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Colonial Encounters in Jm Coetzee's Early Fiction

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Colonial Encounters in Jm Coetzee's Early Fiction COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN J. M. COETZEE’S EARLY FICTION: TWO TROPES OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY (GYARMATI TALÁLKOZÁSOK J. M. COETZEE KORAI REGÉNYEIBEN: AZ INTERSZUBJEKTIVITÁS KÉT TRÓPUSA) Értekezés a doktori (Ph.D.) fokozat megszerzése érdekében az irodalomtudományok tudományágban Írta: Veres Ottilia, okleveles angol nyelv és irodalom szakos tanár Készült a Debreceni Egyetem Irodalomtudományok doktori iskolája (Angol irodalom programja) keretében Témavezető: Dr. Bényei Tamás (olvasható aláírás) A doktori szigorlati bizottság: elnök: Dr. ……………………………… tagok: Dr. ……………………………… Dr. ……………………………… A doktori szigorlat időpontja: 2017. ……………… … . Az értekezés bírálói: Dr. ……………………………… Dr. ……………………………… A bírálóbizottság: elnök: Dr. ……………………………… tagok: Dr. ……………………………… Dr. ……………………………… Dr. ……………………………… Dr. ……………………………… A nyilvános vita időpontja: 2017. ……………… … . 1 Én, Veres Ottilia, teljes felelősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés önálló munka, a szerzői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletben tartásával készült, a benne található irodalmi hivatkozások egyértelműek és teljesek. Nem állok doktori fokozat visszavonására irányuló eljárás alatt, illetve 5 éven belül nem vontak vissza tőlem odaítélt doktori fokozatot. Jelen értekezést korábban más intézményben nem nyújtottam be és azt nem utasították el. Veres Ottilia 2 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN J. M. COETZEE’S EARLY FICTION: TWO TROPES OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY1 „az én létezésem a te léted lehetőségeként szemlélveˮ2 Kertész Imre “The human relation (…) is terrible.”3 Maurice Blanchot 1 This research was supported by the European Union and the State of Hungary, co-financed by the European Social Fund in the framework of TÁMOP-4.2.4.A/ 2-11/1-2012-0001 ‘National Excellence Program’. 2 Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (50). 3 The Infinite Conversation (59). 3 Contents Chapter One. Introduction………………………………………………………………….…..5 Chapter Two. Colonial Intersubjectivity in Dusklands and Foe..………………….………..28 Sinbad (and Nessus)….…………………………………………………….……34 Herakles…………………………………………………………….....................50 “Strange backward embrace:” Colonial Intersubjectivity in Foe……...……….55 Female Oedipus…………………………………………………..…...…………65 Chapter Three. On Looking and Blindness in Waiting for the Barbarians………….......……71 “Loops of wire:” Colonial Oedipus ………………………………………..…….…...71 “ I am not myself”..………………………………………………………….…...…......83 Chapter Four. Homo Solitarius: Intersubjectivity in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and Beckett’s Molloy..............................................98 Cape Town Beckett……………………………………………………………………...98 Detours: The Story of A and C……………………………….………………………108 Prosthetic Relationships: Sisyphus, Roch …………………………….…….……...112 “A creature beyond:” Gardening…….………..……………………………...119 Conclusion: Orpheus and Eurydice…………………………………………………………125 References ………………………………………………………………………………........137 4 Chapter One Introduction “The gun stands for the hope that there exists that which is other than oneself.”4 J. M. Coetzee J. M. Coetzee’s reputation is steadily increasing even more than ten years after he received the Nobel Prize for literature. This is obvious not only from the fact that his work, translated into twenty-five languages, is widely taught internationally on all levels, but also from the plethora of awards his novels have been lavished with. He won the Booker Prize first in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K (before Graham Swift’s Waterland and Salman Rushdie’s Shame) and then for a second time in 1999 for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the Booker twice. The Nobel Prize followed in 2003 (after Imre Kertész)—making him the second South African writer to win, after Nadine Gordimer—though Coetzee had been nominated for it as early as 1996 and then again in 2000 and 2001.5 There is perhaps no contemporary writer whose oeuvre has given rise to more book- length studies, let alone the proliferation of essays and articles in Europe, the US, and South 4 Dusklands (79). 