The trickster and the prison house : The Bakhtinian dimension of ‘ the carnivalesque ’ in Breyten Breytenbach ’ s True Confessions o f an Albino Terrorist

This paper undertakes an analysis o f Breytenbach’s prison book in terms o f the autobiographer's psychological response to his experience o f incar­ ceration. Breytenbach’s ‘gallows hum our' is shown to parallel the Bakh­ tinian ‘carnivalesque' with its symbolic destruction o f official authority on the one hand, and the assertion o f spiritual renewal on the o ther While looking into the carnivalesque dimension o f gallows humour as mediated through the literary device o f the trickster figure, I shall show that ‘the laughter o f irreverence' goes beyond mere verbal playfulness in that it is part o f a spiritually-based programme o f opposition.


Introduction
Breytenbach the poet, prose writer, painter, public figure and exile is also an ex convict and, as he calls himself mockingly in his prison book, an "albino terro rist" .Having received a nine-year sentence for political offences, he served se ven and a half, with the first two spent in solitary confinement: "a spell from which" -as J.M. Coetzee believes -"he emerged with his sanity miraculously unimpaired" (Coetzee, 1992;376).What may have led Coetzee to this conclusion was that, although Breytenbach wrote the memoir after his release from prison, the general tenor o f the book suggests to readers that they are in the company of a mind actually experiencing the immediacy o f the daily prison condition while in full control o f all its faculties.Intrigued by Breytenbach's ability to cope with the evil effects o f imprisonment, especially with prison space, Coetzee goes on to ponder that what will survive of True Confessions is not the narrative o f capture, interrogation and imprisonment, absorbing though that is.Rather, it will be Brey-tenbach's transformation o f the physical constraints of the prison cell into the metaphysical state of the internal exile.It is the "metaphysical cell" (Davies, 1990) that leaves its mark.Coetzee (1992:379) tries to give an explanation by viewing Breytenbach the memoirist primarily as a poet, whose poetry "stops at nothing: there is no limit that caimot be questioned.His writing goes beyond in more senses than one".
As regards the memoir, True Confessions 'goes beyond' the documentary value of the standard prison memoir and also avoids the embittered attitude so charac teristic o f many prison memoirists.One need only consider the prison memoirs of political prisoners such as Ruth First (1988), Molefe Pheto (1985) and Caesarina Kona Makhoere (1988) in order to understand how a rigid opposition to the 'hostile space' makes it extremely difficult for the imprisoned person to come to terms with incarceration, and to survive with psychic equilibrium unimpaired.Aware of the danger of psychic dissociation in prison, Breytenbach, as he recol lects in True Confessions, self-consciously embarked upon a sustained practice of disciplining his mind, a process that closely resembles Albie Sachs's earlier efforts o f mentally suppressing aggressive attitudes towards his captors as described in The Jail Diary o f Albie Sachs (1966).Breytenbach's desire to sur vive the hostile space is very clearly stated in the introduction to Part Four (Brey tenbach, 1984b), in which he invokes Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess o f wisdom, to help him cope with the conditions o f incarceration: I invoke thee, I concentrate on thee, I salute thee.Come onto my tongue and never leave me again May my intellectual faculties never go astray May my errors not weigh unduly on my becoming Give that I be freed from the vicissitudes of life hi times of peril, may my spirit not go mad May my intelligence function without obstacles.

Gallows humour as coping mechanism
What is evident in the above quotation is Breytenbach's determination to survive the damaging effects o f imprisonment through an intellectual understanding and mastery o f his situation.This is apparent at several layers throughout the memoir, and initially it may be surprising to the reader that the apparently light-hearted vein in which the memoir is written is also part o f a spiritually-based programme of opposition.As we shall see, spiritual mastery and irreverent laughter are not, in Breytenbach's case, necessarily contradictory conditions.At the outset, Breytenbach recognises that already "the game was up" (16)'; and, towards the end, he refers to the entire prison experience as "this macabre dance, this fatal game -because", he says, "there are certainly elements of a game pre sent" (341).As he puts it in the introduction to Part One, tlie autobiography is the story of "how a foolish fellow got caught in the antechambers o f No-Man's-Land; describing the interesting events, including a first trial where various actors and clowns perform" (11).
