J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Biographies viii

Introduction 1

Part I Context

1. Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

André Brink

2. Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

Louise Bethlehem, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

3. Coetzee and Gordimer

Karina Magdalena Szczurek

4. Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

Pieter Vermeulen, University of Leuven, Belgium

5. Border Crossings: Self and Text

Sue Kossew, University of New South Wales, Sydney

6. Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

Derek Attridge, University of York, UK

Part II Theory

7. Writing Desire Responsibly

Rosemary Jolly, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada

8. Literature, History and Folly

112

Patrick Hayes, University of Oxford, UK

9. Queer Bodies

123

Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford, UK

10.

Eating (Dis)Order: From Metaphoric Cannibalism
to Cannibalistic Metaphors

135

Kyoko Yoshida, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

11. Acts of Mourning

147

Russell Samolsky, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

12. Sublime Abjection

159

Mark Mathuray, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to express their gratitude to the publishers and editors of the
following, for permission to reprint earlier versions of essays collected here:

Journal of Literary Studies, 23, 2 (2007) (for Pieter Vermeulen’s essay);
J. M. Coetzee no sekai, (ed.) Tajiri Yoshiki (Tokyo: Eiho-sha, 2006) (for Kyoko

Yoshida’s essay, published in Japanese as ‘Shokujin kara seisan made: Coetzee
sakuhin ni okeru mono kuu imeji’);

Journal of Literary Studies, 21, 3–4 (2005) (for Louise Bethlehem’s and Elleke

Boehmer’s essays).

We should also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United
Kingdom, for the conference funding which made possible and supported
the international conference ‘Contemporary Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee and
Post-Apartheid South African Literature’, held at Royal Holloway, University of
London, 29–30 April 2005, at which many of the chapters in this book origi-
nated as presentations. We also warmly thank the English Department at RHUL,
which generously assisted the organizers with conference costs and secretarial
support.

Our partners and families have been unstinting in their support for us during

the protracted process of bringing this book to fruition: our deep gratitude to
them all.

EB, KI, RE.

Biographies

Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York. He is well known
as a scholar of Joyce, South African writing, poetic form, literary theory, mod-
ernism, and literature and ethics. His recent publications include J. M. Coetzee
and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), The Singularity of Literature
(2004), Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (2003) and Joyce
Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (2000). He is a Fellow of the British
Academy, and a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Louise Bethlehem is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and in the
Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her
research interests include South African cultural and literary historiography,
postcolonial theory and memory studies. Her book Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary
Culture and its Aftermath was co-published by Unisa Press and Brill in 2006.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University
of Oxford. Her publications include Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resis-
tance in Interaction 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Stories of
Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005), Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd ed. (1995; Oxford
University Press, 2005), as well as four novels, the latest of which is Nile Baby
(2008).

André Brink taught Afrikaans and Dutch literature at Rhodes University,
Grahamstown from 1961 to 1990, before becoming Professor of English
Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town from 1991 to 2005. He
has lectured extensively at universities in Europe, the United States and Austra-
lia. His novels, including Looking on Darkness (1973), A Dry White Season (1979),
A Chain of Voices (1982), Imaginings of Sand (1994), Devil’s Valley (2000) and Pray-
ing Mantis (2005) have appeared in 33 languages, and his memoir, A Fork in the
Road is to be published in 2009.

Anne Haeming has a PhD in English and American Literature entitled ‘Cultiva-
tion as Colonization: The Spatial Basis of Human Creation in J. M. Coetzee and
Timothy Findley’ (University of Konstanz, Germany). Apart from postcolonial
theory, she is interested in the interdisciplinary context of image/body/media.

Patrick Hayes (University of Oxford) teaches literature from the nineteenth
century to the present day. His own research interests are in twentieth-century
writing, particularly in modernism and its legacies in post-war fi ction. He has
published articles on the fi ction of J. M. Coetzee.

Katy Iddiols (Royal Holloway, University of London) organized a major inter-
national conference on J. M. Coetzee and has spoken on his work at academic
events. Her PhD is entitled ‘Using Authenticity: J. M. Coetzee’s Writing’ and
her current research interests include J. M. Coetzee, South African writing
and postcolonial literatures.

Rosemary Jolly is Professor of English at Queen’s University. She has published
on South African literature and culture; she also researches the connections
between gender-based coercion and violence, and HIV/AIDS. Her current
work involves the relations between public health, cultural and human rights
discourses (see ‘For Northern Displacements: Understanding the Meaning of
Madness in Global Constructions of AIDS’, The Global South 1. 1 (Winter 2007):
55–65). She is currently completing a book on narrative, human rights and
post-apartheid culture, under contract with Liverpool University Press.

Sue Kossew is Associate Professor in English and Head of the School of English,
Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her
area of research expertise is in postcolonial literatures, particularly those of the
settler colonies. She has published four books: Pen and Power: A Post-colonial
Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink (Rodopi, 1996); Critical Essays on J. M.
Coetzee (G. K. Hall, 1998); Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (Nova
Science Press, 2001) with Dianne Schwerdt; and Writing Woman, Writing Place:
Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (Routledge, 2004). She is cur-
rently working on editing a collection of essays and interviews on the work of
Kate Grenville to be published by Rodopi.

Mark Mathuray is a Leverhulme Early Careers Research Fellow at Royal
Holloway, University of London. He studied and taught at the University of the
Witwatersrand, South Africa, and received a PhD from Sidney Sussex, Univer-
sity of Cambridge. Mathuray’s forthcoming book (from Palgrave Macmillan)
attempts to locate in a variety of texts what might be called the political uncon-
scious of African symbolic production through the deployment of a very specifi c
idea of the sacred. His research interests include African literature, postcolo-
nial theory, modernism and the sacred.

Russell Samolsky is assistant professor of Anglophone literature at the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include South African
literature and the global humanities. He has published articles on Shakespeare,

Biographies

Kafka, Coetzee and Derrida. Currently he is working on a book project entitled
Killing Dogs, which examines the position of the dog in terms of the contempo-
rary discourse on the question of the animal.

Karina Magdalena Szczurek is a writer and literary critic. She has a PhD in Eng-
lish and American Literature from the University of Salzburg (thesis on Nadine
Gordimer’s post-apartheid writing). Her current research interests include
South African literature and neo-slave narratives. She lives in Cape Town and is
a regular book reviewer for The Sunday Independent. Her short stories have
appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, most recently in The Chil-
dren’s Hours: Stories of Childhood (Arcadia Books, 2008).

Pieter Vermeulen is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of
Literary Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published articles
on critical theory (especially on the work of Geoffrey Hartman and Erich
Auerbach) and on contemporary literature (especially J. M. Coetzee). He is
also the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Phrasis on the work of Adorno
(forthcoming), and of Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing (Rodopi, 2006)
and Re-Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity (Rodopi, 2008).
His current research deals with forms of ‘post-melancholic’ subjectivity in the
contemporary novel.

Kyoko Yoshida teaches English at Keio University in Tokyo. She is a contributor
to the fi rst Japanese anthology of criticism on J. M. Coetzee. Her short stories
have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Chelsea, and others. She has also
been working on translations of Japanese contemporary poetry and drama.

Biographies

Introduction

Robert Eaglestone, Elleke Boehmer and Katy Iddiols

The novels and non-fi ction of Nobel-laureate J. M. Coetzee are characterized by
an intense though oblique involvement with the political, intellectual, aesthetic
and philosophical issues of our times. The aim of this book is to explore some
of these many complex engagements and contexts.

If normal critical caveats were not enough, JC, the protagonist of Diary of Bad

Year, J. M. Coetzee’s 2007 novel, makes clear his contempt for exactly the sort of
book that you are now reading. Describing a sequence from The Power of Night-
mares, Adam Curtis’s 2004 documentary fi lm about the response to terrorism,
JC ridicules the US prosecutors’ ‘paranoid interpretation’ (32) of a video made
of a trip to Disneyland by four young American Muslims, in which the ‘very
amateurishness of the video was ground for suspicion since, where Al Qaida is
concerned, nothing is what it seems to be’ (32). He goes on:

Where did the prosecutors learn to think in such a way? The answer: in litera-
ture classes in the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, where they were
taught that in criticism suspiciousness is the chief virtue, that the critic must
accept nothing whatsoever at face value. From their exposure to literary the-
ory these not-very-bright graduates of the academy of the humanities in its
postmodernist phase bore away a set of analytic instruments which they
obscurely sensed could be useful outside the class room, and an intuition that
the ability to argue that nothing is as it seems to be might get you places.
Putting those instruments in their hands was the trahison des clercs of our
time. (33)

There are two distinct attacks made here, both of which relate to the title
of this book, ‘Theory and Context’. The fi rst is on the paranoia and bad faith of
literary theory and argues that suspicion is a poor ‘chief virtue’ in our reading
of literature. The second is on the inappropriateness of these sorts of ideas to
applications outside the literary sphere, to a wider context: the trahison is the
sharing of the ‘analytic instruments’, their movement outside the classroom.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Of course, in analysing these attacks, it is important not to confuse the author

J. M. Coetzee with the author JC (Anya calls him ‘Juan’). (Even writing that
sentence is more than faintly comical, and sounds the sort of remark that JC –
especially given his love of Tolstoy – might despise, despite the serious and
revealing ‘literary theoretical’ issues about authorship.) The fi rst, the ‘real’
author, writes highly complex and ambiguous fi ctions and latterly speaks only
through fi ction; the second writes, as it were, work that seems to be one step less
complex (author of two of the three strands of the Diary . . ., as it were). The
latter’s view on literary theory, in a typical J. M. Coetzee move, are fi ctionalized:
here, it is JC, not J. M. Coetzee, with whom we are engaging. It is also important
to put these views into the context of the novel: they are assertions made by a
cantankerous, slightly self-obsessed writer, who is, in fact, behaving suspiciously,
and the remarks illustrate these qualities. And it might also be right to question
the historical accuracy of this assertion (one suspects few US lawyers were
trained in literature departments). But despite these qualifi cations, the attacks
remain attacks.

To the issue of theory’s bad faith: suspicion and bad faith are not attractive,

and JC implies that they are not suitable for reading literary art. But, by the
same token, when we read, rather than simply being swamped by affect – the
shock and (somehow) shame we, too, feel with Denisov as he howls like a dog
at his discovery of Petya Rostov’s death – we are also, surely, by necessity involved
with thinking through, responding to, engaging with, questioning, the work we
are reading: intellection, as well as emotion, is part of the way that literature, in
Kafka’s phrase, breaks the frozen sea within us. This might be called suspicion,
or approaching work in bad faith and, of course, in some cases, might be these:
but it might also be called facing a work with one’s whole self, or with all one’s
faculties. The position of the dividing line between bad faith suspicion and
good faith engagement is a question of judgement. We hope that these essays
demonstrate the latter rather than the former.

True, literary critical and theoretical discourse runs other risks too.

J. M. Coetzee’s elusive and indirect comments on his own work show his aware-
ness of these. One is to turn singular literary works into examples of, say, literary
movements (‘a great post-modern novel’), historical moments and contexts
(‘postcolonial fi ction’) or cultural/political/moral arguments (about eating
meat and animal rights, for example, or global state power). Moreover, with a
novelist who so inhabits these debates and fl ows of ideas, as Coetzee does, and
who has so much to say about them (even if at an angle), this risk becomes
greater. We hope that the essays in this volume have avoided this risk not least
because – and this is one measure of his greatness as a writer – Coetzee has. His
works, as Derek Attridge has argued, cannot be simply categorized as making
assertions, statements and claims, are not examples of non-literary positions but
rather use fi ction to do precisely what philosophy and theory cannot. Each of
them make singular explosions of the mind, the form and content of which are

Introduction

inaccessible save in the form in which they present themselves as novels. They
can’t simply be fi led under pre-existing categories but demand further and con-
tinually more nuanced understanding, building on established concepts and
developing judgements. Indeed, it is precisely the centrality of this ‘hard to
grasp’ aspect of his work combined with its intellectual and aesthetic range and
discipline that has made Coetzee so rewarding for critics and theorists. This
shouldn’t be a surprise: as thinkers like Adorno and Derrida have argued, it is
precisely that which can’t be grasped or comprehended that most stimulates
the desire to grasp. His novels are best seen as processes that inspire or, better,
demand thinking and responses. And the range of the thought they demand is
enormous.

This leads to the second of JC’s attacks, the relationship between ideas devel-

oped in the literary sphere and the wider world: that is, the context of litera-
ture. Of course, one – perhaps the main – context of any work of literature is
the context of literature itself, its own ‘as if’ autonomous history and develop-
ment. In the case of J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre, Beckett and Dostoevsky are perhaps
the most signifi cant literary ancestors, though there are other major infl u-
ences, and part of a response to his work is to trace these roots. But it seems
hard to see how this literary, disciplinary ambition corrupts the sense of US
prosecutors. JC refers, surely, to a wider range of analytic instruments devel-
oped from a huge array of ‘extra-literary’ contexts, political, psychic, philosoph-
ical, international, gendered and so on, the very multiple and shared contexts
in which we all live and which characterize so much work on literature. Of
course, the question of how the world and a literary text – how a text and its
context – come together is impossibly hard: it is the core issue of Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory and since the 1960s (at least) has been a continual and deep-
seated source of critical disagreement (almost: schism). But if the actual paths
from world to text and from text to world are not clear, it is clear that there are
paths, that these two spheres are inextricably interwoven. It is clear, not least, in
the work of J. M. Coetzee. Not only is this very diffi culty – the mutual relation-
ship between literature and the world – part of the constant background of his
work, but specifi c histories occur and reoccur. The complex relationship to
South African history is shown intra alia in Life & Times of Michael K and Waiting
for the Barbarians, both obliquely located in African and postcolonial contexts.
Experiments with form and the ethics of representation, in Foe, for example,
align the work with arguments made through the constellation of philosophical
ideas known as postmodernism. The approaches to gender and sexuality in
Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man and in the autobiographical work are
interventions in global discussions of gender and its changing representation.
More than this, Coetzee’s writing reverberates at the cutting edge of debates
across the public sphere and in the humanities now. Controversies over animal
rights and over eating meat circle around The Lives of Animals; accounts of
trauma and torture draw on his Waiting for the Barbarians. Warnings about global

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

state power, atrocity, about international war and empire – for lack of better
words – sound throughout his work from the fi rst novella, Dusklands, to the
most recent publication Diary of a Bad Year, and have loud contemporary reso-
nances. The novels, both before and after the end of apartheid, demonstrate
his continuing preoccupation with the recalcitrant presence or residue – par-
ticulars, bodies, realities – of South Africa: his work is concerned again and
again with the nature of embodiment. There are, even, perhaps, wider contex-
tual themes that characterize his work. It would seem hard either not to bring
these areas to bear in coming to understand J. M. Coetzee’s fi ction and odd,
too, or not to bring from the text to the world lessons learnt and ideas so devel-
oped. Here, as with the ‘theory’ section, this book seeks not to ‘decode’ or to
reduce his work to a cipher of political or cultural history but to explore how
the works in themselves have transformed the canons or histories to which they
lay claim.

As we have suggested, this volume is divided into two parts, refl ecting not

a watertight division between these two unstable and intermingled categories
but a differential sense of emphasis between the authors. The fi rst contribu-
tion, ‘Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View’ is by the leading South Afri-
can novelist André Brink. He offers a series of personal refl ections on shifts of
atmosphere and emphasis in South African literature after apartheid, illus-
trated with examples from a range of writers, including van Niekerk, Tlali, Mda,
and Galgut, as well as his own always insightfully attuned work. Speaking in an
overall optimistic vein, Brink suggests that writers are no longer as troubled by
the sense of working under an edict (to be relevant, or serious, or polemical).
As a result the personal and the political in South African literatures are now far
more creatively interrelated. Following this, Louise Bethlehem, in a provocative
and densely theorized essay ‘Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text’, considers
the evasive self-refl exivity that characterizes Coetzee’s relationship to both place
and historicity in his work, relating this in particular to Elizabeth Costello: Eight
Lessons (2003) as his fi rst post-South African novel. To her, this novel insistently
reaches beyond the specifi c in order to ‘ratify a universalism that dispenses with
the longing marks of a genealogy’. This universalism can be read, disturbingly
or otherwise, as allowing his expatriate South African readers, if they so wish, to
endorse a placeless universalism and erase questions of historical guilt. With
this postulation established, however, Bethlehem sets about detecting the ways
in which the universal and the abstract in Coetzee is everywhere contaminated
with the specifi c and the literal, to an extent which grounds us, as Derek Attridge
writes, in the ethical event that his writing as process insists upon. In relation to
Elizabeth Costello in particular, the South African context specifi cally intrudes in
the text’s preoccupation with embodiment as a form of truth, something which
it shares, Bethlehem contends, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
(TRC) fi nal report. This important intertext for Elizabeth Costello in similar ways
over-valorizes the reality of the suffering body – a body that the text cannot

Introduction

however, in all its corporeality, ultimately make available to us. Developing this
focus on Elizabeth Costello, Karina Szczurek in ‘Coetzee and Gordimer’ offers an
experiment in authorial ventriloquism by adopting the voice of J. M. Coetzee’s
‘cousin’ Eliza to examine the striking parallels between Gordimer’s biography
and that of Coetzee’s alter ego Elizabeth. She then turns from speculating as to
the signifi cance of this provocative masking and notes instead the ways in which
Costello also resembles Coetzee.

Remaining with, but at a tangent to, the South African context, in ‘Word-

sworth and the Recollection of South Africa’, Pieter Vermeulen gives a fi nely
attentive reading of Coetzee’s literary context with, and ultimately distinction
from, Wordsworth, chiefl y through his autobiographical poem The Prelude. The
essay’s starting point is to seek an approach to Coetzee’s autobiography in Boy-
hood and Youth which challenges the predominant critical interpretation
of these works as closed philosophical self-refl ections. Instead, introducing
perspectives from Coetzee’s hermeneutic of writing Africa in White Writing, and
detecting Wordsworthian traces throughout the 1990s Coetzee, Vermeulen
proposes that particulars of South Africa in Coetzee are in fact more resistant
to incorporation into an epistemology of the growth of the writer’s mind
than anything in Wordsworth. As in Bethlehem, South African reality consis-
tently insists upon and yet resists (at one and the same time) its being incorpo-
rated into the writer’s language, or, as Vermeulen has it, ‘hermeneutic
programme’. South African facts, to Coetzee, must ceaselessly be ‘reconfi gured’
into writing or else be irretrievably lost. For Sue Kossew in her essay, ‘Border
Crossings: Self and Text’, Coetzee’s last-but-one novel Slow Man is a demanding
refl ection on the interplay between, and shifting boundaries separating,
history and fi ction, and life and art. In an interpretation that bears analogy
with Zoe Wicomb’s suggestion that the novel offers us the equivalent of
sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s critical refl ections on artistic convention, Kossew
suggests that in Slow Man the artifi ce of history and the reality of fi ction are
manipulated relative to one another. Any clear sense of what is imagined
and what is real is inexorably broken down. The fi nal piece in this section,
Derek Attridge’s ‘Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett’, draws both
on the literary and historical contexts of Coetzee’s work. Focussing on his
often ignored sense of comedy, Attridge highlights Coetzee’s debt to Samuel
Beckett. Describing the discovery of Beckett by the narrator of the memoir
Youth, Attridge suggests that while Coetzee’s early critical work on Beckett in
theoretical linguistics and quantitative methods of literary analysis didn’t
develop far, it left an ineradicable mark in Coetzee’s writing. Attridge argues
that Coetzee found in Beckett a ‘form for the movements of the mind’ and
then analyses Coetzee’s changing views on Beckett. However, central to
Coetzee’s response to Beckett has been style and the comedy of the body
ill-matched with the mind. This allows Attridge to challenge the critical consen-
sus – that Coetzee takes up Beckett’s bleakness but not his comedy – by arguing

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

that, read with a sensitivity to the nuances of style and tone, we can appreciate
the interplay between the apprehension of the human claim to be in charge of
the body and a grim awareness of some of the less welcome consequences of
bodily autonomy.

Beginning the second section of the book, Rosemary Jolly’s essay ‘Writing

Desire Responsibly’ questions the relationship between desire and responsibil-
ity in writing. She suggests, as a starting point, that desire and responsibility
represent a crucial dialectic in Coetzee’s fi ction and that Coetzee’s recent
novels have fundamentally been about this relationship. Jolly turns to the fi gure
of the desiring author and the consequences of this representation: betrayal
(referring to The Master of Petersburg); the role of the reader and levels of explic-
itness (in Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello). Her essay concludes by considering a
major theme in Coetzee’s work: the impact of writing about violence. Focussing
on the pivotal Age of Iron, Patrick Hayes, in ‘Literature, History and Folly’, argues
that the novel is best read alongside Coetzee’s 1992 essay on Erasmus’s The
Praise of Folly. Here, again, as in Attridge’s essay comedy and literary infl uence
go together, and Don Quixote – from which the title comes – emerges as a key
intertext to Age of Iron through both its comedic and serious ‘sides’. Hayes
suggests that Age of Iron tries to cultivate a ‘nonposition’ in relation to history,
which is neither to deny it nor to stake assertions. Elleke Boehmer’s essay
‘Queer Bodies’ explores, in its fi rst half, the lineaments of dissident or queer
desire which Coetzee’s work (in particular the two memoirs) traces after 1989,
almost as if in response to the ‘liberation’ of the discourse of love that was
meant to follow the fall of apartheid. In its second half, the essay suggests that,
far from being liberatory, queer desire in the later Coetzee, and especially in
Elizabeth Costello (2004), swerves away from an identifi cation with otherness,
especially where that otherness takes on womanly form, instead collaborating
with misogyny.

Continuing the focus on the body, Kyoko Yoshida’s ‘Eating (Dis)Order’

explores metaphors of eating and cannibalism in Coetzee’s fi ction. Observing
that eating is handled with discomfort in his fi ction, Yoshida suggests that eat-
ing was a fundamental issue in Coetzee’s writing well ahead of its emergence in
The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). Indeed, eating serves
as a metaphor for the relationship with otherness and ethical responsibility.
Russell Samolsky opens his chapter ‘Acts of Mourning’ by reading Elizabeth
Costello’s claims for the unlimited powers of empathy in conjunction with
Jacques Derrida’s formulation of an impossible or inconsolable mourning. He
explores the confl ict between Elizabeth Costello’s declaration that there is no
end to the degree that we are able to ‘think ourselves into the being of another’
and Derrida’s assertion that a limit to ‘thinking our way into the full being of
the other’ is established by death. Samolsky emphasizes that, for Derrida, ‘con-
suming the other by act of introjection’ or non-mourning signifi es the totalitar-
ian task of eliminating difference whereas Costello maintains that the structure

Introduction

of genocide is made feasible by the failure to imagine ‘our way into the full
being of the other.’ Samolsky asks how Disgrace might signal to a way through
this impasse. He refl ects on this question with a perceptive consideration of the
role played by dogs in Disgrace, which in turn provokes an approach to the wider
issues of ethics and mourning that they raise through their presence in the
novel. Mark Mathuray’s chapter ‘Sublime Abjection’ then looks at Foe and, chal-
lenging the more typical critical views, introduces what he describes as the
‘stalled sublime’ to the domain of Coetzee criticism. Mathuray’s ‘stalled sublime’
refers to a post-Kantian, post-Romantic fracture and suspension of the sublime
experience. In his fi ction, Mathuray argues, Coetzee denies the moment of ratio-
nal and psychological triumph (and hence hermeneutic closure) which suc-
ceeds the moment of defeat and failure in the Kantian account of the sublime.
Without any intervention of grace, or of a political vision, Coetzee’s alienated
characters fail to read their historical others. Mathuray reads Kristevan abjec-
tion (a version of the stalled sublime) in his original analysis of the horror felt
by Susan Barton at Friday’s mutilation.

In ‘Authenticity: Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations’, Anne

Haeming examines how Coetzee simultaneously highlights and conceals the
made-ness of things, whether it be his own texts, or, within his texts, construc-
tions, ideologies and objects. By drawing attention to his texts as constructs,
Coetzee emphasizes the existence of an originator. Haeming explores how
self-referential narrative devices stage the intermediary realm between fact and
fi ction, including the diaries, chronicles, records and editorial frames that per-
vade Coetzee’s work. Especially in the current context of reclaiming the South
African past, this chapter focuses on Coetzee’s preoccupation with (hi)stories as
(re)constructions in order to explore the role of the author and authenticity
in his work. In the closing essay of the collection, Katy Iddiols' ‘Disrupting
Inauthentic Readings: Coetzee’s Strategies’ refl ects on the role of theory in
general and suggests that Coetzee employs a range of highly effective strategies
throughout his fi ction in order to protect his writing from the injury caused
by inauthentic readings. With particular reference to Coetzee’s most recent
publication Diary of a Bad Year, she argues that these strategies ultimately moti-
vate Coetzee’s readers towards a more authentic way of reading and approach-
ing his fi ction.

Chapter 1

Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

André Brink

Thank you, again, Karina

Although with some natural misgivings, I attempt, in this chapter, to set my own
novels within the context of recent writing in South Africa. I try to address the
problem of discussing my own work by referring to my writing only in as much
as it illustrates some of the more obvious trends in post-apartheid literature.
Even so, it is a hazardous enterprise for which I must ask the reader’s indulgence.

My reluctance is compounded by the fact that we are a mere twelve or so

years into the ‘new South Africa’, which makes any categoric assertions prema-
ture. However, as the shift from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ began to manifest itself
rather sooner in the arts (theatre, dance, music, painting sculpture and cer-
tainly literature) than in politics, it is not entirely unproductive to attempt a
tentative outline of at least some of the aspects of this shift.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the change has been what may be
described as a move inward, away from politics as drama and spectacle and
social phenomenon towards internalization and interiority. Of course, in many
works of fi ction produced during the apartheid years there was already an
awareness of a balance between the private and the public. But it would seem
that narrative in the new era is being driven more by human and individual
experience than by ‘the situation’, which may also imply a move from the socio-
political towards the ethical and the subjective. This should not be construed as
a rejection or a denial of politics, but much rather a process of reimagining the
political, the social, the public. As happened under the infl uence of feminism,
the private becomes the political. But the opposite is just as true: the political is
now being perceived more and more in terms of private experience. There is,

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

as Sam Durrant indicates in his work on Coetzee and mourning (Durrant
1999), a ‘refusal to be conscripted’.

In J. M. Coetzee’s work this has always been evident, from In the Heart of the

Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) to his last obviously South
African novel Disgrace (1999). In Gordimer, the shift perhaps fi rst became fore-
grounded in My Son’s Story (1990) and The House Gun (1998), to become most
poignantly interiorized in None to Accompany Me (1994). It is certainly a cardinal
feature in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) in which an explicitly polit-
ical act, the murder of the American exchange student Amy Biehl by young
Azapo activists, is reinvented and re-infl ected as an interaction between two
mothers, one black, one white. And this kind of reinvention also characterizes
such diverse novels as Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) and Damon Galgut’s
The Good Doctor (2003).

It seems plausible that a driving force in this shift has been the ripple effects

of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which, for all its fl aws and
inadequacies, was a watershed in recent South African history. The experience
of thousands of victims of apartheid (as well as a number of perpetrators) testi-
fying in public about the private horror they had lived through, individually or
within their families or their circle of friends and acquaintances, signifi cantly
assumed the form of storytelling. Countless voices narrated for the fi rst time in
their lives – and for the fi rst time in South African history – not any general or
public version of an ‘acceptable’, offi cially sanctioned history, but the private
and personal experience of ‘ordinary’ people previously bypassed by the codi-
fi ed forms of that history – forms invariably shaped by historiographers who
were both white and male.

How often during the apartheid years had I, like so many other writers both

black and white, been prompted to choose between the telling of, say, a simple
love story (as if any love story could ever be simple!), and a story with a recog-
nizable social and political resonance. More often than not it was the latter
option we chose – not because apartheid was foisted on our consciousness or
our conscience as an ideology, a theory, a ‘system-out-there’ – but because it was
a force that determined the most immediate and urgent choices of our daily
lives: whom to love? whom to marry? where to live? what career to follow? to
which school we should send our children . . .? All of which means that, even
then, we were aware of the intensely personal lurking within the public domain
of experience.

But it was that public dimension which often appeared to us more immediate

in its demands, more urgent, and so it tended to take precedence. As a result
there were always stories placed on the back burner, waiting for ‘one day’ when
we could return to them and explore them more deeply without any inner com-
pulsion other than the urge to tell a story. That day has now come. And it is the
recognition of this new freedom of choice that characterizes much of the exhil-
aration of the inner liberation embodied in the new South Africa.

Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

This does not mean that the writer now attempts to ensconce her- or himself

within the ‘purely personal’. It is by no means a rediscovery of individualism,
whether in the Romantic or self-aggrandizing modes of the nineteenth century
or the existential despair that marked so much of the twentieth. It is rather the
expression of that affi nity with others which the individual writer experienced
during the years when, menaced by a single enemy – the abuse of power
expressed in the form of apartheid – all of us, of all cultural, social and racial
groups, found comfort in a solidarity from which we drew strength, energy and
courage. Having once experienced that closeness, that profound humanity that
bound all of us together in a precarious situation, one could never again be
‘simply’ an individual. And so, even in the present exploration of our private
selves, it is always, whether overtly or implicitly, solidly founded on the acknowl-
edgement of what we share – as South Africans, as human beings.

In my own work, I have always been conscious of the two dimensions of the

private and the political as driving forces or sources of inspiration. These mani-
fest not necessarily as polarity or dichotomy, but as positions on a sliding scale –
whether in Looking on Darkness (1974) where the private via dolorosa of Joseph
Malan is also the narrative of the apartheid victim, or in A Dry White Season
(1979) where the somewhat naïve but well-meaning Ben du Toit experiences
his battle with the violence and bureaucracy of apartheid primarily on the level
of personal relations. For me, the transition possibly began with An Act of Terror
(1991). Here the private crusade of Thomas Landman, as the culmination of
the attempts of thirteen generations in his family history to respond to the call
of Adamastor and to ‘acclimatise’ in Africa, also means going beyond the per-
sonal rebellion of Ben du Toit as he moves towards full political engagement
and the assumption of responsibility towards his country’s history and his
people.

In this regard, I should say that I believe the opportunistic defi nitions of

‘Afrikaner guilt’ by writers like Rian Malan (My Traitor’s Heart, 1990), and, per-
haps to a lesser extent, Mark Behr (The Smell of Apples, 1993) have done a disser-
vice both to a re-evaluation of Afrikaner (and in fact South African) history and
to the processes of interiorization stimulated by the transition to a new South
Africa. I certainly reject the notion of personal or communal guilt as a numb-
ing, paralysing force which effectively cancels history. Surely another route is
possible – that of not only acknowledging complicity but also of a commitment
to responsibility, a position from which one can move in a much more creative
way towards new beginnings.

This has assumed different forms in my own recent novels: whether in The

Other Side of Silence (2002) where Hanna X moves beyond guilt towards the
assumption of creative responsibility; or in Before I Forget (2004) where the inter-
sections between Chris Minnaar’s love life and his country’s history are marked
by female presences through which some kind of atonement might become
possible.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Femininity indeed offers a prominent domain of experience in recent South
African fi ction. This works not only through the predominance of female writ-
ers, both in Afrikaans (Joubert, Krog, Winterbach, Van Niekerk, and others),
and in English (Gordimer, Jooste, Mann, Awerbuck, Watson), but also through
an intensifi ed exploration of the implications and challenges of femininity.
A signifi cant introduction to an enquiry into this dimension of recent fi ction is
provided by two key titles from the years of transition leading up to the fi rst
free elections of 1994. On the one hand, there is the affi rmation of femininity
apparent in Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985); on the other, Mtutuzeli
Matshoba’s rage and despair about emasculation and denial in Call Me Not a
Man (1979). An entire chapter in history is encapsulated in these titles. In a way
both of them may appear to point the way towards Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie
Mandela (2003) in which the whole of colonial history becomes feminized in
the image of the penelopeian, waiting, lamenting and ultimately triumphant
woman.

There are so many manifestations of the move towards explorations of the

feminine as a kind of prow fi gure in post-apartheid fi ction that it deserves an
entire study in its own right. These explorations may range from the quiet
and delicate but profound assertions of the female gaze in Mary Watson’s
Moss (2004), to the redefi nitions of the ‘female domain’ in Miriam Tlali’s Mihloti
(1984); from Elsa Joubert’s historical meanderings (1978/80), to the trium-
phant dissection of oppression and subservience, both explored as manifesta-
tions of femininity, in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004). And then there is,
inevitably, J. M. Coetzee whose explorations of the female experience range
from the imaginings of Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977) via the clair-
voyance of the dying Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron (1990) to the disconcerting
multiple-eye-of-the-fl y inquisitions of Elizabeth Costello (2003).

In my own work, I attempted an enquiry into the female experience of Africa

in An Instant in the Wind (1976), amplifi ed in The Wall of the Plague (1984; masked
within the effort of a man to re-imagine the feminine contours of his lover’s
mind). Later I ventured – more recklessly perhaps – into the machinations of a
female narrator in Imaginings of Sand (1996) and, more recently, in The Other
Side of Silence (2002). This confronted me with the immemorial problem of
impersonation.

Under ordinary circumstances it is hardly a problem: surely, it is the very

starting point of any act of narrative imagination to project oneself into the life
of another. But there are certain situations where power relations within the
context of the narrative act may complicate the challenge. If, within patriarchy,
a male narrator impersonates a female, or within a racist society a white narra-
tor ‘speaks for’ a black character, it may very easily become an appropriation of
the voice of a traditionally deprived other. However, even where imbalances in

Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

society may at fi rst sight appear to militate against the audacity of such appro-
priation, this may be mitigated in an increasingly pluralistic world where more
and more women, and more and more blacks, can – and do – ‘speak for them-
selves’. Also, as Thaïs E. Morgan argues in Men Writing the Feminine (Morgan
1994), there is a difference between speaking ‘on behalf of’ and ‘speaking
from a position of solidarity with’. With this reassurance (though still in awe
of a situation which can so easily become muddled or muddied), I attempted
in Imaginings of Sand (1996) and The Other Side of Silence (2002) to venture into
the territory of imagining the other. In the fi rst, I used a young female narrator
and, embedded within her narrative, a hundred-year-old grandmother, to
reconstruct between them the story of the nine generations of women who
constitute their tribe (among other things as a corrective to the numerous
male genealogies I have constructed in other novels). In the second, I allowed
a tongueless female victim of male colonial atrocity to ‘speak back’ to the patri-
archy which had made and unmade her. To me, this became part of a whole
new wave of writing in which history is reshaped in order to reinterpret the
present.

The reinvention of history is indeed another major current in contemporary
South African writing. During all the turbulent centuries of colonialism in
Southern Africa a specifi c – and all too familiar – pattern of historiography
became prevalent, a master narrative (in every sense of the word) devised by
white, male historians. Admittedly, the pattern was not quite as simplistic as
in many other colonial situations, in that writing in Afrikaans presented a
curiously ambiguous view. The Afrikaans language, shaped from the mid-
seventeenth century in the mouths of slaves (mostly Indonesian) and indige-
nous Khoisan peoples who could not speak the language of the colonizing
masters (Dutch) properly, of course brought about fascinating processes of cre-
olization. It became a vehicle through which, in Rushdie’s overused term, the
empire could ‘write back’. However, at the same time Afrikaans gradually
became more the language of the bourgeoisie, until towards the end of the
nineteenth century when it was appropriated by an increasingly nationalistic
community in opposition to English and Dutch, and assumed a new position of
power within the colonial situation. It evolved into ‘the language of apartheid’.
In this way historiography became fully the property and the tool of the ruling
white elite. But that ‘other’ Afrikaans, the language of the deprived and the
oppressed, still lurked behind the new and monstrous Frankenstein.

It was only during the process of the dismantling of apartheid that the notion

of ‘a South African history’ became broadened and diversifi ed into a whole
array of different histories. This happened in line with the global renewal of

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

historiography in the wake of Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie’s Montaillou, in which
the traditional view of history as the account of the actions of emperors and
kings, princes and generals and notables was replaced by what Njabulo Ndebele
in another context would call ‘the rediscovery of the ordinary’: the lives of
common people without whom – as Brecht so unforgettably depicted it in his
poem ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters’ – the great and the famous could never
have risen to the top (Le Roi Ladurie 1975; Ndebele 1991). So, in the literature
of the new South Africa, a whole jigsaw puzzle of histories came into being.
These include Griqua history in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story (2001), the Xhosa’s
cattle killing in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000; taken further in an
as-yet-unpublished novel by Siviwe Mdoda), a redefi nition of Afrikaner history
in the Boer War by Christoffel Coetzee (Op soek na Generaal Mannetjies Mentz,
1998), and women’s history in Elsa Joubert’s Isobelle’s Journey (1995; 2002).
There is also an amazing overview of the early years of Dutch colonization, as
experienced by the Khoikhoi and Dutch colonists at the Cape, the Dutch mas-
ters in Holland, and the early settlers in Batavia and Mauritius, in Dan Sleigh’s
masterpiece Islands (2004). Many of these reviews of history return to a pre-
colonial Africa, to a world of myth and magic which shows fascinating parallels
with the very origins of Western historiography in the inventions of Herodotus.

The exciting possibilities of turning history inside out to reveal its mythical

underpinnings have inspired, in my own narrative explorations, a novel like
The First Life of Adamastor (1993; allegedly the Khoi ‘original’ on which the
Portuguese poet Camoens based his Luciads, an epic of the Cape of Good
Hope). I think also of the retelling of the Landman family story in An Act of
Terror (1991) or that of Kristien’s ancestry in Imaginings of Sand (1996), or more
recently, Praying Mantis (2005). In this last-named the fi rst Khoi missionary
ordained at the Cape occupies a space between an ancient Khoisan mythology
and the Christian world of the London Mission Society.

At this point the historical exploits of recent South African fabulists merge with
another of the trends which have become evident in post-apartheid literature,
namely what for want of a better term one might call a local variant of ‘magical
realism’. This somewhat unfortunate appellation inevitably tends to bring to
mind the late-twentieth-century explosion of Latin American fi ction by such
writers as Marquez, Donoso, Llosa, Fuentes, and Amado. However, Africa has
had its own form of magic realism in the long tradition of oral narrative which
spanned many centuries before it erupted in the work of writers as diverse as
Amos Tutuola or Ben Okri. What predominates in this tradition is the fore-
grounding of ancestors who continue to intervene actively in the affairs of the

Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

present, an easy gliding between the worlds of the living and the dead (see
Cooper 1998).

Mda already handles this with easy grace in Ways of Dying (1997). In The

Madonna of Excelsior (2004) he adds a further dimension, where through
repeated acts of narrative magic he brings to life paintings by the Flemish-South
African artist Father Claerhout. In this way, he revisits – and in the process
re-imagines – a dark and sordid chapter from the apartheid era when a large
number of religious and political leaders in the Free State village of Excelsior
were accused of contravening the notorious ‘Immorality Act’.

In numerous other forms the fascination with the magical-realist becomes

manifest, such as also in Ann Landsman’s Devil’s Chimney (1999) in which the
ostrich feather boom in the Little Karoo at the turn of the twentieth century is
resurrected to establish an unsettling juxtaposition of the past and the present.
In the short stories of another writer from the Little Karoo, Abraham de Vries,
in his collection Uit die kontreie vandaan (2000), the everyday and the seemingly
ordinary are persistently unmasked to reveal something utterly unfathomable,
inexplicable or grotesque at their very heart. In the fantastical Ivan Vladislavic’s
short novella The Folly (1993) an amazing multidimensional ‘pleasure dome’ is
fabricated with string and nails only to be utterly undone in a sleight of hand
which reveals the entire edifi ce to be no more than a construct of language.

My own preoccupation with a realism amplifi ed by magic and mystery has

so far been indulged in a novel like The Rights of Desire (2000) where the present-
day, post-apartheid world of the retired librarian Ruben is constantly disturbed
by the ghost of a seventeenth-century slave woman who haunts his home. She is
possibly a reminder that, most particularly in a country like South Africa with its
many unresolved issues and its pathological repressions, the past is never dead.
And in another guise it may be said to return in Praying Mantis (2005) in which
the African landscape itself offers innumerable points of access between the
‘real’ world and that of the spirits and the dead and the too-easily forgotten.
Nothing seems to be quite as real as the possible. What is important in an evalu-
ation of the magical-realist in South African fi ction is that its two constituents –
the magical and the real –exist not in opposition to one another, but as perfectly
complementary phenomena, each being the extension and the amplifi cation
of the other. A rose is a rose is a mystical rose.

The South African judge Richard Goldstone tells the story of a black stage-

hand in an apartheid-era production of Aida, who had as one of his special tasks
the duty to lead a group of camels between their enclosure in the zoo and the
opera house before and after every show. One evening, on his way to a perfor-
mance, he was stopped by a white constable who peremptorily wanted to know
what the hell he was doing. Very truthfully and simply he replied, ‘I am taking
the camels to the opera’. Present-day South African fi ction is a place where this
may just be quite literally true. And the point is not that a ‘simple explanation’

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

underlies a seemingly fantastical event, but that there need not be anything
particularly outlandish about a group of humpbacked animals attending the
performance of an opera. In this new world anything is possible; everything
is true.

Whether realistic or fantastic, historical or contemporary, much of the vivacity
and versatility of literature in the new South Africa is due to a heightened aware-
ness of language: language not merely as a vehicle for storytelling but as a
remarkable encounter with meaning and truth at innumerable levels. Not just
the story, but the process of telling it inspires our writers to a much larger degree
than ever before, as we move from the reportage of apartheid towards inven-
tion, imagination and discovery. It is certainly a feature of much recent writing
that the act and processes of writing themselves come under scrutiny.

Dan Sleigh’s enquiry into the fi rst years of Dutch colonization at the Cape

acquire an intensity and acuity because the scribe, the Dutch East India Com-
pany secretary Grevenbroeck, is observed in the process of committing his
memoirs (even his inventions and hunches?) to paper (2004). It is the act of
writing that gives shape to Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1999), as it does
to the narrating of her stories in To My Children’s Children (1990) or Forced to
Grow (1992). In Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) it is writing which trans-
forms painting into a new discovery of reality and its origins. Most of the fasci-
natingly complex text of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) is presented in
the form of diaries, letters, poems, memoirs or the transcription of unuttered
thoughts. In the work of Coetzee, much of the subtlety of Waiting for the Barbar-
ians (1990) may well lie in imagining the Magistrate as the narrator of his own
story, not simply after the event but as part of the event, constitutive of the event.
Certainly, in Foe (1986), the narrative action (and the interaction of narrators
from this text and from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Roxana) resides largely in
the processes of verbalizing. And in Elizabeth Costello (2003) the text of the main
character’s lectures determines the dynamics of the narrative and its evolution
through question-and-answer sessions with her audience to its communication
with readers ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the book.

What has fascinated me in my own recent attempts at storytelling has often

been the invention of an ‘impossible situation’: the telling of a story which
cannot, realistically, be told. The journalist Flip Lochner gives an account of his
visit to hell in Devil’s Valley (1998) within a situation where he is, presumably,
already dead. And the imaginings of Estienne Barbier in On the Contrary (1993)
resound as a conundrum: ‘I am dead, you cannot read: this will (therefore) not
have been a letter.’

Post-Apartheid Literature: A Personal View

The stunning variety of new trends in South African writing which have begun
to manifest themselves in recent literature (what I have so briefl y indicated
here is a random indication of possibilities) suggests that the country fi nds itself
on the verge of a veritable explosion of creativity. This is evident not only in the
work of established writers but in an impressive spectrum of new voices; and in
the almost frenzied pace with which students in Creative Writing courses at the
University of Cape Town and other institutions are moving into publication.
Even in stark or dark tales there lurks a sense of wonder and of discovery: the
sheer adventure of writing, whether fl owing from the workings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission or emanating from a multitude of other stimuli
and sources. It is no longer inevitable, as it was so largely the case under apart-
heid, to be gloomy or dour in one’s exposition of horrors and depression.
Writers appear to have (re-)discovered the simple truth that there are also rea-
sons to celebrate and to affi rm. Concomitantly, it is no longer necessary for
commentators to evaluate a writer in terms of what she or he is against. What is
relevant now is the quality of the writing as such.

This quality is not, as yet, unambiguously beyond reproach. In some respects,

as in the revisiting of the Black Holes of apartheid, the interminable evocations
of a childhood in the shadow of apartheid can become predictable and cloying.
(Though some of it may be moving and brilliant, like Jeanne Goosen’s Not
All of Us, (1990), Pamela Jooste’s Dance With a Poor Man’s Daughter (1998), or
Carolyn Slaughter’s Before the Knife (2002).) Just as there is much to be deplored
in the socio-politics of the country today, after the initial euphoria, much of the
writing may be mediocre. But the élan is unmistakeable: the urge to create, the
need to tell a story. And a surprising proportion of what is published is more
than merely promising or encouraging. Much of it is exhilarating, often tre-
mendously relevant and signifi cant, refl ecting the profound joy that resides in
the rediscovery of literature, not just as an account or a refl ection, but as an
adventure and as an affi rmation of the indomitable energy of the human spirit.
Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive.

Works Cited

Cooper, Brenda (1998), Magic Realism in West African Fiction. London: Routledge.
Durrant, Samuel (1999), ‘Bearing witness to apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s inconsolable

works of mourning’, Contemporary Literature, 40, (3), 430–63.

Le Roi Ladurie, Emmanuel (1975), Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 á 1324. Paris:

Gallimard.

Morgan, Thais E. (1994), Men Writing the Feminine. Albany: SUNY Press.
Ndebele, Njabulo S. (1991), Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Johannesburg: COSAW.

Chapter 2

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text*

Louise Bethlehem

In the last of the eight lessons that partly constitute the work which bears her
name, Elizabeth Costello stands at the gate, and, standing there, is abandoned
to a form of deixis which is irreducible to the coordinates, in time or space, of
her literal positioning in a town where ‘the guardian of the gate never sleeps and
the people in the cafés seem to have nowhere to go’ (J. M. Coetzee 2003: 195).
We are thoroughly in the province of metafi ction, a conventional enough
emplacement for a text by J. M. Coetzee, as David Attwell has so productively
argued (1993: 20). It is thus not surprising to see the fi ction of reference to
setting turning back on itself to trace instead a ‘supplementary’ course (Jacques
Derrida 1976 [1967]) which targets not so much the fi ctional world as fi c-
tionality itself. The very title of the entry, ‘At the Gate’, constitutes a form of
fi ctive diversion: the distraction – or entertainment – of intertextuality. The title
diverts naming, as for Derrida, whose ‘homonymic’ recital of Kafka in ‘Devant
La Loi’ – a piece which like ‘At the Gate’ deliberately intersects Kafka’s récit
‘Vor dem Gesetz’ or ‘Before the Law’ – can readily be drawn into this discussion
(Derrida 1987 [1982]: 128; Franz Kafka 1983 [1914]: 3–4). ‘One title occasion-
ally resonates like the citation of another’, states Derrida. ‘But as soon as it
names something else as well, it no longer simply cites. Rather, the one title
diverts the other for the benefi t of a homonym. All of this could never occur
without some degree of prejudice or usurpation’ (Derrida 1987 [1982]: 128).
Derrida prefaces his reading of Kafka by stressing the paradoxical singularity of
intertextual citation. Its supplementary agency of naming implicitly precipitates
the emergence of type of ‘event’, a term I use in anticipation of Derek Attridge’s
deployment of it through Derrida and for Coetzee (see Attridge 2004b and the
discussion below).

Drawing on these contributions, it is now possible to recast the illusion of ref-

erence presented by the title of Coetzee’s text. ‘At the Gate’ deliberately opens
its syntax to an isomorphic allusion: preposition plus article plus noun. But it
simultaneously opens out onto the extended performance of citation which con-
tours the intertextual coming-into-being of Coetzee’s text as one index of the

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

literariness of this very text. It thus is literariness that Elizabeth names, rather
than say, ‘Franz Kafka’, in the ‘mise en scène’ (Coetzee 2003: 209) which makes
hers one of the ‘improper’ (Derrida 1987 [1982]: 131) and always provisional
proper names of literature: ‘It is the same with the Kafka business. The wall, the
gate, the sentry, are straight out of Kafka. So is the demand for a confession, so
is the courtroom with the dozing bailiff and the panel of old men in their
crows’ robes pretending to pay attention while she thrashes about in the toils of
her own words. Kafka, but only the superfi cies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and fl at-
tened to a parody’ (Coetzee 2003: 209). To put it differently, the coils of words
which are attributed to Elizabeth but which originate neither with her nor
wholly with her author draw language into the familiar embrace of the ‘poetic
function’ in Roman Jakobson’s typology: the turning of the message on itself
which dislocates the sign into the self-reference of literariness (1960).

My own prejudice, to recall Derrida, in delineating these turns lies in the stag-

ing of a kind of anticipatory defence against prematurely conceding Kafka’s
pre-eminence within the interpretative fi eld of Coetzee’s text, at least the fi eld
within which I would like to position myself. I seek, somewhat wilfully, to resist
submission to the law of allegory, the allegory of Kafka’s ‘Law’, viewed from the
perspective of a universalist construction of the literary canon, even if Kafka’s
written lore also encompasses ‘In the Penal Colony’ (Kafka 1983 [1919]: 140).
This work’s relevance for the questions I shall be raising will become apparent
soon enough. I will thus have very little to say in the argument that follows
about the Kafkaesque genealogy of ‘Lesson 8’, as it is also named, despite my
awareness that such a genealogy might plausibly be charted. For all their fore-
grounding, I experience the allusions to Kafka in ‘At the Gate’ as somehow
recalcitrant in releasing meaning. These resistant allusions nevertheless invite
recuperation as the signifi ers of a self-refl exive engagement with literariness.
In this respect, they are consonant with the larger interrogation of the formal
demands of the literary text which is a distinctive trait of Coetzee’s oeuvre as
well as of the discrete ‘lesson’ within whose parameters ‘Kafka’ is now held in
suspension.

But what of J. M. Coetzee – the other proper name which impinges on our

string of citations given the ‘axiomatic consensus’ that Derrida, in the essay on
Kafka, terms authorship (1987 [1982]: 130)? How might we readers position
the generically anomalous sequence of texts consumed as Elizabeth Costello
with respect to the body of writing by Coetzee that has preceded it? More spe-
cifi cally what relations does it entertain with those texts which proclaim their –
and their author’s – South African descent? Literary critical historiography
shows that for many of us, to have read Coetzee in the wake of David Attwell’s
rigorous elucidation of the pre-1994 corpus as ‘situational metafi ction’, has
meant partially to endorse Coetzee’s own claims regarding the relative auton-
omy of ‘the novel’. This is no longer beholden, as Coetzee once notoriously put
it, to ‘conclusions that are checkable by history (as a child’s school-work is

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

checked by a schoolmistress)’ (Attwell 1993: 20; Coetzee 1988: 3). At the same
time, some critics, Attwell included, have insisted that Coetzee’s studied self-
refl exivity vis-à-vis what might be called the ‘representational literalism’ of apart-
heid-era South African literature was neither intransitive nor self-contained, a
move which has allowed Coetzee’s imbrication in the political matrix of the
apartheid state to be addressed (Attwell 1993; also Susan VanZanten Gallagher
1991).

Unlike In the Heart of the Country (1978 [1977]), Waiting for the Barbarians

(1982 [1980]), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), or Age of Iron (1991 [1990])
however, whose South African historicity is part of the history of their recep-
tion, and unlike the recognizably post-apartheid text Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth
Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) seems to resist the impulse that might turn its
very obliqueness back into the folds of the post-1994 State. The novel, if such
it is, rejects all but a contingent South African emplacement for its writer-
protagonist, so that mimesis alone surely cannot suffi ce in this regard. Instead,
Coetzee’s privileging of the transcultural moment and, moreover, of the height-
ened metafi ctional dimensions of the work, particularly in its eighth lesson,
seems to ratify a universalism that dispenses with the longing marks of a geneal-
ogy – Coetzee’s, but equally my own – which might reveal us to be the expatriate
subjects of the former apartheid state. What does John Coetzee’s boyhood matter
to Elizabeth Costello, the female Australian writer protagonist who seems
to reiterate her author-progenitor’s consistent refusal of forms of writing
narrowed down to the certain consolations of what she terms: ‘the question of
historical guilt’ (ibid.: 203)?

But is this ostensible veering away from South Africa, borne through

Elizabeth Costello’s peripatetic status in the world at large and displaced, more-
over, in ‘Lesson 8’ beyond the cosmopolitanism even of this world, to be trusted?
Drawing on Judith Butler’s claims in her essay ‘Restaging the Universal’, I would
like to interrogate this turn as an instance of what Butler calls ‘spectral univer-
sality’ (2000: 23). The latter term arises in the course of Butler’s efforts to con-
vey how the allegedly universal staging of a problematic can be made, despite
itself, to divulge its specifi c provenance. Butler’s claim concerning the ‘contam-
ination’ of the universal by the ‘particular contexts from which it emerges and
in which it travels’ (39, 40), proceeds with reference to a reading of Hegel
which allows her to lay bare the mechanism of contamination: ‘The universal
can be the universal only to the extent that it remains untainted by what is
particular, concrete and individual. Thus it requires the constant and meaning-
less vanishing of the individual . . . . Without that vanishing immediacy, we
might say, universality itself would vanish’ (40). It is to the vanishing mediation
of South Africa in the generation of the metafi ctional text before us that I now
orient myself.

If, according to Butler, an overdetermined spectrality inheres in the very

gesture that seeks to ground the legitimizing authority of the universal, how
might ‘South Africa’ be understood as its haunt? Might this spectrality perhaps

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

reveal itself between the lines or as a catch in the voice, so to speak? The catch
in the voice of yet another moribund Elizabeth perhaps, Elizabeth Curren this
time, as she revisits the displacement her daughter voices: ‘I was born in Africa,
in South Africa’ (Coetzee 1990)?

Is it possible to read Coetzee’s expatriate

formalism in Elizabeth Costello, its laboured metafi ctionality, as somehow ‘con-
taminated’ by the traces of a repudiated content? Where does this content resist
its repudiation, over and above the spectrality of the bodies, veiled or perhaps
in plain view, in the Marianhill clinic of Elizabeth Costello’s sister Blanche
(Coetzee 2003: 134)? There is something deeply unsettling about Elizabeth’s
description of the children dying of HIV/AIDS at Marianhill, but does it consist
in her reckoning with a morbidity that is seen, or in her phantasmatic evocation
of an unseen residue? ‘As for the children, perhaps Blanche has tucked the
worst cases away out of sight, but she is surprised at how gay even a dying child
can be. It is as Blanche said in her book: with love and care and the right drugs,
these innocents can be brought to the very gate of death without fear’ (Coetzee
2003: 134, my emphasis L. B.). I need not belabour the reference to ‘the very
gate of death’, but I do want to voice, at least, the question of the relation
between those South Africans subjects who do not disclose visible evidence of
their suffering and the ones that do – tucked somehow away out of Elizabeth
Costello’s or Elizabeth Costello’s direct sight but lingering nevertheless in collec-
tive memory by virtue of the fl agrantly corporeal displays enacted before the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

To raise such questions, in dis-

regard for something like the manifest textual content of Coetzee’s work, is to
presume to read Elizabeth Costello against its transcultural and universalizing
aspirations. It is to grapple with my own stealthy insistence that this is (also) a
post-apartheid text without acceding, albeit through inversion, to a trivializing
essentialism mirrored in Rian Malan’s open speculation in October 2003: ‘Now
that Coetzee has left us, is his Nobel really a triumph for the Rainbow Nation,
as our newspapers claim?’ (Malan 2003).

Defl ection then, not defection

For all that it defensively forecloses the possibility of ‘post-apartheid South
Africa’ being taken as its referent, let me risk the proposition that Elizabeth
Costello contains a persistent interrogation of the relations between representa-
tion and material embodiment. This draws the text back, despite itself, I will
eventually claim, into the semiotic matrix of post-apartheid South African liter-
ary culture. I will substantiate this view through taking up the penultimate text
of the work again.

For readers concerned with the theoretical reach of testimony, Elizabeth

Costello’s positioning, in ‘Lesson 8’, at the threshold between life and death
illuminates a différance (Derrida 1982 [1968]) internal to the ‘confession’ she is

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

constrained to make (2003: 212), particularly if we view her predicament as a
narratological displacement – a form of rendering literal, a rending into plot –
of the question that Coetzee addresses elsewhere: Can secular confession,
devoid of a ‘confessor empowered to absolve’, ever lead, in Coetzee’s phrase,
‘to that end of the chapter whose attainment is the goal of confession’ (1992
[1985]: 253, emphasis in original)? Instead of the end of a chapter, however, we
have before us a chapter that ends the supposed or reconstructed biographical
sequence by prolonging it.

But what is prolonged in this ‘afterlife’ (2003: 209)

is precisely not testimony whose conditions of possibility become increasingly
tenuous – it is the body. The ineluctable corporeality with which the entry begins
– ‘It is a hot afternoon. The square is packed with visitors. Few spare a glance for
the white-haired woman who, suitcase in hand, descends from the bus. She
wears a blue cotton frock; her neck, in the sun, is burned red and beaded with
sweat’ (Coetzee 2003: 193) – persists, long after the diegesis has suspended the
facticity of a world reduced to the coordinates of a spectacularly failed and
insistently clichéd ‘simulation’. ‘It is the same with the Kafka business. . . .
Kafka, but only the superfi cies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and fl attened to a
parody’ (209).

The body abides; Elizabeth Costello resides within it. The lesson insists on
this.

For the moment, all she hears is the slow thud of the blood in her ears, just
as all she feels is the soft touch of the sun on her skin. That at least she does
not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every
step of the way, this gentle lumbering monster that has been given to her to
look after, this shadow turned to fl esh that stands on two feet like a bear and
laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body,
this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far
beyond her powers would it be, she somehow is this body; and all around her
on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their
bodies too. (210, emphasis in original)

The material body appears irreducible despite its discursive fabrication; in
excess of its discursive fabrication: ‘That at least she does not have to invent’.
Moreover, the character Elizabeth’s refl ection makes the fabricated discourse
appear to partake of an irreducible reality in a manner that can be specifi ed
with respect to extra-textual co-ordinates. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler
points out that it is possible to read invocations of the ‘materiality’ of the body,
Costello’s present appeal included, as a form of nostalgia for what Butler terms
a grounding and constitutive extra-discursive principle of ‘necessity’. This
necessity is frequently formulated as the claim that ‘bodies live and die; eat and
sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence’, and that these ‘“facts”

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

. . . cannot be dismissed as mere construction’. ‘Surely’, says Butler, temporarily
inhabiting an argument she will eventually reject, ‘there must be some kind of
necessity that accompanies these primary and irrefutable experiences’ (1993: xi).

I will return to Butler’s counter-argument, phrased in terms of the vertigi-

nous chiastic relationship between language and the body, below. For now, let
me note that the understanding that body exists, distinct from the language
which signifi es it, is partly produced in ‘At the Gate’ through deliberate textual
recursion. This results less in vertigo than in the consolidation of the material-
ity of the living body in yet another text which is, and is not, Elizabeth’s.

There is an episode in the Odyssey that always sends a shiver down her back.

Odysseus has descended into the kingdom of the dead to consult the seer
Tiresias. Following instructions, he digs a furrow, cuts the throat of his favou-
rite ram, lets its blood fl ow into the furrows. As the blood pours, the pallid
dead crowd around, slavering for a taste, until to hold them off Odysseus has
to draw his sword. . . . She believes most unquestionably in the ram, the ram
dragged by its master down to this terrible place. The ram is not just an idea,
the ram is alive though right now it is dying. If she believes in the ram, then
does she believe in its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black,
pumped out in gouts on to soil where nothing will grow? The favourite ram
of the king of Ithaca, so runs the story, yet treated in the end as a mere bag of
blood, to be cut open and poured from. She could do the same, here and
now, turn herself into a bag, cut her veins and let herself pour on to the pave-
ment, into the gutter. For that, fi nally, is all it means to be alive: to be able to
die. Is this vision the sum of her faith: the vision of the ram and what happens
to the ram? Will it be a good enough story for them, her hungry judges?
(2003: 211)

Costello’s invocation of the ram, an identifi cation with it that amounts to a
radically literal reading of its being (see Attridge 2004b: 39–40), mimes for us
the metonymic transfer that we perform, as readers, when we lend our own
corporeality to the text to animate the fi ction of hers. Our imbrication in the
reading process is not merely coincidental to my argument, nor is the consoli-
dation of the material body the only process that might be observed here (‘The
ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive’ 2003: 211). Following Derek Attridge’s
rich work on ‘literature in the event’, which is closely allied to the notion of a
literal reading (39), I suggest that we understand this passage to contour an
‘event in reading’ whose unfolding, Attridge claims, delineates the very course
of the ethical in literature (2004a: 654). The staging of this event is crucially
bound up with the irruption-into-text of the material body.

