Die 'toelig'van metafore in die tronktekste van Breyten Breytenbach

Abstract

Breyten Breytenbach's prison texts are to be regarded as a new and meaningful contribution to a hitherto marginalised genre of Afrikaans literature. This dissertation indicates that strict Censorship and Prison laws allowed the South African authorities to create their own prison metaphor. An investigation of prison conditions and its possible implications for the use of metaphor by an essentially visual and communicative writer like Breytenbach, indicated that imprisonment involves far more than the mere loss of physical freedom. The discourse of imprisonment is a political discourse of power which renders the prisoner powerless by depriving him of the freedom of expression and forces him to express himself in metaphorical terms. Breytenbach was horrified by the misery concealed behind South African prison walls and vowed to expose the truth behind the propagated truth of the official metaphor. During his seven years in solitary confinement he was allowed to write, but the keeping of diaries and notes was strictly prohibited. Breytenbach's metaphors subsequently acted as a camouflage for coded messages and memos. His metaphors thus were meant to be concealed from, and concealing to the unintended reader but they also had to be revealed and revealing to the intended reader. In the process of finding and decoding the metaphors, the intended reader would then become an active conspirator or accomplice in a subversive poetic act. However, because prison experiences are essentially similar, the prison metaphor also risks becoming a mere cliche, and thereby it also becomes "trapped in the prison house of language". This dissertation then also wanted to establish if and how Breytenbach's prison metaphors managed to escape the metaphorical prison of semantics. In the theoretical chapter of this dissertation the discourse on metaphor was explored in an effort to find a theory which would facilitate the description of Breytenbach's prison metaphor. It was found that Breytenbach's metaphor is not a product but a process. Some valuable guidelines were also found, such as the theory of alethetic reading. Another useful theory was that the interpretation of metaphor is an intimate act of invitation and response which offers the reader the option to participate in a compelling and pleasurable quest for hidden truths. Various statements by Breytenbach were also examined, which indicated that he regards metaphor as being a transformative and transformational process of existential exchanges between the writer and his intended reader. Extensive investigation of Breytenbach's poem, 'Die toelig van metafore' (('YK') pp. 55-57) within the theoretical framework revealed that, in order to escape from the confines of his imprisonment Breytenbach's ears become metaphorical feet and metaphysical wings for imaginary excursions beyond the prison walls. He also becomes a pilgrim of the metaphysical in-between of the unconscious mind, where he encounters persistently ricocheting images from his past existence. However, his quest for the missing key to the full realisation of man's existence leads him to the underworld of human nature where he finally experiences the mind shattering revelation that the hunter and the hunted are eternally reflected in each other as twin prisoners of life. In the process he invented and reinvented the minotaur, Huntingdon and brotherhood metaphors, all of which are represented in the metaphor of twins. The final conclusion of this study was that Breytenbach' s metaphors escape the prison house of language by their active resistance to being trapped or named. He condenses an enormous frame of reference into a metaphorical seed, small enough to pass between the prison bars to his reader, who should then nurture it to grow to the same enormous existential reference.