Writing Out of All the Camps

J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement

Laura Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135868994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination--combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory--of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists ( Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace ), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story ( Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country ), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas ( Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals ), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts ( Waiting for the Barbarians ). The work has broad academic appeal in the established fields of not only literary studies--postcolonial, contemporary, postmodern and environmental--but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. Because of its broad and interdisciplinary range, this text bridges a conspicuous gapin studies onCoetzee.

Chapter One

(Dis) Placing Coetzee: An Introduction

The function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty bound to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that the classic will not survive the decentering acts of criticism may be turned on its head: rather than being the foe of the classic, criticism, and indeed criticism of the most skeptical kind, may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival. (J. M. Coetzee, “What is a Classic?: A Lecture,” Stranger Shores 16)

One does not, of course, “like” Coetzee. Oily smooth, prickly, repellent, the prose presses, probes, and lets drop the conditions it touches. (Regina Janes, “Writing without Authority” 103)

J. M. Coetzee is an outsider in the realm of white South Africa both as an English speaker with an Afrikaans surname and by virtue of his own self-placement. His writing is continually characterized critically in terms of the things that it and he, by extension, does not do: Coetzee does not express an overt political stance with regard to South Africa in his literature; he does not answer questions after public lectures; he does not write realistic fiction; and now, after a recent move to Adelaide, Australia, Coetzee, as one of South Africa's most prominent writers, does not even live in South Africa. Derek Attridge justifies the absence of explicit ethical action in Coetzee's work claiming that “in both apartheid and post-apartheid society . . . such action is paradoxically undermined by its ideological premises” (“Expecting” 59). Furthermore, just as his work is marked by a refusal to engage publicly in the political realm, Coetzee does not confess details about his personal life as evidenced most explicitly in a recent interview with Eleanor Wachtel in Brick during which Coetzee agreed to the discussion under the conditions that Wachtel ask him no questions about “his own work, his life, or the political situation in South Africa” (38).

How then, one may wonder, is it possible to know Coetzee at all? What sorts of questions does he answer? Of course, Wachtel's interview was all about language, about the choices one makes as a writer with regard to language, in Coetzee's case, a writer who grew up speaking “English at home, Afrikaans in [his] public life” (38) and who writes in English. Such a discussion is, in one sense, merely about language as a literal means of communication, neither about Coetzee's life and his writing, nor about politics in South Africa. But then again, language, especially in the postcolonial, post-apartheid context of Coetzee's works, always gives way to metaphor. In Boyhood (1997), the first installment of Coetzee's three-part autobiography, tellingly written in the third person, for example, John makes the unpopular choice of liking the Russians instead of the Americans because of his preference for the letter “r,” “particularly the capital R, the strongest of all the letters” (27). In Boyhood, as in much of Coetzee's writing, the literal—this seemingly aesthetic choice about language—has the symbolic power to place the authorial persona of John outside of acceptable choices. It is from this linguistically determined position as an outsider that Coetzee's ethics begin to become apparent as his authorial choices with regard to language continually make manifest the rhetorical slippage between aesthetic preferences and political representations.

There has been an abundance of criticism leveled at Coetzee for these choices with regard to language and politics, this refusal to realistically represent in his fiction South Africa's political situation as it unfolds before him. For example, Mike Marais describes the acrimony with which Foe (1986), Coetzee's metafictional treatment of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, was met: “while the country was burning, quite literally in some places, the logic went, here was one of our most prominent authors writing about the writing of a somewhat pedestrian eighteenth-century English novelist” (“Death and the Space” 1). But because one cannot read South African literature without reading apartheid, or as Stephen Clingman claims, “in Africa human cannot be separated from historical experience” (Novels 3), Coetzee's novels never exclude this historical reality from which they are drawn; instead, Coetzee's rhetorical choices simply deny that there is merely one way to tell any story, including the stories of colonization, apartheid, and democracy in South Africa. Coetzee's life, like his writing, has been lived—albeit quietly—in opposition to the master narratives of South African historical experience, and his literary discourse places his work outside of the more traditional periods and themes that have tended to define South Africa's literary history both prior to and since the inception of apartheid in 1948.

