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Ars Artium: An International Peer Reviewed-cum-Refereed Research Journal
Ars Artium: An International Peer Reviewed-cum-Refereed
Research Journal of English Studies and Culture
ISSN (Online) : 2395-2423 ISSN (Print) : 2319-7889
Vol. 7, January 2019
Pp. 20-34
http://www.arsartium.org
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart
of the Country and Psychoanalytic Feminism
Shadi S. Neimneh*
Marwan M. Obeidat**
Motasim O. Al-Mwajeh***
Abstract
Using the theories of Kristeva, Lacan, and Freud, this article offers a psychoanalytic
feminist explication of the language of the body in J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart
of the Country (1977). A lonely spinster in a remote South African farm, the narrator
constructs a subversive vision of the body to counter patriarchal social and linguistic
constraints. In a colonialist setting duplicating patriarchal oppression, the
undifferentiated "semiotic" is used to help the narrator construct a dissident
counterpart to the "symbolic" master narrative of patriarchy. The transgressive
"semiotic" disrupts the ordered "symbolic" in the hysterical reveries of the narrator,
Magda, who weaves a discourse that writes back to patriarchal discourses on hysteria
and colonialist ones subjecting women. The narrative dramatizes feminist concerns
about identity and (in)equality, and the daring visceral, sexual, even obscene,
language of some entries challenges the authority of master discourses. Lacking
structure or logic, Magda's diaries embody semiotic signification as opposed to the
cultural and social levels of meaning ascribed to patriarchy and even an extreme form
of the semiotic, the "abject" as the excluded realm writing back to phallocentrism. The
novel documents an oscillation between the symbolic and the semiotic dimensions of
language to defy superimposed gender identities and oppressive binaries.
Keywords: Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Body,
Farm Novel, South Africa, Kristeva, Semiotic, Symbolic, Genotext.
*
Associate Professor, Department of English, Hashemite University, Zarqa - 13115,
Jordan. Email: shadistar2@yahoo.com
* * Professor of American Literature and Vice-President at Philadelphia University,
Amman - 19392, Jordan (on sabbatical leave from Hashemite University, Jordan).
Email: obeidat@hu.edu.jo
***Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jadara University, Irbid - 21110,
Jordan. Email: motasimrawashdeh@gmail.com
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
21
1. Woman as the Negation of Man and the Colonized Other
Readers and critics of J. M. Coetzee's second novel In the Heart of the Country
(1977) – hereafter abbreviated as HC – often find an unconventional text taking the
form of a sequential diary or journal entries (specifically 266 numbered narrative
sections) by a single speaker, a lonely spinster "in the middle of the veld in the middle
of nowhere" (119). Essentially, HC, which resonates with echoes of fantasy and
imagination from which to draw sublimity, is an epitome of a postmodern unstable
narrative with a self-conscious nature and explicit inwardness. Such a narrative has
the power to conflate "ethics" of sexism and racism, promoting an ethic of equality
and mutual respect. The psychological disorientation of the narrator enhances the
unreliability of the account as the entries contradict and revise each other. Magda – "a
poetess of interiority" (35) – is imprisoned inside her "locked diary" (13). This
monologist says that she deals in "signs merely" (27). Language constitutes her only
reality and her sole defensive escape from social and cultural clutches and
confinements. However, Magda's identity is trapped in language and (male-controlled)
discourses dictated by her father in the absence of her mother who has died before
the story begins. Hence, Briganti (1994) sees her as "a perfect example of the decentered
subject of post-modern texts" (37). It would be legitimate, however, to explore how
she attempts to counteract the center or simply challenge the margin she inhabits
within her patriarchal culture.
Magda lives on a Boer farm in the South African Karoo, and she is aware that her
existence must be endorsed by others, mainly her father, in order for her to carve a
valued identity. Her stance on her plight is reminiscent of Hegel's Master/Slave
dialectic as a struggle for recognition. Feelings of inferiority compel her to use a
subversive form of language that counters the hierarchal language of her masters,
giving voice to the marginal subaltern Magda. She complains that her words "are not
words such as men use to men" (8). Alone in her room, she creaks: "into rhythms that
are my own, stumble over the rocks of words that I have never heard on another
tongue. I create myself in the words that create me, I, who living among the
downcast have never beheld myself in the equal regard of another's eye, have never
held another in the equal regard of mine. While I am free to be I, nothing is impossible"
(8). This need for different words, for an alternative dissenting discourse, constitutes
the essence of this contraposition with the semiotic set against the symbolic
patriarchal language. The result is a form of écriture feminine that Kristeva calls the
"genotext." HC has as an underlying pattern of bodily drives and fluids, which
corresponds to the "genotext" aspect of the signifying system and the semiotic abject
à la Kristeva. Marginalized and excluded, Magda opts not for the language of her
masters, but for an alternative means of self-expression and dissent, one that undoes
the gender-based divide and eschews the polarization of the sexes.
