fiction as foe the novels of j.m. coetzee

8/14/2019 Fiction as Foe The Novels of J.M. Coetzee

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Fiction as Foe: The Novels of J.M. Coetzee

Derek Wright, N. T. University, Darwin, AustraliaThe settings of J.M. Coetzee's five novels are, at first glance, unusual for acontemporary South-African writer.1 They are, respectively, th e United States,undefined parts of the South-African hinterland of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen turies, the frontier of an unn am ed country on the roof of the world,a war-ravaged Cape Town and Karoo of the future, and the fictional-cum-metafictional te rrito ry of the Robinson Crusoe fable. In fact, each of th e nove lsis , not surprisingly, a fictional extrapolation from South Africa's current historical crisis. In these fictional projections, how ever, the very fictional p rop erties ofmyth, ideology, and historyand finally fiction itselfare themselves targetedas a principal source of hostility to hum an v alues in the colonial context.Coetzee's first experiment in damaging and deranged fictions, Dusklands(1974), couples two megalomaniacal narratives. The first, 'Th e Vietnam Pro ject, is that of Eugene Da wn , a mythographer employed by the Am ericanmilitary in a Californian research station to explore the potential of radiobroa dcas ting for psychological warfare against Vietnam . The second, 'T heNa rrative of Jacobus Coetzee, purp orts to be a translation of an eighteen th-

century frontier narrative of a brutal punitive expedition against the NamaquaBushm en. The first is, by im plication, a m odern version of the colonial frontiernarrative insofar as the American occupation of Vietnam is a continuation ofthe processes of Western imperialism, and both men are revealed to be paranoid victims of the colonial men tality. Both mythologize their w ar into the p attern of benign fathers putting down rebellious children who are incapable oftaking care of themselves (the American authorities finally discover Dawn, atthe peak of his m adness, torturing his youn g son in a hotel room). Both condemn their subjects to death in the name of some higher power, each regarding himself as an instrum ent of God or a tool in the han ds of history (109),though for Jacobus the gun is the major instrument and symbol of control, forEugen e the wo rd. Like his historical Afrikaans coun terpa rt, the latter has anexploring temp eram ent: Had I lived two hun dred yea rs ago I wou ld ha ve hada continent to explore, to ma p, to open to colonization. In that vertigin ousfreedom I m ight have exp and ed to my true potential (31-32). Like the M agistrate in Coetzee's third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), he likes torecord the customs and decipher the relics of the people he is involved in destroying. To the power of the gun is added that of the pen, camera, and radio -speaker, through which academic writers and media men presume to speak forthe obscure, remote people whose right of speech they in fact deny and who, asin the living analogue of contemporary South Africa, are still unable to speakfor themselves. Dusklands challenges the idea that the exploring social scien-1J.M. Coetzee's novels are:Dusklands(1974; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983);Inthe Heart of theCountry (1977; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); Waiting for t he Barbarians (1980; rpt.Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982);lifeand Times of Michael K(1984; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1985);Foe (1986;rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). All page references are given in parentheses inthe text of the article and are takenromthe Penguin editions of the novels.The Novels of }.M. Coetzee 113


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tistthe ethnographer and mythographercan neutralize his stance towards,and distance himself objectively from, the colonized subjects of his exploration.Rather, his own mental fictions are imposed upon them, locking them into aforeign code of consciousness, and Coetzee refuses to exempt the novelisthimself from the colonization process. Coetzee situates himself at the edge ofDawn's narrative by giving his own name to the director of the propagandapro gr am , ironically called the New Life Project, and Jacobu s Coetzee'seighteenth-century narrative is supplemented by a critical afterword from anS.J.Coetzee an d is trans lated by one J.M.Coetzee, thu s linkin g the autho rwith h is Afrikaans ancestors. Since both of the nar rators are m ad , it is difficultto disting uish w hat happ en s from wh at they imagine, to mark off what is realfrom what is invented, but th e novel does not stay for long even within the elastic bo un ds of a der ang ed psychological realism. As Teresa Dovey ha s ob se rv ed 2th e self-implicating strategies of Co etzee's fiction, by cand idly an nouncing its fictionality, take self-consciously into account the material circumstances of the book's composition, the conditions for the production ofnarratives like this, and the processes by which particular modes of narrativean d discourse th at have been tied up with the colonization process are officiallyinstitutionalized an d constitutionalized. The very arbitrariness with which thetwo narratives are conjoined implies that their relation to historical reality isproblematical and is not a straightforward matter of represen tation. BehindDusklandsare the implica tions that Realism is simply a prod uct of one limiting kind of language code, and that, as Stephen Watson has argued, 3it is notonly through violent military conquest that we are colonized but through language itself through conventional sign systems passing themselves off asnatura l and universal. To the extent that historical realism is the favoredmode of the frontier and colonial narrative, the literary deconstruction of traditional realism is simultaneously a political act of decolonization, and Coetzeeattem pts both of these in his first n ovel.

