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  • Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaUniversity of Oklahoma

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  • 7. M. Coetzee fs Cultural Critique HARALD LEUSMANN

    J. M. Coetzee {b. 1940) South Africa

    Fiction, Criticism

    There are books one should have read prior to visiting South Africa. Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart comes to mind, as do Allister Sparks's The Mind of South Africa and Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, of course. But do not forget J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), this brilliant novel written after the demise of the apartheid regime that deals with the collective mood of present-day South Africa's white popula- tion at the end of the dark twentieth century. Coetzee's pro- tagonists go through the same dilemma as the undead in Beckett's Endgame, who, in light of their memories, are damned to relive their pasts over and over again. The redeeming consolation Beckett generously provides - comic, grotesque, lunatic - is not forthcoming from Coetzee. Instead, he forces his readers to look into abysses they do not really want to look into but are actually unable to turn away from anymore. His aesthetics of failure almost borders on the absolute.

    Coetzee's " intellectual honesty erodes all basis of conso- lation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession," according to the Swedish Academy's announcement of Coetzee as the laureate of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. This blunt honesty often leads to the indifferent, if not hostile reactions of his fellow South Afri- cans. His work is praised and wins awards abroad; in South Africa, however, the publication of Disgrace caused irritation among a number of members of the governing African National Congress and controversial debates in parliament. The picture Coetzee had painted of the postapartheid state was allegedly too dark and negative, with the result that the doubtful philologist and writer Coetzee found himself between a rock and a hard place. In the eyes of the old

    regime he was an enemy of the state clothed in a poet's robe, while for his black readers he wrote in a style considered to be too "white." To this day he remains an enigma. Who is he? Where can he be positioned?

    He is someone who knows much about the tongue's hesitation to approach the linguistic boundaries between lan- guages, someone in whose work names do not necessarily align themselves to persons and things. He is someone who as a child thought of himself as English because his family spoke English at home, although his last name is of Boer ori- gin and his father is more Boer than English. He is someone who treats language like a dangerous snake, with firmness as well as caution, because he distrusts its promise to contribute to an understanding between peoples. He is a white African in whose novels the country of apartheid and the postcolo- nial presence of South Africa are scrutinized in a clear and uncompromising light that makes sure no traces of injury and destruction can escape. He is a brilliant writer of prose who can be regarded as a rejuvenated version of an all-too- known figure in world literature: the moralist in the tradition of the French moralists and the great modern novelists, a sci- entist who researches human behavior by observing living objects.

    J. M. Coetzee, University of Oklahoma, April 2003

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    "Coetzee destroys the apparently moral foundation of our discourses: the protection of animals or liberalism, for example, or enlightened tolerance with regard to questions of race or jurisdiction. Only those who expose themselves to disgrace and redemption, guilt and atonement are likely to encounter anything close to justice."

    60 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004

  • Relatively unknown in 1981, Coetzee published an essay on the use of the present tense in Franz Kafka's story "The Bur- row/' Coetzee has written many essays; this one, however, is of special importance. Kafka's use of the present tense, Coetzee argues, transcends social, historical, and psychologi- cal categories. This tran- scendence is the decisive factor in Coetzee's search for the strict rules of a lan- guage that would allow him to push forward into new linguistic territory in those small, enclosed narrative worlds. He looked for structures that would produce what we think we know as the "first-person singular."

    The publication of Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 revealed that Coetzee had not forgotten Kafka. The novel is mainly set in the Karoo, a barren steppe on the southern tip of Africa. There in the grandiose emptiness, the scattered islands of colonialism - the settlements of the white farm- ers - can be found. Through this landscape Michael K roams, fleeing civil unrest in the big city and searching for his moth- er's hometown. One day he arrives in the town of Prince Albert. With its pale white lines of houses, baroque pedi- ments, the church, the jail, the police station, and the town- ships on the fringes, this town is a doll's house of apartheid. A glance behind the scenes brings to the fore the old South Africa. There are farmers who beat their workers to death. There is a black girl who, accused of theft, is robbed of her clothes and painted with white paint. These are lynching sto- ries reminiscent of William Faulkner's Light in August. Coet- zee exposes layer by layer the nightmares South Africans must have and the mental deformations of and within a racist caste system.

    It is characteristic of Coetzee that, when he wrote Life & Times of Michael K, he avoided taking sides between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress's armed resistance. He consciously left out the political posi- tion in favor of the poetic. Therefore, it made him suspicious during a period when positions became more clear-cut: because he refused unambiguous statements and because his books passed the board of censors. After the formal abolition of apartheid he tried, at once cleverly and firmly, to maintain the position of a language that avoids taking sides. So can Coetzee be described as an escapist? No, rather the contrary. It proves to be highly important for his political potency that

    he is a professor of literature, too. His references to other writers (Kafka, for example) are not little quirks or acquired accessories at all; rather, they lead to the dilemma of a writ- ing from which Coetzee wanted to escape: either he repro- duced the obscenities of the state or ignored them. Both parts of the spectrum proved unsatisfactory to him.

