Reading Coetzee's Women

Sue Kossew, Melinda Harvey, Sue Kossew, Melinda Harvey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030197773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world's most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee's texts address the 'woman question'. There is a focus on Coetzee's representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his 'ventriloquism' of women's voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.

Part IBecoming Woman, Becoming Other

© The Author(s) 2019

Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey (eds.)Reading Coetzee's Womenhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_2

Begin Abstract

He and His Woman: Passing Performances and Coetzee’s Dialogic Drag

Laura Wright¹

(1)

Department of English, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, USA

Laura Wright

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

CoetzeeHumourDragDialogismPerformance

End Abstract

I want to begin this exploration of J. M. Coetzee’s woman with two instances of drag in South Africa—the Miss Gay South Africa pageant of 1999 and Pieter-Dirk Uys’s decades-long performance of Evita Bezuidenhout—in order to situate the discussion that follows.¹ I will ultimately focus on Coetzee’s Troy Lecture, ‘At the Gate’, given at the University of Massachusetts just days after his winning the Nobel Prize in 2003, and my reading of his performance as the narrator of Elizabeth Costello’s story as an instance of ‘dialogic drag’, a term that I coined, after spending much of the day of the lecture with Coetzee, in my dissertation and subsequent 2006 book Writing ‘Out of All the Camps’: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement. And to that end, I want to stage this chapter as a kind of play—and to engage playfully with what I contend is Coetzee’s most significant woman, Elizabeth Costello.

Act I: Men in Dresses

Stage left: Elizabeth Costello (EC) steps off a bus. She is a ‘white-haired woman who, suitcase in hand, descends … She wears a blue cotton frock; her neck, in the sun, is burned red and beaded with sweat.’ (Elizabeth Costello: 193)

EC: ‘Is this the gate?’ (193)

Stage right: Evita Bezuidenhout (EB) walks towards Costello.

EB: ‘There are things that have to be said, and if the confusion is very strong when people say “but who said that? Did Evita say that or did Pieter-Dirk say that? And who the hell is he? He’s just a house clown.” Well, the joke is not my mouth, it’s your ear.’ (Shaw, 2007, emphasis added)

This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative and provocative Costello as a dialogic instigator who emerged during the interstitial space between his South African fictions and his citizenship in Australia, where he moved after publishing 1999s Disgrace . Over the last four decades, Coetzee’s engagement with white female subjectivity has taken three different yet sequential forms: first, via his female narrators Magda (1977), Susan Barton (1986), and Mrs Curren (1990) he has explored the ways in which white women’s voices enter into and are negated from male-dominated institutions like literary and social production. Second, in Disgrace (19), he creates a narrative about the impossibility of the arrogant male belief that one can ‘be the woman’ (160), embody her narrative, and write her as anything other than his idea of her. Finally, in his creation of Elizabeth Costello (2003, 2005), Coetzee undertakes an act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself. In many ways, it is possible to read the character of Elizabeth Costello as the answer to the question of the limits of the sympathetic imagination that Coetzee has been asking since the 1970s.

Ultimately, my argument is that via an implicit enactment of drag, Coetzee engages very explicitly with the ways that all of ‘his women’—but particularly his woman Elizabeth Costello—refuse compliance with his interpretations and frustrate his all-too-conscious attempts to embody and narrate their experiences. Further, Coetzee via Costello abdicates the need of the male author to ‘be the woman’ (Coetzee, 1999b: 160) as a preoccupation of much of Coetzee’s fiction prior to 2003. Coetzee’s women misbehave; they lie and scream and sometimes go mad. They argue, refuse to be quiet, and play tricks. They aren’t nice ladies, complicit and appropriate, and they work to frustrate and complicate both Coetzee as author and his various audiences. Further, via the performative act of reading Costello’s ‘lessons’ in Elizabeth Costello as his lectures, Coetzee engages in an act of drag that is dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense;² while he does not don women’s clothing and makeup to ‘perform’ Costello in the way that Uys does to perform Evita, and while Coetzee does not identify as gay, as Uys and the Miss Gay South Africa pageant contestants do, Coetzee’s performance of Costello, his best known female protagonist—a famous Australian novelist who willingly voices strong and often provocative opinions—queers his text by rendering present the fraught nature and dilemma of white womanhood in ways that invite commentary from Coetzee’s audiences within and beyond his works of fiction. Throughout his writing career, Coetzee has repeatedly engaged with the complexity and difficulty of imagining the interiority of a subject position other than his own, specifically the position of white womanhood.

Drag is always complicated and complicating. An article titled ‘Drag Queens Outrage Africa’ appeared in the Independent in November of 1999 and focused on the way that the Miss Gay South Africa pageant, a competition between male drag performers, was received when it was hosted in the town of Nelspruit, ‘arguably the most conservative town south of the Limpopo River.’ South Africa’s 1994 constitution guaranteed rights to LGBTQ individuals, but in 1999, in the weeks and months preceding the pageant, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, and Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi all made international news for a series of homophobic statements, some of which called for the jailing of LGBTQ Africans. Further, ‘South Africa itself faced new challenges to its constitutional guarantee of gay rights. In a country which is already xenophobic about other Africans, gay activists are concerned about the reception … asylum-seekers [from Pakistan and Uganda] will receive,’ and three weeks prior to the pageant, ‘Cape Town’s leading gay and lesbian bar, the Blah Bar, was pipe-bombed. Even though no one was injured, and gay-bashing remains relatively rare, activists fear they may be seeing the start of a trend’ (‘Drag Queens’). Many of the arguments at the time—and currently—against homosexuality and crossdressing in Africa stem from the belief that homosexuality was a colonial import, unknown in traditional African societies prior to colonization. The counterargument, however, comes from ‘activists citing African words for homosexuality and listing pageants across the continent in which men dress up as women. Their argument is that it was homophobia rather than homosexuality that the colonizers brought’³ (‘Drag Queens’).