Magda realizes that the major form of her oppression is a discursive one, which
should justify her lapse into a disruptive language that counters the rigid man-woman
binaries as well as other complex power structures. Magda is not only oppressed by
the language of her father, but also by a related patriarchal literary tradition in which
she is caught up. She, however, recounts a travesty of the farm novel genre (the
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plaasroman of Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith in the South African literary
tradition);i life on the farm is one of boredom and desolation, incest and broken
taboos. Heat, insects, and flies spoil farm life. She ends up not writing a pastoral or an
idyll but an anti-pastoral narrative about "the lonely farmhouse and the stone desert"
(12) and the boredom that makes her imprisoned within her empty monologue. In her
story, the neat farm falls apart; the servants get to challenge the authority of their
masters; fowls desert the farm, and the sheep get lost to jackals. Reflecting on this
decline, Magda says, "The potatoes have gone to seed, the fruit has rotted on the
ground. The dog has departed, following Hendrik. The pumps spin monotonously day
and night, the dams flow over. The farm is going to ruin" (120). Magda's words,
hence, reject the established conventions of the farm novel of Afrikaner mythology.
The anti-pastoral form of the novel seems to foreground its subversive content about
the oppressed female body within patriarchal traditions. Moreover, HC rejects the
linear master narrative and adopts, instead, a diffuse and chaotic nonlinear writing
style, (one employing repetitions, reproductions, contradictions, gaps, etc.) in line
with its subversive structure and conflated nature.
An outraged, frustrated maiden, Magda conforms to the stereotypical hysteric
female who feels ineffective because of her spinsterhood. She negatively views
herself as "a miserable black virgin" (5), "a thin black beetle with dummy wings who
lays no eggs and blinks in the sun" (18), a "brittle, hairy shell with the peas of dead
words rattling in it" (37), and "a black widow in mourning for the uses [she] was
never put to" (40-41). She thinks of herself as "a straw woman, a scarecrow, not too
tightly stuffed, with a scowl painted on [her] face to scare the crows and in [her]
centre a hollow, a space which the field mice could use if they were very clever" (41).
Her dark imaginings, as manifested in such examples, are full of negative
conceptualizations and self-denigration. To put it in Freudian parlance that defines
women in terms of lack and difference from men, i.e. castration and penis envy,ii she
says, "If I am an O, I am sometimes persuaded, it must be because I am a woman"
(41). However, she re-envisions these preconceived notions in order to assert that she
is more than that – "I am an uneasy consciousness but I am more than that too. When
all the lights are out I smile in the dark. My teeth glint, though no one would believe it"
(3-4). She refuses to be invisible and disenfranchised, not to become "one of the
forgotten ones of history" (3). It is, therefore, legitimate to assess the disruptive
potential of her conflated monologues in what follows hereinafter, looking at those
textual aspects that seem to pose a threat to established conventions and structures.
Right in the first entry, and cancelling the possibility of her memory about
watching the arrival of her father with his new wife, Magda asserts her status as a
colonial subject subordinated by patriarchy: "I am the one who stays in her room
reading or writing or fighting migraines. The colonies are full of girls like that, but
none, I think, so extreme as I" (1). Indeed, in presenting herself as a colonized
subject, desolate Magda foregrounds the framework of the dynamics of traditional,
patriarchal, and colonial oppression. Put plainly, she is triply victimized and mistreated
by gender-based polarizations, by her domineering father (and later by his new wife)
and a black servant called Hendrik, and finally by the colonial forces that exacerbate
the situation of already subjugated women and the land on which they subsist. She
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
23
poses questions, and she herself offers ample answers to them: "Who is behind my
oppression? You and you, I say, crouching in the cinders, stabbing my finger at father
and stepmother" (4). Although Magda articulates the social and sexual dynamics of
oppression to which she is subjected, the cultural oppression she faces as a result of
gendered/oppressive language and discourse (together with her counter discourse)
needs further examination.
This wavering position of Magda at the intersection of social and historical
oppression-patriarchy and colonialism-has been studied and ascertained by many
critics. According to Dominic Head (2009), Magda "enacts the psychological
confusions and divisions of the colonial mindset" and thus "occupies an ambivalent
position, as both victim and perpetrator of colonialism" (43). As a white woman within
a colonial structure, her complicity and subordination are manifest. Hence, Sheila
Roberts (1992) calls her "a second-in-command colonizer" (22), being both a
colonizer and a colonized. For David Attwell (1993), Magda is a "displaced subject"
and "not one of the primary agents of colonization but who lives in the conditions
created by such agents, and who endures the subjectivity this position entails" (56).
