Phantoms of Hysteria ‒ Novelistic Phantasmagoria in Lesego Rampolokeng’s Whiteheart: Prologue to Hysteria
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Date
2018
Authors
Wachira, Ibrahim
Kaigai, Kimani
Muhia, Mugo
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Cogent OA
Abstract
This article examines how the narrator in Lesego Rampolokeng’s Whiteheart: Prologue to
Hysteria (Hereafter designated as W/ H) deploys spectres of hysteria as a novelistic
phantasmagoria to challenge the subject in the (a)political subject in the fictive post-apartheid
South Africa and re-examine how spectres of Apartheid devour the country through veiled
repressive juridical structures. The novel is written in paragraphs/ sections which appear to
be disjointed, and this forms a problematic of reading and interpreting it as a concrete whole.
Subsequently, the critical purview of novelistic phantasmagoria is proposed as the fabric that
unites the, otherwise, fragmented paragraphs into an articulate work of literature. Julia
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic idea of the ‘khora’ enables this essay to examine how the ‘mother’
pulsating under the symbolic eventually evolves from a nurturer to a devourer. Jacques
Lacan’s idea of the ‘paternal metaphor’ aids this article to show how the symbolic (the
structural order of the society) may become articulately repressive that the nurturer/ mother
dialectic (the intricate relationship that makes a people a nation) is blurred. Melaine Klein’s
psychoanalytic theory of Projective Identification enables this essay to examine how the
narrator in W/ H is able to project the phobic object from the khora pulsating below the
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symbolic into the psyche in order to warn the post-apartheid South African subject against
perpetuating oppressive laws that had pitched the country/ mother into repression during the
apartheid era. Through textual analysis, the essay hopes to validate the assumption that the
author deploys novelistic phantasmagoria as a unique imaginative pathway for unlocking a
potentially therapeutic space with literary efficacy for freeing South Africa from the
disarticulating repressed phobic colonial and apartheid objects of subjugation.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Phantasmagoria, Spectres of hysteria, Literary slide, Projection, W/ H ‒ Whiteheart, Prologue to Hysteria, Lesego Rampolokeng