As evidence of the existence of men dressing as women in precolonial Africa, Bernardine Evaristo notes that, ‘Andress Battell, an English traveller in the 1590s, wrote this of the Imbangala of Angola: ‘They are beastly in their living, for they have men in women’s apparel, whom they keep among their wives.’ Furthermore, ‘transvestism occurred in many different places, including Madagascar and Ethiopia’ (Evaristo). The push back by black male leaders like Mugabe et al. against men—black men in particular—dressing as women is a product of a more general fear focused on the very understandable concern with the ways that colonization across the continent emasculated black African men; therefore, a performative event in which men—particularly black men—appear in drag could be interpreted as constituting a specific kind of threat to postcolonial male identity, one that flaunts a performative and highly artificial femininity. As Margery Garber asserts, ‘the use of elements of transvestism by black performers and artists as a strategy for economic, political, and cultural achievement marks the translation of a mode of oppression and stigmatization into a supple medium for social commentary and aesthetic power’ (303). The performer is able to challenge both racial and gender-based social norms, revealing that all supposedly essential identity is derivative. As Dylan Muhlenberg notes in a 2017 article covering South African drag queens, ‘there’s no identity being mocked here, because identity itself is being dismantled.’ Such an assertion counters arguments that male drag performance constitutes a misogynist critique of actual women that functions in ways that are synonymous with the racism of blackface.

Kathleen LeBesco disagrees with interpretations of the way that ‘drag has sometimes been read as an acknowledgement of and capitulation to a restrictive, superficial, and still powerful set of gender signifiers, rather than an attempt to disrupt such signifiers,’ arguing rather that drag’s politics are highly disruptive. She notes that Judith Butler ‘argues that the constant denaturalization of gender that drag entails means that hegemonic culture is deprived of the claim to essentialist gender identities’ (233), a position with which LeBesco agrees. As a form of displacement, drag, according to Judith Butler, ‘is a cite of certain ambivalence’ (125) that constitutes neither an act of ridicule nor an attempt at passing, but rather a space of performative engagement with and disruption of gender-based expectations with regard to power. During the 1999 Miss Gay South Africa pageant, a mere five years after South Africa’s first democratic election that established the presidency of Nelson Mandela, men mimicking women offered an affront to homophobic sentiments uttered across the continent as well as to colonial and gender-based norms that had dominated the apartheid administration—an administration that, during the previous two decades, had been regularly and famously critiqued by another man in drag, white satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose character of Afrikaner Evita Bezuidenhout, ambassador to the fictitious black homeland, the Republic of Bapetikosweti, became a South African cultural icon.

In Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story, filmmaker Julian Shaw states that in the 1980s, Uys ‘was the most outspoken opponent of apartheid…. He could have been killed for the things that he said. He got away with it for one reason,’ and that reason was that he said those things in drag and used satire to overcome apartheid censorship. Furthermore, according to Shaw, ‘this was no standard drag act, no way. Evita became South Africa’s most famous white woman.’ Uys continues to perform Evita, describing her as a clown in the struggle against fear, racism, and political correctness. ‘Just because she doesn’t exist doesn’t mean she’s not real,’ he says’ (‘Hi, my Name is Evita’). The fact that via drag, satire, and parody Uys was able to avoid censorship and become the most famous white woman in South Africa during apartheid speaks volumes about the ambivalent position of real South African white women, problematically situated as both white oppressors and subordinate patriarchal subjects. Because of white women’s placement within a social and rhetorical system that has largely silenced them or generated narratives of their complicity with apartheid as well as an innocence in need of protection from the supposed threat of black men, white femininity already constitutes a masquerade even when it is not viewed through the parody of drag, and ‘the figure of the white woman is thus clearly marked for a restrained number of acceptable guises, all of which demand limited, restricted accessing of the public space’ (Horrell, 2004: 772). According to Georgina Horrell, the ‘negotiation of identity performed by white women in contemporary South African narratives’ constitutes ‘stories … of guilt and alienation; of truth and reparation; of women’s place in a space inscribed by shame, fear, power and desire’ (774). But the performative voice of the white Afrikaner female also allows Uys, a white man who, like Coetzee, is an uncomfortable—even, perhaps, unwilling—beneficiary of apartheid patriarchy, the opportunity to critique its mechanisms, alienate himself from them, and generate dialogue through humour.

Act II: New Twitter challenge: Describe yourself the way a male author would (Whitney Reynolds, Twitter, 1 April 2018)

From stage left: Jennifer Weiner: ‘Her breasts entered the room before her far less interesting face, decidedly maternal hips and rounded thighs. He found her voice unpleasantly audible. As his gaze dropped from her mouth (still talking!) to her cleavage, he wondered why feminists were so angry all the time.’ (Twitter, 2 April 2018)

From centre stage: Maria Dahvana: ‘Her body was an hourglass meant for taking his time, but her mohawk concerned him. She had a lesbian look, & too many tattoos, in languages he ...