Coetzee's second novel, In theHeartof the Country (1977), is sited in thenightm arish world and murd ero us fantasies of another mad person, M agda,a vagu ely nineteenth -centu ry spinster living on a farm o ut in the veld, totallyou tsid e hum an society, almost outside humanity (118). In her fantasy Magdais perpetually killing and burying her father Johannes, one of the mythic fathers of the Afrikaans government who refuses to be got rid of in spite of herim agin ative efforts to fold him aw ay for the night (137). If I intend to settlehim in this g rave there is no w ay to do so but to pull him in, to climb in first andpull him in after m e, she concludes (92). But now I think tha t for som e daysafter m y death h e will still lie here breathing, waiting for his nourishment (137).Her desire to be rid of her father, and the regime he represents, springs fromher white liberal impulse to communicate with and befriend her slave servantsKlein Anna and Hend rick. Magda, as suffering wh ite female, empathizes withthe oppressed blacks to the point where she virtually thinks herself black:From w earing black too long I hav e grow n into a black person (96). She we arsw hite only at night and black by day, and imagines both her black daytim eself and her white nigh ttime self as being rape d by He ndrick. She is ba rrenand, like the blacks in the scheme of the official colonial fiction, is viewed as

Teresa Dov ey, Coetzee and H is Critics: The Case of Dusklands, English m Africa14.2 (1987): 25.Steph en W atson, Colonialism and the N ov els of J.M.Coetzee, Research in African Literatures 17.3(1986):374.

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sexless by a white paternal authority which considers itself as the supreme embod ime nt of potency. The father's codes, how ever, hav e also entr app ed thedaughter, who finds her behavior circumscribed by the inherited patterns ofdom inance an d subservience. A female colonial Crusoe, she insists on ren am ing her Friday and , like her father, resorts to the gun w hen willpower fails andrefuses to let the African tak e charge of his ow n destiny. But Magda is cau ghtup in fictional codes of a sociolinguistic as well as a historical order, for thenineteenth-century colonial spinster in her historical backwater is, amazingly,familiar with the com mo nplaces of structur al linguistics: W ords alien ate.Langu age is no med ium for desire. Desire is rap ture , not exchange. It is onlyby alienating the desired tha t langu age masters it (26). As in Dusklands themadness/reality frontier is also the site of a debate between postmodernism'sand traditional realism's approaches to language, and the novel, by thrustingits heroine and an implied nostalgia for realism into the heart of the postmodernist breakdown, acquires an often painfully reflexive awareness of the contemporary contexts of its composition.Waiting for the Barbarians Coetzee's third novel, is a timeless parable ofEmpire, set on the frontier of an anonymous country, in the fort of an unnamedimperial power, and focuses on the moral dilemma of a liberal-minded Magistrate who takes the side of the nomadic people occupying the wilderness onthe other side of the barbarous frontier. The dom inan t enemy-fictions in thisnovel are th e barbarians of the title and the fisherfolk with wh om the un di s-crimin ating impe rial pow er frequently confuses them . The real nom ads andhunters behind the labels desire only, it seems, to be left alone in peaceful co

existence with the frontier people on land which they consider theirs to traverse . The imperial pow er, however, persuad es itself into believing that it isunder threat and sends out an army to kill or imprison and torture thebarbarians, w ho respond by destroying crops and leading the garrison intothe desert w here the soldiers die of starvation and e xposu re. The military ofthe civilized pow er, wh o are of course the real barba rians, then proce eds toinflict a terrible and hide ous revenge. The barb arian s, who are basically innocent, are really a mental fiction born of colonial paranoia and a political convenience: their invention has become indispensable for the maintenance of ablind, insane power which sucks everything into its vortex and for the antithetical definition of the Empire as a force for civilization, wh ich pres up pos es theexistence of barb arism . The title is taken from a poem by Cavafy: And no wwhat will become of us without Barbarians?/Those people were some sort ofsolution. 4 Civilization cannot exist without an enemy. A com passionate m anw ho always believed in civilized behaviour, the Magistrate is throw n into jailand tortured for his treasonable kindness to a crippled barbarian womanwh om he nurses back to health and then return s to her people. By taking theside of the opp res sed , th e Magistratem uch mo re than Magdaeffectivelybecomes one of them and at his eventual release is left stranded between twocam ps, a man wh o lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that m aylead nowhere (156). His mu ddled m inority position makes him a com mo n figure in Coetzee's work: the reluctant colonizer who can no longer bear the burden of an arbitrary historical role which condemns him to treat others as things

