Rita Barnard

English Department
University of Pennsylvania
rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu

 

Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Perspectives on South Africa 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

 

Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

 

David Attwell’s important new critical account of J.M. Coetzee’s work takes as its epigraph a statement from one of his interviews with Coetzee, recently collected in Doubling the Point:

 

I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations--which are shadows themselves--of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light.(341)

 

The remark is in many ways characteristic of Coetzee: it does not refer in a direct and unproblematic way to any one of his novels; and yet it captures their rigorous sense of their own limitations, as well as their muted utopian dimension. The allusiveness of the statement is also characteristic, in that it rewrites, rather than merely echoes, Plato’s allegory of the cave. Deeply conscious, as always, of our inevitably mediated and tenuous sense of reality (perhaps, in this context, we might call it “History”), Coetzee shares something of Plato’s skepticism about what the poet might do in the world: a body still chained in darkness can scarcely be an “unacknowledged legislator,” nor a herald, nor even a truthful witness. (South African literature, Coetzee once remarked, is “exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write in a prison” [Doubling, 98]). Yet the shadow-play he evokes here–and, he feels, in his fiction–is not quite the trivial passage of objects before the firelight which Plato has us conceive. It is a shadowy premonition of the impossible, of a different way of seeing: one that can only begin at that moment when, first, the body is unshackled, and then the eyes turn to a new order.

 

This statement, though far more personal, is reminiscent of a moment in Coetzee’s 1986 essay, “Into the Dark Chamber.” The piece recalls how Rosa Burger, the protagonist of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, is thrown into utter confusion as she watches a “black, poor, brutalized” man cruelly whip his donkey in a drunken fury. The act brings to Rosa’s mind, in the rush of an instant, a vision of the entirety of human suffering and torture, especially politically motivated cruelty: “solitary confinement … the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island” (Doubling 367). But it does so in such a way as to render moral judgement impossible: here is “torture without the torturer,” victim hurting victim. How does one proceed beyond this vision? Coetzee asks. He ends his essay with an expression of his longing, with Rosa, for a restoration of ethics, for a “time when all human acts … will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment,” for a society in which it will “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgement”–the gaze of one who has faced the light outside the prison-cave–“to be turned upon scenes of torture” (Doubling, 368).

 

The imperative to proceed “beyond” is, of course not one that is often indulged in Coetzee’s novels, nor is it clear, from a strictly logical or materialist point of view, that such a move is really possible. What is at stake, when Coetzee, and his critic/interlocutor, ponder this question, is the relationship between the imagination and the real, or, if you will, between textuality and history. This relationship is the main concern of David Attwell’s book. The project of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the distance between two contradictory attitudes towards history on the novelist’s part. The first position, discussed in Attwell’s opening chapter, finds its most forceful expression in Coetzee’s controversial address (“The Novel Today”) to the Weekly Mail Book Week in 1987. Coetzee here insists on the discursive nature of history, and its difference from–and even its enmity to–the discourse of the novel. He describes the position of the South African novelist as follows:

 

In times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.... (15)

 

In the face of what we might call the dominant counter- hegemonic discourse of the mass democratic movement, in which literature must become a weapon in “the struggle,” Coetzee resolutely refuses the “correct” position of supplementarity, and claims the separate discourse of the novel, of the story, as his own–beleaguered–terrain.

 

The second position, discussed in Attwell’s final chapter, emerges from Coetzee’s 1990 interview with the Washington Post, in which “real history” seems to be reaffirmed. A propos of Francis Fukiyama’s (premature) post-Cold War declarations about the global achievement of liberal democracy, the novelist observes:

 

There is a certain controversy, isn't there, going on right at the moment in the United States about "the end of history"?... The position, expressed in a very crude way, is that the Western democracies have reached a stage in their historical development in which development ceases because there is no stage beyond it.... That very way of seeing the history of mankind is a symptom of the First World ... moving to a plateau of inconsequentiality or irrelevance. It's actually the Third World where history, real history is happening. And the First World has played itself out of the game.(Attwell, 124)

 

This observation, with which Attwell brings his study to its close, is read as a return to the site of history, “real history,” as a place of privilege.

 

For Attwell, whose approach to literature is theoretically eclectic but fundamentally historicist, and whose declared purpose is not only to explicate, but to offer a “tribute” to Coetzee’s oeuvre (7), Coetzee’s insistence on novelistic autonomy in “The Novel Today” essay presents something of a political and a methodological problem. As a South African academic, he is only too aware of the critical protest which this kind of position could– and did–elicit; namely, that Coetzee is guilty of a decadent, elitist aestheticism.¹ He seems somewhat embarrassed by the “chilly political choice” and the “exclusively and unhappily Manichean” terms in which it is offered (16-17; Trump 107). It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that this might be the reason why “The Novel Today”–surely one of Coetzee’s most provocative and least circulated pieces–is not included in Doubling the Point.