To present prison as a "No-Man's-Land" or as "a private zoo", as he calls it else where (44), a place where various "caricatures of mankind" (44) are housed, cer tainly contains some "elements of a game", which makes it possible for the pri soner to "talk and to laugh, to situate [him]self ' (280).On inspecting the laughter and irreverence which allow Breytenbach to "situate him self', however, the rea der is struck by the resemblance his 'gallows humour ' has to what Mikhail Bakh tin, in Rabelais and His World (1965)^ calls 'the camivalesque' with its inherent 'grotesque realism'.

The healing potential of laughter
Despite differences in time and place between Bakhtin and Breytenbach, parallels in their response to, and conceptions of life are evident.The nature of this re sponse creates an open textual space within which the writer inscribes himself and out of which he challenges the general closure of his times.
Although he was not physically imprisoned, Bakhtin developed an original critical theory around the relativising concept of the camivalesque, the symbols of which are "filled with this patlios of change and renewal, with the sense o f gay relativity [my emphasis -ID] of prevailing rules and authorities" (Bakhtin, 1984:11).This theory bears many resemblances to the imprisoned Breytenbach's use o f gallows humour as a coping mechanism.It is doubtfiil whether Breytenbach was familiar with Bakhtin's writings; nonetheless, it is interesting to consider the circum stances that in the two writers provoked a camivalesque interpretation of the Page numbers refer to Breytenbach, Brcyten. 1984a.The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.London ; Faber & Faber.
Rabelais and His World appeared in English translation in 1968 after having passed through a unique 'adventure story' of its ovm Initially submitted as a Ph.D thesis in 1940, its author was not permitted to defend it until 1947 because of the frenzy of postwar xenophobia and anti-liberal campaigns that characterised Stalinist dictatorship at its height.Although Bakhtin defended the thesis with much rhetorical skill so as to avoid ideological accusations, the conservatives on the panel blocked the award of a doctorate to him on grounds of heresy from socialist realism.It was much later, in 1965, that the book was published in Russian, thanks to the manoeuvering of Bakhtin's friends.
oppressive conditions o f their existence.It is not only physical incarceration (as in Breytenbach's case), of course, that may induce states o f extreme distress; an equally traumatic experience may be the psyche's incarceration in the oppressive ideology o f a totalitarian system.Turning to Bakhtin, we need to recall that he witnessed the worst days of Stalinist dictatorship, that era o f "total incarceration" (Davies, 1990:8), where political constraints forced him to address his theory of the camivalesque not to Russian society itself, but (by analogy) to another time and place, i.e. to the sixteenth century world o f Rabelais, so as to avoid a direct confrontation with the cultural censors of his own day.(Rabelais' courageous attacks on obscurantism, we may recall, brought on him the ire o f the Sorbonne and the French parliament.)Breytenbach was physically imprisoned for opposing apartheid, another form o f totalitarianism.The works of Bakhtin and Breyten bach, therefore, spring from an age of ideological totalism, with the South Afri can's gallows humour and the Russian's camivalesque both pointing to the heal ing potential of laughter in that the roar of laughter symboUcally destroys the monoUthic seriousness and authority of the 'official' culture.Just as Bakhtin's cami valesque points to a whole world turned upside down, so Breytenbach's humour serves to subvert the extemal pressure to which he was constantly subjected in prison.His mockery turns the captor/victim relationship upside down and renders it harmless, the victim becoming both an actor in, and a spectator of, his own captivity.
This attitude is also in keeping with the paradoxical spirit o f some Far Eastem spiritual disciplines, especially with Zen Buddhism', which Breytenbach was practising at the time o f his imprisonment.To put it briefly, the aim o f Zen is to assist individuals attain a state o f maximum spiritual awareness, satori, while li berating their natural energies and "giving free play to all creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in [their] hearts" (Fromm, 1960:114).Breytenbach's in vocation to Sarasvati, which I quoted earlier, will be seen as a suggestive aspect of this response.

The spirit of the 'cam ivalesque'
As concerns the camivalesque, the emphasis lies, for some, with the semiotics of the grotesque body, i.e. with an intensely physical rejection o f the authority fl it is difficult to render acceptable, within the absolutist Calvinist way of life, the Zen Buddhist spirit of relativisation with its implicit exploding of extemal authority -filial, fraternal, statal, divine.The unconventional logic and the polyphony of points of view in Zen may be disconcerting as when articulated, for example, in the following statement: "One may regard the universe fi'om a number of equally valid points of view -as many, as one, as both one and many, as neither one nor many But the final position of Zen is that it does not take any special viewpoint, and yet is free to take every viewpoint according to circumstance."(Watts, 1971:188.)gures.For Bakhtin and for Breytenbach, however, it is the mental attitudes exemphfied by the carnival.To put it briefly, it is the spirit o f laughter and mock ery that constitutes the power of their rebellion rather than the minute descriptions o f grotesque bodies and the space they inhabit.