For Jane Poyner (2009), Magda "inhabits the psychically and textually precarious
position of being both oppressor, as white colonial, and oppressed, as female" (33).
However, how does Magda envisage a way out of such entangled relations between
oppression caused by patriarchy and oppression caused by colonialism (as both forms
have historically tried to silence women and appropriate their language)? It is the
purpose of this article to answer this complex-in-demands question by looking at
ways of breaking the discursive violence of patriarchy and colonialism into two
master narratives.
Magda's linguistic structuring of her existence comprises a discourse revolving
about the body. She, therefore, uses language, i.e. the main tool of her oppression,
against itself, against this very oppression. It is with this transgressive language that
she resists patriarchal domination and cultural conceptions of submissive
womanhood. This harsh patriarchal language justifies what Briganti calls the
"obsessively frequent descriptions of herself as a scrawny, rickety scarecrow of a
woman" (38). The abusive, insulting language Magda uses is more than an attempt to
"construct a narrative of her own desire" (Briganti 38). In being unpredictable and
unconventional, Magda is resisting silence and established forms of injustice or
negative stereotypes. In fact, she twists, rethinks, and exploits the established literary
and psychoanalytic patriarchal discourses and power structures that she relies on,
inviting those patriarchal (Freudian, Lacanian, and Hegelian) discourses only to
subvert them. Counteracting the master-narrative, she is asserting her "yes" to the
patriarchal "eternal no" of her father and her "no" to the sexually demanding "yes" of
the farm-hand Hendrik. The discourse and rhetoric Magda has received as part of her
sexist and colonial education is that of the masters, not the language of the heart,
passion, reciprocity, or communication. Rather, it is a discourse inherited from and
corrupted by colonial legacies fostering discrimination and lack of equality. Hence,
she seeks an alternative means of self-expression, mainly a semiotic-driven discourse
rather than a symbolic one, as will be demonstrated in the following discussion.
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A product of "a cruel culture that considers daughters inferior [to sons], Magda
gets no recognition from her father" (Kumar 2016: 23). The drama of sexual rivalry
and violence in the novel revolves around the insatiable sexual appetite of Magda's
father (bringing in a new wife after the death of Magda's mother and then sleeping
with Hendrik's wife) and the subsequent vengeful sexual humiliation (rape) of Magda
at the hands of Hendrik during the absence or after the death of her father and Magda's
own murderous fantasies of patricide. In reality or in her mind, Magda's body
becomes the new colonizable space for the black native whose land and woman had
been exploited in colonial history. Expressing her feeling of marginalization and
inferiorization, the psychotic Magda complains: "My father pays no attention to my
absence. To my father I have been an absence all my life. Therefore, instead of being
the womanly warmth at the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum
towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft
eddying through the corridors, neglected, vengeful" (2). Manifesting a negative form
of Oedipal complex, she makes her father a major problem in her psychic and social
development and the source of her hysteria. Her father, for instance, never forgave
her mother for not bearing him a son. A patriarchal culture, we know, places much
emphasis on having a son that carries the father's name. Lamenting her lost mother,
Magda accuses her father of murdering her mother: "His relentless sexual demands
led to her death in childbirth. She was too frail and gentle to give birth to the rough
rude boy-heir my father wanted, therefore she died" (2). On the one hand, Magda
characterizes her father as a patriarch and sexual master/monster over women on his
farm. On the other land, she mourns the loss of the maternal impulses in her life,
which made the phallocentric order of patriarchy more dominant.
Her father, the Afrikaner patriarch, and the black servants are essential for our
understanding of this context on the grid of power relations of master-slave
dialectics. Magda is the victim of this struggle for power between the white settlers
and natives and masters and slaves. She is the abused and seduced daughter of the
colonies: "Wooed when we were little by our masterful fathers, we are bitter vestals,
spoiled for life. The childhood rape: someone should study the kernel of truth in this
fancy" (3). Freud (1989) has highlighted the sexual factor in the aetiology hysteria. A
sexual experience in the past, e.g. sexual abuse or seduction during the childhood
years, constitutes, for Freud, the hysterical state, without physical symptoms. He
asserts that "the aetiology of hysteria lies in sexual life" (101). For Freud, hysteria is
but a common neurosis causing trauma and affecting "a pathogenic action later, when
they [the sexual experiences] have been aroused after puberty in the form of
unconscious memories" (106). Evoking Freudian logic about women being distorted
versions of men, Magda claims, "I am incomplete, I am a being with a hole inside me,
I signify something, I do not know what, I am dumb, I stare out through a sheet of
glass into a darkness that is complete, that lives in itself, bats, bushes, predators and
all, that does not regard me, that is blind, that does not signify but merely is" (9). She
refers to herself as a "hysteric" and invites Freudian interpretations of her case: "I
blush for my own thin smell, the smell of an unused woman, sharp with hysteria, like
onions, like urine" (86). Confirming the etymology of hysteria as the wondering womb
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
25
and Freud's studies on hysteria, she asks: "But who would give me a baby, who would
not turn to ice at the spectacle of my bony frame on the wedding couch, the coat of
fur up to my navel, the acrid cavities of my armpits, the line of black moustache, the
eyes, watchful, defensive, of a woman who has never lost possession of herself? ...