What does it mean for Attridge to put forth a theory of ‘literature in the

event’ (the subtitle of his volume on Coetzee) that couples literariness with the

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

ethical? In The Singularity of Literature, Attridge argues that the literary work is
‘an act, an event of reading, never entirely separable from the act-event (or acts-
events) of writing that brought it into being as a potentially readable text, never
entirely insulated from the contingencies of the history into which it is pro-
jected and within which it is read’ (2004c: 59). It brings about the ‘singular
putting into play of – while also testing and transforming – the set of codes and
conventions that make up the institution of literature and the wider cultural
formation of which it is part’ (106). Form, Attridge argues, is crucial to the ‘stag-
ing of meaning’ that is the literary work (109, emphasis in original), and is inte-
gral to the work’s capacity to exceed the mere endorsement of referentiality
(119). Moreover, it is precisely with respect to the formal performativity of the
work that the ethical dimension of the act of reading arises:

The distinctive ethical demand made by the literary work is not to be identi-
fi ed with its characters or its plot, with the human intercourse and judgments
it portrays . . . . Rather, it is to be found in what makes it literature: its staging
of the fundamental processes whereby language works upon us and upon the
world. The literary work demands a reading that does justice to the formal
elaboration of these processes, a reading in the sense of a performance, a
putting-into-action or putting-into-play that involves both active engagement
and a letting-go, a hospitable embrace of the other. (130)

In a slightly different formulation, Attridge stresses that ‘The distinctiveness
of the ethical in literature, and in artworks more generally, is that it occurs as
an event in the process of reading, not a theme to be registered, a thesis to be
grasped, or an imperative to be followed or ignored’ (2004a: 654).

These are important claims. They are the very precondition, in fact, for the

unfolding of my own argument. But let me qualify that the alterity to which my
reading of ‘Lesson 8’ is beholden is perhaps more situated, and in a sense more
preoccupied with the conditions of its own historical over-determination, than
Attridge’s preference for a non-instrumentalist, that is to say arrivant, ethicity
might care to accommodate.

Shifting Attridge’s emphasis slightly, I would like

to rehearse my own preoccupation with that which is derived over and above
that which, or who, arrives. That which is derived: namely, the partly occluded
historicity (whether inter- or extra-textual) of the phenomenon we stenograph-
ically re(pro)duce as ‘apartheid’. In full deference to what Coetzee has Costello
term the ‘madness of reading’ (Coetzee 2003: 174), I would like to query – or
is it to re-inscribe – the parameters of Attridge’s construction of literature-
in-the-event by re-reading the second paragraph I have quoted for residual
evidence of a deferred historicity whose formal trace is evident as citation. But
not only as citation. My understanding that such historicity is both staged and
can be accessed here stems from my contention that at this point in the text
Elizabeth’s non-mimetic after-life, her ‘sur-vie’ if you like, crosses a defi nitively

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

realist recuperation/survival/survie of the material body. This, I want to sug-
gest, is a distinctively post-apartheid modality.

In order now to stage this argu-

ment with reference to its post-apartheid derivation, allow me fi rst to make
some general comments about the indebtedness of realist signifi cation to
embodied materiality.

We have already seen Judith Butler enunciate the apparent chain of causality

which, for its adherents, couples the material body to realist models of signifi ca-
tion through a mobilization of the ‘necessity’ that attends ‘irrefutable’ bodily
experiences (1993: xi). Thus, in one version of such arguments, the felt pres-
ence of my body, named now as ‘my body’, allows me to experience an illusory
plenitude of the sign; the coincidence in me of signifi er and signifi ed. The non-
linguistic ontology of the body is made, paradoxically, to facilitate its linguistic
domination through a certain reassuring self-refl exivity. This dynamic under-
lies the metonymic extension, augmented by projection and identifi cation,
which binds the reader to Elizabeth to Homer’s ram. Contrary to such claims
however, it is crucial, says Butler, to counter the trope of necessity in its various
forms. While conceding that there is an ‘outside’ to discourse, Butler neverthe-
less calls upon us to exercise caution in apprehending it – it cannot be known
except through the devices of a linguistic performativity. ‘Although the body
depends on language to be known’, she writes in a subsequent essay, ‘the body
also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of capture. It would be tempting to
conclude that this means that the body exists outside of language, that it has an
ontology separable from any linguistic one, and that we might be able to
describe this separable ontology. But this is where I would hesitate, perhaps
permanently, for as we begin that description of what is outside of language
[. . .] we have already contaminated, though not contained, the very body we
seek to establish in its ontological purity. The body escapes its linguistic grasp,
but so too does it escape the subsequent effort to determine ontologically that
very escape’ (2001: 257). Instead of conceptualizing the beyond of discourse as
pure exteriority, that is to say as ‘an absolute “outside”, an ontological thereness
that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse’ (1993: 8), Butler would
have us cast the problem in far more relational terms. What is at stake is not the
(im)possibility of literal reference, so much as the ceaseless vertigo of the chias-
mus, as the later formulation has it. ‘The very description of the extralinguistic
body’, she notes, ‘allegorizes the problem of the chiasmic relation between
language and body and so fails to supply the distinction it seeks to articulate’
(2001: 257). Butler will thus consistently stress the indissoluble trace of signifi -
cation that adheres to the body even though the body seems, under certain
philosophical constructions – or in certain institutional contexts, the torture
chamber for instance (see Elaine Scarry 1985) – to efface discourse in favour of
sheer materiality. For these and other reasons, she advances the axiom that
‘there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a formation
of that body’ (1993: 10).

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

It is pivotal to my argument to recognize that this generalized nostalgia

for the irrefutability of the body, viewed as the particular symptom of a more
overarching desire for mimetic adequation, is a feature precisely of the dis-
course of South Africa’s TRC. Recall Richard Wilson’s claim that the TRC
recruits the ‘victim’ to the service of a non-ethnic South African nationalism,
and interpellates her as the measure of a reconstituted (because newly constitu-
tional) form of citizenship (2001: 13–17, see also 2–3). This codifi cation is a
resolutely corporeal one, as Wilson and others have claimed. The materiality of
the South African body, the space of embodiment it occupies in its ongoing
mutilation, or once occupied under the disciplinary apparatus of the apartheid
state (prison-cell, torture chamber, mass grave), constituted a central preoccu-
pation of the TRC. Embodiment, whether thematized in testimony or evident,
in evidence, as material residue on display before the Commission, was central
to what Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz have analysed as the ocular
politics and the realist epistemology of the Commission. The two are intimately
related. At the visual core of the TRC hearings, the authors claim, were ‘descrip-
tions, representations and confl icts around bodies in various states of mutila-
tion, dismemberment, and internment within the terror of the past’ (1996: 9).
Through the ‘visuality of the body presented in discrete and individualised
cases’, they add, ‘the past of apartheid becomes measurable, transparent, docu-
mentary and fi nite allowing for the fi nal fatality of apartheid and a rebirth
at the threshold of a new nation out of “exquisite cruelty” [in Archbishop
Desmond Tutu’s phrase]’ (12, see also Rassool et al. 2000: 126).

Basing myself partly on Minkley, Rassool and Witz’s prescient TRC critique,

I advance the argument that the exhumed corpse’s visuality – and in a more
condensed form, that of the mutilated body on display before the TRC – draws
the legitimating authority of the index (Peirce: 1992) and the grounding agency
of the material body, into visible convergence on the surface of that body – a
surface that is more or less complete, more or less replete. The Commission’s
epistemology, premised on the very possibility of mimetic adequation that
Butler opposes, makes the real seem to inhere in material embodiment under
a scopic regime which matches past suffering to the ‘empirical edifi ce of the
body’ (Rassool et al. 2000: 126). Whereas the TRC’s turn to the body seems to
promise immediacy of reference, and the facticity of a resolutely material
(because corporeal) historical narrative, it delivers instead a mnemonics
whose recall of the body calls upon embodiment to provide the antecedent
condition for the referentiality of history.

The abject or wounded or even par-

tially decomposed body of the victim of human rights abuses upon which the
Commission focused its gaze becomes a kind of archive, since the history of
apartheid is inscribed in the materiality of this body. Thus, the scar for example,
the most conventional of our schemas for understanding the inscription of vio-
lence on the body, is implicitly held to be the amanuensis of violence in the epis-
temology of the TRC. It foregrounds the realist modality of the written as the

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

‘pure encounter of an object and its expression’ (Roland Barthes 1995 [1986]:
141), where writan, as Joss March reminds us, once meant ‘to score, incise,
carve, engrave with a sharp instrument’ (1998: 261). Moreover, the scar is cast
as the truthful amanuensis of violence, since the truth of its writing is validated
by the substance of the body, an understanding which curiously replays the
logic of that other tale by Kafka that haunts Coetzee’s text, ‘In the Penal
Colony’ (1983 [1919]).

Like the mnemonic apparatus of the TRC, ‘At the Gate’ stages an appeal to

the semiotic agency of the material body grounded in the speculative but none-
theless spectacular, irruption of blood. This irruption bequeaths to Elizabeth
Costello a haunted intimation of veracity, a vision approaching ‘the sum of her
faith’ (2003: 211). Thus, in the second of the passages that I have cited, the
appeal to the material body produces the effect of a suffusion of truth. But the
mise en abyme of the act of reading (one of whose purposes I have already
claimed, is to model the belief that we as readers invest in the body’s effusion of
truth), does not proceed without confl ict. What we are given is the truth in –
rather than of – the text. For Elizabeth has, quite simply, no veins to cut. Her
embodiment is an afterimage of the written: it does not subtend referentiality
in quite the same way as the body of the victim who testifi es before the TRC.
Instead we apprehend Coetzee producing ‘bodies’ through recourse to the
performative dimensions of a textuality that the passage in question purports to
deny: ‘The ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though right now it is dying’
(2003: 211). Materiality of the letter, then, to recontextualize Paul de Man’s
phrase (de Man 1986: 89) – not materiality of the body avant la lettre. The give
and take of an elaborately self-refl exive discourse appears to insist on this.

But does not this very insistence provide a possible critique of the corporeal

economy of the TRC? It does so precisely in that it reinstates the referential chi-
asmus through understated reliance on the overwriting that secretly inhabits
the besitz/besetzung (possession/cathexis) of ‘pure body’ even – or better still,
especially – in the service of a post-apartheid nationalism. After all, the material
body, Coetzee is well aware, does not simply underwrite an excess of truth with-
out also coupling the body to its historicity, to its contingent narrativizations.
I take this understanding to inform his well-known admonition ‘[I]in South
Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the
body. It is not possible . . . for political reasons, for reasons of power’ (1992: 248).
Provided, of course, that we allow the emphasis to fall on ‘in South Africa’ – in
South Africa under the state of emergency evoked in Age of Iron, a text which
like Coetzee’s pronouncement on the body, arises from ‘A country prodigal of
blood’ (Coetzee 1991 (1990): 57).

My recourse to Age of Iron is quite deliberate. It makes Elizabeth Costello’s

meditation on Homer’s ram the site of palimpsest, of a textual haunting that
emerges between the lines the moment Elizabeth Curren’s description of the
black boy victimized by the police is brought back into play: ‘Blood fl owed in a

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

sheet into the boy’s eyes and made his hair glisten; it dripped on to the pave-
ment; it was everywhere. I did not know blood could be so dark, so thick, so
heavy’ (ibid.). But does not this very trail suggest that Coetzee’s avowal/dis-
avowal of the textually unmediated body in ‘At the Gate’ fails the very lesson
that I have attempted to adduce. It is precisely in the face of the victim that the
metafi ctional seizure (capture, convulsion) of corporeality assumes the force of
historical repression. In the very staging of its metafi ctional constructedness, its
willed detachment from all referential historicity except the history of its inter-
textual generation, the textual body that Elizabeth Costello offers us is the
agent of a properly historical repression – while itself constituting, I would
suggest, the phantasmatic trace, beholden to a certain Nachträglichkeit of that
which is repressed.

It is possible to view the relation I have sketched between Elizabeth Curren

and Elizabeth Costello’s afterlife as a form of metalepsis, a disruptive attribu-
tion of present effect to a remote cause (Lanham 1991: 99), which is yet another
way of recasting the ‘delayed effect’ that is Nachträglichkeit. The illicit joining of
Curren and Costello reveals the literal belatedness of ‘At the Gate’ to be an
instance of what Cathy Caruth might term an ‘impossible’ historicity. The blood
spoor I have traced is the product of a specifi cally South African historicity
whose intelligibility as traumatic symptom properly exceeds inscription within
a single place or time (Caruth 1995: 5, see ibid.: 5–9 and 1997), but does not,
I would caution, hereby come to stand outside history. The doubling that
undoes the abstraction of Coetzee’s expatriate metafi ction rehearses a form of
errance (Paul de Man 1986: 91) whose very displacements produce its ethicity.
The failure of the metafi ction to extradite itself enacts perhaps one of its more
perverse successes. For might not this interdiction of extradition – this speaking
across a prohibition (cf. Derrida 1998 [1996]: 31–34) – be more promising,
after all, than the abstraction of a truth distilled as the stillness of the soma, living
body and corpse both (Agamben 1998: 66); more telling than the persistence
even now, that is to say, still, of the body’s remains?

Unless we are prepared to countenance the loss of the body to the lösung/

(di)solution of nationalism (and I include a precious and precarious post-
apartheid constitutionality here, too), let us recall that the textual body is never
truer than when it is beside itself. The delayed and relayed corpses/corpora of
‘Lesson 8: At the Gate’ challenge us to reinterrogate precisely the pre-eminence
of synecdoche and allegory in our critical refl ections on those processes
whereby, as well as those mnemonic and/or scopic regimes wherein, the dis-
crete human body is nationalized as public or state property.

And it is here,

perhaps, that the enigmatic presence of Costello’s Dulgannon frogs (Coetzee
2003: 216–21) might be recuperated against the judge-in-chief’s ‘allegorical’
misreading of her ‘belief’ in them (220). In obstructing the relay or transfer/
transference–of the allegory which they nevertheless allow us to entertain, they
recall us to the awareness that the relationship which obtains between the living

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

matter of the organism and its discursive reclamation, like the relationship
between the body and the body politic, is sometimes chaotic, somewhat chias-
tic; always the site where ‘belief’ – a certain ideological confi guration – is actively
elicited.

But now my recourse to the restless still of the body’s remains must give up

its own ghosts, bound to the time and place of my writing, Mt. Scopus, East
Jerusalem, Israel. No spectral universality can be allowed to attach to the gene-
sis of my text if it is to remain true to the leapfrog of displaced historicity it has
traced. This is not all that is at stake, however. In studied but ineluctably com-
plicit defi ance of the discourses of Jewish nationalist entitlement by reason of
bodily suffering which continue to justify the Occupation, let me emphasize—
as a matter of political interest but not, I hope, instrumentalism – that the body,
pace Elizabeth, does not speak itself except through massive, and potentially
contested or contestatory, historical mediation. If there is an urgency to my rhet-
oric here, and I believe there is, it is because I too inhabit a country ‘prodigal of
blood’. And there are bodies – Palestinian bodies, Israeli bodies – on the line.

Notes

This article had its genesis in a presentation at ‘Contemporary Perspectives on
J. M. Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South African Literature: An International
Conference,’ held at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham,
United Kingdom, 29-30th April 2005. It was fi rst published in a special edition of
the Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap entitled ‘New
Research on J. M. Coetzee’, guest edited by Marianne de Jong. My thanks to
Andries Oliphant for permission to reprint it in the present volume. Thanks to
Carola Hilfrich and Catherine Rottenberg for drawing my attention to Derrida’s
‘Devant la Loi’, and Butler’s ‘Restaging the Universal’, respectively.

With respect precisely to literariness, let me emphasize that my casting of citation
as a kind of productive diversion that summons us into the presence of the liter-
ary is irreducible to something like an ‘anxiety of infl uence’ in Harold Bloom’s
sense (1973), a notion which Coetzee’s narrator in the Nobel Lecture He and His
Man also repudiates: ‘For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of sto-
ries in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then
they must sit forever in silence’ (2004 [2003]: 16).

On ‘representational literalism’ see Damian Grant (1985 [1970]: 14–15).
For a consideration of the realist orientation of apartheid-era literature, see Beth-
lehem 2001.

For an extended comparison of Elizabeth Costello and Elizabeth Curren, see
Dorothy Kuykendal’s ‘I Follow the Pen: The (Dis)Location of Two Elizabeth C’s’
(2005). Derek Attridge cautions us regarding a potential ambiguity that ‘plays
around the name of the letter-writer in Age of Iron. She is unnamed at fi rst, but we
eventually learn that her married name is “Curren” and that her initials are “E.C.”
However, both Coetzee himself, in the interviews in Doubling the Point (250, 340),

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

and some critics – presumably following the author’s extra-textual comments –
refer to her as “Elizabeth Curren”’ (2004b: 94–5). I will be revisiting the
intersection of the two Elizabeths below.

A fuller discussion of HIV/AIDS as providing an interpretive context for Elizabeth
Costello remains largely beyond the scope of this paper, but see footnote 7.

Attridge’s discussion of the problem of terminating a confessional sequence refers
repeatedly to the TRC, but addresses a different set of questions than those I will
be unfolding (2004b: 138–161). The ongoing chronological deformation of the
biographical sequence of the character called ‘Elizabeth Costello’ is apparent in
‘As a Woman Grows Older’, New York Review of Books, 15 January 2004, 11–14, as
well as in Coetzee’s 2005 novel, Slow Man.

For Attridge’s vigilance regarding the potentially instrumentalist appropriation
of the literary by history or by the political, among other things, see his exhorta-
tion as regards ‘the unpredictability of reading, its openness to the future’ (2004c:
129–30). For an exposition of Derrida’s notion of the arrivant with respect to
Coetzee, see Attridge 2004b: 119–37.

The word ‘survie’ enables me to acknowledge a debt that has been prolonged
since the issue of prolongation was fi rst raised in this paper. I am profoundly
aware of the genesis of this article in response to Adam Sitze’s radicalization of
the Althusserian notion of ‘survie’ in his indispensable analysis of the relations
between testimony and sovereignty in the TRC (Louis Althusser 1997 [1969];
Sitze 2003: 66–77). For Althusser, as Sitze reminds us, the paradigmatic instant of
survie relates to the residual persistence of Tsarism in post-revolutionary Russia.
In South Africa, survie takes a different form. Noting the continuity between the
apartheid and post-apartheid regimes, Sitze argues that ‘the debt payments that
accompanied the arrival of the popular sovereignty of the post-apartheid state
became so large that, by the late 1990s, they all but ruled out the possibility of
providing medical treatment for poor people living with HIV/AIDS. The same
funds that could have been invested in the immune systems of the population liv-
ing under the jurisdiction of the New South African state were instead spent
paying off the acquisition of the jurisdiction itself. Biopolitical catastrophe is here
the price of political sovereignty’ (2003: 71). The epistemic and tropological pre-
conditions for this, Sitze suggests, are derived from the TRC’s valorization of
suffering. ‘[The Commission’s] emphasis on the survival of suffering established
the possibility for suffering’s survival: its specifi cally pastoral powers renewed the
capture of naked life by the jurisdiction of sovereign power’ (ibid.: 36–7, and see
the discussion in ibid.: 47–77). This chiasmus, which Sitze considers with specifi c
reference to the Mbeki regime’s notorious denialism concerning the transmission
of HIV/AIDS and its effects on state policy between 1998 and 2003, generates an
‘uncanny repetition’ of, for instance, the high infant mortality rates in the apart-
heid Bantustans (ibid.: 75, and see particularly Sitze 2004: 780–90).

I have treated the connection between the Peircean index and ‘the scar-as-sign’
in my reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, where I explore the consequences, for
a gendered reading of the novel, of the collusion between scar and index: their
seeming to constitute an exception to the arbitrary nature of the sign (Bethle-
hem 2003). I undertake a fuller articulation of the body politics of the TRC in the

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text

concluding chapter of my book, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its After-
math (Unisa and Brill, 2006).

For a brief summary of the meaning and development of the term in Freud, see
P. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis 1973: 111–14.

See Shai Ginsburg’s essay on the national allegory in pre-State Israel, ‘Genre,
Territory, Theory: Yosef Haim Brenner and the Erets-Israeli Genre’, paper pre-
sented in Hebrew at the Department of Comparative Literature and Poetics, Tel
Aviv University, 23 May 2005.

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Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Chapter 3

Coetzee and Gordimer

Karina Magdalena Szczurek

Nothing I say here will be as true as my fi ction.

Nadine Gordimer

Some time ago Eliza Coetzee, a distant cousin of the famous author, J. M. Coetzee, was
invited to London to speak about one of her relative’s books, Elizabeth Costello. A writer
herself, but only marginally known outside South Africa, she gladly accepted, seeing the
conference as a possibility to add some clarifi cation to the confusion and unease accumu-
lated around her cousin’s book. When it was her turn to speak, she removed her reading
glasses from an etui, adjusted them on her nose and began boldly:

Reviewing Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) John Maxwell Coetzee

wrote about two aspects of writing which most of us authors would recognize
only too well:

the stories we write sometimes begin to write themselves, after which their
truth or falsehood is out of our hands and declarations of authorial intent
carry no weight. Furthermore, once a book is launched into the world it
becomes the property of its readers, who, given half a chance, will twist its
meaning in accord with their own preconceptions and desires. (2004b: 4)

I am standing here before you not only as an author but primarily as a reader.
I am taking my chance. These are my preconceptions and desires, but my inten-
tion today is not to twist, but rather to untwist some meanings.

In all the excitement surrounding its publication, none of the reviewers and

critics writing about Elizabeth Costello – Eight Lessons (2003) seems to have noticed
one of the most obvious features of the fi ctional heroine of this remarkable
book, namely the striking similarities between her and the real-life South
African author Nadine Gordimer.

I want to argue that both, Gordimer and

John, not only have been aware of each other for a long time as fellow writers,

Coetzee and Gordimer

but John has involved them both in a fascinating one-sided literary polemic, as
I would like to call it. Today, I want to expose the parallels between the two
women, Elizabeth Costello and Nadine Gordimer, and talk about Elizabeth
Costello as a fi ctional vehicle for conveying John’s ideas. I will outline the impli-
cations of this construct, concentrating on the main topics of the book and
attempting to grasp John’s elusiveness as an author in the process.

Apart from John, Nadine Gordimer is probably the South Africa-born author

best-known outside the country. Their writing has been repeatedly compared in
reviews, interviews, essays and critical studies. Both have also commented on
each other’s works. To my knowledge, Gordimer has done so mostly in inter-
views, but she has also reviewed Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K in 1984
(‘The Idea of Gardening’) and was asked to write the Preface to Huggan and
Watson’s Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee (1996). John has written more exten-
sively on Gordimer, discussing her work at length in a few publications (Coetzee
1980, 1992, 2001, 2003a).

John’s deeper involvement with Gordimer’s writing – the one-sided polemic –

began, as I see it, in the late 1990s, when he was no longer only commenting
on her work as a literary critic but directly reacting to it in his own fi ction. The
two most prominent instances that I would like to focus on today are the char-
acterization of Elizabeth Costello in the book of the same title, and John’s by
now famous, or, as some would argue, infamous novel Disgrace (1999a).

Elizabeth Costello came to life as a fi ctional character during the Ben Belitt

Lecture which John delivered at Bennington College in 1996. She became
quite a sensation when he allowed her to reappear in his Tanner Lectures
at Princeton University in the following two years. John was invited to speak in
the lecture series dedicated to the discussion of ethical and philosophical top-
ics. Nicholas Dawes recalled the occasion in his review of Elizabeth Costello: ‘he
read a story in two parts about an ageing Australian writer who delivers two
awkward, poorly received and strangely resonant lectures on animal rights’
(Dawes 2003: 21). In the following years, John delivered several more lectures
in this unusual format, always returning to this strange character who now
began to haunt the literary world (and perhaps John himself).

Elizabeth Costello is mostly composed of rewritten versions of these earlier

lectures, now presented as Lessons. From the beginning their heroine has
shared some obvious characteristics with Nadine Gordimer, but it was only in
the Lessons’ fi nal revised versions that her unmistakable resemblance was
conclusively revealed. I want to emphasize emphatically however that in spite of
all I am going to tell you, Elizabeth Costello is not Nadine Gordimer – I like
Nadine much too much to believe anything to the contrary.

John’s Elizabeth Costello (which is her maiden name) is an Australian author

who spent her childhood in the suburbs of a big city, Melbourne. Similarly,
Nadine Gordimer also kept her maiden name and grew up in the suburbs of a

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

big city, Johannesburg. Costello married twice, has two children, a son and
a daughter, one from each marriage, and her second husband died recently.
The same is true of Gordimer. Like Gordimer, Costello only has one sister (both
sisters’ names begin with a B). Both women seclude themselves in the mornings
to do their writing and both missed a good deal of their children’s childhoods
because of their work. They are also declared non-believers.

A small critical industry, as John calls it, developed around Elizabeth Costello;

the same is true of Gordimer. Both authors repeatedly take up the theme of fact
and fi ction in their writing and have been on the executive of PEN. Both write
about sex, passion, jealousy and envy with an insight that shakes you (cf. 5).
Costello received a very important literary prize because it was meant to go to
some author from her home country – a fact that she was not quite comfortable
with. Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in 1991, and there were some critics
who alleged it was only because she was the most prominent South African
anti-apartheid author at the time.

Both, Costello and Gordimer, emphasize that in the fi rst place they are writ-

ers, not thinkers, and in their writing they can feel their ‘way into other people,
into other existences’ (22). They are not particularly inclined to take up gender
as an issue in their fi ction; nevertheless, it surfaces indirectly and unmistakably.
Both women take control of the exchange with interviewers, presenting them
often with blocks of dialogue which seem rehearsed (even though I suppose all
writers do so after a while, since we are hardly ever confronted with original
questions).

Coming from postcolonial countries, Costello and Gordimer share an

ambivalent relationship to Europe’s literary canon: admiration and distance.
Gordimer has been strongly infl uenced by European authors but has always
considered herself a profoundly South African writer, deeply rooted in her
own country. However, along with many European authors, Gordimer, as well
as Costello, see in the traditional novel an attempt to understand human fate
in terms of the individual; they see the genre as a form of history. Stephen
Clingman referred to Gordimer’s fi ction as ‘history from the inside’ (cf. The
Novels of Nadine Gordimer – History From the Inside (1986)), and according to John,
Elizabeth Costello’s ‘books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell
out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place’ (Coetzee
2003b: 207). In 1988, Gordimer stated in an interview: ‘The function of the
writer is to make sense of life . . . to make something coherent out of it’ (Topping
Bazin and Dallman Seymour 1990: xiv, my emphasis). For Costello, the tradi-
tional novel is, as John writes:

an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how
it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having
undergone experiences B and C and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the
novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. (38–9, my emphasis)

Coetzee and Gordimer

What the two women certainly do not have in common is their appearance.
Gordimer is well-known to be much more elegant and sophisticated than
Costello is described as being (as photographs at least of Gordimer attest),
although Derek Attridge has brought to my attention that the actress chosen
to play Costello in the feature fi lm based on The Lives of Animals (1999b) resem-
bled Gordimer in terms of her looks. However, that is beside the point. More
important might be the fact that when Gordimer was once asked to draw a
caricature of herself, she drew a cat, signing it with: ‘With acknowledgements to
my son, Hugo’ (cf. Roberts 2005: 297).

At one point, Costello’s son also

compares his mother to a cat: ‘One of those large cats that pause as they eviscer-
ate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare’ (5).
No, not entirely fl attering.

What is even more pertinent is that it is most unlikely that all the striking

parallels between the two women are purely accidental. John is too conscious
and precise a writer for such coincidences simply to occur without a reason.
I am not a Gordimer scholar. In fact, I am not a scholar at all. My status in the
world does not rest on whether I am right or wrong in claiming that John is
responding to Gordimer in the fashion I have mentioned. But I would like to
think he is (cf. 19). What did he want to achieve by giving Elizabeth Costello
Nadine Gordimer’s characteristics? Or by giving Costello’s son his own fi rst
name? Is he referring to Gordimer’s reputation as the Grande Dame of South
African Letters, a kind of mother fi gure to next generations of authors? Is the
characterization a tongue-in-cheek extra for literary scholars? These questions
haunt me, but I have to leave them open for now.

Instead, I would like to turn to the earlier instance of John’s obvious direct

responses to Gordimer’s writing evident in his novel Disgrace (1999a), which Lars
Engle called ‘an uncanny revision’ (2001: n.p.) of Gordimer’s None to Accompany
Me (1994). She herself denied seeing any parallels between the two novels in
an interview she gave Karina Magdalena Szczurek in February 2004 (n.p.).
Yet, they are not hard to detect. Both novels deal with the question of land
politics and responsibility in South Africa in the post-apartheid era, and both
end with white women choosing to become black men’s tenants, a choice Engle
calls an ‘allegory of a possible trajectory of white South Africans, from inheri-
tors of empire to dependents on black enterprise’ (2001: n.p.). Each novel, as
he sees it, is a ‘meditation on ageing and developing beyond the sexual phase
of one’s life’ (ibid.) (as is Elizabeth Costello, by the way). The main characters,
Vera Stark and David Lurie, see in their children’s ‘lesbianism a possible reac-
tion to the parent’s heterosexuality’ (ibid.). Both novels question the ‘idea of
nuclear family centred on a passionate heterosexual relationship’ (ibid.), offer-
ing instead ‘multiracial, partly adoptive families based on elective affi nities [. . .]
or on mutual protection and opportunism’ (ibid.). Engle also mentions the
parallel between Zeph Rapulana and Petrus. The two men are ‘non-violent, at
times comforting, yet appropriative fi gures; both are people whose progress

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

from dispossession to possession can, guardedly, be celebrated as what the
New South Africa is supposed to be all about’ (ibid.) None to Accompany
Me and Disgrace cannot rest with the claim ‘that rape of white women on
farms by black men unknown to them is simply revenge’ (ibid.), and opt for a
historical-political dimension to explore instead the private form of atrocious
violence.

All in all, Engle argues that Disgrace ‘respond[s] with guarded pessimism to

the optimism of None to Accompany Me’ (ibid.). At the end of his essay he sum-
marizes his point as follows:

Without Coetzee’s own commentary, which we are unlikely to get this morn-
ing or, indeed, ever, it would be hard to be sure, and presumptuous to claim,
that he was thinking about Gordimer’s work when he wrote his own. [. . .]
Yet it is very tempting to approach some of the apparent bleak elements of
political prophecy in Disgrace [. . .] as partly as revisionary allusions to None to
Accompany Me. (ibid.)

It might be just as presumptuous of me to claim that John was thinking of
Gordimer when he called Costello into being, but the temptation to do so is
simply irresistible. Besides, Costello is so much more than merely a fi ctional
imitation of Gordimer. In his preface to ‘The Novel in Africa’, Randolph Starn
quotes John as admitting that ‘[t]here is [. . .] a true sense in which writing is
dialogic; a matter of awakening counter-voices in oneself and embarking on
speech with them’ (1998: vi).

My cousin likes speaking in riddles, using meta-

phors, allegories, symbols, and masks to get his ideas across, so one is tempted
to look beyond literal meanings that do not lend themselves to easy interpre-
tations. No wonder John has been repeatedly called one of the most elusive
writers of our time. His character Elizabeth Costello is a chameleon, taking on
‘fl eeting identities’ (43) which cannot really be pinned down. As I have sug-
gested, parts of her have been obviously modelled on Nadine Gordimer. Parts
might have been modelled on other authors – A. S. Byatt and some of her hero-
ines come immediately, if less obviously, to my mind; I even detect certain simi-
larities with myself, which I would prefer not to mention. I will let others
research those stories.

Of greater relevance is the suggestion that Elizabeth Costello is an alter

ego of her author. In an editorial letter, James Wood remarked that ‘Costello is
obviously not Coetzee, but it may be going too far to grant her the fullness of
fi ctional autonomy’ (Wood 2003a). In his review of Elizabeth Costello, he argues
that Costello was used by John as a persona speaking up for the author himself
(Wood 2003b). David Lodge reached a similar conclusion in his review of the
book and spoke about ‘the teasing similarities and differences between her and
her creator’ (Lodge 2003). He pointed out that both are ‘major world writer[s]’
around whom ‘a small critical industry’ (ibid.) has sprung up, and both have

Coetzee and Gordimer

received numerous prizes and awards. Costello ‘is by no means a comforting
writer’, he wrote; neither is her creator (‘Disgrace must be one of the least com-
forting novels ever written’ (ibid.)), and they both engage in intertextual games
in their fi ction (cf. ibid.). Like John, Elizabeth frequently travels around the
world to give lectures and to attend international conferences. The main differ-
ence between author and character, apart from gender, is that Elizabeth Costello
is twelve years older than John (cf. ibid.).

So, what does this imply? I suggest to read Elizabeth Costello as a fi ctional

vehicle, in which John, Gordimer – even myself – and potentially other authors
as well as a certain dose of fi ction are being fused into one character, whom
John uses for transmitting some ideas about fi ction and reality. One should also
bear in mind that ultimately Elizabeth Costello is a story, but even though most of
us enjoy a good story, some critics found fault with John’s narrative strategy.
Referring to The Lives of Animals, which came to form the central part of
Elizabeth Costello, Lodge remarked:

Not surprisingly most of the commentators felt somewhat stymied by
Coetzee’s meta-lectures, by the veils of fi ction behind which he had con-
cealed his own position from scrutiny. There was a feeling, shared by some
reviewers of the book, that he was putting forward an extreme, intolerant,
and accusatory argument without taking full intellectual responsibility for it.
(ibid.)

Why are the issues Costello raises problematic and make us feel so uncom-
fortable? The reason might be that we know how close to the truth each discus-
sion of them comes; and truth is hardly ever a comfortable commodity. Each
lesson cuts deep to the bone, removing us, the readers, from our comfortable
social and political safety niches or comfort zones in which we prefer to hide
from reality. No wonder we feel that somebody ought to take responsibility for
our feeling of insecurity.

Elizabeth Costello’s Eight Lessons concentrate on lectures and conversa-

tions about topics as diverse as animal rights and colonialism (inseparable in
Costello’s argument), about reason and compassion, the humanities, the Greeks
and the Christians, the gods and the humans, the responsibility of us writers to
think ourselves into anything (even bats), about intertextuality, ageing, belief,
the existence of evil, and ‘writers who venture into the darker territories of the
soul’ from which there is no returning ‘unscathed’ (160). Blurring the bounda-
ries of fact and fi ction, Elizabeth Costello raises ethical and aesthetic questions,
asking about what it means to be human. According to Lodge the book fi nds
‘a new urgency in the big, perennial questions’ (Lodge 2003), such as:

Why are we here? What should we do? What is it all about? It is a book which
begins like a cross between a campus novel and a Platonic dialogue, segues

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

into introspective memoir and fanciful musing, and ends with a Kafkaesque
bad dream of the afterlife. It is progressively permeated by the language of
religion, by a dread of evil, and by a desire for personal salvation. Its key
words are ‘belief’ and ‘soul’. (ibid.)

Breaking the chains of convention, Elizabeth Costello’s frame story is told ‘with
laconic metafi ctional interpolations by the implied author, drawing attention
to the conventions of realism that are employed, and occasionally fl outed, in
the narrative itself’ (ibid.). It is, in the words of another anonymous critic, a
‘meditation on the nature of storytelling that only a writer of Coetzee’s calibre
could accomplish’ (Anon. 2005). How can one fi nd fault with such innovation?
Especially when you consider that one of Elizabeth Costello’s central concerns is
an attack on the role of the writer as a paid performer – a seal-like entertainer.
Moreover, it comes as no surprise that the book addresses the issue of African
authors writing for European audiences and not their own, because storytelling
in Africa ‘provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers’ (41).
Costello argues:

African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they
seem to me to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the
foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted
the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers. Yet how can you
explore a world in all its depth if at the same time you are having to explain
it to outsiders? (51)

In his review of Elizabeth Costello, Lodge elaborates further and perceives a kind
of provocation in this particular discussion in the book:

This [. . .] explains why there are ‘so many African novelists around and yet
no African novel worth speaking of.’ It is the result of ‘having to perform
your Africanness at the same time as you write.’ This is a fairly provocative
assertion for a white South African writer to put into the mouth of his
white Australian heroine, and is made even more so by the fact that [. . .] the
work of several real African novelists, such as Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri,
[is discussed in the book] in some detail (Lodge 2003).

The assertion seems even more provocative and interesting in the light of
what I have said before, if one considers that John once wrote the following:
‘what people outside South Africa know about modern South Africa comes from
South African writers, Gordimer prominent among them’ (Coetzee 2001: 273).
Isn’t he himself also guilty of the same charge?

Coetzee and Gordimer

In the end, whatever topic the book Elizabeth Costello takes up, it leads you not

only into a minefi eld of polemics but also on a journey of discovery, as Lodge
reminds us:

One is quickly drawn into the debate, fascinated by the thrust and parry
of argument and counterargument, and compelled to re-examine one’s
own principles and assumptions – not only with reference to animal rights
and vegetarianism. For these issues involve the defi nition of what it is to be
human and where human beings stand in relation to the rest of creation,
questions which have engaged the attention of several disciplines in recent
years – ethology, sociobiology, anthropology, and cognitive science, as well as
philosophy (Lodge 2003).

Elizabeth Costello’s greatest achievement (for some its greatest fl aw) is that it
offers no easy answers, perhaps no answers at all. However, its main character
knows that ‘ambivalence should not disconcert her. She has made a living out
of ambivalence. Where would the art of fi ction be if there were no double
meanings? What would life itself be if there were only heads and tails and noth-
ing in between?’ (Coetzee 2004a). The book refuses to take a defi nitive stance
on any issue, letting the characters discuss different sides of each argument. It
is a never-ending debate that throws light on each topic it takes up, but never
gives privilege to a fi nal position. Starn eloquently sums up for us:

The calculus of exploration is what matters here in any case, not the answers,
or at least not the easy answers. Coetzee’s cruise ship will never come to port,
but I can fairly promise that readers of his story will be fascinated and
instructed by the voyage of an exacting and powerful literary intelligence.
(1998: vii)

Furthermore, it would be wrong to say that the book offers no guidance at
all. As John’s cousin I feel the need to defend Elizabeth Costello against such
charges. The book’s guiding lights are humanity, sympathy, and beauty as a
redeeming force. Nevertheless, one cannot help thinking that the question
posed by Costello’s son, ‘Why can’t she just come out and say what she wants
to say?’ (82), is justifi ed. We might ask ourselves the same question, but it would
mean misunderstanding the Lessons. We have to admit that, however crypti-
cally, the book raises some very important issues; and that at the end of the day
John’s elusiveness is not as elusive as it might seem. Many people seem to forget
that he is consequently the author of Elizabeth Costello, and that, apart from
some loosely adapted quotations, every single word in the book came from John’s
pen, or rather his keyboard.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

All of these considerations can be linked to the concept of grace, or rather

dis-grace in our context. The hyphen is important to indicate a kind of strip-
ping off.

When we think of grace we usually think of elegant behaviour, or

God’s kindness shown to believers, or the state of a soul freed from evil. John
chose ‘disgrace’ for the title of his 1999 novel. At the end of it David Lurie is
stripped of all such grace. So is Elizabeth Costello in ‘At the Gate’. She is too old
to bother with pleasantries and politeness, she is not seeking God’s grace nor a
soul freed from evil: she recognizes how futile that is. Elizabeth Costello,
stripped of all her grace is just a fi ctive character created by the real-life author,
J. M. Coetzee. There is nothing elusive about this fact.

In his review of Elizabeth Costello Dawes remembers John’s suggestion that as

long as the writer does not fi nd grace, there will also be no ending to their
story:

In his critical work on confessional literature Coetzee suggests that, for a
writer like Dostoevsky, only the intervention of grace can bring an end to the
process of confession, and an end to the story. But of salvation in his own
novels, with their absolutely masterful endings, he says only ‘no, regrettably
no: I am not a Christian, or not yet.’ As long as grace is delayed – and it may
be delayed forever – it seems he [Coetzee] will have to continue writing.
(Dawes 2003: 21)

John seems to be doing just that and keeps stimulating our intellects. Like
Elizabeth Costello with Kafka’s ape, ‘We don’t know and will never know, with
certainty, what is really going on in this story’ (19). So we continue probing; so
does John.

When Elizabeth Costello makes her fascinating grand entrance in chapter

thirteen of John’s Slow Man (2005), she does not resemble Nadine Gordimer in
any way anymore, but her presence is as daunting as ever. And once again the
‘Costello woman’ (ibid.) and the Coetzee man refuse to explain themselves,
but both in their own way have an intriguing story to tell. This latest evasion fas-
cinates and enlightens. Whether it is the last, one cannot know. In John’s next
novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Costello only makes a brief unobtrusive appear-
ance. After almost a decade of her presence in his life it is quite a relief to see
her hold on him loosening.

I will certainly continue reading. In a sense, today, I am just one of the gold-

fi sh critics whom Costello’s son John criticizes: ‘Flecks of gold circling the dying
whale, waiting their chance to dart in and take a quick mouthful’ (6). That is
exactly what I just did. But then again as a writer, I cannot resist a good story.

Tired by the performance, Eliza Coetzee looked up from her notes and said, Thank

you.

‘A strange ending. Only when she [. . .] folds away her papers does the applause start,

and even then it is scattered. A strange ending to a strange talk.’ (80) Eliza took off her

Coetzee and Gordimer

glasses and gently rubbed her right eye before looking up and giving her audience a tenta-
tive smile.

With a nod at the gentleman raising his right-hand fi nger in the fi rst row she indicated

her readiness to take the fi rst question.

Notes

In the following account I trace the ‘life and times’ of J. M. Coetzee’s probably
most enigmatic character, Elizabeth Costello. To examine her function as a per-
sona, an alter ego, a fi ctional character and author, I imitate Coetzee’s own
invention by introducing a fi ctional character named Eliza Coetzee, whom I use
here to debate the issue at hand on my behalf. In my chapter she is J. M. Coetzee’s
distant cousin of the preceding brief introduction. An author herself, living in
South Africa, she is invited to a conference in London to speak about her famous
relative and his character, Elizabeth Costello. Thus, I let Eliza Coetzee tell the story
of Elizabeth Costello. Page references in the text indicate Coetzee (2003b).

Since fi rst noticing this resemblance in 2003, I only encountered one other critic
referring to it in his work: Ronald Suresh Roberts in No Cold Kitchen (2005), his
biography of Nadine Gordimer.

For details of Elizabeth Costello’s trajectory from that fi rst lecture in 1996 to her
appearance in Elizabeth Costello – Eight Lessons in 2003 see D. Attridge (2004:
192–7).

As Roberts points out the caricature is well-known in the South African literary
scene.

This is of course an adaptation of Mihail Bahktin’s notion of the dialogic.

This idea was introduced to me by Edwin Hees.

Works Cited

Anonymous publisher comments (http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=27086&cgi=pro

duct&isbn=0670031305, accessed 15 January, 2005).

Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading – Literature in the

Event. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

Clingman, Stephen (1986), The Novels of Nadine Gordimer – History From the Inside.

Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Coetzee, J. M. (1980), ‘Review of Nadine Gordimer by Michael Wade’, Research in

African Literatures, 11, (2), 253–6.

—(1992), ‘Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture (1989)’, in Derek Attwell (ed.),

Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambridge, London: Harvard University
Press, pp. 382–8.

—(1999a), Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg.
—(1999b), The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
—(2001), ‘Gordimer and Turgenev’, in Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999., London:

Secker & Warburg, pp. 268–83.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

—(2003a), ‘Awakening’, The New York Review of Books, 50, (16). (http://www.nybooks.

com/articles/16670, accessed 15 January, 2005).

—(2003b), Elizabeth Costello – Eight Lessons. London: Secker & Warburg.
—(2004a), ‘As a woman grows older’, The New York Review of Books, 51, (1). (http://

www.nybooks.com/articles/16872, accessed 15 January, 2005).

—(2004b), ‘What Philip knew’, The New York Review of Books, 18 November 4–6.
—(2005), Slow Man. London: Secker & Warburg.
—(2007), Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker.
Dawes, Nicholas (2003), ‘Review of Elizabeth Costello’, The Sunday Times, 28 Septem-

ber 21.

Engle, Lars (2001), ‘Disgrace as an Uncanny Revision of Gordimer’s None to

Accompany Me’, Unpublished essay, n.p., Tulsa, OK: University of Tulsa.

Gordimer, Nadine (1984), ‘The idea of gardening’, The New York Review of Books, 31,

(1), 3–4.

—(1994), None to Accompany Me. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
—(1996), ‘Preface’, in Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (eds), Critical Perspec-

tives on J. M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan, pp. vii–xii.

Lodge, David (2003), ‘Disturbing the peace’, The New York Review of Books, 50, (18).

(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16791, accessed 15 January, 2005).

Robert, Ronald Suresh (2005), No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer.

Johannesburg: STE.

Starn, Randolph (1998), ‘Preface’, Occasional Papers, 17, Doreen B. Townsend Cen-

ter for the Humanities, v–vii. (http://repositories.cdlib.org/townsend/occpapers/17,
accessed 15 January, 2005).

Szczurek, Karina Magdalena (2004), ‘Vocal cords of the imagination’, unpublished

interview, 13 February 2004, Johannesburg.

Topping Bazin, Nancy and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds. (1990), Conversations

with Nadine Gordimer. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi.

Wood, James (2003a), ‘A frog’s life’, London Review of Books, 25, (20). (http://www.lrb.

co.uk/v25/n20/wood02_.html, accessed 15 January 2005).

—(2003b), ‘Letter’, London Review of Books, 25, (23). (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n23/

letters.html#5, accessed 15 January 2005).

Chapter 4

Wordsworth and the Recollection

of South Africa

Pieter Vermeulen

In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and cus-
toms: in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed; the Poet
binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society . . .

William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’

Against the background of the once-prevailing critical image of J. M. Coetzee as
an eminently unsociable writer of hypertheorized metafi ctions, the publication
of his autobiographical novel Boyhood in 1997 inevitably came as something of a
surprise. Less surprising is the way in which the critical reception of Coetzee’s
autobiographical work has tried to contain the impact of that surprise. The
programme of that containment, as it can be observed throughout different
critical essays, goes as follows: fi rst, it duly notes that ‘the notoriety of Coetzee’s
reputation as a fi ercely private person’ (Collingwood-Whittick 2001: 15) left us
unprepared for the 1997 publication of Boyhood (Attridge 2004: 140); then, it
reprogrammes this surprise in the assertion that we should have been expect-
ing it all along, if only we had not failed to register the autobiographical prom-
ise of ‘the invaluable frame of reference provided by Coetzee’s own theoretical
writing on the genre’ of autobiography (Collingwood-Whittick 2001: 14) in
Doubling the Point.

This 1992 collection of essays and interviews conducted with David Attwell

is then said to have announced, in two privileged moments, not only the possi-
bility of an autobiography, but also the fact that this autobiography would
take the particular form of a third-person, present-tense narration. First, there
is the ‘acute analysis of confession’ (Attridge 2004: 141) in the 1982–83 essay
‘Confession and Double Thoughts’, a text Coetzee himself saw in hindsight
‘emerging as pivotal’ (Coetzee and Attwell 1992: 391). This essay offers, in the
words of Derek Attridge, a demonstration of ‘the structural interminability of
confession in a secular context’ (2004: 142). That this theoretical impasse will

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

fi nd its formal solution in a third-person, present-tense narration is ascertained
by the second moment our interpretative programme invokes. In the ‘Retro-
spect’ at the end of Doubling the Point, Coetzee sketches ‘the fi rst half’ of his life,
the part up till his move from England to Texas in the 1960s (the terrain to be
re-covered by Boyhood and Youth), in, precisely, the third-person present tense.
This short narrative breaks off when Coetzee comments on ‘the formalistic,
linguistically motivated regimen’ he subscribed to during the writing of his dis-
sertation on Beckett. He parenthetically notes the reason for his decision to
arrest his autobiographical narrative at this precise moment:

The discipline within which he (and he now begins to feel closer to I: autrebi-
ography shades back into autobiography) had trained himself/myself to
think brought illuminations that I can’t imagine him or me reaching by any
other route. (Coetzee and Attwell 1992: 394)

Coetzee goes on to note that the confession-essay ‘marks the beginning of a
more broadly philosophical engagement with a situation in the world’. It is the
‘philosophical’ status of these two moments that explains their privileged role
in the prevailing interpretation of Coetzee’s autobiographical performance.
The philosophical message of Doubling the Point delivers both the meaning and
the form of an autobiographical project that is thus pre-interpreted as the
application of this philosophical meaning. ‘Coetzee’ then becomes the name of
an eminently closed programme that pre-forms our interpretation of it.

The problem with this construction, and the reason I want to propose a dif-

ferent reading of Coetzee’s autobiographies in this essay, is that the meaning of
Boyhood and Youth is then already prescribed – and readable as a philosophical,
non-fi ctional discourse – in 1992. If we bear in mind David Attwell’s statement
on Coetzee’s work that it rediscovers ‘fi ction’s capacity to reconfi gure the rules
of discourse’ (Coetzee and Attwell 1992: 11), the autobiographies’ smooth
reduction to this pre-established meaning in effect abolishes their status as fi c-
tions – as a form of writing capable of changing the rules imposed on it from
outside. Taking this reconfi gurative potential seriously, as I propose to do here,
implies then at least an acceptance of the fact that Doubling the Point’s relation
to the autobiographies is not that of a philosophical master-interpretation to its
application. This acceptance is facilitated when we note that Doubling the Point
itself already warns against the construction of such a relation. Attwell’s fi rst
question in the book’s opening interview, for instance, starts with ‘I would like
to begin at the beginning, by raising the question of autobiography’, an issue
Coetzee’s answer translates into ‘a question about telling the truth rather than
as a question about autobiography’, never resolving the question beyond the
assertion that ‘[t]ruth is something that comes in the process of writing, or
comes from the process of writing’ (18).

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

As this invites us to read the actual writing that allegedly supports the prevail-

ing understanding of Coetzee’s autobiographies, we can note that while this
line of interpretation unfailingly quotes Coetzee’s parenthetical remark on
the shading of autre - into autobiography, it does so without retaining the
parentheses and, therefore, the sentence surrounding it (see Lenta 2003: 160;
Collingwood-Whittick 2001: 21; Attridge 2004: 140). The sentence is: ‘The dis-
cipline in which he . . . had trained himself/myself to think brought illumi-
nations that I can’t imagine him or me reaching by any other route.’ The reason
this sentence is generally omitted is, I suggest, that it considerably qualifi es
the self-evidence of the general elevation of Coetzee’s ‘shading’ into a moment
of enlightenment when it is read carefully. It envisions the more testing alter-
native scenario of an ‘illumination’ reached by a ‘discipline’ and a ‘training’
that is a one-way route rendering its alternatives unimaginable. Given the fact
that Coetzee asserts, at another place in Doubling the Point, that in the face of
history, ‘the task [of fi ction] becomes imagining this unimaginable’ (68), it is
nothing less than the relation between history and fi ction that is brought into
play here. What is suggested is that the hermeneutical programme that I have
sketched in the reception of Coetzee’s autobiographies may in fact be a more
exacting ‘disciplining’ of the text and of the power of writing than this pro-
gramme is itself aware of. In the rest of this essay, I will show how this more
exacting aspect of hermeneutic harmonization is correlated in Coetzee’s work
with certain pedagogical and poetical positions, which all converge in the fi g-
ure of William Wordsworth. I will argue that Coetzee’s autobiographical work
situates his own writing practice in relation to these positions, and that they
ultimately formulate a specifi cally South African (i.e. non-English) response to
them that consists in an explicitly ‘prosaic’ (i.e. non-poetic) form of fi ction.

Coetzee’s work stages the violence of hermeneutical illumination in Disgrace,

the only novel to have appeared in between the two autobiographical instal-
ments. As ‘disgrace’ is a term that also fi gures prominently in Boyhood

(see B 8,

21, 65, 76, 112), Disgrace can also be read as the elaboration of this term, as also
a gloss on one crucial aspect of the autobiographies. David Lurie, the book’s
soon-to-be-disgraced protagonist, professor of literature and writer of a book
on Wordsworth, is teaching a class on Wordsworth’s failed encounter with Mont
Blanc in Book 6 of The Prelude. Lurie’s failure to move his class beyond ‘silence’
and ‘blank incomprehension’ in his discussion of a fi rst excerpt brings him to
invoke a second passage in order to get his message of the happy coexistence
of ‘imagination’ and ‘the onslaughts of reality’ across. Only, these two passages
do not happen to add up to a solution, as Lurie himself notes: ‘The [second]
passage is diffi cult; perhaps it even contradicts the Mont Blanc moment.’ Yet
his hermeneutical desire to harmonize these two moments—which, as readers
of Disgrace will appreciate, is never simply that—is strong enough to cover
up this embarrassment with a violent interpretative imposition: ‘Nevertheless,

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Wordsworth seems to be feeling his way toward a balance’ (D 23–4, italics mine).
This balance is what the book calls ‘the harmonies of The Prelude’ (D 13).

In this context of the question of interpretation, it is relevant that The Prelude

is, among other things, a particularly strong instance of a literary work that
double-times as the story of the genesis of its own poetical achievement, and
therefore as a pre-formation of its own interpretation. Indeed, its demise in
the rest of Disgrace should warn against a repetition of this confi guration in the
case of Coetzee’s autobiographies. The formal success of its narrative of the
‘growth of a poet’s mind’ (the poem’s subtitle) assures the applicability of its
lesson to the whole of Wordsworth’s poetical development which it traces (Pfau
1997: 303), and, for David Lurie, also to the reality of post-apartheid South
Africa. Later in the class on Wordsworth, David Lurie once more attempts to
bring home Wordsworth’s lesson of the harmony between the imagination
and ‘the onslaughts of reality’, in a last effort to overcome the ‘dogged silence’
(D 32) of the class:

Wordsworth is writing about the Alps . . . We don’t have Alps in this country,
but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which
we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Word-
sworthian moments we have all heard about. (D 23)

Lurie’s attempted translation does not lead to the desired illumination. South
Africa, a country in which, Coetzee once wrote, ‘light and shadow are static’
(Coetzee 1988: 43), apparently resists entrance into Wordsworth’s pedagogic
fantasy of a tranquilly recollectable education by nature’s teaching – which
Lurie, in the rest of Disgrace, will learn with a vengeance through a very differ-
ent re-education programme.

I will show in the rest of this essay that in order to valorize Boyhood and Youth

as both ‘fi ctions’ and ‘autobiographies’, Coetzee’s staging of Wordsworth in
Disgrace is crucial – and, even more pointedly, its evocation of Wordsworth as
the writer of a self-interpretative autobiographical English poem. Against the
books’ facile reduction to a ‘philosophical’ meaning that was established in a
very different South Africa (that from before the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, to name only one context whose relevance for the issue of auto-
biography cannot be dismissed), their reading as a counter-performance to
the Wordsworthian position they confi gure can make sense of this performance
as what Stathis Gourgouris has called a (myt)historical gesture. In his book on
‘Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era’, Gourgouris defi nes as ‘antimy-
thical’ ‘whatever element cultivates the allure of a transcendental signifi er’ (say,
The Prelude, or certain invocations of Doubling the Point). Gourgouris’s claim for
literature, then, comes close to Attwell’s understanding of the ‘reconfi guration
of the rules of discourse’ performed by Coetzee’s fi ctions. He proposes to con-
sider ‘the claim of literature’s intrinsic theoretical capacity to be a performative

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

matter, a matter of (re)framing the conditions of action and perception within
a shifting social-historical terrain, which renders one’s relation to the object of
knowledge a process (praxis) of restlessness and transformation’ (Gourgouris
2003: 11). Taking into account ‘literature’s intrinsic capacities to theorize the
conditions of the world from which it emerges’ and to performatively intervene
in them (p. xix), the autobiographies can appear as no longer merely the
belated applications of a ‘transcendental signifi er’ – which would repeat the
violence of David Lurie’s interpretative balancing acts. Rather they appear as
fi ctions that do not culminate in a philosophical statement, but that include
their status as a third-person present-tense narrative written in English prose in
South Africa (each of these terms will be shown to matter) as a last stage within
their reconfi gurative performance. Measuring the scope of the books’ recon-
fi gurative capacity as fi ctions will also allow me, in the rest of this essay, to address
their reconfi guration of even Coetzee’s non-fi ctional statements. As autobio-
graphical fi ctions, then, they also offer a clue to the way Coetzee envisions his
own prosaic writing practice in Boyhood and Youth – which is not to say that this
insight should cultivate the allure of an alternative transcendental signifi er that
can be applied to the rest of Coetzee’s oeuvre.

As I already suggested, Wordsworth enters Coetzee’s work as a problem of

translation. In the introduction to White Writing (1988), Coetzee describes the
problem with South African nature poetry as the resistance its landscape offers
to the imposition of meaning: ‘The poet scans the landscape with his herme-
neutic gaze, but it remains trackless, refuses to emerge into meaningfulness
as a landscape of signs’ (Coetzee 1988: 9). The rest of the book goes on to
identify the poet’s ‘imperial eye’ (174) as Wordsworth’s; Wordsworth is credited
with the insight into the shortcomings of the painterly principle of the pictur-
esque for ‘express[ing] the feeling of someone confronted with the grandeur
of the Alps’ (41n1), but his corrective theory of imaginative sublimity still, in
Coetzee’s words, ‘responds to the question of how landscape can be composed
as a signifi cant whole in the imagination in the absence of some aesthetic prin-
ciple . . . to give it unity’ (41; Becker-Leckrone 1998: 999). Because this is still a
response to a hermeneutical and therefore distinctly European question, how-
ever, Wordsworth’s answer is of only regional relevance. Coetzee writes how ‘in
European art the sublime is far more often associated with the vertical than the
horizontal’, and this sublime thus fi nds no application on ‘the South African
plateau’. As he puts it: ‘Wordsworth called sublimity “the result of Nature’s fi rst
great dealings with the superfi cies of the earth” . . . not considering that plains,
as well as mountains and oceans, resulted from these dealings’ (52).

In Disgrace, David Lurie achieves the bridging of this geographical gap by

a relation of mastership, in which he himself appears as the ‘disciple’ of his
‘master’, Wordsworth – and after Coetzee’s 1994 detour through Dostoevsky’s
Petersburg (in The Master of Petersburg), we are entirely prepared for the demise
of this model (for Wordsworth, see Reid 2004). This is not the place to offer a

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

complete reading of Disgrace, but a shorthand for the book’s development may
run as follows. Lurie’s disgrace develops as the increasing impossibility to
remain blind to the fact that it is not so much the ‘disciple’ that is disappearing
as the complement of the ‘master’ in post-apartheid South Africa, but rather
the ‘servant’ or the ‘slave’. In other words, while the real problems besetting
Lurie can be described as an effect of the disappearing distinction between
master and slave (his daughter’s neighbour Petrus becomes ‘his own master’;
D 114–17), Lurie attempts to solve them by a restoration of the relation between
master and disciple (as when ‘guiding’ Lucy after her rape; D 156, 161). What
primarily feeds this blindness is the fi gure of Wordsworth: talking to Melanie,
Lurie says that ‘Wordsworth has been one of my masters’, and the book adds:
‘It is true. For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude
have echoed within him’ (D 13).

I have already pointed to the violence of this harmonization in the Alps

passage. Disgrace offers a second scene of the disgrace of this masterly instruc-
tion when Lurie, after the exposure of his dealings with Melanie, is referred to
as ‘the disgraced disciple’ of Wordsworth with a reference to The Prelude’s ‘Blest
Babe’ passage. This passage from the second book offers The Prelude’s most
explicit exposition of Wordsworth’s pedagogical programme: its subject is the
blessed babe, ‘[n]ursed in his Mother’s arms,’ and thereby ‘[a]n inmate of this
active universe’ (ll 235, 255):

Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the fi lial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world. (ll 243–5)

This graduation from mother into ‘the world’ has, in this passage, an explicit
poetological correlate: The infant’s ‘mute dialogues with [his] Mother’s heart’
are, because they fi gure as the origin of Wordsworth’s poetical development in
The Prelude, retroactively qualifi ed as ‘the fi rst / Poetic spirit of our human life’,
that remain ‘[t]hrough every change of growth and of decay, / pre-eminent till
death’ (ll 269, 261–6). With this assured possession of the poetical spirit, Word-
sworth’s poetical education is then the mere ‘display’ of the unchanged means
‘[w]hereby this infant sensibility’ was ‘[a]ugmented and sustained’ (ll 270–3).
Because it is the development of an intrinsically meaningful project, this pro-
gramme can henceforth transfi gure the negativity of experience, ‘the onslaughts
of reality’ (D 24), into a stage in the growth of the childhood mind into that of
which the mother has always already made it the father.