* * *

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, eight years prior to the National Party's political victory and the codification of a long-extant racial oppression under the campaign slogan, “apartheid,” or “separateness.” According to Michael Green, the 1940s and 50s were characterized by historical fiction written “in response to increasingly militant nationalism” (16). Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (1948), for example, was published the same year that the Afrikaner National Party took power in South Africa under the apartheid slogan, yet Paton's narrative resisted, albeit in a sentimental manner, the nationalist racism of such a policy South Africa's other Nobel Prize winning white writer, Nadine Gordimer, was already writing and publishing short stories in the 1940s. Her second novel, A World of Strangers, published in 1958, focuses upon multiracialism, the dominant mode of social and political opposition to apartheid. Drum magazine's advent in 1951 provided an outlet for a group of black, predominantly male writers that have since been referred to as epitomizing South Africa's literary renaissance (Driver 231). These writers included editors Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahele as well as Alex La Guma, Can Themba, and Bloke Modisane, among others.¹

Coetzee did not publish his first work of fiction, Dusklands, until 1974, but the two extant volumes of his autobiography (or autre biography, as these works are often described by critics like Derek Attridge and Margaret Lenta), Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), situate the protagonist, “John,” within the context of South African history as an outsider, a figure who remains oppositional to the dominant discourse of the 1940s and 50s. John's aforementioned interest in the letter “r” characterizes his generalized disinterest in going along with the proverbial crowd and choosing, instead, an internal logic defined by an inherent sense of passionate resistance. For example, in Boyhood, the narrator claims, that “he chose [to like] the Russians in 1947 when everyone else was choosing the Americans; having chosen them, he threw himself into reading about them” (27). Furthermore, in the 1960s depicted in Youth, John has left South Africa and is living in London, far away from the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 during which police opened fire in a black township and killed 67 demonstrators (Clingman, Essential 52). In 1962, the same year that Nelson Mandela was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, Alex La Guma, while under house arrest, wrote A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, a collection that explores the status of the “colored,” or mixed-race, population in a Cape Town slum. By contrast, in Youth, John feels that he is free from the political strife that exists in his home country, the strife depicted in La Guma's fiction. His position, for example, is characterized by his ability to exist as an “onlooker” (85) and not an activist at a campaign for nuclear disarmament rally in Trafalgar Square. But the frustration at his own inability to fully escape involvement is apparent when the narrator says,

out of the frying pan and into the fire! What an irony! Having escaped the Afrikaners who want to press gang him into their army and the blacks who want to drive him into the sea, to find himself on an island that is shortly to be turned to cinders! What kind of world is this in which he lives? Where can one turn to be free of the fury of politics? (85)

Coetzee's representation of the political situation in South Africa is a representation of an authorial desire not to be apolitical, but to exist in self-contained opposition to a political co-opting that is often indicative of active demonstration. Furthermore, mediated through a third-person narrator, the narrative style mimics the narrator's political intention: such an act of displacement complicates any critical ability to define Boyhood and Youth as typically autobiographical and thereby places these works outside of any one specific literary genre.

In 1970, homeland citizenship was imposed on all Africans, and both the writing and political ideology of the 1970s were characterized by the Black Consciousness Movement, defined by its leader Steve Biko as

the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their operation—the blackness of their skin—and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It is based on a self-examination, which has ultimately led them to believe that by seeking to run away from themselves and emulate the white man, they are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. (49)

The Soweto Revolt of 1976, during which 575 people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed by police forces (Clingman, Essential 118), marked a significant moment in Black Consciousness thought. As Stephen Clingman notes, the revolt “was a concerted challenge to the state, and it set the tone for the decade to come. At the same time, however, it was a challenge to white sympathizers” (Essential 118). A climate of increasingly violent civil unrest contributed to what Michael Green claims was a skepticism towards the ability to represent the past in fiction (17); Dusklands, Coetzee's first work of fiction—which appeared alongside Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974) and subsequent to Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1973)²—exemplifies such skepticism. The second of the two novellas that constitute Dusklands, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” provides a fictional account of eighteenth-century Dutch exploration, and Coetzee's project in this narrative, claims Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, is to expose “to the reader the fraudulent or fictitious nature of documents that feign historical authenticity” (“J. M. Coetzee's” 77). But again Coetzee's work resists a tendency to focus specifically on South Africa; unlike Gordimer and Head whose novels explicitly critique South African history, the first novella of Dusklands, “The Vietnam Project,” is narrated by an American whose job is to examine the efficacy of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War.

