Table Of ContentCRITICAL 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 ...
