Narratologically speaking, the storyworld is an artifice, a construction. It is a fictional space – usually a mental space that exists in the imagination of the reader of a literary text. However, a storyworld can also be a digital space (in computer games) or a physical space – as, I argue, it is in installation art. Here, I am perfectly aware that different levels of immersion are possible. I obviously acknowledge that in terms of specific, individuated experience, different people will interact with this installation piece in different ways. Here such factors as race, gender, age, cultural identification and disablement will each affect the specifics of an individual’s interpretation. However, what I attempt here is to produce a workable model that better showcases the centrality of character as a narratological tool for the interpretation of installation art. Space will not allow for an explication of infinite possibilities of interpretation. Nonetheless, the storyworld space is never simply physical (or digital, for that matter) because it also exists conceptually. For example, it recalls places and events, and it narrativises or thematises the space. The storyworld is also circumscribed by time, which may be foreshortened, made sticky, stretched, frozen, layered, fast-forwarded, shuffled or manipulated in other ways.¹⁰ Typically, the storyworld is ontologically distinct from the actual world – but this notion is challenged in installation art where the space of the artwork is a physical space that bears ontological traces of both the ‘real’ world and the storyworld. In turn, this ontological blurring allows for a more expansive view of character, because the ‘I’ who enters the artwork is not only ontologically tied to the ‘me’ in the real world, but also to the ‘me’ who becomes a character in the installation artwork.

Character¹¹ is the central focus of this article and thus deserves more detailed consideration. Narratologically speaking, character can be defined as ‘a participant in a storyworld’ (Jannidis 2013; Margolin 2007). In art historical terms, the person who enters the installation artwork is described as a participant rather than a viewer, because he or she participates in the work in some or other way – navigating physically through the work, doing something inside the work and ‘completing the piece’ (Bishop 2005:11). Therefore, if a person as the ‘I’ enters the work, that ‘I’ is a participant in its storyworld – ‘I’ becomes a character. In addition, installation artworks often recall a person or persons that are not actually inside the work; these absences can also be described as characters.¹²

The topology of postmodern characters as proposed by Fokkema (1991) provides salient and useful character dimensions that guide the ways in which character in Van der Merwe’s installation artworks (and others) can be interpreted and constructed. Five specific issues are extrapolated from Fokkema’s study: (1) the human-like aspects of character, (2) the ontological status of characters, (3) characters as closed versus open entities, (4) multiple or fragmented selves in character constructions and (5) characters as selves in search of others.

There is a cubicle in the gallery, only large enough to accommodate one or two persons (Figure 1).¹⁵ A label title on the wall next to the cubicle informs me that this is Jan van der Merwe’s Biegbak/Confessional. ‘I’ enter the cubicle that houses the work through a white curtain. The space is small and intimate and looks like a washing-up space in a poorly equipped kitchen (Figures 2 and 3). Everything inside has the likeness of the familiar; all the objects and fixtures are life-size and recognisable. But everything is also strange: it is made of or covered in rusted metal – cloths, drying rack, apron, sink and taps. It seems as if ‘I’ am in a fictional domestic space where everything is made of something else (like Hansel and Gretel’s house of cake and sweets). In another sense, it seems as if ‘I’ am looking at things that recall those captivating underwater rusted images of the Titanic resting on the ocean bed, where divers have discovered plates, dishes and other objects crusty with sea-age – used things that suggest traces of human presence. Like in these images, time is transfixed. Ordinary things become extraordinary, archaeological: they are coated with layers of time, and they tell the stories that their now absent users cannot. The things here in the artwork seem old and therefore infinitely fragile, and they pervasively suggest a time long gone.

‘My’ presence in the artwork initially seems almost invasive: ‘I’ am looking at someone else’s ordinary, intimate things in a space that is not ‘my own’. But yet, ‘I’ am inside, and strangely engulfed. The space is someone else’s, but in another sense it accommodates ‘me’. It is familiar enough to be ‘my world’. I look down into the kitchen sink, and it is possible to imagine that this is ‘my’ sink, ‘my’ place to stand. Obviously, the subjective is not universal but it is paradoxically universal, that each ‘I’ may experience the world subjectively. Van der Merwe plays on this point in his art. It also feels, however, as if ‘I’ am standing in the place of someone else who may have used it long ago and is now departed, or ‘I’ am standing in the place of someone who never was here but who was wished into this place, almost like a memorial that functions to recall someone who is not there. Indeed, Van der Merwe (Van der Merwe pers. comm., 12 Dec. 2012 and 23 July 2013) calls his works ‘monuments to the unknown’ – a phrase he uses to draw attention to the memorialisation of people who may appear invisible to the world but who were important to him.

