Abstract
SummaryMarlene van Niekerk’s three novels, Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum: A Story with Paintings show a deliberate engagement with the abject and abjection in the Kristevan sense of the word. Kristeva examines abjection and its manifestations extensively in Powers of Horror (1982) and this text form the theoretical departure point for this analysis. Following Dovey (1988) my approach will be “drawing attention to the theoretical issues the novels articulate and to the modes of novelistic discourse with which they engage”. I will locate the traces of the abject in Van Niekerk’s novels and demonstrate to what extent the three texts under discussion reflect Kristeva’s viewpoints on abjection, the relationship with the maternal body and related themes within Kristeva’s critical project such as the boundary between the I as subject and the abject object, food loathing and the omnipresent struggle with the maternal hold over the subject.
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