Dedi Felman: I thought we’d start off by talking first about Marlene [van Niekerk]’s work and the magnificent masterpiece of translation that you’ve wrought with Agaat. And it is an epic of translation [fingering the rather bulky South-African published copy that Heyns has carried to the interview]; how many pages is this?

Michiel Heyns: (Laughter) It’s 700, about 695 pages.

The Afrikaans may have been a bit longer, in fact. Isn’t that a rule of thumb that a translation is usually 10% under the original? That’s what the publisher told me. I couldn’t swear that the Afrikaans is longer, but I somehow remember 700 plus pages.

DF: Can you first introduce our readers, because the book is not yet available in the US, although maybe it will be by the time we publish this . . .

MH: We hope so . . . (laughter)

DF: Introduce us to the story, and maybe a little bit to Marlene herself?

MH: This is obviously the long-awaited follow-up to Marlene’s first novel, Triomf, which was published here and very well received; it is being filmed at the moment in Afrikaans, by a Zimbabwean director living in Paris.

The interesting thing about Agaat, apart from the fact that it was long awaited—it was almost ten years after Triomf—is that it is also such a change in register.

Triomf is raunchy, it’s very urban, the people are frankly trashy, they are the left-behinds of apartheid. They were the voting fodder. They feel disenfranchised, well, they’re not exactly disenfranchised, people are still competing for their votes, but by and large that’s all they are really good for. It’s a very urban novel with a very deliberately unelevated idiom—it’s very crude, extremely crude.

And then came Agaat, which is a farm novel. The family, the people are what I suppose can be regarded as a kind of Afrikaner aristocracy. They are people who went to university, they are landowners.

And by and large, Milla imagines that she is performing an act of great mercy and charity.

But Marlene is, in Agaat, as in Triomf, very interested in questions of power and, of course, I think she sees Milla’s taking up of Agaat as an exercise of power, as a manipulation.

I found a passage in T.S. Eliot [from "Little Gidding"] which I thought expressed very well the sort of central idea of Agaat and Marlene agreed and we reprinted it and what it says is:

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue. [Heyns' emphasis]

I think that very much sums up where we are when the novel starts. Because the novel starts with Milla on her deathbed, slowly, very slowly dying of motor neuron disease (ALS), and her faculties shut down one by one. And for 700 relentless pages we have this dismantling of this body traced then in various ways.

There are four narratives. One is the present tense: the description of Milla’s day-to-day communion with Agaat. Because Agaat, now, and the roles have been reversed: whereas Milla taught Agaat to speak, to read, to write, now Agaat has to speak for Milla, she has to read for her, she has to write for her, she now does everything for Milla. And of course Agaat is [now the locus of] power and I think the novel very much swivels on that Foucaultian idea of caring as an exercise of power.

I’m rambling (laughter) so . . . I’ll stop there.

DF: The power structures in this novel are very elaborate. Maybe we can go back to that in a minute. I also want to note your important statement that “caring has a power of its own.” Let’s return to that as well.

Now, you started to say that there are four narrators. Can you go through and explain who those four narrators are? What their tenses are. It’s a very complex weaving of voices, of tense . . .

MH: . . . it is voice—and style really, isn’t it? The stylistic differences are perhaps the most noticeable.

The first is the main narrative. The present tense. It is in the present tense, which is not strange in Afrikaans because that is the usual narrative tense. But in English, it would have been more obvious that it is the here and now. And that it is what is happening now and in this room between Milla and Agaat. And it registers every move Agaat makes through Milla’s consciousness. So it’s a hypersensitive account of a sick room and of Agaat’s movements.

Then, from that, we move to the most traditional, the flashback in which we are retold in fairly conventional chronological order the story of Milla’s marriage. It starts with Milla’s engagement to Jak. This is when her mother hands over the farm, and it is when Milla assumes power: she assumes power over Jak and she assumes power over the farm. Jak, of course, thinks that he is assuming power.

DF: Accusatory?

MH: Yes. Well, you know: You did that. You did that.

Accusatory is too strong, but it’s a sense of . . . a recording of what she has done as if she is pointing a finger at herself.

DF: At herself?

MH: Yes. Perhaps not intentionally, but the style is turning the novel onto Milla. For instance, say in the sex scene between her and Jak. It gives it a kind of an objectivity which first person wouldn’t have had. As if someone is standing back, slightly skeptically, and describing Milla’s movements from outside.

DF: It’s interesting, because . . . it’s not the way that I remember that scene. The way I remember it, the sex scene seems so intimate and so real—and so full of life—that it’s a direct contrast with the sickbed. As you say, the sickbed voice is a distanced voice, a voice twice removed. It’s someone else’s consciousness. It’s a different person almost.

MH: Well, I think Marlene would be pleased. No, because Marlene is actually very hard on Milla, harder than I am, in the sense that she’s very interested in Milla’s manipulation of power, to the extent almost of wanting to nullify the good intentions that there were, you know. Those good intentions were thoroughly mixed, of course. But, anyway, so Marlene is not very sympathetic to Milla. She’s not very sympathetic to Jak either. But she does see him as a victim of Milla, and that, in a way, he’s reacting to his own powerlessness. And he’s reacting in the only way he knows how, which is violently and very unpleasantly.