In important ways, Bakhtin regarded the carnival as a semiotics of the grotesque.
In equally important (and related) ways, the carnival signified a mental attitude: the carnival of laughter and mockery as a power of rebellion.It is the latter sense that applies most pertinently to Breytenbach.
We also need to see the camivalesque as part of Bakhtin's conception of 'dialogism', which, he says, "is the sin e q u a n o n for the novel structure", to the same degree that "camivalisation is the condition for the 'ultimate structure' of life ... Dialogue so conceived [language as constitutively intersubjective] is opposed to the 'authoritarian word' in the same way as carnival is opposed to official cul ture" (Pomorska, 1984:x).showing that Bakhtin had serious doubts about socialism's conccra for the spiritual aspirations of the individual.Lodge (1990:2) uses a quotation from Tzvetan Todorov to point to Bakhtin's attitude towards socialism: "At some points [Bakhtin] did recognise, and even expressed appreciation of socialism, but he complained of, and worried about, the fact that socialism had no care for the dead".When Bakhtin died, at the age of 80, says Lodge, "he was buried according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox church" (Lodge, 1990:3).
the context o f his own Calvinist Afrikaner inheritance, an inheritance which, as a Paris-based intellectual artist, he has tried to master even as he admits that he could not evade his 'South African' commitment.This is the frame, then, within which Bakhtin's theory of the camivalesque should be seen as applicable to Breytenbach.The camivalesque acts as a device to chal lenge the totalist aspirations of the official culture, which are in conflict with the aspirations o f the individual.The spirit o f irreverence becomes a form o f inner defiance in its open sense, which is imphcitly a "subversive openness" that seeks to "destroy the forces o f stasis and official ideology through ... parody[ing them]" (Holquist, 1984:xvi).Laughter explodes the forces o f stasis and "builds its own world in opposition to the official world, its own church in opposition to the official church, its own state in opposition to the official state" (Bakhtin, 1984:88).This alternative polis of the dissident subculture is "finally a symbol of freedom, [of] the courage needed to establish it [and] the cunning required to maintain it" (Holquist, 1984:xxi).Throughout history, the aim o f the carnival festivities has largely been one o f parodying serious rituals and important events in order to gain some detachment from official authority and oppressive 'official truths'.As Bakhtin (1984:10) has it, "one might say that carnival celebrated tem porary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order . . . it was hostile to everything immortalised and completed".While referring to Rabelais, Bakhtin (1984:3) says that there is in Rabelais' images ... no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness ... these images are opposed to all that is finished [my emphasis -ID] and polished, to all pom posity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world out look.
Breytenbach has a similar 'subversely open' attitude against the 'forces o f stasis' as regards the closed mind and space o f the apartheid prison house: There is no composition like decomposition: not just a rearranging or a fal ling apart, but verily rotting to the bone to bring to light the essential struc ture.The further you go, the more you realize that there are no finites [my emphasis -ID], just movements of the mind, only processes (Breytenbach, 1984a:151).
What this sort o f rebellion suggests is a "ritual spectacle" attitude (towards op pression), one o f Bakhtin's three categories o f the camivalesque.I shall look at this manifestation in detail before turning briefly to Bakhtin's second category, that of the "comic vertjal composition".In this article I will not deal with the third category referred to as "various genres of billingsgate" (cf Bakhtin, 1984: 5).

The 'life-as-spectacle' attitude
Bakhtin's "ritual spectacle" parallels what Breytenbach (1984a:363) calls "gal lows gladness" which can be illustrated in the "albino terrorist's" mocking 'lifeas-spectacle' attitude towards his prison experience, as well as in his use o f the literary device of the trickster, according to which he self-mockingly scrutinises his own identity.
The concept of 'life-as-spectacle' is most explicitly employed by Breytenbach in the two trial scenes, which are staged in the narrative in such a way as to high light the perverse rituals of the law and to undermine the 'monolithic' seriousness o f its 'immortalised' truths.Breytenbach's trials had stirred considerable interest at the time of their occurrence (1975 and 1977) and the tragi-comic register informing the memoirist's recollections of them corresponds, to a large extent, to the literal truth that had played itself out in the courtroom and in Breytenbach's wisecracking, clowning attitude towards his interrogators.Peter Dreyer (1980: 16-17), one of the Breytenbach case commentators, for instance, describes the first trial in the following terms: "the pubhc scarcely knew whether it was being presented with a Greek tragedy, a James Bond farce or an Agatha Christie thriller".