* Waiting for the Barbarians in C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley & PhilipSherrard (London: hattotcWindus, 1978) IS.The Novels of JM. Coetzee 115


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and him self to a state of m urd ero us self-hatred. He tries, the nar rator says, tolive outside of history.What the Magistrate attempts, the protagonist of the next novel, Life andTimes ofMichael K(1983), do es. Michael K, conclud es the ho spital doc tor intowhose care he drifts, is a hu m an soul above and beneath classification. He isunto uch ed by history . . . a creature left ove r from an earlier age (207). Thenovel depicts the strange peregrination of Michael, a municipal gardens labore r, from the Cap e to the Karoo with the sick body , and then the ashes, of hismother: a pilgrimage which is blocked at every border by army and militarypolice, and which leads to his triple internment as vagrant and suspectedgue rrilla in prison, camp , an d hosp ital. There is a war, civil or revolution ary,going on in the background of his journey but it remains vague: it is fought,according to the camp com man dant, so that minorities will have a say in theirdestinies, which probab ly refers to the ruling wh ite m inority keeping theirsay (215). K, who barely kno ws there is a w ar on, is out of it becau se he is

busy existing on his own marginal terms, unresponsive to historical determinants which to him are unrea l. In Waiting for the Barbarians the ruling abstraction, the hostile fiction preoccupying the paranoid mind of the oppressorw as the barba rian. In Michael K however, there is a sense in which theprevailin g fiction is exten ded beyon d the guerrillasthe friends Michael isaccused of collaborating with by growing them food on his improvised allotment in the Karooto take in the whole unreal, insane historical situation ofSouth Africa which has issued in Civil War. The keynote is again sounded bythe doctor, who sees Michael not as part of the substantial historical worldwhich he himself believes in but as scuffled together from a handful of d u s t .. . into the shape of a rud im enta ry man. He is a genuine little ma n of earth,his fingers hooked a nd ben t, ready for a life of bur row ing, a creature tha tspends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comesdigs its own grave and slips quietly in and dra w s the heavy earth over its headlike a blanket and cracks a last smile and turns over and descends into sleep,home at last, while unnoticed as ever somewhere far away the grinding of thewheels of history continues (220).

Continually lapsing out of and back into consciousness, less a human being than a spirit of ecological endurance, Michael K is a creature not of humanhistory but of earth, his tru e literary ancestors Lear's naked unaccom mo datedman and those rocklike, purely elemental W ordswo rthian presences, theLeech-Gatherer and the Old Cumberland Beggar, rather than Voltaire's Candid e (w ho also works in the garden ). Disenfranchized from a hum an existence on the earth's surface, he is directed back towards the earth itself andgoes literally un de rgro un d like an animal, insect, or gru b, leaving no trace ofhimself; he is ploughed back into the soil and, after surviving three dungeonlike incarcerations, rises, as if from the dead, from the element to which he hasrooted himself. Earth is a constan t touchsto ne and referent for his existence.He burrows, grubs, plants, and hides in it, he carries his mother's ashes to thepar t of it from wh ence sh e came, and he will take back as food only what h e hasput into it: his family of sister-melons and brother-pumpkins, the fruit of hisreal mo ther, to which he is umbilically connected by an invisible cord of tenderness. It keeps him barely alive and a dum brates his grave, for his desire togrow food is inversely prop ortion ate to his need to consum e it: As he tendedthe seeds and watched and waited for the earth to bear food, his own need for116 TheInternational Fiction Review16.2 (1989)


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food grew slighter and slighter . . . When food comes out of this earth, he toldhimself I will recover m y app etite, for it will hav e savor (139). He plan ts forposterity, not for the present, and, as Nadine Gordimer has noticed, to keepthe earth, not himself alive.5 Planting is K's, and the earth's, positive alternative to history as War: Enough men had gon e off to war saying the time forgardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because oncethat cord was broken, the earth wou ld grow ha rd and forget her children (150).Thus K makes his own kind of history: the earth man does not ponder theme aning of his existence but creates and becomes it. For those w ho live mo me nt by mo me nt there is, as K claims at the close, time enoug h for ev erything (249): for the tender of earth who transcen ds the historical, suspe nd edtime of war, time is as full at one time as at any other, being ever geared to thefruitful eventfulness of natu re. At the end of the book he is bo un d for ea rthagain, without money for food but with half a packet of seeds to reestablish hisconnection with his element.

