruik van het woord land / country in de romans van vele Zuid-Afrikaanse auteurs. Met de hantering van dit woord – al dan niet kwalificatief, maar altijd afgaand op gevoelens – refereert ook Coetzee naar de betrokkenheid van de Zuid-Afrikaners bij hun land, opgevat in de letterlijke betekenis van grond als ook als een groter en abstracter geheel. De beste vertolking daarvan is de plaasroman,
respectievelijk farm novel – het subgenre van de roman waar de problematiek van verlies en verwerving, schade en inbezitname centraal staat, de boerderij en het land idyllische proporties aannamen en het Afrikaans/Afrikaner pastoraal ideaal zijn neerslag vond (2011:93).
Lupine readings for oppositionality thus attempts to read-for shadows of indiscernibility, but the process is changed in a way by coming into contact with queerness: now we read-for to
excavate queer traces under the normative-queer (or white-queer) intensities of Venter’s oeuvre. We do not seek to procreate with the text, but to fuck with (into) it.
Interlude: “Concerning the disease of lycanthropy”
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves