Haunted house, haunted nation: Triomf and the South African postcolonial gothic

Abstract

Summary By drawing upon contemporary loci of fear and cultural anxiety, Gothic literature continually reinvents itself across international borders. This article places Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf (2004) within the context of the Gothic novel as a uniquely South African development of the postcolonial Gothic mode. In Triomf, Van Niekerk reworks the conventions common to Gothic fiction to create a literature of terror that captures the Zeitgeist of Afrikaner anxieties ‐ the novel functions as a critique of white South Africa's civil religion of cultural dominion. Specifically, Van Niekerk deploys a hauntology of the Voortrekker tradition that questions the congruence of South Africa's mythologised past and the nation's projected postcolonial claims for the present and future; as Sophiatown's buried past rises to the surface, the Benade family find themselves haunted by the apartheid policies that constructed their suburban home ‐ the haunted house becomes the haunted nation. To illustrate the spectral purpose at work in Triomf, I reference Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx as a framework from which to view the ideological haunting that Van Niekerk uses in her narrative. As the free elections of 1994 draw near in the novel, haunting gives way to the possibilities of a Gothic apocalypse that threatens not only the Benades, but also the self‐sustaining colonial ideology that enables Afrikaner cultural and political superiority.