Who would wake my slumbering eggs?" (10). Magda hints at a possible link
between her spinsterhood and her ugliness, which makes her physically unattractive
for potential suitors. If she is subtly and consciously constructing her identity as a
"hysteric," it is merely to dismantle this patriarchal logic and give her the freedom to
ramble against patriarchal structures and fixities.
While contemplating murdering her father and his new bride with an axe, Magda
continues to construct herself as a hysteric. She establishes the patriarchal context of
hysteria only to deconstruct it as we will argue in the next section. She refers to her
father's maleness and by extension to male authority as the cause of her hysteria, as
"the tired blind fish, the cause of all my woe, lolling in his groin (would that it had been
dragged out long ago with all its roots and bulbs!)" (11). For Lacan (1999), the phallus
as the supreme signifier-of desire, authority, rationality, presence, and power-is not
the male organ. However, it is related as men can "pretend" to possess it by virtue of
their anatomy. In "The Signification of the Phallus," Lacan argues, "It should not be
forgotten that, of course, that the organ that is endowed with this signifying function
takes on the value of a fetish thereby" (583). The phallus still carries the connotations
of the male member together with meanings of power and authority. It is
simultaneously the penis and the recognition of lack or absence of it. Since the
symbolic realm for Lacan is phallic, one based on recognition of lack and desire for
fulfillment, Magda is not subject to this symbolic order. Magda's narrative carves out
a copious horizontal space of subversion and counterdiscursivity for resistance and
challenges patriarchal discourses on sexual difference, Lacanian and Freudian in this
case. The female body becomes an arena for all kinds of sexual violations, a typical
medium for oppression as well as Magda's vision of emancipation from real and
imagined restrictions and demarcations.
As she is absorbed in her diaries, Magda, it can be argued, issues empty
complaints or threats that do not move beyond words. However, it is the
transgressive and eruptive potential within her words that we seek to investigate here.
For example, Magda ponders,
Though I may look like a machine with opposed thumbs that does housework,
I am in truth a sphere quivering with violent energies, ready to burst upon
whatever fractures me. And while there is one impulse in me that tells me to roll
out and erupt harmlessly in the great outdoors, I fear that there is another
impulse-telling me to hide in a corner like a black widow spider and engulf
whoever passes in my venom. 'Take that for the youth I never had!' I hiss, and
spit, if spiders can spit (39).
The next segment explores those "violent energies" and hidden impulses in her diaries
and shows her attempts to contest and transcend any reductive paradigms, dominant
narratives, hegemonic apparatuses, and traditional superstructures (which accede to
traditional gender roles of women rarely involving women in decision-making
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processes) vis-à-vis this symbolic realm of meaning and structure via the semiotic
and abject as theorized by the French feminist critic Julia Kristeva.
2. Subversive Language: The Semiotic, the Abject, and
the Symbolic
At one point early in the novel, Magda evokes the indecent content of her diaries that
we will relate to the semiotic aspect of language. She asks,
Is there something in me that loves the gloomy, the hideous, the doom-ridden,
that sniffs out its nest and snuggles down in a dark corner among rats'
droppings and chicken-bones rather than resign itself to decency? And if there
is, where does it come from? From the monotony of my surroundings? From
all these years in the heart of nature, seven leagues from the nearest neighbour,
playing with sticks and stones and insects? (23).
She questions and yet suggests the subversive nature of her entries which
function as counter-discursive postures thwarting dualistic thinking, transcending the
foundations of patriarchy, and denying the overriding stereotypes about the docility
and submissiveness of women. In a French feminist spirit, Magda becomes her body
and the language she uses to describe this "hideous" body, nothing more. Roberts
(1992) asserts that Magda's descriptions of her ugliness are "unimaginably comic"
and that she offers a "sustained verbal comedy and thought-provoking
philosophizing" (30). However, Magda's ruminations are not necessarily "comic." The
logic of her writing finds parallels in the unconscious of pre-Oedipal drives and
instincts. It is in line with the id and nature as opposed to the superego and culture.
