Threshold People: Liminal Subjectivity in Etienne van Heerden, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

In Mad Dog and Other Stories (1992), Afrikaans writer Etienne van Heerden meditates on the damage apartheid wreaks on normative understandings of human subjectivity. In this chapter, I will be focusing on the ways in which two stories from the collection, ‘White Monkey’ and ‘My Afrikaner’, constitute a vicious cycle whereby the racist and hierarchical understanding of human subjectivity posited by apartheid is predicated upon, and becomes the occasion for, physical and epistemic violence. Experience of that violence further damages the subjectivity of victim and perpetrator alike. This preoccupation with the psychic and physical effects of an apartheid mentality aligns the Mad Dog narratives with works from two canonical South African writers: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), written during the latter years of apartheid, and Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun (1999), set in the new South African state. Like van Heerden’s narratives, Barbarians and The House Gun ask what sort of subjectivity, or potential for human reciprocity, apartheid and its associated outrages leave in their wake.