"To Petrus": Coetzee, Krog, critics.

Chapman, Michael

"J M Coetzee and his Doubles." Conference, New York University (2728 April 2007). Journal of Literary Studies 25(4), 2009. Guest Editors: Mark Sanders & Nancy Ruttenburg. 143pp.

Mike Marais. 2009. Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of JM Coetzee. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. 249pp.

Carrol Clarkson. 2009. J M Coetzee: Countervoices. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 230pp.

Antjie Krog. 2009. Begging to be Black. Cape Town: Random House Struik. 291pp.

The books and conference papers on J M Coetzee under review here speculate on what David Attwell ("J M Coetzee and the Idea of Africa", JLS: 67-83) summarises as the two 'positions' in which the author is located in critical responses to his work: one, fictions in which African humanity is under-represented and undervalued; two, fictions less mimetic more autotelic, the discourse referring to other discourses (e.g. discourses of power) which are deconstructed from within Coetzee's reflections and writings. Having identified 'reciprocity' as a key contested terrain in Coetzee's work--how to avoid the epistemological capture of the Other in the gaze of the Self (in postcolonial studies, usually the non-Western Other, the Western Self) critics like Derek Attridge (2005) and, as reviewed, Mike Marais pursue the 'autotelic' position even as the mimetic, African-directed position retains a certain critical purchase.

Marais's Secretary of the Invisible takes its title from the "Eighth Lesson" in Elizabeth Costello. Finding herself a "petitioner before the gate" Costello must make a statement of her beliefs to her judges. She is a writer, she writes what she hears, she is a secretary of the invisible, a dictation secretary, and should she be asked, dictated by whom, she would reply, "By powers beyond us" (Coetzee 2003:194-200). With each chapter granting meticulous attention to each novel Marais's purpose is to show that "Coetzee stages the complex process alluded to by Costello: he conceives of an outside to history, a point of exteriority, of invisibility or otherness, that may inspire the writer of literature"(xi). As in Attridge, the principal influence is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1981[1974]). But if Levinas's ultimate Other is God or the Deity, Marais avoids a transcendental signifier; rather, he concurs with Blanchot (1995[1969]): alterity is absolute because it is ultimately irreducible; what is Other is not just different to, but always more than, history. Here Marais invokes the Coetzee art/politics debate in which, as Coetzee (1988:2) phrased it in South Africa of the 1980s, the novel is not a "supplement", but a "rival", to history; its aesthetic aura adds meaning, or meanings, as it positions itself both inside and outside of the societal event. Its ethical responsibility is non-intrusive upon the Other.

Of course, to those who are unsympathetic to such a stance, however principled it might be, Coetzee's reluctance to engage the Other will denote the under-represented, undervalued Africa to which Attwell refers and to which in his brave (I use the word deliberately) paper among Coetzee aficionados he suggests an alternative perspective on reciprocity or its lack in Coetzee's commitments. Like Roy Campbell and several other writers of modernist or fictional experimental persuasion, Coetzee found in the idea of Africa an "occultation" by which Attwell means, metaphorically, an "eclipsed object [that] continues to hold sway over the subject's imagination, releasing an aesthetic charge and leaving an ethical disturbance" (JLS:71). Africa as a place of "mutilated meanings" may help explain why Coetzee's novels--Coetzee (1985) levels the question at Karel Schoeman--cannot read Africa as community but, at best as landscape uncongenial to European naming, at worst as environment hostile to human habitation. Attwell does not conclude, as Marais does, that Coetzee's perceived preoccupation with human/human, or human/non-human, connection or disconnection leads in his work to a repetitive quality. An unexpected conclusion, as in Marais's critical enterprise Coetzee can usually do no wrong. (See Marais, 223-6)

Is repetitive quality a fault of Coetzee or a fault of his critics' interpretative grid? It is a question that engages the attention of both Carrol Clarkson and Nancy Ruttenburg. Responding to what she sees (in Attridge? in Marais?) as a reading of Coetzee's fiction as a "themed staging" (69) of Levinas's (or with small modification, Blanchot's) ethical philosophy, Clarkson locates her ethic/aesthetic focus in Bakhtin's (1981) formulation of the 1920s, in his "dialogic imagination". (Yet another Euro-theory as the master schema, under-represented, undervalued Africa is likely to utter.) According to Bahktin, no utterance is ever free of other (even Other) utterances. The authorial 'I' in Coetzee's fiction may hide behind the character/persona of Jacobus Coetzee or Magda or, in free indirect speech, behind David Lurie, but is never the sole speaker. Rather, there is an activation of the speech and sensibility of other writers (the trace of Defoe, Dostoevsky, et al.) as the speaker creates a voice which, in a certain way, disposes itself towards its created characters as well as to 'You', 'We' (its listeners or readers), and which, in turn, disposes its listeners to its voice. To be immersed in the world of the creative or critical work is to experience a proliferation of fictional "countervoices" (the term Countervoices features in the title of Clarkson's study), including countervoices within the authorial 'I' as it questions its own authority, its own ethical position, its own subscription to any rule of narrative or, indeed, genre.