Kristeva reacts to the phallocentric logic of psychoanalysis and the exclusion of women
from representation and participation. She argues that the semiotic and the symbolic
are two components or modalities of the signifying system in a dialectical process,
two dispositions manifesting relevant dichotomies like unconscious-conscious,
nature-culture, and id-superego. We can view the interaction between the semiotic
and the socio-linguistic symbolic to be analogous to Lacan's conception of the
distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. Magda dwells on the semiotic
aspect of language in her diaries and even on the extreme form of this language, the
abject, by way of uncovering a feminine identity and voice negating or counteracting
patriarchal logic that draws more on the symbolic level of signification.
In her book Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) – an academic treatise
originally published in French in 1974 – Kisteva draws a crucial distinction between
the oscillating semiotic and symbolic aspects of language: "These two modalities are
inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the dialectic
between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory,
poetry, etc.) involved" (24). The semiotic is ordered by the maternal body around
which drives are structured (27-28). It is the pre-Oedipal bodily processes and drives
that are located in what she calls "the chora," the realm of plenitude and oneness with
the mother's body. So, this semiotic space can be enigmatic, contradictory,
mysterious, unstable, and plural. It better suits the feminine realm because it is not
repressed. Kristeva disrupts power relations and refutes the trajectory of inequities,
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
27
structural rigidities, gender, caste, and race constituencies. The semiotic, as a
pre-Oedipal provisional and chaotic flow of bodily force and drive energy, makes
identity precarious and contingent. The symbolic, by contrast, corresponds to
grammar and syntax, i.e. meaning or language structure. Kristeva stresses that
"Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he
[or she] produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclusively' symbolic, and is
instead necessarily marked by indebtedness to both" (24). The semiotic disrupts the
symbolic, functioning through the gaps, repetitions, digressions, and absurdities in
Magda's narrative. It becomes more appropriate for positions of marginality and
oppression in juxtaposition to dominant language, discourse, and ideology. It
dominates Magda's subject position at the expense of the (patriarchal) symbolic.
The same intersection Kristeva articulates between the semiotic and the symbolic
in her book also applies to "genotexts" and "phenotexts." Texts having the underlying
structure of drives are "genotexts." Those issuing from social, linguistic, and cultural
rules and are meant for communication and obey rules are "phenotexts" (86-87). The
signifying process, Kristeva concludes, "includes both the genotext and the phenotext"
(87-88). Kristeva states,
What we shall call a genotext will include semiotic processes but also the
advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition, and their
division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the
body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter
encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of
nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields (86).
In this regard, Magda's narrative is also a "genotext" functioning on the borderline of
the symbolic. It is an instance of the semiotic, feminine "genotext" negotiating the
symbolic, masculine "phenotext" of social rules and linguistic codes.
The psychoanalytic feminism of Kristeva can be seen as a revision and
elaboration of Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, his major work being Écrits (1966),
the three registers of psychic subjectivity include the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and
the Real.iii It is the Symbolic that refers to laws, rules, social practices, structures, and
meaningful traditions of cultures and societies, all intertwined with language and
socialization. At this level of the Symbolic, paternal authority acts as a disciplinary
force through associations of symbolic castration and desire to possess the Phallus as
the supreme signifier of desire which both men and women lack and aspire to identify
with. Lacan makes the symbolic order of language essential for human subjectivity as
reality makes sense and has meaning through words (language) on the page.
However, Lacan's theory is phallocentric because the phallus is associated with
masculinity, with pretending to have the phallus. The paternal metaphor is essential
for his theory of subjectivity and sexual difference. The law of the father is his way of
expressing the relationship between law and language through a paternal prohibition
of incest and taboos. Lacan's and Krsiteva's relevance to this argument is evident. For
instance, Magda retains that "Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire.
Desire is rupture, not exchange" (26) and that she gets to know about life from the
dictionary. However, she objects to the old, "correct" language of her father,
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renouncing subsumption or co-optation to the center of power. Magda, in the Lacanian
tradition, defines desire in terms of lack. The signifier of the other's desire for Lacan
is the Phallus, which she does not possess – being a woman and a spinster – and
cannot even "seem to" have as men would. In Lacanian logic, a man is castrated by
not being the wholeness the phallus grants. By contrast, a woman is castrated by not
being male. Like Freud, Lacan seems to subordinate female sexuality by privileging
the male in relation to the phallus.