Breytenbach himself describes his trial as a "dance o f the law" (60) and a "cir cus" (67): that is, the trial is transported into 'life-as-spectacle' as the memoirist seeks a detachment to make possible the creation of a reconstructed inner space, an inner space permitting a humorous interpretation of the dictum "the Law Is" ( 251): what is interrogated is the corrupt system of law and its lackeys.As Brey tenbach describes it, the first trial was presided over by "an old flunkey going by the name of Silly" (p.63), who must have received his orders fi-om the mockhonorifically nicknamed Sitting Bull himself, i.e. the then prime minister, B.J.
Vorster.Another representative of the Law is the prosecutor's senior assistant, a supercilious man who 'opens his heart' to Breytenbach by confessing that he is a Satanist.Breytenbach comments: "and we felt we might have something in com mon here, as he sensed, he said, an admiration for the Devil in me too" (63).
Whether the state functionary realised it or not, his identification o f Breytenbach with the devil suggested something of his fear that the prisoner, through his clowning, may have had the capacity to bring the solemnity o f the proceedings in to disrepute.
In this gallery o f buffoons there is, however, one supreme clown.Colonel Hun tingdon, who stands out by virtue of his utterly split personality.His schizoid mental associations allow him to believe that he is able to combine his duties as a Security Police officer with his having humane feelings towards the prisoner.Thus, he pretends -before the trial begins -to defend Breytenbach's interests, really believing that his intention is to assist the prisoner: "Why bother to have le  (61).Later on, during the trial, Huntingdon, wishing to 'defend' Breytenbach, testifies to the latter's cooperation.As Breytenbach writes; "to my everlasting shame, [he] went up to testify to my cooperation" (66).The trial-circus ends with Huntingdon pretending "to be aggrieved and surprised by the severity o f [the] sentence" ( 98).
What all these prison-camival-figures, or embodiments o f " State the Father", have in common is that "they are fascinated by the mechanism o f the trial-asritual.They love to assist at the conclusion and the accomplishment o f their handiwork" (64) because, as Breytenbach puts it in a lighter note now -that bare ly conceals the sinister undertone -they want "to make sure that the noose fits snugly" (64), and that "the show ... go[es] on!" (67).

The trickster-in-prison
The spirit o f laughter and irreverence is not only apparent in Breytenbach's mocking 'life-as-spectacle' attitude, but is also mediated in the memoir through the use o f the trickster figure.In Jungian psychology, which Bakhtin clearly evokes, the archetypal 'trickster' functions to restore proportion and perspective in relation to the network o f constituting circumstances in which one may find oneself trapped.Once having developed a 'theory' about what is going on, once capable o f predicting which 'play' is on, the trickster-in-prison begins to recast his experience as a contrived drama, in which he can play-act while keeping in touch with his sense o f identity.The trickster is thus internally a liberated man: one who no longer confiises his own identity as individual human being with that of his socially inscribed role (in this case, as prisoner).As Jung has it, the trick ster is an ambivalent figure, the embodiment of both sides, not 'either/or', but 'both/and'.He is "a wounded wounder ... [a] sufferer [who] takes away suffe ring through ... the transformation of the meaningless into the meaningfiil" (Jung, 1980:256).
To transform "the meaningless" is to subvert the arbitrary meaning which the state machinery is determined to impose on the individual.In attempting to subvert the meaning o f trial and imprisonment, the albino terrorist turns to mockery.Probably one o f the best illustrations o f the autobiographer's para doxical self-mockery is to be found in the title o f the memoir itself, which is meant to cast doubt on the truthfulness of "the true confessions" that the ensuing pages claim to offer.While the word confessions recalls St. Augustine's and Rousseau's time-honoured autobiographies, the second part o f the formulation, "of an albino terrorist", suggests (in the context o f apartheid) the debunking of official language and veracity.Breytenbach evidently is playing around with his own ambivalent status as "an albino in a white country" ( 260) by looking at him self from more than one point of view.