 

In fact, however, the main impulse in J.M. Coetzee: Politics and Writing in South Africa is not to evade, but to challenge and complicate such a polarization of history and fictionality, by exploring the ways in which Coetzee’s novels are themselves contextualized. Attwell offers the term “situational metafiction” as a way of suggesting that the tension between the two contradictory positions is both irresolvable and productive. The term, as he argues, is by no means paradoxical: “Coetzee’s figuring of the tension between text and history is itself a historical act, one that must be read back into the discourses of South Africa where on can discern its illuminating power” (3).² Whether or not Coetzee chooses to represent South African history is then far less important, in this study, than the fact that his work consistently registers, even when it tries to escape, the political pressures that shape the act of writing. The historical contextualization we see in Attwell’s text is not the kind Coetzee excoriates in “The Novel Today”: the kind that treats the novels’ conclusions as checkable by history “as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a school mistress” [3].³ Attwell suggests that for Coetzee, as for Jameson, “History” per se is unrepresentable, but, as a political unconscious, leaves its mark on all forms of expression. The position is formulated as follows in Doubling the Point: “it is rare that history should emerge … as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. History, in [Coetzee’s] work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation …” (66).

 

Compared to the other three full-length studies of Coetzee’s work (by Penner, Dovey, and Gallagher) Attwell’s is by far the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in its treatment of the South African context–historical, political, and literary. Indeed, it is fair to say that only Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context, makes much of an attempt to offer a historicist reading.⁴ Attwell’s book situates the novels not only in terms of political events–the Soweto uprisings, the death in detention of Steve Biko, etc.–the kind of thing that Gallagher, at her greater remove from South Africa, also provides–but in terms of both the academic and political discourses prevalent in South Africa at a given moment.

 

Attwell is able, for instance, to relate the political stance of Dusklands (1974) to the emergence of a post- liberal discourse in South Africa during the seventies: a phenomenon shaped, in various ways, by the Black Consciousness movement, by Beyers Naude’s Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS), by the first contributions of a South African Marxist historiography, and by the first challenges to the comfortable Leavisite humanism that had dominated South African English departments up to that point. Or, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), he is able to demonstrate that the novel, despite its fictional location and indeterminate time–and despite its stated theme of resistance to “the time of History” as the imposition of a vicious Empire– responds rather specifically to the discourse and practice of the state at a particularly paranoid moment. In the wake of the Soweto uprising, and the fall of colonial regimes to the north, the Apartheid regime developed a “total strategy” to counter the “total onslaught” of terrorists, communists, and agitators at the border (not to mention those in the backyard, under the bed, and behind every bush). The novel’s challenge to “Empire’s” cruel certainties in its quest for self-preservation and its elimination of the “Other,” clearly responds to this time of detentions, bannings, torture, and rumors of torture in South Africa. Moreover, as Attwell argues, the very phantasmagoric remoteness of the novel’s mise-en-scene, has the paradoxically representational dimension of mimicking the phantasmagoric character of the state’s paranoid projections. As one who was subjected at school to classes in “Youth Resistance,” who joked that the Communists invented sex to seduce the Afrikaner teenager, and who listened in astonishment to the callous excuses given for the deaths in detention in the years just before the novel’s publication, I can only confirm the aptness of this contextualization: it is impossible for someone who lived through the late seventies in South Africa to read the novel only as “being about” a fictive never-never land.

 

But to say this is to minimize the caution with which both Attwell, and Coetzee in Doubling the Point, approach the question of relevant “facts” and “contexts.” (At the beginning of the latter book, for instance, we find Coetzee pondering the problem of writing the history of his intellectual career: “But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall with your evolving purpose. What is the purpose in the present case?” [Doubling 18].) Attwell’s introduction, significantly, offers a kind of apology for his own historicizing efforts: he recognizes that these might go against Coetzee’s “evolving purpose” (which Attwell admits seems to be shifting, in the later novels, in the direction of a kind of self-exploding textuality that opposes the fixed structures of historical consciousness).

