| Abstrakt: |
This article explores chaos or ‘mania’ as aleitmotifinMemorandum: A Story with Paintingsby Marlene van Niekerk and Adriaan van Zyl (2006. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau). I argue that ‘mania’ is an evocation of the Dionysian forces in life and art: what Friedrich Nietzsche relates to the destructive-transformative power of primordial creative energy, and the urge to cosmic interconnectedness. The tale of Johannes Frekerikus Wiid is a Nietzschean quest in which the protagonist's reconstruction of an overheard conversation – a ‘word and allusion mania’ (2006, 35) – unexpectedly becomes the catalyst for his transformation into a creator and artist. This article focusses on the death of Wiid's interlocutors (Messrs X and Y) and how their breaths become divineafflatusfor Wiid's imagined conclusion to their conversation: an allusive and enigmatic dialogue of their final passage across a personalized river Styx to their cosmic nest. This dialogue is intermediated by Van Zyl's ‘Hospital Diptych III’, a painting of an empty hospital bed alongside a painting of a tempestuous sea. This visual text is positioned at a critical point in the written narrative and invites a discussion of the relationship between image and text. The mutual interdependence of image and text inMemorandumis exemplary of Peter Wagner's notion of the ‘iconotext’: ‘an artefact in which the verbal and visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric that depends on the copresence of words and images’ (1996.Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 16). In conclusion, I consider the reciprocity between image and text, and how this contributes to the significance of Wiid's quest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