When Magda looks in the mirror, in a subversion of Lacan's mirror stage that
marks the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, she does not see wholeness
or feel satisfied. Looking at a mirror in her room, she says, "It gives me no pleasure to
pore over reflections of my body" (21). For Lacan (1999), the subject is caught up "in
the lure of spatial identification" in this stage ("Mirror Stage," 78), transforming
fantasies about a fragmented body into an "'orthopedic' form of its totality" ("Mirror
Stage," 78). Instead, Magda smiles at her image facing her and even talks to it (21).
She is not deceived by her image à la Lacan. Rather, she sees an ugly face:
It is at times like these that I notice . . . how thickly the hair grows between my
eyes, and wonder whether my glower, my rodent glower, to mince no words,
I have no cause to love this face, might not be cosmetically tempered if I
plucked out some of that hair with tweezers, or even all of it in a bunch, like
carrots, with a pair of pliers, thereby pushing my eyes apart and creating an
illusion of grace and even temper (21-22).
Rather than wholeness and satisfaction, her reflected image offers a sense of
fragmentation and inadequacy. If she is trapped in Kristeva's semiotic, she is equally
stuck in Lacan's pre/counter-symbolic imaginary. In both cases, we are dealing with
a stunted psychosexual development, and thus an inadequate socialization vis-à-vis
language. Magda makes us question the rational, ordering the potential of language
and the coherent subjectivity of the speaker/writer.
In addition to challenging the novel's form/genre, as noted earlier, Magda's text
dwells on the bodily in language, on the semiotic that underlies representation and
disrupts unitary meaning, to give her a language of her own, not the symbolic
language of patriarchy. She laments not being able to access "the doubleness of
signification" (4), i.e. meaning and representation attached to signs or the relationship
between signifiers and signifieds, and she reaffirms the lost or repressed maternal
connection to the symbolic order, i.e. culture and civilization. She mourns the split
from the maternal body that may have caused her bleak existence. "Do I truly believe
that stuffed in a crack between my soft mother and my baby self lies the key to this
black bored spinster?" (5). The fluid, imaginative language she uses counters the
regulations and prohibitions of the symbolic. Her language is one of rhythm and
images, not structure and syntax. Confirming this, Magda says, "I live neither alone
nor in society but as it were among children. I am spoken to not in words, which
come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in
postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences
whose grammar has never been recorded" (7). This pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal nuanced
language she alludes to is the semiotic language of the body negotiating the margins of
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29
the symbolic. It is the pre-linguistic, raw femininity unrefined by hegemonic culture
and its oppressive language. In this light, the borderline existence of Magda (living not
alone and not in society but among children) acquires additional meaning.
Compelled to use writing, i.e. the Law of the Father as the paternal metaphor of
signification, against her silence and marginalization, Magda uses a subversive form
of this writing to vent her frustration and anguish. And since this form of feminine
writing gives primacy to the body by way of defying phallocentric logic, it negotiates
the symbolic through the semiotic. Magda forges her identity in a semiotic discourse
that defies patriarchal and colonial discourses of domination. She complains: "The
language that should pass between myself and these people was subverted by my
father and cannot be recovered. What passes between us now is a parody. I was born
into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective. It was my father-tongue. I
do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its
distances, but it is all we have" (97). The hierarchical language of patriarchy revolves
around splits and divisions between subject and object, child and mother, man and
woman, nature and culture, and master and slave. Unlike Magda's suppressed voice,
the language of her masters is the language of the rigid mind as opposed to the
impulsive heart. This language that her father passed on to her and which she
acquired through the colonial South African farm context has already distorted any
possible communication or reciprocity between her and the servants. According to
Lacan, the symbolic order of language consists of relations of exclusion and sexual
difference, which allows for socialization through the regulation of desire. Magda's
references to "hierarchy", "perspective", and "distance" in patriarchal language can be
understood in this light.
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982; originally published in French
in 1980), Kristeva describes the semiotic in terms of the abject and revolting. She
defines the abject as the excluded, what is outside the realm of meaning. She views
the abject as a reaction to repression and a reminder of a former unity between the ego
and the world: "The abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that has always
already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes
the ego back on its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the
ego has broken away-it assigns it a source on the non-ego, drive, and death" (15). It
is essential that we understand the revolting abject in terms of the repressed maternal
principle as opposed to the paternal symbolic. Patriarchal societies attempt to repress
the maternal impulse as a threat to the formation of subjectivity. Simply put, the abject
is what is banished in the course of identity-formation, including the mother's body
and bodily fluids. It reveals the weakness or inherent fragility of identity and all forms
of subject-object dyads.
