- Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Mike Marais
Rhodes University, English Department, Department Member
Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us concerns itself with the issue of white identity, but does so through its invocation of Zimbabwe’s failed policy of... more
Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us concerns itself with the issue of white identity, but does so through its invocation of Zimbabwe’s failed policy of racial reconciliation. In this article, I examine this novel’s meditation on reconciliation and the possibility of attaining a postcolonial condition that breaks with colonial modes of identity predicated on negating forms of racial difference. I trace, in particular, Holding’s use of the confessional mode of writing in his engagement with the idea of reconciliation. Whereas this mode ordinarily focuses on individual guilt, I show that, in Holding’s novel, it expresses the collective shame of whites for their separatism, which is presented as a failure of imagination. Throughout, my focus is Holding’s recalibration of the confessional mode of writing to accommodate a community perspective, and the implications of this reconceptualization for confession’s...
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abstract:In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist undergoes in Of Beasts and Beings in the context of Zimbabwe's policy of reconciliation. On becoming aware of his whiteliness, this... more
abstract:In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist undergoes in Of Beasts and Beings in the context of Zimbabwe's policy of reconciliation. On becoming aware of his whiteliness, this character, prompted by shame, writes a narrative in which he projects himself into the position of a black person. I argue that this act of imaginative identification may be read as the white protagonist's attempt to reconcile with his black compatriots, but also show that the form of reconciliation here involved is dialectical in nature rather than assimilative. Thus conceived, reconciliation places the two races in a dialectical relationship that posits the possibility of their sublation and with it the attainment of a truly postcolonial condition. I, however, go on to argue that the novel self-reflexively questions its representation of this post-racial state by acknowledging its own implication in colonial history. Through a critique of its shameful complicity with this history, it casts doubt on the ability of the sympathetic imagination to enable a transcendence of the discourses of whiteness. Finally, I contend that the novel's desire for transcendence, despite its awareness of its implication in colonial history, invests it with an ambivalence that allows it to negotiate the problem of the shamefulness of white, postcolonial writing.
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Research Interests: Art and English in Africa
I n JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), the character Lucy Lurie is raped by three black men on her smallholding outside Salem in the Eastern Province. For reasons that are never directly articulated in the novel, Lucy responds to her... more
I n JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), the character Lucy Lurie is raped by three black men on her smallholding outside Salem in the Eastern Province. For reasons that are never directly articulated in the novel, Lucy responds to her ordeal rather enigmatically: she does not report the rape to the police and she continues to live on the smallholding without attempting to secure the premises. Critics in South Africa have responded to Coetzee's depiction of the rape and ensuing events in terms that are predictable in a literary establishment which seems, as a matter of course, to reduce heterogeneous political, social and literary positions to the simplistic oppositions of race politics. On the one hand, Coetzee has been criticized for the supposed conservatism or racism implicit in his portrayal of the rape of a white woman by black men. Although this criticism is most evident in the African National Congress's submission to the Human Rights Commission's inquiry into racism in the media, it can also be seen in Michiel Heyns's dismissive reference to Disgrace as a "Liberal Funk" novel (2000), that is, as representative of a sub-genre of the South African novel that records liberal fear at the marginalization of whites in the post-apartheid period. On the other hand, Coetzee's portrayal of Lucy Lurie's passivity following her rape has been read as exemplifying whites' acceptance of their peripherality in the "new" South Africa. This interpretation was first offered by Athol Fugard and has since become something of an orthodox response to the novel, which is somewhat ironic, given that Fugard, by his own admission at the time of his comments, had not yet read the novel:
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... Underpinnings of the Early English Novel ... Since it is immersed in discursive structures, the novel implies, the subject's consciousness is, in phenomenological terms, "intentional," that is, it is always directed at... more
... Underpinnings of the Early English Novel ... Since it is immersed in discursive structures, the novel implies, the subject's consciousness is, in phenomenological terms, "intentional," that is, it is always directed at objects and therefore constitutes them (see Husserl 1931, 257). ...
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In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle, his first-person narrator, with a hermeneutic sensibility. This is, of course, evident in the fact that Tearle is a proofreader, albeit a retired one, who is... more
In The Restless Supermarket (2001), Ivan Vladislavic invests Aubrey Tearle, his first-person narrator, with a hermeneutic sensibility. This is, of course, evident in the fact that Tearle is a proofreader, albeit a retired one, who is dedicated" to matter in its proper order"(42), and ...