5 Considering the plethora of prizes (and the number of honorary doctorates) that he kept receiving, it may strike one as ironical that he had serious difficulties with publishing his first novel (Dusklands [1974]), joining the illustrious and long list of famous writers who struggled to have their first book published (Kannemayer 236). Other prestigious awards his novels have received include the CNA Prize (the most prestigious literary prize in South Africa, which he won three times) and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (for Foe in 1986) (joining writers such as Borges, Ionesco, Simone de Beauvoir, Graham Greene, Naipaul, and Kundera). In Hungary, although quite a number of his novels have been translated, apart from three well-translated novels (Dusklands/Alkonyvidék, trans. Bényei Tamás, Waiting for the Barbarians/A barbárokra várva, trans. Sebestyén Éva, and his latest novel The Childhood of Jesus/Jézus gyermekkora, trans. Kada Júlia), his books, unfortunately, appeared in very poor translations (published by the Art Nouveau publishing house from Pécs). (In reference to the poor Hungarian translations of In the Heart of the Country, Foe and Michael K, see Tamás Bényei’s article „Az elveszett történet (J. M. Coetzee: Foe)” in Élet és Irodalom [2005. március 25].) The responsibility of a publisher translating first-rate literature with second-rate translators cannot be overemphasized. Hungary basically does not know Coetzee; apart from the few books properly translated, the Hungarian audience does not read Coetzee in Hungarian. 5 Africa. Despite the relative shortage of time, the critical response to Coetzee’s fiction is already varied and might be said to have gone through identifiable stages. The first wave of critical response (from the end of the ’80s and the first half of the ’90s), inspired by his early novels, emphasized the embeddedness of Coetzee’s fiction in the context of his native South Africa.6 Dick Penner’s (1989), Susan Gallagher’s (1991) and David Attwell’s (1993) studies primarily examine the “variety of social, cultural, and rhetorical contexts from which his novels emerge and in which they participate” (Gallagher x) and describe his oeuvre as “situational metafiction” (Atwell 3) and as pertaining to “apartheid literature.” At the same time, however, others (like Sue Kossew, Peter Knox-Shaw or Gordimer) criticized Coetzee for not attending closely enough to the struggle and oppression in South Africa in the apartheid years, claiming that his novels lacked the political urgency of the age and failed to confront the political condition of oppression.7 The main argument behind this criticism was that in the years of struggle in South Africa many writers were banned or they emigrated and those who stayed were duty-bound to express themselves against apartheid (Kannemayer 257). Coetzee has always distanced himself from being labeled a South African writer and refused to be branded as a writer coming from the geographically restrained provincialism of the colonies, claiming that his intellectual allegiances have always been clearly European, not African (Kannemayer 565), admitting at the same time his awareness of the complex historical position from which he writes and his strong “attachment to the ground” (Kannemayer 214, 234). Averse to being labeled a South African novelist on the back cover of his books, he wanted to avoid the danger that any writing from South Africa be read only as a reflection of or resistance to a particular political situation (Attridge 71). Gallagher, however, claims that, besides the obvious European roots of Coetzee’s fiction (Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, Pound), his South African heritage is “more than he admits” (45). Although he preferred to be published as a 6 Teresa Dovey’s monograph (written in 1988) forms an exception. Reading Coetzee’s fiction in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is part of the “universal” readings of Coetzee, despite its early publication date. Though taking a clearly poststructuralist (specifically Lacanian) stance, the problem about Dovey’s book, as López argues, is that it “reduces Coetzee’s complex engagement with different discursive modes and theoretical currents to a mere appropriation of the Lacanian paradigm” (11). 7 As a reaction to Gordimer’s essay “The Idea of Gardening,” in which she attacks Coetzee for not taking political action in his works (“Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it” [142]), Coetzee speaks against South African writers as “cultural workers” (Kannemayer 392). 6 novelist “pure and simple” (as Secker and Warburg, the highly regarded British publisher had him appear on the back covers of his books, rather than a South African novelist, as he featured for Ravan Press) (Kannemayer 290), the publication of Doubling the Point, one of his most important collections of interviews (published in 1992 by David Attwell), eradicated the misconception that Coetzee was apathetic in the face of South African politics. Nowadays there is little disagreement among attentive readers of Coetzee—they are united in rejecting the notion of his allegedly irresponsible politics. The consensus is that Coetzee is in fact “deeply involved in South Africa’s violent history” (Kannemayer 494). (Besides the novels that are clearly set in South Africa [like Dusklands, Michael K, Age of Iron, or Disgrace] or other novels the setting of which only alludes to South Africa [like In the Heart of the Country], he wrote a whole book on censorship8). In his lecture entitled “What is
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