If South African fiction of the 1970s is characterized by a critique of the possibility of truth-telling about the past, literature of the 1980s and early 1990s is perhaps primarily concerned with representing a possible future after the massacres at Sharpeville and Soweto, after the murder of Steve Biko in prison in 1977, and after, as historian Anthony Butler discusses, the removal of 3.5 million people between 1960–1989 as a result of the establishment of so-called ethnic homelands (24). During the 1980s, both Gordimer and Coetzee wrote novels situated in some fictive and potentially apocalyptic future moment. In 1980, the same year that Zimbabwe gained independence, Coetzee wrote Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel deeply concerned with its protagonist's inability to imagine a future other than one characterized by the dictates of Empire. If Coetzee deals with the South African situation in Waiting for the Barbarians, it is through the allegory that characterizes this narrative and allows for his implicit critique of Empire to travel to other colonial locations. In 1981, Gordimer wrote July's People, a novel that depicts the quintessential interregnum moment she describes in her 1982 essay “Living in the Interregnum,” as the white protagonist Maureen Smales runs toward an unknown future during a fictional South African civil uprising—the same fictive uprising, perhaps, that Coetzee later explores in Age of Iron, a novel he published in 1990, the same year Nelson Mandela was freed from prison.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, South African authors have had to come to terms with the construct known as the “new” South Africa, a place where the vestiges of a history of racial oppression still occupy the major part of the narrative frame. Many South African authors struggle, as playwright Malcolm Purkey claims that he is doing, to find a “new fiction” and a “new enemy”—an external nemesis—against which to pit their work.³ Similarly, literary critics are seeking new ways of identifying, classifying, and categorizing South African literature as it exists and continues to emerge from a legacy of colonial imposition. In his study, A History of South African Literature, for example, Christopher Heywood attempts to “overfly the colonial past” by approaching the categories of “English, Afrikaans, Coloured, and Black . . . as a single subject” (vii). And while Nadine Gordimer's recent novel The Pickup (2001) is set initially in South Africa, the protagonist Julie Summers emigrates with her lover Abdu to his unnamed Arab village. In a literary move uncharacteristic of her writing career, Gordimer's narrative is set, at least in part, in an unspecified location—a location beyond the boundaries of post-apartheid South Africa. It seems rather ironic, then, that at this tumultuous and shifting literary moment, Coetzee's second Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace (1999) emerged as arguably his most realistic and political novel, set firmly within the post-apartheid present of South Africa. At the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that perhaps Gordimer and Coetzee had engaged in a paradigm shift that may have—once again—displaced critical ability to characterize Coetzee as Gordimer's “other.”

Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, as South Africa's two predominant contemporary white writers of fiction, are often cast in relief against one another as authors with vastly different approaches to their artistic treatment of the political situation in South Africa, a situation that artists, many critics claim, have an ethical responsibility to realistically represent. And the South African artist's primary responsibility has been to represent the race-based injustices inherent in South Africa's history, injustices that have—perhaps with good reason—outweighed other potential political and ethical concerns. For example, while Gordimer is undeniably and admittedly political in her work, writing explicitly against apartheid, her writing is less concerned with feminist issues. As Stephen Clingman notes in The Essential Gesture, “women's liberation in South Africa, as far as [Gordimer] was concerned, was attendant upon and secondary to more fundamental economic and political change” (199). Coetzee's writing, by contrast, is always evasive of an overt political stance, confessional, anti-apartheid, feminist, or otherwise. Such nonparticipation has led to charges of complicity and and-feminism, or to the somewhat reductive claim that, because he often refuses to locate his narratives in any “real” location, Coetzee writes “parables of, among other things, the contemporary political situation in the Republic of South Africa” (Merivale 153). Critical defense of Coetzee's evasive position, on the other hand, is most often characterized by claims like Jane Poyner's that Coetzee's tendency to write against confession and realistic representational narrative as well as a supposed tendency not to voice black South African characters “constitutes a scrupulously defined political position: as (unwilling) representative of the colonial oppressor, Coetzee refuses to assert the (hi)stories of the Other, to impose meaning on them” (67).

Whether read through a positive or negative lens, however, Coetzee's political silences, especially in the context of South Africa, must be recognized as conscious acts of resistance against the kind of realistic representation that is expected and in many ways required of South African artists. Yet Coetzee's writing is implicitly political by virtue of its resistance, a resistance engendered by many of his characters. Acts of resistance are in themselves political as they constitute reactions to (or more specifically, against) a political situation or the agreed-upon expression of a political situation. Furthermore, such resistance, in as much as it marks a refusal to accept political and historical narratives as de facto truths, is an ethical analysis of representation: by refusing to present the decided-upon version of political events, Coetzee's narratives engage with the ethics of accepting any representation as the truth. Therefore, I have argued previously that Coetzee's work functions as minor literature⁴ by highlighting the ways that “each individual intrigue” is connected to the larger framework of politics (Deleuze and Guattari 17).⁵ But whether or not Coetzee's narrative strategies destabilize claims that his writing either usurps a voice that is not his own (as far as his female narrators are concerned) or fails to realistically represent, or voice, black South Africans, the continual debate about the ethical responsibility of the artist is situated within the theoretical interregnum that characterizes the transitional natures of South African society and literature.

The presence of a theoretical interregnum has become a defining aspect of South African literature and history as a result of Nadine Gordimer's aforementioned essay, “Living in the Interregnum.” Despite the literal meaning of “interregnum” as the interval between the end of one sovereign's reign and the accession of the next legitimate successor, philosopher Antonio Gramsci redefined the term when he interpreted it within the context of Marxist revolution. The interregnum, according to Gramsci, is the temporal period during which “the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”⁶ This interregnum, claims Gramsci, results from a crisis of authority: “if the ruling class has lost its consensus; i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant,’ exercising coercive force alone, thi...