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Starving Across the Color Line: J. M. Coetzee in Apartheid South Africa

Alys Moody

in The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism

Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this ... More

Chapter 4 examines the writing of J. M. Coetzee in the context of late apartheid South Africa, where the call to political responsibility returns with a new urgency. Coetzee breaks with this consensus, maintaining a commitment to aesthetic autonomy through his investment in a European modernist tradition that incorporates the art of hunger. In a context where hunger itself was highly politicized, Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K produces an anti-politics of hunger, whose autonomy rests in the disjuncture between its white author and its Coloured protagonist. Pursuing this argument through a genetic reading of the novel’s drafts, this chapter shows how this novel was written out of and against both the debates about art and politics in apartheid-era South Africa, and the emerging theoretical positions that governed Coetzee’s international anglophone academic context at this moment.Less

Uncreative Writing: Interviews, Literature, and the Work of Contemporary Authorship

Rebecca Roach

in Literature and the Rise of the Interview

This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through ... More

This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through their opposition to creative writing. Drawing on the examples of Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and J. M. Coetzee, the chapter demonstrates that interviews have become the quintessential example of uncreative, instrumental, authorial labour. However, in a time in which literature is frequently conceived in opposition to information, interviews also become a productive site for authors to reflect on the nature of literary representation and contemporary creative work. In their opposition to creative writing, interviews can also become an example of ‘uncreative writing’. As information surplus and networked digital computing make traditional, primarily print-based, norms of authorship, creativity, and inscription less tenable, for some of the authors discussed here the interview offers a generative site for exploring new modes of creative expression fit for the twenty-first century.Less

The Religion of Style

David James

in Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation

Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots ... More

Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots sketch preparations for mortality, testing consolation’s sufficiency without stripping its contribution to the role fiction can ‘play’ in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the apprenticeship of dying’. Testaments to what writing itself might conserve in advance of what cannot be altered, these epistolary fictions of expectation place the perceived consolations of religion in critical conversation with the ethically contestable consolations of style. They confirm Ricoeur’s warning that when ‘consolation’ emerges in fiction, ‘one must not cry self-delusion too hastily’, even if the unpicking of self-delusion is part of a novel’s economy of affect—as Disgrace (1999), the chapter’s third selection, powerfully exemplifies, a work that interrogates its own redemptive language of the soul at a juncture for South African culture characterized by pervasive disappointment and the irreparable pain of apartheid’s legacy.Less

J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands: ‘The voice of the doubting self’

Denis Sampson

in The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings

Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both ... More

Dusklands consists of two novellas, ‘The Vietnam Project’, a confession by an army psychologist, and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, a ‘memoir’ of a Dutch explorer, in South Africa in 1760; both narrators are complicit in barbaric activities and their voices represent a compulsive deception. ‘The Narrative’ is presented as an authentic document of an Afrikaner ancestor, recovered in a pseudo-scholarly edition by ‘the author’s father’ and translated by the novelist, or one who bears the same name. The novella’s larger concern is with ideas of narrative/authorial voice, especially in traditions of fictional realism and historical writing, in particular the representation of Africans. That concern, rooted in Coetzee’s own academic work in linguistic and textual study (notably, of Beckett), translation and anthropology, becomes central to much of his fictional career, especially in his experiments in the confessional genre. Its personal origins are explored in the trilogy, Scenes of Provincial Life.Less

Working with Translators

J. M. Coetzee

in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture

Exchanges between the novelist J. M. Coetzee and a number of his translators (including those into German, French, Dutch, and Serbian) illustrate some of the problems typical of literary translation. ... More

Exchanges between the novelist J. M. Coetzee and a number of his translators (including those into German, French, Dutch, and Serbian) illustrate some of the problems typical of literary translation. For instance, choosing among semantically equivalent terms that carry differing cultural connotations, or rendering sentences whose syntactic structure bears part of the semantic load.Less

“What Is a Classic?”: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question

Ankhi Mukherjee

in What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon

T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted ... More

T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.Less

J. M. Coetzee's Australian Realism

Elleke Boehmer

in Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form

This chapter examines the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetics of his shift from an agonistic settler tradition within South African writing, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode ... More

This chapter examines the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetics of his shift from an agonistic settler tradition within South African writing, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode of realist writing that came with his move to that country in the early 2000s. It considers how a shift of national location within the international republic of letters might impinge on a settler or colonial tradition within postcolonial poetics; or whether it is rather the case that such a strand or tradition operates in cross-border, transnational ways, freely making itself available to writers from different postcolonial domains.Less