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Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on the political left. l Her survey of the censure which Coetzee's work has received from this quarter reveals that the grounds for... more
Teresea Dovey raises a number of pertinent points in her criticism of Coetzee's detractors on the political left. l Her survey of the censure which Coetzee's work has received from this quarter reveals that the grounds for rejection are generally of an ideological nature, ranging from accusations that his "writing is preoccupied with problems of consciousness, thus betraying an idealist rather than a materialist stance" to the contention that in "failing to delineate the economic complexities of oppression, [he] has got his history all wrong."2 To her list could be added the accusation levelled at Coetzee's Foe* at a recent seminar on the novel, that it is divorced from South African social and political realities - another essentially ideological complaint.4 Dovey argues that this type of criticism, with its desire that Coetzee "write in some other way,"5 exemplifies what Eagleton calls the "normative illusion," defined as follows...
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According to Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee's fiction, on a thematic level, ‘repeatedly suggests that the condition of modernity is made up of competing, equally important, and yet incommensurate ways of imagining the good community’... more
According to Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee's fiction, on a thematic level, ‘repeatedly suggests that the condition of modernity is made up of competing, equally important, and yet incommensurate ways of imagining the good community’ (p. 4). The first of these imaginings is grounded in the Kantian notion that the human individual is a rational and autonomous agent, and that it is precisely his or her rational autonomy, and capacity to direct life through neutral principles that commands the respect and recognition of other individuals. As is evident in its emphasis on rationality, this politic of equal dignity and recognition is universalistic in its claims. In contrast, the second imagining of community is based on the recognition of cultural specificity, and the argument that freedom and equal recognition are only possible through a revision of deleterious cultural stereotypes. In its terms, the good community ‘must be founded on the recognition, and active fostering of cultural particularity’ (p. 12). This politic of difference is highly suspicious of the universalizing claims of the politic of dignity, arguing that its appeal to equal dignity is itself a form of particularism masquerading as universalism
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During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee’s fiction was that it did not engage with the depredations of apartheid. Thus, for instance, Michael Vaughan complained that this writing downplays “material factors of oppression and... more
During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee’s fiction was that it did not engage with the depredations of apartheid. Thus, for instance, Michael Vaughan complained that this writing downplays “material factors of oppression and struggle in contemporary South Africa” (1982, 126), and Michael Chapman attacked Foe for failing to “speak to Africa” and simply providing a “kind of masturbatory release . . . for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie” (1988, 335). Many critics have responded to the crude literalism of this argument. David Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, for instance, is a sustained attempt to place what he refers to as Coetzee’s “situational metafiction” in its historical context and thereby expose the nature and extent of its engagement with the realities of apartheid (1993). More recently, Derek Attridge has questioned the instrumentalist assumptions that underlie this critical debate by arguing that Coetzee’s writing is aware of and sensitive to literature’s singular relationship to an otherness which seeks constantly to enter and change the cultural formation. While Attridge contends that the reader’s encounter with the alterity of the work must needs have a tangible impact on the lifeworld, he maintains that since the other in question
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Introduction Hospitality in the Early Fiction A Goatseye View of the Stone Desert: Life & Times of Michael K A Child Waiting to Be Born: Foe From the Standpoint of Redemption: Age of Iron The Writing of a Madman: The Master of... more
Introduction Hospitality in the Early Fiction A Goatseye View of the Stone Desert: Life & Times of Michael K A Child Waiting to Be Born: Foe From the Standpoint of Redemption: Age of Iron The Writing of a Madman: The Master of Petersburg The Task of the Imagination: Disgrace A Slow Story?: Slow Man Conclusion Works Cited Index
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This essay examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Ken Barris's portrayal of the life of a street child in What Kind of Child. Responses to literary representations of subaltern suffering are sharply divided. On the one hand,... more
This essay examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Ken Barris's portrayal of the life of a street child in What Kind of Child. Responses to literary representations of subaltern suffering are sharply divided. On the one hand, there is the commonsense view that such representations require one to imagine what the situation of other people may be like, and that, in doing so, one opens oneself to their experience of life. To the extent that representations of suffering inspire one to reflect on one's relations to others, they are salutary. On the other hand, though, such depictions, like poverty tourism, may be accused of providing a spectacle of distant suffering that one vicariously experiences from a position of privilege and then discards. So, for instance, Shyamal Sengupta describes Slumdog Millionaire as a "poverty tour" (qtd. in Magnier), and Alice Miles even accuses it of being "poverty porn". To aestheticise the suffering of impoverished people is to commodify it for the consumption and prurient pleasure of the bourgeois world. What is partly at stake here is the ethical question, harking back to Aristotle's account of tragedy, of the strange pleasure aroused by spectacles of suffering. While it may be that one's imaginative engagement with subaltern suffering renders one more sensitive to the plight of others, it may equally well be that one is entertained in the process.
