PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the exemplary model. While The Novel advances a well-thought-outpostmodern theory of language and narrative, it is Brink’s creative work that is most relevantto our topic of para/inquiry. The burdensome desire for an originary origination that directsthe history of the novel, according to Brink, is captured quite succinctly in the Preface to hisnovel The Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor, in which he writes that the “distinctionsbetween was and wasn’t are rather blurred.” 5 It is worth mentioning that in both spheres,scholarly and creative, Brink, known as a political writer, addresses much of the criticism thathas been leveled against postmodernism for its supposed apolitical nature. He argues thatDerrida’s now famous-line that “there is nothing outside the text” [Il n’y a pas d’hors-texte]was wrongly taken to mean that the world is inconsequential. It also was mistakenly read tomean that intellectual endeavors were inconsequential. In stating his proposition, Brinkreminds us, Derrida was arguing that there is not a transcendent element that settles, as amatter of adjudication, the issue of interpretation. Or, in other words, there is not an ultimateor transcendent signified that gathers all signifiers (meaning and value) beneath it.In The Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor, André Brink interrupts the beginning ofhis own narrative, the form of the novel, and the reader’s processes of interpretation, bydirecting attention to the Derridean infinity of anterior narrative moments which “begins,” orhas already “begun,” his writing: “in which, after some critical remarks about early Frenchand Portuguese interpretations of Adamastor, the narrator proposes the terms of his contractwith the reader.” 6 Thus “begins” the peculiar introduction to The Cape of Storms, in whichBrink divulges to the reader that the motivation behind his recent literary “venture” is a“nagging question” concerning the possible existence of an “Urtext” – an unwrittencosmogonic myth, some “raw material,” which may have informed the sixteenth-century24European story of Adamastor. According to Brink, Adamastor the Titan, whose body formedthe “jagged outcrop of the Cape Peninsula,” appears for the first time in Rabelais’sPantagruel, some time after European explorers made their first contact with the people ofsouthern Africa. 7 Brink’s fascination with the possibility of an unwritten Urtext linkingtogether Rabelais’s and Camões’s Adamastor leads him to ponder the ramifications of acultural and historical synthesis of Europe and southern Africa through the fragmentedstructure of myth and the subjectivity of an immortal prophet.The seemingly eternal and coalescing promise of an available cross-cultural cosmogonycompels Brink to begin with beginnings. His narrative sets an immortal prophet and apossible unwritten Urtext that shapes the myth of Adamastor alongside the story of Christ’sdeath and resurrection. This competing structure of sacrality is brought to the Africancontinent by the explorers, thus suggesting that one could reveal through comparative myth aplace and moment of origin, or, at least, first contact between European explorers and thepeople of southern Africa. This profound opposition between the shared Urtext and theunshared world comes to expression in Brink’s novel through the articulation and designationof sacred space around the presence of an eternal hero: “Our fear turned to jubilation. Withour own eyes we had witnessed that, far from desecrating the grave, these people alsorespected our Great Hunter; so there was nothing to fear anymore.” 8 Brink’s Adamastor, theperson of T’Kama, goes on to tell the story of that first contact between Vasco de Gama andhis men on their way to or from the East.The novel seems to play back for the reader, time and time again, the urgent desire fororigins and destinations in literature and myth. The first contact between the Europeanexplorers and the people of the African continent is more than an historical moment to be