It is this blissful educational fantasy that enters the life of John in Boyhood in

the shape of his childhood companion, the Children’s Encyclopaedia:

Childhood, says the Children’s Encyclopaedia, is a time of innocent joy, to be
spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

absorbed in a storybook. It is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him.
Nothing he experiences in Worcester, at home or at school, leads him to think
that childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring.
(B 14)

By the time the boy realizes the incompatibility of Wordsworthian innocence
and South African experience, the fi rst two chapters of the book have already
unhinged the applicability of Wordsworth’s pedagogy. The fi rst problem is the
mother, as the ‘mute dialogues’ are replaced by her ‘dogged silence’ (B 3): ‘He
shares nothing with his mother’ (B 5). The education into a poetry expressive
of the ‘fi lial bond’ with nature, which Coetzee in White Writing identifi es as
the search for ‘a natural or Adamic language . . . a language in which there is
no split between signifi er and signifi ed, and things are their names’ (Coetzee
1988: 9), is already frustrated in the book’s fi rst lines. ‘They live on a housing
estate outside the town of Worcester, between the railway line and the National
Road. The streets of the estate have tree-names but no trees yet’ (B 1). Not only
are things not their names, these names even fail to refer to what they name.
The Wordsworthian preconditions of tranquil recollectability are therefore
rigorously unfulfi lled. Whereas the boy’s father and his father’s brothers do
reminisce about their schooldays with ‘nostalgia and pleasurable fear’ (9), their
recollected education does not resemble that of the infant babe in the bosom
of nature. What they recall is their schoolmasters’ regime of caning (B 9), a
violence which I already showed to be the dark truth of a (Wordsworthian and
hermeneutical) scenario of progressive illumination. It is because these occur-
rences of the mother, of experience, of language, and of recollection do not
add up to the meaningful whole of a Wordsworthian education that the boy’s
childhood weighs on him like ‘a burden of imposture’ (B 13). The boy’s initial
situation is marked by his exposure to the experience of the incompatibility of,
on the one hand, the Wordsworthian educational fi ction (see Reid 2004: 163)
imposed on him and, on the other, the much bleaker programme of a disciplin-
ing by reality, which he refuses in the name of precisely the Wordsworthian
imposition: ‘The very idea of being beaten makes him squirm with shame’
(B 8). Yet the alternative, Wordsworthian road is, in the South African context,
equally shameful: ‘He has never been beaten and is deeply ashamed of it. He
cannot talk about canes in the easy, knowing way of these men’ (B 9).

It is important to insist that Coetzee’s books do not simply dismiss the ele-

ments of Wordsworth’s educational programme: the relevance of Wordsworth’s
terms is precisely that the books actively and performatively (‘(myt)historically’)
reconfi gure them. For instance, the boy’s failure is emphatically qualifi ed as a
failure to add up these terms into a harmonized, meaningful whole: in the boy’s
idiosyncratic preference for the Russians over the Americans, the book notes,
‘He knew everything there was to know about Russia: its land in square miles,
its coal and steel output in tons, the length of each of its great rivers, the Volga,

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

the Dnieper, the Yenisei, the Ob’ (B 27). This prosaic enumeration, however,
does not add up to poetic harmony, that is, to a well-rounded identity. This fail-
ure is repeated, near the end of Boyhood, in the boy’s relation to England:

There is the English language, which he commands with ease. There is
England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is
loyal. But more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as
truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass. (B 129)

This passage still betrays a crypto-Wordsworthian conception of ‘experience’
as the appropriate road to the ‘proper’, ‘the real’, which the book qualifi es as
‘the English’ (B 29, 52–3). The question on which Boyhood ends still under-
stands the proper way to integrate these experiences into an identity to be the
work of recollection – yet this adoption of another Wordsworthian term begins
to register an important difference. The boy’s family has just participated in the
funeral of the boy’s aunt, who had devoted her whole life to the translation, the
printing, and the binding of a book written by her father. The title of this book,
translated, is ‘Through a Dangerous Malady to Eternal Healing’ (B 117). The recu-
peration of the onslaughts of reality that this title suggests seals the book’s fate
in South Africa: it remains unread. Yet, importantly, the unsold copies remain;
also, the funeral of the boy’s aunt has not resulted in a successful burial: the
coffi n is not yet ‘lowered into the grave’ when it starts raining, and the company
leaves the graveyard (B 164). It is this double insistence of the remains that disturbs
the tranquillity of the resurgence of the memorial imperative, and turns it
into something altogether more melancholic than what the Wordsworthian
programme envisioned:

. . . no one has given a thought to the books . . . that no one will ever read;
and now Aunt Annie is lying in the rain waiting for someone to fi nd the time
to bury her. He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in
his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not
remember them, who will? (B 166)

One way to situate the answer of the autobiographies to this self-addressed
question is by tracing their reconfi guration of Wordsworth’s key concepts of
experience and recollection (the terms in which this question is still formu-
lated), from the initial ‘dogged silence’ in Boyhood to Youth. As the crucial role
of dogs in Disgrace may already suggest, a not merely fanciful way of doing this
is following precisely the ‘dogs’ associated with this silence. They fi rst recur in
the young boy’s attempt at recounting ‘his own fi rst memory’: this memory tells
of ‘a small spotted dog’ that is hit by a car – ‘its wheels go right over the dog’s
middle’. The truth of this fi ction, however, is immediately qualifi ed when the
book adds that ‘[t]here is another fi rst memory’ (B 30). The unrecuperable

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

status of a primal scene again targets the cornerstone of the Wordsworthian
edifi ce of recollection, the mother: ‘His very fi rst memory, earlier than the dog
. . . is of her white breasts. He suspects he must have hurt them when he was a
baby, beaten them with his fi sts, otherwise she would not now deny them to him
so pointedly, she who denies him nothing else’ (B 35). It is the awareness of the
contingency of this cornerstone – a ‘rock’ is the term used (B 35, 116) – that
interrupts the mute dialogue of love. ‘The thought of a lifetime bowed under a
debt of love baffl es and infuriates him to the point where he will not kiss her,
refuses to be touched by her. When she turns away in silent hurt, he deliberately
hardens his heart against her, refusing to give in’ (B 47). So much for the infant
babe.

Only two pages after the destruction of this fi ction, ‘His mother decides that

she wants a dog’ (B 49). The boy claims his share in this acquisition: ‘He insists
on being the one to name it.’ This dog, however, resists playing to the rules of
this imposition: the dog is ‘not yet full grown when he eats the ground glass
someone has put out for him’. The boy helps to bury the dog. ‘Over the grave
he erects a cross with the name “Cossack” painted on it. He does not want them
to have another dog, not if this is how they must die’ (B 50).

This then leaves us with the following development: Boyhood moves from a

‘dogged’ silence over the freely fi ctionalized creation of a dog to the insistence
on the remains of the real, irreplaceable dog. This ternary structure can serve
as a shorthand for the development of the young Coetzee’s sense of memorial
vocation, while it can also explain the shifting geographical and temporal terms
in which Boyhood and Youth cast the notion of experience. The places in the
books are indeed crucially articulated with a distinct temporality. Whereas
the South Africa of Boyhood is the incapacitating site of imitation, miming and
aping (Y 90), which corresponds to the fi rst stage of uncreative, dogged silence,
London, where John moves in Youth, is lived under the imperative of a ‘readi-
ness’ to be ‘transformed’ (Y 93). The young poet is ‘ready for anything, in fact,
so long as he will be consumed by it and remade’ into ‘his new, true, passionate
self’ (Y 111). Experience, that is, is reduced to the occasion for the recognition
of ‘the self-generating, self-built powers of his mind’ that also structures the
development of The Prelude (Becker-Leckrone 1998: 1011), which corresponds
to the second stage – that of an unbound poetical imagination.

The onslaughts of reality, however – and this is a third geographical and

temporal position, and one which was not yet available in the binary construc-
tion of the autobiographical sketch in Doubling the Point – doggedly insist (for
Coetzee’s ‘logic of threes’ see Barney 2004). And because the second position
is associated with a Wordsworthian conception of experience and imagination,
it is in this third position that Coetzee’s reconfi guration of Wordsworth will be
found. The onslaughts of reality had already insisted earlier in Boyhood, of
course, most obviously in two encounters with ‘Coloureds’, and most explicitly
in a scene where John and two friends trespass on the property of an Afrikaans

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

farmer. Their punishment is announced as ‘a cane, a strap; they are going to be
taught a lesson’. The instruction comes, eventually, in the shape of the farmer
and his dog; musing on his disgrace, the boy realizes that ‘[t]here is nothing
they can say to redeem the experience’ (Y 71). When Youth writes that ‘London
is proving to be a great chastener’, the only instruction the outcome of this
chastening still allows is learning your lesson ‘like a beaten dog’ (Y 113). Where
the paradigm for the young Coetzee’s exaltation of experience is that of the
‘transfi guring fi re of art’, the ‘fi ery furnace’ of poetry (Y 3, 11, 25, 30), ‘the
work of transmuting experience into art’ (Y 44, 95), London has, by the end of
Youth, most radically chastened this harmonizing recuperation of experience:

Experience. That is the word he would like to fall back on to justify himself
to himself. The artist must taste all experience, from the noblest to the
most degraded. . . . It was in the name of experience that he underwent
London . . . (Y 164)

It is at this moment near the end of Youth that the book refuses the two most
familiar models for the inclusion of experience in an artistic autobiography.
It is not a straightforward Kunstlerroman, in which the artist is ‘enriched and
strengthened’ (Y 66) by his experiences in order to write the work we are
reading, and in which the success of this achievement retroactively valorizes
these experiences. It also is not a confession that congratulates itself on its con-
version into an understanding of the vanity of these experiences. There is noth-
ing to be said ‘for its having nothing to be said for it’ (Y 164). It is this radical
chastening that prevents the impasse that Coetzee in ‘Confession and Double
Thoughts’ has called ‘a potentially infi nite regression of self-recognition and
self-abasement in which the self-satisfi ed candor of each level of confession of
impure motive becomes a new source of shame and each twinge of shame a
new source of self-congratulation’ (Coetzee and Attwell 1992: 282). This double
dismissal of the models of experience-as-enrichment and of the confessed
insight into the vanity of experience – both of which can ultimately be referred
to the model of The Prelude – means that Coetzee’s books, by the very fact that
they still appear as autobiographies, occupy a third autobiographical position
different from both. They remain as works of prose. I will attempt now to show
how this third confi guration of recollection and experience is the autobiogra-
phies’ distinctive reconfi guration of the Wordsworthian model, and how this
reconfi guration is presented as a distinctively South African one.

This third position is fi gured, by the autobiographies themselves, as that

which outlives, in the books geological imaginary (Coetzee 1988: 167), poetry’s
cleansing and transfi guring fi re, that is, as earth and water. Early in Youth, the
operation of water is fi gured very much like that of fi re: ‘From the waters of
misery one emerges on the far bank purifi ed, strong, ready to take up again the
challenges of a life of art’ (Y 65). The growing awareness that ‘South Africa is a

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

wound within him’ (Y 116), however, will recall the would-be-poet in London to
a scene in Boyhood: while visiting the farm of his father’s family, the boy encoun-
ters ‘a canvas water-bottle’ from which he drinks, yet ‘[h]e pours no more than
a mouthful at a time. He is proud of how little he drinks. It will stand him in
good stead, he hopes, if he is ever lost in the veld’ (B 83). There seems to be a
connection, then, between the specifi city of South Africa and the scarcity of
water, and this scarcity – and the concomitant abundance of earth – fi gures the
position of Coetzee’s autobiographical prose itself. This prose seems to respond
to a particularly South African situation, an insight that only dawns on the poet
while he is in London. The farm is also the one place where the young boy has
a sense of belonging to something that is ‘greater than any of them’ (B 96).
This belonging is explicitly also said to be a rootedness in ‘the stories’ of the
farm (B 22): the farm is covered ‘by a soft white web of gossip spun over past
and present’ (B 85). Near the end of Youth, this childhood experience comes to
insist at the moment when he refuses to abandon the writing of his thesis on
Ford Maddox Ford: ‘Yet he does not want to abandon it. Giving up undertak-
ings is his father’s way. He is not going to be like his father. So he commences
the task of reducing his hundreds pages of notes in tiny handwriting to a web
of connected prose’ (Y 136, italics mine).

As the scene with the water-bottle already suggested, this call to prose coin-

cides with the discovery, while reading ‘memoirs of visitors to the Cape’, that
‘South Africa is different’ from England, and different in the way the abun-
dance of England’s ‘sounding cataracts’ (B 105, the only line from Wordsworth
quoted in the book) is different from South Africa’s economical water-bottle.
Whereas England is ‘by now wrapped in centuries of words’, in the case of
South Africa, ‘[w]ere it not for this handful of books, he could not be sure he
had not dreamed up the Karoo yesterday’ (Y 137). It is this opposition between
English imaginative abundance and the scarcity of South African stories that
generates the writer’s prosaic responsibility. The writing of a ‘web of connected
prose’, that is, appears as a distinctly South African (that is, distinctly non-
English) necessity, which cannot take the form of Wordsworthian poetical
harmonies. Unlike poetic recollective harmonizing, prose, the young poet dis-
covers, ‘seems naggingly to demand a specifi c setting’ (B 62), and this setting
is, for John, emphatically South Africa. It is South Africa’s nagging need for a
storied web of description, for a connection to particulars that are not spirited
away into harmonious universals, that obligates what I want to call Coetzee’s
prosaics of enumeration – an account of particulars which need no longer be
harmonized into a meaningful poetic whole; the realization that ‘[o]ne day
the farm will be wholly gone, wholly lost’ suffi ces already to ‘griev[e] at that
loss’ (B 80). It is only through prosaic enumeration, and not through the impo-
sition of the Wordsworthian sublime, that the particulars of South Africa are
allowed to remain and to go on insisting and are not given up to poetical har-
monization. It is in this sense that, as Derek Attridge writes: ‘[t]he truth that

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Boyhood offers, then, is fi rst and foremost that of testimony’; as a ‘documentary
work’ (Attridge 2004: 155).

To return to David Attwell’s appraisal of Coetzee’s ‘fi ction’s capacity to recon-

fi gure the rules of discourse’, as I have tried to show this reconfi guration is ‘at
once an embrace and a reconfi guration’ (Wenzel 2000: 108) of what it responds
to as its insistent given. This can be the unburied corpse of aunt Annie, the
Karoo, the mewling foetus in Youth, and, as the latter is the fruit of a confl ict
that is also Coetzee’s, also Coetzee’s own prose. I want to suggest that by paying
attention to the books’ performance of reconfi guration, we no longer require
a philosophical statement to make this work meaningful, as the work assures its
own signifi cance through its reconfi gurative ‘(myt)historical’ performance.

Importantly, one of the insistent remains that the books’ performance can

be said to reconfi gure is Wordsworth’s poetry itself. The relation between
Wordsworth and Coetzee must then not be reduced to an opposition between
the ‘colonial’ and the ‘postcolonial’, or between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. Rather,
Coetzee reconfi gures Wordsworth’s poetry into a form of prose that is more
adequate to the South African situation to which it responds. His autobio-
graphies stand as testimonies to literature’s persistent capacity to re-structure
the rules of discourse.

Notes

Page references to Disgrace, Boyhood, and Youth are cited in the text preceded by the
abbreviations D, B and Y, respectively.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Literature in the Event.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barney, Richard (2004), ‘Between Swift and Kafka: Animals and the politics of

Coetzee’s elusive fi ction’. World Literature Today, 78, (1), 17–23.

Becker-Leckrone, Megan (1998), ‘‘Sole author I, sole cause’: Wordsworth and the

poetics of importance’, MLN, 113, (5), 993–1021.

Coetzee, J. M. (1988), White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa.

New Haven: Yale University Press.

—(1998), Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Vintage.
—(1999), Disgrace. London: Vintage.
—(2002), Youth. New York: Viking.
Coetzee, J. M. & David Attwell (1992), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews.

Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press.

Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila (2001), ‘Autobiography as Autrebiography: The fi c-

tionalisation of the self in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life’,
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 24, (1), 13–23.

Wordsworth and the Recollection of South Africa

Gourgouris, Stathis (2003), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythi-

cal Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lenta, Margaret (2003), ‘Autrebiography: J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth’, English

in Africa, 30, (1), 157–69.

Pfau, Thomas (1997), Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Roman-

tic Cultural Production. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Reid, Ian (2004), Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies. Aldershot:

Ashgate.

Wenzel, Jennifer (2000), ‘The pastoral promise and the political imperative: The

Plaasroman tradition in an era of land reform’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46,(1),
91–113.

Wordsworth, William (1985), The Fourteen-Book Prelude. Ed. W. J. B. Owen. The

Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Chapter 5

Border Crossings: Self and Text

Sue Kossew

She [Elizabeth Costello] is of the opinion that until I have crossed a certain threshold
I am caught in limbo, unable to grow . . . (Slow Man: 112).

It has become increasingly important, as we talk of a ‘borderless’ world created
by globalization – referred to by Nadine Gordimer as a ‘frontierless land’
(Gordimer 1999: 207–13) – and by the reach of the internet, to refl ect on the
nature of borders and boundaries, both real and metaphorical. Paradoxically,
national borders and national identities seem as important as ever in the world
of real politik even while academic studies draw attention to the constructedness
of such notions. However, the metaphorical force of the border has always
haunted works of literature, especially by means of the margins of engagement
and exchange set up in the interaction between text and reader.

Spatial theory, postcolonial theory and poststructuralism have all provided

useful theoretical frameworks for considering the nature of the border, and for
developing what is becoming known as ‘border poetics’. Such a border poetics
involves the study of ‘how territorial borders are given form through narrative
and symbolic (fi gural) presentations’ (Schimanski and Wolfe 2004: 2). The
emphasis is on both a poetics of space and on the material as well as metaphori-
cal implications of borders. Inevitably, by challenging or breaking down the
‘containment and categorization’ inherent in established borders, an element
of transgressing limits and limitations emerges (Henderson 1994: 2), thereby
trespassing across such boundaries.

The ‘spatial turn’ (as Edward Soja has termed it) in literary and cultural

studies together with an increasing focus on the nature and effects of globaliza-
tion have drawn attention to the complex patterns of cultural formation and
reformation that accompany processes of travelling, migration, diaspora and
global communications. Homi Bhabha suggests that this global movement has
directly impacted on the way we conceive of nationhood and nationality. The
‘very concepts of homogenous national cultures . . . are in a profound process

Border Crossings: Self and Text

of redefi nition’ (Bhabha 1994: 5), and consequently can no longer rely on the
unifying myths and discourses of nation. In relation to national cultures, for
example, he uses the term ‘third space’ as a way of suggesting the ‘productive
capacities’ (Bhabha 1994: 38) of cultural hybridity, challenging the notion of
any given national identity. The implication of this approach to cultural identity
is to stress the ‘transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imag-
ined communities’ (Bhabha 1994: 5), or, otherwise put, the continually emerg-
ing hybridity of all forms of culture. As nations and national cultures respond
to new infl uences, old histories are displaced and new discourses of nation
emerge in acts of what Bhabha calls ‘cultural translation’. As he explains, this
hybridity is itself a third space that ‘enables other positions to emerge’. He con-
tinues: ‘The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different,
something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and
representation’ (Bhabha 1999: 211). Nationhood and nationality are con-
structed both discursively and performatively, then, and Bhabha focuses on the
links between ‘nationness’ (Bhabha 1994: 2) and identity to suggest that our
century’s end (the fi n de siecle) has produced a sense of transition, a borderland.
Here ‘space and time cross to produce complex fi gures of difference and iden-
tity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’ (Bhabha
1994: 2).

Other postcolonial theorists have drawn attention to the ‘material and ideo-

logical force of the trope of the boundary’ (Ashcroft 2001: 175) – particularly
in the form of the colonial boundary, of course – demonstrating how its
regu lation of space ‘is a metonymy for the regulatory practices of Western
epistemology itself’ (Ashcroft 2001: 164). Ashcroft proposes the alternative of
the ‘horizon’ or ‘horizonality’ to the colonial border, ‘for whereas the bound-
ary is about construction, history, the regulation of imperial space, the horizon
is about extension, possibility, fulfi lment, the imagining of postcolonial place’
(Ashcroft 2001: 183). A poststructuralist approach such as Derrida’s has sug-
gested that writing itself is always at the ‘running border’ or on the edge of
‘what used to be called a text’ and that this instability is a productive one that
infi nitely defers signifi cation and subverts the dividing lines between ‘a fi ction
and a reality’, thereby ‘overrun[ning] all the limits assigned to it’ (Derrida
1991: 257). This focus on the issue of borders, border-crossings and running
borders seems to me a productive way to discuss the complex representational,
textual and socio-political aspects of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man – the fi rst of
his novels to be given an Australian setting since the writer’s migration to
Adelaide.

J. M. Coetzee’s work has always engaged with the problematics of borders and

thresholds, and not only by means of the meta-textual relationship between
text and reader referred to by Derrida, but also by Coetzee’s constant allusions
to his own authorship and to the nature of authorship itself. It particularly
engages with these problematics through his exploration of how borders relate

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

to binaries; binaries of here and there, self and other, body and soul, human
and animal, life and afterlife, inside and outside. Where binaries and boundar-
ies mark out difference and separate one entity from another with the certainty
of conviction, the process of unsettling these certainties draws attention to the
constructedness of these divisions. It creates ambivalence, a ‘neither yes nor
no’, a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’, that is characteristic of all of
Coetzee’s works.

I want to argue that Coetzee’s literary use and subversion of the border as a

trope draws on both these approaches. That is, it engages with the productive
instability of the imagined borders of text and reader, and also subverts and
questions the discourses of certainty that set up material and imperial borders.
I focus in what follows on a reading of border crossings and thresholds in
Slow Man, but, to contextualize this, would like to provide a very brief overview
of two of Coetzee’s earlier novels, Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians, for
their more clearly postcolonial use of border tropes.

There are a number of important ways in which Coetzee’s Dusklands explores

ideas of borders and crossings. The fi rst and perhaps most obvious one (and
one that links it with the structure of Slow Man) is the border in the text itself,
which led some critics to describe it as two novellas when it was fi rst published –
that is, the division of the text into two distinct sections, ‘The Vietnam Project’
set in the United States during the Vietnam War and dated 1972–73 and ‘The
Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, set in colonial South Africa and dated 1760.
These two narratives are offered without overt connection, as novellas, yet the
parallels are strong, so that, despite the wide variations in time and space, there
is a constant dialectic between them in terms of subject matter, moral issues and
motifs, through cross-reference and common terminology. The reader has con-
stantly to move across the borders between the two sections, seeking parallels
and links. The reading process itself is a kind of journeying across borders.
This is of particular signifi cance, of course, in the text as both protagonists are
types of colonizers, establishing ownership and control over foreign territories.

One of the most important borders Coetzee explores in Dusklands is the tenu-

ous border set up between history and fi ction. History is shown to be authored
and ideological, not the objective account it pretends to be. Language itself is
shown to form an important part of this self-justifying process. Dawn’s ‘mytho-
graphy’ and Jacobus’s accounts of his incursions into the ‘heart of darkness’ use
convenient myths to justify and legitimate not just to recount. Paul Carter refers
to such imperial history as ‘a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions’ (Carter
1987: xv). The Magistrate’s account of his time at the border post (a signifi cant
term) in Waiting for the Barbarians is similarly also shown to be self-justifi catory,
an excuse as much as a memoir.

What the journeys across borders from self to other in both these texts

expose, however, is the very collapse of such binaries as the colonizer comes

Border Crossings: Self and Text

face to face with his own savagery. The enemy (if there is such a category) is
shown to be within the fortress, not outside it. As Constantine Cavafy’s poem
‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ suggests, the construction of borders between
self and other and the invention of barbarians was itself ‘a kind of solution’ to
the malaise of Empire.

On another level, the metatextuality of Dusklands, evoked by its incorpora-

tion of the author’s surname within the text and by the additional material
(Afterword and Appendix) that disrupt the authority of the preceding account,
disturbs the neat borders set up between reader and text, between Derrida’s
categories of ‘a reality’ and ‘a fi ction’. Crucially, the reader is made constantly
aware of both texts as scenes of writing, of texts being written by authors, one of
whom is J. M. Coetzee. Indeed, all of Coetzee’s novels contain this ‘laying bare’
or exposure of the creative process, drawing attention to their own textuality.

All of these borderline tendencies can be seen too in Coetzee’s latest novel,

Slow Man. His adoption of Australian citizenship has prompted some critics
to look for signs of this change of place from South Africa to Australia in the
texts and subject matter of his most recent books, a search that Coetzee’s previ-
ous post-South Africa text, Elizabeth Costello, despite its eponymous Australian
feminist author, confounded. However, the searcher for signs of the move to
Australia will not be disappointed with Slow Man as the novel has many national
and local references and the motif of migration seems to be integral to the text.
Adelaide itself provides the physical setting of the novel and its famously sedate
pace may also account for the ‘slow’ in the title. As a sideline, but one that is
relevant to the novel’s engagement with notions of nationhood, Coetzee him-
self has been enthusiastically adopted as an Australian writer. His work appears
in collections of the ‘best Australian essays’, and one newspaper has been
known to refer to Australia’s two Nobel-prize winning authors, Patrick White
and J. M. Coetzee. The porousness of borders is particularly evident here.

A number of reviewers of Slow Man have commented that the novel divides

into two sections which are not, however, marked by a change of narrator or a
marker of separation in the text itself. The fi rst section is a seemingly realistic
account of a collision between a cyclist and a motor car on an Adelaide
street. The second section is marked by the metafi ctional entry into the text of
Elizabeth Costello, the Australian feminist writer whose lessons are the subject
matter of Coetzee’s previous text, Elizabeth Costello, and who appeared earlier
in The Lives of Animals. By setting up this border zone in the text between fi c-
tion and metafi ction, Coetzee unsettles the reader’s desire for certainty. For
Elizabeth appears to be the author of the text we are reading, and she is attempt-
ing to goad Paul Rayment, largely unsuccessfully as it turns out, into perform-
ing as a ‘hero’, a ‘main character’ (Coetzee 2005: 229). This authorial intrusion
is, indeed, the literary equivalent of Derrida’s textual edge or border that
blurs divisions between fact (or ‘the real’) and fi ction. The name of this novel’s

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

protagonist, Paul Rayment, itself raises an important issue in relation to the text
as performance. In addition to the connotations of the word ‘raiment’ as dress,
clothing or costume, we are told some time into the text that Paul’s surname
should be pronounced to rhyme with the French word ‘vraiment’ or truth
(Coetzee 2005: 192). Clearly, both these aspects of the name draw attention to
this border between, on the one hand, the performativity of the character and
his slowness to perform – Elizabeth’s frustration with him is shown when she
declares that he should cure himself, she ‘will try not to hurry [him] on any
more’ (Coetzee 2005: 161) – and, on the other, the notion of ‘truth’ or the
‘reality effect’. On another level, this revelation to the reader about the pro-
nunciation of Paul’s surname raises the issue of freedom and determination or
choice, another theme that is integral to the text. What authority does the
anglophone reader have in deciding how to pronounce ‘Rayment’, given that,
like Elizabeth Costello, we have probably been mentally rhyming it with ‘pay-
ment’ until Paul corrects her (and us)?

There are other implications, though, arising from the ambivalence that the

text engenders through Elizabeth Costello’s intrusive entrance, which give rise
to questions such as the following. Did Paul actually die in the accident and
does the account of its after-effects take place in ‘real life’ or in the afterlife?
What effect does the manipulation of the text and its main character by
Elizabeth have on the reading experience? Where do the borders between cre-
ator and creation lie? Between body and prosthesis? At the borders of the body
itself? Between originality and the fake? And what is the signifi cance of the
hybrid identities of the characters in the text, whose diasporic nationalities
defy categorizations of belonging or not belonging?

In another story involving the writer Elizabeth Costello entitled ‘As a Woman

Grows Older’, Coetzee has her muse on the nature of ambivalence in both life
and fi ction:

Well, ambivalence should not disconcert her. She has made a living out of
ambivalence. Where would the art of fi ction be if there were no double mean-
ings? What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails and nothing in
between? (Coetzee 2004: 1)

In addition to what could of course be read as a self-refl exive comment on
Coetzee’s own narrative method, this latter comment gives pause for thought.
For what can be more clearly binaristic than ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ on a coin? And
how can there be anything ‘in between’? One way to visualize this dismantling
of the border between opposites is to reconstruct the idea of a coin, not as an
either/or but as showing ‘two sides of the same coin’ (as the Magistrate comes
to realise in Waiting for the Barbarians) at the same time. This doubling or mirror
image is one that undermines the certainty and equivalence of signifi er–
signifi ed, and that embraces the idea of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’,

Border Crossings: Self and Text

recalling Elizabeth Curren’s desire to reject the absolutism of either ‘yes’ or
‘no’ in Age of Iron.

Paul Rayment, on the other hand, who has been a professional photogra-

pher, values (in Coetzee’s word, ‘trusts’) ‘pictures more than he trusts words’,
believing that photographs remain ‘fi xed [and] immutable’ whereas stories
‘seem to change shape all the time’ (64). He discovers, however, that computer
technology has destabilized the notion of the seemingly ‘immutable’ photo-
graph, which can now be manipulated so that Drago Jokic, representing the
younger generation, can insert his own family images into the ‘originals’ that
Paul valued so highly as part of Australia’s historical record. Here again, the
desire to mark off the territory of history as objective fact on the one hand,
from change and retelling (the marks of story-telling) on the other, is shown to
be backward-looking, old-fashioned and as open to ambivalence, fakery and
manipulation in the same way as fi ction itself is. History, in other words, is, like
fi ction, as much subject to the manipulation of memory.

The amputation of Paul’s leg and his subsequent awareness of the ghostly

limb syndrome – whereby an amputated limb continues to cause pain long after
it has been severed from the body – is a central physical incident in the text (the
result of his accident), but also a useful metaphor. In this way the limitations
and indeed the limits or borders of the body, the mind and textuality itself, are
tested. The trope of the body threshold is a useful one to suggest the boundar-
ies, real or imagined, between bodily and mental states.

Paul’s amputation signals a threshold or boundary in his life that marks off

his past life from his future life as a ‘disabled’ person. He describes this bound-
ary-marker of his changed state in both physical and metaphysical terms, as a
‘cut’ that ‘seems to have marked off past from future with . . . uncommon clean-
ness’ (26). By having to come to terms with his new ‘disabled’ and slow self,
Paul has to leave behind his old ‘whole’ self and his accustomed way of life. In
refusing a prosthesis (which he considers to be surreal, ‘out of Dali’ (9)), Paul
determines to come to terms with what he calls ‘this thing . . . this monstrous
object swathed in white and attached to his hip’ (9; italics in original), the
‘lumpish thing he will henceforth have to lug around with him’ (14). This
description of his amputated leg expresses Paul’s sense of physical and mental
dissociation. Pain, he suggests, is the ‘real thing’ (12), a new reality that he has
to learn to live with, and one that forces him to pay attention to his body in a
way he has never had to previously. Indeed, from the fi rst moments of the text,
the notion of betrayal by the body is established. Hit by a car while travelling on
his bicycle in Magill Road, Paul is aware that ‘his mind is unable to control his
body’ (1). The questions he poses are signifi cant:

What is this? he mouths or perhaps even shouts, meaning What is this that is
being done to me? or What is this place where I fi nd myself? or even What is this fate
that has befallen me? (4; italics in original)

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Paul’s sense of being manipulated by some greater force than he, is expressed
through the passive voice (‘being done to me’, ‘has befallen me’) and the
increasingly high-fl own phrasing of his initially simple question – what is this? –
invokes the classical notion of a metamorphosis from one state of being to
another. Throughout the text, the juxtaposition of the everyday and quotidian,
with the extraordinary and even the surreal maintains a nightmarish quality.
The reader is never entirely sure what is ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, or even, as Paul
himself suggests at one point, whether the whole scenario is taking place in the
afterlife.

In addition to this revulsion at and betrayal by his own body, it is the loss of

his freedom of movement and the contraction of his universe that he feels most
deeply – his sense of having to live a ‘circumscribed life’ (26). Paul’s loss of
freedom, however, is not just the result of his accident and its subsequent effect
on his body. Coetzee poses a version of the question of the dialectic between
freedom and determinism that underlies much of his oeuvre – what freedom
do characters have within the text? Indeed, if the text is itself a kind of body
(a body of work), to what extent does it have an autonomous existence or is it
always itself a ghostly limb that remains attached after severance from its author,
an absent presence? And what of the characters of the text? What are the limita-
tions that mark the writer’s attempt to establish the ‘reality effect’ of characters
and the obviously constructed nature of this process? The text sets up such
questions, and by introducing Elizabeth Costello, the unwelcome fi gure of the
author herself (‘the Costello woman’, as Paul comes to call her), about halfway
through the narrative, complicates the boundaries between reader and text,
protagonist and author-fi gure, text and authorship.

Manipulation – in a number of senses of the word – is therefore a central

issue in the novel. It relates at the most basic level to the physical manipulation
that Paul needs from his carer in the form of physiotherapy for his ‘stump’ (or
‘le jambon’, as Paul calls it). It also relates to the manipulation by computer of
his original photographs that changes them from ‘authentic’ to ‘fakes’; and,
more metaphysically, to the way Paul feels he has been manipulated by the
fates, as well as to Elizabeth’s manipulation of him as a character in her novel,
the novel we are reading and extracts from which he reads in her notebook left
on his table. As Paul complains to Elizabeth, ‘You treat me like a puppet . . . You
should open a puppet theatre or a zoo . . . put us [her characters] in cages with
our names on them’ (117). Of course, the power relationship between them is
not as simple as that, and the ‘betrayal’ can be twofold. Paul too has the power
to withhold his story, to be a ‘slow man’, a character who, like Michael K, refuses
to perform. In this way, the arrival of Elizabeth in the text marks the intrusion
into the seemingly realist text of the ‘paratextual’ (to use Genette’s term), an
unsettling and disturbing move that casts doubt on the established boundaries
between reader, text and writer, thus manipulating the reader, too, into examin-
ing the very processes by which texts, characters and textual incidents come

Border Crossings: Self and Text

into being and take on ‘reality’. The illusion of a character’s bounded freedom
within a text, then, is closely linked to the illusion of freedom in life itself and
the possibility of our every move being manipulated by what Coetzee loosely
terms ‘the gods’.

Elizabeth Costello has provided Coetzee with a literary persona (ostensibly

an ageing feminist Australian novelist) who is given to lecturing others on mat-
ters of ethics and responsibility. Her appearance in Slow Man at his threshold
(more mundanely, at the door of his apartment; 79), and her seemingly bizarre
request for him to give her his hand to check that ‘our two bodies would not
just pass through one another’ (81) like ghosts, followed by her quoting the
fi rst sentences of the book we are reading, Slow Man, all point to a metatextual
intrusion of a putative authorial presence to disrupt the reality effect that the
reader has encountered so far.

It is she who plants the seed of doubt into the

mind of the reader and, indeed, of Paul himself about Paul’s state of being as
she describes Magill Road as ‘the very portal to the abode of the dead’. Was this
portal open or closed? Elizabeth’s avowal that she will be accompanying him for
‘the foreseeable future’ (84) and that, as his ‘model guest’, she will be giving
him a ‘touch on the shoulder . . . to keep [him] on the path’ (87) reinforce the
theme of otherworldly manipulation. For both Paul and the reader, the remain-
der of the textual journey will be in company with Elizabeth who, it appears,
like the ‘gods’ has the power to guide and control the narrative and therefore
Paul’s fate as a character within it. Yet Elizabeth emphasizes her own mortality,
suffering a heart complaint and looking ‘white about the gills’ (83). The bound-
ary between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘real life’ and ‘text’ is
thereby made problematical. Elizabeth is both visitor and visitation, recalling
the classical threshold between life and afterlife (the portal or gate), between
gods and mortals, which is, by its very nature, a permeable boundary (see also
Coetzee 2003: 194, where Costello is again ‘a petitioner before the gate’).

What, then, is the nature of Elizabeth’s visitation? It is she who tells Paul that

she ‘came to fi nd out what happens when a man of sixty engages his heart
unsuitably’ (199), and Paul who retorts that he was not ‘put on this earth to
entertain you’, suggesting that she ‘visit [herself] on some other candidate’
(199). On the one hand, this visitation is metafi ctional; on the other, it could be
seen to have a more political edge, relating to the text’s situation within an
Australian context.

By turning up at Paul’s door as an unannounced and unexpected visitor,

Elizabeth relies on his hospitality to take her in. It is this trope of host and
visitor (or even host and parasite) that returns us to the border of the nation
itself. Contemporary popular discourses in Australian politics have emphasized
the importance of policing borders to keep out unwelcome refugees or asylum
seekers. John Howard’s Coalition Federal Government’s policy of incarcerating
asylum seekers in detention centres or suffi ciently remote Pacifi c islands while
their applications for legal entry were processed (often for long periods of

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

time) elicited long-term protests from civil libertarians. With this trope in mind
(that of host and visitor), the idea of migration and diasporic crossings of bor-
ders assumes a heightened importance in the novel, linked with identity and
the body politic. It is signifi cant that a number of the characters in Slow Man
ironically do not identify themselves as ‘Australian’. Paul himself, we are told,
migrated to Australia from France as a child, but has never felt himself ‘at
home’ in Australia: ‘I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the
French . . . That is all there is to it, to the national-identity business’ (197), as he
says to Elizabeth. In other words, national identity is not embodied or essential
but performative, ‘passing’ for Australian is ‘all there is to . . . the national-
identity business’.

Linked to this awareness of not quite belonging is the sense in which

language operates as a marker of national identity. Paul is similarly distanced
from the English language in which he asserts he has never felt at home but
speaks rather like ‘a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy . . . it is the language that is
spoken through me’ (198). Paul’s lack of belonging or being at home is not
simply a matter of nationality, though. He admits to Elizabeth that he speaks
English like a foreigner because he is a ‘foreigner by nature’ (my emphasis) and
has been a foreigner all his life (231). Being an outsider, then, is both a physical
and spiritual state of being for Paul. It is also the way he is able to mark out his
own sense of individuality or difference – ‘If there were no foreigners there
would be no natives’ (231) – so setting up a border zone between being inside
or outside the nation-state.

Marijana Jokic, his carer, by contrast with Paul, cannot ‘pass’ for Australian.

She and her husband Miroslav are Croatian migrants and Paul describes
Marijana’s speech as ‘rapid, approximate Australian English with Slavic liquids
and an uncertain command of a and the, coloured by slang she must pick up
from her children who must pick it up from their classmates’ (27). This hybrid
speech mirrors Bhabha’s third space of cultural hybridity referred to earlier.
Their son, Drago, is the second-generation migrant, subject to the pressures
of conforming to Aussie stereotypes of masculinity: as Paul warns Marijana,
‘This is not an easy country for a boy to grow up in . . . A climate of manliness
prevails. A lot of pressure on a boy to excel in manly deeds, manly sports’ (74).
Importantly, by inserting a Jokic family member’s face into Paul’s historic pho-
tographs of Australian settler families, Drago is altering the national record,
rewriting the ‘national memory’ (221), as Elizabeth suggests. He asserts thereby
his own sense of belonging, of being inside rather than outside history, a history
from which Paul himself feels excluded – ‘foreigners keep out’, ‘an affair for
the English and the Irish’ (52). This is despite his contribution to the historical
record in the form of his bequest of his photographs to the State Library.

Paul’s outrage at Drago’s act of what he sees as vandalism is related to his

desire to maintain a boundary around the notion of an original photographic
print and a fake. It is Marijana who points out the contradiction of an ‘original

Border Crossings: Self and Text

photograph’ when she says, ‘Original is copy already. Is not like painting’ (245).
Elizabeth’s sarcastic comment on the Jokic’s fake Japanese garden – ‘so real! So
authentic!’ – draws attention to the instability of any border set up between the
‘real’, and the ‘imagined’ or ‘fake’. The notion of parallel universes or the sim-
ulacrum draws us back to the world of the text where Paul reads in Elizabeth’s
notebook about himself. ‘All the time he thought he was his own master he has
been in cage like a rat . . . with the infernal woman standing over him, observ-
ing, listening, taking notes, recording his progress’ (122).

To take this parallelism even further, Paul begins to wonder if he has been

translated to ‘the other side’, a ‘second world that exists side by side with the
fi rst . . . identical with the fi rst . . . except that one now has Elizabeth Costello
around one’s neck’ (122; italics in original). This sense of having crossed over
a threshold with death ‘a mere hiccup in time after which life goes on as before’
(123) unsettles perhaps the most entrenched border of all, that between life
and death, body and soul. Just as Paul begins to wonder about the existence of
an alternative world, he also wonders about the difference between the ‘true
story’ and the ‘alternative story’, and wants to be given an assurance that ‘he has
not been duped’ (115).

From one point of view, the other Marianna (whose name of course has the

same pronunciation as Marijana

) could be wearing dark glasses to hide her

blindness or, from the other point of view, could be wearing them to hide the
fact that she was not blind. Paul’s and the reader’s desire for clarity (to see
clearly), for ‘assurance’, is constantly deferred by the narrative. When Paul asks
Elizabeth directly ‘Are you real?’, she replies, ‘As real as you’ (233); and when
he asks her, ‘Am I alive or dead?’, she replies, ‘A poor forked creature, that is all
I am, no different from yourself. An old woman who scribbles away, page after
page, day after day’ (233). Neither answer, it should be noted, provides the
assurance Paul desires, but, instead, more equivocation. Paul is a character in a
novel and Elizabeth is an author who is also a character in a novel – but is it a
different novel or the same one? The ambivalence remains. Slow Man relent-
lessly yet also teasingly pushes against textuality itself, against the threshold
between the written and the writer, between the real and the imagined, the text
and the reader, testing their limits and limitations and refusing to settle on one
side of the border or the other.

Notes

There is one signifi cant change, though, to the fi rst words of the novel. Elizabeth
recites the words but uses the word ‘tumbles’ rather than ‘fl ies’ that appears on
the fi rst page of the book (my thanks to Zoë Wicomb for pointing this out). The
implication of this is that Elizabeth’s authorship itself is being overwritten as of
course it is, by J. M. Coetzee.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Elizabeth draws the homophonic names to Paul’s attention when she tells him:
‘Her name is Marianna, as I said, with two ns. I cannot help that. It is not in my
power to change names . . .’ (98). The focus on pronunciation in this novel
reminds us of the orality of Coetzee’s texts which take on a life through being read
aloud. Coetzee himself is, of course, a consummate performer of his own texts
and, indeed, reading his own texts is the only public performance he engages in.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill (2001), Post-colonial Transformations. London and New York:

Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi(1990), ‘The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Jonathan

Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.

— (1994), The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Carter, Paul (1987), The Road to Botany Bay. London: Faber.
Coetzee, J. M. (2003), Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. Australia: Knopf, an imprint of

Random House Australia; fi rst pub. in the UK by Secker & Warburg 2003.

— (2004), ‘As a woman grows older’, New York Review of Books, 51, (1) (January 15

2004). Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16872

— (2005), Slow Man. Australia: Knopf, an imprint of Random House Australia; fi rst

pub. in the UK by Secker & Warburg 2005.

Derrida, Jacques (1991), ‘Living on: Border lines’, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), The

Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gordimer, Nadine (1999), ‘Living on a frontierless land: Cultural globalization’, in

Nadine Gordimer, Living in Hope and History: Notes from our Century. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 207–13.

Henderson, Mae G. (1994). ‘Introduction: Borders, boundaries, and frame(works)’,

in Mae G. Henderson (ed.), Borders, Boundaries and Frames: Essays in Cultural
Criticism and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–30.

Schimanski, Johan, and Stephen Wolfe (2004), ‘Border Poetics? A Comparative

Perspective’, Tromso 11–13.11.2004: 2. Available at: http:uit.no/getfi le.php?Pageid=
9778.Fileid=231.

Wicomb, Zoë (2006), ‘Slow Man and the Real’, Conference Paper presented at

‘A Dialog Conference on J. M. Coetzee’ held at Universität Salzburg 22–24 June
2006.

Chapter 6

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence:

Coetzee’s Beckett

Derek Attridge

Eight pages into ‘The Vietnam Project’, Coetzee’s fi rst piece of fi ction to be
published, there is a description of marital sex that reads like a challenge to the
entire tradition of erotic prose, and to the unsuspecting reader as well:

Now is also the time to mention the length of gristle that hangs from the end
of my iron spine and effects my sad connection with Marilyn. Alas, Marilyn
has never succeeded in freeing me from my rigors. Though like the diligent
partners in the marriage manuals we attend to each other’s whispers, moans,
and groans, though I plough like the hero and Marilyn froth like the hero-
ine, the truth is that the bliss of which the books speak has eluded us. The
fault is not mine. I do my duty. Whereas I cannot escape the suspicion that my
wife is disengaged. Before the arrival of my seed her pouch yawns and falls
back, leaving my betrayed representative gripped at its base, fl ailing its head
in vain inside an immense cavern, at the very moment when above all else it
craves to be rocked through its tantrum in a soft, fi rm, infi nitely trustworthy
grip. The word which at such moments fl ashes its tail across the heavens of
my never quite extinguished consciousness is evacuation: my seed drips like
urine into the futile sewers of Marilyn’s reproductive ducts. (Dusklands 7–8)

Eugene Dawn is clearly a sick man, his mental distress as he formulates inhu-
mane policies on behalf of the US military registering on his suffering body.
It is hardly surprising that sex with his wife is unsatisfactory, and perhaps we can
understand, if not forgive, his urge to lay all the blame on her. What is remark-
able, however, is that his description, for all its anger and bile, has a dimension
of comedy: the culminating moment that we are led to believe by ancient litera-
ture as much as by contemporary culture should be the supreme experience of
joy and human connectedness is presented with the utmost detachment, the
language repeatedly defeating all expectations of some saving pleasure or
empathy, however minuscule. One aspect of this sort of comedy is what Freud

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

calls ‘unmasking’, the revelation – as he puts it in the fi nal section of Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious, on varieties of the comic – of ‘the physical
demands lying behind the claim of mental love’.

But there’s a signifi cant diff-

erence between this example and the most common manifestations of the
comedy of bodily dependence undermining the noble claims of humanity: the
description is being offered by the agent himself, rather than by a detached
commentator. To understand why this doesn’t destroy the comedy, we may
appeal to another aspect of the comic as analysed by Freud, ‘humorous plea-
sure’, which arises if we’re saved from expending affective energy in pity for
the suffering of an individual when he or she succeeds in treating it with
supreme indifference.

A crucial dimension of the operation of humorous pleasure is the precise

choice of words, since one way in which the victim rises above his or her situa-
tion is by showing that it doesn’t inhibit the display of verbal brilliance; we can
thus enjoy the assured handling of language both for its own sake and because
it lets us off the hook of sympathy. When Dawn describes his penis as a ‘length
of gristle’, the unexpected but vivid term creates a particularly unattractive
image of the male member and at the same time conveys a sense of distance
not only by its charge of self-loathing but by its demonstration of Dawn’s capac-
ity to fi nd le mot juste.

When he tells us that Marilyn’s ‘pouch yawns’ the comedy

of reductiveness – no room here for romantic notions of sexual union – is
enhanced by our appreciation of the linguistic craftedness of the phrase. And
the fi nal sentence reveals quite explicitly the acute self-consciousness with
which he searches for exactly the right word.

None of this is to claim that the passage is simply high comedy; the combina-

tion of self-hatred and misogyny is pretty distasteful, and one may fi nd these
aspects of the writing overwhelming any potential humour. But uncertainty
of tone is a part of the whole novella’s modus operandi: the absence of normal
affect on Dawn’s part – an emblem as well as a product of the greater failure of
empathetic imagination that facilitates American policy in Vietnam – is what
gives rise to, and is signalled by, the mordant postures captured by the carefully
managed language.

Coetzee is, of course, not the fi rst writer to undercut the hallowed conven-

tions of sexual description, whether romantic, erotic or pornographic, by con-
veying – through a character’s deliberate choice of a reductive vocabulary – an
absence of the emotions that both cultural history and, if we’re lucky, personal
experience lead us to expect. His most signifi cant predecessor in this respect is
Samuel Beckett.

* * *

Coetzee’s sense of possible literary models for his own writing changed
dramatically when, while working in London in the early 1960s as a computer
programmer, he discovered Beckett’s prose – if, that is, the memoir Youth can

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

be taken as a reliable report on the author’s experiences.

(The memoir may, of

course, be unreliable on this point as it is on some other points; but were we
able to know this for certain, we would still have to ask why Coetzee chose to
invent this moment and invest it with such signifi cance.) Here is his account:

In the window of a second-hand bookseller off Charing Cross Road . . .
he spots a chunky little book with a violet cover: Watt, by Samuel Beckett,
published by Olympia Press. Olympia Press is notorious: from a safe haven in
Paris it publishes pornography in English for subscribers in England and
America. . . . It is hardly likely that Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting for
Godot and Endgame, writes pornography. What kind of book, then, is Watt?

. . . He buys the book and takes it back to Major Arkwright’s. From the fi rst
page he knows he has hit on something. Propped up in bed with light pour-
ing through the window, he reads and reads.

Watt is quite unlike Beckett’s plays. There is no clash, no confl ict, just
the fl ow of a voice telling a story, a fl ow continually checked by doubts and
scruples, its pace fi tted exactly to the pace of his own mind. Watt is also funny,
so funny that he rolls about laughing. When he comes to the end he starts
again at the beginning. (155)

Up to this moment, the would-be author whom we identify with the young Coe-
tzee has been pursuing a path laid down by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; he has
attempted to write modernist poetry and has been studying Ford Madox Ford’s
fi ction for an MA degree. Beckett’s Watt offers a new direction. ‘How’, he asks
himself, ‘could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford
when Beckett was around all the time?’ (155).

What was it about Watt that appealed so much to the young Coetzee?

Beckett’s comic prose, written with scrupulous precision, disregarding the
canons of plot and character development, and wary of the great themes of the
literary tradition, could hardly have offered a greater contrast to Ford’s earnest
engagement with the demands and delusions of his time, his attempts at psy-
chological depth, and the complex but coherent architecture of his most
successful narrative structures. One can imagine the computer programmer
enjoying the many passages in which what he calls Beckett’s ‘logico-computa-
tional fantasies’ are set up and then sent up.

Coetzee comments much later in

an interview that reading Beckett he was gripped by ‘that unbroken concern
with rationality, that string of leading men savagely or crazily pushing reason
beyond its limits’ (Doubling 26).

The fi rst substantial result of the new attachment was not literary, but

academic: Coetzee moved to the United States, where in 1969 he completed
a PhD dissertation on ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in
Stylistic Analysis.’ This dissertation is in part a product of Coetzee’s fascination

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

with Beckett’s prose, and in part a product of the heady atmosphere in the
sub-discipline of stylistics in the mid-1960s, when the burgeoning fi eld of theo-
retical linguistics seemed to hold out the hope of purely quantitative methods
of literary analysis that would put criticism on a scientifi c footing. If he had
doubts about the potential of the computer in the world of the humanities, he
set them aside, at least when choosing a dissertation topic. With a degree in
mathematics and experience as a programmer, as well as a fascination with liter-
ary style, an exercise in quantitative stylistics must have seemed a highly appro-
priate choice, and it held out the prospect of producing a model whereby the
subtle effects of literary language could be rendered amenable to precise
analysis.

However, if Coetzee began with such ambitions, there are signs that they

had been qualifi ed by the time the dissertation was fi nished. His conclusion
about the exercise in stylostatistics he has just performed is that ‘we fi nd pre-
cious little about Beckett that we might not have guessed’, adding, ‘It is no
consolation to be told that our guesses have at least received numerical confi r-
mation’ (148). Describing his dissertation project in Doubling the Point in the
early 1990s he hints at a different agenda from the sober one announced in the
formal abstract: ‘Beckett’s prose, up to and including The Unnamable, has given
me a sensuous delight that hasn’t dimmed over the years. The critical work I did
on Beckett originated in that sensuous response, and was a grasping after ways
in which to talk about it: to talk about delight’ (20). And later he comments
on the essays he published on Beckett in the early 1970s, most of which were
revisions of sections of the dissertation: ‘The essays I wrote on Beckett’s style
aren’t only academic exercises, in the colloquial sense of that word. They are
also attempts to get closer to a secret, a secret of Beckett’s that I wanted to make
my own’ (25).

The published essays don’t, however, hint at the implicit con-

clusion of the dissertation: that after years of scholarly labours on the PhD
project, Beckett’s secret remained unrevealed.

Coetzee was not, then, attracted by the famous negativity that is so often

taken to be Beckett’s trademark. Rather, it was the Irish author’s handling of
language, specifi cally the English language, that he found irresistible; the abil-
ity to portray indigence, physical distress, boredom, the pursuit of unattainable
goals, and many other features of imperfect lives in such a way as to produce in
the reader what Coetzee terms ‘a sensuous delight’. This delight is inseparable
from Beckett’s comedy, the writing that young John in Youth fi nds so hilarious.
The secret of Beckett’s that Coetzee wanted to make his own, and that gave
rise to hundreds of pages of detailed analysis, was the secret of that style, a style
capable of transforming the disappointments and dead-ends of quotidian expe-
rience, of what Coetzee calls ‘the ordinary’,

into intense pleasure.

There is of course something quite Beckettian about a lengthy dissertation

using quantitative tools to conduct a minute analysis only to conclude that to a
large extent the enterprise was in vain; it is Watt writ larger and without the

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

jokes. But the dissertation demonstrates something important: what Coetzee
found so liberating in Beckett’s English prose was that style could be the heart
of the writer’s enterprise, not an instrument wielded purely in the service of
content. His earlier attempts at fi ction, according to Youth, foundered on the
necessity for prose, unlike poetry, to have a specifi c setting (63); Beckett, how-
ever, showed that prose, too, could do very well without a determinate location.
What Coetzee needed, and what Beckett offered, was a means of escape from
his own too-present background: in Youth he describes South Africa as ‘an alba-
tross round his neck’ that he wants removed (101), and as ‘a wound within him’
that he wishes would stop bleeding (116). (When he started publishing fi ction,
however, having learned this Beckettian lesson, he was able to reintroduce
the historical with subtlety and forcefulness, something that Attwell brilliantly
demonstrates.

)

Coetzee may have failed to quantify and render computable Beckett’s stylistic

singularity. However, there’s a different sense in which Coetzee could be said to
have come to understand Beckett’s secret, a sense Coetzee himself spells out in
a short piece entitled ‘Fictional Beings’.

He offers the scene of a tennis coach

teaching a young player a particular stroke by a mixture of words and demon-
strations. When fi nally the player is able to play the stroke himself, even though
he cannot say what it is he is doing, there is an important sense in which he can
be said to have understood what the coach was explaining to him. One can relate
this explanation of infl uence to Coetzee’s own account of the importance of
Beckett to him, in the 1993 essay ‘Homage’

What one can learn from Beckett’s prose is a lesson one level more abstract
than one can get from verse. The lesson is not so much about getting the
movements of the voice onto the page as about fi nding a form for the move-
ments of the mind. In Beckett’s case, this comes down to a certain counter-
pointing of thought and syntax. . . . It comes down to a certain dancing of
the intellect that is full of energy yet remains confi ned, a dancing on the
spot. (6)

Like the tennis player understanding the coach, Coetzee’s own remarkable
dance of the intellect – the phrase is of course Pound’s – is testimony to a lesson
thoroughly absorbed.

* * *

Coetzee’s fascination with Beckett has been continuous from the early dis covery
in London until today, and an attempt to delineate what it is he values most in
his predecessor may throw some light on his own practice. In 1974, he com-
pared Nabokov’s literary radicalism unfavourably with Beckett’s; in 1979 he
published a review of Deirdre Bair’s biography, which had appeared the previ-
ous year.

His dismay at Bair’s failure to appreciate ‘the nature of Beckett’s

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

enterprise as a novelist’ is given a precise focus in his response to her comment
on Watt: he calls her claim that Beckett was ‘confused’ when he wrote this novel,
and that he undercuts ‘any meaning or appreciation’, ‘execrable literary criti-
cism’ (87); and he goes on to charge her with ‘incomprehension of Beckett’s
chief work, Watt and the trilogy of novels’ (88). A dozen years later, in the inter-
views with Attwell published in Doubling the Point, he commented that the late
works of Beckett speak in ‘post-mortem voices’ and are ‘quite literally, disem-
bodied’, whereas his interest lay in ‘how the voice moves the body, moves in the
body’. In ‘Homage’ (in which he writes about ‘some of the writers without
whom I would not be the person I am’), he notes that Beckett’s work shook his
confi dence that he had nothing to learn about the English language. ‘As soon
as I began reading Beckett I knew I was reading someone whose sensitivity
to the nuances of weight, coloration, provenance, and history of individual
words was superior to mine’ (7). Coetzee was, at this time, writing The Master
of Petersburg, in which a different literary father takes centre stage, one not
mentioned, surprisingly, in ‘Homage’. But Dostoevsky did not displace Beckett,
and in 2006 Coetzee’s interest in the Irish author surfaced in three places. One
was an introduction to a volume in the new Grove Press edition of Beckett’s
work (ix–xiv), most of it reprinted in Inner Workings, the second was a con-
tribution to a volume entitled Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, and the
third a lecture to a Beckett conference in Tokyo in September.

By 2006, Coetzee was less likely to place Watt among Beckett’s fi nest work:

he begins the Inner Workings essay with what can be read as a correction of his
earlier views:

Although Watt, written in English during the war years but published only
in 1953, is a substantial presence in the Beckett canon, it can fairly be said
that Beckett did not fi nd himself as a writer until he switched to French and,
in particular, until the years 1947–51, when in one of the great creative out-
pourings of modern times he wrote the prose fi ctions Molloy, Malone Dies,
and The Unnamable (‘the trilogy’), the play Waiting for Godot, and the thirteen
Texts for Nothing. (2007b 169)

Coetzee describes Beckett over the next three decades as ‘stalled’, until with
the works of the early 1980s, Company, Ill Said Ill Seen and Worstward Ho, ‘we
emerge miraculously into clearer water’ (171). In this short piece, Coetzee
expresses some dissatisfaction with the mathematical aspect of Beckett’s writ-
ing he had earlier enjoyed (‘texts built up from repertoires of set phrases by
combinatorial methods’ (170)), and stresses – as he had in Youth – the comic
dimension of Beckett’s best work. Just a few phrases from the piece will indicate
this aspect of his response: ‘fi erce comic anguish’ (170), ‘dark comic energy’
(171), ‘optimistic yet humorously sceptical about what can be achieved’, ‘philo-
sophical comedy’ (172). In the piece in Beckett Remembering (74–7) he tells the

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

story of Beckett’s application to the University of Cape Town when it advertised
a lectureship in Italian in 1937 (Coetzee found Beckett’s application in the
university archives: Beckett was not offered the job); and in the Tokyo lecture,
entitled ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’ he speculated further on
Beckett’s philosophical comedy and, perhaps with an eye to his Japanese loca-
tion, related it to Melville’s whale.

In the lecture, Coetzee begins by depicting Beckett as a philosophical dualist,

and it is instructive to test his description against his own fi ction. ‘He seems to
believe that the connection between the mind and the body is mysterious, or
at least unexplained. At the same time he – that is to say, his mind – fi nds the
dualistic account of the self ludicrous. This split attitude is the source of much
of his comedy.’ Yet, Coetzee continues, Beckett’s attacks on the dualist account
have no effect: ‘Each time the dualist account resurrects itself and re-confronts
him’. Coetzee concludes that Beckett doesn’t take refuge in the alternative
account, philosophical monism, because he ‘is too deeply convinced he is a
body plus a mind. . . . His everyday experience is that he is a being that thinks,
linked somehow to an insentient carcass that it must carry around and be car-
ried around in’. The disparity between mind and body becomes particularly
marked with old age, of course; and both Beckett and Coetzee often create
characters more elderly and decrepit than they are. The 72-year-old protago-
nist of Diary of a Bad Year, in a short piece entitled ‘On Aging’, says ‘All old
folk become Cartesians’ (2007a 181).

There are numerous examples in Beckett’s work of the kind of comedy

Coetzee is alluding to: the body and the mind frequently seem ill-adapted, and
the disjunction is funny, both because, as Freud among others observed, it pro-
duces absurdities that defl ate human pretensions and because it satirizes a long
tradition of writing and thinking in which the mind is glorifi ed, and another
long tradition in which the achievements of the body are romanticized. And yet
it is humour shot through with its dark opposite, with a sense of the unattain-
ability of the ideals so valorized in the Western tradition of art and philosophy.