In the work, ‘I’ notice movement in a monitor positioned inside the sink. ‘I’ see hands moving around in a perpetual circular motion – they are scrubbing a saucepan, continuously, over and over:

Also there are other possibilities. For example, ‘I’ (at this early stage) see the hands as most likely those of a European woman. Thus, as a small example of the significance which a spectator as recipient gives to a work of art as text; ‘my’ race, ‘my’ gender and ‘my’ assumptions, will inform ‘my’ interpretation. For example, if the ‘I’ is also European, the hands could also be ‘my’ hands, or ‘my’ grandmother’s hands. Perhaps ‘I’ stand inside the space and imagine ‘her’ kitchen, ‘her’ washing up space?

Therefore, there seems to be important but absent role-player(s) in the story: in Biegbak/Confessional (Van der Merwe 2003), this absence refers to the person whose hands appear in a monitor inside the sink scrubbing a cooking vessel in a video loop that repeats the same movements every few seconds. The sense of absence is made tangible by the use of placeholders that stand for human presence – aprons, kitchen things and moving hands but no actual person aside from fragments or suggestions. I argue that the key to the stories told by the works is the unknown absent character(s). ‘My’ presence as a viewer in the work is as crucial: ‘I’ am standing where the absent person(s) should be standing, and thus ‘I’ take this person’s place for the duration of my engagement with the work. How does the absent person(s) tell ‘their’ stories? These become ‘my’ concerns, as well as ‘theirs’, ‘my’ telling and ‘theirs’. This is clearly not a story that is discovered, but rather one that is constructed in a subjective manner.

For one illustrative example, the artwork may present ‘me’ with the suggestion that ‘I’, ‘my assumed aunt’, or perhaps the artist’s imagined grandmother, can all be accommodated in this work. The work generates a sense of longing, possibly because it recalls the absent ‘one(s)’ whose space ‘I’ occupy. When ‘I’ look up, ‘I’ see raindrops like tears drizzling down a window in a continuous motion, above the kitchen sink (Figure 3). It is a projection of the image of a window with video material that loops. The circular motion of the hands that wash, the raindrops that are slowly and endlessly making their tearful way downwards and the nostalgic sense of the entire small space generate a thick tangle of emotion: longing mostly, but more. There is a sense that there are stories waiting to take shape inside this very personal place. This is a representation of a domestic space that someone goes into in order to disappear, to perform ‘her’ duties, but also to meditate – the name Biegbak/Confessional¹⁶ suggests a religious contemplation. One is aware that in the Catholic Church a confessional is a place where one goes to have his or her sins ‘washed away’. Perhaps there is a link between absolution of sin and the hands ‘washing the dirty pot’. There are many stories here, and in some ways ‘I’ understand them completely. ‘My’ stories, ‘my’ memories and the artist’s stories of his grandmother conflate. This is perhaps because ‘I’ feel myself merging with the absent person who is suggested by the work, and ‘my’ stories merge quite easily with ‘hers’. It makes perfect sense, on one level. Nonetheless, this is an entirely subjective process; but ‘I’ realise that my co-feeling and co-narrating are part and parcel of this process. ‘I’ share a story position with the artist, and with the absent people ‘I’ imagine or produce here. Why and how this is possible, and why these stories matter, are involved questions, and they propel my interest into the stories in Jan van der Merwe’s installation artworks.

As suggested above, Biegbak/Confessional ostensibly recalls an absent (and most likely departed) grandmother: (the artist confirms this hunch that the work is ‘about’ his late grandmother,¹⁷ for those willing to suspend suspicion of the intentional fallacy). But, it is also about me and about my grandmother because the work allows me to project my stories into the space through my body, mind and emotion.

In this sense, I argue that ‘I’ as the viewer-character experience narrative identification – ‘I’ identify with the absent other sufficiently to care about ‘her’. However, narrative identification does not fully circumscribe the sense that ‘I am’, in some sense, ‘her’ – in other words, being-with and being-through another (cf. Chamarette 2013).

To empathise takes one further: ‘[I]n regards to narratives, empathy facilitates imaginative participation’ (Daly 2014:229). Yet, narrative empathy still does not account, to a satisfactory extent, for the experience of the self that becomes the other, but internalises the assumed ‘her’, if only temporarily. That is because with empathy the distinction between the self and the other remains intact. In order to achieve a sense of self-other transcendence, I argue that what is required is narrative intersubjectivity. This would allow ‘me’ to experience the self as the other. Intersubjective experience is intensely embodied,¹⁸ subjective and participatory (see Chamarette 2013).

The experience of intersubjective becoming the other is a function, I argue, of focalisation. Firstly, focalisation is a means of identifying with a character (Mainar 1993) – but to co-focalise with the absent other, allows the experience of identification to become empathy, and then to make intersubjectivity happen. This is because ‘I’ am cognitively, emotively and even in an embodied sense shaping the narrative content when ‘I’ (co-)focalise. ‘I’ feel with the absent ‘other’ (‘I’ experience empathy) but ‘I’ also experience a loss of boundaries between ‘myself’ and the absent ‘one’: physically, mentally and emotively. ‘I’ conflate with ‘her’ – this is the shared mind and body of intersubjectivity – where the self becomes the other. And so it is by means of focalisation that the ontologically complex absent character can tell ‘her’ stories through ‘me’.

