Fantasie en ideologie in Eugene Marais se Dwaalstories

Abstract

In the four short stories published in the volume Dwaalstories, Eugène Marais achieves a very charming combination of fantasy and ideological coding. The fantasy seems, on the one hand, to camouflage the possible effects of certain ideological stances in the stories and also to predispose a naïve reading, while the more submerged ideological coding, on the other hand, invites closer inspection, which will uncover the real clout of the message. Traditionally, fables recount the victory of the weak over the powerful due to the intervention of some magical outside force. In these African fables this convention is employed to demonstrate the successful undermining of the despotic use of power which causes the innocent to suffer. Assisted by forces of magic residing in Nature, the weak react against injustice, so rectifying the social imbalances and counteracting the dangers caused by the inhumane use of group or institutional force. The purpose of this article is to describe the way in which fantasy and ideology are intercoded in Marais’s Dwaalstories.