The two issues that come up repeatedly in Coetzee’s responses to Beckett,

then, are style and the comedy of the body ill-matched with the mind. A prime
site for such mismatches is, of course, sex; and the works most often cited by
Coetzee, the prose writings from Watt to The Unnamable, furnish several exam-
ples, in all of which style plays a crucial part in establishing a comic tone. Let’s
imagine young John Coetzee in London propped up in bed starting Watt,
expecting, from its Olympia Press imprint, something titillating. He fi nds that
the novel starts with the discovery by a character named Mr Hackett that the
seat at a tram stop he regards as his own is already occupied by a couple. And
sure enough, on the second page, he encounters a sex scene:

Mr. Hackett decided, after some moments, that if they were waiting for a
tram they had been doing so for some time. For the lady held the gentleman

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

by the ears, and the gentleman’s hand was on the lady’s thigh, and the lady’s
tongue was in the gentleman’s mouth. Tired of waiting for the tram, said
Mr. Hackett, they strike up an acquaintance. The lady now removing her
tongue from the gentleman’s mouth, he put his into hers . . . Taking a pace
forward, to satisfy himself that the gentleman’s other hand was not going to
waste, Mr. Hackett was shocked to fi nd it limply dangling over the back of
the seat. (6)

Although this description is not in the fi rst-person form characteristic of Freud’s
model of humorous pleasure, I think we can see the same process of psychic
economy at work. Mr Hackett, as the reader’s representative, fends off the med-
ley of potentially intense responses, both affective and somatic, to this public
display of sexual intimacy, including embarrassment, annoyance, curiosity, and
physical arousal, by choosing language as distanced as possible from emotion
and eroticism: the repetition of ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’, the ploddingly explicit
account of positions and actions, the almost mathematical reciprocity of the
two tongues and the two mouths. Beckett tracks what we must assume to be
Mr Hackett’s growing astonishment purely by means of the sequence from
the absurdity of the ears to the suggestiveness of the thigh to the explicitness of
the kiss, the style itself conveying nothing of his surprise, but implying that
simple logic is at work: note the effect of the connective ‘For’. The stylistic pre-
cision is of the utmost importance in maintaining the distance necessary for
the humour.

There is very little sex in Watt, in fact, though somewhat later in the book,

there is a long account of the repeated sexual feats of Watt and the fi shwoman
Mrs Gorman, of which this is a representative sample:

Then he would have her in the kitchen, and open for her a bottle of stout,
and set her on his knee, and wrap his right arm about her waist, and lean his
head upon her right breast (the left having unhappily been removed in the
heat of a surgical operation), and in this position remain, without stirring, or
stirring the least possible, forgetful of his troubles, for as long as ten minutes,
or a quarter of an hour. . . . From time to time, hoisting his weary head, from
waist to neck his weary hold transferring, Watt would kiss, in a despairing
manner, Mrs. Gorman on or about the mouth, before crumpling back into
his post-crucifi ed position. . . .

Further than this, it will be learnt with regret, they never went, though more
than half inclined to do so on more than one occasion. (138–40)

The scene itself is touching, but any persistence of sentiment is inhibited by the
choice of words. All is poignant in the fi rst sentence, if a little over-specifi c for a

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

romantic moment, but the puncturing that follows is merciless ‘(the left having
been unhappily removed in the heat of a surgical operation)’. (And how
extraordinary that ‘in the heat of’ is, suggesting that the mastectomy was the
accidental act of an overenthusiastic surgeon.) Also typical of Beckett are the
qualifi cations that draw attention to the excessively meticulous narrator (what
Coetzee calls his ‘doubts and scruples’): ‘without stirring, or stirring the least
possible’; ‘for as long as ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour’; and most comic
of all, ‘Watt would kiss . . . Mrs Gorman on or about the mouth’.

It is when we reach the trilogy that we fi nd Beckett’s sexual comedy achieving

its full-blown scatological realization, and often in the mode of fi rst-person nar-
rative. Molloy, in the novel of that name, reminisces about the woman who
made him ‘acquainted with love’ and empties the event of any hint of eroticism
by stylistic means:

She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can’t say for certain.
Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the
bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put,
my so-called virile member, not without diffi culty, and I toiled and moiled
until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s
game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent
myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told
me so. (56–7)

We’re aware of the detachment of memory, but also of a profound innocence:
this is a man who has heard or read about the value of love and sex – he appears
not to distinguish between them – and is attempting to put this imperfect
knowledge into practice. Not surprisingly, the result is unsatisfactory, but it
makes for a superb antidote to the usual clichés. ‘Toiled and moiled’ is, it’s true,
a cliché, but not one we associate with the motions of sex, while the cliché ‘virile
member’ is signalled as such by the self-mocking adjective ‘so-called’. And once
more the qualifi cations and corrections add a pedantic touch to a style that we
would expect to be concentrating on the excitements of the subject matter: ‘in
this I put, or rather she put’; ‘not without diffi culty’, ‘in the long run’.

Something similar to the effect of the removed breast occurs as the passage

continues, and we learn how Ruth’s, or was it Edith’s, physical ailments deter-
mine the nature of their lovemaking:

She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from
behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago.
It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she
confi ded that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant
exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s
what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too
was an eminently fl at woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on
an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that
case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she
held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it. . . . (57)

Molloy’s innocence about sexual matters produces a bizarre series of specula-
tions, far removed from the language of passion or nostalgia. But while the
content is outrageous – especially the image of a man pretending to be a woman
by clutching his testicles lest they collide with his lover’s – the style in which it is
presented is that of musing uncertainty, the way one might ponder what one
had for dinner last Thursday or whether it is likely to rain. The questions are
not urgent (‘Have I never known true love, after all?’), and the speculative tone
is conveyed by words like ‘perhaps’ and ‘surely’. Any inclination towards arousal
or sympathy is nipped in the bud.

A little later, Molloy speculates further on his experience, comparing copula-

tion with masturbation, and again sex is reduced to the mechanical and the
mindless, even though it is being represented as ‘true love’:

I would have preferred it seems to me an orifi ce less arid and roomy, that
would have given me a higher opinion of love it seems to me. However. Twixt
fi nger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison. But love is no doubt above such
base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your fran-
tic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous
membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its
tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away,
high above the tight fi t and the loose. (58)

Molloy allows himself some poetic diction – ‘Twixt’, ‘’tis heaven in comparison’,
‘comes to pass’, ‘wings away’ – but it is ludicrously juxtaposed with the matter-
of-fact and the technical – ‘orifi ce’, ‘arid’, ‘roomy’, ‘rubbing-place’, ‘mucous
membrane’, ‘tumefaction’.

In course of the second novel of the trilogy, Malone Dies, the narrator tells the

story of Macmann, immured in an institution and cared for by Moll. In his
story-telling vein Malone uses something approaching a high style, but in treat-
ing of sex there is the same comic overthrow of all conventions, romantic, erotic
and pornographic:

This fi rst phase, that of the bed, was characterized by the evolution of the
relation between Macmann and his keeper. There sprang up gradually
between them a kind of intimacy which, at a given moment, led them to lie
together and copulate as best they could. For given their age and scant

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

experience of carnal love, it was only natural they should not succeed, at the
fi rst shot, in giving each other the impression they were made for each other.
The spectacle was then offered of Macmann trying to bundle his sex into his
partner’s like a pillow into a pillow-slip, folding it in two and stuffi ng it in with
his fi ngers. But far from losing heart they warmed to their work. And though
both were completely impotent they fi nally succeeded, summoning to their
aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking
from their dry and feeble clips a kind of sombre gratifi cation. (261)

Of course the funniest part of this account is the sentence about Macmann
attempting to enter Moll; introduced with a passive construction suggestive of
a formal style – ‘The spectacle was then offered’ (a meaningless fl ourish, in fact,
as there is no-one watching) – it descends quickly into the most unerotic of
similes, ‘of Macmann trying to bundle his sex into his partner’s like a pillow
into a pillow-slip’. And as if this weren’t comic enough, Beckett’s narrator con-
tinues, ‘folding it in two and stuffi ng it in with his fi ngers’. The action is ludi-
crously inappropriate, but what makes it funny rather than pathetic is the
energetic language – who could predict the verb ‘bundle’? The last sentence
presents a triumph, though a strictly limited one: their embraces (comically
dignifi ed with the archaic word ‘clips’) are ‘dry’ and ‘feeble’ and their gratifi ca-
tion ‘sombre’.

Finally, in The Unnamable, the speaker – in his guise as a trunk in a jar outside

a restaurant – has no inkling of the romantic or the erotic; all he can imagine is
masturbation over the sight of a horse’s rump (and even that remains
unachievable):

The tumefaction of the penis! The penis, well now, that’s a nice surprise, I’d
forgotten I had one. What a pity I have no arms, there might still be some-
thing to be wrung from it. No, ’tis better thus. At my age, to start manstuprat-
ing again, it would be indecent. And fruitless. And yet one can never tell.
With a yo heave ho, concentrating with all my might on a horse’s rump, at the
moment when the tail rises, who knows, I might not go altogether empty-
handed away. Heaven, I almost felt it fl utter! Does this mean they did not geld
me? I could have sworn they had gelt me. But perhaps I am getting mixed up
with other scrota. Not another stir out of it in any case. (335)

Once again, any potential compassion on our part for this remnant of human-
ity investigating the possibility of sexual arousal is short-circuited by the lan-
guage, which unremittingly substitutes self-mockery for self-pity (‘Heaven, I
almost felt it fl utter!’). There are the familiar questions and qualifi cations: ‘well
now’; ‘And yet’; ‘who knows’; ‘perhaps I am getting mixed up’. And the comedy
of inappropriate juxtaposition is heightened by the lurches from high and lear-
ned style (‘’tis better thus’; the past tense of ‘geld’ as ‘gelt; ‘manstuprating’ – such

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

a recherché term for masturbating that even the OED doesn’t recognize it

) to

the down-to-earth (‘With a yo heave ho, concentrating with all my might on a
horse’s rump’).

* * *

Coetzee’s evident and avowed debt to Beckett has not, of course, gone
unnoticed. The many studies of the earlier writer’s infl uence on the later have
focused on such matters as death, silence, inheritance, nothingness, ethics,
metafi ction, politics, and the body.

However, although Coetzee’s stylistic

debt to Beckett is often mentioned, it hasn’t been discussed in detail. Even less
attended to is the importance of Beckett’s comedy, which, as we’ve seen, is
central to Coetzee’s response to his predecessor. James Wood’s comment on
Coetzee probably sums up the consensus view: ‘His prose is precise, but
blanched; in place of comedy there is only bitter irony (this is Coetzee’s large
difference from Beckett, whom he so clearly admires)’.

How is it that Coetzee

could have rolled about laughing when reading Watt, and yet turn out to be
such an apparently humourless writer himself ? Or does closer attention to the
Beckettian qualities of Coetzee’s style challenge this characterization?

Let’s return to Eugene Dawn depicting sex with Marilyn in Dusklands. Sex

without passion, described in a language far from that of traditional erotic or
romantic narratives, and a male speaker somewhat baffl ed by the events he is
describing, as if he were outside them: we are not far from the mood and style
of the passages we’ve looked at from Beckett’s prose. The vocabulary doesn’t
repeat Beckett, but is equally surprising and anerotic: ‘representative’, ‘sewers’,
‘reproductive ducts’. ‘Moans, and groans’ is reminiscent of ‘toiled and moiled’;
the ‘immense cavern’ of Marilyn’s vagina recalls Edith’s ‘arid and roomy’ one;
Dawn’s ‘betrayed representative’ is a personifi cation that echoes Molloy’s ‘fran-
tic member’; Dawn’s ‘evacuation’ looks back to Molloy’s ‘discharged’. Dawn’s
description of the penis’s desire – ‘it craves to be rocked through its tantrum in
a soft, fi rm, infi nitely trustworthy grip’ – is close to Molloy’s description of the
same predicament – ‘when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-
place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane’. Dawn’s performance of
the act as a duty whose rituals are imbibed from marriage manuals has the same
tonality as Molloy’s comment, ‘I lent myself to it with a good enough grace,
knowing it was love, for she had told me so’. There is a touch of Beckett’s use of
a highly formal style in the clause ‘though I plough like the hero and Marilyn
froth like the heroine’; we might have expected ‘froths’ but Dawn chooses the
hyper-correct subjunctive.

And yet it’s also very different from Beckett, perhaps most signifi cantly in the

nature of its humour. Dawn’s account is funny, certainly, but it’s the humour of
the misanthrope; where Beckett’s characters express a certain disappointment
in the act of love, they are willing participants who haven’t given up hope. Watt
may be weary and despairing, but he does forget his troubles on Mrs Gorman’s

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

lap for ten or fi fteen minutes. Molloy may fi nd sex a tiring mug’s game, but he
perseveres with good grace, and though he may have doubts about the orifi ce
he entered and the gender of the individual to whom it belonged, he is philo-
sophical rather than bitter about it. The Unnameable is fi red by the thought
that his penis may still have some life in it. Eugene Dawn, however, is angry and
resentful, and his unusual language indicates a cynicism about the romanti-
cized view of sex that is not quite the same as Beckett’s characters’ serene lack
of self-consciousness. Where Beckett’s heroes show winning hesitations, doubts,
and recalibrations, Dawn’s conviction never wavers. If we do laugh at his extraor-
dinary representation of sex, it is fi tfully and reluctantly.

The narrator in Coetzee’s next work of fi ction, Magda in In the Heart of the

Country (1977), is his most Beckettian, both in the broader scheme of an intro-
spective and wordy monologue whose relation to reality is not always easy to
fathom and in the small details of style. However, Magda is generally not
detached in the manner of Dawn, and her experiences and fantasies of sex are,
for the most part, conveyed in language that preserves their emotional inten-
sity. There are, however, moments when she is capable of something like his
detachment, expressed in a style just as precisely and potently fashioned – and
rather funnier. She imagines having a husband,

whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights, in the dark, so as not
to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to
the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the
bedside, and endure the huffi ng and puffi ng of, and be fi lled eventually,
one expects, with seed by, and lie listening to the snoring of, till the balm of
slumber arrive. (42)

When we encounter the sardonic speculation ‘if the arts of arousal can be
learned’ we could be reading Beckett. Later Magda comes upon the servants
Hendrik and Anna having sex; Hendrik grins at her and ‘From his middle juts
out unhidden what must be his organ, but grotesquely larger than it should be,
unless I am mistaken’ (76–7). The sexual innocence, and the humour of that
fi nal qualifying phrase, stamp Magda, temporarily at least, as a female Molloy.

In his next novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee found a distinctive voice

that has only the occasional hint of Beckett, and the depictions of sex in that
novel and the ones that followed, although none of them could be described as
conventional, don’t possess the dark comic edge of the ones we’ve looked at.
Let me jump to Disgrace, where sexual encounters abound. The style of David
Lurie’s afternoon sessions with Soraya, the prostitute, conveys little emotional
depth but equally no comic detachment. The short description of sex with
the new secretary Dawn (is the name a coincidence?) shares some of the
detached antagonism, and the vocabulary, of the passage from ‘The Vietnam
Project’ I’ve already cited: ‘Bucking and clawing, she works herself into a froth

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

of excitement’ (9). But the encounter I want to pause on occurs in the after-
math of the attack on Lurie’s daughter and himself, when he starts helping his
daughter’s friend, Bev Shaw, with her work at a nearby animal shelter. One day
she invites him to meet her at the clinic, and he realizes that the invitation is a
sexual one. The encounter is given to us, like the entire novel, from Lurie’s
perspective.

The choice is between the operating table and the fl oor. He spreads out the
blankets on the fl oor, the grey blanket underneath, the pink on top. He
switches off the light, leaves the room, checks that the back door is locked,
waits. He hears the rustle of clothes as she undresses. Bev. Never did he dream
he would sleep with a Bev.

She is lying under the blanket with only her head sticking out. Even in the
dimness there is nothing charming in the sight. Slipping off his underpants,
he gets in beside her, runs his hands down her body. She has no breasts to
speak of. Sturdy, almost waistless, like a squat little tub.

She grasps his hand, passes him something. A contraceptive. All thought
out beforehand, from beginning to end.

Of their congress he can at least say that he does his duty. Without passion
but without distaste either. (149–50)

We’re a long way from Beckett’s monologues, it is true, but in contrast to
the other sexual events of the novel, this one has a tinge of Beckettian comic
distance. The overscrupulous account – ‘the grey blanket underneath, the pink
on top’; the unfl attering description of the woman’s body, ‘only her head stick-
ing out’, ‘like a squat little tub’ (Ruth/Edith, too, we remember, was ‘eminently
fl at’); and the dutiful performance of the act all hark back to the sex of Watt
or the trilogy. Occasionally the phrasing, for the most part typical of Coetzee’s
distinctive mature style, holds a memory of Beckett too, especially the fi nal
sentences, with their formal vocabulary and word-order, their representation of
sex as obligation, and their balanced evaluation. Coetzee thus draws on the
resources of the Beckettian style to convey the marked difference between the
present encounter and Lurie’s previous dalliances, and to suggest a new realism
in the sexual attitudes of this teacher of Romantic poetry. Once again, though,
Lurie’s condescending knowingness is much less forgivable than the child-like
ingenuousness of Beckett’s characters.

The third-person present narrative of Disgrace, which has become Coetzee’s

preferred mode, is also the narrative mode of his two memoirs, Boyhood and
Youth. The former, which tracks young John between the ages of ten and thir-
teen, has only occasional intimations of sexual desire, but the latter includes
several sexual experiences. Most are simply painful, but one that has some

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

affi nities with Beckett is the fi rst, in which the young man’s inexperience pro-
duces something like the wry self-distance that makes the Beckettian anti-heroes
so funny. John, in Cape Town, has been invited to a get-together in a bungalow
on the beach, and there he meets an older woman named Jacqueline.

Jacqueline suggests a walk on the beach. Hand in hand (how did that hap-
pen?) in the moonlight, they stroll the length of the beach. In a secluded
space among the rocks she turns to him, pouts, offers him her lips.

He responds, but uneasily. Where will this lead? He has not made love to an
older woman before. What if he is not up to standard?

It leads, he discovers, all the way. Unresisting he follows, does his best, goes
through with the act, even pretends at last to be carried away.

In fact he is not carried away. Not only is there the matter of the sand, which
gets into everything, there is also the nagging question of why this woman,
whom he has never met before, is giving herself to him. (5)

The vocabulary is conventional, not Beckettian (‘hand in hand’, ‘pouts, offers
him her lips’, ‘carried away’), but the uncertainty, the self-questioning, the
sense that he is perceiving his own actions from outside, recall Beckett’s narra-
tors. Just as Molloy lends himself to intercourse with good grace, so John ‘does
his best, goes through with the act’. And there is something Beckettian about
the funniest touch in the passage, whereby any possibility of a lingering roman-
ticism is banished by the intrusion of the real: ‘the matter of the sand, which
gets into everything’.

Finally, in Slow Man there is a sexual encounter which, in its bizarreness if not

in its style, is more like Beckett than anything he has written. Paul Rayment, a
sixty-year-old Australian, has lost a leg in an accident, and while he is recuperat-
ing is visited by an author, Elizabeth Costello – who also turns out to be his
author. In order to distract Paul from his hopeless passion for his nurse
(described by Coetzee with powerful realism, and not at all Beckettian in man-
ner or content) she arranges a liaison with a blind woman he once saw with a
frisson of desire in a lift. He and the blind woman meet in his fl at, and have an
awkward conversation. The passage continues with a single, singularly lengthy
sentence that is as much a challenge to the reader as the one we began with:

And somehow or other, in the midst of all this – the fretting, the embarrass-
ment, the averting, the philosophising, to say nothing of an attempt on his
part to loosen his tie, which has begun to choke him (why on earth is he wear-
ing a tie?) – somehow, clumsily yet not as clumsily as might have been, shame-
facedly yet not so shamefacedly as to paralyse them, they manage to slip into
it, into the physical act to which they have willy-nilly contracted themselves,

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

an act which while not the act of sex as generally understood is nevertheless
an act of sex, and which, despite the truncated haunch on the one hand and
the blasted eyes on the other, proceeds with some dispatch from beginning
to middle to end, that is to say in all its natural parts. (108–9)

It is a strange episode in a strange book, and one that seems to lead nowhere;
but the sentence in which the sexual act is described at least produces some-
thing of the pleasure that Coetzee fi rst identifi ed in Beckett some forty years
earlier, the pleasure of a style that refuses the temptations of conventional
erotic writing, that evinces a comic appreciation of the business of sex while
retaining a humane understanding of bodily needs. One could not say that the
style precludes all sympathy – ‘truncated haunch’ and ‘blasted eyes’ are not as
detached as ‘length of gristle’ or ‘like a pillow into a pillow-slip’ – but at the
same time it does refl ect, as does the entire novel, a wish to resist the tempta-
tions of both pity and self-pity, and to insist, as Beckett so often does, on the
sheer absurd mechanics of the act of sex.

The fact that this episode doesn’t grow naturally out of the events of the pre-

vious narrative but is staged by an author who is at once within and outside the
fi ction points to the possible reason for its strangeness: it is itself a mechanical
device, a writer’s attempt to steer an evolving plot in a different direction. It
fails; Rayment has no desire to repeat the experience; Elizabeth Costello has to
be content with a different story, one over which she is not entirely in control,
and one in which sex is absent but the erotic very much present. And in
Coetzee, the erotic and the act of sexual intercourse seldom go together.

* * *

It is not my contention that Coetzee is a comic writer whom we have mistakenly
taken to be a bleak one: neither of these descriptions, I believe, is accurate or
helpful.

But the more we can bring to his work a sensitivity to the nuances of

style and the fi ne gradations of tone the more we will appreciate the constant
play between a comic apprehension of the absurdity of the human claim to be
in charge of the body and a grim awareness of some of the less welcome conse-
quences of bodily autonomy. To end with a question: if the former tendency is
constrained by the latter in Coetzee more than it is in Beckett, from whom he
learned so much, is this because Coetzee’s characters never achieve the sublime
indifference to the practical affairs of the world that Beckett’s do? Beckett, after
all, wrote Watt while in hiding from the Gestapo in southern France, but didn’t
allow this circumstance to impinge on the comic exuberance of his writing.

Coetzee’s pages, we may suspect, are darkened by the external events that
accompanied their composition; and the bodies he writes about are subject to,
or understood in the context of, exacting ethical and political responsibilities.
If we can’t talk about Coetzee’s ‘sexual comedy’ in the way we can about

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

Beckett’s, in spite of the evident importance of Beckett in Coetzee’s develop-
ment as a writer, it may be because the shadow of those demands falls on every
sentence.

Notes

I would like to thank Asja Szafraniec for helpful comments on an earlier version
of this essay.

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Pelican Freud Library 6, ed. Angela
Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 286.

Jokes 293–301. Freud’s examples include ‘gallows humour’, as when the criminal
on his way to execution on a Monday says, ‘Well, this week’s beginning nicely’
(294). Freud revisited the question of humorous pleasure in a short paper writ-
ten in 1927 (‘Humour’, Art and Literature : Pelican Freud Library 14, ed. Albert
Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 425–33).

In his MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford, Coetzee cites Ford’s suggestion that the
prose writer ‘should seek le mot juste as long as le mot is not too juste, too surprising’
(‘The Works of Ford Madox Ford’, University of Cape Town, 1963, Appendix
B.11). Coetzee’s own practice here clearly contradicts Ford’s dictum.

Coetzee remarks elsewhere that he had read Waiting for Godot in the 1950s
(Doubling the Point, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992), 20); this would have been in his teens. During his stay in London, he also
bought and read Octavio Paz’s collection of Mexican poetry, which was translated
(with assistance) by Beckett; see ‘Homage’ (Threepenny Review, No. 53, Spring
1993: 5–7), 5.

Coetzee’s MA thesis is a lengthy survey of Ford’s vast creative output, with the
highest praise reserved for the ‘technical triumph’ of The Good Soldier, in which
Ford’s use of an untrustworthy narrator is described as a ‘stroke of genius’
(5.24–5).

‘Beckett and the Temptations of Style’, Doubling, 46. Deleuze discusses these
exhaustive and exhausting catalogues of possibilities in ‘L’épuisé’, published as
an appendix to Beckett’s Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 55–106.

Three essays derived from the dissertation were reprinted in Doubling the Point:
‘The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett’s Murphy’ (1970), ‘The Manuscript
Revisions of Beckett’s Watt’ (1972) (reprinted only in part), and ‘Samuel Beckett
and the Temptations of Style’ (1973). In 1973 he also published a new essay,
‘Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition’, Computers and the
Humanities 7.4 (1972–73): 195–8. These pieces do not have the sceptical view of
their own methodology that marks the conclusion of the dissertation.

Coetzee agrees with Richard Begam that Kafka and Beckett are ‘writers of the
ordinary’ (‘Interview’, Contemporary Literature 33 (1992): 419–31), 421.

See David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley:
University of California Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 1993).

Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 10.2 (2003): 133–4.

Threepenny Review 53 (Spring 1993): 5–7.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

‘Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art’, UCT Studies in English 5 (1974): 1–7;
Review of Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, UCT Studies in English 9 (1979):
86–9.

Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005 (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), 169–73;
Knowlson, James and Elizabeth, eds. Beckett Remembering/Beckett Remembered (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006); ‘Eight ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,’ Borderless Beckett/
Beckett sans frontiers, ed. Minako Okamuro et al. (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi).

Another follower of Beckett is John Banville; here, for instance, is the narrator of
Birchwood:

For example, the vagina I had imagined as a nice neat hole, situated at the
front, rather like a second navel, but less murky, a bright sun to the navel’s
surly moon. Judge then of my surprise and some fright when, in the evening
wood, tumbling with Rosie through the lush wet grass, I fi ngered her furry
damp secret and found not so much a hole as a wound, underneath, uncom-
fortably close to that other baleful orifi ce. (London: Picador (1998), 13)

Of course, Banville doesn’t completely extirpate the erotic as Beckett (and
Coetzee’s Dawn) do; the conventions of romantic sex are present in phrases like
‘evening wood’, ‘tumbling with Rosie’, ‘lush wet grass’ and ‘damp secret’. In a
later sexual encounter, there is a reference to ‘that lugubrious puce stalk, my
faintly pulsating blunt sword of honour, sticking out of my trousers’ (131): this
could hardly be more Beckettian in its aneroticism.

Manstupration is in fact an archaic French term for masturbation; the English
equivalent (which is perhaps what Beckett was thinking of) is manustupration.

Essays on Coetzee and Beckett include Paul A. Cantor, ‘Happy Days in the Veld:
Beckett and Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country’, South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994):
83–110; Gilbert Yeoh, ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, minimal-
ism and indeterminacy’, Ariel 31.4 (2000): 117–37 and ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel
Beckett: Ethics, truth-telling, and self-deception’, Critique: Studies in Modern
Fiction 44. 4 (2003): 331–48; Chapter 4, ‘Coetzee Reads Beckett’, of Steven G.
Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2000); and Peter Boxall, ‘Since Beckett’, Textual Practice 20.2 (2006): 301–17.

‘A Frog’s Life’, London Review of Books, 25.20 (October 2003): 23.

Is it signifi cant that Coetzee’s fi rst-person narrator’s name continues Beckett’s
series of M’s? (It is followed, we might note, by the Magistrate, the Medical
Offi cer, and – albeit not a fi rst-person narrator – Michael K.) Many of Banville’s
fi rst-person narrators, too, have names beginning with M.

In the fi ctional narrative of Diary of a Bad Year, the erotic is omnipresent, but
there is no sexual activity; and the central character, although he is a 72-year-old
writer suffering from increasing decrepitude and thoughts of death, is not a
Beckettian fi gure, in spite of one or two highly Beckettian phrasings in his
fi rst-person narrative.

For a reading of Disgrace which does ample justice to the novel’s comic ele-
ments, see Patrick Hayes, ‘Byron, Stavroguine, Lurie: Comique et gravité dans
Disgrace’, J. M. Coetzee et la littérature européenne: Écrire contre la barbarie, ed. Jean-Paul
Engélibert (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 135–47.

Sex, Comedy and Infl uence: Coetzee’s Beckett

In the fi nal paragraph of his dissertation, Coetzee mentions that Watt was written
in France between 1941 and 1944, and in a later piece reprinted in Doubling
the Point, ‘Remembering Texas’ (1984), he describes the manuscripts as having
been written ‘on a farm in the south France, hiding out from the Germans’
(51). Attwell, in J. M. Coetzee (10), suggests that the dissertation’s close indicates
Coetzee’s interest in the consequences of historical rootedness, something his
novels will explore fully.

Works Cited

Attwell, David (1993), J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley:

University of California Press; Cape Town: David Philip.

Banville, John (1998), Birchwood. London: Picador.
Beckett, S. (1979), The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. London:

Macmillan.

— (1988), Watt. London: Picador.
Boxall, Peter (2006), ‘Since Beckett’, Textual Practice, 20. 2, 301–317.
Cantor, Paul A. (1994), ‘Happy Days in the Veld: Beckett and Coetzee’s In the Heart

of the Country’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 93, 83–110.

Coetzee, J. M. (1963), The Works of Ford Madox Ford. University of Cape Town:

[MA Thesis]

— (1969), The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis Uni-

versity of Texas. [PhD Thesis]

— (1972–3), ‘Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition’, Computers

and the Humanities, 7. 4, 195–198.

— (1974), ‘Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art’, UCT Studies in English, 5,

1–7.

— (1977), In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (1979), ‘Review of Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography’, UCT Studies in

English, 9, 86–89.

— (1980), Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (1982), Dusklands. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (1992), Doubling the Point (ed. David Attwell). Cambridge: Harvard University

Press.

— (1992), ‘Interview’ with Richard Begam, Contemporary Literature, 33, 419–431.
— (1993), ‘Homage’, Threepenny Review, 53, 5–7.
— (1994), The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (1997), Boyhood. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (1999), Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg
— (2002), Youth. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (2003), ‘Fictional Beings’, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, 10. 2, 133–134.
— (2005), Slow Man. London: Secker & Warburg.
— (2006), ‘J. M. Coetzee’, in J. and E. Knowlson (eds.), Beckett Remembering/Beckett

Remembered. London: Bloomsbury, 74–76.

— (2007a), Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker.
— (2007b), Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005. London: Harvill Secker.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

— (2008), ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,’ Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans

frontiers, ed. Minako Okamuro et al. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.

Deleuze, G. (1992), ‘L’épuisé’ in Beckett, S., Quad. Paris: Minuit, 55–106.
Freud, S. (1976), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Pelican Freud Library 6,

ed. Angela Richards). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

— (1985), Art and Literature (Pelican Freud Library 14, ed. Albert Dickson).

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Hayes, Patrick (2007), ‘Byron, Stavroguine, Lurie: Comique et gravité dans Disgrace’,

in Jean-Paul Engélibert (ed.), J. M. Coetzee et la littérature européenne: Écrire contre
la barbarie. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 135–147.

Kellman, Steven G. (2000), The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press.

Wood, James (2003), ‘A Frog’s Life’, London Review of Books, 25. 20, 23.
Yeoh, Gilbert (2000), ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, Minimalism

and Indeterminacy’, Ariel, 31. 4, 117–137.

— (2003), ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth-Telling and Self-

Deception’, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 44. 4, 331–348.

Chapter 7

Writing Desire Responsibly

Rosemary Jolly

The conclusions of both Disgrace and Slow Man describe a parting. In Disgrace,
Lurie ‘gives up’ the wounded dog for which he has taken responsibility, possibly
having decided that euthanasia is in the dog’s best interests (Coetzee 1999a:
220). In Slow Man, Paul Rayment formally takes his leave of Elizabeth Costello,
explaining that he does not love her (Coetzee 2005: 263). Whether Lurie is put-
ting the dog out of the dog’s misery, or whether he is letting himself off the
hook of having to care for a suffering creature, or even if these two conceits are
anything but mutually exclusive, the decision requires some negotiation
between desire and responsibility. When Paul Rayment ‘gives up’ Elizabeth
Costello, explaining that she is inadequate to his desire, Slow Man concludes,
implying that the act of novel-making itself is sustained by desire.

Slow Man, through the invocation of Elizabeth Costello, the writer we fi rst

meet in The Lives of Animals, explicitly raises the question of the role of desire in
the process of writing. Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello fi gure the relation
between author and character as one driven by desire – especially devious
desire. It is also a relation terminated by the failure of desire. Further, while the
author may ‘take’ responsibility for the desire to create, this in no way means
that the author (say, Elizabeth Costello) wields overwhelming authority over his
or her character (say, Paul Rayment). Indeed, it is Rayment, the eponymous
slow man, who dismisses the advances of his fi gurative author, not vice versa.
How, then, do Coetzee’s representations of sexual relations, and those between
author and character, fi gure devious desire and responsibility for such desire?

Disgrace opens with the instantly engaging refl ection of the infamous Lurie in

Coetzee’s accustomed free indirect discourse: ‘For a man of his age, fi fty-two,
divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well’ (1999a: 1).
Lurie conceives (so to speak) of ‘the problem of sex’ in economic terms. Not
only does he comment on how much he pays ‘Soraya’ – R400 for ninety min-
utes, of which half goes to Discreet Escorts; he also thinks of sex as a need which
he fulfi ls with the least expenditure of energy on his part: ‘He lives within his

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

income, within his temperament, within his emotional means’ (2). The ques-
tion that follows is obvious, and Coetzee poses it: ‘Is he happy? By most mea-
surements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus
of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead’ (2). Lurie’s confi guration of
‘the problem of sex’, then, would appear to be how to fulfi l desire while mini-
mizing any responsibility that could emerge through the pursuit of that desire.

Even Lurie seems taken aback that this approach appears to render him

blissful, even if it is ‘a moderate bliss, a moderated bliss’ (6). The language of
moderation, the warning of the chorus from Oedipus, suggests that, in the long
run, framing desire within an economy of fi nancial and emotional expenditure
is itself unsatisfying. In the end, for all the debates about (ambiguous) closure
in Disgrace, one can at least conclude that this economy has failed Lurie, and he
recognizes that he exceeds it, even if neither he (or for that matter, we) can say
why, precisely, he comes to such a radical understanding. If, at the beginning
of Disgrace, Lurie acts on his desires to ensure immediate pleasure with the least
expenditure of responsibility on his part, his perverse desire to incinerate the
corpses of dogs to avoid the mutilation of their (dead) bodies marks a differ-
ence. This particular act of desire is not witnessed by anyone other than the
reader: in Disgrace, no one, other than the reader, is there to reward Lurie’s
piety – not even the dogs. As such, the disposal of the dogs’ bodies, Lurie’s
acting-on-desire, is non-reciprocal, except across the differential registers of
character and reader. Elizabeth Costello, author, and Paul Rayment, character
and sometime reader of both Costello and her writings, exemplify these differ-
ential registers and the relations between them. While the metafi ctional aspect
of Slow Man showcases relations between author and character, Coetzee’s previ-
ous fi ction abounds with explorations of different sorts of makers of fi ction.

The acts of rape that Coetzee’s fi ction depicts involve fantasy on the part of

the perpetrators; they are quintessential enactments of desire without responsi-
bility, without regard to or for others. It is not that the rapist has no fi ction-mak-
ing ability; it is that his act of fi ction-making is despotic, precisely because his
fi ction is imposed on his victim, denying her any alternative ‘reading’ of the
violation. By using the term ‘reading’, I risk inviting a metaphysical under-
standing of what is meant by reading, in which no material bodies are involved
and therefore no violation actually can be registered as having taken place.
However, it is an ethic of Coetzee’s fi ctional practice to recognize that, while the
medium of writing is made up of words that comprise fi gurative constructs, this
does not necessarily entail, and indeed, should not entail, the denial of material
bodies.

‘Reading’ is not a metaphysical act, but an embodied practice.

Dusklands, Coetzee’s earliest internationally published fi ction, makes clear

the link between the erasure of otherness, rape, and the fantasy of mastery. The
erotic vision it represents is an extreme version of sex without consequence or
responsibility. Jacobus Coetzee, protagonist of the second novella, The Narrative
of Jacobus Coetzee, tells us that sex with Dutch girls, the offspring of the white

Writing Desire Responsibly

colonists, affords no pleasure, because Dutch girls embody property and there-
fore power, and cannot be raped without consequence. With a Dutch girl, he
tells us,

You lose your freedom . . .. Whereas a Bushman girl is tied to nothing, literally
nothing. She may be alive but she is as good as dead. She has seen you kill
the men that represented power to her, she has seen them shot down like
dogs. You have become power itself now and she is nothing, a rag you wipe
yourself on and throw away. . .. She can kick and scream but she knows she is
lost. That is the freedom she offers, the freedom of the abandoned. . .. She
has given up the ghost, she is fl ooded in its stead with your will. She is the
ultimate love you have borne[,] your own desires alienated in a foreign body
and pegged out waiting for your pleasure. (1974: 61)

Figures of this scenario, repeated with difference, recur in Coetzee’s subse-
quent fi ctions, both in terms of characters who rape other characters, and in
terms of their fi ction-making correlatives: author-despots who dictate to their
characters – propagandists – like Eugene Dawn.

Magda, narrator of In the Heart of the Country, is a parody of the farmhouse

spinster who sees no-one other than the servants and the odd messenger.

are not surprised, then, but may be moved, by her pitiful assumption that
rape, coerced sex, sex without mutuality, is what she should ‘learn’ in order to
be initiated into society as a female subject. When Hendrik discovers that
Magda, unlike her father, cannot pay him his wage, he rapes her.

The rape is

Magda’s fi rst experience of sexual intercourse, and there is no doubt that she is
in acute physical pain, puzzled by the fact that, as Hendrik tells her, ‘It won’t
hurt’ and ‘Everyone likes it’ (1977b: 107).

‘Am I now a woman?’ she asks her-

self (and us). ‘Has this made me into a woman?’ She refl ects that when Hendrik
creeps into her bed and ‘takes’ her ‘It hurts, I am still raw, but I try to relax, to
understand the sensation, though as yet it has no form’ (110).

Magda tries to build a relationship within this economy of rape in exchange

for the withdrawal of material goods, as if it were the foundation of social and
sexual intercourse:

I run my fi ngers over Hendrik’s face, this is something he allows me. His
mouth is not smiling, but smiling is not the sole sign of happiness. ‘Do you
like what we do? Hendrik, I know nothing. I don’t know whether you like
what we do. Do you understand what I am telling you ?’(111)

We, as readers, are included as the addressees of her question. What she seems
to be telling us is that she has no access to a discourse of mutuality outside of
abuse; but she suspects, like Lurie, like Rayment, that her current reality may
be inadequate to her desire. As befi ts the parody of a Karoo spinster, In the

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Heart of the Country is saturated by Magda’s discourse of unfulfi lled desire: her
entry into mutually coercive relations with Anna and Hendrik brings no joy to
either her or the reader. Paraphrasing her own narrative, we may say that as
readers, our ‘sensation’ of Magda as a character takes the ‘form’ of unfulfi lled
desire.

Jacobus Coetzee expresses the need to kill and the need for violent inter-

course within the same breath: he needs to kill, because, he says, ‘the gun saves
us from the fear that all life is within us. It does so by laying at our feet all the
evidence we need of a dying and therefore a living world’ (1974: 79). Here
Jacobus Coetzee confuses need and desire. In the Heart of the Country presents
a very different picture. Magda fi gures not desire expressed as need, but rather,
the need to desire, one that we overlook or judge at our own peril. Denial of
desire, or the assumption that all desire is perverse, and should therefore be
denied, constitutes precisely the kind of Calvinist repression that André Brink
speaks so persuasively against in Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (1983).
Coetzee’s fi ction consistently challenges this kind of repression.

Repression in this instance performs a resolution of the tension between

desire and responsibility: repression is invoked in order to enshrine respon-
sibility, and to get rid of desire together, reformulating it when necessary as
a regrettable or sinful impulse. The problem with this is that it resurrects hypoc-
risy on the one hand and confession on the other as coping mechanisms for a
situation in which desire is censored and the human character attempts to
reduce itself by denying desire as itself a need. At this stage, the (human)
character may exercise violence against that which reminds him of the ‘threat’
of need (such as Eugene Dawn, or Jacobus Coetzee, both narrators of Dusk-
lands, or Joll, the character in Waiting for the Barbarians); or, like David Lurie at
the beginning of Disgrace, the character may invoke a rhetoric of economy in
relation to those elements that confound his attempts to deny or minimize
desire.

When the desire for the other mutates into the need to deny the other, to

destroy the object of desire in a doomed attempt to eradicate the vulnerability
desire itself entails, the metaphysical schema resurrected by such repression
creates violence – often physical – in its wake. In an oft-quoted passage from
Doubling the Point, Coetzee recognizes the use he makes of fi ction to assert the
vulnerability of being embodied. Against the suffering of the body he pits fi c-
tions that use the materiality of fi ction – reading as an act of engagement –
against bodily suffering:

If I look back over my own fi ction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard
erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not ‘that which
is not,’ and the proof that it is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes
the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such

Writing Desire Responsibly

crudeness in fi ction; one can’t in philosophy, I’m sure.) . . . Let me put it
baldly, in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and
therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical
reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but
for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous:
it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body
takes this authority: that is its power. (1992: 248)

As is clear from his fi rst parenthetical statement in this meditation on the

body, responsibility is not about denial of desire: ‘I would not assert the ethical
superiority of pain over pleasure’ (248). Denial of desire is tantamount to denial
of the body, and is, in this sense, related to the denial of suffering.

While many have perceived Disgrace as a novel out of joint with the times, in

an ironic way, Disgrace fulfi ls the predictions of those writers who viewed the
transition to democracy in South Africa as an opportunity to write about per-
sonal relations, rather than to comment on the broader political ‘state of the
nation’.

I make this claim because Disgrace seems to ask the question, what

would happen if, in addition to the suffering body, the desiring body were to
take authority? Further, what would it mean for the author to take responsibility
for (his) desire, a desire Coetzee terms ‘what’ [the author] wants-to-write’?

In Doubling the Point, David Attwell questions Coetzee as to why Michael

K. does not join the guerrillas in an alternative, heroic version of Life & Times
of Michael K.

One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn’t write the books one
doesn’t want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in
all its own resistance to being known. The book about going off with the guer-
rillas, the book in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write, wanted
enough to be able to bring off, however much I might have wanted to have
written it – that is to say, wanted to be the person who had successfully brought
off the writing of it.

What, then, do I want-to-write? (208)

I read this as a version of a question that could be, and has been, asked about
Disgrace, as well as Life & Times of Michael K. In the case of Disgrace, the question
would be, why is the liberated South Africa not the hero of the story?

The answer Coetzee gives Attwell, referencing Life & Times of Michael K.,

suggests that the desire to write is tied up with a responsibility that has nothing
to do with a general responsibility towards an extant community of others, but
rather to the other that is both the desire-to-write and the desire-to-be-written,
the latter of which by defi nition does not yet exist, remains to be invented.

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Coetzee associates this wanting-to-write with a giving up of oneself – a posses-
sion of the writer – who is responsible only when s/he gives him/herself over to
the act of writing:

Stories are defi ned by their irresponsibility: they are, in the judgment of Swift’s
Houynhnhms, ‘that which is not.’ The feel of writing is one of freedom, of
irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet
emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road. (246)

Coetzee describes the novel as

less a thing and more a place where one goes everyday for several hours a day
for years on end. What happens in that place has less and less discernable
relation to the daily life one lives or the lives people are living around one.
Other forces, another dynamic, take over. . .. Whatever the process is that
goes on when one writes, one has to have some respect for it. It is in one’s
own interest, one’s own very best interest, even one’s material interest, to
maintain that respect. (205).

Slow Man is, I propose, a fi ctional rendering of what this process of writing
involves. Elizabeth Costello, author, and Paul Rayment, character, entertain a
mutual antipathy. She fi nds him ‘slow’, incapable of precipitating action as a
character should, unable, in her words, to ‘push’ (2005: 204). The analogy to
giving birth does not escape Paul Rayment: but why should he push to ‘give
birth’ to her invention? Instead, he allows events to ‘befall’ him (21) and, by his
own admission, fails to live up to the measure of heroism his bicycle accident
may have precipitated:

. . . escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside
him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the
sort. He is trapped with the same self as before, only greyer and drearier.
Enough to drive one to drink. (54)

In the end, of course, it is Paul Rayment’s rejection of Elizabeth Costello’s
attempted manipulation of him, signalled by his antipathy to her physical
embodiment, that concludes the novel:

. . . Marijana is behind them now, and he is left with Elizabeth Costello. He
puts on his glasses again, turns, takes a good look at her. In the clear late-
afternoon light he can see every detail, every hair, every vein. He examines
her, then he examines his heart. ‘no,’ he says at last, ‘this is not love. This is
something else. Something less.’ (263)

Writing Desire Responsibly

Yet inhabiting space – as author, as character, as reader -- with Paul Rayment’s
perverse desire for an impossible relationship with Marijana, with Elizabeth
Costello, the perverse and unwanted author, with the perverse and grumpy
Paul Rayment himself, is what has created the substance of Slow Man as a
fi ction, or what Derek Attridge calls ‘literature in the event’ (Attridge 2004).

Lurie is another grumpy, old and often unattractive, even despicable, charac-

ter-narrator with whom we inhabit space in close proximity. As author or as
reader, inhabiting space with a none-too-attractive character, one whom we
think we may never respect, may be required for ‘that which lies somewhere at
the end of the road’ to emerge. In the case of this reader, what (perversely)
engages my admiration is Lurie’s refusal to deny his attraction to Melanie. This
does not entail my affi rmation of the relationship he develops with Melanie;
indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Lurie rapes Melanie, and that any other
reading of his encounter with her at her fl at participates in Lurie’s metaphysical
delusion that it is ‘not quite rape, not that, but undesired nevertheless, unde-
sired to the core’ (Coetzee 1999a: 25).

What is attractive about Lurie here is his refusal to lie, to suggest that he is no

longer attracted to young girls like Melanie; and his refusal to accrue to the
University committee that hears the case against him the status of anything
other than secular authority. Dr. Farodia Rassool wants him not only to plead
guilty, but also to outline precisely what he is being censured for. She wishes to
see contrition in Lurie’s response, but reads no such element in his bearing or
speech. When she asks him whether his response refl ects his ‘sincere feelings’,
he refuses to engage with the process any longer:

He shakes his head. ‘I have said the words for you, now you want
more, you want me to demonstrate their sincerity. That is preposterous.
That is beyond the scope of the law. I have had enough. Let us go back
to playing it by the book. I plead guilty. That is as far as I am prepared to
go.’ (1999a: 55)

As others have pointed out, this can easily be read as a criticism of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission in which, in its crudest form, all that is
demanded from a perpetrator who has committed politically motivated crimes
is confession and contrition, vocally performed; but who is to say the perpetra-
tor is sincere in the performance of his confession?

Yet there is another element of Lurie’s performance that bears scrutiny.

What, we may ask, are we to make of his patently absurd ‘confession’: that when
he passed Melanie in the old college gardens:

Words passed between us, and at that moment something happened which,
not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffi ce it to say that Eros entered.
After that I was not the same. (52)

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Lurie is clear that this is not a defence; and he is equally clear that the impulse
that led him to approach Melanie Isaacs and ask her to his house was not ungov-
ernable (52). It is the very absurdity of Lurie’s response that speaks a certain
truth: Lurie is aware that he does not understand his own desire, and therefore
cannot explain it, as though it were ‘fi nished’, to Farida Rassool or anyone else.
In the fi rst place, Lurie insists on the right to mental privacy: ‘What goes on in
my mind is my business, not yours, Farida’, he tells his confi dent, if not self-
righteous colleague (51). In the second place, his answer to the committee, while
in one sense obviously facetious, is not simply facetious: Lurie admits that his
desire is indecipherable to himself (which is not the same as absolving himself
from responsibility for that desire, a position to which he comes perilously close
on occasion, at least before he leaves for the Eastern Cape).

In ‘The Harms of Pornography’, a chapter in Giving Offense: Essays on Censor-

ship, Coetzee takes on a character of whom Farodia Rassool may be seen to
be a parodic embodiment: Catherine MacKinnon on the relations between
pornography and the abuse of women. One of his key objections to MacKinnon
is that she assumes men are conscious of and understand their own desire;
thus she produces a Manichean allegory of the relations between men and
women, ‘simplifi ed to the point of caricature’ (1996: 62). ‘The interests and
desires of human beings are many times more complex, devious, inscrutable,
and opaque to their subjects than she seems to allow’, Coetzee argues (62);
and, later in the same essay, he maintains that ‘Freedom of expression is
desirable; but like all desires (. . . including the desire that drives the present
writing) the desire for freedom is devious, does not fully know itself, cannot
afford to fully know itself’ (74).

What the character of Lurie demonstrates, and what Coetzee here argues for

explicitly, is that desire cannot know itself, that creative work is associated with
inscrutable desire: Lurie’s opera; Coetzee’s writing. This does not mean, how-
ever, that desire is thus licensed to exercise itself in ways that violate the other,
as in the imposition of metaphysical constructs that deny the resistance of the
other, even to the extent of ignoring corporeal suffering, to achieve their own
ends. Unequivocal examples of this would be Jacobus’ rape of the ‘Bushman
girl’ and Lurie’s imposition of his desire on Melanie at her fl at, even in the face
of the fact that he himself realizes at the time that his attentions are ‘undesired
to the core’ (1999a: 25).

Coetzee’s early fi ctions then are, in a sense, caricatures of the human char-

acter, in the same sense that Coetzee argues that MacKinnon simplifi es rela-
tions between men and women ‘to the point of caricature’. Eugene Dawn and
Jacobus Coetzee present the (spurious) rationality of Cartesian politics, while
Magda represents the impossibility of a desiring body who attempts to subsist
on rhetoric. This rehearsal of Coetzee’s earlier fi ction allows us to see the novels
including and subsequent to Waiting for the Barbarians in a certain perspective:
the perspective of a writer who understands what is at stake in refusing to see
writing character as writing, on the one hand, characters whose actions follow

Writing Desire Responsibly

101

logically from a character seen as ‘given’, born fully fl edged into the mind of
the author, who merely has to fi ll out the predictable details; or, on the other,
writing critiques of how the contemporary human character sees itself, critiques
that produce characters on the verge of being incorporeal altogether; critiques
that risk mirroring, in fi ctional form, the diatribes of Calvinist repression. In
view of this, the challenge for the author who wants-to-write characters that are
not caricatures becomes one in which the author is no longer the origin of
character but, as Lucy Graham has argued, is acting on the desire-to-write by
constituting writing as the medium in which author, character and narrator
meet on mutual terms (Graham 2006). Here writing is that which ‘gives birth’
to relations of mutuality without coercion: relations between author and char-
acter, and character and reader.

Coetzee’s fi ctions explore the relations between what we may call, following

Coetzee himself, devious, even perverse, desire to the act of artistic creation. In
his texts, desire for the other, for the body of the other – corporeal desire – is
closely associated with the desire to produce artistic creations. We might be
tempted to assume this as cliché. But the cliché is reworked in ways that
Coetzee’s protagonist-writers could not have envisioned when they fi rst took on
responsibility for the impulse to write by acting upon it. Youth treats the cliché
with heavy irony from beginning to end, ridiculing (but not dismissing entirely)
the narrator’s sense that the artist must have interesting, passionate love affairs
in order to write. The young Coetzee tries to imagine the lives of great writers
and emulate them, defi ning their success in terms of the (imaginary) mistresses
he attributes to them. Thus the young Coetzee refl ects that

He is well aware that his failure as a writer and his failure as a lover are so
closely parallel that they might as well be the same thing. He is the man, the
poet, the maker, the active principle, and the man is not supposed to wait for
the woman’s approach. On the contrary, it is the woman who is supposed to
wait for the man. . .. Unless he wills himself to act, nothing will happen, in
love or in art . . ..

There is another and more brutal way of saying the same thing . . .. The
most brutal way is to say that he is afraid, afraid of writing, afraid of women.
(2002: 166–7)

The young Coetzee is, to all intense and purposes, a ‘slow man’.

It is precisely the desire to ‘host’ the space of writing that is evident when

characters engage in the bathetic rather than the heroic. What most readers
of Youth will remember is not the narrator’s idealized versions of sexual and
creative engagement, but the series of actual sexual encounters upon which
he embarks, which are disastrous. One need only remember they involve one
abortion and one desertion of a young woman from the home country,
Marianne, after Coetzee-the-youth makes love to her. He is attracted to

102

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Marianne because she is the friend of his cousin, Ilse, who is herself therefore
out of bounds; but he does not know that she is in fact a virgin – a fact that he
discovers when she bleeds copiously after the act.

Key to the aesthetic J. M. Coetzee develops in Youth is precisely the juxta-

position of the ecstasy of desire with the tawdry reality of the proto-artist’s
attempt to fulfi l those desires. He imagines his cousin, before he sees her, as
an Aryan huntress; she appears as ‘an ordinary moon-faced girl who wheezes
when she talks’ (2002: 127). However, Coetzee-the-youth is not as innocent
as the contrast between his fantasies and the reality may at fi rst suggest. He
senses precisely the perverse mixture of the other and the familiar that leads
him to fantasize about Ilse, and actually act upon that desire with her friend,
Marianne, despite the fact that neither woman is described in physically attrac-
tive terms – quite the contrary. They are women, that strange country to the
youth; but they are from his country, they are associated with his sense of the
familiar:

In his fantasy he recognises the erotic tingle. What is it about his girl cousins,
even the idea of them, that sparks desire in him? Is it simply that they are for-
bidden? Is that how taboo operates: creating desire by forbidding it?

Or is

the genesis of his desire less abstract: memories of tussles, girl against boy,
body to body, stored since childhood and now released in a rush of sexual
feeling? That, perhaps, and the promise of ease, of easiness: two people with
a history in common, a country, a family, a blood intimacy from before the
fi rst word was spoken. (126)

The recognition of the attraction of the forbidden is resurrected when he
decided to have sex with Marianne: ‘She is not his cousin; but she is his cousin’s
friend, she is from home, and an air of illegitimacy hangs excitingly around
her’ (128).

In Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren’s writing is initiated by her cancerous growth,

itself a perverse relative of hers, who takes up residency in her in a parody of the
pregnancy that produced the addressee of her discourse – the daughter in
America. The impulse to write is also accompanied by the visitation of Verceuil,
who is both repellent and familiar – repellent in his lack of hygiene, his abusive
language, his crassness; yet familiar in the truth he embodies, a truth about the
inspiration of the elderly and the homeless to shed appearances and seek com-
fort in the face of death. To erase the attraction between Verceuil and Elizabeth
Curren is to censor desire on the part of the elderly narrator, rather than to
acknowledge the confusing mixture of the fascination of an abomination, and
the desire for comfort and physical intimacy, that comprises Elizabeth Curren’s
attraction to Verceuil. The relation between dying and the embrace of the lover
is clearly played out in the novel’s closing scene. But what, precisely, does the
realm of the dead have to do with desire, responsibility and writing?

Writing Desire Responsibly

103

The dead have subjectivity in Coetzee’s fi ction; where they do not, as in

Dusklands, their exclusion as subjects is highlighted as an act of violence. In Age
of Iron, Elizabeth Curren imagines walking over the faces of the dead, whose
shapes protrude from the surface of the ground, making their presence felt
beneath her feet (1990: 125). She is also obsessed with ‘the unquiet dead’ who,
following in the tradition of Virgil, Dante and T. S. Eliot, speak, as it were,
through the words she writes (176). Tellingly, Paul Rayment refl ects on the
exclusion of the dead from the list of relatives he is asked to provide on the
form he is handed to fi ll out by the social worker in the hospital: ‘Those into
whose lives you are born do not pass away, he would like to inform whoever com-
posed the question. You bear them with you, as you hope to be borne by those who come
after you’ (2005: 8).

The author brings the character to life; in turn, the character will bring the

writer back to life long after he or she is dead, but his characters continue to be
read. In view of this, it is not surprising that, ‘at the conclusion of Slow Man’,
Costello asks Paul Rayment, when she is about to be deserted by him, ‘But what
am I going to do without you?’ The writer is bereft without her character: ‘She
seems to be smiling’, we are told, ‘but her lips are trembling too’ (263). If ever
the conclusion of a novel were able to be put in the hands of a character rather
than an author, this is it. The author is not ‘anterior’ to character, to use Lucy
Graham’s term (2006: 219–20); indeed, the author, Elizabeth Costello, seems
strangely dependent upon her Rayment character.

In The Master of Petersburg, the writer desires to bring the dead back to life.

Dostoevsky, in Petersburg to discover the circumstances of the death of his
stepson, Pavel, searches to express his love for his son; a love that he did not
entertain – or at least, did not express – while Pavel was alive. He occupies
Pavel’s room, tries on the white summer suit Pavel has left behind, has an affair
with Pavel’s landlady, Anna Sergeyevna, and develops a friendship with her
young daughter, Matryona, who had in turn been a friend of Pavel’s. Indeed, he
tries Pavel’s life on, as it were, in the attempt to reach Pavel over the gulf that
separates the living and the dead. In taking this trajectory, however – as Derek
Attridge has carefully described – the narrative leads not to a conclusion of
mourning, but a description of the art – the event, in Attridge’s terms – of fi c-
tion making.

Here desire, death and writing meet in a narrative of fi ctional creation that is

anything but comforting. Responsibility to both the living and the dead is cast
out, registered as immaterial, in the face of the dictates of what Attridge
describes in terms of Derrida’s arrivant, but what I wish to recast here as the
desiring author. Attridge cites from Derrida’s ‘Psyche’ to outline the process of
inventiveness involved in fi ction-making a la Coetzee:

One does not make the other come, one lets it come by preparing for its
coming. The coming of the other or its coming back is the only possible

104

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

arrival, but it is not invented, even if the inventiveness of the greatest genius
is needed to prepare to welcome it: to prepare to affi rm the chance of an
encounter that not only is no longer calculable but is not even an incalcula-
ble factor still homogenous within the calculable, not even an undecidable
still caught up in the process of decision making. Is this possible? Of course it
is not, and that is why it is the only possible invention. (2004: 341–2)

What Attridge highlights in his reading of the key Coetzean texts is that the fi c-
tions demand that we as readers, following the author in his desire-to-write,
exceed the calculability of reason, of material economics, every other attempt
(be it Jacobus Coetzee-like or Lurie-like) to control the interaction between
ourselves and that which issues forth from the desire-to-write, and following
this, the desire-to-read. Responsibility to desire, specifi cally, to the desire-
to-write or ‘invent’, is formulated here as the refusal to calculate the cost of the
vulnerability that desire entails.

In The Master of Petersburg, the cost is great, as the series of betrayals that con-

stitute Coetzee’s fi ction of the genesis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed emerge.
There is the betrayal of Dostoevsky’s wife in his sexual relations with Anna
Sergeyevyna; and the betrayal of Anna Sergeyevna both in his use of her as a
way to access Pavel, and his use of her to enact his fantasy of using Matryona
in the same way. For Dostoevsky fantasizes about Anna’s daughter, Matryona.
He betrays Matryona’s faith when she asks him why Pavel had to die, deliber-
ately reducing her to tears by responding that perhaps Pavel means nothing to
God; perhaps God does not hear very well. He then comforts her when
she turns to him, by gripping her shoulder. But the comfort is also a betrayal:
he imagines a statue he has seen of the Indian God, Shiva, dead on his back,
with a goddess, ‘ecstatic – riding him, drawing the divine seed out of him’
(1994: 76). For this is what he desires from Matryona: that she (using him as a
conduit?) might draw the seed out of the dead Pavel. ‘He has no diffi culty’, we
are told, ‘in imagining this child in her ecstasy. His imagination seems to have
no bounds’ (76).

There is the actual betrayal of his stepson entailed in the perversion of

mourning into the business of writing (which produces an entirely unfavour-
able portrait of Pavel as a young man); and the fact that, just as he is aware –
relishes even – the experience of seeing Matryona peer through the door at
him and her mother in bed together – he knows that Matryona may well read
his fi ction of Pavel, in which Pavel sleeps with a young woman, himself relishing
the fact that he is titillating the curiosity of a young girl who sees himself
and Anna in the act. All this is set in the context of The Possessed, in which
Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, in the uncensored version, violates his landlady’s eleven-
year-old daughter – Matryosha, the affectionate appellation of Matryona often
used by the other characters of The Master of Petersberg for Coetzee’s Matryona –
and fails to take steps to prevent her from committing suicide.

Writing Desire Responsibly

105

Then there is another betrayal, this time not noted by Attridge, which is the

betrayal of Dostoevsky by Coetzee: not only in the general and less intimate
sense of creating a fi ction that replaces the unknown genesis of The Possessed;
but in creating one that ascribes to Dostoevsky the desire to violate a girl-child.
Attridge notes, following Joseph Frank, who depends upon V. N. Zakharov for
his information, that stories of Dostoevsky’s violation of a girl appear to stem
only from his reading of the banned chapter to his friends, stories that were
then spread by the malice of Turgenev (2004: 136). In this sense – despite the
fact that The Master of Petersburg is blatantly a fi ction, in that Pavel outlived
Dostoevsky – Coetzee’s fi ction seems to underwrite the perverted desire in The
Master of Petersburg as Dostoevsky’s – as necessary, not incidental – to his craft.
Key to writing, key to the inventiveness of the genius awaiting the arrivant, is
an imagination that has no bounds, such as that of the Coetzeean Dostoevsky
who imagines Matryona in her ecstasy; such as that of the Coetzee who betrays
Dostoevsky; such as that of the writer who is, by defi nition, irresponsible to
everything but what Coetzee terms what the author wants-to-write.