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: The Rights of Desire and the Embodied Lives of Animals

Elizabeth S. Anker

in Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

This chapter offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which tackles the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) experiment in human rights—in particular its agenda of ... More

This chapter offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which tackles the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) experiment in human rights—in particular its agenda of uncovering stories of violation and holding them up for public scrutiny. Located explicitly in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace challenges the philosophical and practical wisdom of using the language of rights either to condemn wrongdoing or to instigate sociopolitical recovery. This chapter examines Disgrace's use of the animal world as a surrogate approach to social justice, its focus on the ambivalences of human rights rhetoric within and in the aftermath of the project of South African reconciliation, its explanation for why rights logic has failed to meaningfully reverse the many injustices of the apartheid era, and its condemnation of what it considers to be more systemic failures afflicting the liberal articulations of selfhood that consolidate dominant discourses of human rights.Less

Opera and the Limits of Representation in j. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Kathryn Lachman

in Borrowed Forms: The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction

Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace offers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to ... More

Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace offers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to stage the problems of writing. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is an aging English professor at Cape Town University who attempts to write an opera about Lord Byron's late romance with an Italian countess. A failed affair with a student, followed by the loss of his job and a brutal attack on his daughter's farm, challenge Lurie's assumptions about justice, entitlement, violence, and representation in post-apartheid South Africa. While critics have generally read the opera as an embedded narrative that sheds light on Lurie's developing ethical sensibilities, this chapter reads the opera against feminist music criticism, Coetzee's broader work, and French theory, to argue that it constitutes a far more radical disruption in the text. The opera opens a space of opacity and unreadability in the narrative, staging the problem of representing the other. Coetzee draws on opera to re-evaluate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary South Africa—and in literature itself.Less

Against State Literacy: J. M. Coetzee vs the novel

Peter D. McDonald

in Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing

Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the ... More

Seen in the context of UNESCO’s analysis of apartheid education and its long-running debates about indigenous knowledge, this chapter reflects on J. M. Coetzee’s critical relations with the traditions of the European novel, whether in its ‘realist’ or in its ‘modernist’ modes. It begins by examining the school edition of F. A. Venter’s Swart Pelgrim (1958), arguably the most prescribed novel of the apartheid era, which included a curiously high-minded supplementary essay by the leading Afrikaans literary critic A. P. Grové who also happened to be an influential censor. Through detailed readings of Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986), it then shows how Coetzee sought to distance himself and his ideal reader from the European novel, taking issue with its representational powers, its claims to knowledge, and its apparent cultural mobility.Less

A Man's Scenery

Rita Barnard

in Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place

Lars Engle's essay “The Novel without the Police” categorizes the work of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard according to Raymond Williams' usual triad of the dominant, emergent, and ... More

Lars Engle's essay “The Novel without the Police” categorizes the work of J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard according to Raymond Williams' usual triad of the dominant, emergent, and residual forces visible in any given cultural formation—including that of academic literary criticism. Coetzee's fiction signifies what Engle sees as the dominant trend: an anti-positivist, anti-humanist practice of negative hermeneutics, doubtful of all essentialisms and master narratives. Coetzee challenges such notions as self-identity, sincerity, and truth-telling, as do the European theorists of whose work he is an incisive reader. Gordimer's fiction signifies for Engle certain emergent possibilities.Less

Barbarism in Repetition: Literature's Waiting for the Barbarians

in Barbarism and Its Discontents

This chapter examines the critical potential of the barbarians' absence by focusing on the topos of “waiting for the barbarians” through a comparative reading of C. P. Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the ... More

This chapter examines the critical potential of the barbarians' absence by focusing on the topos of “waiting for the barbarians” through a comparative reading of C. P. Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) and J. M. Coetzee's homonymous novel (1980). It assesses the implications of the barbarians' failure to arrive in both works and considers repetition as a barbarian operation linked with foundational categories of civilization. Using a multiplying, kaleidoscopic lens, the chapter highlights barbarism in repetition and as repetition and discusses the ways in which the overdetermined name “barbarian” can be repeated into new senses in the space of literature. It also looks at the concept of repetition in relation to two other concepts: “history” and “allegory.”Less