This point is reinforced at the end o f the book: on being released from prison, where he had served time as a 'terrorist', this trickster goes for a swim in the ocean and is surrounded by black children for whom he is just another 'albino'."I was surrounded by small Black children who saw nothing wrong with this Whitey being in the water with them.Ignorant little bastards -haven't you heard about Apartheid yet?" (331).Breytenbach's whiteness here has an extremely am bivalent connotation: the newly released prisoner does not claim any right to ad miration for having once attempted to strike a blow at the very structure of racial discrimination to which he now draws the children's attention.
Clearly, the ritual spectacle has involved stratagems of comic verbal composition, Bakhtin's second categoiy of the camivalesque: a strategy closely linked to the coping mechanism o f preserving the personality in the hostile enviroimient.Throughout the memoir, for example, "the albino terrorist" has been aware of the multitude o f personae lying behind the name Breyten Breytenbach -in his schi zoid role as "an albino in a white country".This is evident when we simply list all the other names he seems to consider appropriate for defining the various cir cumstances in which he finds himself, and which call forth different frames of mind.Breytenbach calls himself Dick, Antoine, Herve -which are all various political aliases adopted prior to his incarceration; Jean-Marc Galaska -the name under which he returned to South Africa in 1975; in prison he becomes M r Bird, Bangai Bird, the less educated inmates calling him Professor, Professor Bird; after his hair has been cut and his head shaved he becomes Billiard Ball; there is also Jan Blom, an earlier poet-mask o f Breytenbach's, as well as Don Espejuelo, literally 'the knight o f the mirror', who is responsible for the metaphysical me ditations.These personae serve temporary purposes for the trickster, whose taste for nominal transformation seems to point to the fact that "there is not one person that can be named and in the process o f naming be fixed for all eternity" (13).This kind of awareness may also be detected in the scene in which a warder asks Breytenbach who in actual fact he is, while the "albino terrorist" pretends not to be quite sure either: "He wanted to know whether I was indeed Breytenbach.A metaphysical question admittedly, but I took the risk o f saying 'yes'" (233).The role of laughter essentially is to overcome fear, death, and everything deadening and dying.It has been said that Rabelais's laughter broke ground for the French Revolution.The Russian Revolution was accompanied by buffoonery and satire.

Conclusion: The limits of laughter
When referring directly to Mikhail Bakhtin and his concept o f 'the camivalesque ', Plyushch (1979:301-302) briefly summarises the theory o f "the alldestroying and all-creating laughter" as follows: ... laughter destroys the old and moribund and gives birth to the new ... it throws dirt at everything that degrades and oppresses man.What are the limits of laughter?If laughter in its totality engenders a dialectical attitude toward the world, then, it too should be dialectical in both negating the old and creating the new.Otherwise it is reduced to a laughter of nihilism, cynicism and madness.
Why I have mentioned Plyushch here is that the issues he raises have peculiar pertinence to the way we may want to see  (Davies, 1990) incarceration acquire collective and political significance by each dissident's suggesting a symbolic role model in facing forms o f extreme oppression with dig nity.Thus, through a feedback effect, these gestures come to strengthen the col lective struggle itself The various strategies o f coping with and reconstructing the hostile space become, in effect, pohtical gestures, in that politicisation means -according to Emma Mashinini (1989:24) -"I am human.I exist.I am a com plete person" .The feeble and lonely voices o f dissenters speak o f the right to bear witness, as individuals, to the suffering o f the many who do not possess the power of articulating their suffering and/or investing it with meaning.This repre sents "a new symbolic community: the community of those who suffer and live to tell and are ready to suffer again for the right to tell" (Tamas, 1993:15).But, to reiterate, behind the societal claim is a spiritual core.The right to bear witness to, and tell about, one's own and others' suffering has more than verbal impli cations.As I have suggested, the implication is spiritual in nature.Whereas Bakhtin was a devout Christian, Breytenbach and Plyushch share deep-seated beliefs in Zen Buddhism.O f course, in the harsh political climate o f Soutii Afnca in the 1980s (when Breytenbach wrote True Confessions), one might have been tempted to reject Breytenbach's interest in, and practice o f Zen Buddhism as an indulgence.It is a fact, nonetheless, that despite the diversity of styles and sub ject-matters he has adopted throughout his writing career, Breytenbach's interest in the general principles o f Zen Buddhism has been constant.In drawing paral lels with the Russian prisoner's interest in Zen, we are reminded that Breytenbach belongs to a broader intellectual community and that his writing is neither simply an effect of the rebellious sixties in Western Europe (where his 'modernism' had its apprenticeship), nor can it, as I suggested above, be confined to South African political specificities.Rather, this symbolic network gives the overworked terms o f 'universalism' and 'autonomy of art' spiritual strength and social substance.Whether this makes Breytenbach less a South African writer and more o f an 'in ternational' one is, within the terms of this paper, beside the point.