    Like Beckett, Kafka belongs to and looms in the back- ground of Coetzee's prose, although he does not imitate their style. His own, very South African answer to Beckett is the early novel In the Heart of the Country {1977), which is about the black interior views of a white farmer's daughter. Dis- grace, the novel on postcolonial violence, continues this theme and also reveals the early obsession of Coetzee to study human beings from the perspective of female charac- ters. It is a tremendous novel that poses the question of how life in postapartheid South Africa is possible for its citizens. Written in a hard, straight language rich in associations, Dis- grace reveals Coetzee as a profound researcher of human determinants. Disgrace deals with abuse and rape; it is about guilt bigger than the individual life.

    Fifty-two-year-old literature professor David Lurie imposes a sexual relationship on a female student who com- plies at first and then reports it to the university administra- tion. As a result, Lurie is fired and retreats to his daughter Lucy, who lives on a farm, making a living from agriculture and dog breeding. Lurie lives a torn existence between Musil, Joyce, Rilke, and Byron in an Occidental theater of illusion, on one hand, and an outside world that remains for- eign to him, on the other. He does not understand the black Africans' language. Their culture is mysterious to him, even repulsive - but at the same time it evokes desires and lusts, sometimes also feelings of shame with regard to the destruc- tive powers of his own culture. Lucy is raped by three black

    men from neighboring farms, but she does not want to leave or report the incident to the police, even though she knows the rapists; rather, she takes the rape as atonement for the historical guilt of her ancestors and suc- cumbs to the new power relations. The rape, she says in humble self- abasement, is the price she must pay in order to be allowed to stay and continue an undignified life like the dogs for which she cares. In the

    Cover of Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983; reprint, 1985)

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    Cover of Coetzee's Disgrace (1999)

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    WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004 61

  • Cover of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003)

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    end, there is only disgrace, and the narrator seems to come to the conclusion that there is no longer a place for white people in South Africa. Lurie is searching for redemption but only meets abasement in his task of putting dogs to death and disposing of them. Finally, Lurie and Lucy arrive at the point where Michael K began.

    In Coetzee's books, neither acceptable life plans nor ideologies play a significant role. He

    destroys the apparently moral foundation of our discourses: the protection of animals or liberalism, for example, or enlightened tolerance with regard to questions of race or jurisdiction. Only those who expose themselves to disgrace and redemption, guilt and atonement are likely to encounter anything close to justice. This seems to be his overriding con- cept, and it can make sense only because Coetzee refuses to situate his writing within an overtly political framework. It allows him to form questions and constellations for which politics has no language and makes a famously unpolitical writer political. In the end, this kind of writing, which defines itself solely through literary investigation, achieves enormous social and cultural relevance by avoiding the pit- falls of taking sides in the black- white political division of his native country. Most recently, Coetzee has gone so far as to turn his back on postapartheid South Africa. His move to Australia can be interpreted as an attempt to establish a new identity as an Australian writer carrying a lesser "historical guilt" than the South African he once was, because the Aus- tralian aboriginal population is in the minority.

    In the past few years, Coetzee has used the fictitious "Australian" author Elizabeth Costello as a masque for the revival of the genre of philosophical dialogue. Mrs. Costello gives outraged lectures on the mass slaughter of animals, on Auschwitz, and on Holderlin's gods. She is a relentless moralist, a mobile task force of literature who leaves behind traces of intellectual despair. Elizabeth Costello (2003) is a clever and irritating book that, at first sight, comes across like a collection of literary essays, which are highly argumenta- tive and never lacking in challenging theses. In one of them, Costello argues that the details of a novel which describes the execution of the group of failed Hitler assassins around Graf von Stauffenberg should not gain any publicity, as it is morally irresponsible to open one's literary imagination to these particular executioners and thereby help to circulate

    their evil. Even more daring is Costello's thesis on the slaughtering of animals for the sake of eating: "We are sur- rounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing . . . bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them." For a reserved person like Coetzee, these are astonishing opinions and would certainly undermine his reputation if they really were his views. However, they are uttered by Elizabeth Costello, his invention, who became "famous" in the 1960s with The House of Eccles Street, a feminist classic on Marion Bloom, wife of James Joyce's protagonist in Ulysses.