Here we have, then, an account of the responsibility one has to have to the

desire-to-write, and the commitment, not in terms merely of time, but of the
energy required to host the fi ction. In Attridge’s reading of this process, cost
should not – and indeed cannot – be counted. Yet what does it mean, ethically,
for us to expect the writer to expect the unexpected, when the unexpected
requires the author to host perverted desire, to desire-to-write what the
Elizabeth Costello of the lessons calls, despite her consciousness of its ana-
chronistic essentialism, ‘evil’? This is not a question that is often raised, because
the question itself raises the spectre of censorship: state censorship and self-
censorship. But is this spectre a suffi cient deterrent to direct us away from the
question raised so startlingly by Elizabeth Costello? And even if Costello’s voice
should not and cannot be aligned with that of the author J. M. Coetzee, her
creator, does that let us off the hook? For, in one sense, Coetzee is arguing that
the creation overmasters the writer by that very same writer’s desire.

In Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship Coetzee argues against MacKinnon,

against censorship, basing his argument, in the end, not on the rights of
readers but on the responsibility – may we say even the desire – of the author:
‘Neither legal bans on pornographic representation nor the chilling climate
of censure or social disapproval . . . will prevent serious writers from exploring
the darker areas of human experience. The question is simply: ‘at what cost to
them?’ (1996: 74). With this question in mind we can attempt a reading of that
most neglected of Elizabeth Costello’s lessons, ‘The Problem of Evil’.

Perhaps the paucity of commentary on this lesson has to do with its anoma-

lous nature. Coetzee has spent the better part of his career representing the
abhorrent side of human relations, especially sexual relations: note that we do
not get a representation of intercourse that is not rape until the scene of
Lurie’s patronizing sex with Bev Shaw in Disgrace. In view of this, it may seem

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

odd for Elizabeth to attack Paul West’s book, The Very Rich Hours of Count van
Stauffenberg, which represents the attempted assassination of Hitler, and the
subsequent execution of the plotters, for being ‘obscene’, using the occasion of
a conference in Amsterdam to do so.

The attack is not because Paul West is an inadequate writer. On the contrary,

Costello attacks Paul West and his book precisely because he is a gifted enough
writer to put her, as reader, in the place of the killing of the would-be assassins.
There is a ruthlessness, a relentlessness, to Costello’s own account of West’s
description of their deaths. In quite probably the longest sentence Coetzee has
ever written, she muses about the source of West’s material, imagining witnesses
who write down in detail the fear of the prisoners as they are hung, as they are
told ‘what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run
down their spindly old-man’s legs, how their limp old-man’s penises would
quiver one last time’. Costello repeats what she sees as Paul West’s crime – and
Hitler’s – in that she puts us, the readers, in the very same voyeuristic, contami-
nating space she sees Hitler occupying:

One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a nondescript place that
could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights
so that back in his lair in the forest Adolf Hitler, Commander-in-Chief, would
be able to watch on fi lm their sobbings and then their writhings and then
their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfi ed he had had his
revenge. (2003: 158)

Costello describes her reaction to West’s book:

This is what Paul West had written about, page after page after page, leaving
nothing out, and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with her-
self, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she sat with
her head in her hands. Obscene! She wanted to cry but did not cry because
she did not know at whom the word should be fl ung: at herself, at West, at the
committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes. Obscene
because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because
having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up
and hidden forever in the bowels of the earth. . .. (158–9)

Costello, then, places herself in a conundrum. She wants to convey the sense

that evil exists, and that it is a contaminating force, and that those who repre-
sent it themselves risk contamination, as do their viewers. To do so, however, is
to risk being accused of censorship; to risk being thought ‘old-fashioned’
through her association of evil not simply with acts themselves, but with her
notion that the repetition of those acts through representation extends the
realm of the contaminated, the realm of the evil; and fi nally, to risk alienation.

Writing Desire Responsibly

107

Coetzee, moving to the present tense, as if to acknowledge the question he
poses to himself about how the fi ction might unfold should Costello make her
case, asks: ‘How will Amsterdam react to Elizabeth Costello in her present state?
Does the sturdy Calvinist word evil still have any power among the sensible,
pragmatic, well-adjusted citizens of the New Europe?’ (159). What language
can Costello use that will not register her argument as banal?

Interestingly, we get Costello’s point of view but, unlike the other lessons, we

never hear a voice other than Costello’s, except for that of a question from the
audience about whether Costello responds this way to West’s novel because she
is ‘a weak[er] vessel’ than he is (175). There is no substantial ‘other’ with which
to debate Costello’s point of view: no son, no Nora, no Abraham Stern, no
Blanche to put an opposing argument, or even a different point of view, either
as character in terms of literary form, or orator in thematic terms. Another
conundrum: writing requires hosting the other, without knowing what the
other may be(come); and if the other becomes evil, then the self – even, or
most particularly, the writing self – may become the agent of that evil. Or as
Stephen Watson so aptly puts it in his review of The Master of Petersburg: ‘To
write one has to transgress, to be divided, even double. But to be double is to
open oneself to the possibility [and here Attridge adds, one might say the neces-
sity] of being overtaken by another voice. This voice may be anything but
benign; it may even be that of the Devil himself’ (Watson, ‘The Writer and the
Devil’ cited in Attridge 2004: 129). The newness of the other brings difference,
writing; but if that other is evil, the other that is the writer is subsumed by the
devil himself.

At this stage you may think I am beginning to sound as extreme, as off the

wall, as Costello herself. But Costello does give one practical example of what
she means. She tells us something, she says, she has never told anybody – a con-
tradictory gesture, of course, telling us the secret that is to be kept her own
forever. She tells us of abuse she experienced when she was nineteen, in
Melbourne. She allowed herself to be picked up, went to the man’s fl at, and
then apologized, saying she could not go through with the act of sex. The man
thinks it is a game, then begins to abuse her seriously, so that she ends up with
multiple injuries and a wired jaw:

It was her fi rst brush with evil. She had realized it was nothing less than
that, evil, when the man’s affront subsided and a steady glee in hurting her
took its place. He liked hurting her, she could see it; probably liked it more
than he would have liked sex . . .. By fi ghting him off she had created an
opening for the evil in him to emerge, and it emerged in the form of glee,
fi rst at her pain (‘You like that, do you?’ he whispered as he twisted her
nipples. ‘You like that?’), then the childish, malicious destruction of her
clothes. (166)

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Elizabeth Costello refl ects that what is important about this episode, why she
has remembered it in connection with Paul West’s novel, is the fact that

she has never revealed it to anyone, never made use of it. In none of her sto-
ries is there a physical assault on a woman by a man in revenge for being
refused . . . what happened in the rooming house belongs to her and to her
alone. For half a century the memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg
of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth. She fi nds it good,
it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the
grave. (166)

Once again, of course, Coetzee is revealing it to us. So what does the precious-
ness of this silence represent?

Obviously, Coetzee is not in favour of any crass censorship, as Giving Offense

testifi es. Costello herself realizes that her argument can be seen as some blunt
form of censorship against representations of aggressive acts, and recoils from
this possible judgement of her argument, but nevertheless proceeds to make it.
However, there are other clues to what Coetzee may be up to in his representa-
tions of the relations between the telling of violent acts and the contamination
that may be incurred in doing so. In Giving Offense, he appears to support the
rape victim-survivor who refuses to re-victimize herself by retelling her testi-
mony for the purposes of prosecution because, he argues, the courts may hold
to a discipline of the guilty versus the innocent, but the court of public opinion
has not relinquished a contradictory ‘moral’: that of honour versus shame
(1996: 80).

Coetzee is remarkably prescient of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation

Commission in this respect, when one looks at the narratives of women who
refused to testify to abuse, particularly sexual abuse, for the reason Coetzee
outlines here.

In some measure it is also due to the fact that shame trumps

innocence that Lucy, after her rape in Disgrace, refuses to take her assailants to
court. To the extent that the representation of the rape – be it of Elizabeth
Costello or Lucy – would raise the spectre or the reality of re-victimizing both of
them as shamed – would, in fact, contaminate them despite the fact that they
are victims, and not the perpetrators of the evil infl icted upon them – silence
would seem valuable in their cases; a cost not to be given up lightly, despite the
demands of the other who is both antagonist and muse of the writer.

What, then, of the writer, J. M. Coetzee, who seems in this lesson to be argu-

ing for certain silences on behalf of the writer. Obviously, Coetzee has told
Costello’s secret; but he has not told Lucy’s, to the extent that the rape is told
from Lurie’s, not Lucy’s, perspective. Indeed, Lurie’s attempts to get Lucy to
explain herself, justify her position, are remarkably futile, as are attempts to get
Coetzee to speak of his own private life. In this sense, the risk of betrayal, rather
than that of censorship, appears to drive Coetzee’s pleas for certain silences,

Writing Desire Responsibly

109

despite the remarkable number of perverse desires his fi ction describes and, if
we follow in the way of Elizabeth Costello’s refl ections on West’s book, thereby
enacts.

In exploring devious desire, desire that does not and cannot know itself, in

Coetzee’s fi ction, I am limited by the strategic silences that prevent the author
from betraying too much. Elizabeth Costello presents us with a correlative of
these constructed silences in the blindness she manufactures to obscure her
desire from Paul Rayment. She covers his eyes in a mixture of fl our paste, so
that he cannot see the substitute Marianna she provides for him to have sexual
intercourse with in the place of the unattainable Marijana. She makes the
substitution because she believes that Marianna is an appropriate and realiz-
able vehicle for Rayment’s passion; Marijana is not. Whether one thinks that
Costello, author, has indeed procured the mysterious blind woman from the
elevator for Paul Rayment’s enjoyment, or whether Costello has somehow,
impossibly, substituted herself, is a moot point. The encounter between, on the
one hand, the author, wilfully blind to her character’s desire in her attempts to
seduce him into her idea of who he ‘should’ be and who he ‘should’ desire, and
on the other, the character, wilfully blind to the author’s desires for him, delight-
fully obstructive of them, forms a veritable parody of devious desire as the muse
of fi ction. Under the circumstances, one prefers not to speculate as to the
nature of the desire, devious – perverse, even -- as it may well be, that drives the
critic’s will to write.

Notes

The pre-eminent fi gure of such embodiment can be found in Coetzee’s Foe (1986).
Friday, in the fi nal paragraph of the novel, is rendered by the unnamed narrator
as one who lives in a place that is ‘not a place of words’ but ‘the home of Friday’
(157), where Friday’s corporeal being, although immediately inaccessible to the
narrator precisely because the narrator’s world is that of words, is nevertheless
substantial. Here bodies are not signs of metaphysical otherness; here ‘bodies are
their own signs’ (157). In other words, the body, albeit rendered in words, does
not stand, here, for a construct other than the body.

For a reading of Dusklands as an analysis of relations between despotic mythmakers
and disempowered ‘readers’ see Jolly 1996, pp 110–37.

For a reading of Magda as part and parcel of Coetzee’s parody of the plaasroman
in In the Heart of the Country, see Dovey (1988). Coetzee himself describes the
features of the plaasroman he parodies in White Writing (1988).

This is the fi rst instance in which Coetzee narrates a rape from the perspective of
the woman. In Elizabeth Costello he has the eponymous character describe her rape;
I shall reference this narrative in the conclusion of my reading.

In keeping with Magda’s mode of narration, the rape is told a number of times, so
that the rape is anticipated by the reader in each repetition, creating an effect of
inevitability and endlessness.

110

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

This unfulfi lled desire is represented by Magda’s description of herself as ‘a zero,
null, a vacuum’ (1977b: 2); and as ‘a hole with a body draped around it’ (1977b:
41). Graham (2006) citing Attwell in Doubling the Point (Coetzee 1992), remarks
on what Attwell calls Coetzee’s interest in ‘a poetics of failure’ (Coetzee 1992:
86), highlighting the poetics of failed reciprocity that attend upon both Coetzee’s
reading of Achterberg’s ‘Ballade van de Gasfi tter’ (Coetzee 1977a) and In the
Heart of the Country, both published in 1977.

For a discussion of the implicit censorship or silencing of particular subjects con-
sidered ‘inappropriate’ for fi ctional representation until the liberation of South
Africa from apartheid had been accomplished, see Brink 1998 and Tlali 1998.

For a brief rehearsal of the acidity with which Disgrace was received precisely
because it does not represent the liberated South Africa as hero, see Jolly 2006a.

See my argument against Michael Marais’ reading of Disgrace in Jolly 2006a. This
argument counters two articles of Marais’ on Disgrace (see Marais’ 2000a and
2000b).

See, for example, Head 2006 and Boehmer 2006.

Note that this is, in fact, the core of Coetzee’s critique of the conservative
relations between the censor and censored writer in Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship.

Marianne’s name is, of course, very close to that of the addressee of Paul
Rayment’s passion, Marijana who, like the youth Coetzee’s cousin, is also ‘out of
bounds’, not least because she is married.

In this respect, Dostoevsky’s imagining without bounds, his freedom to write, is
specifi cally related to the perverse capacity to envision Matryona ‘in her ecstasy’
(Coetzee 1994: 76). Attwell, citing Coetzee’s work on Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly,
highlights the fact that Coetzee analyses the nature of the author-ity proposed in
Erasmus, relating it to ‘ek-stasis’. ‘What is unique about Folly’s mode of truth is
its positionality,’ says Attwell (2006: 35): the truth is spoken by a character least
presumed to be able to speak the truth. As such, ‘Folly’s truth entails “a kind of
ek-stasis, a being outside of oneself, being beside oneself, a state in which truth is
known (and spoken) from a position that does not know itself to be in the posi-
tion of truth”’ (Coetzee 1996: 94 cited in Attwell 2006: 35).

See Jolly 2006b.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event.

Chicago: Chicago UP.

Attwell, David (2006) ‘The life and times of Elizabeth Costello: J. M. Coetzee and

the public sphere’, in Jane Poyner (ed.), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public
Intellectual. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, pp. 25–41.

Boehmer, Elleke (2006), ‘Sorry, sorrier, sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, in Jane Poyner (ed.), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public
Intellectual. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, pp. 135–47.

Brink, André (1983), Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege. London: Faber and

Faber.

Writing Desire Responsibly

111

— (1998), ‘Interrogating silence: New possibilities faced by South African litera-

ture’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature,
Apartheid, and Democracy 1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 14–28.

Coetzee, J. M. (1974), Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan.
— (1977a), ‘Achterberg’s “Ballade van de Gasfi tter”: The mystery of I and you’,

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 92, (2), 285–96.

— (1977b), In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg.
— (1990), Age of Iron. New York: Penguin.
— (1992), Doubling the Point: J. M. Coetzee, Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

— (1994), The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker and Warburg and New York:

Viking.

— (1996), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— (1999a), Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg.
— (1999b), The Lives of Animals. With Garber, M. Singer P. and Doniger, W. Ed. Amy

Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP.

— (2002), Youth. London: Secker and Warburg.
— (2003), Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker and Warburg.
— (2005), Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg.
Dovey, Teresa. (1988), The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Craighall: Ad.

Donker.

Graham, Lucy (2006), ‘Textual transvestitism: The female voices of J.M. Coetzee’, in

Jane Poyner (ed.), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, Ohio:
Ohio UP, pp. 217–35.

Head, Dominic (2006), ‘A Belief in Frogs: J. M. Coetzee’s Enduring Faith in

Fiction’, in Jane Poyner (ed.), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, pp. 100–117.

Jolly, Rosemary (1996), Colonization, Violence and Narration in White South African

Writing. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP.

— (2006a), ‘“Going to the Dogs”: Humanity in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of

Animals, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Jane
Poyner (ed.), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, Ohio: Ohio
UP. pp. 148–71.

— (2006b), ‘Haunting the domain of speakability: Women, stigma, and shame’,

paper presented at the Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Refl ecting on Ten
Years of South Africa’s truth and Reconciliation Commission Conference,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 22–26 November 2006.

Marais, Michael (2000a), ‘“Little enough, less than little: nothing”: Ethics, engage-

ment and change in the fi ction of J. M. Coetzee’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46, (1),
159–82.

— (2000b), ‘The possibility of ethical action: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Scrutiny 2, 5,

(1), 57–63.

Tlali, Miriam (1998), ‘“Interview” by Rosemary Jolly’, in Derek Attridge and

Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy
1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 141– 4.

Chapter 8

Literature, History and Folly

Patrick Hayes

In response to the ways in which Coetzee’s writing has at times been felt to be
an excessively ‘literary’ response to the serious political demands made upon
the writer by the confl ict in South Africa, attempts to defend his work have
often emphasized ways in which the literary might itself be taken seriously. In
his 1987 lecture, ‘The Novel Today’, Coetzee argued that the novel is a process
that ‘operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions,
not one that operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in
conclusions that are checkable by history’ (3). Claiming that the demands of
the confl ict in South Africa have forced literature and history into outright
rivalry, on this occasion Coetzee left his audience in no doubt as to which of
these rivals he favoured.

To Coetzee’s claim for literary rivalry we might contrast Derek Attridge’s

more nuanced argument, developed both in The Singularity of Literature and in
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, that literature should be construed as a
pre-eminently ‘ethical’ space whose responsibility in relation to history lies in
its openness to alterity.

Yet Attridge’s reading of Age of Iron – a novel he rightly

identifi es as pivotal to our understanding of Coetzee’s handling of the politics
of representation – is in practice more akin to the logic of rivalry. In Age of Iron,
he argues, Coetzee stages ‘the literary’ through the fi gure of Elizabeth Curren,
a retired professor of classical literature, who sympathizes with the aims of those
who are resisting the South African state, but deplores the violence of their
methods. His account emphasizes Elizabeth’s heroism: not her physical hero-
ism (she does not join in the struggle in any literal way), but the seriousness of
her ethical response to the demands made upon her by ‘the political’.

But how seriously can we take Elizabeth? In the central episode of the book she

is prevailed upon to drive her housekeeper to the township of Guguletu in the
middle of the night; upon arrival she is exposed to a nightmarish scene of politi-
cal violence. Refusing to accept the ready-made moral defi nitions that are offered
her, she responds to what she has seen in her own ethically serious way: a series of
self-lacerating questions culminate in the desolate feeling that she ‘will never be

Literature, History and Folly

113

warm again’ (1990 and 1998: 108). She comes home and falls asleep; upon wak-
ing her sense of bewilderment and desolation remains: ‘I woke up haggard. It was
night again. Where had the day gone?’ (108). Then she walks to the toilet:

Sitting on the seat, his trousers around his knees, his hat on his head, fast
asleep, was Vercueil. I stared in astonishment.

He did not wake; on the contrary, though his head lolled and his jaw hung
open, he slept as sweetly as a babe. His long lean thigh was quite hairless.
(108)

‘Vercueil’ is a vagrant of uncertain identity who has rather mysteriously taken
up residence in Elizabeth’s home. Here we fi nd him at his most ludicrous: his
clownish appearance makes for a literally astonishing interruption of her seri-
ous thoughts. Then she goes downstairs:

The kitchen door stood open and garbage from the overturned bucket was
strewn all over the fl oor. Worrying at an old wrapping paper was the dog.
When it saw me it hung its ears guiltily and thumped its tail. ‘Too much!’
I murmured. ‘Too much!’ The dog slunk out. (108)

Wherever Verceuil and his dog go they make a mess: tripping up, spilling things
over, wallowing in rubbish. And note that this is not a sad and serious old
dog, but a silly young thing, ‘little more than a pup’ (6), always fooling around
and getting into trouble.

For Elizabeth it is utterly exasperating that such clownish goings-on should

interrupt her ethical temper, and like her we may well wonder what these intru-
sive comic oddities are doing in the text. I am going to argue that Age of Iron is
best read alongside Coetzee’s 1992 essay on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1509),
which in fact revises his earlier view that the literary text should position itself
as a rival to history.

Refl ecting upon the complex ways in which Erasmus’s text

negotiates its historical situatedness, Coetzee here attempts to outline the seem-
ingly impossible idea of a ‘nonposition’, which in The Praise of Folly involves
the elaboration of a series of unstable and elusive ironies around the fi gure of
the fool. The ‘power’ of such a text, he explains, lies not in the strength of any
alternative it is posing, but ‘in its weakness – its jocoserious abnegation of big-
phallus status, its evasive (non)position inside/outside the play’ (1996: 103). It
is from an attempt to preserve the distinctiveness of the literary as a mode of
discourse, yet in such a way that does not revert to formulations of rivalry, that
Coetzee turns to folly and the ‘jocoserious’.

To explore this curious idea of a ‘nonpositioned’ writing I must fi rst outline the

peculiar identity of Elizabeth, as it is only by recognizing that she is in fact better
seen as a fool than as a hero that we can begin to appreciate the jocoserious

114

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

energies of this text. Elizabeth’s literary identity is in fact well defi ned in
terms of genre: Age of Iron is made up of an enormous letter to her daughter in
America, and this is the fi rst clue that she should be recognized as a parodic
version of the heroine of the long-outdated genre of the epistolary novel. As
I will show, she embodies this genre much in the same way that Alonso
Quixano, or Don Quixote, another literary fool in the Erasmian tradition,
embodied the equally moribund chivalric romance. Neither of these intertexts
have so far been recognized in scholarly accounts of Coetzee’s novel, yet an
appreciation of them will open up a new understanding of the highly sophisti-
cated ways in which Coetzee chooses to handle the politics of representation.

We know Coetzee was thinking about Don Quixote around the time he began

composition of Age of Iron. His Jerusalem Prize Lecture (1987) draws attention
to the address given two years previously by Milan Kundera, which ‘gave tribute
to the fi rst of all novelists, Miguel Cervantes’ (1992: 98), and emphasized the
value of the novel as a form able to challenge the intolerant certainties of his-
tory. Kundera, of course, had the totalizing political systems of Central and
Eastern Europe in the Cold War years very much in mind; Coetzee, however,
complained that he was constrained from joining Kundera in an equivalent
tribute to the legacy of Cervantes. The writer in Africa, he adverted, unlike the
writer in Europe, cannot draw upon those resources at once aesthetic and
ethical that are, as Kundera put it, ‘being held safe as in a treasure chest in the
history of the novel’ (164). The precise terms of the reason he gives are interest-
ing: Coetzee described the form of the novel as ‘too slow, too old-fashioned, too
indirect to have any but the slightest and most belated effect on the life of the
community or the course of history’, implying that for the writer in South
Africa, the type of truths the novel might be able to tell are as old-fashioned and
irrelevant as the chivalric romance was in the days of Alonso Quixano. For a
South African writer to embrace the novel as a serious rival to history is just
as fantastical and doomed to ignominious failure as Alonso’s embrace of the
chivalric romance.

The relation of this address to Age of Iron will become clear if we refl ect for a

moment upon Cervantes’ comic masterpiece. Alonso read many romances
before madness overcame him, but took as his main literary model Amadís de
Gaula (1508) by Garcí Rodriguez de Montalvo. According to Stephen Gilman,
while the chivalric romance form of the Amadís was still popular by the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century, when Cervantes began to compose Don Quixote,
its popularity ‘resembled that of western romances shortly after the disappear-
ance of [the U.S.] frontier’ (4), which is to say that it spoke, in grandest terms,
of the values and imperatives of the Spain of the reconquista, completed by the
conquest of Granada in 1492, over a hundred years before. Changed times
had produced a literary reaction to romance in the form of the picaresque, fi rst
with the anonymous novella Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), and then with the instant
success and wide publication of Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache (1599):

Literature, History and Folly

115

this genre effectively turned the idealism of romance on its head by replacing
the questing knight with a base-born observer, whose role was to portray every-
thing that was hateful and dismaying about humankind from his ‘dog’s-eye’
view of the world.

Gilman emphasizes the ways in which Don Quixote invites a

metafi ctional reading as a ‘collision of genres’ between the Quixotic idealism of
the old romance form, and the cruder, more prosaic realism of the new pica-
resque, which the deluded and hapless Alonso repeatedly encounters, and
which defeats him every time: Cervantes requires the reader to recognize
Alonso as the parodic incarnation of a moribund (if still much loved) literary
genre. Both Amadís de Gaula and Don Quixote are advanced in years, but
whereas Amadis is miraculously free from the effects of aging, Quixote is
a worn-out old man; instead of Amadis’ fair and noble steed, Quixote has an
old nag, Rocinante (which translates roughly as ‘work-horse previously’);
instead of his deeds winning respect and admiration, Quixote is forced to
observe that he does not occupy the age of chivalry, or as he terms it, quoting
Hesiod, the ‘golden age’, but is instead faced with an ‘age of iron’, an age in
which his values and his genre have no hold:

Friend Sancho, you must know, that, by the will of heaven, I was born in this
age of iron, to revive in it that of gold, or, as people usually express it, ‘the
golden age’.

If the reference to Rocinante did not suggest the relation between Cervantes’
Don Quixote and Coetzee’s Age of Iron (Elizabeth jokingly describes her decrepit
Hillman car as ‘willing but old, like Rocinante’ (18)), then Quixote’s repeated
invocations of the ‘age of iron’ he occupies of course must.

Elizabeth drives

out in her own ‘Rocinante’ to confront the new reality that by turns ignores
and despises her, just as Quixote sallies out on Rocinante to confront his ‘age of
iron’, the new and crudely material world of the picaresque, which mocks and
bewilders him. Like Quixote, Elizabeth is not only a ‘fossil from the past’ (72),
but ‘a dodo’ (28); moreover, by her own reckoning ‘the last of the dodos’ (28).
The difference between these two dodos is that whereas Quixote wished to
return the present age of iron to an age of gold, the age in which his genre of
chivalric romance was more meaningful, Elizabeth wishes to return to a newer
age, an age in fact opened up by the story of Alonso Quixano himself in 1605.
This is what she calls ‘the age of clay’ or ‘the age of earth’ (50), an age in which
things are not fi xed and certain, but malleable and open to doubt. It is the
age in which individuals and the importance of their ethical experience rose to
pre-eminence in literature: Kundera’s age of the novel.

Just as any reading of Don Quixote that aims to appreciate Cervantes’ Erasmian

play with the institution of literature in seventeenth-century Spain depends
upon the reader’s skill in being able to recognize the hero as the embodiment
of a moribund and old-fashioned – if nonetheless much loved – literary genre,

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so does a reading that wishes truly to take the measure of Age of Iron depend
upon the reader’s ability to recognize Elizabeth Curren as a throwback, a fool
stuck in a bygone age, a museum piece, or even ‘a museum that ought to be in
a museum’ (190) – not ‘Curren(t)’ at all. Coetzee fashions her as a heroine
from the form of the epistolary novel, ‘a fossil from the past’ (72) if ever there
was one, which is as soft a target for critics of the novel’s claim to cultural author-
ity as was the chivalric romance for Cervantes: ‘too slow, too old-fashioned, too
indirect’ to be considered a serious rival to the ways of knowing and being now
in the ascendant. The foundationary Amadis de Gaula of the epistolary novel was
of course Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and a great deal of hopeless fool-
ishness is carried over from this ‘old fossil’ straight into Elizabeth’s letters,
altered only by the chill air of parody.

Perhaps primary among the folly is her mystifi ed belief in the privileged

status of epistolary communication as a peculiarly direct and honest form, capa-
ble of literally embodying the heroine. Pamela feels she can vouch for the truth
of her writing unproblematically, because ‘tho’ I don’t remember all I wrote,
yet I know I wrote my Heart’ (230); symbolically, she keeps her letters hidden
on her body, either stuffed into her bosom or sewn into her clothes, as if they
really were a physical part of her. Disconcerting, perhaps, to fi nd Elizabeth
maintaining exactly the same mystifi ed nonsense: ‘day by day I render myself
into words and pack the words into the page like sweets . . . Words out of my
body, drops of myself, for her to unpack in her own time, to take in, to suck,
to absorb’ (9). These words certainly are ‘old-fashioned drops’, and this ludi-
crous idea of incarnate language, spread on thickly with a glutinous sentimen-
tality, is never surrendered by Elizabeth: long after her crisis of self-doubt at
Guguletu and her advice to distrust what she says, Elizabeth is still talking about
‘this letter from elsewhere (so long a letter!), truth and love together at last’ in
which ‘every you that I pen love fl ickers and trembles like Saint Elmo’s fi re’
(129), or insisting that ‘these words, as you read them, enter you and draw
breath again’ (131).

Habermas has argued that the creation and consumption of novels like the

phenomenally successful Pamela was important to the creation of the forms of
intimacy and privacy that would underpin the various institutions of the emer-
gent bourgeois property-holding democracy.

Like Pamela herself, the violation

of the intimate sphere of her house and its environs leads to some of Elizabeth’s
greatest exasperation. The return of Bheki and then the addition of John to the
house leads to an irritable questioning of who is staying where, to which Bheki’s
taunt, ‘Must we have a pass to come in here?’ (47) truly fi nds the mark. She is
later enraged upon discovering that John has been sleeping in her car, another
cherished private space:

‘I hear you and your friend have been sleeping in my car. Why didn’t you ask
my permission?’

Literature, History and Folly

117

Silence fell. Bheki did not look up. Florence went on cutting bread.
‘Why didn’t you ask my permission? Answer me!’
The little girl stopped chewing, stared at me.
Why was I behaving in this ridiculous fashion? (58)

As was the case with the ‘old-fashioned’ nature of her supposedly incarnate
language, so is her judgement here a true one: she does cut an unqualifi edly
‘ridiculous’ fi gure vis-à-vis the moral and communal priorities of the prevailing
ethnic confl ict when she insists on the type of privacy and personal space that it
was Pamela’s fi ght to win from Mrs Jewkes and Mr. B.

Perhaps even more telling is Pamela and Elizabeth’s shared commitment

to what Ruth Perry, in Women, Letters and the Novel, refers to as ‘the agonised
individual consciousness’ (116) as the basis for ethical action. What continually
surprises Mr. B about Pamela is her lack of recognition for the imperatives of
his essentially feudal schema of ownership and obligation, and her reliance
instead upon an inner light, as evidenced by her letters’ continual investigation
of moral feeling. Over time this inwardness of Pamela’s, and indeed its physi-
cal incarnation in her letters grows to fascinate him until he is ‘awaken’d to
see more Worthiness in you than ever I saw in any Lady in the World’ (84).
Equally, even in the most pressing situations, Elizabeth characteristically refuses
to accept ready-made moral formulae: at Guguletu, when she is asked by
Thabane to pronounce upon what she has seen, she falters and refuses, explain-
ing that while these are ‘terrible sights’ that ‘are to be condemned’, she ‘cannot
denounce them in other people’s words. I must fi nd my own words, from
myself’ (98–9).

However, this last example is as revealing of the differences between Pamela

and Elizabeth as it is of their continuity. To those familiar with the conventions
of the epistolary genre, it is ludicrous to feature a mother as the heroine: from
the Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678) through to Lady Wortley
Montagu or Clarissa herself, the heroine is invariably a nubile young girl, often
of uncertain social status, but, crucially, vulnerable to the wiles and ruses of
rogue sexual desire. There are no mothers as heroines (as far as I am aware) in
the entire history of the genre until Age of Iron, where, in as grotesque a parody
of the epistolary heroine as ‘the knight of the sad countenance’ was of the
chivalric, the heroine is not only a mother, but has a disgusting and decaying
body. (Is it mere coincidence that Pamela Andrews’ mother was also called
Elizabeth?) Ruth Perry emphasizes the centrality of sexual desire as a motive
force in the literary innovativeness of the genre:

Most early epistolary novels duplicate a woman’s consciousness by providing
her letters, and then allowing the audience to get inside it by reading
those letters. The fact that the climax of the plot generally also had to do with
‘getting inside’ a woman suggests that the sexual act works as a metaphor for

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

the more important literary innovation – the getting inside of a woman’s
consciousness by the writer and by the reader. (131)

This is especially the case in Pamela: recall the famous scene in which Mr. B
tries to undress Pamela ostensibly to get to the letters she has sewn into her
clothes and stuffed into her bosom. Elizabeth’s disgusting old body is as
undesirable as Pamela’s beautiful young body (she is between fi fteen and six-
teen years old) is compelling; and by extension, her words – the whole inner
drama of the ‘agonised individual conscience’ – are as undesired as Pamela’s
are treasured, sought for, and fought over. Elizabeth comes to recognize that
‘Mr. Thabane does not weigh what I say. It has no weight to him. Florence does
not even hear me. To Florence what goes on in my head is a matter of complete
indifference’ (163) – but quite the opposite was the case with Pamela’s words,
which could not have become more infl uential over the course of her story, as
she reforms Mr. B and ineluctably progresses into the higher echelons of
society. Elizabeth’s insistence on the value of the individual soul over the group
bond and the innocence of childhood over the urge to commit simply pass
unweighed, have no more truck with proceedings than Quixote’s insistence
that master Andres be not beaten by his cruel employer. It is precisely within
the terms of the epistolary equivalence of body and word when Elizabeth
laments: ‘I remember, when the boy was hurt, how abundantly he bled, how
rudely. How thin, by comparison, my bleeding onto the paper here. The issue
of a shrunken heart’ (137).

Having now established the parodic, or ‘jocose’, side of this jocoserious text,

we must now join it with the serious, and again Don Quixote comes to our aid.
In the closing words of the Jerusalem prize address Coetzee drops a hint:

The story of Alonso Quixano or Don Quixote – though not, I add, Cervantes’
subtle and enigmatic book – ends with the capitulation of the imagination to
reality, with a return to La Mancha and death. (99)

What is it, then, about a ‘subtle and enigmatic book’ that might allow the Quix-
otic fool to evade this onerous fate?

As I have suggested, Don Quixote stands in a tradition of writing about folly, or

even writing by Folly, beginning with Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, in which the
position of the fool is exploited within a series of textual processes that create a
particularly unstable irony – one which playfully troubles prevalent ideas of
what counts as the serious. Whereas in ‘The Novel Today’ Coetzee had described
the relationship between the novel and history as one of rivalry, to stage the
novel instead as a recognizable fool, and thereby to decline what the Erasmus
essay called a ‘big-phallus status’, is fi rst and foremost to shelter the text from
the accusation that it is ‘taking sides’. Indeed, a reading of Age of Iron that
emphasized the allegorical thrust of the story would be hard pressed indeed to

Literature, History and Folly

119

discover any ‘big-phallus’ assertion of the power of literature to outface the
truths of history: Elizabeth Curren is not only cast in the outdated form of
the epistolary novel, but is repeatedly humiliated, increasingly ostracized, and
made ever more painfully aware, as she approaches her death by cancer, of how
her ethnic identity implicates her in patterns of oppression that make her not
only irrelevant but, in the eyes of many, actively pernicious. However, Quixote’s
great fortune was to pass through the world with the clownish fi gure of
Sancho Panza by his side, Sancho being suffi ciently down-to-earth to mock his
more extravagant follies, and practical enough to make sure Quixote physically
survives his encounters with the brutishly picaresque world. Perhaps most
importantly, Sancho is gullible enough to be impressed, at times, by his master’s
fi ne speeches.

We must now consider Coetzee’s clown.

Elizabeth and Verceuil (and his young dog) are the Quixote and Sancho of

our Age of Iron: just as Sancho looks after Quixote’s old nag, Verceuil is always
called upon to drive Elizabeth’s Rocinante, the aged but beloved Hillman.
Recall the episode to which I referred in our earlier discussion of Elizabeth‘s
persistence in the assumptions of the epistolary novel, where the demand for
privacy had led her into taking the tone of a prison-guard:

‘Why didn’t you ask my permission? Answer me!’
The little girl stopped chewing, stared at me.
Why was I behaving in this ridiculous fashion? (58)

It is a truly Quixotic moment, in which Elizabeth’s impulses seem thoroughly
crushed by the dignifi ed silence of the black characters. But before we can draw
a line under it and irreversibly condemn her as an idiot, in come Vercueil and
the dog: ‘immediately the tension was broken’, we are told, and Elizabeth is
rescued from her slide into a particularly unpleasant form of lunacy. ‘The dog
was leaping up at him, bounding, frisking, full of joy. It leapt at me too, streak-
ing my skirt with its wet paws. How silly one looks fending off a dog!’ (59).
A small incident perhaps, but not an untypical one. What the dog has done
is effectively kept open a space in the text for the rivalry between the haggard
old form of the novel and the iron-like force of history to continue, to prevent
it from being decided: the bounding and frisking and general silliness of
Verceuil’s dog protect Elizabeth at the moment she needs it most, marking
her off from the serious judgement about to be remorselessly applied. She
becomes momentarily too ‘silly’ to be worth condemning, the judgement upon
her slips off in the presence of the clown. And inconsequent though she has
just become, she does not merely remain so: she has survived the scene, and her
story continues.

As with Sancho in Don Quixote, Vercueil’s presence does not only produce

bathos. Right at the end of Part II, Elizabeth narrates her quest to the police
station in Caledon Square in order to lay charges against the policemen who

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

knocked down John and Bheki. Of course, as she pathetically recognizes, in the
cold air of the police station her words seem merely a piece of ‘liberal-humanist
posturing’ (85), a grand rhetoric (‘ You make me feel ashamed,’ I told them’)
that falls fl at and makes her look ‘such a fool’. And she does look like a fool:
what are the value and weight of her words and her inevitable tears in this situa-
tion? Like the perpetually lachrymose Pamela, she is now ‘suddenly on the edge
of tears again’, but nonetheless, back in the car with Vercueil, she embarks
again on another elevated ethical peroration:

‘Perhaps I should simply accept that that is how one must live from now on:
in a state of shame. Perhaps shame is nothing more than the name for the
way I feel all the time. The name for the way in which people live who would
prefer to be dead.’
Shame. Mortifi cation. Death in life.
There was a long silence.
‘Can I borrow ten rand?’ said Vercueil. ‘My disability comes through on
Thursday. I’ll pay you back then.’ (86)

I quote at length because of the particularly protean nature of this text,
and the complex back-and-forth it stages between the serious and the comic.
Here Elizabeth’s words are all spoken in report to Vercueil, who sits in the
parked car on Buitenkant Street. Buitekant is the Afrikaans word for ‘outside’,
literally made up of buite (out) and kant (side), and Buitenkant Street – Outside
Street – on which is situated the Castle, is so named because it formerly marked
the boundary between what was then the Cape Colony and the rest of Africa. As
Coetzee notes in ‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’, Erasmus adopted Terminus,
god of boundaries, as his personal emblem. Typical of Vercueil to be patrolling
the boundary, but upon which side do Elizabeth’s words fall – the foolish or the
serious? Across the road, in Caledon Square, Elizabeth’s words made a total
‘fool’ of her. But here in the car with Vercueil they sit differently. The grand
self-condemnations (‘Shame. Mortifi cation. Death in life’) pass into one of
Vercueil’s long silences. But does the silence only mean he is not listening – that
Elizabeth is simply irrelevant? He then asks to borrow money, which is of course
amusing coming so hard upon the high seriousness claimed by (if never quite
granted to) Elizabeth’s speech. But there are two particular aspects of this scene
that we should not ignore. First, that Vercueil’s request does indeed make the
scene a mildly funny one, and not merely risible (which it had been, according
to Elizabeth’s report, in Caledon Square) and that whereas something that is
risible is simply dismissed, something that has a funny side is not necessarily
totally without signifi cance; secondly, that this transition into Vercueil’s comic
request comes after a silence, which may be read as a respectful silence that
allows Elizabeth’s words space to breathe and settle, to fi nd some weight. Vercueil
is elsewhere from time to time apparently quite interested in Elizabeth’s words,
not least when she begins to talk about the literary tradition, and thus one of

Literature, History and Folly

121

the boundaries we must respect, if we are to play along with this jocoserious
text, is to withhold from prejudging the meaning of his silence. This is a
complicated thought, but what is happening in the text is indeed complex:
Elizabeth’s words, the cracked old voice of a particularly moribund literary
form, clearly do not hold centre-stage, as she would wish them to, but neither
are they simply shunted off-stage, as the certainties of history would wish them
to be. By becoming less serious in the car with Verceuil, her words paradoxically
acquire a kind of strength they did not otherwise possess.

I have only been able to point to a couple of short examples of how Age of

Iron tries to cultivate a ‘nonposition’; a fuller analysis would go on to consider
many other passages of the text, including Vercueil’s abruptly curtailed play
with Florence’s children, his dancing to the national anthem (‘Don’t be silly,
Vercueil’ Elizabeth crossly tells him (181)), and crucially his broader role as her
‘shadow husband’ (189). If, as Ruth Perry argued, the epistolary novel associ-
ated the desirability of the heroine’s body with the desirability of what she had
to say, perhaps as ‘Mrs. V’ (190) in bed with Vercueil at the end, in this bizarre
yet poignant version of a novelistic romantic fi nale, Elizabeth may indeed have
found her passage to seriousness. Yet how seriously can we take this ending?
Vercueil ‘does not know how to love . . . He does not know how to love as a boy
does not know how to love. Does not know what zips and buttons and clasps to
expect. Does not know what goes where’ (196). Like the text itself, Vercueil
makes no claim to ‘big-phallus status’.

‘What matters’, Coetzee explained in the interview in Doubling the Point, ‘is

that the contest is staged, that the dead have their say, even those who speak
from a totally untenable historical position’ (250). In Age of Iron there are some
clear limits on the extent to which Elizabeth’s voice might stake its claim. For
instance, when she asks Vercueil to squire her to Guguletu, that place in which
political violence and the morally compelling communal reactions it invites are
at their most intense, all we get from Vercueil is a fart (‘he broke wind’) and a
curt refusal (‘“Fuck off,” he mumbled’) (88). And of course without her
Sancho, Elizabeth staggers from Guguletu harried, close to defeat, and with the
front window of her ‘Rocinante’ Hillman car now smashed in. But as I have sug-
gested, while she is certainly forced into a weaker status in Coetzee’s text than
the ‘age of clay’ would have granted her, this ‘subtle and enigmatic’ book also
fi nds ways in which her discourse might survive. Through the ministrations of
Vercueil and his young dog Elizabeth keeps going, never climbing too high, but
never collapsing entirely.

Notes

‘Reading a work of literature entails opening oneself to the unpredictable, the
future, the other, and thereby accepting the responsibility laid upon one by the
work’s singularity and difference . . . In a sense, the ‘literary’ is the ethical.’ Derek
Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago, 2004) 111.

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’, Giving Offense (Chicago, 1996) 83–103. Coetzee

did not wish ‘The Novel Today’ to be reprinted in Doubling the Point, the 1992
collection of his literary-critical work.

Cervantes was later to write a parody of the genre, Dialogue of the Dogs, literalizing
this metaphor by featuring two dogs as picaros, worrying about whether the fact of
their ‘dogness’ was affecting their good judgement of the social scene they
observed.

There are repeated references to Alonso Quixano’s regret that he occupies an
‘age of iron’: see especially 77, 142, 151, 481.

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 43–57.

Stephen Gilman argues for the importance of Sancho within Cervantes’s design,
as ‘a sort of human buffer state between his master and the stony implacability of
what was out there in the world’ (91–3). See also Auerbach’s account of Sancho in
Mimesis (2003): ‘Sancho is his consolation and his direct opposite, his creature
and yet an independent fellow being who holds out against him and prevents his
madness from locking him up as thought in solitary confi nement’ (353).

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Auerbach, Erich (2003), Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cervantes, Miguel de (1994), Don Quixote. Trans. Charles Jarvis. Oxford: OUP.
Coetzee, J. M. (1988), ‘The novel today’, Upstream, 6, (1), 2–5.
—(1990, 1998), Age of Iron. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1998.

—(1992), Doubling the Point. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard

University Press.

—(1996), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gilman, Stephen (1989), The Novel According to Cervantes. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry

into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of
Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kundera, Milan (1988), The Art of the Novel. London: Faber & Faber.
Perry, Ruth (1980), Women, Letters and the Novel. New York: AMS Press.
Richardson, Samuel (1999), Pamela. Oxford: OUP.

Chapter 9

Queer Bodies

Elleke Boehmer

This essay begins with what might be termed Coetzee’s signature synedoche –
the memorably smooth and slim legs of Afrikaans/Coloured boys featured
towards the start of Boyhood: A Memoir (1997). The reader might not at fi rst
notice how very attractive and smooth these legs are to the young John were it
not that within a few pages of describing their fascination he returns to the
experience. He returns to go over the legs again, as if to enjoy and to perfect
them further. The fi rst occurrence is worth quoting in full because it draws
out a number of key elements that this essay will further explore. First and
foremost, the legs are represented as disassociated, even disembodied signifi ers
of an almost ineffable erotic beauty. Putting aside the oblique reference to
John’s feelings of exultation following the wrestling matches with his friends
Greenberg and Goldstein in the park, this refl ection on legs represents, signifi -
cantly, the narrator’s fi rst open acknowledgement of desire.

He likes to gaze at slim, smooth brown legs in tight shorts. Best of all he loves
the honey tan legs of boys with blond hair. The most beautiful boys, he is sur-
prised to fi nd, are in the Afrikaans classes, as are the ugliest . . . Afrikaans
children are almost like Coloured children, he fi nds, unspoiled and thought-
less, running wild. . . .

Beauty and desire: he is disturbed by the feelings that the legs of these boys,
blank and perfect and inexpressive, create in him. What is there that can be
done with legs beyond devouring them with one’s eyes. What is desire for ?

The naked sculptures in the Children’s Encyclopedia affect him in the same way:
Daphne pursued by Apollo; Persephone ravished by Dis. It is a matter of
shape, of perfection of shape. He has an idea of the perfect human body.
When he sees that perfection manifested in white marble, something thrills
inside him; a gulf opens up; he is on the edge of falling. (Coetzee 1997: 56–7)

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

As is clear from this quotation, when the lean, tanned legs of the boys are fi rst

introduced they are androgynously coded, even if quickly resolved into young
male form. Conversely, when human bodily perfection is granted female iden-
tity, it is the non-human identity of Greek goddesses carved in stone. It remains
consistent in Coetzee that women, too, may be the bearers of lean sculpted
legs, their single most eroticized feature in his work, but that women’s bodies
normally tend to an unattractive, un-Grecian softness, fl oppiness, and mess,
also associated with spillage, leakage, and waste. Even in the recent 2005 novel
Slow Man, the desired Marijana’s ‘shapely’ ‘smooth, brown’ legs are contrasted
with the uncontrollable, unmistakably womanly squishiness of Marianna, Paul
Rayment’s one-off escort arranged by Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee 2005: 149, 186).
This tendency to squishiness and mess equates with that which, with reference
to his teacher Mrs Oosthuizen in Boyhood, John calls ‘outpourings’ (B 9). In
Lesson 5 of Elizabeth Costello (2004), a novel that underscores the link between
the Greeks, well-formed male limbs, and the study of pure form, the term is
‘exuding’: ‘The Greeks do not exude. The one who exudes is Mary of Nazareth’
(EC 140, 149).

Still working within this visual and erotic economy of desire, the young John

after a mere couple of paragraphs of the refl ection on legs in Boyhood, imagines
that babies are born from the anus, ‘neat and clean and white’, and not from
any other neighbouring orifi ce as his schoolmates believe. Coming so soon
after his remarkable admission to an early adolescent love of Grecian form,
with all the homoerotic connotations that he will know this bears, the image
forms an extraordinarily open, perhaps even playful, admission of a certain
kind of childish solace to be derived from the anus. This is accompanied by
an interesting rejection of dark, guttural words to do with the backside, and,
simultaneously, as matches a confi guration of Grecian and anal desire, the
cancellation, albeit from the perspective of the child, of the vagina, which in
Youth (2002) will bring mainly mess and complication. In Elizabeth Costello, by
contrast, the vagina, from the point of a re-fi ctionalized Leopold Bloom, is
merely a question mark on the body of Artemis, a question which leads on to
the perennial question in Coetzee about the relationship of aesthetics to the
real world (EC 190). There will be occasion later in this essay to return to these
fi gurations of the female body.

Now to the second description of young male legs in Boyhood, which here

unequivocally belong to a single Coloured boy. At the beginning of the chapter
immediately following the description of clean anal birth, the young John is
traversing a strip of public ground with his mother, feeling self-conscious, like a
scuttling beetle, when a Coloured boy crosses their path. There is nothing
unusual about the boy and yet the sight of him for John is momentous. He
experiences feelings of bursting and a loss of control which correspond to the
sensation of falling induced by the Afrikaans boys’ legs. He is overwhelmed, in
other words, by an experience of un-quantifi able, irrefutable desire. Again it is

Queer

Bodies

125

the combination of tight shorts and slim, beautiful legs that produces this effect:
‘There are hundreds of boys like him, thousands, thousands of girls too in short
frocks that show off their slim legs. He wishes he had legs as beautiful as theirs.
With legs like that he would fl oat across the earth as this boy does, barely touch-
ing it’ (B 60). John becomes lost in a stream of thoughts on innocence and
bodily perfection contrasted with the shame and darkness of sexual delight.
This then leads to a visceral confrontation with the word perversion, which he
attaches to himself, whereas the Coloured boy’s body seems newly sprung from
its ‘shell’. Perfection, homoerotic perfection, once again, is not of woman born.
The heterosexual body possibly is.

Coetzee’s tellingly excessive erotic description of the body, especially the

young male body, in his fi rst memoir cannot but strike the reader as provoca-
tive. His fascination with those legs, that process of going over them, the open
admission of perversion, draws attention to something not much observed in
his work, especially his later work, which forms the focus of this essay. There is
not only the prominence of the legs – a prominence that suggestively points up
the emphasis he places elsewhere on thin, lean, strong (sometimes tanned,
sometimes white) legs. There is also the fact that the template for this fi gure
of desire tends to be boys’ legs. The handful of exceptions to this in the mem-
oirs includes, in Boyhood, his sympathetic cousin Agnes who is seen as soft yet
has slim brown legs, and the woman neighbour in Plumstead newly arrived
from England who spends her days tanning her long white legs (B 135). In
Youth there is the blonde girlfriend Caroline from Cape Town, whom he
re-encounters in London (and mentions in almost the same breath as his expe-
rience of being picked up by a man) (Y 78–9). At the tail-end of their affair, they
cycle in the country close to Bognor Regis: ‘Her blonde hair fl ashes, her long
legs gleam as she turns the pedals; she looks like a goddess’ (Y 109). Again, as
in the reference to Artemis and Bloom from Elizabeth Costello, we fi nd the associ-
ation between sculpted legs and deity. In all three cases the female legs arguably
spring to notice because of how they conform to a model that is not marked for
femininity. Slow Man’s ‘dreamboat’ Drago Jokic, son of Paul Rayment’s beloved
Marijana, is several times described both as well-formed and as descended from
the gods, in touch with the angels (SM 42, 182, 190).

As is the case for most instances of bodily synecdoche, a critic is tempted to

read the narrator Coetzee’s adored legs as symptoms, fetishes of desire, possibly
even, as he himself suggests, as signifi ers of perversion. As early in Boyhood as the
description of Rob Hart caned by the outpouring Miss Oosthuizen, the young
John has prepared the ground for this perception. He has felt attracted to Rob
Hart, he observes, to the world of sex and beating that he represents (B 9). He
is, he refl ects when speaking of his unusual affi nity for the Russians in the
Cold War, one of those who always inhabits a secret. He compares himself to a
trapdoor spider, hiding, living in the dark (B 28). Joining together this trail
of signifi ers, to secrecy, holes in the ground, sex, it becomes apparent that

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Coetzee post-Age of Iron, certainly the Coetzee of the two cryptic memoirs,
demonstrates a new interest in aspects of the eroticized male body, if of the
smoother, more lithe, more feminine kind. He toys, in other words, though it
may only be a toying, with queering, with modes of queering himself. So – to
offer another example – he evokes strong memories of the young Coloured
boy Eddie who comes to help his mother, who is as old as he is. He speaks of
Eddie’s wiriness and strength, his smell, his fascinating gyrations in the bath
(B 74–6). By contrast his father’s mature male body is embarrassing and disgust-
ing to him (B 109, and elsewhere). The boy John observes that he does not
know how to behave towards grown men, whether to court their approval or to
offer resistance (B 132).

For a writer usually assumed to be unquestioningly heterosexual – witness

the relative paucity of queer readings of his work – post-1994 Coetzee appears
to allow himself considerable leeway in dwelling upon, gentling, fondling in
script, if not male bodies, then androgynous parts of male bodies. This while he
intermittently associates his understanding of passion with tightness, smooth-
ness, self-containment. If romantic love, as he writes, is soft and soppy, he is
‘of stone’ (Y 121, 123). At the same time, especially in Youth, he at times quails
before, and turns away in guilt and half-disguised revulsion from manifesta-
tions of bodily femaleness. If he (the narrative consciousness) cannot explicitly
locate homosexual desire within himself, or so the incident with the gay man in
Youth appears to suggest, he does by virtue of omission, by implication, enter-
tain the possibility of a queer eroticism.

By thus surveying the lineaments of queer desire, the always-oblique Coetzee

has responded, perhaps ironically, always after his own fashion, to an edict of
his times. That edict was famously framed in Albie Sachs’s 1989 ANC in-house
paper in which, inter alia, he called for the banning of the phrase ‘culture is
a weapon of struggle’ (Sachs 1996: 239–48). Coetzee has responded, that is,
dissidently, waywardly, perversely, queerly, experimenting with the confl icted
signifi cations of being at once male and ‘arty’ in the South African context
(Dollimore 1991). Sachs in the in-house paper also of course controversially
suggested that with the demise of apartheid South African writers should write
less of apartheid and more about love, once a politically ‘irrelevant’ topic.
Coetzee has taken up Sachs’s challenge with characteristic defi ance, therefore,
responding by seeming not to respond, by opening up the wider, forbidden
spectrum of love, specifi cally if codedly of queer love, till relatively recently
virtually taboo in South African fi ction and a classic source of ‘giving offence’
(Coetzee 1996). True, each one of the 1997–2005 texts – Boyhood, Youth,
Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello – make heteronormative assumptions with respect to
the main characters. This is most obvious in Disgrace, in Lurie’s dumbfounded
fascination as to what the lesbian Lucy might do with her lover, but such assump-
tions also subtend Paul Rayment’s speculations as to the ‘husky’ Drago’s
attractiveness to girls (See Boehmer 2002). Yet even as the novels draw their

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127

heteronormative conclusions, each also admits of the dissident, amorphous,
free-wheeling, and non-object-directed aspects of desire, including of queer
desire. This admission, I will later submit, comes to a point of at-once-crisis-and-
resolution in the cross-dressing or cross-embodying performed in Elizabeth
Costello, which is centrally what that essay-as-novel is about. Thereafter, in the
meditation on the maimed self that is Slow Man, erotic interest in human shape-
liness (masculine and feminine) is relentlessly, even perversely recuperated
into the framework of rule-bound intimacy that is the family. Here, practical
care, a ‘diminished’ love, is all that is fi nally available as a poultice for the
wanting heart (SM 113).

In the course of my further reading of parts of Boyhood, Youth, and, fi nally,

Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s troubled interest in clean-limbed, sculpted, leggy
Grecian bodies will continue to form the focus of the discussion. My concern
will be to consider how self-conscious and choreographed the lineaments of
(seemingly) queer desire are in this writer who is in general so highly self-
conscious and so very aware of form. Essentially my question is: does John
Coetzee the writerly subject know how queer he in fact allows himself to appear
to be? Is he aware of how dissident he is? By virtue of his giving away as much as
he does in this respect in Boyhood, he does not seem to notice how much of his
queer secret – or queer aesthetic – he is betraying. Indeed, by defi nition, the
queer Coetzee cannot be as self-aware in this respect as he often is in other
areas. The queer body, as in Caravaggio interpreted by Bersani, is an enigmatic
body; it presents a ‘provocative unreadability’, something like a Grecian statue’s
utterly desirable yet inaccessible alabaster legs (Bersani and Dutoit 1998: 2,
8, 12). Boys’ perfectly honed, parthogenetically generated legs in Boyhood,
I want to suggest, possibly expose even more than they conceal. That is to
say, there may be an encrypted eroticism – an eroticism blocked by a mystery,
an unacknowledged homoeroticism in fact – in Coetzee’s trademark willing-
ness to reveal a little, never too much. In Plumstead, he makes friends with
Theo Stavropoulos, rumoured to be ‘a moffi e, a queer’, his name not by chance
it seems signifying God. He likes Theo’s suavity, his resistance to conformity, his
resilience, his, dare I say it, Greek style. Is this simply because Theo’s qualities
correspond to his own feminine if not effeminizing interest in elegance and the
arts, or is there something more explicitly if codedly Greek to his attraction?
‘He would like to do battle for Theo’, he archly writes (B 150).

Having posed the question of queerness I am however anxious not merely to

seek to ‘out’ the writer J. M. Coetzee, whether aesthetically or in the real world.
I want rather to ask what such queerness might mean to this writer. Why should
he dabble in queering himself, he who in his two ambiguous memoirs is so very
troubled by his closeness to his mother and the many effeminate tendencies
which alienate him from the beloved masculine environment of his father’s
family’s farm? Is it the case, as the critic Brenna Munro has asked in a study of
the new South Africa’s ‘coming out narratives’, that Coetzee in a novel like

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Disgrace is interested along with Gordimer in the ‘unmaking’ and disorientation
of whiteness (Munro 2004)? Is he concerned to explore the reinvention of
ethnic identities, national/family structures, and class alignments (as again in
Slow Man), for which process gayness is both a catalyst and a metaphor? Or,
given that the queer Lucy is never really centre-stage in his most explicitly post-
apartheid novel, Disgrace, is Coetzee as ever more interested in the epistemo-
logical questions of identity which queerness, among other topics, allows him to
raise? A queer consciousness occupies that cusp between cold reason, the mas-
culine domain, and embodiment, where femininity resides, which so preoccu-
pies him in Elizabeth Costello. Women, says Sister Blanche in that novel, live in
proximity to the ground; inhabit fully, entirely, the places of agony and desire.
In her unwritten confession to her sister, Elizabeth Costello confi rms exactly
this judgement.

In her Epistemology of the Closet and other work, Eve Sedgwick reminds us that

queer desire refers to excess, that which transgresses fi xed choices and defi ni-
tions. Queer is ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and
resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of
anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to sig-
nify monolithically’. And: ‘[q]ueer suggests possibilities for organizing around
a fracturing of identity’ (Sedgwick 1990: 8, 9, 27. See also Fuss 1991). A queer
reading, far from being paranoid, ferreting out hole-and-corner implications, is
interested therefore in those moments where, turning again to the terms and
sight-lines of Leo Bersani, the body at once presents and withdraws itself; where
desire involves a continual interplay of self-exposure and self-concealment. A
queer reading is not concerned about eviscerating the erotic secret, that which
now solicits, now refuses, symbolization. It is committed rather to collaborating
with wayward movements of half-expressed desire; desire which cannot be
acknowledged in so many words, or resolved into single object-choices. Accord-
ing to such a reading therefore the boyish legs the young Coetzee lingers over
are almost quintessentially queer, do not clearly signify one sex, or resolve into
a particular sex act. Instead they suggest interrogative ways of probing, perhaps,
new kinds of belief and forms of embodiment. What is by contrast of relatively
little interest in terms of my reading is that aforementioned incident in Youth
where John allows himself to be picked up in order to fi nd out whether he is
homosexual; or how he is to be categorized vis-à-vis the sexual divide. The queer
Coetzee, I’d want to suggest, is not particularly bothered about such categories,
even though his refusal of them does not escape gender stereotyping. Indeed it
may be that at certain points of tension, as in Elizabeth Costello, his subtle queer-
ing slides over into a far from subtle misogyny.

To turn now to Youth, a self-conscious portrait of the artist or poet as a young

man which is more openly and tenaciously than Boyhood preoccupied through-
out with desire. John wants to be a poet, the memoir’s syllogism runs, and the

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129

poet, specifi cally the male poet, is driven by a transfi guring desire. Therefore he,
John, is in quest of desire (Y 29, 66). In reality however – and in this lies the
unlikely humour of the book, its queer, if not misogynist joke – sex throughout
Youth is mostly unsatisfactory, degrading, uncomfortable, most obviously so
when it involves a direct encounter with the seepages and effl uvia of a woman.
In general, women in this text, other than Caroline, briefl y, on her bicycle, and
the remote, ivory-white girl-poet, resist idealization. Greek self-containment
and sculpted inaccessibility are not the properties of woman’s body. This is
most obviously so at two crucial moments of crisis in John’s story, which involve
women bleeding as a result of sex, and, in response, his habitual retreat into
what he calls ‘his coldness towards women’ (Y 95).