Clarkson's is a densely layered study. She shows that the linguistic sciences (the narratological position of I, You, We) can lend precision to literary criticism. As she illustrates her argument (126-30): the contingency of any single set of beliefs or cultural practices is not in itself reason enough to reduce countervoices to a singular, predominant voice. The unrelenting playing out, in Disgrace, of Lurie's (or is it Coetzee's, or the history of the novel's?) Eurocentricism has much to do with the heightened sense of unease that one--who is 'one', the mimetic or the autotelic interpreter? experiences in the reading to completion of this particular novel. (We recall ANC anger at what was perceived to be the Afro-pessimism of Disgrace; we recall world laudation.) According to Clarkson there is no "simple plurality" (177). The readers of Disgrace--at least, some of the readers--undergo together with Lurie a moral and an imaginative expansion through recourse to a European culture (foreshortened in 18th-century Romantic reference and allusion) which was simultaneously a culture complicit in a violent history of colonialism. (See Coetzee's White Writing(1988) for his delineation of the "discourse of the Cape".) The writing self is part of a way of life, Clarkson concludes, in which the I, the You and the We are connected in profound, mutually inclusive ethical-aesthetic responsiveness.

Clarkson reminds us forcibly that Coetzee is not a philosopher of ethics, but a writer of what Ruttenburg calls the "human document" ("The Human Document", JLS: 51- 66). Like Clarkson, she reacts somewhat against the Levinasian paradigm. In her reading of the Coetzee text there is no bracketing off of one's own values so as to allow a full experience of a character's alterity unconstrained by judgment or preconditions (51). Rather, she takes her cue from Elizabeth Costello's "amoral conspiracy" or "breathing together" of reader and fictional character. Reading thus conceived raises the difference between the real and fictional person permitting a "promiscuous interpenetration of experience that the reader, at the moment of reading, is powerless to refuse" (51). In short, the work of art resists its reduction to the schema. Or, as Coetzee put it some years ago in his interview with Attwell: "The 'feel' of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility towards something that has not yet emerged, but lies somewhere at the end of the road" (1992:246). If the voice here suggests a Levinasian caution in imposing its will to power on the Other, the counter-voice suggests simultaneously the Coleridge/Costello sympathetic imagination. Or is it Keats's "negative capability"? Several intertexts lend themselves to 'our' will to interpret. As Clarkson might say in countervoiced interaction with Bahktin, the author-I is defined not by what it says, but by the position from which it speaks (89).

The distinction is useful in preparing points of entry to Krog's Begging to be Black, a creative non-fictional, generic hybrid of I, You, and We, in which Krog attempts to understand "what we say and have said about each others in this country [South Africa]" (vii). The title does not do justice to its author's strenuous, dramatically enacted interrogation of the difficulties, or challenges, of an interconnectedness that does not erase difference. In Ruttenburg's seeking an alternative model of understanding to the 'themed staging' of Levinasian philosophy, she used the term "synapse" (51) between the reader and character, and with Begging juxtaposing political/ criminal murder, testimony, German-South African observations, the history of the Sotho king Moshoeshoe as prefigure of Mandela, and sparring between husband-and-wife, Krog in intermittent discussion with an Australian academic says, "'How do I flee towards black, to use your term, if I have never cared to know what that means... I am not necessarily interested in African philosophy versus Western philosophy, but rather in what kind of self I should grow into in order to live a caring, useful and informed life--a "good life"--within my country in southern Africa.'" To which the Australian academic replies: "'Are you talking about a kind of entanglement?'" Krog: "'No, it's not about mingling, or the entanglement of roots, but how one root can become or link to another.'" The Australian academic: "'A synapse.'" Krog: "I smile. 'Perhaps that is the word'" (94-5).

With her husband ("J") prepared to deflate his wife's idealism, or her naivete (like Coetzee's Summertime, Begging flagellates its own author), Krog steps out of easy West/Africa dichotomies. If ubuntu is communal, it is debatable whether it is essentially African or, more universally, premodern; instead of the Levinasian stranger, we encounter A C Jordan's 'African' stranger, who should be accommodated within community (186). But with ubuntu "so very much alive"--Krog avers--people do not survive these "brutalising-into-being-an-individual surroundings" (226): that is, the contemporary squatter camp where struggles for scarce resources lead to xenophobic violence. How does one square an 'African' refusal to criticise Mugabe's atrocities with Mrs Cynthia Ngewu's testimony to the TRC?

'This thing called reconciliation... if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed [my son]... if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back ... then I agree, then I support it all [his application for amnesty].' (211)

But at the conference in Turkey, at which Krog delivered her paper from which she quotes here on "forgiveness in terms of this interconnected humaneness", the audience sits with "a fierce gleam of hurt, anger and bitterness in their eyes" (212).