Clearly, Breytenbach's spirit o f irreverence has nothing to do with "the laughter of nihilism, cynicism and madness".What I am suggesting is a possible answer to Plyushch's question: "What are the limits o f laughter?"An appropriate under-Standing o f the laughter o f Breytenbach as prisoner and as memoirist suggests its value for his survival as a whole human being.
As a fiirther point o f comparison and consideration, I finally wish to turn to an other autobiographical text that was conceived in the spirit o f laughter and irreve rence.It is tellingly entitled H istory's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography(1979), and written by the Soviet mathematician Leonid Plyushch, who served time in prison and psychiatric wards for his anti-totalitarian attitudes.Plyushch  (1979:301)  says: At this point it must be emphasised that Christianity, for a citizen in an atheist state, constitutes an oppositional ethos comparable to Breytenbach's Zen Buddhism in In his introduction toAfter Bakhtin, (1990), David Lodge discusses, among other things, Bakhtin's position within the debate of the 1920's between Marxism and Formalism, What literary critics have often forgotten about Bakhtin is that terms like h eterog lo ssia , m u ltip licity o f styles, m u lti-a ccen tu a lity, p o ly p h o n y , d ia lo g ism , etc, are for the Russian critic only part o f a lifetime inquiry into profound questions about the entire enterprise o f thinking about what human life means.As Wayne Booth recognises, Bakhtin's ultimate value -fiill acknowledgment of, and participation in a Great Dialogue -is thus not to be addressed as just one more piece of 'lite rary criticism' ... "It is a philosophical inquiry into our limited ways of mirroring -and improving -our lives" (Booth, I989:xxiv-xxv).What is significant about "The Great Dialogue" -as Booth concludes -is that there is a religious dimension: the dialogue occurs between h o m o re lig io su s and God.But this dimension o f Bakhtin's existence is usually ignored in the fashion for Bakhtinian revival in contemporary 'postmodernist' criticism.Living as he did during the heyday o f Communist dictatorship, Bakhtin could not afford to be explicit about his religious convictions in his writings.Nonetheless, "he was unusual in retai ning his Christian faith, in the Russian Orthodox tradition"(Lodge, 1990:2/. Breytenbach today.His brand of mockery has been regarded by some in South Africa as little more than nihilism.It is difficult for politically radical critics, for example, to erase the recollections o f Breytenbach at his own trial: instead o f seeing Breytenbach in command of any 'ritual spectacle', these critics are embarrassed to recall the Afrikaner-domi nated security police pleading for the minimum sentence on behalf o f one o f the sons, albeit a 'prodigal son'.An inevitable question, therefore, might be: what is the value o f Breytenbach's essentially intellectual rebellion in relationship to the majority o f the oppressed?How one answers this depends on how one situates oneself in South African politics.The positioning is not simple and would need to account not only for a 'community o f the oppressed' but also for a 'community o f the oppressors': that is, we would need to locate Breytenbach fumly wathin the community in which he inescapably has his roots.Accordingly, we may wish to see his laughter as an attack directed back against the dour Calvinist way o f life o f his own background.Certainly his actions have been interpreted by some as a form o f attack on Afrikanerdom and this has not prevented his being ac claimed by the Afrikaner literati; his prizes tend to be awarded for 'literary craftsmanship' rather than for the 'political content' o f his writings.Such a clearcut separation o f fimctions features in many critical responses to his work.grounded in the physical deprivation of the disenfranchised; we should not, how ever, underestimate the effects of psychological torture on the sensitive mind.In fact, his rebellion o f the mind touches very personal convictions.Behind the carnivalesque in Breytenbach, as well as Bakhtin and Plyushch, there are allegiances to what one might call a 'symbolic community' of those practising morality as a private act: something based on deep moral and religious precepts.Although this attitude towards incarceration (incarceration in the broad sense of the word) may be prone to attacks by social commitment, it should be borne in mind that the individual gestures o f resisting either physical or psychic /"total" The reaction against Afrikaner Calvinism may be a valid one that should not be interpreted as merely cynical or nihilistic.Neither should we really be merely cynical about the fact that Breytenbach's suffering was o f a different, less physi cal kind from that o f the black oppressed.His rebellion may not have been 136 ISSN 0258-2279 Literator 16 (I) April 1994:127-138