DF: OK, so now let’s go back to the two voices.

DF: So when we get to her death, we are right at the beginning with the adoption of Agaat.

MH: Yes.

DF: And why does Milla decide to record her doings at the time of the adoption of Agaat?

DF: And, as you say, this is a matrilineal descent to begin with, and there is this sense that she is grooming Agaat for that, even though Milla has a son.

MH: And so she is passing on, and of course, also what one is more aware of in the Afrikaans than in the English, is that Marlene is passing on a whole cultural possession, in terms of songs, poems . . . And it is also Marlene writing down a lot of things that might get lost. Old words. Myths.

DF: I don’t think you talked about this, but historically, the starting point and ending date of the novel are significant . . .

MH: Yes, they are significant. I think Milla and Jak got married right after the accession to power of the National Party, in 1948. Then Agaat was adopted in the early sixties, so she is an apartheid child. And she is very much brought up in accordance with the tenets of apartheid.

Agaat’s great bitterness is that when she is brought into the house, Milla doesn’t have any children of her own and Agaat’s brought up almost as Milla and Jak’s child. Then Milla gets pregnant with Jakkie, and Agaat is put into the backyard and made into a servant. So having been brought up as a member of the family, all of a sudden she is this servant. In fact, she becomes a nothing in that the other servants don’t accept her. They think she’s privileged; she has a better room than they do. But nor is she accepted into the house because she’s not actually part of the family. So she’s left in between. And she’s very bitter about it.

DF: But we haven’t got to the fourth narrative yet.

MH: Right. The third is the diaries . . .

So the fourth. The fourth is: Marlene talks of the lyrical passages, they are stream of consciousness, tracing all the various stages of the disease. I think that’s how Marlene saw it. But they are strange washes of memory and associations, in terms of the body that is slowly breaking down.

It’s often not very easy to see what is happening there, and one has to, when one has read the whole novel, one has to go back, and you see that Marlene has woven into those passages themes from the rest of the novel that she has also very carefully traced. For example, Milla first becomes aware that she is ill is when she drops something. She discovers suddenly that she can’t hold things anymore. And then, she uses a wheelchair, and then she can no longer use a wheelchair.

And so there is that breaking down. In poetic terms. Very strongly metaphorical. Very strongly associative. Those are the italicized passages.

DF: I wanted to go back to the question of the various power structures in the novel. It is such a dense web. There’s Agaat’s relationship to Milla, there’s Agaat’s relationship to KleinJak, there is Milla’s relationship with KleinJak, there is both of their relationships with Jak. There’s Milla’s relationship with her family. She starts out in the opening scenes as very independent and rebellious—an interestingly independent woman even as we meet her in her completely dependent later stages.

With such a complex setup, I wondered whether the point is not to create any kind of structure at all but just merely to trace the shifts between the characters. It’s complicated by the flashbacks, and the back and forth of the chronology, but that it’s the shifting of the relationships that are the point rather than any particular structure of power.

MH: I think you are absolutely right because those power relationships shift all the time. At times, Milla is very much under the domination of Jak. But in the larger context, she is probably the stronger character. The moment she becomes pregnant she is stronger than Jak, because she is now producing the heir. So through bringing forth their manchild she is stronger than her husband, but of course in terms of the mores of the time she is under the authority of her husband. Yes, so you’re right that it shifts—and with Milla and Agaat, almost from second to second. Even when Milla is completely powerless and lying there she can still project a certain kind of power. Which Agaat can choose to ignore and yet at times, has to heed. I think that’s what makes those present tense passages so very strong. It is always a struggle. It’s not just someone lying flat on her back being dominated by someone else. It’s a game that is renegotiated all the time. So I think you’re absolutely right that it’s not a rigid structure.

DF: Clearly there’s a parallel to the shifts in the form of the novel as a whole, because you are constantly shifting back and forth in time. Is there a parallel to that in the language?

MH: I hadn’t thought of the language itself as embodying those shifts.

DF: The idea struck me because of that fourth voice . . . That fourth voice is where she is taking language and that negotiation of structure to the extreme . . .

MH: Yes, I think it’s true that that’s where the language is liberated and deprived of those structures of tense and reference that one would normally have. It’s a suspension of a lot of structure. Certainly Marlene is trying to give the impression of a more subconscious awareness floating through. But very much in terms of sense impressions, Marlene writes very much for the senses, sound, smell, touch, all those are very much part of her recollections as floating associations.

DF: The publisher’s description of the novel starts by noting the main character’s paralysis of voice due to the advanced stage of her disease, yet one leaves the novel with a powerful sense of Milla and Agaat’s voices. Does the literal paralysis of the speech of the heroine amplify her voice? How is this achieved?

MH: The four narratives help. As one narrative slows down, the other one is picking up momentum. We are moving toward the moment of revelation: we know that we will find out how Milla came across Agaat as the present-tense narrative unwinds, and we know that Milla will die. And these two narratives are seeking each other all the time.

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-last-farm-novel-an-interview-with-michiel-heyns/#ixzz0lpZHR3OJ