On the value of listening to the stories of Others, Krog (99-102) introduces Petrus's story (the Petrus of Disgrace; Begging is dedicated to one or another "Petrus"). Lurie acknowledges--Krog pursues David Lurie's thoughts--that Petrus doubtless had a story to tell. He would not have minded hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. So Petrus's story--Krog again responds to her friend the Australian academic--is "'relentlessly framed and interpreted by that which forms the fibre of English ... Sunday after Sunday in the newspapers ... framed as one of deep-seated, mindless, generic corruption, run through with indigenous howls like...We will kill for Zuma'." This however is not Petrus's story, Krog continues; rather, Petrus--we are urged to understand--functions within an "'ethic that is communal to the core'". Despite this he is judged--Lurie is the third-person, indirect focaliser of Disgrace--by an "'ethic that is individual.'" [Krog's author-voice guides us to what she imagines Petrus would say] '"Professor Lurie ... smug within his belief that what he believes is the only right belief.'" Instead of listening to the "'complexities of caring within a globalised community'" Lurie "'wrings their necks and throws them on the enormous trash heap in his head of African failures'" (102).

The way forward may not be simply to oppose Petrus's story to Lurie's story, as Krog at this point might wish her reader to do; for she herself continually qualifies her own struggle to understand what it involves to beg to be black. Asked why she does not write novels so that she can "'explore the inner psyches of the characters'", she offers a thought-provoking justification for her unique brand of non-fiction:

'The strangeness. Whatever novelistic elements I may use in my nonfiction work, the strangeness is not invented. The strangeness is real, and the fact that I cannot ever really enter the psyche of somebody else, somebody black. The terror and loneliness of their inability is what I don't want to give up on. ... [O]ur imagination is simply not capable of imagining a reality as--or with--the other.' (267-8)

If these words begin to suggest the themed staging of Levinasian philosophy, then--to return to Attwell's summary of the two positions in Coetzee criticism--Krog's conclusion attaches 'discourse' to an African bedrock:

'Yes, I now think that to imagine black at this stage is to insult black. That is why I stay with non-fiction, listening, engaging, observing, translating, until one can hopefully begin to sense a thinning of skin, negotiate possible small openings at places where imaginings can begin to begin.' (268)

As though she is alert to Mary West's (2009: 65-102) reservations that in A Change of Tongue Krog cannot entirely avoid retreating into her own "whiteness" as a norm, Begging to be Black sets out to "make whiteness visible" (West 2009:19) for painful self-scrutiny. Experience and critique together inform Krog's human document.

To return to Coetzee criticism--as in the publications reviewed here--is to return to an erudition that at times is forbidding. Marais's chapter on Slow Man, for example, left me feeling somewhat slow-witted; Zoe Wicomb came to my rescue ("Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing", JLS: 7-24). This novel, we are to understand, functions through the concept of substitution, in which there is a continuous slippage between the real and representation. Despite the ministrations of author-shade Elizabeth Costello --her unexpected intrusion into the plot deflects reader attention from Paul Rayment's failed attempts at intimacy with his Croatian nurse--the protagonist Rayment (a leg lost in a cycling accident) chooses to remain a one-legged, inchoate character. The novel, in part--Wicomb concludes is a wry comment on the role of the writer whose task is to bring characters into being. Such wryness, such parody, turns Marais back to the earlier Coetzee (223-6). Parody--he now recognises (Mrs Curren likens her motor vehicle to Rocinante)--leavens Coetzee's acerbic precision. Yes, but the element of parody had preceded the slightly absurd, quixotic Mrs Curren (Age of Iron, 1990). Jacobus Coetzee (1974), Magda (1978), the Magistrate (1981), all engage in dialogues which are undermining of their own designs or desires. It is the quality that invokes readers'--at least, some readers'--sympathetic imagination. My point is that Coetzee criticism, its erudition notwithstanding, is in danger of disconnection from broader, less specialised, less arcane currents of literary education and life. Is it not time for a J M Coetzee Society? It is a relief, in any case, to return to the pleasure of Coetzee's own 'novel' fictions.

This is not to deny, however, that among contemporary writers of South African interest J M Coetzee and Antjie Krog, in different ways, offer literary criticism its richest rewards.

References

Attridge, Derek.

2005. J MCoetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail.

1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. C Emerson and M Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Blanchot, Maurice.

1995[1969]. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. S Hanson. Minneapolis ; University of Minnesota Press.

Coetzee, J M.

1974. Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

--. 1978. In the Heart of the Country. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

--. 1981. Waitingfor the Barbarians. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

--. 1985. Review, Karel Schoeman's 'n Ander Land. Die Suid Afrikaan (Summer): 48.

--. 1988. "The Novel Today." UpStream 6(1): 2-5.

--. 1988. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South-Africa. Johannesburg: Radix.

--. 1990. Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg.

--. 1992. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

--. 1999. Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg.

--. 2003. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker and Warburg.

--. 2005. Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg.

--. 2009. Summertime. London: Harvill Secker.

Krog, Antjie. 2003. A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Randon House.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1981[1974]. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. A Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

West, Mary. 2009. White Women Writing White: Identity and Representation in (Post-) Apartheid Literatures of South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.