The fi rst of these incidents, perhaps the more painful one, concerns a Cape

Town girlfriend called Sarah, who has an abortion after getting pregnant. John
accompanies her through much of the experience, suffering overwhelming
feelings of guilt, squeamishness, inadequacy. Then she disappears from the
text. She comes to the experience equipped with clean bed linen and hides
from him ‘the evidence of what is going on inside her body: the bloody pads
and whatever else there is’, yet he clearly cannot put them out of his mind
(Y 34). He thinks of sewers, tides, pods of fl esh, shame. The second incident
in which shame and blood, now visible blood, are associated, is when in
London he sleeps with his cousin’s friend Marianne and fi nds she is a virgin.
She bleeds, apparently copiously (128–30), and stains the bed, which does
not belong to John (Y 128–30). He is at this point a caretaker-lodger. He is
wracked with shame, tries to hide the evidence of what they have done, and,
even more suggestively, is appalled at Marianne’s response to the incident,
her very able coping, her whispering with the nanny. He is threatened by the
fact of the two women conspiring among themselves.

For the rest he describes the women he goes with, no matter how much or

how little he wants them, as un-Lawrentian, lacking fi re and perfection, in fact
lacking anything to distinguish them at all (Y 32, 68). Basically such women are
‘unformed’, girls rather than women, who ‘in their hearts did not want to do it,
just as in his heart of hearts he could not have been said to want to do it either’.
So he feels he fails in sex, he lacks heart, the returns of passion are meagre
(Y 133). Yet despite this he remains ‘ready for anything’, romance, tragedy, as
long as it will ‘consume’ and ‘remake’ him, allow him to transcend sexual cate-
gories, to be transfi gured (Y 111). Signifi cant in the terms of the reading I am
trying to follow through here, is that his quest to be sexually remade does not
have a particular orientation attached to it. It is not explicitly heterosexual.
After all, guilt-free love, he cryptically notes in a comment on Pound, may
equate with the worship of Greek gods. And the love of like and like, he further
observes when fantasizing about wrestling with his girl cousins, gives a promise
of ease: there are ‘no introductions needed, no fumbling around’ (Y 126, 133).

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Remembering also cousin Agnes of Boyhood, the bodies of such girls have the
wiry androgynous attractiveness of Eddie and the anonymous Coloured boy:
they are not fully woman, prone to outpourings, awkwardness, fi lled with the
potential to bring shame.

As all Coetzee readers are aware, the writer has long been preoccupied

with the epistemological problem of fully comprehending, of identifying with,
extreme otherness, especially with the other’s suffering body (Spivak 1999:
169–97). Think only of Lurie’s self-appointed task of accompanying dead dogs
to the incinerator in Disgrace. In his novel-in-eight-lessons Elizabeth Costello he
has given himself the opportunity at last to refl ect self-consciously and openly
on this problem. The element that draws together the disparate lecture tab-
leaux that make up this novel-manqué is not only that they all involve the
female novelist Elizabeth Costello, though that is of course signifi cant, but that
they concern ‘embodying’ (Lee 2003: 21). Every episode in the novel drama-
tizes the stand-off between embodiment and reason, whether it is a question of
Thomas Nagel imagining himself as a bat, Ted Hughes bodying himself forth as
a jaguar, or an African novelist embodying the European novel form. Whether
it concerns novelists entering the world of Molly Bloom or imagining them-
selves in Hitler’s death camps, ‘the notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal’
(EC 75–6, 97, 12).

How appropriate it is then that in a book centrally preoccupied with both the

ethical problem of suffering, especially of others, and the connected problem of
‘inhabiting another body’ or ‘the sensation of being’ (EC 96, 78), ‘queer’ Coe-
tzee has taken it upon himself to impersonate a woman novelist. As with Susan
Barton or Elizabeth Curren, but more self-refl exively so, he has con summately,
apparently willingly, surrendered to ‘the challenge of otherness’ (EC 12). He
has chosen to submit to the femaleness, weakness, softness, eternal travail, that,
as suggested, he has not only long associated with the body of woman but has
also suspected of residing within himself, within his own rigidly controlled and
contained, awkward or – in the conventional defi nition – ‘queer’ body.

There are strong critical temptations to read into the character of Elizabeth

Costello a representation of Nadine Gordimer: she is small, grey and birdlike;
she does not suffer fools gladly. But a strong, even self-evident case could equally
be made for the closeness of Coetzee and Costello: both are vegetarians and
Antipodeans; both are profoundly jaded by the life of the peripatetic perform-
ing writer. Both have had some childhood involvement, however tenuous, in
Catholicism. In embodying a woman, Coetzee has as it were met her half way,
making that woman something like himself, which obviously means something
like a man. In her incarnation as a writer on the international circuit, she is hav-
ing to probe by way of reasoned arguments women’s embodiment as quintes-
sential suffering creatures, and her own embodiment as an object of male lust.

Yet, curiously if predictably, even while so openly embodying a woman,

Coetzee has in a sense stripped her of fl esh, reduced her centredness as

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131

a physical human being. She is often represented from the outside, as elderly,
dying, as through the device of her mostly absent son John. This is an odd, if
not queer technique, for, by repeatedly describing Elizabeth as tired, greying,
shrivelling, and so on, and as a reasoning if sympathetic character, what Coetzee
the novelist effectively does is to de-sex her. In her case, he does not want to
deal with the problem of the fl esh, of desire, unless in memory, as in her mem-
ory of sitting, aged 40, for Mr Phillips, in which she noticeably pictures herself
from the outside, as the aging male artist’s subject. Even if this is the scene
where she most exposes herself as a body, we are not told anything of what this
experience feels like, from within, apart from the reference to the sensation of
cold air on bare skin.

In short, the elderly woman writer Elizabeth Costello as a character in

this text is remarkably bodiless; fi nds herself disembodied even as she is embod-
ied. She is a grandmother and an Australian, yet she is never represented as
physically involved with her grandchildren or as experiencing Australia, its
heat, its fl ies, its frogs, as a living being. Even her memory of lying in the arms
of the African novelist Egudu is noticeably if not also egregiously sketchy, almost
empty, just as the wind instrument she imagines herself as being for him is in
its way an empty vessel, fi lled with air. To one who indicts Descartes for privileg-
ing reason, she interacts with the world, both the public and the domestic, at
a level almost exclusively cerebral, self-contained and masculine. She does
not, as does Molly Bloom, leave her smell about; she does not, unlike Mary of
Nazareth, exude (EC 13, 149).

It is at this point, I want to suggest, where Elizabeth Costello, the novelist

John Coetzee impersonating as a woman, bodies forth as less than a living
female being, that the female body in the text becomes somewhat queer. Or
should that be, almost queer, just less than queer? It is here, I further want to
suggest, that something in the male novelist baulks at femaleness, at its gross,
un-Grecian embodiedness. There is a secret embedded in the characterization
of Costello, a Caravaggio-like secret, that Coetzee cannot make explicit as the
ethical framework of the novel would fall apart, but that emerges in the contra-
dictory juxtaposition of different scenes of embodiment in the second half of
the text. The secret – or possibly crisis – might be phrased in this way. The
queerness of John Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello emerges not from the fact that,
fi nally, having stood so often on the side of the silenced other, in Foe as in
Disgrace, he has now spoken from within the very body of the other. That he has
impersonated – not merely ventriloquized. No, the queerness of John Coetzee
is revealed when he refuses to go through with the masquerade. He cannot do
it aesthetically, it offends him; it is, to use his word, literally obscene and should
be off-stage, no matter how much prompting his ethics might give him to go
through with it (EC 168–9). Put differently, he cannot at such points prevent
his underlying if de-sexed homoeroticism from sliding into a type of sexism and
thus arguably becoming the more skittishly and provocatively homoerotic.

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

His attraction to honed Hellenic bodies, again referred to in detail in this novel,
as in the comparison of the Greeks and Zulu warriors, draws him away from
the wracked and guilt-ridden Hebraic body, which is coded both animal and
female. In fact he does not actually want to be, to form part of, the body of a
woman. And with Slow Man he again externalizes Elizabeth Costello, who is now
become the unwelcome companion to the bodily reduced Paul Rayment.

I will spell out my speculation a little further. Towards the end of the pair of

lectures fi rst published as The Lives of Animals (1999), Elizabeth Costello encour-
ages her audience: ‘I urge you to walk, fl ank to fl ank, beside the beast that is
prodded down the chute to his executioner’ (EC 111). This is all very well for
the purpose of making her point about attempting to experience animal being
as living fl esh. Yet, in the next lecture but one, ‘The Problem of Evil’, which fol-
lows on from the meditations on the revealed word of God in Africa, she appears
to stand appalled at her own invitation. A novelist Paul West who has written a
book about the punishments Hitler infl icted on those who conspired against
him, has in her opinion gone too far. He has brushed against evil and ‘unveiled
horrors’ whereas to her mind there are dark territories of the soul from which
the writer cannot return unscathed (EC 160, 162). In other words, the imagina-
tive embodiment of some kinds of evil in text must remain taboo. This is a
chute down which the writer should not proceed; it is obscene and ought to
remain hidden (159).

To provide clarity on what she might mean by such evil, indeed by this volte-

face in her thinking, Elizabeth Costello turns half-way through the episode
‘The Problem of Evil’ to a horrifying experience of her own, which we can only
read as a correlate for the obscenity of West’s novel. It is one of those points in
the text where an experience of pure and painful embodiment ‘irrupts into this
book of structured arguments’ (Lee 2003: 21). Elizabeth remembers how a
man she allowed to pick her up when a young woman, began to beat her up
when she resisted him. (Why, we may well ask, could she not have done the
picking up?) His response is out-of-all-proportion, irrational, violent: it is an
encounter with evil in so far as her assailant began to enjoy the experience of
hurting her and burning her clothes.

Jacqueline Rose has critiqued this incident-within-an-incident in Elizabeth

Costello as giving an inadequate ethical response to questions of how and
whether to represent the horrors of the Holocaust (Rose 2003). While I’d agree
that Elizabeth’s anxieties about the real-world ethics of storytelling, as opposed
to the deferrals that involved the once-post-structuralist Coetzee, are very
broadly sketched, I’d want to add a further, to-me-more-serious objection. It is
that at this point that the ruse of Coetzee writing as a woman, this device of
female embodiment, is unwittingly exposed as a ruse. In fact he does not want
to embody, even for the sake of the device, just as Lurie in Disgrace at no point
enters the scene of Lucy’s rape, does not go there.

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133

It is signifi cant that in the description of the violent incident Elizabeth’s

memory is represented in a single frame, dissociated from the rest of her life,
embedded within her like an ‘egg of stone’ (EC 165–6). Consequently the third
person ‘she’ that Coetzee uses throughout of the novelist becomes suddenly
both unsatisfactory and yet revealing. It alerts us to the fact that even at this
moment of extreme personal crisis Elizabeth is represented strictly from the
outside, almost objectively, ostensibly by herself, yet without any sensory evoca-
tion of what this extreme experience of pain must have involved. The imper-
sonator Coetzee has refused to accompany his alter ego Elizabeth, not on
ethical grounds, I would venture, but because the embodiment of such humili-
ation and victimhood profoundly disturbs and unnerves him – or the narrative
point of view. There is something so utterly appalling about the experience
of being the victim, enduring such punches and blows, in short, about being
a womanish ‘weak vessel’, that it causes Coetzee effectively to suspend the
representational logic of embodiment that forms the ethical underpinning to
most of Costello’s arguments (EC 175). He momentarily withdraws from his
cross-dressing and resorts instead to a now-compromised pose of queerness
which is however comfortable and habitual to him – that is, to the stony and
self-concealing silence of the masculine statue unmoved by Hebraic agonies
and viewed from without.

Paul West, Elizabeth’s interlocutor, signifi cantly remains silent, as silent as a

statue – a statue with a ‘rather handsome profi le’, it might be added – through-
out her interrogation of his work, even when she addresses him directly. Despite
a relatively brief appearance, West, who has allowed himself to burn with the
fi res of hell, whose name embodies the extremes of experience, Hebraic (Paul)
and Hellenic (‘the West’), is a fi gure with whom identifi cation is more possible,
more desirable and sexy, than with the aged novelist. Ultimately, then, I would
submit, Coetzee would prefer to fl irt with the Greeks and with Zulu warriors,
provocatively to queer himself, than to go through with a full embodiment of
femaleness, with all its outpourings and vulnerability. Finally he elects – in spite
of himself, but that is the dilemma he opts for – to resort to queerness (and, by
Slow Man, to the male body with its symbolic wound). He would rather queer
himself than act female; the queer body is in this sense to him a refuge.

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit (1998), Caravaggio’s Secrets. Boston: MIT Press.
Boehmer, Elleke (2002), ‘Not saying sorry, not speaking pain: Gender implications

in Disgrace’. Interventions, 4, (3), 342–51.

Coetzee, J. M. (1996), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

134

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

—(1997), Boyhood: A Memoir . London: Secker and Warburg.
—(1999a), Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg.
—(1999b), The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—(2002), Youth. London: Secker and Warburg.
—(2004), Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg.
—(2005), Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg.
Dollimore, Jonathan (1991), Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault.

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fuss, Diana (1991), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York and London:

Routledge.

Lee, Hermione (2003), ‘The rest is silence’, Guardian Review, 30 August.
Munro, Brenna (2004), Queer Futures: The New South Africa’s Coming Out Narratives.

Unpublished PhD thesis. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia.

Rose, Jacqueline (2003), On Not Being Able to Sleep. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.

Sachs, Albie (1996), ‘Preparing ourselves for freedom’, in Derek Attridge and

Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy,
1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990), Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (ed.) (1997), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 10

Eating (Dis)Order: From Metaphoric

Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

Kyoko Yoshida

My subjectivity has always been antagonized by its being in English . . . the mirror in
which the cannibal of the language might glimpse himself.

—John Mateer, ‘The Holy Spirit of Elsewhere’

Bodies That Eat

In J. M. Coetzee’s fi ction, bodies that eat are often depicted as something
awkward and troublesome. Table scenes are often the stage of confl icts and
dilemmas. Coetzee’s fi ction treats the imagery of eating with caution and dis-
comfort. This chapter will examine how eating has been a central issue in
Coetzee’s fi ction well before it became explicit in The Lives of Animals (1999)
and Elizabeth Costello (2003). In this chapter, I focus on recurring images of
eating in Coetzee’s fi ction and explore ethical anxiety and semantic dilemma
in relation to Coetzee’s fi gurative language – how the paradoxical metaphors
work hand in hand with the conundrum of eating.

Metaphor of Incorporation

Maggie Kilgour, in From Communion to Cannibalism (1990), analyses Western
classics from Homer to Melville, paying special attention to the imagery of
Communion and cannibalism, and argues that the textual imagery of eating
reads as a metaphor of incorporation (absorption, assimilation, integration,
embodiment) – in other words, as a model of encounter between inside and
outside, between individuals and the world outside. Like food, the metaphor of

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ingestion, once incorporated into the body of literary texts, transforms into an
organic network of meanings and implications, some of which seem contradic-
tory to one another. Let us outline what an act of eating implies in its different
phases.

To eat is to select: the act of eating presumes constant discrimination. First

of all, one must distinguish between the edible and the inedible, followed by
discriminations according to the religious, hygienic, or culinary requirements,
such as between the animate and the inanimate, quadrupeds and others, differ-
ent parts of the body, different ways to slaughter, raw and cooked, different ways
of cooking, and so on. (Kilgour 7; Probyn 2000: 3). Elspeth Probyn (2000)
points out that eating requires constant and clear distinction between ‘self’ and
‘others’ as well as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (7). Once food is taken into the body,
however, eating becomes a metaphor for assimilation and absorption. To chew
and digest becomes an act of identifi cation, not differentiation, in that the sub-
ject attains oneness with the object: the eater becomes one with the eaten, sub-
ject with object, self with other (Kilgour 9–10). The clear distinction between
edible and inedible vanishes. The boundary between self and other becomes
blurred. To eat is to lose oneself. The relationship between self and other meta-
morphoses in its digestive process. ‘You are what you eat.’ The imagery of eat-
ing, where opposites meet, therefore, ‘subverts normal defi nitions of identity’
(13). Like the paradox of eating, a fi gure of speech operates in double perspec-
tives in regard to the strange and the familiar, since a trope brings the alien
home while estranging the familiar (13).

However, when the image of eating comes to the extremes of cannibalism

and starvation, the fi gurative language begins to melt down. Kilgour calls can-
nibalism ‘the ultimate “antimetaphor”’ (16). ‘Replacing more orthodox though
indirect means of communication, the image of cannibalism is frequently con-
nected with the failure of words as a medium, suggesting that people who can-
not talk to each other bite each other’ (16). Finally, when the opposites meet
‘mouth to mouth’, one thinks less of eating than lovemaking. The mouth is the
organ for ingestion, speech and lust, and as Probyn puts it, ‘the most obvious
link between food and sex’ is ‘the literal eating of the other that cannibalism
represents’ (8).

In his essay ‘Meat Country’, Coetzee also defi nes human beings in terms of

the mouth’s functions:

But we have not made ourselves to be creatures with sexual itches and a hun-
ger for fl esh. We are born like that: it is a given, it is the human condition
[. . .] Asking whether human beings should eat meat is on the same level
of logic as posing the question, ‘Should we have words?’ We have words;
the question is being posed in words; without words there would be no
question. (46)

From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

137

Susan the Predator

In Foe (1986) Friday is suspected of cannibalism without a chance to explain
himself. The fi rst time cannibalism is mentioned in the novel is when Cruso lists
different hypotheses as to why Friday’s tongue is cut by the slavers:

‘Perhaps the slavers, who are Moors, hold the tongue to be a delicacy,’ he
said. ‘Or perhaps they grew weary of listening to Friday’s wails of grief, that
went on day and night. Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling
his story: who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was
taken. Perhaps they cut out the tongue of every cannibal they took, as a
punishment. How will we ever know the truth?’ (23)

It is clear from the onset who did harm to whom: the slavers to the slave. Yet
when it comes to the reason why the abuse took place, four possibilities are jux-
taposed as equal and only uncertainty remains at the end of Cruso’s speech.
Here, Cruso presents two extremes as equally possible: ‘Friday being eaten’ and
‘Friday eating someone’. Perhaps the Moor slavers savour the tongue as a deli-
cacy, or perhaps Friday is punished for cannibalism . . . Neither Susan Barton
nor the reader ever get to learn the true reason for Friday’s mutilation, but in
Barton’s mind, the idea of Friday as food is not considered at all. He is branded
as the eater, which instantly transforms her into the edible. The eater and the
eaten must be always divided at the moment of eating. The novel soon reveals
how slippery the dynamics of the eater and the eaten are, as it is her hunger that
provokes her fear of Friday:

My thoughts ran to Friday, I could not stop them, it was an effect of the hun-
ger. Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten
the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse,
a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now
I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what meat must once
have passed them.

[. . .] The blood hammered in my ears; the creak of a branch, or a cloud pass-
ing across the moon, made me think Friday was upon me; though part of me
knew he was the same dull blackfellow as ever, another part, over which I had
no mastery, insisted on his bloodlust. (106)

As soon as Barton is aware of her own hunger, she projects it on Friday, gener-
ating fear in herself. ‘The cannibal is the individual’s “alien,” against which
[she] constructs [her] identity, and whose threat to that identity is represented
as literal consumption’ (Kilgour 147). In Barton’s delusional state of hunger,

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

‘the hunger’ becomes ‘his hunger’, thus shifting the subject of eating from
Barton to Friday. Cruso is blamed as the person who inspired her with fear of
Friday as a cannibal, but the other three hypotheses including the one that per-
ceives Friday as the eaten do not come to her mind at all. As her fear builds up,
the object of eating in her imagination changes from the dead baby to herself.
‘The hammering of blood’ in her ear is transfused into Friday as his ‘bloodlust’.
The mutilation of Friday’s tongue is an unmistakable trace of violence infl icted
on him, and conversely, that same lack suggests the possible violence he might
have infl icted on others. This reciprocity imprinted on Friday’s body leads to an
illogical conclusion – Friday is a cannibal. Vacancy supports potentiality. Because
of his lack of ingestive organ, his ingestive monstrosity sounds more plausible.
But this is just one aspect of Barton’s projection on Friday.

Barton’s insatiable desire to decipher mute Friday does not remain fi xed on

this type of colonial discourse only. Through her efforts to construe Friday, the
novel exhausts what functions a tongue possesses – to eat, to speak and to love.
Barton becomes obsessed to possess the secret of Friday’s missing body part,
which she begins to perceive as a metaphor:

Now when Cruso told me that the slavers were in the habit of cutting out the
tongues of their prisoners to make them more tractable, I wondered whether
he might not be employing a fi gure, for the sake of delicacy: whether the lost
tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation;
whether by a dumb slave I was to understand a slave unmanned. (118–19)

This association between the tongue and its analogue continues to infl uence
Barton’s interpretation of Friday. Early on, she compares the tongue mutilation
with circumcision, wondering, ‘Who, after all, was to say he did not lose his
tongue at the age when boy-children among the Jews are cut; and if so, how
could he remember the loss?’ (69). Later, the suspicion for castration is proven
true. An apprehension in one’s imagination becomes a fearful conviction, and
soon gets corroborated by an elusive witness and scant evidence – this process
is parallel to how Defoe’s Crusoe encounters ‘cannibals’ and how the myth of
cannibal barbarians spread in the imperial West.

Once the castration becomes indisputable, the power of metaphorical associ-

ation grows potent in Barton’s imagination, unleashing her desire to pierce
further into the mystery. Friday’s alleged cannibalism obsesses Barton so much
as to take her fi gures of speech to another level of desire, begetting a ‘confusion
of appetite’ (Probyn 98). Barton tries to play the fl ute in consort with Friday as
a means of communication with him since the instrument is the only way to
create sound for Friday. Her one-way yearning induces in her mind an illusion
of Friday listening to her sound, a rare moment in the narration when the point
of view shifts to Friday: ‘All the while I was playing [the bass fl ute] . . . Friday lay
awake downstairs in his own dark listening to the deeper tones of my fl ute, the

From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

139

like of which he could never have heard before’ (96). When Barton fantasizes
about Friday, images of male and female sexuality are inverted as if to refl ect
Barton’s phallic desire to penetrate Friday, when, for example, she likens
‘Friday’s story’ to ‘buttonhole, carefully cross-stitched around, but empty,
waiting for the button’ (121).

According to James McCorkle (2000), the cannibals in this novel are Barton

and Foe. The two in pursuit of their own versions of the island narrative may be
well aware of their inability to discover the true story of the island, but that does
not obstruct their writing, for through writing, producing texts, narrating
stories, and embracing Others as readers, they establish their identity, which
ultimately leads to their salvation (496). Barton wants Foe to author an island
story, but she also insists on her own authority to tell her version of the story.
Barton is possessed by seemingly confl icting desires, and that is why she calls
herself both Foe’s muse and vampire (Coetzee 139; McCorkle 496). McCorkle
points out that the scene in which the two make love the fi rst time – while
discussing bloodsucking and the relationship between muse and poet – refl ects
the psychology of endocannibalism whose purpose is to suck vitality and knowl-
edge from other members of society (496).

Anthropologist Peggy Sanday (1986) observes that in endocannibalism,

‘human fl esh is a physical channel for communicating social value and procre-
ative fertility from one generation to the next [. . .]. Endocannibalism recycles
and regenerates social forces that are believed to be physically constituted in
bodily substances or bones at the same time that it binds the living to the dead
in perpetuity’ (7). In general, ‘the passing of tradition through graphesis’ takes
over endocannibalism: the practice of endocannibalism becomes a displaced
ritual or metaphor (McCorkle 497). What passes between muse and poet and
between writer and reader takes over actual consumption of fl esh. Barton and
Foe’s case is situated in the blurred zone between hematophagia and literature.
They both produce poetic text while sucking each other’s blood. In this rela-
tionship behind the artistic creation, anthropophagia serves as a metaphor for
writing, and vice versa.

Metaphoric Cannibalism

While Dusklands (1974) and Foe concern cannibalism explicitly, similar eating
situations permeate Coetzee’s other books. The common logic here depends
on problematic identities of self and other, equivalence of food and word, of
eating and writing, and the reciprocal act of eating.

Life & Times of Michael K (1998) could be defi ned as a story about one man’s

sustenance. The text maintains detailed descriptions of K’s meals: K undergoes
changes of diet from the omnivorous to the frugivorous, and then to self-
starvation. Initially, K eats whatever he can put his hand on, but as he hides in

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the countryside from the chaos of the civil war, he cultivates a secret pumpkin
garden on which he becomes dependent. The death of his mother plays an
important role in his peculiar dietary conversion.

The two nights before she succumbs to illness, K has a dream: the mother is

visiting him at Huis Norenius, where K was raised as a child, with ‘a parcel of
food’ as a gift, which was ‘curiously light’ (38–9). And two days after the moth-
er’s death, an unfamiliar nurse summons K and passes him a parcel, saying,
‘This parcel, [. . .] contains your mother’s ashes’ (43). At the news, K has a
vision of patients eaten up alive by fl ames. K wonders, ‘How do I know?’ (44).
Know what? To know whether his mother was fed to fi re alive? Or to know
whether the ashes in the parcel actually belong to her? To know implies a com-
plete understanding of (the mother’s) death, pure and beyond words. The
packet does not contain the kind of total knowledge that K hungers for. At
this point, both the subject and contents of his knowledge are not revealed to
K himself.

Once his mother passes away, K suffers from a sense of derealization. The

quotidian scenes turn tenuous in his eyes: ‘it seemed strange that people should
be eating and drinking as usual’ (45). After an eventful journey, K reaches an
abandoned farm where his mother might or might not have grown up. K strug-
gles to hunt a ewe for food with a pen knife, and the pains of butchery (both his
and the animal’s) infl ict an immediate feeling of regret in him. Giving up on
eating the animal, he breaks into the farm house and eats a bottle of apricot
preserve instead. At this point, K still holds the packet of his mother’s ashes
dear, yet he is at a loss what do to with it. He then discovers the farm’s irrigation
system still intact. Cleansing himself with the dam’s water, he comes to a full
realization that ‘The time came to return his mother to the earth’ (80). He
clears a small patch of fi eld, sprinkles the ashes on the dirt, and plows the earth
‘spadeful by spadeful’ (80).

Weeks pass and fi nally the day of harvest arrives and he cooks and eats

the fi rst pumpkin, a special fruit for K, ‘the fi rst fruit, the fi rstborn’ (155), a sac-
rifi ce for the feast. Grilled on the charcoal, ‘The fragrance of the burning fl esh
rose into the sky’ (155). This rising smoke signals the double meanings of har-
vest and funeral, the two sides of one private ritual. His unbidden prayer to
thank ‘what we are about to receive’ is directed to the earth. While grilling the
fi rst fruit, K feels ‘his heart suddenly fl ow over with thankfulness [. . .] like a
gush of warm water’ (156). ‘Now it is completed’, he says to himself. Now it is
time to taste the food that ‘[his] own labour has made the earth to yield’ (156).
This fulfi lling meal is described in the language both sensuous and evocative of
the mother’s cremated body: ‘Beneath the crisply charred skin the fl esh was
soft and juicy [. . .] He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes [. . .] The aftertaste
of the fi rst slice left his mouth aching with sensual delight’ (156). As ‘his teeth
bit through the crust into the soft hot pulp’, K thinks, ‘such pumpkin I could
eat every day of my life and never want anything else’ (156). The ashes of K’s

From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

141

mother are now literally incorporated in his body through the medium of the
pumpkin he grew. The purpose of K’s journey was to bring her back home.
Her motherland becomes conterminous with the earth that K plows and from
which he derives his life. Through the cultivation of the pumpkins, K properly
buries and resurrects his mother, and becomes one with her, making her part
of him. The funerary rite is now complete, as K has become a complete being.
‘The idea of return is both idealized as a return to communion with an origi-
nary source and a primal identifi cation, and demonized as regression through
the loss of human and individual identity; one returns to the father by being
eaten by him; one reenters the garden by becoming a vegetable’ (Kilgour 11).
According to Marvin Harris (1985), whose work Coetzee refers to in ‘Meat
Country’, ‘Consumption of the ashes and bones of a deceased loved one was a
logical extension of cremation. After the body of the deceased had been
consumed by the fl ames, the ashes were often collected and kept in containers
to be fi nally disposed of by ingesting them—usually mixed in a beverage’ (200).
K’s new life in the abandoned farm begins with this mediated mortuary
cannibalism, in which he takes over the life and wisdom of the previous genera-
tion and supplements and compliments himself, integrating himself and his
mother into a more complete, self-contained self.

In the second half of the novel, K keeps rejecting meals provided at the

internment centre. The narrator of the second part, the doctor at the centre,
struggles to fi nd any signifi cance in K’s self-starvation. K simply states, ‘It’s not
my kind of food’ (198). The baffl ed narrator plies K with questions: ‘Why? Are
you fasting? Is this a protest fast? Is that what it is? What are you protesting
against? Do you want your freedom?’ (199). According to Maud Ellmann, there
is no such thing as silent hunger strike. In The Hunger Artist (1993), she argues
that both poets and writers who fast for the sake of their artistic writing and
those political activists who starve themselves for realization of their social
justice accompany starvation with language. In order to make one’s emaci-
ated body a ransom for political negotiation, a statement must be made to
clarify what one’s withering fl esh represents. Only with a statement does the self-
destructed body embody something; the private body manages to become the
text of collective suffering (13–21).

While protesters ‘transform their bodies into the “quotations” of their fore-

bears, [. . .] it is also true that self-infl icted hunger is a struggle to release the body
from all contexts, even from the context of embodiment itself. It de-historicizes,
de-socializes, and even de-genders the body’ (Ellmann 14). Hunger becomes so
immediate that spectators witness nothing but the body screaming in silence.
Michael K’s peculiar inanition is illegible as a protest, but it is ‘the ambiguity
between the reticence of fast and the loquacity of hunger’ (Ellmann 18) that
the narrator doctor cannot overlook.

As his harelip symbolizes, K is deprived of words from birth. At Huis

Norenius, they would put on music constantly, which would make K ‘restless’

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

and prevent him from forming his ‘own thoughts’ – ‘It was like oil over every-
thing’ (182). As an adult, articulation remains beyond his means: ‘Always, when
he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness
before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour
words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained’ (150–51). Ellmann com-
pares K with Meursault from Camus’s The Outsider (2000) – both men are anti-
heros in that they cannot explain themselves for their peculiar acts against the
social code; they are unable to articulate the singularity of their motives (108).

How much is K aware of the signifi cance of his symbolic cannibalism in

relation to his self-contained fasting? Later when the doctor at the internment
centre asks K of his mother’s whereabouts, K gives a literal answer, ‘she makes
the plants grow’ (178). The doctor misinterprets K’s answer as a euphemism,
meaning that K’s mother is ‘pushing up the daisies’. K, recalling the vision he
had when he received the packet of ashes, corrects the doctor: ‘They burned
her [. . .] Her hair was burning round her head like a halo’ (178), thus making
a clear connection between his mother and the vegetables he grew. Although
unable to articulate its signifi cance, K embraces the funerary rites he per-
formed and the substance he has taken in in the process.

To K who refuses to explain, the narrator vents his fumed irritation: ‘We don’t

want you to be clever with words or stupid with words, man, we just want you to
tell the truth!’ (190). The narrator speaks from the world where the bread of
life differs from actual bread. For Michael K, there is only one: the real bread,
so he cannot choose either one of the two. K suffers a type of aphasia that
estranges symbol from substance, metaphors from objects, language from
things, words in mouth from foods in mouth. The diffi culty here is that his lim-
ited intelligence allows him to speak only in literal terms and that his euphoric
communion with Mother (Earth) further alienates him from verbal communi-
cation. Metaphor is ‘a basically dualistic trope that depends upon a difference
between its inside and outside, its literal and fi gurative meanings; “antimeta-
phorical” positions dream of abolishing this duality in order to return to a
proper and literal meaning’ (Kilgour 12). In reality, words are not foods. But
for K, the only food (or word) worthy of eating (or speaking) is the food (or the
word) that is word (or food). After the words/foods are ‘eaten up’, nothing
remains but a complete self, or, to the narrator’s eye, ‘a black whirlwind roaring
in utter silence’ (226).

Cannibalistic Metaphor

In Elizabeth Costello, the title character mobilizes cannibalistic imagery in order
to make her point against the meat factory. The lecture audience (both fi c-
tional and real) are demanded to imagine themselves being on the side of the
eaten. In order to imagine oneself as meat cattle or broiler chicken meant to be
slaughtered and consumed, one must unleash one’s cannibalistic imagination,

From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

143

which Costello repeatedly attempts to arouse throughout the lecture, even
resorting to Holocaust analogies, comparing the cattle in the slaughter house
with the Jews in the extermination camps:

[People living near the camps] said, ‘It is they in those cattle cars rattling
past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?’ They
did not say, ‘It is I who am in that cattle car.’ They said, ‘It must be the dead
who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my
cabbages.’ They did not say, ‘I am burning, I am falling in ash.’ (79)

Whereas the quotidian statement – ‘the dead are being burnt’ – does not make
the speaker taste ‘the burnt fl esh’ in her mouth, the fi gurative discourse, the
language of poetry – I am burning, I am falling in ash – demands cannibalistic
imagination.

Costello’s rhetoric may be named ‘cannibalistic metaphor’ as opposed to the

previous examples of metaphoric cannibalism. As stated before, the imagery
of eating disintegrates in the extremity of cannibalism. Kilgour acknowledges
the power of cannibalistic imagery but fi nds it problematic as well since it has
‘a tendency to consume the mediating power of fi gures, subverting the possibil-
ity of a free communion between individuals, by drawing extremes into a cata-
strophic meeting that is less “face to face” than “mouth to mouth”’ (17). Images
of eating are prone to contaminating and infecting the rest of the discourse.
Through our imagination, semantic association, and submerged desires, meta-
phors of eating spread fast to peripheral words and images. Especially in the
case of cannibalistic metaphor, fi gures of speech and actual fi gures cannot keep
their distance, and they gravitate towards each other, fi nally clinging to one
another as if gulping one another. This is because the image of people eating
other people is too corporeal while being inconceivable at the same time, as
compared to the image of people eating chicken, for example.

Breaking Bread

The literary symbolism of Communion, the ‘breaking of bread’, is another
frequent element in Coetzee’s fi ction related to the imagery of cannibalism.
The ritual of the Eucharist provides another prime example of reciprocal trope.
The host of the Last Supper is the Host itself, which is the sacrifi ce to God.
Communion is an act of feeding each other on each other through a ‘compli-
cated system of relation in which it becomes diffi cult to say precisely who is
eating whom’ (Kilgour 15). In the broader imagination, it symbolizes human
bonds in the community through sharing meal and thoughts.

Perhaps the only plump protagonist in Coetzee’s fi ction so far, the Magistrate

in Waiting for the Barbarians (1999b) is a man of robust appetite who believes in
the goodness of food. He never gives up his trust in the sensitivity of the human

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

palate and dreams that the taste of ‘new bread and mulberry jam, bread and
gooseberry jam’ (151) will assimilate the barbarians to the frontier way of life
someday. When the Magistrate suffers under the tyranny of the Third Bureau,
hunger eclipses his indignation.

Yet, when it comes to his relationship with the Barbarian girl, the Magistrate

is confused by the ambiguity of his desire towards her: is it carnal, therapeutic,
reparative, colonial or cannibalistic? His pleasure derives from the deep sleep
he drifts into as he cleanses her body, the sleep of exhaust and satisfaction like
the one that comes after making love or suckling the mother’s breast. It is the
pleasure of losing himself – fi rst in the languid movement of washing and then
totally losing himself, blacking out. He does not inquire further into the nature
of his desire as he rubs her legs to reach the state of self-oblivion.

His fi rst washing of the Barbarian girl comes soon after he wonders if Joll

washes his hands before ‘breaking bread’. Now, instead of cleansing his own
hands to draw a distinction between himself and Joll, the Magistrate washes the
girl’s feet, like Christ before the Last Supper. Soon after the second washing
of her feet, the reader is informed that the Barbarian girl has moved into the
barracks kitchen, sharing the space with the existing scullery-maid, an equiva-
lent of the Magistrate’s bit on the side in the soldiers’ perception.

In the realm where the Magistrate operates, eating is cheek by jowl with

cleansing, which may explain his persisting association between torture and
dining. How could Joll and Mandel eat without feeling that they are feeding
on the tortured bodies? This fi xation reveals that the narrator’s association
between bread and body is well beyond the symbolic one – it is precisely this act
of breaking bread with their unclean hands that incriminates those from the
Third Bureau. The bread on the table denounces their crime by pointing to the
violated bodies that remain unseen behind the closed door.

We encounter the scenes of ‘breaking bread’ again in Disgrace (1999a) and

Elizabeth Costello, in which the communion imagery dramatizes confl ict at the
dinner table, a setting to make peace in vain. Behind the actual scenes, bodies
are at stake once again; we see bread and bodies together on the table. In
Disgrace, Melanie’s father Mr. Isaac invites the reluctant David Lurie to dinner
at home, to ‘Break bread with us’ (167). In the course of the dinner at the
Isaacs, Lurie has ‘a vision of himself stretched on an operating table’: ‘A scalpel
fl ashes; from throat to groin he is laid open [. . .] A surgeon, bearded, bends
over him, frowning. What is all this stuff? growls the surgeon. He pokes at the
gall bladder. What is this? He cuts it out, tosses it aside. He pokes at the heart.
What is this? ’ (171).

Here, Lurie is on the (operating) table as a sacrifi ce, becoming an eaten,

instead of sitting at the table in communion with his fellow eaters. When the
image of helpless Lurie under vivisection is superimposed upon the supper
table of the pious Isaacs, an ironic crucifi x emerges. Lurie’s experience of
eating while being eaten may resemble Communion, truest to its signifi cance as
‘reciprocal incorporation’ (Kilgour 15).

From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic Metaphors

145

Images of eating, metaphoric cannibalism, and cannibalistic metaphors play

an important role in the transfi guration of fi gurative language. Michel Jean-
neret (1991), who discusses eating metaphors in the Renaissance texts, stresses
the transfi gurative power of such metaphors while reminding us of their dual
propensity:

These metaphors are more than innocent approximations; they are to be
taken at face value. Something of nature is supposed to be actually present at
the heart of the writing. And yet these images are topoi hallowed by tradition,
and cannot not be seen as products of culture, well-worn stylistic effects whose
mimetic power is debatable. The desire to fi ll the gap between words and
things is itself a product of verbal strategy. Thus we come up against two inter-
pretations which are incompatible and yet, individually, compelling. (265)

Deeply rooted in the inherent paradox of language, Coetzee values fi gurative

language sometimes to the extent that clichés and similes impose literal mean-
ings, while the reader is reminded time and again that the writer is sceptical
about the potentiality of language. Coetzee’s cannibalistic metaphors transform
everyday expressions and behaviours into something too corporeal to disre-
gard. As a result, any act of eating – even eating pumpkins – becomes impreg-
nated with an impression of cannibalism. Once the idea of eating some-body
becomes the fear of eating any body, one is forced to make a conscious decision
of eating no body. This anxiety is endless and self-consuming since one may
successfully repress one’s carnivorous cravings and convert to vegetarianism,
but since one cannot live without eating any-thing/body, one never becomes
free from the anxiety of (people) eating.

To put it in extreme terms, in the novels discussed in this chapter, all repre-

sentations of eating converge to imagery of cannibalism. Coetzee’s fi gurative
language fl eshes out the symbolism of banquet and re-presents the body, which
has remained intangible, hidden behind layers of rhetorical tropes. Once these
bodies are on the table, it will not be easy to overcome the anxiety to eat any
body, even bread. On the other hand, as seen in the case of Michael K , one’s
fl esh and blood may be the only kind of soul food, the source of inspiration.

Eating is at the core of J. M. Coetzee’s fi ction – this may not be the central

theme, but by reading through the imagery of eating in his fi ction, we may be
able to observe how eating escalates the tension between fi gurative language
and substance/body, and how the eating metaphor expands to the network of
other images central to his fi ction.

Works Cited

Camus, Albert (2000 [1942]), The Outsider. (L’Etranger. 1942.) Trans. by Joseph Lar-

edo. London: Penguin.

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Coetzee, J. M. (1987), Foe. 1986. London: Penguin.
—(1995), ‘Meat Country’, Food: the Vital Stuff. Special issue of Granta 52, pp. 41–52.
—(1998), Life & Times of Michael K. 1983. London: Vintage.
—(1999a), Disgrace. New York: Viking.
—(1999b), Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. London: Penguin.
—(2003), Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking.
Defoe, Daniel (1999), The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,

of York, Mariner. 1719. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellmann, Maud (1993), The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Harris, Marvin (1985), Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. New York: Simon and

Schuster.

Jeanneret, Michel (1991 [1987]), A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the

Renaissance. (Des mets et des mots: Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance. 1987.)
Trans. by Emma Hughes and Jeremy Whiteley. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Kilgour, Maggie (1990), From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors

of Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mateer, John (2007), ‘The holy spirit of elsewhere’, The Indian Ocean World Confer-

ence, Aug. 11–12, The University of Malaya.

McCorkle, James (2000), ‘Cannibalizing texts: Space, memory, and the colonial in

J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’, in Theo D’Haen and Patricia Krüs (eds), Colonizer and
Colonized: Volume 2 of the Proceedings of the xvth Congress of the International Compara-
tive Literature Association “Literature as Cultural Memory.” Amsterdam: Rodopi,
pp. 487–99.

Probyn, Elspeth (2000), Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities. London: Routledge.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves (1986), Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 11

Acts of Mourning

Russell Samolsky

Few writers are as keenly aware of the ethical traps and responsibilities facing
them as J. M. Coetzee. Reviewing Breyten Breytenbach’s Dog Heart, which
includes frightening stories of attacks on whites and dogs in the rural Western
Cape in post-apartheid South Africa, Coetzee writes: ‘These stories make
disturbing reading not only because of the psychopathic violence of the attacks
themselves, but because they are being repeated at all.’ ‘For the circulation of
horror stories’, he asserts, ‘is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia
about being chased off the land and ultimately into the sea’. ‘Why’, he asks,
‘does Breytenbach lend himself to the process?’ (2001: 256). Coetzee’s ques-
tions might surely be folded back upon his own novel Disgrace, which met with
a contested political reception in the ‘new South Africa’. How, we might ask,
does Coetzee himself not add to the circulation of horror with the publication
of a text that concerns a brutal assault on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape,
in which a young lesbian is gang-raped by three intruders who also deliberately
engage in the slaughter of her guard dogs?

Why does Coetzee give over his tal-

ents to this process and how might we read Disgrace as an ethical response to this
question? In this chapter, I will address the problem of the killing of the dogs in
Disgrace by examining a set of ethical relations between the animal, the work of
mourning and the work of art in Coetzee’s text. I will do so by risking this prop-
osition: that the sublimate of the work of mourning in Disgrace is the work of art.
What is at stake in this proposition, I argue, is not some beguiling economy of
adequation by which the work of mourning is transmuted into the work of art,
but, rather, the relationship of empathy to alterity in Disgrace.

The formulation ‘sublimate of the work of mourning’ with regard to Disgrace

inevitably calls up David Lurie’s task of escorting the unwanted or cast-off dogs
to their deaths:

‘When people bring a dog in,’ he remarks, ‘they do not say straight out,
“I have brought you this dog to kill,” but this is what is expected: that they will
dispose of it, make it disappear, dispatch it to oblivion. What is being asked
for, is in fact, Lösung (German always to hand with an appropriately blank

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

abstraction): sublimation, as alcohol is sublimed from water leaving no
residue.’ (Coetzee 1999a: 142)

The use of lösung in Disgrace is not, of course, without its inter-textual reso-
nance. Ineluctably recalling endlösung – Hitler’s ‘fi nal solution’ – the word
establishes a linkage between the Jewish Holocaust and the ubiquitous slaugh-
ter of animals. In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello argues for precisely
this relation. What allowed the killers to orchestrate the genocide of the Jewish
Holocaust, what allowed those around the camps to keep the horror of this
knowledge from themselves, what allows the distinction between the human
and nonhuman to rest on whether you have a black or a white skin is a refusal
to occupy the place of the other. They said to themselves, Elizabeth Costello
tells us: ‘It must be the dead who are being burnt today . . . They did not say,
“How would it be if I were burning?” They did not say, “I am burning, I am
falling in ash”’ (Coetzee 1999b: 34). It is this unwillingness to think your way
into the being of the other that allows us to guard from ourselves the knowl-
edge that the abattoir and the concentration camp are ‘more alike than they
are unalike’. Against the argument that one cannot think one’s way into the
being of a bat, she declares, ‘there is no limit to the extent that we can think
ourselves into the being of another: There are no bounds to the sympathetic
imagination’ (35). Her claim surprisingly is founded on the dislocating contra-
diction of thinking one’s own death, of looking back upon oneself from the
position of death. She claims:

When I know with this knowledge, that I am going to die, what I know is
what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it will never know anything
anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses
in a panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same
time. (32)

Confronted with the force of this contradiction, the limits of sympathetic
knowledge expand. If one can think through the aporia of death, why, she asks,
‘should we not be able to think our way into the life of a bat?’ (32–3).

However, Elizabeth Costello’s claim for the unbounded powers of sympathy

runs up against the limit Derrida proscribes for calling the other into one’s
being – a limit that will require a brief excursus into the differing conceptions
of mourning advanced by Freud and Derrida. Mourning, Freud contends, takes
place as part of a psychic economy in which the libido is successfully with-
drawn from the lost object that then allows for the mourner’s investment in
new attachments. Melancholia or mourning without end, on the other hand,
results in an unresolved attachment on the part of the ego to the lost object.
Freud thus establishes the distinction between mourning as the salubrious
integration or absorption of loss into consciousness and melancholia as the

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149

pathological failure of that integration. However, it is precisely in this failure of
integration that Derrida holds out the possibility of an ethical or what he calls
an impossible mourning. While successful mourning constitutes an idealized
consumption of the dead, translating singularity into similitude, failed mourn-
ing, Derrida claims, leaves ‘the other his alterity, respecting thus his infi nite
remove’ (Derrida 1986b: 6). He further destabilizes the canonical notion of
successful mourning by reinterpreting the psychoanalytic distinction between
incorporation and introjection. Introjection, he claims, amounts to the absorp-
tion of the dead other who is internalized and merged with the being of the
mourner, while incorporation marks the other as a foreign body sealed or
entombed within the living body of the mourner. ‘Cryptic incorporation’,
Derrida adds, ‘marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning’ (Derrida
1986a: xxi). If accomplished mourning grants the dead a transcendent place in
the memory of the living, failed mourning cannot advance beyond the corpse.
Derrida’s theorization of the structure of melancholia as ethical or impossible
mourning points to an opposition between his claim that death marks a limit
to thinking our way into the full being of the other and Elizabeth Costello’s
claim that it is precisely the contradiction of being able to think one’s death
that demonstrates that there is no limit to the extent that we can think ourselves
into the being of another. What is at stake here is not only the ethical limits of
mourning, but also the question of genocide. For Costello, it is the failure to
think our way into the full being of the other that makes possible the structure
of genocide. For Derrida, consuming the other by act of introjection marks the
totalitarian project of eradicating difference. While it might appear that this
aporia is born of the forcing together of two disparate texts, it is my contention
that the tension between empathy and alterity constitutes a generative contra-
diction that is already part of the structure of Disgrace itself. Here, then, I will
attempt to mark out a space of imbrication in the text between the drive to
consumption and the demands of alterity.

In guiding the dogs to their untimely deaths, David seems to act upon

Elizabeth Costello’s admonition to anyone who thinks that life matters less
to animals than life does to humans: ‘I urge you to walk’, she says, ‘fl ank
by fl ank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner’
(Coetzee 1999b: 65). Assisting in the euthanasia, holding and calming the dogs
before the administration of the lethal poison, overwhelms and transforms
David beyond his powers of self-understanding, but this trauma also seems to
grant him an empathetic grasp of the dog’s knowledge of their impending
deaths:

‘They fl atten their ears,’ he reports, ‘they droop their tails, as if they too feel
the disgrace of dying; locking their legs, they have to be pulled or pushed or
carried over the threshold . . . none will look straight at the needle . . . which
they somehow know is going to harm them terribly.’ (Coetzee 1999a: 143)

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

David’s task of escorting the dogs to their end concludes with the disposal of
their corpses by feeding them into an incinerator. At fi rst he would simply
drop the plastic bags off and leave them to be incinerated by those working the
furnace. However, he soon notices that the dogs’ bodies are stiffened by rigor
mortis, resulting in the workmen beating the bags containing the corpses to
break their limbs so that they do not get stuck in the furnace (144–5). Troubled
by this knowledge, David feels compelled to intervene and to take over the
task of feeding the corpses into the furnace himself. If he pulled or pushed the
dogs over the threshold in life, in death, he performs a similar task, pushing
the corpses though the furnace, giving them a smoother passage. Precisely
because it can no longer matter to the dogs, the attention he grants the
corpses is not one of utility, but one of profound mourning or even as he will
later call it, love. ‘It is this experience’, Derek Attridge comments, ‘of fi nding
oneself personally commanded by an inexplicable, unjustifi able, impractical
commitment to an idea of a world that has room for the inconvenient, the
non-processable’ that allows for the preservation of ‘the ethical inte grity of
the self’ (Attridge 2004: 187). So dislocating and overwhelming has the shock
of escorting the dogs to their end been that David has been transformed into,
what he calls himself, a ‘dog undertaker’ – one to whom is given the mourning
work of honouring the corpses. Although it is precisely the lack of utility that
grants an ethical power to David’s honouring of the corpses, there is another
sense in which David’s work of mourning performs an ethical task.
In honouring the corpses of the dogs, David begins to reverse a tradition in
which the animal – the vulture for example, or the jackal who famously feeds
among the tombs – but most particularly the dog, has been branded as the
devourer of human remains, disturbing and dishonouring the rites of human
mourning. It is the unburied, unmourned body of Polynices that was left for the
dogs outside the city walls, we recall, that instigates the tragedy of Antigone,
which stands at the inception of our works of mourning. To cite a contempo-
rary example, during the Rwandan genocide, dogs were often seen feeding off
piles of corpses scattered over the red earth. Upon its incursion into Rwanda,
the reinvading Rwandan Patriotic Front engaged in the wholesale slaughter of
dogs, all of which were deemed responsible for the dishonouring of Tutsi
corpses.

The contemporary question of the animal in theoretical discourse, then,

must surely form a crucial part of the ethics of the work of mourning in relation
to race and even to genocide. This applies not only with regard to the claims of
a ‘genocide’ of animals (crucial as this is) but in terms of the relation of the
question of animals to the questions of race and human genocide. In what fol-
lows then, I want to mark out part of this discourse with regard to Disgrace and
the question of the animal under apartheid. While away from his work of mour-
ning, David thinks to himself: ‘the dogs released from life within the walls of the
clinic will be tossed into the fi re unmarked, unmourned’ (Coetzee 1999a: 178).

Acts of Mourning

151

David here mourns and marks each dog in its singularity of being and yet
the dog’s corpse also marks the unassimilable limit of the other. Vigilance over
this ethical limit is, however, threatened in the last moments of the text when
David thinks of entering into his opera the mournful howl of a crippled stray
for whom he feels particular care. ‘Would he dare to do that?’ he asks himself:
‘bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens . . .?
Why not? Surely, in a work that will never be performed, all things are per-
mitted?’ (215). David’s decision to fi nally give up the lame dog at the close of
the text is written in language that alludes to sacrifi ce. ‘Are you giving him up?’
he is asked. ‘Yes, I am giving him up’, David answers, in the last words of the
text (220). Yet his sacrifi ce of the dog threatens to retroactively consume his
evacuated or inoperable opera. This threat of consumption is not simply a
fi gural one; David, after all, speaks of himself as ‘consumed’ by the opera, and
by this he means not only that he is deeply absorbed in its composition, but that
he is held, as he himself comes to realize, in ‘the music itself’ (184). Bringing
the dog into the piece thus poses the threat of rendering the opera a ‘consum-
ing’ work of mourning, capturing in its lament the unguarded alterity of the
other. However, Disgrace is a subtle text and this is not quite the opera that is
given to us. Fascinated by the sound of David’s humming of Teresa’s line, the
lame dog cocks its head, listens and ‘seems on the point of singing too, or
howling’ (215). The dog, then, is only on the verge of howling, marking in
its own way its prescient mourning before the absolute limit of its own death.
However, guarding thus the alterity of the dog as absolute other, guarding, that
is, against the operatic consumption of the dog, opens diffi cult questions of
artistic responsibility before the approach of the other. Failure to incorporate
the dog’s howl amounts in effect to its lösung – liquidation without remainder,
or perfect sublimation. This problem is given a deeper urgency when we hear
the inevitable resonance of David’s ‘Yes, I am giving him up’, with Lucy’s ‘no,
I am not giving it up’ (200). She is speaking here of her smallholding but the
words might refer as well to the child to come. Does Disgrace then risk falling
prey to iterating the sacrifi cial structure of the Akedah, the sacrifi ce of Isaac on
mount Moriah? When the text speaks of David ‘bearing [the dog] in his arms
like a lamb’ (220), is it not possible to discern behind this Christian scene
another older substitution, the substitution of the ram for the child? Might the
animal be sacrifi ced so that the child may be born? Does the text, despite itself,
reinscribe the sacrifi cial economy that underwrites the constitution of the
human?

Lucy suffers a sacrifi ce of self so profound and dislocating that it rips a tear in

her being, marking a shift in the boundary of the self that allows for the
approach of the other. Jonathan Lamb aptly describes this:

Disgrace is a collapse of the ego induced by a pain and humiliation so severe
that the acute sense of dispossession . . . accompanying it is not a hypothesis

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

or a fantasy but a brutal expulsion from familiar thoughts into presentiments
so alien, unconsoling, and vivid that they could belong to someone or some-
thing else. (Lamb 2001: 138)

Indeed, it is one of the subtle ironies of Disgrace that despite Lucy’s statement
that she does not ‘want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig
and have to live as a dog or a pig under us’, she does indeed come back
from her traumatic death as a dog, or at least in the position of a dog (Coetzee
1999a: 74). How humiliating, David says of Lucy’s proposal that she begin her
life over, starting at ground level, with nothing. ‘Like a dog’, David asks her.
‘Yes, like a dog’, she answers.

David himself, we recall, fi gures trauma in sacrifi cial terms. He thinks of the

experience of dying within his own psyche that his trauma has infl icted upon
him in the same terms that he thinks about the goat’s foreknowledge of death
at the edge of a knifeblade. ‘[Y]ou cease to care’, he says, ‘even at the moment
when the steel touches your throat’ (108). It is not, however, only the traumatic
aftermath of his attack, but the very attack itself that is fi gured in sacrifi cial
terms. This sacrifi cial economy is reinforced by the scene of the killing of the
dogs by one of the African intruders:

With practiced ease he brings a cartridge up into the breech, thrusts the
muzzle into the dogs’ cage. The biggest of the German Shepherds, slavering
with rage, snaps at it. There is a heavy rapport; blood and brains splatter the
cage. For a moment the barking ceases. The man fi res twice more. One dog,
shot through the chest, dies at once; another, with a gaping throat-wound, sits
down heavily, fl attens its ears, following with its gaze the movements of this
being who does not even bother to administer a coup de grace. A hush falls.
The remaining three dogs, with nowhere to hide, retreat to the back of the
pen, milling about, whining softly, Taking his time between shots, the man
picks them off. (96)

The deliberate practice of the killing, its cruel and considered quality, the
time taken between shots, the fact that the caged dogs pose no threat, goes
beyond the senseless carnage of the massacre, as Lucy calls it, and seems to
bespeak a ritualized act of slaughter. This ritualized slaughter amounts, I claim,
to a sacrifi cial gesture. In this scene, the dogs are steadily reduced to a state of
cowering humiliation before the power of the intruder. Unlike the dogs in the
clinic who cannot look at the euthanizing needle, the biggest of the German
Shepherds ‘slavers with rage’ and snaps at the muzzle of the gun only to have its
brains and blood splatter the cage. The dog shot through the throat fl attens its
ears in a gesture that repeats the fl attening of the ears of the dogs before they
are euthanized in the clinic, as if it too feels the disgrace of dying. The dog shot
through its throat ‘follow[s] with its gaze’, we are told, ‘the movements of this

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153

being who does not even bother to administer a coup de grace’. Who speaks here:
David or the dog? David surely traces his gaze and judgement by way of the
gaze of the dying dog. He surely speaks in the place of the dog. However, it
also seems true to say that the dog has empathetically entered David’s being,
speaking through him, reversing through its anguished gaze the human–
animal relation, with the human killer now cast as ‘a being’ outside the fold of
the ethical. When I make reference to ‘speaking through’, I am not simply talk-
ing in fi gures, for the notion of ‘speaking through’ does not only function as
a trope in Coetzee’s writings but also takes on the quality of a material or per-
formative event, a thought advanced by Elizabeth Costello. Contesting the
claim that animals are too dumb and stupid to speak for themselves, she asks us
to consider the effect on Albert Camus of watching his grandmother cut off the
head of a hen, which she had asked him to bring to her. ‘The death-cry of that
hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly’, she tells us, ‘that in
1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of
the polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then,
that the hen did not speak?’ (Coetzee 1999b: 63). For Costello, the animal does
speak through the artist or writer. Might the dogs in Disgrace then be speaking
through Coetzee? In her Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifi cant
Otherness, Donna Haraway deploys Althusser’s concept of interpellation to claim
that ‘through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals “hail” us
to account for the regimes in which they and we must live’ (Haraway 2003: 17).
Might we not see the text of Disgrace as an instrument of this hailing? Might the
dogs not be hailing Coetzee, constituting him as a writing subject, speaking
through him, deploying what I want to call an ethics of metalepsis? It is, per-
haps, in terms of this act of speaking through that the dogs and the intruders
meet once again.

However, if we are to take seriously this act of speaking through, and if we are

to understand ethics as founded on a capacity for empathy, then the animal’s
powers of empathy provoke a perplexing question. Is the animal always outside
the ambit of ethical responsibility? Dogs in Disgrace are granted, after all, pow-
ers of empathetic feeling. The old bulldog Katy is described as being in ‘mourn-
ing’ and as being ‘ashamed’, the dogs in the clinic are said to feel shame, and
after her attack on Pollux, Katy is said to be ‘pleased with herself and her
achievements’ (Coetzee 1999a: 208). Apartheid presented us with a special
instance in the history of the human capture of the empathetic powers of the
dog. Burying the six dead dogs, David looks at ‘the dog with the hole in its
throat [that] still bares its bloody teeth’ (110). He looks at it now with a differ-
ent gaze, a gaze that no longer seems to fuse him to the dying animal, but a
deadened gaze, cast over a pile of corpses. Thinking back on the killing of the
dogs by the intruder he remarks to himself: ‘Contemptible, yet exhi larating,
probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black
man. A satisfying afternoon’s work, heady, like all revenge’ (110). What lies

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

behind the killing of the guard dogs that had been conditioned and tainted
by apartheid is a gesture of sacrifi cial retribution in which the power of the
black man is asserted over the lives of animals embedded in the power
relations of apartheid. What is at stake in the sacrifi ce of the dogs is not only
the killing off of a wrong-headed behaviouralist inculcation, but also the
destroying of those powers of empathy on which the dogs’ capacity for moral
relations rest. Indeed, when David traced his gaze through the anguished
gaze of the dying dog, reversing the human–animal relation, with the human
killer cast as ‘a being’ outside the fold of the ethical, it was not only the human
that was cast in the traditional position of beast, but the human coded as the
black man.

However, Disgrace is too ethical a text to submit to this sacrifi cial structure

without response or without responsibility. If we might read the slaughter of the
guard dogs in terms of the aftermath of apartheid, what sense are we to make
of the sacrifi ce of the young, unwanted, lame dog in the last moments of the
text? Let us begin with David’s ascription of a soul to the dogs. The church
fathers, he earlier muses, have denied them souls, but before the sacrifi ce of the
lame dog that he loves, he pictures the soul of the dog released, leaking out
of its corpse. He thinks of the dog carried like a lamb into the clinic and its
incomprehension in the face of death, before which, as with Elizabeth Costello,
the whole structure of its knowledge collapses. However, in contrast to
Heidegger, for example, or a whole tradition of Western metaphysics, the ani-
mal in Disgrace is not denied the apprehension of its own death. What is at
stake in the apprehension of death is the very origin of the contemporary dis-
course on ethics. For Emmanuel Levinas, subjectivity ‘is constituted fi rst of
all as the subjectivity of the hostage’; the subject is held hostage by the face of the
other or what amounts to the recognition of the mortality of the other (Derrida
1992: 279). The subject is called into responsibility for the other, before respon-
sibility even for himself, by the injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’. But as Derrida
points out, although:

[d]iscourses as original as those of Heidegger and Levinas disrupt . . . a
certain traditional humanism . . . they nonetheless remain profound human-
isms to the extent that they refuse to sacrifi ce sacrifi ce. The subject (in Levinas’s
sense) and the Dasein are ‘men’ in a world where sacrifi ce is possible and
where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on
human life, on the neighbour’s life, on the other’s life . . .. (279)

Levinas, in other words, denies the animal a recognition, however obscure,
of its own mortality and the ethical call of the other. However, in Disgrace, as
we have seen, the animal is not denied a face or gaze that holds the other ethi-
cally hostage, and it is here, I think, that Coetzee and Derrida approach one
another.

