Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee PDF
Preview Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON]. M. COETZEE Also by Graham Huggan TERRITORIAL DISPUTES: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction Also by Stephen Watson SELECTED ESSAYS, 1980-90 RETURN OF THE MOON: Translations from the /Xam Critical Perspectives J. on M. Coetzee Edited by Graham Huggan Department of English, Harvard University and Stephen Watson Department of En8lish, University of Capetown Preface by Nadine Gordimer First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-24313-6 ISBN 978-1-349-24311-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24311-2 First published in the United States of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12312-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical perspectives on J. M. Coetzee f edited by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson; preface by Nadine Gordimer. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12312-3 I. Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -Criticism and interpretation. 2. South Africa-In literature. I. Huggan, Graham, 1958- 11. Watson, Stephen. PR9369.3.C58Z638 1996 823--dc20 94-24879 CIP © Macmillan Press Ltd 1996 Preface© Nadine Gordimer 1996 Essay by Derek Attridge © University of Illinois Press 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-56912-2 The rights of Nadine Gordimer, Graham Huggan, Stephen Watson, Benita Parry, Michael Marais, Kenneth Parker, Peter Knox-Shaw, Ian Glenn, Teresa Dovey, Patricia Merivale, Derek Attridge and David Attwell to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written pem1ission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written peffllission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence peffllitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 Contents Preface vii Nadine Gordimer Acknowledgements xiii List of Abbreviations xiv Notes on the Contributors XV 1 Introduction Graham Duggan and Stephen Watson 1 PART I 2 Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee Stephen Watson 13 3 Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee Benita Parry 37 4 The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzee's Post-colonial Metafiction Michael Marais 66 5 J. M. Coetzee: The Postmodem and the Post-colonial Kenneth Parker 82 PART II 6 Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence Peter Knox-Shaw 107 7 Game Hunting in In the Heart of the Country Ian Glenn 120 v vi Contents 8 Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories Teresa Dovey 138 9 Audible Palimpsests: Coetzee's Kafka Patricia Merivale 152 10 Oppressive Silence: J.M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of Canonisation Derek Attridge 168 11 Evolution and Entropy in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron Graham Huggan 191 Afterword David Attwell 213 Works Cited 217 Index 231 Preface NADINE GORDIMER It might be better to call this an anti-preface rather than a pref ace. I understand a preface to a book of this nature to require a preview of the contents in relation of the authors of the critical essays to their subject but I, as J. M. Coetzee's fellow-writer, nat urally take the subjective view, which is that of the writer to the critics. Whichever way, the relation is a We/They one; for me, John Coetzee and I are We and the critics are They. As a writer, I must break with the conventional function of the preface and present a view of the written-about rather than the writers-about. Who is addressing whom in a collection of literary criticism? Is it a dialogue between critic and critic? Between critic and writer? Between critic and reader? Very likely these questions have been the subject of discourses I have not read. My general experience over the years has been that the subject is avoided. We all agree that for the health of literature there must be a canon of criticism, but how it functions I don't believe we are sure or don't care to enquire. That a critique is firstly a dialogue between critic and critic is clear in this collection, where the pollen of an insight garnered from Coetzee's work is blown through the pages of scholarly jour nals to fertilise a second generation of insights or mutations in contradiction. The exchange serves as both expansive and correc tive in the placing of a work within the confines of current liter ary theory, which, in the regime of the intellect, arrives from successive intellectual traditions at the linguistic, philosophical, metaphysical and material possibilities inherent in contemporary consciousness, rather as in the regime of governments the fron tiers decided in past wars, the price of oil and the possibilities of extending human life or destroying for ever its sustenance deter mine the ethos of sociopolitical power. Criticism, like the litera ture it propagates itself on, seeks to transcend its time and is formed by its time; this is reflected fascinatingly in a dominant debate in this collection. vii viii Preface J. M. Coetzee's critics almost all seem awed by his textual in novations which, as one puts it, traverse European literary and philosophical