    Coetzee uses Costello as a masque to reflect on the ulti- mate purposes of life and writing. He wraps the considerable seriousness of the essays around the irony of the narratives. Here, Costello defends her frequently exaggerated opinions and arguments while an anonymous third-person narrator connects Costello's ideas with her circumstances. In this way we accompany Costello on lecture tours and award cere- monies to Pennsylvania, Amsterdam, and Johannesburg, twice even with her son John. We follow her posing as a Holderlin expert musing on the mythical "intercourse of gods and mortals," on "the whole god-and-man business." We see her arguing with her sister Blanche, or Sister Bridget, a nun who cares for Hiv-infected children in Africa and believes in the Bible but not in literature. In the end, we leave her in a place fashioned out of innumerable Kafkaesque ref- erences, where she must state her creed in order to be allowed entrance to a city through one of its gates.

    The ironic interplay of narrative and essay shows even the most provocative sentences of Elizabeth Costello in relative terms. A Jewish poet protests her comparison of mass animal slaughter to the Holocaust by absenting himself from a din- ner in her honor; Costello's son distances himself from his mother; and she herself admits on a later journey, without taking anything back of course, that she had gone a step too far in that case. Costello explains her moral rejection of the aesthetic depiction of violence in the case of the execution of Hitler's would-be assassins by relating her own experience of evil in form of a physical assault on her that almost turned into rape. She never told anyone a word about it in order not to pass on something unclean; she does not believe anymore "that storytelling is good in itself."

    One is left with questions about the seriousness of these essays. Is Coetzee, for the sake of his and our own intellectu- al stimulation, just playing ping-pong with risky ideas? Did a formerly serious Coetzee become an eloquent provocateur? What else makes sense of those provocations with regard to the Holocaust associations of questionable taste? Frivolity must be excluded. In all its irony, Elizabeth Costello is charac- terized by a large measure of seriousness and ultimately plays back and forth over the ultimate questions of our culture. What is better, to write (and how?) or to do good

    62 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004

  • Coetzee in Bagshot, England, in 1964

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    (and what?)? If one does one or the other, what purpose does it serve? The irony of the book moves between these two poles. Should we do good like Blanche, Elizabeth's sis- ter, who as a nun strives to overcome the suffering of this world with the goodness of the hereafter? Or remain anchored in this world like Elizabeth herself who, in one of the most impressive scenes of the book, bears her breasts to a terminally ill cancer patient and in the end kisses his penis? And should we write like the

    novelist who portrays the evil of Hitler's executioners? Or write like Elizabeth Costello who, in her creed in front of Kafkaesque judges, presents herself as someone who embraces eternal life?

    There are not many books in which ethical and aesthet- ic elements strengthen each other in such an irritating way. First and foremost, in Coetzee's oeuvre there is Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello is nothing else than a continuation of Dis- grace by different means, lifting the motives that one had to unearth in Disgrace into the spotlight of an intellectual debate. Disgrace already followed the movement from a pro- fessor's writing to the good deeds of a person taking care of abandoned dogs; it also follows the movement of the world of postcultural metropolitan people to those who live in the humble vicinity of mangy animals. Disgrace reveals this pat- tern with a clear religious conclusion and contains, like Eliz- abeth Costello, a provocative allusion to the Holocaust. Both texts allude to the ambiguity of redemption and a " final solu- tion." In Disgrace, the burning of animals is - though not explicitly stated - described in terms reminiscent of the Holocaust's crematoria. At the same time, the killing of ani- mals - as is the case for Elizabeth Costello - contains hints of a redemptive nature. Lurie, the professor of literature, com- pares Bev Shaw, the founder of an animal clinic, to an Indian priestess, as does John his mother Elizabeth Costello. Both books mention the redemption of the soul on the day of the Last Judgment.

    In a most risky passage, Coetzee portrays Lurie as redeemed during the killing of the animals. Lurie, alien among people and for whom language is "tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites," feels "adopted" by his favorite dog and even plays on the banjo for the animal like Orpheus on the lyre. When he must kill the dog, lan- guage comes back to him in a redemptive way because Lurie recognizes that it is morally corrupt to deny one's heart to a fellow being: "He had learned by now ... to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love."

    It becomes obvious that Coetzee has described protagonists with great sympathy and deep imagery in both Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello; protagonists who turn away from writing and our civilization with metaphysical radicalism. Disgrace already went beyond the realms of the politically critical South African novel. And Elizabeth Costello confirms that, for years now, Coetzee has been developing a cultural critique that was not visible in his earlier works. The constructed cat- egories of white and black become more and more obsolete or merge into a single entity the more one makes sufficient use of one's literary abilities to fathom each character's sub- jectivity - this is both Costello's and Coetzee's answer; this is their moral argument.