Acts of Mourning

155

We are now in a position to return to the question of David’s bringing of

the dog into the opera. In its fi nal manifestation, the opera, we recall, concerns
a middle-aged Teresa Guccioli calling to her long-dead lover, Lord Byron, in
the underworld. She sings to him and ‘from somewhere, from the caverns
of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied’ (Coetzee
1999a: 183). So faltering and faint is the voice of Byron, whom she calls ‘her
child, her boy’, that Teresa has to support it, singing his words back to him,
drawing him back to life, breath by breath. David brings Teresa to life out of the
traumatized folds of his own soul. Poignantly, he grants to Teresa the role of
supporting the shade of Byron, but even more extraordinary, his opera, his
work of mourning, becomes itself performative. Pushed to his limits by Pollux,
the boy rapist, who has come to live on Petrus’s holding, pushed to the limits,
that is, by the violent turns of the new South Africa, David must, like Lucy, learn
to live in a condition past honour. ‘That is why he must listen to Teresa’, he
tells himself, ‘Teresa may be the last one left who can save him. Teresa is past
honor . . . She will not be dead’ (209). ‘He speaks Italian, he speaks French,
but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa’, David claims
(95). But this, it turns out, is not quite true. It is, after all, the Italian lines of the
opera that Teresa sings through David, who, sitting in his dog-yard in Africa,
‘harkens to the sad swooping curve of Teresa’s plea as she confronts the dark-
ness’ (213). In Italy, Teresa picks up a mandolin: ‘Plink- plunk goes the mando-
lin in her arms, softly . . . Plink-plunk squawks the banjo in the desolate yard
in Africa’ in answer to the question David asked himself at the moment of his
own nadir: how can a man in his state ‘fi nd words, fi nd music that will bring
back the dead?’ (156). Phoenix-like, metaleptically, the work of mourning as
the work of art folds back to support its originator, to call its composer back to
life. ‘That is how it must be from here on’, David says to himself, ‘Teresa giving
voice to her lover and he . . . giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame’
(183). The ‘halt helping the lame’ refers to David’s giving voice to Teresa; it
refers, too, to the lame boy, Byron, but it also foreshadows the question of the
bringing of the lame dog into the opera just as the voice of the illegitimate
Allegra, which emerges from nowhere, foreshadows Lucy’s illegitimate child to
come.

The dog is fascinated by the sound of the banjo. When he strums the strings,
the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums Teresa’s line . . . the dog
smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too, or howling. (215)

The dog ‘cocks its head, listens’ in a gesture that seems to defy for a moment
the future fl attening of its ears before the disgrace of its dying. The dog is only
on the verge of singing or howling and what David will enter into the opera, if
he does, is the musical trace of its own lament loosed ‘between the strophes of
lovelorn Teresa’s’ (215). The bringing in of the trace of the dog’s voice would

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

not even amount to the welcoming of the voice of the other as other but an
alterity that ‘can only be the loss of the other in its self-presentation, that is, the
trace of the other’ (70). It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back to
animals’, but rather in Derrida’s terms of ‘perhaps acceding to a thinking,
however fabulous, however chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence . . .
of the word otherwise, as something other than privation’ (Derrida 2002: 416).
It is in these terms fi nally that I want to stake an ethical claim for the inclusion
of the trace of the dog.

Let us recall that David feels himself consumed by the

opera, but it is

. . . not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but
the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as
some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself. . .. (Coetzee
1999a: 185)

David is held in the voice that strains to soar away like the spirit but is reined
back to the material. The trace of David’s voice and that of the dog’s would here
be held beyond the discriminations of language that has founded the human/
animal divide. The trace of the voice of the dog is held in the music not as some
pale shadow of the human, but as the trace of the other as other.

Might we not discern, then, the redemption of the dog’s alterity in the sacri-

fi ce of the three-footed dog, an avowal of the absolute singularity of the dog as
other? ‘They do us the honour of treating us like gods, and we respond by treat-
ing them like things’ Lucy says (78). However, Disgrace offers us another way of
reading ‘things’ against the grain. The word ‘thing’ recalls David’s reading of
Lucifer: ‘He lives among us, but he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls
himself: a thing . . ..We are invited to sympathize’ David says, ‘but there is a limit
to sympathy’ (33). A limit, that is, to sympathy or to the capture of empathy.
Perhaps this too is a necessary consequence of the excessive and incalculable
demands of sacrifi ce. Might this not be what Disgrace itself ultimately risks,
becoming consumed and sacrifi cing itself ? In propelling itself into the space of
absolute sacrifi ce, in offering itself in sacrifi ce to its other, in responding, that
is, to the impossible demand of the other, Disgrace also guards its alterity.

Thinking about his sacrifi ce of the dog, David pictures the corpse before the

fl ames to see that it is ‘burnt, burnt up’ (220). He will do that for him, David
says: ‘It will be little enough, less than little: nothing’ (220). What is left is not
only the ash or cinder – another way in which Derrida names the trace – but the
incorporation of the unassimilable body into the crypt of the living. We might
think, then, of Disgrace as a conscious interrogation of the perfective – an action
carried through to its conclusion – burned, burnt up. What the text then refuses
is the perfective in its absolute sense. It is not fi nally in the sense of lösung, but
as the limit of the cinder that the sublimate of the work of mourning is the
work of art. It is here that the question of the sacrifi ce of the stray dog and the

Acts of Mourning

157

honouring of the corpses fi nally meet up. Unlike the guard dogs, the lame dog
has little power and is of little use. However, the dog gestures towards an art (or
is perhaps already an artist) that is beyond calculation, that holds itself open to
the approach of the other as other, and that listens to the trace of the non-
human other. It gestures to an art that, even as it succumbs to sacrifi ce, urges us
to sacrifi ce sacrifi ce, and here surely, to give a different sense to my question,
the animal is not outside the ambit of ethical responsibility.

I want to close by drawing an ethical allegory between the return of the

charred corpses of the dogs and the return of the disinterred bones of the tor-
tured ANC fi ghters exhumed from unmarked burial sites on state torture farms
by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Apartheid’s project was
one of lösung, after all, and the interdiction of mourning. Refusing lösung, the
dogs’ return offers David what I would like to call here the gift of mourning. In
Specters of Marx, Derrida speaks with some disapproval of ontologizing remains
as one of the tasks of mourning. The work of mourning, he remarks, ‘consists
always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the fi rst
place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead’ (Derrida 1994: 9).
The work of mourning requires that the object of mourning be fi xed and that
it stay in place, but like the dogs that refuse the consuming fi res of extinction,
the bones of the tortured return not spectralized but cryptically incorporated
in the collective consciousness of the new South Africa. They return, that is, in
defi ance of what must always go unmourned, apartheid’s totalitarian project of
the interdiction of mourning.

Notes

This question has also been addressed by Rita Barnard (2003: 202).

For a different treatment of the question of sacrifi cial responsibility, see Lucy
Graham (2002).

For an article that is much more circumspect about the possibility of entering the
dog into the opera, see Louis Tremaine (2003: 603–4).

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the

Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barnard, Rita (2003), ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African pastoral’,

Contemporary Literature, 44, 2, 199–224.

Coetzee, J. M. (1999a), Disgrace. New York: Penguin Books.
— (1999b), The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP.
— (2001), Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999. New York: Viking.

158

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Derrida, Jacques (1986a), ‘Fors: The Anglish [sic] words of Nicolas Abraham and

Maria Torok’ Introduction to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Trans.
Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

— (1986b), Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. New York: Columbia

University Press.

— (1992), ‘Eating well, or the calculation of the subject’, in Elisabeth Weber (ed.),

Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 255–87.

— (1994), Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.
— (2002), ‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 2,

369–418.

Graham, Lucy (2002), ‘‘Yes, I am giving him up’: Sacrifi cial responsibility and

likeness with dogs in J. M. Coetzee’s recent fi ction’, Scrutiny, 2, (7), 1, 4–15.

Haraway, Donna (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifi cant

Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Lamb, Jonathan (Fall 2001), ‘Modern metamorphoses and disgraceful tales’,

Critical Inquiry, 28, (1), 133–66.

Tremaine, Louis (2003), ‘The embodied soul: Animal being in the work of

J. M. Coetzee’, Contemporary Literature, 44, (4), 587–612.

Chapter 12

Sublime Abjection

Mark Mathuray

Much has been made of the mutilated and silenced black slave at the heart of
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. Analyses of Coetzee’s depiction of Friday are put in the
service of opposing approaches to the South African writer’s fi guring of alterity
in his novels. Recent postmodern and postcolonial readings emphasize both a
reticence on the part of the author to speak on behalf of the oppressed – they
make a specifi c claim about political representation, a refusal on the part of
the white writer to script the dominated black voice – and by representing as
heterogeneous the language games of the oppressor and the oppressed, they
claim that the writer invests the scripted silence with power, thus casting the
fi gure of the slave as embodying a form of anti-colonial resistance.

Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s article, ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading
Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana’ has proved infl uential in relation to poststructuralist
and postcolonial readings of Coetzee’s Foe. Not only does Spivak argue that
the novel stages the impossibility of an overdetermined political project as it
casts as oppositional the political programmes of feminism and postcolonial-
ism, she also locates the representation of Friday in the novel in (and as) the
‘strange margins’ – an agent, rather than a victim, that resists the metropoli-
tan’s attempt to voice his claims and desires (Spivak 1991: 172). He is, accord-
ing to Spivak, ‘the curious guardian at the margin’,‘the unemphatic agent of
withholding’ (172).

An effective rejoinder to Spivak’s argument is voiced by the protagonist

of Coetzee’s novel. Susan Barton, the would-be writer in the novel, is also an
astute critic of her (and Coetzee’s) text and her various attempts to analyse
her story both anticipate the critical responses to the novel and often subsume
their arguments. In the third part of the novel, which consists, in most part,
of a series of theoretical arguments between Susan Barton and Daniel Foe,
Barton carefully distinguishes between her silence and Friday’s. She argues
that whereas her silence is ‘chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence’,
Friday’s silence (an imposed silence, an authorial and colonial imposition), is
a ‘helpless silence’ (Coetzee 1987: 122). ‘No matter what he is to himself’,

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Barton passionately proclaims, ‘what he is to the world is what I make of him’
(122). Rather than identifying the muted slave’s disarticulation with power,
agency or resistance, Barton suggests that his silence is no guarantee against
assimilation to the dominant discourse, the dominator’s discourse. In fact, it
is precisely his silence which facilitates a co-option into any number of critical
paradigms, be they modernist, postmodernist, postcolonialist, Marxist, feminist
or otherwise. Barton further argues that it is her silence that is invested with
power – a power that lies in the ability ‘to withhold’ (123). Through her deliber-
ate silence about her daughter, Barton, rather than Friday, functions as the
agent of withholding in the novel.

More Marxist-minded approaches, however, contest the positive tenor of the

above readings. Benita Parry’s particularly incisive article ‘Speech and Silence
in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee’ is exemplary in this regard. Parry argues that
the silencing of the dominated in Coetzee’s texts repeats the exclusionary ges-
tures of colonial discourse – his texts rehearse the failures the writer himself has
ascribed to ‘white writing’ in South Africa.

As they remain unknowable and

radically other, these fi gures are not given a space from which to contest their
constitution by the narrative voice, which is almost always European (or white)
and very often female, making it impossible for them to disturb the dominant
discourse (Parry 1998: 152).

Barton’s ‘hermeneutics’ may once again prove

useful. She seems to be acutely aware that her texts (the memoir-letter in part
one, the letters to Foe in part two and the fi rst-person narrative of part three)
return repetitively to the site of their silence, to the sign of their anxiety –
Friday’s tonguelessness – a void at the heart of her narrative which destabilizes
her pursuit for control. Friday’s mutedness disturbs and interrupts the oppres-
sor’s voice, casting its projects, in relation to the historical other, as irredeem-
ably incomplete and as always-already unresolved. ‘To tell my story’, Barton
writes to Foe, ‘and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book
for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell
Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost!’ (Coetzee 1987: 67).

More signifi cantly for my purposes, Parry also suggests that the multiple scor-

ing of silence in Coetzee’s novels has less to do with articulating the disarticula-
tion of the relation between oppressor and oppressed but rather signals the
‘fi ctions’ urge to cast off worldly attachments, even as the world is signifi ed and
estranged’ (Parry 1998: 153). Thus for Parry, speechlessness in Coetzee’s texts
becomes identifi ed with the ineffable, signifying what cannot be spoken, and
the fi gure of the oppressed, as arbiter of this portentous silence, is given access
to a numinous condition (154). Other critics have also detected a desire in
Coetzee’s texts to escape the quotidian, a drive towards sublimity, towards tran-
scendence. Kwaku Larbi Korang perceives in Susan’s relation to Friday and in
the fi nal dream-like epilogue a ‘straining towards an impossible beyond’
(Korang 1998: 190). In relation to Coetzee’s earlier novels, Stephen Watson
notes a desire ‘to preserve the contemplative, mythmaking, sacralising impulse

Sublime

Abjection

161

at the heart of modernism’ (Watson 1996: 34) – an Eliot-like recourse to
myth as a disavowal of history. However, it is Graham Pechey who has clearly
identifi ed Coetzee’s poetics with the category of the sublime. In ‘The Post-
apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary’, Pechey heeds and quali-
fi es Njabulo Ndebele’s call for the rediscovery of the ordinary through the
analysis of a relatively recent literary phenomenon, ‘the postapartheid sublime’
which would, according to Pechey, transform the victory over apartheid into a
‘gain for postmodern knowledge, a new symbiosis of the sacred and the pro-
fane, the quotidian and numinous’ (Pechey 1998: 58). As Pechey does not refer
to any other novels except Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg that might fi t into
this category, I felt that his ‘postapartheid sublime’ operates more as a prescrip-
tive rather than a descriptive analytical tool. His language is Christian. Words
like ‘temptation’, ‘false gods’, ‘latter-day prophets’, and ‘grace’ gird a Romantic
view of literature which regards the novel (and art in general) as a conduit
between the everyday and the sacred. As Pechey sees Coetzee’s deployment of
the sublime in The Master of Petersburg as being identical with his earlier novels
written during apartheid, I am unsure as to what is particularly postapartheid
about the postapartheid sublime.

However, Pechey’s observation of the signifi -

cance of the category of the sublime for an understanding of Coetzee’s aesthet-
ics and politics is insightful.

I suggest the centrality of both the sublime phenomenon and the ambivalent

experiences it produces for an understanding of the narrative strategies and
textual processes of Foe but depart from Pechey’s postmodernism and Parry’s
Marxist position to argue that Coetzee’s fi ction deploys the sublime only to dis-
avow it. Key to understanding Foe is the idea of what I term the stalled sublime – a
rupture, a stalling of the sublime movement, which prevents an intervention of
the transcendent and hence interpretative fi xity. As the mental movement of
the sublime is forestalled by the refusal to resolve the breakdown of discourse/
meaning, Coetzee’s novels (especially Foe) founder on the sublime experience
(rather than its resolution), whose affective correlatives include anxiety, alien-
ation and ‘astonishment’.

There is no intervention of the transcendent, no

resolution of the breakdown in meaning, and terror does not transform into
tranquil superiority. In his texts, we are confronted not with a failed dialectic
(the disarticulation between self and other) but rather with a failed epiphany.

In addition to offering a description of Coetzee’s Foe in terms of the theory of
the stalled sublime, I argue that, implicitly, the novel, in terms of form and con-
tent, encodes the theory.

Ab/Re-jecting the Sublime

Drawing from the Kantian formulation of the sublime, Thomas Weiskel iden-
tifi es, heuristically, three phases of the ‘mental movement’ involved in the

162

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

sublime encounter (Weiskel 1976: xx).

A phase in which the relationship

between mind and object breaks down, or in which the reader is confronted
with a text that exceeds comprehension by having too many signifi ers or sig-
nifi eds (what he calls an ‘epiphany of absolute limitation’ [44]) is preceded
by a phase in which mind and object, signifi er and signifi ed, are in a determi-
nate relationship and succeeded by the recovery of balance between inner and
outer through the intervention of the transcendent. For Kant, the transcendent
reveals a ‘supersensible substrate of nature’ (Kant 1914: 109). The third phase
allows us to glimpse at and become aware of our destiny as moral beings, thus
the possibility of meaning is rescued (see Weiskel 1976: 23–8). Coetzee’s struc-
turing of the primary sublime moment in Foe, Barton’s encounter with Friday’s
‘tonguelessness’, mirrors Weiskel’s fi rst two phases of the sublime moment. We
encounter a determinate relationship that Barton establishes with the black
slave. He is a ‘shadowy creature’, a ‘dull fellow’ to whom she gives little more
attention than ‘any house-slave in Brazil’ (Coetzee 1987: 22–3). Racial differ-
ence and a power differential are fi rmly in place. At this point, Friday
operates in Barton’s narrative as nothing more than he would have in the
Coetzee-identifi ed ‘white writing’ of Southern Africa – the fi guring of blackness
as silence or a ‘shadowy presence’ (see Coetzee, White Writing, 1988: 5, 81). It is
neither the fact of his blackness nor his status as a slave but rather the
awareness of Friday’s mutilation that seems to rupture Barton’s established
relationship with the slave. When Cruso attempts to show her the reason for
Friday’s silence, she draws away. She claims: ‘I began to look on him with the
horror we reserve for the mutilated’ (Coetzee 1987: 24). The primary images
of the sublime moment, the abyss, darkness, and silence, dominate the scene.
Barton says of Friday’s mouth, which seems to her to be an abyss, ‘it is too dark’
(22). The text registers that ‘a silence fell’ (22). The moment generates, in
Barton, what seems to be Burkean terror and a bewildering and paralysing of
rational faculties. She claims not to be ‘mistress of [her] own actions’ as she
shrinks from the slave: ‘I caught myself fl inching when he came near me’ (24).
In the April 25th letter to Foe, Barton admits that the thought of Friday’s muti-
lated tongue causes her to ‘shiver’ (57). Rudolf Otto describes the encounter
with mysterium trememdum as eliciting a ‘shudder’ – the subject ‘held speechless,
trembles inwardly’ (Otto 1925: 17). The rupture, the shift from security to pro-
found anxiety, is signalled and performed by the text through the use of the
temporal qualifi er ‘Hitherto’ (24). Friday’s silence becomes more than mere
mutedness, more than a ‘shadowy presence’, but a signifi cant absence. For
Barton, there seems to be a pressing presence in his silence, the signifi cance of
which she will pursue throughout the novel and attempt to convert into
narrative.

I regard Kristeva’s theory of abjection in Powers of Horror as a version of

what I call the stalled sublime and her concomitant view of subjectivity proves illu-
minating in the attempt to address the ‘aporia’ of Barton’s horror at Friday’s

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Abjection

163

mutilation. For Kristeva, abjection, like the sacred and the sublime, generates
an experience that is a ‘compound of abomination and fascination’ as it is
related simultaneously to fear (phobias) and pleasure (jouissance): ‘One does
not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and pain-
fully. A passion’ (Kristeva 1982: 167, 9). However, the sublime with its appeal to
transcendent principles for its resolution ‘covers up the breakdowns associated
with the abject’ (12). In relation to Weiskel’s model, the third phase becomes
the ‘something added’ to abjection (12). Specifi cally, abjection is occasioned,
as the sublime in Weiskel’s model (and Coetzee’s analysis in White Writing),
through a breakdown in meaning. In abjection, it is caused by a loss of distinc-
tion between self and other, between subject and object. Yet, paradoxically, the
subject is drawn, compulsively and obsessively, to the objects or the phenomena
that facilitate the crisis. Abjection, Kristeva argues, is related ultimately to ‘what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules’
(4). She relates the experience to a stage in psychosexual development before
the subject establishes relations to objects of desire or of representation, a stage
when the distinctions between human and animal, between nature and culture,
are marked. An encounter that produces a radical breakdown in meaning
returns the subject to that limit-situation. ‘There, I am at the border of my con-
dition as a living being’ (3).

In her essay on abjection, Kristeva claims that the abject is also a ‘deject’ – ‘he

separates, places, situates himself, he strays’ (Kristeva 1982: 8). As much as Foe
is ‘about’ Susan Barton’s attempt to have her story told, it also charts her search
for a home. Yet we are also made aware that she is never at home. On the island,
she desperately wants to be rescued and tells Cruso, ‘I have a desire to be saved
which I must call inordinate’ (Coetzee 1987: 36). However, as soon as she is res-
cued, she begins to hanker after the life on the island (see Coetzee, Foe, 1987:
43). In England, she longs ‘to be borne away to a new life’ (63). Coetzee gives
us an acute sense of Barton’s unbelonging, her eternal homelessness, her obses-
sive desire to be elsewhere. She is a ‘deject’, she strays. The novelist translates
the transcendental homelessness of the modern subject, a subject cast away,
into Barton’s paradoxical desire for a home and the knowledge of its eternal
impossibility. Kristeva’s claim about the salvation of the deject (‘the more he
strays, the more he is saved’ [Kristeva 1982: 8]) echoes Foe’s acknowledgment
of the ‘maze of doubting’ in which every writer is lost and his proffered solution
to Barton’s fears about the insubstantiality of her daughter (and herself). He
tells her that ‘your search for a way out of the maze [. . .] might start from that
point [the sign of blindness] and return to it as many times as are needed till
you discover yourself to be saved’ (Coetzee 1987: 136, my parentheses).

Constantly threatened by the loss of system or of order, the abject is ‘neces-

sarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichean’ – she never stops demarcating
her universe (Kristeva 1982: 8). The Susan Barton of the memoir is a supreme
arbiter of difference. Not only does she seek to distinguish Cruso and herself

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

from Friday by her characterization of the slave as a ‘cannibal’, a ‘savage’ and
‘superstitious’ (for examples, see Coetzee, Foe, 1987: 31, 104, 106), she also
polices class and social difference. She says of Captain Smith: ‘I found him a
true gentleman though a mere ship-master and the son of a pedlar’ (Coetzee
1987: 42). Early in her memoir-letter, even before she recounts her meeting
with Cruso, Barton establishes a distinction between humans and animals
which will prove crucial to her relationship with Friday. She identifi es speech
with civilization and humanity:

So if the company of brutes had been enough for me, I might have lived most
happily on my island. But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech,
can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals,
and the moan of the wind? (8)

The onomatopoeic quality of the animal sounds she describes (the caws, the
screeches, etc.) establishes an organicity between sign and referent, a direct
relation between language and object, from which as we shall see she clearly
separates herself. The rhetorical nature of the question suggests an agreement
between her and the reader – a shared ideological position that distinguishes
the speech of the ‘civilized’ from the sounds of animals and brutes. The slip-
page from ‘brutes’ to animals should also be noted, which posits an identity
between them. Barton deploys this identity to ascribe Friday’s lack of speech,
his enforced silence, to the trope of animality (he is ‘like an animal wrapt
entirely in itself’ [70]). His is the life of an animal. Although the ascription
echoes racist colonial ideology, it seems to have a rather different import for
Barton. She writes: ‘I have no doubt that amongst Africans the human sympa-
thies move as readily as amongst us’ (70). Rather, it is allied to the affective
correlative of the sublime/abject moment, alienation – the radical exclusion
from intersubjective community. The major implication of Friday’s mutedness
is not some hidden story of colonial brutality but rather that it prevents
communication and exacerbates her alienation. ‘To live in silence’, Barton
writes, ‘is to live like the whales, great castles of fl esh fl oating leagues apart [. . .]
or like the spiders, sitting each alone’ (59).

Animal similes dominate Barton’s narrative and letters. In the opening para-

graph of the novel, she describes herself fl oating in the sea ‘like a fl ower of
the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfi sh of the kind you see in the waters of
Brazil’ (5). The excess of similes marks the gap between language and reality,
problematizing a mimetic theory of language. By reaching for one simile
after another, her language struggles to overcome the divide between sign and
referent. Implicitly, the excessive similes stage a crucial distinction for Barton,
that between herself and the animal world. From this point of view, it is pre-
cisely the gap between language and reality that she wants to maintain. The
indirect nature of the comparisons opposes the organicity of the animal sounds

Sublime

Abjection

165

(discussed above). When she is cast up on the island, Barton is deeply disturbed
by Friday’s and Cruso’s initial reactions to her, which blur the boundaries
between humanity and animality. She believes that Friday regards her ‘as a seal
or a porpoise thrown up by the waves’ and Cruso as a ‘fi sh cast up by the
waves’ (6, 9). This unease at her closeness to the animal world fi nds symptom-
atic expression in her refusal to use ape-skins for warmth. She writes:
‘I preferred not to have the skins upon me’ (19). Otto suggests that an encoun-
ter with the numinous produces a feeling of what he calls ‘creature-conscious-
ness’ (Otto 1925: 20). The subject experiences a sense of being a ‘nothingness’
in relation to an overpowering might. S/He is reduced to the status of
a creature, an animal. In a letter to Foe, Susan wonders if she should have
asked Cruso if he ever had an epiphany on the island, a moment when ‘the
purpose of our life here has been all at once illuminated’ (Coetzee 1987: 89).
Would it reveal, she asks, the island (and the world) ‘insensible of the insects
scurrying on its back, scratching an existence for themselves? Are we insects,
Cruso, in the greater view? Are we no better than the ants?’ (89). The opposi-
tion between humanity and animality, and the racial, social and class differ-
ences that Barton obsessively keeps watch over seem to be constantly under
threat, thus revealing the frailty of the symbolic order, which as Kristeva, follow-
ing Mary Douglas, points out is a ‘device of discriminations, of difference’
(Kristeva 1982: 69).

Coetzee structures two sequences in the novel as rites of passage, as passages

through a ‘liminal’ phase in which the symbolic order of the social aggregate
and power relations are undermined.

The ‘liminal’ phase of the rite-of-passage,

V. W. Turner argues, is characterized by marginality, the transgression of bound-
aries and by in-betweenness: ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there;
they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom,
convention and ceremonial’ (Turner 1969: 95).

Barton ascribes an epic narra-

tive to Cruso’s experiences on the island. She thinks of him as a ‘hero who had
braved the wilderness and slain the monster of solitude and returned fortifi ed
by his victory’ (Coetzee 1987: 38). The description of the epic nature of Cruso’s
struggles on the island immediately succeeds Barton’s recounting of her
journey through listlessness and melancholy to a return to fruitful labour (see
Coetzee 1987: 35–6). As Barton is wont to associate narrative with investing
experience with meaning, she expects Foe (and the reader) to establish a con-
gruence between her experience and the epic she ascribes to Cruso’s stay on
the island. She calls this period ‘the darkest time’, a time of ‘despair and leth-
argy’ (35). During this period, the divisions and distinctions that Barton uses to
demarcate her universe become unhinged: social and racial distinctions (‘My
skin was as brown as an Indian’s’ [35]), the divide between human and animal
(she bolts food ‘like a dog’ [35]), and the opposition between savagery and
civilization (‘I squatted in the garden, heedless of who saw me’ [35]). For the
abject whose need to mark out the world borders on obsession, this ‘liminal’

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J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

period can be nothing other than the ‘darkest time’. She conceives her return
to the symbolic order as a return to labour (‘step by step I recovered my
spirits and began to apply myself again to little tasks’ [35]). By the end of
the novel, she reverses her view on productive labour. She casts a return to
society as a return to a ‘life [that] is abject. It is the life of a thing’ (126, my
emphasis).

The other rites of passage sequence also replicates the crossing-of-boundaries

generated in and by the liminal phase. In the fi nal sequence of part two of
the novel, Barton and Friday journey to Bristol to try and fi nd a ship that will
take Friday back to ‘Africa’. The journey to Bristol is also a return to their
point of entry into England. In a text that privileges spatial inertia to temporal
movement as its structuring device, the journey to Bristol with its picaresque
quality appears ‘out of place’. It is during this sequence that boundary-crossing,
characteristic of liminality, is most apparent. For safety reasons, Barton pins her
hair under her hat and wears a coat at all times, ‘hoping to pass for a man’
(101). An old man calls Barton and Friday ‘gipsies’ and explains: ‘we call them
gipsies [. . .] men and women all higgledy-piggledy together’ (108). Not only
are gender distinctions blurred, but also Barton begins to apply animal similes
to herself, for example, ‘a woman alone must travel like a hare’ (100), and
‘I stripped off my clothes and burrowed like a mole into the hay’ (102). An
important aspect of rites of passages (e.g., in initiation rites) involves the
acquisition of knowledge about the gods and about their relationship to human-
ity. During the journey to Bristol, Barton believes that she learns the secret of
Friday’s dancing. As she dances, she falls into a trance in which she sees
‘wondrous sights’ and comes to realize that ‘there is after all design in our lives,
and if we wait long enough we are bound to see that design unfolding’ (103).
Like the epic hero, she is rejuvenated after the encounter with the noumenal
realm.

Barton is convinced that she has received a message of other lives

‘being open’ to her (104). The access to the transcendental sphere, the ‘pleni-
tude of perceptions and gifts’ that Parry sees as the prerogative of the ‘muted’
dominated characters in Coetzee’s novels seems also to be available to the white
female protagonist (see 153).

Coetzee’s deployment of the function and structure of the rite of passage nar-

rative is clearly different from West African literary treatments. Writers such as
Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri emphasize the ‘subjectlessness’ in
their textual mobilization of the narrative in which the cohesion and functional
unity of the clan/society takes precedence over the individual subject – the tra-
ditional import of the rite. The hero returns communicating new strength to
the community. In Coetzee’s recitation/revision of the rite-of-passage narrative,
not only is the resultant transformation directed solely at the individual subject,
but also the identifi cation of the subject with society/community is thwarted.
The return to society exacerbates, rather than mollifi es, the alienation of the
individual. After Barton’s encounter with the noumenal realm, in a sort of

Sublime

Abjection

167

ironic epiphany, she comes to understand that the reason Friday danced at
Foe’s Stoke Newington house was to ‘remove himself’, to escape social interac-
tion (104). The text ultimately refuses the reconciling fi ctions of a transcen-
dent vision by preventing both a resolution in the benevolent Oneness of
traditional sublimity and an escape from isolated individualism to identifi ca-
tion with humanity. From this perspective, we can see Coetzee’s novels as
rehearsing the fi rst two stages of Turner’s rites of passage. In the pre-liminal
phase, the subject is detached from an earlier set of social conditions, from
his/her place in the social structure (for instance, the Magistrate from his posi-
tion as magistrate of the frontier town, Michael K from his gardening job, David
Lurie from his teaching post at the Technical University of Cape Town).
Deprived of status and rank, his characters then exist as marginal or liminal
fi gures that are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between’ and his
novels chart their existence during this ‘phase’ (Turner 1969: 95). However,
this novelistic strategy refuses a ‘post-liminal’ re-aggregation in which the sub-
ject is re-integrated into society into a new, stable state. Furthermore, in Foe, the
counter-discursive strategies, its non-verbal forms of expression (e.g. music and
dance) aggravate the alienation of the characters. In the Stoke Newington
house, Barton hopes that, through music, she and Friday may be able to com-
municate. She fails, once again, in her attempts to create some form of commu-
nication with Friday. The tunes they played on the recorders ‘jangled and
jarred’ (Coetzee 1987: 98). The resisting of the non-verbal as a means of resolu-
tion of sublime terror and alienation reveals another element of Coetzee’s
aesthetic of the stalled sublime.

The author draws attention to Barton’s state of abjection not only through

her dejection (her eternal homelessness) and compulsive need to institute and
mark boundaries but also, most clearly, in her peculiar reaction to Friday
after the primary sublime moment in the novel – her encounter with his miss-
ing tongue. After she discovers Friday’s mutilation, Barton writes: ‘I caught
myself fl inching when he came near, or holding my breath so as not to have to
smell him. Behind his back I wiped the utensils his hands had touched’ (24).
After the sublime encounter, Friday becomes unclean and somehow polluted,
to the castaway. The reaction, she claims, is outside her conscious control: ‘I [.
. .] was not mistress of my own actions’ (24). Kristeva suggests that abjection
involves a process of jettisoning the object that produces the specifi c crisis in
subjectivity from the symbolic order (see Kristeva 1982: 65–7). The excluded
object becomes defi led, an agos. In purifi cation rites, a fi lthy object is prohib-
ited, it is extracted from the secular order and invested with a sacred (secret?)
quality. Defi lement is thus fi lth sacralised (65). It is the process of prohibition
that anthropologists and religious historians (for instance, Frazer, Robertson
Smith, van Gennep, and Lévi-Strauss) see as founding the social aggregate by
maintaining divisions and distinctions between ‘society and a certain nature’
(65). Mary Douglas (1966) suggests that fi lth in African symbolic systems is

168

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

not a quality in itself but rather relates to a boundary, a limit. By treating
the object (in the case of Foe, Friday) that brings about the abject experience as
agos the subject (Barton) attempts to re-instate the boundaries that have sud-
denly become indistinct, the boundaries between self and other, subject and
object, inner and outer. The primary sublime moment in the novel, therefore,
stages an epiphany of absolute limitation, the absolute limit of subjectivity
itself.

A concomitant of treating the object as agos is its removal from the location

of libidinal object. It is, Kristeva argues, ‘asserted to be a non-object of desire’,
it is ‘abominated as abject, as abjection’ (Kristeva 1982: 65).

Coetzee is careful

to remove Susan Barton’s relation with Friday from the circuit of desire. Barton
tells the slave: ‘Be assured, Friday, by sitting at your bedside and talking of desire
and kisses I do not mean to court you’ (Coetzee 1987: 79). She refuses a psycho-
analytical reading of her language: ‘This is no game in which each word has
a second meaning in which the words say [. . .] “I crave an answer” and mean
“I crave an embrace”’ (79). What she feels towards Friday is, according to
Barton, not love but more like something beyond it. She tells her lover: ‘We
[she and Friday] have lived too close for love, Mr. Foe. Friday has grown to be
my shadow’ (115). Barton’s refusal of the logic of desire in her relationship
with Friday resonates with the experience of the Kantian sublime – a certain
disinterestedness, a refusal on the part of the subject to possess the object that
occasions the sublime moment. Although the abject-object fascinates and
beseeches desire, abjection is not sustained by desire (see Kristeva 1982: 1, 6).
The object is, thus, cast as threatening and as fascinating, it is a non-object
into which the speaking being is engulfed. Abjection constitutes the object
not only as agos (that which defi les) but also as katharmos (that which purifi es)
(see Kristeva 1982: 84–5), echoing the double value of the coincidentia oppo-
sitorum of the sacred subject (as both victim/outcast and leader/hero).

Kristevean abjection, the social signifi cances of the pharmakos and the epic
hero-victim are repeated at the level of the individual subject.

Barton’s fi rst

description of Friday casts him in the role of angelic redeemer. She addresses
her existential plea, ‘I am cast away. I am all alone’ to a ‘dark shadow [. . .] with
a dazzling halo’ (Coetzee 1987: 5). As katharmos and agos, Friday incorporates
ambivalence and reversal in a single being. In the scene in which Barton
explains to Friday that she is not courting him, she interprets her obsession
with Friday as the desire for ‘answering speech’. Her desperation in confront-
ing a world in which she speaks ‘into a void, day after day, without answer’ (80)
suggests a godless universe without the possibility of grace or transcendence.
Coetzee makes Friday the bearer of this particular load of signifi cation by
replacing the deus absconditus of modernity with the homo absconditus of the
apartheid state – the ‘missing’ black citizen of a segregated state, the brutalized
and tortured black body that cannot be read. It is only through the forever-

Sublime

Abjection

169

withheld possibility of Friday’s ‘answering speech’ that Barton sees herself as
escaping alienation, which is why she cannot rest.

Barton’s reactions to Friday’s tonguelessness and her obsessive need to invest

his silence with meaning arise neither from racial difference, nor from the
power differential (his status as a slave), nor even solely from his physical
mutilation. The reason why Friday’s perceived emasculation should produce
sublime horror in Barton lies in her description of how she imagines Friday’s
tonguelessness. This immediately precedes her confession to Foe in part
three of the novel. She says: ‘I pictured [it] to myself wagging and straining
under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself’ (119). As Friday’s
lack of tongue functions as a cipher for emasculation in Barton’s ima gination,
on one level, his tonguelessness erases the gender distinctions that are crucial
for Barton. More importantly, as a marginal and marginalized woman, Barton
betrays her awareness that she is as much silenced as Friday. Identity, rather
than difference, confronts Barton in the sublime moment. For the abject, the
obsessive marker of the universe, the supreme arbiter of difference, the break-
down in meaning generated by the loss of distinctions (between man and
woman [through his emasculation], savage and civilized [through her silenced,
marginal status], and deriving from both of these distinctions, the human and
the animal [through the opposition she sets up between civilized speech and
the sounds of brutes and animals]) can only produce horror of the sublime
kind.

Through the depiction of a sublime experience, Coetzee enacts the logic of

the limit of subjectivity. Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the Kantian sublime is
apposite to his strategy. Nancy contests Lyotard’s postmodern formulation of
the sublime with its preoccupation with artistic strategies of ‘presenting the
unpresentable’ and ‘negative presentation’, and argues rather that the sublime
interrogates the logic of the limit. While beauty is concerned with form, with
boundaries, the sublime, Nancy claims, involves ‘the unlimitation (die Unbregen-
zheit) that takes place on the border of the limit, and thus on the border of pre-
sentation’ (Nancy 1993: 35). The sublime does not ‘escape to a space beyond
the limit. It remains at the limit and takes place there’ (49). At the limit, Nancy
argues, there is neither ethics nor aesthetics. In Foe, through the matter of
Friday’s tongue, Coetzee stages an epiphany of the absolute limitation of sub-
jectivity, a sublime abjection. He traces the limits of subjectivity through the prob-
lematization of racial, social and class distinctions, the divide between the
human and the animal, and thus the boundaries between nature and culture.
Through the textual strategies of the stalled sublime and the depiction of an
individual at the border of her condition as a living being, the ‘device of dis-
criminations’ on which the symbolic order (particularly the colonial symbolic
order) rests is destabilized. The logic of the stalled sublime refuses the recon-
ciling fi ction of a transcendent escape from the quotidian. Coetzee replaces
traditional forms of sublimity with a reaching-after the ‘mystery’ of the brutal-

170

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

ized body of the historical other (and the ‘mysteries’ of the literary text itself).
However, the sublime moment in Foe generates neither an ethical relation
(to the historical other), nor a political vision. Precariously balanced at the
limit, the text (and Barton) can only turn on and return to itself.

Notes

For examples of these positions, see Splendore 1988, 59; Bishop 1990, 54; Marais
1996, 73; Macaskill and Colleran 1992, 446.

Coetzee characterizes the defi ning feature of ‘white writing’ i.e. the literature of
a people that are not quite European and not quite African, as a ‘literature
of empty landscape [. . .] [which] is thus a literature of failure, of the failure of
historical imagination’ (Coetzee, White Writing, 1988: 9).

Kwaku Larbi Korang agrees, regarding Coetzee’s disfi guring and disabling of
Friday as a locking into place of blackness, a hedging in that underwrites a ‘quasi-
essentialist interpretation of race and culture’ (Korang 1998: 193).

‘Like Coetzee’s earlier fi ction’, Pechey argues, The Master of Petersburg ‘concen-
trates – only then to displace away from itself – a force of sublime dissonance’
(Pechey 1998: 71).

The principal subjective dimension of the stalled sublime is alienation – the
metaphysical homelessness of the modern subject and the solitary individual
estranged from history are its correlatives. In In the Heart of the Country, Magda
agonizes that: ‘there is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There
is no act I know of that will bring the world into me’ (Coetzee 1977: 10). The
medical offi cer writes of Michael K as a ‘soul untouched by history’ (Coetzee
1985: 207). Susan Barton, in a fl ash of acute self-awareness, conjoins her
eternal homelessness and her desire for redemption: ‘When I was on the island
I longed only to be elsewhere, or, in the words I then used, to be saved’ (Coetzee
1987: 51).

As identifi cation with the historical other is often thwarted in Coetzee’s novels,
their discursive strategy operates outside a structuralist model which relies on
relation for meaning. Also, poststructuralist approaches that celebrate the play-
fulness of the text and the joy in the infi nite deferral of meaning seem far
removed from the anguish produced by the lack of meaning or connection in
Coetzee’s characters.

In White Writing, Coetzee relies heavily on Weiskel’s account of the sublime for
his discussion of the absence of this aesthetic category in nineteenth-century
South African poetry (see Coetzee 1988: 55–60).

There are multiple registers in which Kristeva scores abjection. At times, the
abject refers to the subject experiencing the breakdown (of meaning, identity,
order). At others, abjection refers to the defi led object/other, which for Kristeva
is a non-object, a non-other as abjection operates outside the logic of desire or
representation (Kristeva 1982: 65). Yet at still other times, she relates abjection to
the occasion, the impersonal moment that disturbs identity, order etc.

See V. W. Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969, 95–7.

Sublime

Abjection

171

The other two phases are the pre-liminal phase, in which the initiate is fully inte-
grated into socially structural relations, and the post-liminal phase, in which s/he
is re-integrated into a more advanced level in the social structure.

The structure of rites of passage replicates that of the epic narrative.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, however, the discourse of defi lement and purifi ca-
tion operates at the limits/boundaries of state power – at the frontier of the
colony and in the torture chamber. Coetzee suggests that the torture chamber
‘provide[s] a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarian-
ism and its victims’ (Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 1992: 363). For the Magistrate,
the violence perpetrated in the torture cell sacralises the space and when he
enters it, he wonders if he is ‘trespassing [. . .] on what has become holy or unholy
ground’ (Coetzee 1982: 6). By perpetrating the most violent of rituals, torture,
Colonel Joll, in the eyes of the Magistrate, becomes unclean, and, thus, the cen-
tral problem in his relation to the torturer is his apparent lack of need for a rite
of purifi cation – his ability to move ‘without disquiet between the unclean and
the clean’ after he has trespassed into the forbidden (12). The Magistrate asks
the Colonel: ‘Do you fi nd it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that
one would want to wash one’s hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough,
one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial cleansing [. . .] Otherwise
it would be impossible to return to everyday life’ (126). For an interesting discus-
sion of the functioning of the sacred in Waiting for the Barbarians, see Trevor
James’s ‘Locating the Sacred: J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians’.

Kant, in his ‘analytic’ of the sublime, writes of the pleasure, the one half of the
ambivalent sentiment generated in the sublime encounter, as ‘disinterested’
(Kant 1914: 113). There is no desire on the part of the subject to possess the
object that facilitates the sublime experience.

See Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 1981: 61–171.

Kant’s dynamical sublime repeats at the level of the individual the importance of
contesting the power of Nature. The power of the individual’s imagination
replaces the enactment of ritual challenge.

Works Cited

Bishop, G. Scott, (1990), ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Foe : A culmination and a solution to a

problem of white identity’, World Literature Today, 64 (1), 54–47.

Burke, Edmund (1998), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful.

London: Penguin.

Coetzee, J. M. (1977), In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg.
— (1982), Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
— (1985), Life & Times of Michael K. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
— (1987), Foe. London: Penguin.
— (1988), White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. London: Yale

University Press.

— (1992), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, David Attwell (ed). Cambridge,

MA and London: Harvard University Press.

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Derrida, Jacques (1981), ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 61–171.

Douglas, Mary (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

James, Trevor (1996), ‘Locating the sacred: J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbar-

ians’, in Jamie S. Scott (ed), ‘And the Birds Began to Sing ’: Religion and Literature in
Post-Colonial Cultures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 141–50.

Kant, Immanuel (1914), Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Trans. and Introduction.

J. H. Bernard (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan.

Korang, Kwaku Larbi (1998), ‘An allegory of re-reading: Postcolonialism, resistance

and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’, in Sue Kossew (ed.), Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee.
London: Prentice Hall International, pp. 180–97.

Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. N.Y.: Columbia Univer-

sity Press.

Macaskill, Brian and Jeanne Colleran (1992), ‘Reading history, writing heresy:

The resistance of representation and the representation of resistance in
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’, Contemporary Literature, 33, 432–57.

Marais, Michael (1996), ‘The hermeneutics of empire: Coetzee’s postcolonial

metafi ction’, in Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (eds), Critical Perspectives
on J. M. Coetzee. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 66–81.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993), ‘The sublime offering’ in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question.

Essays by Jean Courtine et al. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany, N.Y.: State Univer-
sity of New York Press.

Otto, Rudolf (1925), The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the

Idea of the Divine and its relation to the Rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. London:
Oxford University Press.

Parry, Benita (1998), ‘Speech and silence in the fi ctions of J. M. Coetzee’, in Derek

Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and
Democracy, 1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–65.

Pechey, Graham (1998), ‘The post-apartheid sublime: Rediscovering the extraordi-

nary’ in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature,
Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 57–74.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1991), ‘Theory in the margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading

Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana’, in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (eds), Conse-
quences of Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 154–80.

Splendore, Paola (1988), ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: Intertextual and metafi ctional reso-

nances’, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, 11, (1), 55–60.

Turner, Victor W. (1969), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Watson, Stephen (1996), ‘Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee’, in Graham

Huggan and Stephen Watson (eds), Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. Hampshire:
Macmillan Press, pp. 13–36.

Weiskel, Thomas (1976), The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology

of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 13

Authenticity: Diaries, Chronicles, Records

as Index-Simulations

Anne Haeming

On 26 July 1995, the President of South Africa published the Promotion of
National Unity and Reconciliation Act which led to the emergence of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (the TRC).

In the Act, ‘it is deemed necessary to establish the truth in relation to past
events as well as the motives for and circumstances in which gross violations
of human rights have occurred. [. . .] [A]nd the Constitution states that
the pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and
peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and
the reconstruction of society’. [Department of Justice and Constitutional
Development]

Partially as a result of the role played by the TRC, South African history has

recently begun to be conceived on the basis of individual stories. From the very
beginning of his literary career, J. M. Coetzee has been preoccupied with ques-
tions of authenticity, truth and its inexistence in the singular form. As part of
this preoccupation, his fi ction also explores what might be called master plots
and ideologies which themselves examine the existence of so-called truths as
no more than artifi cial constructions. In the following, I investigate how
Coetzee, through his works, repeatedly writes out attempts to achieve analo-
gical verifi cation. Furthermore, I suggest that he considers the human desire
for authenticity as expressed via artefacts – artefacts as ‘prostheses of origin’,
to borrow an expression from Derrida (Derrida 1998). Through my explora-
tion of these issues, I will suggest that Coetzee produces a literature which ques-
tions its own status as art, a literature which questions its relation to the world,
a literature which is acutely aware of its own imprisonment in language (and
ideology) and, thus, a literature which problematizes these crucial notions
of representation.

174

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Coetzee’s Edges of Fact and Fiction

The compulsive search for authenticity is a theme which pervades Coetzee’s
texts through their repeated depiction of a range of cultural acts as so-called
‘prostheses of origin’. As man-made indexical signs, they are at the same time
man-made authenticity; and as such they possess an intrinsic colonizing atti-
tude. They articulate the want to structure space and subject it to the law of
‘analogical verifi cation’ (Scarry 1985: 14). Colonial acts of cultivation have to
be seen against the background of index-creation: all for the sake of authentic-
ity. As the term itself implies, authenticity (suggesting the originator of an
action

) is closely linked to the notion of truthfulness. Authenticity is the appar-

ent objective of a range of different textual genres (including autobiographies,
diaries, chronicles and letters), the aim of which initially appears to be to com-
municate truthfulness. Philippe Lejeune, an infl uential thinker about autobi-
ography, refers to this ‘contractual genre’ (Lejeune 1989: 29):

As opposed to all forms of fi ction, biography, and autobiography are referen-
tial texts: exactly like scientifi c or historical discourse, they claim to provide
information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text, and so to submit to a test of
verifi cation. Their aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the
truth. Not ‘the effect of the real,’ but the image of the real. All referential
texts thus entail what I will call a ‘referential pact,’ implicit or explicit, in
which are included a defi nition of the fi eld of the real that is involved and a
statement of the modes and the degree of resemblance to which the text lays
claim. (22, original emphasis)

Lejeune’s conception of truth in the above quotation is not the ultimate

divine Platonic idea, but rather something that should be understood as evi-
dential and verifi able, and as something that bears witness to the existence of
the origin in physical reality. Simon During suggests that this kind of desire
for verifi cation is characteristic in the work of ‘postcolonial novelists’ who feel
compelled ‘to witness their society’ (During 1990: 152). In this way, I suggest
that Coetzee’s writing demonstrates this concern with verifi cation through a
subtext that continuously addresses the idea of writing itself.

This chapter will examine Coetzee’s technique of writing against the back-

ground of seemingly verifi able authenticity. In doing so, he establishes textual
spaces which explore the relationship between experienced ‘reality’ and docu-
mented experience. Through these textual spaces, Coetzee draws attention to
the edges of texts and, consequently, the edges of fact and fi ction. This probing of
the ‘edges’ is particularly revealing in his textual consideration of historical
truth, fi ctional truth and scientifi cally measured and calculated truth. He
repeatedly and persistently confronts the ‘edge’ of these in his writing through

Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations

175

his inclusion of seemingly verifi able texts, including diaries, chronicles, exact
sciences, physics and game theory.

Coetzee’s writing questions whether humans can have authority over ontic

reality. He examines this through the prominent appearance of diaries, travel-
writing, letters and archive material in his work. The human being is cast as
homo faber : a producer of ‘worlds’ which always refer to an existing author, initi-
ator, cause or index. This locating as such elucidates Coetzee’s repeated empha-
sis on verifi able references, traces and inscriptions. In their analogous relation
to the absent physical cause, I suggest that these traces are essentially messen-
gers of authenticity.

Diaries, Chronicles, Records

Coetzee’s fi ctional use of seemingly verifi able references inevitably asks ques-
tions about the reliability of the ‘facts’ or, rather, the implication of facts being
ultimately constructed as products of cultural performances. Coetzee’s merg-
ing of ‘fact’ and fi ction refl ects his own assertion that ‘[a]ll autobiography is
storytelling, all writing is autobiography’(Coetzee, 1992: 391). Indeed, the tex-
tual ‘bastard’ is everywhere in his texts: journal entries, diaries, letters, travel
writing. Much more overt than apparent offi cial historical data in his writing,
autobiographical accounts combine the verifi able side of historical experience
with a seemingly truthful subjective perspective. Coetzee repeatedly uses these
text forms and consciously includes details that underline the indexical quality
of the writing. This technique acts as a simulation of collecting historical data,
refl ecting the objectives of the TRC. However, with these parallels, Coetzee con-
currently highlights the shortcomings of these authenticity-driven attempts
and, I suggest, almost anticipated what was at stake in the work of the TRC.

In Foe, perhaps his most overt narrative discussion on historiography, Coetzee

illustrates how the presence of an eyewitness alone is not suffi cient to convey an
impression of authenticity. After returning from the island, Susan Barton
sets out to have an account written about her time as a shipwreck survivor.

However, she soon discovers that there is an insurmountable gap between her
own memory of this time and the version that is envisioned by Mr. Foe, the
author she has elected to put her experiences down in words. More than that,
Susan has to acknowledge that she has no proof of having lived on the island
and has no indexical sign of her time there, except Friday who, bereft of his
tongue, can tell neither her nor his own story:

I brought back not a feather, not a thimbleful of sand, from Cruso’s island.
All I have is my sandals. When I refl ect on my story I seem to exist only as the
one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a

176

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. (Coetzee
1987: 51)

Words alone, Susan realizes, are not suffi cient: she might be the sum total of

her past experiences; but she has no way to verify the events and non-events
of her time on the island without Cruso. While still marooned, Susan begged
Cruso to fashion some kind of ink and paper to ‘set down what traces remain
of these memories, so that they will outlive you; or, failing paper and ink, to
burn the story upon wood, or engrave it upon rock’ (17), but is, however,
rebuffed. Indeed, back in London and lacking any indexical sign, Susan desires
the proof which can authenticate her memories and turn her into something
substantial:

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty. For though
my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth [. . .].
To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable
chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the
knack of seeing waves when there are fi elds before your eyes, and of feeling
the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fi ngertips the words with which to
capture the vision before it fades. (51–2)

Susan’s conviction that a sense of authenticity is gained and verifi ed through
touchable objects, objects of substance, or ‘excarnations’ (Assmann 1993: 133–55)
is clearly communicated through this passage.

Foe features three different types of writing which all belong to the wider

fi eld of historiography. Susan, returning from an adventurous episode, feels
compelled to set down what happened to her, and ventures into the genre of
travel writing. In her attempts to fulfi l this desire, Susan also approaches the writ-
ing of a diary: her travel writing appears as retrospective journal entries which
combine descriptions of her present situation with island memories. Each diary
passage is clearly announced by a specifi c date which acts as an index and a
marker of seeming truthfulness. However, these apparent diary entries are actu-
ally letters to Mr. Foe, thereby employed to translate this information into a
book. However, as the distinguished author has disappeared, the diary-letters
are in fact written ‘into’ his absence. Normally, as Lejeune remarks, ‘[t]he sig-
nature designates the enunciator, as the address does the addressee’ (Lejeune
1989: 11). However, if one’s address serves as an index that refers back to one-
self, Foe’s absence is made all the more evident since Susan has taken over his
lodgings in his absence, thus fi lling an other’s indexical sign with new content.

Travel writing, diaries and letters are recurring narrative modes in Coetzee’s

writing and are supported by the perspective typical for quasi-authentic
accounts: the fi rst person singular. These narrative modes all demonstrate a
clear inclination towards the sense of the factual to which they each allude.

Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations

177

They are all, to borrow H. Porter Abbott’s phrase, ‘purporting to give the truth
of a real, not an invented, consciousness’ (Abbott 1984: 18). There is, for
instance, the intricate travel writing in the second part of Dusklands which relates
Jacobus Coetzee’s expeditions to the Hottentots and the Namaquas through the
various contradictory voices of fi ctitious-disguised-as-real author, translator and
editor. Through this, Coetzee lays bare ‘what is chronicled, alleged or transmit-
ted through the annals of South African history and the reality concealed behind
the façade of that hectoring discourse’ (Collingwood-Whittick 1996: 76), sug-
gesting that this is basically fabricated and unreliable histo-mythography.
Incidentally, Eugene Dawn professionally pursues mythography as a legitimate
and normal part of propaganda in the fi rst part of Dusklands, remarking that
‘[t]he myths of a tribe are the fi ctions it coins to maintain its powers’ (Coetzee
1974: 24). Dawn’s understanding of this represents another version of the fi c-
tive history which is related by Jacobus Coetzee in his ‘narrative’ (63) about the
journeys and the quasi-ethnographic statements about the indigenous tribes
that he encounters. For him, it is scientifi c truth; but for the reader, these utter-
ances dissolve in a jumble of unfounded voices. Additionally, Coetzee employs
the diary style of writing perhaps most prominently in In the Heart of the Country
where Magda tells her story, again written as a fi rst-person account. Her entries
are short paragraphs that are chronologically enumerated, which serves to
remind the reader of the chronological dates that normally introduce each
journal entry.

Letters also feature throughout Coetzee’s writing, including

one in Life and Times of Michael K which is addressed to Michael from his doctor
to express his inability to understand the inner drive of his former patient
(Coetzee 1983: 149–52). Since the preceding and bigger part of the novel stays
with Michael K, this letter offers the reader another perspective on the same
situation and, as such, unveils the ultimately subjective basis of historical data.
A much more intriguing way of using the epistle form occurs in Age of Iron
which is, quite literally, a letter that the dying Elizabeth Curren is writing to her
absent daughter. Indeed, in the course of the narrative, the reader learns about
Mrs Curren’s arrangement that, after her death, the letter will be sent to her
daughter. However, in a manner similar to the author-confusion in Dusklands,
Mrs Curren loses all credibility as the eye-witness which she has positioned
herself as throughout the novel when, as her letter tells us, she appears to die.
Coetzee’s writing once again breaks down and challenges even fi ctionally
created authenticity and seemingly verifi able ‘truths’.

What, in the light of all this, can still be counted as factual? History, more

than any other scientifi c discipline, appears to constantly and overtly occupy
the border between fact and fi ction, representing the differing and at times
opposing reference systems that play the role of indexical signs. However, the
way that these signs are read is not unilateral and there is not one single, unchal-
lengeable master-plot. Historical ‘facts’, one could say, are like manufactured
wooden slips engraved with indecipherable signs. Indeed, these slips appear in

178

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

Waiting for the Barbarians where the Magistrate understands them to be histori-
cal data from a lost society. The obscure pieces of wood were found on one of
several excavations that the Magistrate had supervised in the previous year. The
digging produced traces of a lost civilization with ‘faded carvings of dolphins
and waves’ (Coetzee 1980: 100) on these ‘relics of the ancient barbarians’ (112).
The meaning of the signs carved into the slips is presented as fundamentally
unintelligible. Demonstrating this, the Magistrate is forced to perform some-
thing of a live deconstruction when ordered by Colonel Joll to unveil their
meaning:

Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan
of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last
years of the Empire – the old Empire, I mean. (112)

However, the Magistrate is not interested in the signs’ meaning. Rather, his
declared focus is on the engravings as indexical traces which refer to their
absent-yet-existent producer(s). ‘I look at the lines of the characters written by
a stranger long since dead’, says the Magistrate (110). His references to the
literal unearthing of the physical traces have a bearing on this insight. Both the
pale animal carvings and the inscriptions in the wood function as verifi cation of
an absent physical presence. Dig at random, he recommends, to prove his
assumption that the whole terrain consists of nothing but ‘barbarian burial
sites’: ‘perhaps at the very spot where you stand you will come upon scraps,
shards, reminders of the dead’ (112).

Dramaturgically, these slips must be seen in relation to the Magistrate’s desire

to write his autobiography. However, he keeps delaying his beginning, suggest-
ing that his life story will in fact never be written. The connection between
the slips and the Magistrate’s unformed autobiography suggest that history is
largely a cultural product. Before stating it expressis verbis – ‘Empire has created
the time of history’ (133) – the Magistrate puts himself in the context of the
wooden slips and thus of the absent eyewitnesses of the barbarian civilization.
He imagines himself dying there, drying up, being shrivelled by the sun,
‘and not be[ing] found until in some distant era of peace the children of
the oasis come back to their playground and fi nd the skeleton, uncovered
by the wind, of an archaic desert-dweller clad in unidentifi able rags’ (100). Just
as the inscriptions on the walls and on the wooden slips verify a producer ‘long
since dead’, the bony leftovers of the Magistrate would not signify except as
proof of his existence. He concludes that any attempt at ‘putting down a record’
(154) in writing would only contribute to the limited ideology of imperialism.
The Magistrate does not want to write ‘a memorial’ (155):

I think: ‘I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history
that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for

Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations

179

the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them.’
(154)

Instead, the Magistrate turns to oiling the slips in order that they might be
buried where he found them so that others could discover them for themselves
one day. The example of the Magistrate illustrates the thin line that exists
between writing history and writing (auto)biography, and between historiogra-
phy and mythography. These two variants are introduced as early as Dusklands,
where both sections that form Coetzee’s fi rst fi ctional text represent one of
the two.

Throughout this chapter, I have gestured towards the notion that every con-

cept of history is framed by ideology.

Coetzee’s works highlight the strong

‘links between colonial fi ctions, history, and exploitation’ (Kossew 1996: 33).
Lejeune, responding to his own Autobiography in France, explores the idea of an
implicit pact that exists between reader and author which underlies the recep-
tion of texts. This applies especially to those with historical allusions, which he
terms ‘referential texts’ which ‘like scientifi c or historical discourse [. . .] claim to
provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text’ (Lejeune 1989: 22,
original emphasis). Lejeune draws particular attention to the terms ‘referential’
and ‘verifi cation’. These range from the referent, which is presented as verifi -
able, the truth and the real, but all are subsumed under the heading ‘proto-
type’ or ‘model’ (25). This is the ‘world-beyond-the-text’ (11) which fi nds its
marks, images and representations in the world of the text. Appearing to fi c-
tionally respond to this idea, Coetzee plays with the expectations held by the
reader about texts which are costumed as autobiography, letter, diary, chroni-
cle, record, or archive material, thereby developing a ‘fi ctional pact’(Lejeune
1989: 15) based on simulation. ‘[I]s not the eighteenth-century novel com-
posed precisely by imitating the different forms of personal literature (mem-
oirs, letters, and, in the nineteenth century, diary)?’ (15) asks Lejeune. Indeed,
Coetzee’s revival of this genre in the era of deconstruction is also recognizable
among some of his fi ctional contemporaries.