 

The reason for this deference lies in Attwell’s realization that Coetzee’s resistance to history is based on what the novelist sees as an ethical and liberatory imperative. In the interview I referred to at the beginning of this essay, Coetzee reminds Attwell–and all of us–that not just history and necessity, but also freedom, stands beyond representation (freedom is, as Kant argued “the unimaginable”); and insists that (paradoxically) because of the way the overwhelmingly brutal facts of South African history tend to short-circuit the imagination, “the task becomes imagining [the] unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of the imagination to start taking place” (66-8). Coetzee, in short, does not deny his own status as a prisoner of history–but insists on the importance of those shadowy projections: the need to also think of “people slipping off their chains.” Attwell’s historicist study therefore remains constantly, and self- critically aware of Coetzee’s urgent insistence on the qualified freedom of fiction. The result is the first reading of Coetzee’s work that contextualizes and politicizes Coetzee’s novels, even as it articulates the theoretical problem of “history” and recognizes the possible limitations of historically demystifying criticism.⁵

 

The value and character of Doubling the Point is rather more difficult to pinpoint. It is, as the subtitle announces, a collection of critical essays and interviews. But it is perhaps primarily an autobiography of sorts; and while, as I suggested above, the collection frequently reveals Coetzee’s connections to the modernist tradition, it has to be seen as a rather postmodern autobiography. It offers only a few moments of conventional first person recollection (notably in the essay “Remembering Texas”), as is consistent with Coetzee’s suspicions about any claim to self-presence–a suspicion that makes him favor the mode of the interview, “as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue” (19). What we end up with is, therefore, fragmentary and dialogic; and, while the collection does conclude with a very revealing retrospective statement in the final interview, this too is rather self-deconstructive. Written in the third person, it identifies, as the pivotal moment of the intellectual life we have just reviewed, the essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”: a skeptical exploration of the infinite nature of confession, of the impossibility to ever tell the truth in autobiography.

 

All this is not to say that many interesting “facts” about Coetzee’s life and thinking do not emerge from Doubling the Point; but that, as I have already suggested, the idea of a personal “history” is from the start problematic. As the final essay states, there is little distinction to be made between the writing of fiction, of criticism, and of autobiography: all of these are modes of storytelling–and in Coetzee’s hand stories are always fictions that will claim no final closure, that are skeptical even of skepticism. Doubling the Point is thus an intriguingly contradictory text: authoritative (the rigor and range of Coetzee’s intellect inevitably give it that austere quality) and anti-authoritarian.

 

It is perhaps fair to say that none of the critical essays here–to turn to another aspect of Doubling the Point–are as good as, for instance, the introduction and the first chapter of White Writing; nor (inevitably) does the collection, selected for the sake of a more or less chronological intellectual biography, have the thematic coherence of that earlier book. The essays do reveal an impressive range of intellectual work: in addition to the pieces on Beckett, Kafka, Gordimer, and Achterberg, already mentioned, Doubling the Point includes discussions of Tolstoy, Dosteyevsky, Gibbon, Newton, Rousseau, Nabokov, Musil, Barthes, Godard, Girard, Derrida, Lacan, Fugard, La Guma, and also of advertising, censorship, and even rugby. I can live without some of the essays included here, especially those in the “Popular Culture” and the “Syntax” subsections of the book (though Attwell’s attempts to relate them to the fiction are consistently interesting). But at least two of essays in the collection, the Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech and the essay on torture (“Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”), have always seemed to me essential to an understanding of Coetzee’s political vision. I am also delighted that the sardonic Barthesian essay “The Burden of Consciousness in Africa” (on the Fugard/Devenish film The Guest [1977]) will now be available to a wider audience. On the whole, it seems to me that Coetzee is revealed in these essays as something quite rare, if not paradoxical: a very academic, very sophisticated autodidact. I don’t think this assessment would strike him as out of line: Coetzee observes at one point that he has no “field” as a literary scholar, and therefore frequently finds himself in the position of “reinventing philosophical wheels” (243). The results are sometimes extremely rewarding for the reader, and sometimes less so. 14] But the essays per se, do not make Doubling the Point: the book’s extraordinary interest lies in the interviews, which are by far the most engaged, the most revealing, and the most suggestive for readings of Coetzee’s fiction yet to appear. One interview even offers a disarmingly candid assessment (or would the essay on confession rule out my use of the word “candid”?) of the reason why so many of Coetzee’s previous interviews seem so terse and unrevealing. Coetzee quite frankly acknowledges his reputation for being “evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant” to journalistic interviewers (65), but suggests that his difficulty with the ordinary interview ultimately comes from a profound philosophical disagreement with their basic assumptions. On some level, he argues, they believe in the confession, whether as something that comes out of a legal interrogation, or (in a more Rousseauvian mode) from the “transports of unrehearsed speech”; while for Coetzee truth is in silence, and in the dialogic possibilities of writing–in the war between the counter-voices which the act of writing evokes within the writer. (The questions and answers here collected were written, not taped.)