traditions. (Though why this should seem extra ordinary to those who are well-read by profession is puzzling: perhaps there are vestigial traces, in the critics themselves, of the very phenomenon of colonialism they are hunting down through his work - why, otherwise, should it be more remarkable that Coetzee's writing, rather than that of, say, Kundera, Primo Levi or Danilo Kis, with whom he shares the power of the imagina tion in its appropriation of forms to its purpose, traverses these traditions?) At the same time, the critics wrestle with whether or not Coetzee's fiction is part of the discourse of colonialism itself, avoiding its stark issues with elegant allegory or whether, in deed, his themes are distilled from that bloody starkness. His work perhaps epitomises the problem of the critic in South Africa (most contributing to this book are doing so as South Africans within our country). What balance between aesthetic values, regarded as transcending time and temporal engagement, formed in and by time, constitutes achievement in literature? If I were to stray, as I have done occasionally, into the territory of the critics, I should expand on this with my own battery of foot notes from Barthes, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacan, Lukacs etc., scraps of paper the Hansel/Gretel critic drops along the pages so that other critics may find their way back to recyclable sources. But I have been asked to preface, not to contribute in the strict sense. I content myself with paying a deserved tribute to the critics I might contend with: it is their theses that have prompted me to think at all of an intervention of my own. And isn't that proof of the value of criticism, between critics in their establishment? What service is criticism to its subject, the writer and the writer's work? In many instances, the critique imposes the intent of the critic on the intent of the writer. This may be subconscious on the part of the critic, nevertheless the writer receives it as intent. Yes, yes- the critic is seeking out the hidden intent of the writer, but does he/she find it? (Sometimes he/she appears to be dis tracted by the fatuous on the way. Even though made condi tional by the precautionary 'could', one of the critics in these covers quotes his suggestion to students that, speaking of Susan Barton in Foe, 'We could fault Coetzee for not letting a woman have access to both authorship and motherhood.' Could we?) The critic sets out on this expedition armed with the compass, sieve and Preface ix latest model geiger-counter of literary theory, but the writer has to forge the literary theory he or she knows, before beginning to write. All labels are peeled away. The writer forgets about the summations of metafiction in order to be in the naked state of grace - no less - in which his/her intent will be worked out. In all humbleness - for it is a humbling and dangerous experience from the point of view of mental exposure - only we know what our motives and purposes are, when we write. Only we know what we were saying. I venture to speak for Coetzee because it is obvi ous to anyone who appreciates his exceptional gifts that he, more erudite than most writers, forgets the language and thought-pat terns of literary theory when he visualises a man digging in a municipal garden, a man tracing the worm-scroll of a scar on a waif's eyelid, a woman washed up. on a desolate shore. His read ers receive these visions directly, unencumbered by any theoreti cal reflection upon them, by any alienating hint of how they were achieved. He forges categories, analyses, his modes are organic, they are transformations of the imagination growing out of his consciousness and that of his society, as the persistent nurture of the earth, producing growing things, is a theme which sprouts through the sombreness of his work. What I have said is not to be taken as an attack on criticism; it is meant as a reminder of the limitations of the function of the critique in any assumption there may be of its usefulness to the writer. Most of us ignore the critical debates that go on over our texts. The critic has to accept the fact that when we writers do read a critical analysis of our work it often seems~ to be some other work that is under discussion, someone else's: the critic's unwritten one. So the question of how much influence a critique may have upon a writer's view of his/her own work is doubtful. Only occasionally - and with gratitude, I may say - does the writer find a critic who has understood exactly what the writer was saying. I hope John Coetzee may come upon that experience somewhere in this book. Only very rarely - and with immense grati tude - does the writer perceive his work to be in the hands of a critic who, starting out from that understanding, discovers for the writer aspects of what he/she was saying that were unknown to him/her. To receive weighty consideration and praise in misreadings of one's work is discouraging in the extreme, for one can't always blame the inadequacy of the critic. Even hermeneutics has to have, on its own terms, something sufficiently lucid to work on ...
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