The Problem of Authenticity: Myth and History

The notion of authenticity, as Lejeune understands it, is based on a relationship
of semblance between ‘model’ and representation. Initially, the prominent sta-
tus of resemblance seems to counter the emphasis put on indexical relations
that I have established in this chapter. However, as I will now argue, there is suf-
fi cient justifi cation to read the two notions in conjunction with each other.
Lejeune lists two levels of resemblance between ‘model’ and sign: fi rstly accu-
racy, which is based on ‘information’; and secondly fi delity to the model, which
he sees as involving ‘meaning’ directly (23). When comparing this to existing

180

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

commentary regarding indexical relationships, Lejeune’s melding of indices
and icons is striking. His use of ‘fi delity’ and ‘meaning’ resonates with iconicity,
thus conveying a mimetic relationship and a much greater space for interpreta-
tion. Consequently, the explanations given by Lejeune allow for a fundamen-
tally indexical conception of (auto)biography, and also of different kinds of
historical writing.

In light of this, it is illuminating to reconsider Coetzee’s Dusklands. The text

presents two possible concepts of historicity, one which gestures towards histo-
riography and the other towards mythography. While the fi rst section, ‘The
Vietnam Project’, explicitly revolves around mythography and the power inher-
ent in this sort of fact-production, the second section, ‘The Narrative of Jacobus
Coetzee’, is a cleverly constructed comment on the emergence of historical
accounts. Coetzee’s ‘project of demystifi cation’ (Collingwood-Whittick 1996:
75) begins with himself: the author. Indeed, his fi rst fi ctional work appears to
be an intricate meta-debate on the Foucauldian author’s proclaimed death.
The two parts, separate yet implicitly connected by thematic parallels, play with
the concept of indexical writing, including autobiography, travel writing and
journal entries. They systematically challenge the reader’s notion about the
texts’ authenticity and therefore their origin – and author. For, as Lejeune
claims, the identity of its author and narrator is essential for an autobiography
to convey authenticity. In ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, Coetzee installs
an intricate network of editors, translators and recorders (all of the last name
Coetzee), which subsequently works to undermine any reliability regarding the
text’s suggested authorship or editorship. In doing so, the text draws attention
to its own making. The author of Dusklands, and thus also that of ‘The Narrative
of Jacobus Coetzee’, seemingly appears as both the translator of Jacobus’s
‘narrative’ (Coetzee 1974: 51)

and also as the second editor of the text (since

the translator’s appearance on the title page is accompanied by a translator’s
preface four pages later) (55).

Signifi cantly, what separates the title page

from the translator’s preface is a telling epigraph by Gustave Flaubert: ‘What
is important is the philosophy of history’ (53). One (rhetorical) question
works to reveal the whole network of metafi ction that exists beneath the text:
Who inserted this quotation? Due to the apparent setting of the narrative – the
expeditions take place around 1760 – Jacobus is ruled out. If it couldn’t
have been Jacobus, could it have been the mysterious S. J. Coetzee, declared
as editor, writer of the afterword, and father of the translator? Or was it
instead J. M. Coetzee who is listed as translator and appears as an implicit
editor? Alternatively, what about J. M. Coetzee, the author of Dusklands?

The text is a layered argument with the aim of showing that history, and

not only ‘the entire history of South Africa’, has been ‘distorted, in a word fi c-
tionalized’ (Collingwood-Whittick 1996: 78). Coetzee’s strategy is simple but
effi cient: the indices included in the narrative range from its ‘Translator’s Pref-
ace’, to the ‘Appendix I’ with the title ‘Deposition of Jacobus Coetzee (1760)’

Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations

181

(Coetzee 1974: 123), to a list of endnotes attached to S. J. Coetzee’s ‘Afterword’
(122) to, fi nally, the signature of the scribe who apparently wrote up what
Jacobus recounted regarding his expeditions. This passage simultaneously
forms the end of the ‘Narrative’, and also the end of Dusklands as a whole:

Related to the Political Secretariat at the
Castle of Good Hope on the 18

November 1760.

X
This mark was made by the Narrator in my presence.
O. M. Bergh, Councillor & Secretary
As witnesses L. Lund, P. L. Le Seuer (125, original emphasis)

There is the Councillor’s signature (in print), that of an eyewitness, a witness
who heard, and a printed ‘X’ – three indexical signs that ultimately indicate
that one Jacobus Coetzee told them a story. However, it is also insinuated that
only Jacobus, with his reprinted-but-handwritten (and thus genuine index) ‘X’
bore witness to the truthfulness of the given account. Read in conjunction with
each other, the account, the afterword by Jacobus’s descendant S. J., and the
translator’s note all represent a contradictory gamut of mythologized history
which has been lent the status of imperial truth. Even though Dusklands was
written in the 1970s, Coetzee’s ripping down of the fake ideological historical
curtain is now, in post-apartheid South Africa, of sustained signifi cance with the
so-called ‘truth commission’ at work. ‘I wonder whether a speculative history is
possible’, Magda muses in In the Heart of the Country in relation to the traded
facts of colonial history, before interrupting herself with an aside acknowl-
edgement: ‘[. . .] – I speculate of course – [. . .]’ (Coetzee 1999: 20). Comments
like this are repeated throughout Coetzee’s work, suggesting an implicit drive
to expose history as a construction of collective myth. In Dusklands, Coetzee
achieved this from two angles: from one position, there is the almost naïve
belief in truth-telling which is represented by the autobiographic and ethno-
graphic stance adopted by Jacobus; and yet from another position, ‘The
Vietnam Project’ is told by Eugene Dawn who introduces himself as mythogra-
pher who is part of the ‘Mythography section’ employed to construe facts
(Coetzee 1974: 4). Indeed, this fi rst section employs a fi rst-person narrator with
a very conscious relationship to both production and use of ‘propaganda’
(4) as ‘psychological warfare’ with an underlying ‘overall war strategy’ (19).

Conclusion

My readings of his fi ction suggest that Coetzee is preoccupied with the human
compulsion to hunt down and, lacking success, enforce authenticity. In light
of the ongoing attempts to retrieve forgotten and/or repressed elements of

182

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

South African history (as demonstrated by the panels of the Truth Commis-
sion), it seems that the craving for authenticity and verifi able stories has intensi-
fi ed. It is this defi ning impulse that Coetzee draws attention to when he writes
around, against, and from the midst of the realm between intra-textual fi ction
and extra-fi ctional reality.

Coetzee’s implicit appeal seems to be a truly moral plea: that it is worth step-

ping back from the endeavour to grasp, hold, and defi ne that which cannot be
grasped, or held, or defi ned. This appeal is echoed by Susan Barton in Foe as
she acknowledges the arbitrariness of her colonial gesture of defi nition:

I say Friday is a cannibal, and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundry-
man, and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? [. . .] No
matter what he is to himself, what he is to the world is what I make of him.
(Coetzee 1987: 121–2).

Notes

‘From Greek authentikós, authénte¯s one acting on one’s own authority, master,
perpetrator; autós self + -hénte¯s doer).’ (Barnhart 1988; 1995: 48).

For more on the link between author and authenticity, see Knieper and Müller,
2003, pp. 7–9.

With this construction, Coetzee manages to address the genre from two angles: on
the one hand, there is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as prominent part of the
canon; on the other is the early nineteenth-century topos of the female shipwreck
as ‘an emblem of British and American nationalism’ (Miskolcze 1999: 52).

The impulse to ‘see’ one’s thoughts as the product of excarnation seems to be a
topic not uncommon for the indeterminate prose form called diary fi ction. As
Kallinis points out in regard to Kosmas Politis’ novel The Lemon Grove, the ‘fre-
quent use of the verb “to see” when referring to memory confi rms that one of
his main purposes at the time of writing is to relive the past by re-seeing it’;
as demonstrated by the phrase ‘To see my thoughts laid out on paper’ (Kallinis
1997: 59). Excarnation, as noted above, is used as introduced by Assmann, 1993,
pp. 133–55.

Kirby, with reference to Adrienne Rich, elaborates on the interrelationships
between the proper name as the address of the space of one’s body and the ever
larger circles of geographical location. While passing over Kirby’s profound
critique of Rich’s arguments, it seems nevertheless reasonable to point out her
conception of the different versions of address as ‘locating the subject in discur-
sive and ideological structures’. In the end, hence, she argues for language as
stuck knee-deep in the spatial ideology of power structures (Kirby 1996: 27).

The author himself comments on this topic in an interview: ‘The numbers don’t
point anywhere’ (Coetzee 1997: 90).

Philippe Lejeune puts this in explicit words: Lejeune, 1989, p. 24.

Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations

183

Other well-known examples of this text form are V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the
World, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,
or Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Roes’ Haut des Südens, and especially many
decidedly feminist writers such as Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body), Carol
Shields (The Stone Diaries) or Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic), to name just a few of
an extensive list.

The second part’s title page, as well as the following three, including the Flaubert
epigraph inserted on what would be page 53, are not paginated.

This is the fi rst page of the second part with a page number.

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter (1984), Diary Fiction: Writing as Action. Ithaca: Cornell University

Press.

Assmann, Aleida (1993), ‘Exkarnation: Gedanken zur Grenze zwischen Körper

und Schrift’, in Jörg Huber and Alois Martin Müller (eds), Raum und Verfahren,
Interventionen 2. Frankfurt a M., Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 133–55.

Barnhart, Robert K. (1988; 1995), The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology:

The Origins of American English Words. New York: Harper Collins.

Coetzee, J. M. (1974), Dusklands. London: Penguin.
— (1980), Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Penguin.
— (1983), Life and Times of Michael K. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
— (1987), Foe. London: Penguin.
— (1992), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, David Attwell (ed.). Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP.

— (Spring/Summer 1997), ‘Voice and trajectory: An interview with J. M. Coetzee’,

Joanna Scott, Salmagundi, 114/115, 82–102.

— (1999), In the Heart of the Country. London: Random House.
Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila (Spring 1996), ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands: Colonialist

Myth as History’, Commonwealth, 18, (2), 75–89.

www.doj.gov.za/trc/legal/bill.htm, 20th April 2008.
Derrida, Jacques (1998), ‘Monolingualism of the Other: or, -the Prosthesis of

Origin’, in Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries (eds), Cultural Memory in the Present.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

During, Simon (1990), ‘Literature – nationalism’s other?: The case for revision’, in

Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, pp. 138–53.

Kallinis, George (1997), ‘

Λεηονοδα′σος: Diary novel or diary fi ction?’, Journal

of Modern Greek Studies, 15, 55–66.

Kirby, Kathleen M. (1996), Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjec-

tivity. New York: Guilford Press.

Knieper, Thomas, Marion G. Müller, (2003), ‘Vorwort’, in Thomas Knieper, Marion

G. Müller (eds), Authentizität und Inszenierung von Bilderwelten. Köln: Halem,
pp. 7–9.

Kossew, Sue (1996), Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André

Brink, Cross/Cultures 27. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Chapter 14

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings:

Coetzee’s Strategies

Katy Iddiols

Interpretation is a notoriously diffi cult concept to pin down and discuss in a
theoretical discourse.

However, in this chapter, I will not focus fundamentally

on theories of the concept itself, but instead consider how Coetzee uses interpreta-
tion as a device in his writing in order to illuminate it (and other related issues)
more effectively and from a more fruitful perspective than can be gained from
the more traditional medium of philosophy. It is my suggestion that this practi-
cal (rather than theoretical) exploration allows for a much more convincing, pro-
ductive and revealing examination of the dangers of interpretation (or, in the
terms of this chapter, inauthentic reading).

I am, of course, painfully aware of the irony of writing an academic chapter

about the reductive dangers of interpretation as this project will inevitably
require extended critical commentary, argument and acts of interpretation (on
some level, at least). However, while the potential for falling into the trap
of oppressive, reductive readings is a risk, this hazard cannot be avoided. As
I begin this chapter, I emphasize my resolve to try to evade this quandary by
resolutely responding to and conserving the voice of the texts themselves.
Additionally, by avoiding the weight wielded by past theoretical considerations
of the themes within this chapter, I seek to avoid speaking over the issues that it
considers by keeping Coetzee as this chapter’s central theorist and author.

Reading Inauthentically: How, Why and At What Cost?

Rather than leave his fi ction open to attempts at hermeneutic mastery, I will
illustrate how Coetzee’s writing tries to avoid the injury that can be infl icted on
texts by inauthentic reading. In this chapter, I will explore what it means for us, as
his audience, to read inauthentically before arguing that this type of reading can
have harmful consequences. I suggest that when we read inauthentically, we
privilege a different version of the text over the originality of the text itself. For

186

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

various reasons, particular readings are privileged over the text, effectively
becoming its (often inauthentic, unsolicited and inaccurate) spokesperson.
These privileged readings might include literary reviews, commentaries, aca-
demic perspectives or word-of-mouth interpretations. Although these readings
of the text may be entirely sympathetic, they can also become inauthentic read-
ings (with all their harmful consequences) when they are allowed to (or appro-
priated in order to) overpower the text’s own voice. It is of very little consequence
whether this was the original reader’s initial intention. An overpowering, benev-
olent interpretation can be just as damaging for the text as a malicious one. The
issue is, I argue, not necessarily the nature of the reading itself, but rather its
employment as a singular, reductive version of the text. I suggest that even the
most conscientious, considered reading would be rendered inauthentic and
capable of infl icting harm if it was used to speak over and/or for the novel in this
way. Our attempts to understand or grasp the text’s ‘meaning’ can often result
in us overlooking many of its subtleties and contingencies. With this in mind,
then, I suggest that as readers, we must be constantly aware of the potential
power (and capacity for injury) that is implicit in our responses to texts. Later
in this chapter, I will argue that Coetzee textually reminds us of this potential
through his writing and role as author, and leads us towards a more appropriate
way of reading.

However, if we understand our desire to interpret in the same terms as many

of Coetzee’s fi ctional interpreters, this would suggest that we want to interpret
the text so that we can master it. For instance, Kim Worthington suggests that
this type of oppression can be seen in Foe as Susan Barton attempts to appro-
priate Friday through her hermeneutic understanding of him:

Susan’s (unsuccessful) attempts to comprehend Friday, to render him read-
able, and thereby subject him to the authority of her (and her society’s) lan-
guage and values amount to an attempt to domesticate and control him;
throughout the novel she attempts to coerce him into performing acts of
communication with the aim of circumscribing and delimiting his personal
autonomy. Susan’s efforts are analogous to those performed by the reader:
we, like Susan, who tries to imagine the ‘true’ story of Friday’s life, perform
the inventive apprehending activity of characterological interpretation.
(Worthington 1996: 256)

Worthington also implicates the reader in this process: like Barton, we too read
in order to try to establish an understanding, both of the characters, and the
text itself. However, as with the implications of Worthington’s observation about
Barton, this parallel suggests that we too can be guilty of ‘attempt[ing] to
domesticate and control’ the text, ‘to render [it] readable’ and to ‘circumscrib[e]
and delimi[t]’ its ‘autonomy’. Indeed, Coetzee’s interpreting characters repeat-
edly reduce and limit their victims through attempts to redescribe them,

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

187

rendering them vulnerable to misrepresentation and its harmful consequences.
Similarly, if we think we know what the text is about, it ceases to mystify us and
we may develop a perceived sense of empowerment at its expense. As readers,
I propose that we frequently risk appropriating the text through our interpreta-
tive attempts, either consciously or unconsciously, in order to refl ect and con-
fi rm our self-perceived hegemonic comprehension of it. This type of inauthentic
reading forces the text into a singular interpretation which has the potential to
misrepresent and limit its contingencies.

In the terms of this chapter, I defi ne a singular interpretation, or singular

reading, as a response to the text which reduces its contingencies and multiplic-
ities and instead imposes a ‘master meaning’ which attempts to sum up what the
text ‘is about’. To read Life & Times of Michael K, for instance, as a novel merely
about an inarticulate man struggling to survive on the land, would miss many
of the textual undercurrents that form the style and the essence of the text.
Richard Shusterman suggests that any description of a work of art becomes an
interpretation of what we consider to be important within it, inevitably resulting
in a range of omissions and exclusions. He asserts that ‘[n]o description describes
everything, egalitarianly refl ecting all that can be said truly about a work’
(Shusterman 1992: 71). Description, I suggest, brings a fundamental limitation
which renders texts vulnerable to inauthentic readings or singular interpreta-
tions. Often, our desire to understand what we have read results in us reducing
an entire novel down to a bald, ill-fi tting summary. In order to make a text fi t our
summary, we might be tempted to ignore its multiplicities and sub-strands in
favour of what we understand to be the ‘central theme’. I suggest that this type
of singular reading is ultimately inauthentic. Any sense of the novel’s own voice
is ignored, and is instead roared over by the powerful, interpretative voice of us
as the self-appointed master-reader. This type of reading does not need to be
consciously oppressive: often, we are tempted to try to reduce a novel to its bar-
est themes in order to be able to grapple with it and draw out what we judge to
be its important elements. However, in this type of reading, we must question
our authority to judge what the important elements actually are.

Indeed, in her infl uential 1966 publication Against Interpretation, Susan

Sontag suggests that our desire to understand a text reveals much about our
own insecurities as readers:

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to
leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By
reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames
the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable. (Sontag
2001: 8)

Sontag suggests that interpretation is a simplifying device in order to make art
less threatening to its audience by making it easier to understand. However,

188

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

after discussing Sontag’s theory, Wolfgang Iser develops this point further to
suggest that because this interpretation must fi t into existing models or catego-
ries that the reader already knows and understands, any potential for a new and
fresh consideration of the text is effectively removed:

The zeal of critics for classifi cation – their passion for pigeonholing, one
might almost call it – only subsided when some special signifi cance of the
content had been discovered and its value ratifi ed by means of what was
already common knowledge. Referral of the text to some already existing frame
of reference became an essential aim of this method of interpretation, by means of which
the sharpness of a text was inevitably dulled. (My emphasis, Iser 1993: 3)

Building on this observation by Iser, I suggest that in the audience’s attempt to
make the work of art less threatening, the audience is actually posing a very real
and dangerous threat to the work of art’s survival though inauthentic readings.
Perhaps recognizing this potential damage, many artists have endeavoured to
complicate interpretations of their work. Sontag recognized this as a type of
conscious artistic rebellion, declaring that ‘a great deal of today’s art may be
understood as motivated by a fl ight from interpretation’ (Sontag 2001: 10). In
attempting to overcome the damage of inauthentic readings, artists can employ
certain devices to complicate and disrupt the possibility of singular interpreta-
tions. After all, texts cannot be pinned down to a singular meaning when its
readers cannot agree on one. With this in mind, then, it becomes apparent that
the threat of inauthentic reading can be frequently challenged by the artist and
his art. While multiple interpretations of a text can still be used inauthentically
by their readers to limit and restrict the distinctiveness of the work of art, they
are unlikely to have the same oppressive potential as a singular interpretation
which is elected to speak for the text itself. Developing this position in relation
to this chapter, I suggest that Coetzee repeatedly constructs his fi ction so as to
provoke multiple responses to his texts in order to protect them from the
damaging consequences of inauthentic readings.

Coetzee’s Alternative: Reading Authentically

In order to demonstrate Coetzee’s protective strategies, I will fi rst establish a def-
inition of the process of reading authentically. In the opening section of this
chapter, I suggested that inauthentic reading occurs when more weight or
authority is given to a secondary opinion, reading or response than to the pri-
mary text itself. With this in mind, then, I suggest that an authentic reading seeks
to give its attention back to the text with all its originality and distinctiveness.
This type of response also demands that readers allow the original texts to speak
for themselves, and do not appropriate them through singular or overpowering

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

189

interpretations or readings. Derek Attridge suggests that this type of singular
reading is inevitably doomed to fail precisely because ‘there is no single
“correct” reading, just as there is no single “correct” way for an artist, in creat-
ing a new work, to respond to the world in which he or she lives’ (Attridge
2004b: 80). Attridge continues to discuss how we might respond to art more
appropriately, and identifi es elements that signify a responsible reaction to a
work of art:

Responding responsibly to a work of art means attempting to do justice to
it as a singular other; it involves a judgement that is not simply ethical or
aesthetic, and that does not attempt to pigeonhole it or place it on a scale of
values, but that operates as an affi rmation of the work’s inventiveness.
(128)

I suggest that Attridge’s conception of responding responsibly can be
closely compared to my conception of authentic reading. As Attridge remarks,
responsible reading should acknowledge and verify the inventiveness of the
text. By speaking over the voice of the text itself, I suggest that inauthentic
readings would inevitably fail to achieve this. Authentic readings, however,
depend on a response to the text in its irreducible entirety. They recognize
that it is not possible to consider, theorize, review, or even notice and under-
stand all the individual elements that make up the text, and the reader is there-
fore not equipped or qualifi ed to speak over it. This authentic type of response
would seek to prevent inauthentic readings and interpretations being heard
at the expense of the original text. I suggest that it is this type of reading which
will illicit more fruitful and insightful responses from the text. Within this
suggestion, I am in no way appealing for an end to literary criticism or inter-
pretations. On the contrary, I fully recognize the worth and value of these
exercises in helping us to consider the many multifaceted intricacies of the
texts that they elucidate and explore. I, however, argue that much harm can be
infl icted by readings that attempt to speak over and for the text itself (or, in
my terms, by inauthentic readings). While we may indeed use other readings
to illuminate and clarify the text from previously unseen perspectives, they
should never be used to obscure, distort or stand in for the text’s own voice. As
readers both of the original text, and as readers of these secondary responses,
I suggest that we are invested with an implicit responsibility to preserve the
text’s own originality. This type of authentic response is necessary to preserve
the potential and the power of the text, allowing it to survive, unimpeded and
unlimited.

However, Coetzee’s status as a literary critic initially appears to complicate

these claims. As I suggested previously, literary criticism can be appropriated by
its readers who may use it to speak over the original text that it explores. If, as
I argue in this chapter, Coetzee’s fi ction embodies a resistance to interpretation,

190

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

why is he so willing to engage in this activity himself ? In his inaugural lecture at
Cape Town University, for instance, Coetzee’s attitude to interpretation seems
to suggest little respect for authentic reading, and instead appears to advocate
total hermeneutic mastery of the text, as supported by his commentary on
Rousseau:

But we do not have to let the matter rest where Rousseau does. We are enti-
tled to press for any kind of understanding we desire (that is, after all, part of
what it means to be a reader). (Coetzee 1984: 2)

As a literary critic, then, Coetzee seems to actively encourage any interpretation
to speak over the text itself. This, he claims, is part of the power of the reader.
Moreover, this is also the right of the reader. Initially, this position seems to
directly confl ict with the protective strategies that Coetzee employs against
inauthentic readings in his own writing. However, I suggest that Coetzee loads
his contentious assertion about the power and rights of the reader with irony.
Indeed, he continues to question this power of the interpreting reader (and
interpretations themselves) later in the lecture:

What privilege do I claim to tell the truth of Rousseau that Rousseau cannot
tell? What is the privilege of criticism by which it claims to tell the truth of
literature? I do not propose to answer this question. Instead, I want to care-
fully count the cost of answering it. Is it not possible that to tell what the privilege
of criticism over literature is would be to tell a truth that criticism cannot afford to tell,
namely, why it wants the literary text to stand there in all its ignorance, side by side
with the radiant truth of the text supplied by criticism, without the latter supplanting
the former? Can literary criticism afford to say why it needs literature? (My
emphasis 5–6)

Coetzee suggests that criticism achieves its sense of power over the text by
supplying its ‘radiant truth’. Criticism wants to speak for the text rather than
letting the text speak for itself, Coetzee asserts, demonstrating its attempts at
hermeneutic mastery. From his simultaneous viewpoint as both critic and writer,
Coetzee can recognize both the temptations of textual mastery, and its harmful
consequences. I suggest that it is partly this dual perspective which encourages
Coetzee to employ his textual defence mechanisms against inauthentic read-
ings. Supporting this position, Ian Glenn suggests that Coetzee is well-equipped
to make himself ‘critic-proof’ based on his ‘double allegiance’ as both writer
and literary critic (Glenn 1994: 25). By being aware of the implications of both
positions as interpreted and interpreter, I argue that Coetzee is able to circum-
vent the damage that singular interpretations would infl ict on his own writing,
which textually encourages us towards a more authentic way, as readers, to
respond to his fi ction.

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

191

Resisting Inauthentic Readings and Writing Back to Theory:

Coetzee’s Fiction

While philosophers and theorists have long considered the dangers and implica-
tions of interpretation as a process, I suggest that Coetzee instead examines these
consequences through his fi ction in order to establish a comparable creative position
with which to reconsider the potential damage caused by interpretation away from
the weight and history of philosophy’s approach to this issue. Rather than, for
instance, theorizing about it with unqualifi ed examples and imaginary conse-
quences, Coetzee embodies it through his writing. This fi ctional disruption of the
process of interpretation actually works to illuminate the dangers of inauthentic
readings that Coetzee’s fi ction writes out. In the following discussion, I, for instance,
explore his use of JC in Diary of a Bad Year in order to suggest that this character is
designed to complicate our efforts to read Coetzee himself into his texts. Similarly,
this strategy is used in various ways in Coetzee’s two volumes of ‘memoir.’ For
instance, Attridge comments that Coetzee’s employment of the third person in
Boyhood ‘implicitly dissociates the narrative voice from the narrated conscious-
ness’ (Attridge 2004a: 143), making it diffi cult for the reader to assume the validity
of the autobiographical subject in the text. Other textual strategies include
Coetzee’s fi ctional depiction of the repeated failure of singular readings (includ-
ing Barton’s unachievable desire to ‘understand’ Friday in Foe) and the damage
infl icted on his characters through being read inauthentically (such as Michael K’s
imprisonment for being perceived as an arsonist and a terrorist in Life & Times of
Michael K ). Similarly, Coetzee also employs various metatextual devices to compli-
cate and subvert the hermeneutic mastery of his texts, including his apparent dis-
inclination to speak publicly as J. M. Coetzee, the writer and academic (as discussed
by Attridge 2004a: 193), and his widely perceived reluctance to mediate between
his texts and their readers (see, for instance, Head 1997: 2). Indeed, in a relatively
early interview with Tony Morphet, Coetzee explains his reluctance to impose a
master-reading on his texts from his elevated position as their author:

Your questions again and again drive me into a position I do not want to
occupy. . . . By accepting your implication, I would produce a master narrative for a set
of texts that claim to deny all master narratives. (My emphasis, Coetzee 1987: 464)

Just as Coetzee uses strategies in his fi ction to limit the threat of singular
interpretation by his readers, he is equally determined to avoid this danger
himself by refusing to illuminate his texts further. Although these are only
a selection of the strategies that Coetzee uses, even brief reference to them
demonstrates the variety and scope of his attempts, as a writer, to avoid the
potential harm infl icted by inauthentic readings. While I fully acknowledge
that Coetzee effectively uses these (and other) various strategies (both textual

192

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

and metatextual) in order to circumvent singular interpretations elsewhere in
his fi ction, I will now focus my attention on his most recent publication, Diary of
a Bad Year, for the remainder of this chapter.

Coetzee gives us little opportunity to limit Diary of a Bad Year through inau-

thentic readings. Instead, I argue that by ensuring that the novel is irreducible,
Coetzee implicitly steers us towards a more authentic way of responding to it.
The novel itself is made up of three strands, which I will differentiate with labels
for clarity of discussion. The main body of the text, which I refer to as ‘Text A’,
is divided into two sections, opening with ‘Strong Opinions’, which is super-
seded by ‘Second Diary’. While these sections of text begin at the top of each
page, there is also one separate band of text that occurs simultaneously under-
neath on each page (Text B). Before long, this second band of text is joined by
a third, which also runs simultaneously underneath (Text C).

The layout

returns to a single text once, and only for a very brief interlude (153–4). The
sections are divided by a single black line, and vary in lengths on each page of
the novel. Text A is made up of a series of sections that appear to conform to
their respective titles. In the ‘Strong Opinions’ section, there are essays entitled,
for instance, ‘On national shame’ and ‘On political life in Australia’.

In the

segment entitled ‘Second Diary’, there are extracts whose titles denote a more
personal content, including ‘A dream’ and ‘Idea for a story’.

Text B is written

in the fi rst person, and seems to be the narrative of the author who is engaged
in writing the Opinions and Diary that constitute Text A. In his own narrative
(Text B), he explains the brief of the project that eventually forms Text A:

The book itself is the brainchild of a publisher in Germany. Its title will be
Strong Opinions. The plan is for six contributors from various countries to
say their say on any subjects they choose, the more contentious the better.
Six eminent writers pronounce on what is wrong with today’s world. (Coetzee
2007: 21)

We hear about his relationship with his typist and we eavesdrop on
their conversations. The writer tells us about his troubles with her editing
skills, and comments that ‘[t]here are times when [he] stare[s] in dismay at the
text she turns in’ (25). Text C is narrated from the fi rst-person perspective of
Text A’s editor/typist, Anya. She describes her interactions with the writer, the
process of typing up the Opinions section, and her thoughts on the material
that she prepares (which forms Text A). For instance, the opening extract
of Text A is called ‘On the origins of the state’, and a signifi cant part of this is
dedicated to a consideration of Kurosawa’s fi lm The Seven Samurai (5–7). Later
on in Text C, we are given Anya’s reaction to this very extract from her position
as typist:

Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai. How John Howard and the Liberals are just the
seven samurai all over again. Who is going to believe that? I remember seeing

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

193

The Seven Samurai in Taiwan, in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. Most of the
time I didn’t know what was going on. The only image that has stayed with
me is of the long naked thighs of the crazy man with the topknot. (33)

Not only does Anya recount the essay (from her own perspective), but she
responds to it with her own opinions, thoughts and memories. Coetzee uses this
technique repeatedly throughout the text to draw our attention to its supposed
method of construction. For instance, in Text C, we hear Anya rebuking the
writer for his inappropriate choice of colloquialisms:

Can I make a criticism? I said yesterday, when I brought him his typing. Your
English is very good, considering, but we don’t say talk radio, that doesn’t
make sense, we say talkback radio. . . .

He gave me a hard stare. Where do I say talk radio? he said.

I pointed to the place. He peered, peered again, crossed out the word talk,
and in the margin, in pencil, painstakingly wrote talkback. There, he said, is
that better? (51–3)

Sure enough, as we read the published version of the novel (which has been
supposedly edited and corrected by Anya), we fi nd an essay entitled ‘On Machi-
avelli’ beginning with the corrected line: ‘On talkback radio . . .’ (17). Anya’s
criticism that occurred in Text C, Coetzee seems to say, has infl uenced the fi nal
version of Text A.

I suggest that Coetzee’s use of this complex palimpsest-esque structure makes

it very diffi cult to know whether to approach the text as memoir, fi ction, theory,
or a combination of the three. Through this complicated structure, Coetzee
prevents us from drawing any defi nite conclusions about the novel. As readers,
we are compelled to approach the text and respond to it in its entirety. How-
ever, even among this deliberately infl icted confusion, Coetzee seems deter-
mined to disrupt his audience’s reading even further by ensuring that the writer
in the text bears several notable similarities to Coetzee himself. We are told, for
instance, that his initials are JC (123), he does not eat meat (165) and he is a
novelist who was born in South Africa (50) but now seems to live in Australia
(171). However, perhaps Coetzee’s most obviously teasing disruption of our
ability to interpret the text easily comes with his most explicit self-reference
when he refers to ‘[his] novel Waiting for the Barbarians’ (171). While this writer
indeed shares many remarkable similarities with Coetzee himself, as readers, we
are textually prevented from engaging in the inauthentic readings of singular
interpretation. However, unlike the disquieting textual warnings about inter-
pretation that Coetzee repeatedly includes in his other novels, I suggest that the
strategies that he uses in Diary of a Bad Year to explore the dangers of inauthen-
tic readings are actually relentlessly mischievous. Coetzee frequently challenges
his readers’ established perception of him as, in his own terms, ‘evasive’

194

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

(Coetzee 1992: 65) through his repeatedly playful gestures towards textual self-
reference. For instance, in Text C, Anya imagines the writer (JC) pleasuring
himself with underwear that he stole from her laundry:

There are a pair of panties of mine he pinched from the dryer, I am sure of
it. My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am gone and wraps himself in my
undies and closes his eyes and summons up visions of my divine behind and
makes himself come. And then buttons up and gets back to John Howard
and George Bush, what villains they are. (Coetzee 2007: 40)

Such an embarrassingly unfl attering depiction by Coetzee makes it very diffi -
cult for his readers to automatically associate the JC of the text with the John
Coetzee of Nobel Prize prestige and Booker Prize reputation. On fi rst reading,
we might wonder why Coetzee wants to gesture towards himself in this way, even
if it is done ambiguously. However, I suggest that it is precisely the undesirable
and unattractive nature of this depiction that makes it diffi cult for his readers
to associate Coetzee with this fi gure. As well as this unfl attering description,
Coetzee makes other veiled references which serve to distance himself from the
fi gure of JC. Anya discovers, for instance, that JC was born in 1934 (50), whereas
Coetzee himself was born in 1940. JC also informs Anya that he ‘did not merit
the gift’ of children (57), whereas Coetzee has had children himself. While
repeatedly aligning himself with the fi gure of the writer, then, I argue that
Coetzee simultaneously uses textual strategies in order to distance himself, thus
compelling his audience towards a more authentic response to the text which
allows it to speak for itself.

I also suggest that this established distance allows Coetzee to approach some

highly personal themes through the text under the protective veil of interpre-
tive disruption. In the section entitled ‘Second Diary’, JC receives some of
his late father’s belongings. He recalls his father and their relationship with
a sadness which pervades the extract:

He never told me what he thought of me. But in his secret heart I am sure he
had no very high opinion. A selfi sh child, he must have thought, who turned
into a cold man; and how can I deny it?

Anyhow, here he is reduced to this pitiful little box of keepsakes; and here
I am, their ageing guardian. Who will save them once I am gone? What will
become of them? The thought wrings my heart. (166)

After Coetzee’s history of interpretative disruptions (both textually and meta-
textually), it would be a brave (or foolish) reader that would attempt defi ni-
tively to claim this as an insight into J. M. Coetzee, the writer and the man.
While this extract bears striking similarities to Coetzee (both sons grew up in

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

195

South Africa and both sons are now ageing writers), I suggest that Coetzee
has textually protected himself from the oppressive consequences of such
inauthentic hermeneutic attempts. As readers, we are unable to appropriate
this description of the writer’s fear for his father’s possessions for our own
interpretative intentions. Instead, the extract remains haunting, sad and ten-
der, and is allowed to speak for itself without being obscured or reclaimed
by overenthusiastic readers. To borrow a phrase from Michael Marais (which
was originally written in relation to Foe but is similarly applicable here), I sug-
gest that Coetzee’s deliberate confusion of his possible role as a character in the
text is:

. . . only one of a number of strategies in Coetzee’s work through which the
text attempts, by both anticipating and politicising the interpretive act, to
forestall recuperation and, thus, to protect its difference from assimilation into
the sameness of the reader’s interpretive community. (Marais 1996: 73)

By overloading us with hermeneutic possibilities, I argue that Coetzee protects
his texts from being restricted or foreclosed by one singular interpretation. By
making his texts ultimately uninterpretable, Coetzee ensures a whole multiplic-
ity of readings. The more varied attempts that are made at interpretation, the
lower the risk that any one reading will be able to proclaim its mastery as the
defi nitive meaning of the text. By showing us the impossibility of choosing any
one of these interpretations over others, I argue that Coetzee undermines the
validity of singular interpretations and inauthentic readings of his texts. My
readings of Diary of a Bad Year illustrate a range of disruptive textual strategies
which I have suggested compel Coetzee’s audience to read more authentically.
In doing so, his text seeks to preserve and protect its irreducible contingencies
from the injury infl icted by inauthentic readings.

Conclusion: Towards a More Authentic Way of Reading

Repeatedly during his fi ction, Coetzee implicates the reader with degrees of
potentially oppressive power. Through his characters and his novels, we are
constantly made aware of the harm that can be infl icted through singular inter-
pretations. Throughout his oeuvre, we have seen a wide range of interpretative
projects attempted with differing degrees of commitment and intention. These
range from Eugene Dawn’s deliberate cruelty in his oppressive rewriting of the
Vietcong in Dusklands, to Susan Barton’s misguided and selfi sh attempts to
interpret the ‘secret’ of Friday in Foe. However, Coetzee never shows us the suc-
cess or benefi ts of any of these attempts to interpret, leaving us to draw our own
gloomy conclusions. Through their attempts at interpretation, his characters
repeatedly abuse, exploit or just get it wrong. With them in mind, it would be

196

J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory

understandable to conclude this chapter with a somewhat pessimistic sugges-
tion of the impossibility of responsible interpretation. Should we, as readers of
Coetzee (who have already had our job complicated by his refusal to offer his
texts to us without a hermeneutic fi ght), translate the unrelenting failure of
interpretation in his fi ction as a textual warning to us all?

Rather than being injured by the oppressive, reductive type of reading that

his characters regularly fall victim to, I suggest that Coetzee instead encourages
a response from his readers that declines to speak over the text, and is instead
determined to recognize and preserve its multiplicities and contingencies. As
Attridge asserts, ‘[Coetzee’s] novels demand, and deserve, responses that do
not claim to tell their truths, but ones that participate in their inventive open-
ings’ (Attridge 2006: 79). Coetzee refuses to allow his fi ction to be reduced to
inauthentic, singular interpretations by making it virtually impossible to be
read and appropriated in this way. Instead, he repeatedly uses these kinds of
strategies to complicate and disrupt our hermeneutic attempts, causing us, as
readers, to rethink the ethics of interpretation. This challenge also implicitly
encourages us to reconsider existing theories concerning the processes and the
consequences of interpretation. In this chapter, I examined some of these dif-
ferent devices used by Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year in order to suggest that he
uses these techniques in his fi ction to protect it from the injury caused by inau-
thentic readings. Through the text’s resistance to singular interpretation, it also
forces us to reassess the role of the reader. As a result of our reconsideration of
the interpretative process that Coetzee’s fi ction demands, he leads us towards a
more responsible, ethical, and ultimately authentic way of reading.

Notes

As I begin this chapter, I fully recognize that my discussion of the processes of
interpretation and hermeneutic reading are intrinsically loaded with the immense
weight of philosophical history. Theoretical discourses have repeatedly approached
and considered these issues under many different movements and guises. How-
ever, rather than use this chapter merely to review and summarize these existing
philosophical and theoretical positions, I will instead use Coetzee as my central
theorist in order to reconsider these concepts from the new positions and perspec-
tives that his writing reveals.

It should be noted briefl y that while I use the term ‘singular interpretation’ to
refer to restrictive and limiting readings of a text, Attridge instead uses singularity
as a concept that is closely aligned with uniqueness or originality.

The third band of text fi rst appears on p. 25 (Coetzee 2007).

These essays begin on p. 39 and p. 115 of Diary of a Bad Year respectively.

These extracts begin on p. 157 and p. 183 of Diary of a Bad Year respectively.

Disrupting Inauthentic Readings

197

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek (2004a), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event.

London: The University of Chicago Press.

— (2004b), The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.
— (2006), ‘Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and

the Question of Literary Reading’, in Jane Poyner (ed), J. M. Coetzee and the Idea
of the Public Intellectual. Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 63–82.

Coetzee, J. M. (1984), Truth in Autobiography [Inaugural Lecture]. Cape Town:

University of Cape Town.

— (1987), ‘Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987’. Interviewed by Tony

Morphet. Triquarterly, 69, 454–64.

— (1992), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, David Attwell (ed.). London:

Harvard University Press.

— (1998), Life & Times of Michael K. London: Vintage.
— (2007), Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker.
Glenn, Ian (1994), ‘Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and the Politics of Interpreta-

tion’. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 93, (1), 11–32.

Head, Dominic (1997), J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Iser, Wolfgang (1993), Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology.

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marais, Michael (1996), ‘The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzee’s Post-colonial

Metafi ction’, in Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (eds), Critical Perspectives
on J. M. Coetzee. Hampshire: Macmillan Press, pp. 66–81.

Shusterman, Richard (1992), ‘Interpretation, Intention, and Truth’, in Gary

Iseminger (ed), Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, pp. 65–75.

Sontag, Susan (2001), Against Interpretation. London: Vintage.
Worthington, Kim L. (1996), Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contempo-

rary Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

abattoir, and concentration camp 148
abjection of character in Foe 163, 167
abused women, refusal to testify 108
accuracy, based on information,

Lejeune 180

act-event of reading  26
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory  3
adventure of literature  19
affi nity of writers, during apartheid  13
African National Congress fi ghters’

bones 157

Africans writing for Europeans  42
‘Afrikaaner guilt’ 13
Afrikaans, writing in  14, 15
afterlife, bad dream of  42
Age of Iron  6, 14, 22, 29, 31, 65, 102–3,

112–22, 126, 177

clown characters in 119
link with The Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 6

Aida opera and stagehand story  17–18
alterity in novels  156, 159
Althusser, Louis, interpellation  153
ambivalence 42

in life and fi ction 63

American Muslims 1
animal

denial of recognition of its

mortality 154–5

rights  3, 41, 42
similes in Foe 164
sounds, onomatopoeic quality  164
speaking through writer  153–4
under apartheid  150

anti-heros 142
apartheid 4

and interdiction of mourning  157
and South African writers  126
victim, narrative of  13

aphasia 142
appropriation of text  187
archive material  175–9
artistic creation  101
asylum seekers, incarceration of, by

Australia 67

‘At The Gate’ 25, 29
attacks on whites and dogs  147
attraction to Hellenic bodies  131
Attridge, Derek  71–89

The Singularity of Literature 26

Australian citizenship, adoption by

Coetzee 63

Australian setting for Slow Man 61
authenticity 173–97

autobiography 180
enforcement of, in fi ction  181
messengers of  175
problem of  180–2
role of  7
through touchable objects  176

autobiographical narrative by Coetzee 48
autobiography and history 178–9

bad faith 1, 2
Banville, John, Birchwood 88–9
Beckett, Samuel 72–85

Coetzee’s dissertation on  48
infl uence on Coetzee  5, 82–7
literary ancestor of Coetzee  3
secret 74

Behr, Mark, The Smell of Apples 13
Bethlehem, Louise 20–33

Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid

Text 4

Bhabha, Homi  60–1
biography as referential text  174
birth from anus  124

Index

200

Index

black slave, Friday, in Foe 162

life of animal 164
silenced 159
victimized 29–30

blood spoor 30
bodily autonomy 5
body

‘extralinguistic’ 27
South African 28

body suffering in South Africa  96, 97
Boehmer, Elleke, queer bodies  123–33
Boer War, and Afrikaner history  16
border poetics  60
border policing in Australia  67
border tropes, postcolonial use  62
boundaries 60
Boyhood: A Memoir  5, 22, 47–58, 84, 126–9,

191

boys’ legs as fetishes of desire 123–5

Breytenbach, Breyten, Dog Heart 147
Brink, André

Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege 96
on post-apartheid literature 1–19
The Rights of Desire 17
South African novelist 4

Butler, Judith

Bodies that Matter 24–5
on chain of causality 26

Byatt, A. S., possible model heroines 40

Calvinist repression 96, 101
Camus, Albert

death of hen 153
The Outsider (L’Etranger) 142

cannibalistic metaphors  135–45
cannibals, in Foe 139
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 114–23
childhood 52–3
chivalric romance  114, 115
chronicles 175–9
civil libertarians in Australia  68
Claerhout, Father, painter  17
classifi cation of text  188
Coetzee, J. M.

embodiment in a woman  133
interpretation of his texts  191
novel writing  98

oeuvre, ‘hard to grasp’ 3
texts of, multiple readings 195
works

Age of Iron 6, 14, 22, 29, 31, 65,

102–3, 112–22, 126, 177

clown characters in 119
link with The Praise of Folly

(Erasmus) 6

Boyhood, autobiography 3, 5, 22,

47–58, 84, 126–9, 191

boys’ legs as fetishes of desire 123–5

Diary of a Bad Year 1, 3, 7, 44, 77, 88,

191–6

Disgrace 3, 6, 12, 22, 32, 37–41,

49–54, 88, 93–6, 105, 108, 110,
126–8, 130–2, 144

gang-rape and dog slaughter

147–56

liberation of South Africa 97
sex scene descriptions 83–4

Doubling the Point 31, 47–9, 55, 74,

76, 96, 97, 110, 121, 171

Dusklands 3, 62, 63, 71, 82, 94, 96,

103, 109, 139, 177, 179, 180–1,
195

Elizabeth Costello 3, 4, 6, 14, 18–33,

36–45, 60, 63–7, 69, 85, 86, 93–4,
98–9, 103, 105, 107–9, 124–32,
135, 142, 144, 148–9, 153–4

Foe 3, 18, 109, 131, 137–9, 159–70,

175–6, 182, 186, 191, 195

Giving Offense: Essays on

Censorship 100, 105, 108, 110

In The Heart of the Country 12, 14, 22,

83, 88, 95–6, 109, 170, 177, 181

Magda 95–6, 170, 181
sex scene descriptions 83

The Life & Times of Michael K 3, 22,

37, 97, 139–42, 177, 187, 191

The Lives of Animals 3, 6, 39, 41, 63,

93, 109, 132, 135, 148

The Master of Petersburg 6, 51, 76,

103–5, 107, 161, 170

The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee 62, 94,

180

Slow Man 3, 5, 32, 44, 60, 61–3, 66–9,

85, 93–4, 98–9, 103, 124–8, 132

Index

201

Stranger Shores 147
Waiting for the Barbarians 3, 12, 18,

22, 62, 64, 83, 96, 100, 143, 171,
178, 193

White Writing 5, 51, 53, 109, 162, 163,

170

Youth 5, 48, 50, 51, 54–8, 72–6, 84,

101–2, 124–9, 191

writings on Samuel Beckett 74

Coetzee, Jacobus, need to kill  96
coherence of past  38
‘coldness towards women’ 129
colonization, Dutch  16
colonizer and savagery  61–3
comedy, sense of  5
comments by typist of novel  192–3
Communion, ‘breaking of bread’  143, 144

Host as sacrifi ce to God 143
imagery of 135

comparison of Nadine Gordimer and

Coetzee 37–46

confession-essay by Coetzee 47–8
confl ict in South Africa, literary

response 112

controlling the text  186
corporeal desire  101
corpses, honour of  149, 150
‘correct’ readings  189
Costello, Elizabeth

as alter ego of author 40
desexed by Coetzee 131
fi ctional novelist, embodiment of

Coetzee 130

creative process, exposure of  19, 63
Creative Writing courses  19
‘creature-consciousness’ 165
cremation 141
criticism in literature  1
Croatian immigrants in Australian

novel 68

cross-dressing 133
cryptic Lessons from novel 42
cultural hybridity 61
Curtis, Adam, The Power of Nightmares

(fi lm) 1

Dangor, Achmat, Bitter Fruit 12

dark experiences of Beckett and

Coetzee 86

dead, obsession with 102, 103
death

desire and writing  103
of dog  55
of Hitler’s assassins  106

Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 18
Derrida, Jacques 6, 61, 156–7

Coetzee’s novel Foe 159–71
on fi ction 20, 21
on mourning 148–9
‘Psyche’ 103

descriptions of works of art as

limiting 187

desire

to hurt in sex  105, 107, 108
need, denial of  96, 97
responsibility and  6, 93, 94
unfulfi lled, Magda character  96
writing of 93–110

desire-to-read, -to-write 104
diaries 175–9, 182
Diary of a Bad Year 3, 7, 44, 77, 88,

191–6

diary style, In the Heart of the Country 177
diary writing in Foe 176
discipline of apartheid state 28
Disgrace 3, 6, 12, 22, 32, 37–41, 49–54,

88, 93–6, 105, 108, 110, 126–8,
130–2, 144

gang-rape and dog slaughter  147–56
liberation of South Africa  97
sex scene descriptions  83–4

disgrace of dying  151, 152
Disneyland trip, video  1
disruptive textual strategies  195
dog and ethical responsibility  55, 157
‘dog undertaker’ 150
dogs

killing of  147–56
trained as enemies to black man  153
treating us like gods  156

Don Quixote (Cervantes) 6, 114, 115, 118
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 76, 104

betrayal of, by Coetzee 105
literary ancestor of Coetzee 3

202

Index

Doubling the Point 31, 47–9, 55, 74, 76, 96,

97, 110, 121, 171

Dusklands 3, 62, 63, 71, 82, 94, 96, 103,

109, 139, 177, 179, 180–1, 195

Eaglestone, Robert, Introduction 1–7
eating

absorption and assimilation  136
anxiety about  135
discrimination 135
metaphor 6, 145
reciprocal act  139
selection 135

Eliot, T. S. 73
Elizabeth Costello 4–6, 18–33, 36–45, 60,

63–7, 69, 85, 86, 93–4, 98–9, 103,
105, 107–9, 124–32, 135, 144,
148–9, 153–4

based on Nadine Gordimer  37
cannibalistic imagery  142
post-apartheid text  20–33

emasculation of Friday, in Foe 169
embodiment

of interpretation by Coetzee 191
release from 141

‘embodying’, novels of  130
emergency state, in South Africa  29
empathy of dogs  153
endocannibalism 139
England and South Africa,

comparison 57

Engle, Lars, on parallelism in two

novels 38

epistolary novel 116–19

in Age of Iron 177

Erasmus, Desiderius, The Praise of Folly 6,

110, 113, 118

escape from own background 75
ethical action 117
evil 106, 132
experience-as-enrichment 56

‘female domain’ 14, 15
femininity in South African fi ction 14, 15
fi ction

and seeming realism 63
speaking through 2

fi ctions and autobiographies  50, 51
fi delity to the model, Lejeune  180, 181
fi gurative language  145
Flaubert, Gustave, on importance of

history 180

fl ight from interpretation, modern

art 188

Foe 3, 18, 109, 131, 137–9, 159–70, 175–6,

182, 186, 191, 195

on cannibalism 137, 138
interpretation of Friday, black

slave 186

folly 118
Ford, Ford Madox  73
foreigners and natives  68
Freud, Sigmund  71–2

‘gallows humour’ 87
Jokes and Their Relation to the

Unconscious 72

on mourning 148–9

Galgut, Damon, The Good Doctor 12
gender issues 3, 38
genocide 150
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship 100,

105, 108, 110

global state power 3
globalization 60
Gordimer, Nadine 36–45

The House Gun 12
My Son’s Story 12
None to Accompany Me 12, 39, 40

grace 44
Grecian form in statues, erotic love

of 123–4, 127, 129

Griqua history 16

Haeming, Anne 173–97
Haraway, Donna, Companion Species

Manifesto 153

harmonization, hermeneutic  49
Hayes, Patrick  112–22
heroines, nubile, young  117
historical accounts, emergence of  177–8,

180

‘historical guilt’ 22
historiography 180

Index

203

history and fi ction 49, 61

memory manipulation 63–6
rivalry of 112

Hitler

attempted assassination 106
‘fi nal solution’ 148

Holocaust see Jewish Holocaust
Homer’s ram  29
homoerotic feelings about legs  123–5, 127
homosexuality 128
horizonality 61
The House Gun (Gordimer)  12
human experience in South Africa  11
human rights abuses, victims  28
humanity and animality  165
humour in sex scene descriptions  77–83

Iddiols, Katy 1–7, 185–96
‘Immorality Act’ 17
In the Heart of the Country 12, 14, 22, 83,

88, 109, 170, 177, 181

Magda 95–6, 170, 181
sex scene descriptions 83

‘In the Penal Colony’ (Kafka) 21, 29
individual and world outside,

encounters 135

individual consciousness  117
internet reach  60
internment of bodies  28
interpretation 189

of Africa  42
dangers of  191
inauthentic reading  185–97
threat-reducing 187

intertextual citation 20
Isaac’s sacrifi ce on Mount Moriah 151

Jeanneret, Michel, Renaissance texts  145
Jerusalem Prize Lecture  114
Jewish Holocaust  132, 148

analogy with cattle killing 143

Jolly, Rosemary 93–110

Kafka, Franz  20, 21, 24
Kafka’s ‘Law’  21
Kant, Immanuel  161

sublime 7, 168, 169

Khoi missionary  16
killing of dogs  149–50
Kossew, Sue  60–71
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay in

Abjection 162

Kundera, Milan, Central Europe 114
Kunstlerroman 56
Kuzwayo, Ellen, Call Me Woman 14
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roi, Montaillou 16
landscape of South Africa 51
Landsman, Ann, Devil’s Chimney 17
language

‘apartheid’, Afrikaans  15
awareness 18
handling by Beckett  74
marker of identity  68
sex scene descriptions  77–83

legs of boys, beauty of  123, 124–5
Lejeune, Philippe, on autobiography  174
lesbian love  126
letters, in Foe 176
Levinas, Emanuel, on subjectivity  154
The Life & Times of Michael K  3, 22, 37, 97,

139–42, 177, 187, 191

literary criticism  189–90
literary movements  2
literary persona, Elizabeth Costello  67
literature

of Coetzee  173
and history, relationship  112
and the world, relationship  3

Little Karoo 17
The Lives of Animals 3, 6, 39, 41, 63, 93,

109, 132, 135, 148

Lodge, David, on Costello in Disgrace

40–1

London experience for Coetzee 56
lost civilization, traces of 178

‘madness of reading’ (Coetzee)  26
‘magical realism’ 16, 17
Magona, Sindiwe, Mother to Mother 12
Malan, Rian, My Traitor’s Heart 13
manstupration 82, 88
master and slave in South Africa  52
The Master of Petersburg  6, 51, 76, 103–5,

107, 161, 170

204

Index

mastery fantasy 94
masturbation 88
material body, irruption-into-text 24,

25, 29

Mathuray, Mark, sublime abjection

159–71

Matshoba, Mtutuzeli, Call Me Not A

Man 14

Mda, The Madonna of Excelsior 17, 18
meat eating  3, 136
meat factory  142
memory, fi rst  54
memory manipulation  63–6
metafi ction  20, 22–3, 30, 63, 180
metaphoric cannibalism  139–43
metatextuality 63
mind-body, ill-matched  77
misogyny 6, 72
misrepresentation of characters  187
models from other authors  40
Mont Blanc, Wordsworth’s encounter

with 49–50

moral arguments 2
mother, relationship with 52, 54
mourning 6

acts of 147–57

mouth functions 136
multiple responses provoked in Coetzee’s

fi ction 188

mutilation of bodies 28

tongue of black slave 162

My Son’s Story (Gordimer) 12
myth as disavowal of history 161
mythography 177, 180

Nabokov, Vladimir, literary radicalism 75
narrative controller 67
The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee 62, 94,

180

narrative voice  18, 191
national cultures, redefi nition  60–1
national identity  68

and ‘third space’ 61

nature poetry, South African 51
Ndebele, Njabulo, The Cry of Winnie

Mandela 14, 16

need, ‘threat’ of 96
Nobel Prize

J. M. Coetzee 23
Nadine Gordimer 38

None to Accompany Me (Gordimer) 12,

39, 40

novel

‘wanting-to-write’, Coetzee 97, 98, 101
and history, rivalry 118, 119

novel protagonist as its critic 159–60

Odyssey, identifi cation with ram 25
Oedipus, on happiness 94
old age, in Beckett and Coetzee

characters 77

opera, voice of dog in it  155–6
oppressed, speaking for  159
originality of text, preservation of  189–90
ostrich feather boom  17

parallelism in two novels 38
Paul Rayment, novel protagonist 63–5
Pechey, Graham, on ‘postapartheid

sublime’ 161

performance of South African writers  42
philistinism 187
picaresque romance  114–15
pigeonholing of text  188
poetical development of Wordsworth,

Prelude 49–50

political experience in South Africa  11
pornography and abuse of women  99
post-apartheid South African literature  4,

11, 23

post-apartheid text 20–33
postcolonial novelists 2

‘witnessing their society’ 174

postcolonial readings of Foe 159
post-modernism 1–3
Pound, Ezra  73, 75
power in silence  160
power of readers  190

Dusklands and Foe 195

power relations  14
Prelude (Wordsworth)  49, 52
‘project of demystifi cation’, Coetzee  180

Index

205

prose versus poetry 57
psychopathic violence 147

queer love 6, 126–9
queerness of Coetzee 131, 133

racial differences 165
rape 94, 95, 109

as intercourse in Coetzee 105
shame of 108

Rayment

as ‘raiment’ dress or clothing 63
as ‘vraiment’ (French, ‘truly’) 63

reading 94

inauthentic 185–96
performance 26

recollection and experience 56
recollection in tranquillity,

Wordsworth 50, 53

reconfi gurations 51, 57

of Wordsworth 55

redescription of characters  186
referential texts, Lejeune  179
refugees, unwelcome  67
‘representational literalism’  22
repression, challenge to  96
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela 116, 118
right of the reader  190
rite of passage narrative  166, 167
rites of purifi cation  171
Rocinante, Don Quixote’s old horse  115
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Coetzee on  190
Russians and Americans  53–4
Rwandan genocide  150

Sachs, Albie, on culture  126
sacrifi cial structure, Disgrace 151
Samolsky, Russell  147–57
Sancho Panza, clownish fi gure  119
scar as violence to body  28–9
‘Second Diary’ in Diary of a Bad Year

192–4

Sedgwick, Eve, Epistemology of the

Closet 128

self and text 60–71
self-hatred 72

sex

with Bushman girls 95
with Dutch girls 94–5

sex act, character’s ignorance about  121
sex as comedy  71–2
sex scene descriptions  77–83
sexual encounters, disastrous  101
sexual experiences with women  129
shipwreck survivor in Foe 175
shooting of dogs in cage  152–3
signifi cation models  27
signifi er and signifi ed  27
silence and meaning  169
singular interpretation, resistance to

196

slaughter

of dogs in Rwanda 148, 150
of guard dogs after apartheid 153

Sleigh, Dan, Islands 16
Slow Man 3, 5, 32, 44, 60, 61–3, 66–9, 85,

93–4, 98–9, 103, 124–8, 132

sex scene 85–6
sexual desire in 98–9

social and class differences 165
South Africa 3, 4, 7

experience 53
literature 11
nationalism, non-ethnic 28
post-apartheid 147

Spain of the reconquista 114
‘spatial turn’  60
‘spectral universality’  22
speech and silence in Coetzee  160
speechlessness in texts  160
spirits of the dead  17
‘stalled sublime’ in Foe 161, 162
starvation 136

and language 141

state torture farms 157
stories of ‘impossible situations’ 18
storytelling of experience 12
Stranger Shores 147
‘Strong Opinions’, in Diary of a Bad

Year 192–3

subjectivity, limit of 169
subjects lectured on, in novel 41

206

Index

sublime 7

Kantian formulation of 161–2

sublime abjection 159–71
sublimity of nature, Wordsworth 51
suspicion 1, 2
Szczurek, Karina, Coetzee and Gordimer

36–46

telling stories 18
temporality 55
terrorism, response to 1
text of novel, jocoserious (Age of

Iron) 118, 119, 121

Texts B and C in Diary of a Bad Year

192–3

‘third space’ of cultural hybridity  68
Tolstoy, ‘J. C.’s love of  2
tongue cutting of slave  137–8
torture 171
transcendent, in Kant  162
travel writing  76, 175–9
Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(TRC) 23, 157, 173

corporeal economy of  29
political crimes  99
South African body  4, 28
storytelling, 12, 19

truth, and writing process 48
Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, on rebirth

after cruelty 28

universal and abstract in Coetzee’s

writing 4

vanity of experience, Prelude 56
vegetarianism 42
verbalizing process 18
verifi cation

desire for 174
Lejeune on 179

Vermeulen, Pieter 47–58

on Coetzee, Wordsworth and South

Africa 5

victory over apartheid 161
‘The Vietnam Project’ novella 62, 71,

180, 181

violation of girl child, Dostoevsky 105
violence 96

in South Africa 112

visitation of Elizabeth Costello 67
Vladislavic, Ivan, The Folly 17
Vries, Abraham die, Uit die kontreie

vandaan 17

Waiting for the Barbarians 3, 12, 18, 22, 62,

64, 83, 96, 100, 143, 171, 178, 193

water scarcity, South Africa  56, 57
West African writers  166
white colonists  95
White Writing  5, 51, 53, 109, 162, 170
Whiteread, Rachel, sculptor, on artistic

convention 5

woman novelist, Coetzee’s impersonation

of 130

women’s history  16
women’s legs  123, 124
Wordsworth, William  47–58

The Prelude 5
and Coetzee 57–9

Wordsworthian innocence 53
work of art

as singular 189
taming of 187

writers and lovers  101
writing, act of  18
writing as a woman  132

Xhosa’s cattle killing 16

Yoshida, Kyoko 135–45
Youth 5, 48, 50, 51, 54–8 ,72–6, 84, 101–2,

124–9, 191

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