 

Comments like these illustrate perfectly what we may find in the best moments of Doubling the Point: observations that are both personally revealing, and that suggest, rather than dictate, ways in which we might read Coetzee’s novels. The remarks on the interview, for instance, present us with an extremely important caveat against reading Coetzee too monologically, or against any simplistic identification of Coetzee’s position with a single character. Let us apply this suggestion to a controversial example: in the case of Life and Times of Michael K. we are not necessarily called upon to read the humble gardener as a figure for Coetzee’s putative political, or more exactly, a-political, position. The novel does not straightforwardly tell us (as such commentators as Gordimer and Steven Clingman seem to have thought) to “cultivate our own garden” as Michael K. does. (That position would seem to reach its limit after all when the garden is mined.) Rather, the novel sets in motion a struggle (a “war” in the novel’s terminology) between certain principles, possibilities, readings, and stories.

 

Another revealing moment in Doubling the Point can be discovered in Coetzee’s moving comments on suffering and the body in the interview preceding the section on “Autobiography and Confession.” I cite his confession at some length:

 

If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, I'm sure.) ... Let me put it baldly, in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being- overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)(248)

 

These comments are offered to account for the curious authority of Friday, the mute, mutilated, unassimilable figure from Foe, whom we are finally called upon to think of as standing outside language. (His home, we are told at the novel’s end, is “a place where bodies are their own signs” [157].) But they remind us, more generally, of the importance of the body in all of Coetzee’s novels: the bitten ear of the Hottentot child and the (unforgettable!) anal carbuncle of the explorer in Dusklands, the broken feet and bloodied backs of the prisoners in Waiting for the Barbarians, the harelip and bony frame of the starved Michael K., and the cancer that is slowly destroying Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron. These remarks explain, moreover, why Coetzee identifies so strongly with the moment in Burger’s Daughter I discussed above: that short- circuiting of moral understanding in the face of human brutality is something that he shares, and tries to repair in his fiction.

 

At the conclusion of Doubling the Point, Coetzee returns us again, surprisingly, to Plato, with a simple insistence that we are somehow born with an idea of justice and truth. This is, as Coetzee is all too aware, a vulnerable and perhaps a naive position, but it is the only way he finds himself able to explain his own marginal position–the paradox of the “colonial postcoloniality” of his texts; the fact that like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians he seems compelled to “choose the side of justice when it is not in one’s material interests to do so” (394-5). The reconstruction of an ethical vision, against the odds of an unbearably violent history, is the imperative with which both these texts finally leave us: Coetzee’s writings, as Attwell concludes, do project beyond their situation, “alerting us to the as yet unrealized promise of freedom” (125).

 

Notes

 

1. See for instance Michael Chapman’s comments on Foe as a “kind of masturbatory release, in this country, of the Europeanizing dreams of an intellectual coterie” (335). Cited in Attwell 127-8 fn.

 

2. In his essay “The Problem of History in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,” Attwell elaborates on the theoretical position underpinning his book (Trump, 128).

 

3. For a discussion of such readings, see Teresa Dovey, “Coetzee and his Critics: The Case of Dusklands,” English in Africa 14 (1987): 15-30.

 

4. The title of Dick Penner’s book, Countries of the Mind, declares candidly that his interest lies elsewhere; and Teresa Dovey, while deploying an extremely limited notion of South African discursive codes which Coetzee subverts, has even less interest in any kind of historical specificity. (Schreiner seems to be the only other South African writer she has actually read.) As Attwell so neatly puts it, Dovey challenges those naive critics who would turn Coetzee’s work into a supplement to history, but then turns it into a supplement to Lacan (2).

 

5. There is an interesting discussion in Doubling the Point of Coetzee’s increasing resistance to symptomatic readings in his own criticism: “Why am I now suspicious of such suspiciousness?” Coetzee asks himself (106). The answer he ventures is that demystificatory criticism tends to privilege mystification. Attwell’s criticism seems to me to be influenced by this discussion. (See, for instance, 118-19.)

Works Cited

 

• Attwell, David. “J.M. Coetzee and the Problem of History.” Trump 94-133. Rpt. Poetics Today 11 (Fall 1990): 579-615.
• Chapman, Michael. “The Writing of Politics and the Writing of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading … (?)” Rev. of Dovey. Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1988): 327-41.
• Clingman, Stephen. “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s.” Trump 41-60.
• Coetzee, J.M. “Author on History’s Cutting Edge. South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee: Visions of Doomed Heroics.” Interview. Washington Post 27 Nov, 1990: C1, C4.
• —. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1987.
• —. “The Novel Today.” Upstream 6 (1988): 2-5.
• Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988.
• Fukiyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.
• Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Gordimer, Nadine. “The Idea of Gardening.” Rev. of Life and Times of Michael K. New York Review of Books 2 Feb. 1984: 3,6.
• Penner, Dick. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
• Trump, Martin. Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 1990): 94-133.