While for Lacan the symbolic Law of the Father censors and represses what
might disrupt the rational order of language, the semiotic abject for Kristeva threatens
the established social order. The symbolic law represses drives and what threatens the
ego. The semiotic, by contrast, asserts those drives and rhythms and brings the body
back to signification against exclusion. The result is a subject in the making rather
than a fixed, coherent identity. Kristeva contends that the abject abides by no rules:
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"The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or
a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them,
the better to deny them" (15). The abject is what threatens the subject, what disturbs
identity and rules. It is what the subject needs to discard in order to have an
independent identity. Abjection, being an instance of the semiotic impulse in language,
is what threatens the subject, what puts it in danger and breaks rules and laws. Hence,
abjection for Kristeva is "a precondition of narcissism" (13), for a self-sufficiency
against the authority of the masters. "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit,"
ponders Kristeva, "are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of
death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates
itself, as being alive, from that border" (3). Such abject wastes assume the space
where the body is not, occupying the border area between the body and the world.
Vomit, waste, semen, dung, blood, and urine are the other side of life that must be
abjected so that the "I" is born and thrives. Kristeva argues, "And yet, from its place of
banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master" (2). Being "radically
excluded", the abject, Kristeva theorizes, draws us "toward the place where meaning
collapses" (2), which is why it is dangerous for the self and others. Significantly,
Magda describes herself early in the narrative in terms of this abject as "a vacuum
towards which all collapses inward" (2). If her diaries deconstruct patriarchal
language, it is by way of creating new meanings and correspondences beyond
confines.
In Coetzee's text HC, Magda abjects herself; she goes through a painful delivery
through language so that she upsets the forces of her oppression. The language of
abjection challenges patriarchal system/order and signals a difficult birth from that
order and a desire for wholeness. Echoing Lacan's conception of the phallus, Kristeva
asserts that "all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being,
meaning, language, or desire is founded" (5). One pivotal scene in the novel in which
Magda vents the abject is when she says,
In the cloister of my room I am the mad hag I am destined to be. My clothes
cake with dribble, I hunch and twist, my feet blossom with horny callouses,
this prim voice, spinning out sentences without occasion, gaping with boredom
because nothing ever happens on the farm; cracks and oozes the peevish loony
sentiments that belong to the dead of night when the censor snores, to the crazy
hornpipe I dance with myself (8).
In this language, Magda vents the semiotic content of her diaries through
references to repulsive dribble and callouses existing at the borders to the body. She
dwells on the obscene, the ugly, and the grotesque by way of expressing her
frustration at male domination and at her being neglected. This uncensored language,
which seems to be provoked as a result of hysteria, is an insult to the reticence of the
hegemonic "yes" or "no" and the patriarchal language of commands.
In another expression of the semiotic abject, Magda utilizes the image of
intertwined feces in defiance of her marginalization by her father, thus achieving a
perverted form of intimacy with her oppressor. A lengthy quote can illustrate this
blurring of boundaries Magda captures in her semiotic discourse:
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
31
Every sixth day, when our cycles coincide, his cycle of two days, my cycle of
three, we are driven to the intimacy of relieving our bowels in the bucket-latrine
behind the fig trees in the malodour of the other's fresh faces, either he in my
stench or I in his. Sliding aside the wooden lid I straddle his hellish gust, bloody,
feral, the kind that flies love best, flecked, I am sure, with undigested flesh
barely mulled over before pushed through. Whereas my own (and here I think
of him with his trousers about his knees, screwing his nose as high as he can
while the blowflies buzz furiously in the black space below him) is dark, olive
with bile, hard-packed, kept in too long, old tired….Where exactly the bucket is
emptied I do not know; but somewhere on the farm there is a pit where, looped
in each other's coils, the father's red snake and the daughter's black embrace
and sleep and dissolve (32).
Fecal matter is an obvious example of the abject in Magda's language that
threatens the ordered language of patriarchy, the symbolic realm of signification.
Bodily wastes exist at the border of civilization and culture. They are banished for the
sake of order, cleanliness, and sanity. Such descriptions allow her to overcome
Oedipal and castration complexes and reach a state of Lacanian jouissance, of
freedom from the hegemonic symbolic order of the phallus. In this uncensored
language, Magda attains Kristeva's semiotic chora, that pre-Oedipal disintegration of
boundaries and dissolution of prohibitions and signifying systems.
After an accident her father has, she and Hendrik try to handle the body. In this
scene, we have more fecal imagery suggesting the abject at work. Magda says,
We pick up the body and carry it to the bathroom, Hendrik taking the shoulders,
I the legs. We strip off the nightshirt and unwind the bandages. We seat the
body in the bath and pour bucket after bucket of water over it. The water
discolours and strings of excrement begin to float to the surface. The arms
hang over the sides of the bath, the mouth gapes, the eyes stare. After half an
hour's soaking we clean the clotted hindparts. We bind the jaw and sew the
eyes to (82).