Coetzee does not provide his protagonist with a surname that would particularize him as a Cape Colored but chooses instead to surround him withKafkaesqu e trappings like the K. s of The Castle and The Trial he has nopermit to be where he is so is moved restlessly on by authority derived fromthe Castle, and is m ad e to feel unspecified guilt over an unn am ed crimeandthe author, remarkably, draws our attention on the first page not to Michael'scolor but to the harelip which so hampers his speech that he is barely articulate. Of course, everything in K's circumstances insists that he isn't wh ite.Coetzee's silence and apparent color-blindness, Kelly Hewson has argued, 6immediately betokens a refusal to label him in any wayblack, white, orcoloredbecause that is precisely what the dehumanizing classifications ofapartheid do, but more important than this is K's representation of somethingso elemental and irreducible that it is beyond formulation in any of the existinghistorical codes: he is chthonic man, outside of language and history, as inarticulate as the seeds, plants, and humus of the earth cycle into which he islocked. Equally impo rtant, K is allowed o nly a minim al articulacy precisely because he is black and because it is dangerous for a white author, a composer ofself-conscious fictions from the enemy camp, to presume to speak for him: adilemma which Coetzee resolves in a different way in his most recent andstartling novel,Foe(1986).

Commenting on Gordimer's achievements in the mode of critical realism,Coetzee has said, I wo uld like to think that today the novel is after biggerg am e 7and , du ring the com position of Michael K expressed feelings of dissatisfaction with the limitations of traditional form.8 InFoe he does away withconventional realism almost altogether, dismantling his own fictions and stripping his fictional practice to the bone. Foe is simultaneously a retelling of theRobinson Crusoe fable, an allegory of South Africa's racial dilemmas, and ameditation on the art of fiction. In this version of the Cruso story the hero is aa Nad ime Gordimer, The Idea of Gardening, TheN ew York Review of Books2 Fe bruary 1984: 6.

Kelly Hew son, Making the 'Revolutionary Gesture': Na dine Gordime r, J.M.Coetzee and SomeVariations on the Writer's Responsibility, riel19.4 (1988): 65-65.J.M.Coetzee, Speaking: J.M.Coetzee (Interview),SpeakMay-June 1978: 23.

8J.M.Coetzee, Interview inKunapipi6.1 (1984):,10.The Novels of J.M. Coetzee 117


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sullen boor with out energy, imag ination, or des ire. Susan Barton, an oth ershipwrecke d v oyager who is washed u p on his island an d into his dull celibateexistence, is amazed that he has kept no journal of his island life Nothing Ihave forgotten is worth remembering -^and has frittered away his time building, with Friday's help, stone terraces for the planting of nonexistent seeds.Reluctantly rescued, Cruso dies at sea a few days from Bristol, and Susan takeshis story and his black servant to one M r. Foe (the novelist Daniel Defoe). Athis quarters she slips into his bed and, in the fashion of the Muse, begets uponhim th e tale which he later pou rs forth as Robinson Crusoe.Through all this, Friday remains mute (his tongue was cut out, either byslavers or Cruso himself) and all attemp ts at communication w ith him com e tonothing, principally because they are foundedand therefore founderonerrone ous Eu ropean cultural assum ptions. When Friday plays his flute, Susancan make nothing of the repetitive six-note melody of his African scales, andwhen she teaches him to write, can make no sense of what he puts to paper.The attempt is abandoned and it is only in the surreal last scene of the book,when a visitor from the future encounters the wraiths of Defoe, Susan, and Frida y, that th e black slave's m outh is prised open an d from it issues a slowstream, w ithout brea th, withou t interruption . . . it run s northw ard and southw ard to the ends of the earth (157). As Michael K's hare lip is correctable andarticulation restorable, so Friday's dumbn ess, a culturally enforced rather thana physical condition , is rem ediable. But w e do not hear, becau se Coetzee doesnot and cannot know, what Friday says. Friday, if he could speak, would speakonly in the colonial language of Cruso; and Coetzee, who can speak, is no

longer prepared to speak for him, thus abandoning the token narrative andpsychological realism of Michael K. Instead, as Helen Tiffin has cogen tly argued, he has demonstrated the oppressive structuresin this case, colonialnarrativesthat render blacks voiceless.9C oetzee dram atizes the complicity ofcolonial settler narratives with exploitative politico-historical processes: the enemy is the imperial text through which the white author shuts the racial andcultural otherness of colonized peoples into closed European myth systemsan d cod es of interpre tation . It is not (and nev er was) tenable for such an author to write either about or on behalf of anyone who, like the South-Africanblack , is still den ied a voice of his ow n. InFoeCoetzee candidly abd icates fromthe fictionalizing process which the earlier novels are either about or participa te in. In his dee pen ing and darken ing vision, the wh ite fiction, by virtue of itspriv ileged ex istence in th e context of black opp ress ion, is alw ays the foe,whether its author's name is Defoe or Coetzee.

9Helen Tiffin, 'Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse, Kunapipi9.3 (1987):, 29-32118 77K International Fiction Review16.2 (1989)

fiction as foe the novels of j.m. coetzee

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