    For the second time in a row now, after Imre Kertesz last year, the Swedish Academy has made a splendid and pleas- ant choice in awarding the 2003 Nobel to J. M. Coetzee, as in past years the aesthetic honor of the Nobel Prize got lost from time to time. In a certain way, the choice can even be regarded as a continuity. Like the works of Kertesz, the Hun- garian survivor of Auschwitz, Coetzee's work combines a historical vision characterized by human catastrophes with literary coping at a high level. Both writers look into the human abyss and are independent of political pressures. Both writers wrestle with issues that are inevitably beyond understanding. Their literary standards, again a continuity, are grounded in similar traditions, like Kafka and Beckett. Kertesz and Coetzee are connected by an absence of senti- mentality or, to say it differently, the intelligence with which they portray horrible experiences of violence. EZZQ

    Ball State University

    Editorial note: For more on Coetzee, see the special section on his life and work in the January- April 2004 issue of WLT, and the text of his Nobel prize acceptance speech in the May-August 2004 issue.

    WORKS CITED Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. 1999. New York: Penguin, 2000. . Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003. . In the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper & Row,

    1977. . Life & Times of Michael K. 1983. New York: Penguin, 1985. . "Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's The Burrow/" Mod- ern Language Notes 96, no. 3 (1981): 556-79.

    Swedish Academy. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003" (press release). October 2, 2003 (www.nobel/literature/laure- ates / 2003 /press .html) .

    Harald Leusmann, a doctoral student in the Department of En- glish at Ball State University, focuses on postcolonial literatures in his studies. A dissertation on black British writing is currently in progress. His articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, WLWE, Wasafiri, The Caribbean Writer, and Atlantic Literary Review.

    WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004 63

    Article Contentsp. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63

    Issue Table of ContentsWorld Literature Today, Vol. 78, No. 3/4 (Sep. - Dec., 2004), pp. 1-158Front MatterAuthor Profile: Muriel Spark [pp. 4-5]Three PoemsThe Creative Writing Class [p. 5-5]Letters [p. 6-6]Hats [p. 6-6]

    The May of Teck Club [pp. 7-11]Author Profile: Ngg Wa Thiong'o [p. 12-12]EssaysRecovering the Original [pp. 13-15]Between Tradition & Innovation: The New Latin American Narrative [pp. 16-19]

    PoetryFour Poems [for the poems on p. 20, 21]Olive Trees [p. 20-20]Stone Fence [p. 20-20]Origins [p. 21-21]Words [p. 21-21]

    Two Poems [for the poems on p. 22, 23]1912 [p. 22-22]Visby [p. 23-23]

    Seven Poems [for the poems on p. 24, 25]All That had Evaded: A Reclogue [p. 24-24]The Sliding Door Disturbs the Birds ... [p. 24-24]Liminal Devotional [p. 24-24]The Gift [p. 24-24]On Not Seeing the Crested Bellbird at Duck Pool Reserve, Mortlock River: A Graphologia [p. 25-25]Cultures [p. 25-25]A Maple Tree [p. 25-25]

    Two Poems [for the poems on p. 26]Here Is the Long Night [p. 26-26]All the Names for Rain Have Changed [p. 26-26]

    Author Profile: Maryse Cond [p. 27-27]FictionThe Road to Adjame-Santey [pp. 28-30]The Last Face [pp. 31-35]Girl Inside Girl inside Girl [pp. 36-38]Touba and the Meaning of the Night [pp. 39-42]

    CurrentsBreaking Taboos in Iranian Women's Literature: The Work of Shahrnush Parsipur [pp. 43-46]Neither Heads nor Tails: The Middle Province in Octavio Paz's guila o sol?The Republic of Jacques Jouet [pp. 52-55]Adrian C. Louis: Poet of Survival [pp. 56-59]J. M. Coetzee's Cultural Critique [pp. 60-63]

    WLT InterviewAn Interview with Ariel Dorfman [pp. 64-70]

    Essential BooksPoetry from Russia: Current Trends and Contemporary Voices [pp. 71-74]

    Children's Literature"She's Grown Dreadlocks": The Fiction of Angela Johnson [pp. 75-78]

    LettersSinging in the Quietness [p. 79-79]Intense Noirs and Regulation Hotties [pp. 79-80]Slouching toward Slovenia [p. 80-80]

    World Literature in ReviewAfrica & the West IndiesReview: untitled [p. 81-81]Review: untitled [p. 82-82]Review: untitled [pp. 82-83]Review: untitled [p. 83-83]Review: untitled [p. 83-83]

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