The intersubjective experience whereby the participant-character in Van der Merwe’s works co-focalises with the absent person allows for the sense that the absent protagonist is remembered and re-membered (made real, and corporeal) because the body and the self of the participant are in some way ‘home’ to the absent other.

Re-membering has to do with ‘fleshing out’ – it entails that an absent person’s physical body gains some sort of physical existence. This happens, of course, through focalisation: ‘I’ as the participant-character see the rain on the ‘window’ created by the projection (‘I’ see what the absent person’s position suggests, ‘her’ seeing). ‘I’ look down, directing ‘my’ embodied gaze where the ‘looking’ absent subject would also cast ‘her’ gaze – at hands which are neither ‘mine’ nor ‘hers’, but suggestive of being both ‘mine’ and ‘hers’.

The incompleteness, the layered complexity of character¹⁹ and the self becoming the other in Biegbak/Confessional becomes more acute when one suddenly notices this: the hands washing the cooking vessel are a man’s – they are hairy and muscular! Perhaps because the space has such feminine overtones, and the work of doing dishes typically recalls a woman (albeit from ‘my’ perspective), the hands ‘I’ thought (or believed or projected), ‘I’ saw, are not the same as the hands ‘I’ now find myself seeing (an instance of cognitive dissonance where one sees what one thinks one sees). Conversations with people who have seen Biegbak/Confessional confirm that the hands are not at first sight necessarily recognised as masculine, but once one notices this, it seems very obvious that they are not a woman’s hands. These hands now seem utterly puzzling – the work is supposed to memorialise, even venerate, someone like a grandmother! And thus, quite clearly, those hands should have been a woman’s.

For the current interpretation, the layeredness and complexity of character suggested by Van der Merwe’s works are therefore lodged precisely in this incredulous appearance of a man’s hands where a woman is imagined as standing. The artist also put himself in the place of the late grandmother who is re-membered in the work – a loss of boundaries occurs between himself and another character.²⁰ The absent grandmother therefore accommodates different subjectivities and ontologies²¹ at the same time – even her grandson’s – as well as ‘me’ and ‘my’ grandmother. (Van der Merwe recalls that his grandmother would pray while doing the dishes – hence the name of the work – for family, friends and even, endearingly, for the fictional characters of serial programmes she followed on Springbok Radio. This adds another character layer and adds fictional characters to the character constellations suggested in the work. In this sense, one can argue that ‘she’ and ‘I’ are unstable, incomplete and selves in search of others).

The absent grandmother can accommodate the artist, but more significantly, ‘I’ also become ‘her’. ‘I’ stand in the fictional place that commemorates ‘where she used to stand’. ‘She’ may also be ‘my’ grandmother whom ‘I’ remember. ‘I’ am constantly shifting between being ‘me’ and imagining (being?) ‘my’ grandmother, recalling also the artist, his grandmother and a generalised notion of a dearly loved woman caring for her folk.

Metaphorically speaking, the work gives a voice to one who is not there and who does not have a voice. This is much like offstage characters that actually constitute the central concern of a stage play (Mahfouz 2012). Often if a character is absent, this absence is the consequence of having crossed the threshold between life and death. Therefore, he or she is not only absent, but may also be remembered with a sense of mourning or bereavement. Freudian views of absence and death entail that in order to mourn healthily, one is supposed to ‘let go’ of those who are mourned. However, such thinking is giving way to current ideas in which ‘living with’, or maintaining a relationship with, the absent other (often one who is dead) is celebrated (Maddrell 2013:501, 506). Embodied intersubjectivity is one way of achieving this: sharing mental, emotional and physical space with the absent (or departed) other – keeping her alive in oneself.

This intersubjective merging with the other allows one to transcend the self. Self-transcendence is concerned with a greater awareness that rises above the self so that the body as well as the mind can transfer themselves into another tangible or intangible, living or imagined entity.

While transcending the self, in installation artworks like this, one also allows the participant-characters to insert recollections from their own lives in order to integrate their experiences with the experiences of characters so that they can construct the story as themselves.²² Van der Merwe’s installation artwork allows the participant-character to ‘fill in’ the works physically, by being the self and the absent character, and to insert his or her own recollections while constructing the fabula(e) of the work.

In the process of making sense of the narrative, ‘I’ am therefore myself narrated and ‘I’ am aware of myself as a character; ‘I’ also become an ‘other’. All these becomings are transformations brought about in the context of the artwork parallels – a process that Paul Ricoeur (1992:164) calls ‘the refiguration of action by the narrative’ (Ricoeur 1992:64) – a way of understanding how identity is shaped through ‘a privileged place of aporias’ (p. 234) into which ‘I’ project ‘my/her’ stories.