‘Going to the Dogs’: ‘Humanity’ in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, The Lives of Animals and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

in Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa

In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first ... More

In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace (1999), he paints a remarkably bleak scenario of South Africa. In particular, it portrays the relations between communities in a negative light, which Derek Attridge argues is a hindrance to, rather than a support of, the enormous task of reconciliation and rebuilding of South Africa. The African National Congress objected to the novel's supposed racism, but ignored the extent to which it explores the systemic aspect of the rape epidemic in South Africa. This chapter compares Disgrace with another Coetzee novel, The Lives of Animals (2001), and shows how the former tackles social violence and the extent to which ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’ are intertwined with the culture of patriarchy. It also examines how the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission containing the testimony of victim-survivors highlight the similarity between the perverse uses of non-human animals in place of humans.Less

States of Emergency, the Apartheid Legal Order and the Tradition of the Oppressed in South African Fiction

Stephen Morton

in States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law

Chapter three considers how the writing of Richard Rive, Alex la Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zoë Wicomb highlighted the role of emergency legislation in the formation of South Africa’s apartheid state, ... More

Chapter three considers how the writing of Richard Rive, Alex la Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zoë Wicomb highlighted the role of emergency legislation in the formation of South Africa’s apartheid state, and the enforcement of the ruling apartheid ideology. Starting with a consideration of South Africa’s emergency legislation, and the socio-historical context in which it emerged, the chapter examines how literary texts contested the apartheid government’s emergency legislation by exposing the sovereign power and force, which underpins the apartheid state – in particular through practices such as indefinite detention and torture. The chapter then considers how, by publicly articulating the conditions of writing in a state of emergency, writers such as Rive, la Guma, and Coetzee question the political autonomy of art and writing, and foreground the importance of writing as a public discourse through which to express the experience of violence sanctioned by the apartheid state.Less

Kafka and Coetzee

Simon During

in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the ... More

This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005) ultimately take an ethical turn, in which the style is engaged rather than detached, authorial figures develop sympathy for marginalized groups, and central characters become members of subaltern communities. In other words, Coetzee’s commitment to postcolonialism both complicates and qualifies his commitment to Kafka’s modernism.Less

Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Fiction

Allison Carruth

in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within ... More

This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within the larger discourse of citizenship and rights. It offers a reading of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to show how human compassion, which is necessary to act on behalf of other animals, might come at the expense of human affinities with other human beings. The chapter also considers an essential component of postcolonial ecocriticism: the human consumption of the other-than-human world and, by extension, human complicity in perpetuating those systems.Less

Poets, Philosophers, and Other Animals

Carrol Clarkson

in Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice

This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s ... More

This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.Less

J. M. Coetzee

Tim Parks

in Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them

This chapter examines J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). The trilogy is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately ... More

This chapter examines J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). The trilogy is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be. All three books bear the subtitle Scenes from Provincial Life, suggesting an attempt to shift the focus away from biography and to remind us that “no man is an island, entire unto himself.” In Youth the young Coetzee is determined to prove “that each man is an island,” while in Summertime an ex-lover remembers Coetzee as having an “autistic quality.” Youth differs from Boyhood in its obsessive use of questions, the young man's thinking being made up of one uncertainty after another. Summertime's shifty position between biography and fiction becomes a powerful analogy for Coetzee's difficulties positioning himself in the world; it is as we struggle to come to grips with its combination of disclosure and secretiveness that we come closest to him.Less

Ashamed of Shame: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Christopher Peterson

in Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality

This chapter focuses on J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace, the first half of which details the scandal that erupts when Professor David Lurie has an affair with a young female student. Although the ... More

This chapter focuses on J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace, the first half of which details the scandal that erupts when Professor David Lurie has an affair with a young female student. Although the university implores David to express repentance and regret for his affair in exchange for maintaining his teaching position, he vehemently refuses. Critics have observed that this offer of amnesty allegorizes the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which advocated a restorative rather than retributive justice through which perpetrators of Apartheid confessed their crimes in return for amnesty. If, as Desmond Tutu has remarked, reconciliation promises to restore both the victim and the perpetrator's humanity, David's rejection of the offer of amnesty implicitly refuses his rehumanization. This apparent embrace of animality eschews the conception of sexuality as calculable, predictable, and tameable. In addition to its concern with desire, sexuality, and animality, Disgrace is equally preoccupied with the processes of aging and dying. While Heidegger argues that death is a possibility or capacity from which animals are excluded--animals “perish” rather than truly die—this chapter concludes that death names precisely an incapacity, a vulnerability according to which human death can no longer be elevated above animal perishing.Less