The popular reception of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and the making of literary systems

Abstract

Marlene van Niekerk's novel Triomf (1994) provides an eviscerating critique of the effects of the cultural, discursive, and physical separations of race and class enforced by apartheid. To the outside world, Van Niekerk offers in Triomf an in-depth and varied view of the Afrikaner's history and culture, thereby providing what readers might experience as a kind of informative insight into this demographic group and South Africa - here particularly the least empowered demographic of Afrikaners who lived under apartheid. But outside of the text, the impact of the novel has also been significant - first in Afrikaans literature, and later also in South African English literature (and beyond) through the success of the translation of the novel by Leon de Kock (1999). The purpose of this study is to revisit the popular reception of Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf within the Afrikaans and English spheres in the first decade after 1994. This article, which focuses exclusively on a chosen set of epitexts surrounding the novel (Genette), draws attention to the overlaps and divergences between the relevant literary systems. I show that while two broadly conceptualised clusters of popular responses may have concretised differently in the English and Afrikaans literary systems - and these differences should not be overlooked - the responses to the text also evidence varied and unexpected links between these systems that disavow any claims to narrowly defined literary cultures.