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Summary In this article, I argue that Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable evinces the kind of aesthetic ambivalence that Theodor Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, ascribes to the artwork’s location both in and outside of society. By tracing the... more
Summary In this article, I argue that Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable evinces the kind of aesthetic ambivalence that Theodor Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, ascribes to the artwork’s location both in and outside of society. By tracing the metaphors used in the narrator’s depiction of the act of narration, I demonstrate that this novel self-reflexively articulates and meditates on its ambivalent position in society. Thereafter, I relate the work’s suspicion of its medium, and therefore its estrangement from itself, to its critique of community’s norms of recognition, which are embedded in language. Finally, I reflect on the potential effect of the text’s aesthetic ambivalence on the reader.
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There are obvious problems attached to the assignation of a label like ‘post-colonial’ to South African literary texts. Annamaria Carusi, for example, points out that in the South African context the term ‘is not seen as applicable by... more
There are obvious problems attached to the assignation of a label like ‘post-colonial’ to South African literary texts. Annamaria Carusi, for example, points out that in the South African context the term ‘is not seen as applicable by either one in the customary coloniser/colonised opposition,’ and that for the one group ‘post-colonialism, as a desirable state of affairs, has been accomplished’, whereas for the other group, ‘to speak of post-colonialism is preemptive’ (‘Post, Post and Post’ 80). This is true if one understands the term in a literal or a strictly chronometric sense. Other interpretations of post-colonialism are possible, however. Stephen Slemon, for example, argues that the concept proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonised nations but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. (‘Modernism’s Last Post’ 6) In Slemon’s terms, it is possible to treat South Africa as the site of such a counter-discourse.
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Explores the occurrence of the idea or the possibility in J.M. Coetzee's 'Age of iron'. Elucidates the transcendental ethics and aesthetics of the novel. Demonstrates that Plato's simile of the cave and theory of forms are... more
Explores the occurrence of the idea or the possibility in J.M. Coetzee's 'Age of iron'. Elucidates the transcendental ethics and aesthetics of the novel. Demonstrates that Plato's simile of the cave and theory of forms are explicated in the novel, where they contribute to a debate on the politics of representation in South Africa.
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En este articulo defiendo que la escritura de Coetzee, estando alienada de la historia pero sin ser capaz de trascenderla, es forzada a tratar sus propias representaciones con una dosis de suspicacia. Por extension, el texto de Coetzee... more
En este articulo defiendo que la escritura de Coetzee, estando alienada de la historia pero sin ser capaz de trascenderla, es forzada a tratar sus propias representaciones con una dosis de suspicacia. Por extension, el texto de Coetzee esta siempre dividido contra si mismo. Nunca esta, dicho en el vocabulario de la hospitalidad, del todo en casa consigo mismo, ya que esta al tanto de que la casa se presupone como en exclusion, sobre la existencia de un forastero, alguien para quien casa no esta en casa. Parte de mi argumento radica en decir que esta turbacion, en la oeuvre de Coetzee, se expresa en la figura del vagabundo que cuestiona, y de hecho resiste, la perspectiva de casa y la nocion de extranjeria desde la que es predicada. Mediante una comparacion de la escritura de Coetzee con la de Salih, demuestro que un texto vagabundo es aquel que intenta sin descanso encontrar al extrano que excede la construccion diferencial del extranjero. Como tal, es un texto que se empena en hacerse hospitalario: al intentar abrirse al extrano, trata de convertirse en una casa para este extrano. Para hacer esto, para convertirse en casa para el extrano que busca, debe advenir otra de lo que es en si misma. El ensayo concluye con una discusion sobre el papel del lector a este respecto
Research Interests: Philosophy and Humanities
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Ken Barris was born in Port Elizabeth and lives in Cape Town, where he works at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. His writing includes two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and five novels, the most recent... more
Ken Barris was born in Port Elizabeth and lives in Cape Town, where he works at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. His writing includes two collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and five novels, the most recent being What Kind of Child (2006) and Life Underwater (2012). His work has been translated into Turkish, Danish, German and Slovenian, and poetry and short fiction have appeared in various anthologies. More recently, he has turned to writing for academic journals. His research interests are postapartheid fiction and language education. He has won the Sydney Clouts Memorial Award and the Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry, the Ad Donker/AA Life Award and Thomas Pringle Awards for short fiction, as well as the M-Net Book Prize and the University of Johannesburg Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for Writing in Africa (2003, 2007), the Herman Charles Bosman Prize (2007, 2013), the PEN/Studzinski Award, and the Commonwealth Prize (Best Book Africa).
