J. M. COETZEE: ETHICS, SUBALTERNITY, and the CRITIQUE of HUMANISM by Deepa Jani B. A. in English, University of Pune, India
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J. M. COETZEE: ETHICS, SUBALTERNITY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF HUMANISM by Deepa Jani B. A. in English, University of Pune, India, 1993 M. A. in English, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Deepa Jani It was defended on April 10, 2013 and approved by Jonathan Arac, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, English John Beverley, Distinguished Professor, Hispanic Languages & Literatures Ronald Judy, Professor, English Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, English Dissertation Advisor: Paul A. Bové, Distinguished Professor, English ii Copyright © by Deepa Jani 2013 iii Dedicated to the memory of my father. iv J. M. COETZEE: ETHICS, SUBALTERNITY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF HUMANISM Deepa Jani, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 In the era of globalization, postcolonial studies is again confronted with the question of Western humanism and its attendant project of universalizing Eurocentric assumptions about the human. My dissertation argues that J. M. Coetzee’s postmodern novels deliberately reconstruct a literary genealogy of this project from the colonial through the postcolonial periods in order to disrupt it. My thesis addresses four novels of Coetzee that cover his entire oeuvre: the early novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the novel of the middle phase Foe (1986), and the later novels— Disgrace (1999) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Each chapter elaborates on the intertextual nature of Coetzee’s novels and explores the rich dialogue between him and the canonical Western writers—Daniel Defoe, Franz Kafka, and Michel de Montaigne. I argue that through metafictional literary forms such as allegory, parody, and the essay, Coetzee’s postmodern novels simultaneously construct and interrupt the Eurocentric humanist universals of progress, reason, rights, the sovereign subject, democracy, and universal history. The totalizing and humanizing impulses of these metanarratives have shaped much of the history of apartheid and colonialism, and continue to do so in our era of neo-imperial globalism. Coetzee’s fiction, with the exception of Dusklands (1974), exclusively stages the relationship between the figure of the liberal humanist and the subaltern, a self-other dynamic based on hegemony rather than pure domination. My analysis demonstrates that, in the figure of the representative humanist, v Coetzee’s oeuvre stages the tendency of the humanizing discourses to produce gendered and racialized subaltern bodies. The novels also dramatize the resistance of the subalterns to the epistemic violence of these narratives, resulting in the eventual failure of the intellectual to grant voice to them. Thus, I propose that Coetzee’s work gestures towards an ethics of the other, in which the Eurocentric self is called into question by the other of history. In the tradition of postmodernism, the relationship between fiction and history is unstable and insecure. His fiction does not stand witness to or represent history, but ceaselessly re- presents the relationship between fiction and fiction, fiction and history, and fiction and the self-of-writing. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... VIII INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 EMPIRE, ALLEGORICAL IMPULSE, AND GAMES OF TRUTH: J. M. COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS .................................................. 30 2.0 WRITING A COUNTER-MEMORY OF EMPIRE: J. M. COETZEE’S FOE ....... 73 3.0 JUSTICE, ETHICS, AND PRACTICES OF FREEDOM: J. M. COETZEE’S DISGRACE .................................................................................................................... 128 4.0 ESSAYING AGAINST EMPIRE: J. M. COETZEE’S DIARY OF A BAD YEAR .............................................................................................................................. 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 221 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my committee members for their generosity, patience and support of my work through these years as a graduate student. Professors Jonathan Arac, John Beverley, Marcia Landy, and Ronald Judy have supported me and taught me in their unique ways and styles. And of course, my special thanks go to Professor Paul A. Bové, the chair of my committee, who has been very supportive, generous, and an astute reader of my work. I have been fortunate to learn from the rigorous reading of each of my committee members, and I am at a loss for words to express my profound gratitude to them. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the English department for their support of my research and teaching through all these years. When I needed it, Kym helped me, and I want to thank her for that. Chris, my partner, has given me the kind of friendship I thought was only possible in novels and movies. I also want to thank him for teaching me chess. What a beautiful game! I want to dedicate this dissertation to my father, whose sudden departure from this earth has left me unmoored. viii INTRODUCTION I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. —Frantz Fanon1 In a society of masters and slaves, no one is free. The slave is not free, because he is not his own master; the master is not free, because he cannot do without the slave. How do the masters of South Africa experience their unfreedom today? —J. M. Coetzee2 The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life … South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation to the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from a prison. 1 —J. M. Coetzee3 Tragedy, J. M. Coetzee reminds us, was the dominant mode of liberal white South African writing under apartheid.4 In his essay on the neglected coloured South African writer Alex la Guma,5 Coetzee bemoans the dominance of the apolitical and the ahistorical mode of tragedy, both in its naturalistic and religious forms, in white writing in English.6 These tragedies often stage the tragic suffering of interracial lovers, who commit hamartia in the white supremacist apartheid system when they love across “the color line.” The tragic plot often ends with the death or exile of the hero. The function of art is to stand witness to the suffering and the triumph of love that runs afoul of the apartheid laws against miscegenation. Coetzee elaborates on the apolitical nature of these tragic fables in the following quote: “The overt content of the fable here is that love conquers evil through tragic suffering when such suffering is borne witness to in art [emphasis mine]; its covert content is the apolitical doctrine that defeat can turn itself, by the twist of tragedy, into victory.”7 The defeat of the tragic hero, who has become a sacrificial lamb, is also his victory. For this to happen, the tragic suffering needs to have the character of universality that is governed by the laws of probability or necessity, rather than the character of particularity that is governed by chance or coincidence, which is the domain of history, so that the audience can empathize with the hero’s suffering and feel pity, but also fear, because they can see themselves as running afoul of the Law.8 Since the Law, both God’s law and man’s law (apartheid), is inscrutable and unshakeable (and thus cannot be challenged or questioned), our emotions of pity and fear for the hero’s tragic suffering can be purged in the representation, or imitation, of that suffering in art: “Nevertheless . that 2 the dispensation under which man suffers is unshakeable, but that our pity for the hero- victim and our terror at his fate can be purged by the ritual of reenactment.”9 For Coetzee, this fatalism in the face of the unshakeable Law is a characteristic feature of both forms of tragedy, religious tragedy and naturalistic tragedy, which have been widely employed by Western writers and white South African writers. Religious tragedy “reconciles us to the inscrutable dispensation by giving meaning to suffering and defeat”10; naturalistic tragedy, influenced by the fatalistic determinism of Emile Zola’s literary naturalism which believed that the laws of environment and hereditary can scientifically determine one’s character, also evokes pity and terror in the representation of the “inscrutable dispensation” of society and genes. In Coetzee’s essay, Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) is an example of the former, and Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy (1925) is an example of the latter. I have begun