'Against extremity': Eben Venter's Horrelpoot and the quest for tolerance

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Phil van Schalkwyk

Dissonance and authenticity

I believe Venter's intention may have been to produce a text that is, in itself, extreme and exposes the reader to extremity. Horrelpoot may be connected with the 'dissonant' aesthetic tradition, disturbing for the very fact that, in Adorno's (1972, 2000: 239-318) terms, it is extremely 'unlovely'. In its authentic conveyance of ugliness, like the music of Schoenberg, it holds up a mirror to society. Adornian scholar Johan Snyman (1999: 65), in a study of Afrikaans poet/intellectual N.P. van Wyk Louw, holds that this kind of art is considered dangerous, as its discomposing nature is at variance with a world that denounces the discomposed for the sake of superficial harmony and prosperity. This is by no means the kind of text that society can utilise to decorate its grand facades. Horrelpoot may justifiably be deemed an 'autonomous' work of art, as defined by Adorno (2000: 239-263), on account of its conscious withdrawal from and opposition to the culture industry which is bent on standardising and administrating the masses toward 'total integration', in such a way that they are not only conditioned to conform and behave predictably, but also 'programmed' to endure the very extremities paraded in Horrelpoot with such harrowing insistence. Moreover, this oppositional character of Horrelpoot also relates to its implicit critical stance toward the new South African national consensus, which has been characterised by a tendency to gloss over the extremes and (persisting) contradictions in our society, to ignore or deny fears/concerns, and to stigmatise what Adorno (1991) has described as non-standardised individuality and the non-identical. (11) In this sense Horrelpoot could be read as an expression of the dialectical openness to experience that Adorno advocated throughout his career: it strives to respond authentically to the moment in history, and to this purpose important constitutive texts, most notably Conrad's Heart of darkness, are revisited.

However, my contention is that Horrelpoot does not fully succeed in this project. To some extent it does preconceive the order of things--a shortcoming exacerbated by its heavy reliance on its main intertext, Heart of darkness. In this regard, Horrelpoot does not escape the charge that Adorno (2000: 267-279) laid against, for example, exponents of jazz music. Venter (2006), as mentioned, aims to foreground experience that is somehow ignored or undervalued/underplayed, in almost the same way jazz accentuates the weak beats by way of syncopation. This principle is at work in the extensive narrative time devoted to certain seemingly unlikely parts of the narrative, for example: the relatively short journey from the airport to the centre of Bloemfontein takes up more than fifteen pages (pp. 54-71). (12) This serves a deliberate purpose: to focus attention on the desperate plight of a specific fringe figure, the Afrikaans-speaking taxi driver Jaap, who used to be an advocate. However, in jazz music, the 'syncopation principle, which at first had to call attention to itself by exaggeration, has in the meantime become ... self-evident' (Adorno 2000: 269). Likewise, Horrelpoot does tend toward a very emphatic kind of presentation which with each new page becomes more cumbersome, and too soon the schema starts to shine through. A very detailed though immutable scenario is created by means of plot structuring and reliance on intertexts, 'as though nothing else existed' (ibid: 271).