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Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of... more
Set in the period following South Africa’s first democratic elections, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor traces the friendship that develops between two doctors working at a rural hospital. While it does not deal overtly with the politics of the “new” South Africa, the novel’s treatment of friendship, which cuts across the distinction between the private and the public, reflects obliquely on the nature of the emerging democratic dispensation. In this paper, I explore the link that Galgut constructs between friendship and community, and argue that his portrayal of the former points to the possibility of a form of community that is premised on a “common strangeness.”
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In a recent article on J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Stephen Watson observes that &dquo;the bulk of South African literature gives much evidence of that atheism of the imagination which is always conspicuous when a writer... more
In a recent article on J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Stephen Watson observes that &dquo;the bulk of South African literature gives much evidence of that atheism of the imagination which is always conspicuous when a writer has set up barriers between human beings and the crucial questions of existence, such as their very awareness of themselves as spiritual beings&dquo;.’ Watson maintains, however, that Coetzee’s novels do not exhibit this form of &dquo;truncated imagination&dquo;:
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Referring to early colonialist literature in general, Abdul JanMohammed makes the point that &dquo;Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own ethnocentric assumptions, instead of... more
Referring to early colonialist literature in general, Abdul JanMohammed makes the point that &dquo;Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own ethnocentric assumptions, instead of actually depicting the outer limits of ’civilization’, it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality&dquo;.2 In this paper, I shall argue that J.M. Coetzee’s novella &dquo;The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee&dquo;, which is presented as a travelogue from &dquo;the great age of exploration when the White man first made contact with the Native peoples of our interior&dquo; (emphasis added, p.115), suggests as much about the ethnocentricity of early South African travel writing. Being a profoundly metarepresentational work, it foregrounds those strategies by which Europeans represent to themselves their others. In arguing this case, I shall trace the novella’s thematization of the mediation of the contact between the European self and the African other by language and the narrative systems of western culture. I shall also demon-
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Research Interests: Art and Literary studies
Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J. M. Coetzee by Maria J. Lopez. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-420-3407-5 (hardcover). xxvii + 344pp. J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett by Patrick... more
Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J. M. Coetzee by Maria J. Lopez. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-420-3407-5 (hardcover). xxvii + 344pp. J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett by Patrick Hayes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-19-958795-7 (hardcover). 275pp. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age by David Palumbo-Liu. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5269-3 (paperback). xiv + 226pp.
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Derek Attridge. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge.Derek Attridge. 2005. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal... more
Derek Attridge. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge.Derek Attridge. 2005. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press.This review essay outlines Derek Attridge's argument for a form of critical attention to the literary text's relationship to alterity. It then traces some of the ways in which Attridge sustains and exemplifies this argument for responsible reading in his exploration of J M Coetzee's writing. While welcoming the substantial contribution which these two studies make to Coetzee criticism and the ongoing debate on the ethics of literature, the essay argues that Attridge fails to signpost adequately his use of, and divergence from, Maurice Blanchot's ideas on literature and alterity, and that this oversight raises and leaves unanswered a number of questions on the literary work's ability to accommodate the other.
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Summary This article explores the epistemological implications of one of the most striking features in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda ([1988]1997): its systematic frustration of the expectations of its readers. Through an examination... more
Summary This article explores the epistemological implications of one of the most striking features in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda ([1988]1997): its systematic frustration of the expectations of its readers. Through an examination of its use of narratorial deception and its skilful deployment of irony, the article argues that the novel prevents readers from occupying a detached position in relation to it and its themes. Particular attention is given to its concern with the provisional nature of human ways of seeing, exemplified by the metaphor of glass that is developed throughout the novel. Oscar and Lucinda compels readers to reflect on the subject position they take up in relation to it, and, in so doing, on their implication in cultural systems of knowledge that seek to contain and eradicate what is deemed unruly. The article suggests, ultimately, that the ethical project in Oscar and Lucinda is performative in nature, and that its success relies on the extent to which it is able to alert readers to the limitations of their ways of knowing, and, consequently, the importance of respecting the otherness of others.
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... the source of the artwork is the experience of the "other dark." In his description of this primal darkness, in which the subject is no longer able intentionally to assume, and so cognitively master, objects... more
... the source of the artwork is the experience of the "other dark." In his description of this primal darkness, in which the subject is no longer able intentionally to assume, and so cognitively master, objects ("Literature" 332), Blanchot is indebted to Levinas's notion of the il ya, that is ...