In this case, the abject indicates the weakness of her father and lack of distance
among the father/master, the oppressed daughter, and the slave worker. The abject
also signifies lack of rigid identity borders. Identity is fluid, leaky rather than
dichotomous. Caught up in a masculine world of representation, Magda uses a
distorted form of this representational medium, one favoring inclusion rather than the
exclusion of patriarchal discourses.
Magda kills, or she thinks she kills, her father and his new bride with an axe in a
grotesquely bloody scene. Like vomit, semen, and faeces, blood is another instance of
abjection and the borders of the ego. Her father lies head and arms over the edge of
the bed "black with his heavy blood" (14). "How fortunate at times like these," Magda
contemplates, "that there is only one problem, a problem of cleanliness. Until this
bloody afterbirth is gone there can be no new life for me. The bedclothes are soaked
and will have to be burned, though not today. There is a quag of blood on the floor and
there will be more blood when I shift the bodies. What of the bodies? They can be
burned or buried or submerged" (15). She even has thoughts about cutting the bodies.
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In the same entry, she says "Am I strong enough to move them unaided in a
wheelbarrow, or must I hack away until I have portable sections? Am I equal to
carrying even a single monolithic trunk? Is there a way of portioning a trunk without
obscenity? I should have paid more attention to the art of butchery" (15). This
language breaks taboos because it entails patricide and then an obscene way of getting
rid of the corpse. If it is simply a fantasy, then it is a violent one at the psychic level,
breaking psychological barriers against male oppression.
One last significant instance of abjection Kristeva highlights and we find in Magda's
diaries is "semen" as a bodily fluid challenging the borders of the ego and forcing a
rethinking of the relationship between what is and is not us. Magda gets raped (or she
has fantasies about being raped) by the black servant Hendrik. This rape seems to
happen many times (in reality or simply in her mind). Those diary entries in which she
describes this rape have multiple references to the semiotic abject: blood, bodily odours,
spit, and semen. At one point, Magda refers to Hendrik's angry, violent semen seeping
out of her body. After he finishes and goes away, Magda says, "Now I know for sure
he was inside me, now that he is out and all the ache and clamminess sets in. I press
my fingers into my groin while beside me he fastens his trousers. It is beginning to
seep out of me, this acrid flow that must be his seed, down my thighs, on my clothes,
on to the floor" (106). Such language allows Magda to better discover her identity
even if she is a victim of rape in many entries. Those bodily fluids existing on the
threshold of a radical identity revolution cause revulsion and thus reclaim the ego back
on itself. Like blood, vomit, mucus, and other bodily fluids, semen indicates the troubled
relation between the self and other, the clean and unclean, and what is "me" as
opposed to what is "not me." This merging of bodily fluids between Magda and Hendrik
signals a threat to the established social order of patriarchy and colonialism as well as
the taboos of miscegenation. To clarify, she, a white girl, shares a lot in common with
a black man due to forces of imperialism, reduction, and subsumption – they have
common denominators, concerns, and adversaries transcending any racial or
gender-based boundaries.
3. Conclusion
William Collins (2014) comments on the nature of this elusive text saying, "At the end
of Heart, readers may have powerfully real impressions of certain events having
transpired, yet no reading of the novel can determine which events are or were 'real'
without giving priority to one of two or more conflicting episodes" (48). Coetzee
wrote an experimental postmodern text that writes back in form and content to
established orders and hierarchies. Weaving the canvas of his conventions and stance
on injustice, Coetzee dramatizes Magda's attempts to be brought back to language by
discharging bodily drives in her language. Magda uses the semiotic aspect of language
to discharge the body and its drives in the symbolic language of patriarchy from
which she has been excluded and which was used to silence her. Functioning at the
intersection of psychoanalysis and feminism, HC is a rich text signifying the eruption
of the abject semiotic into the ordered symbolic of language and representation. It
signals the structure of identity as fluid or leaky. The borderlines of identity are as
Subversive Bodies: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country.....
33
significant as the center. The margin not only challenges the center, but it is also
essential for self-constitution and self-understanding. If patriarchal and colonial
discourse has been a key tool in oppressing her, Magda finds an alternative in this very
language, the most effective tool to contest the dynamics of hegemony and
oppression. She allows the semiotic aspect of this language to negotiate/redefine the
symbolic. The result is a "genotext" that inscribes the banished female body and
experience with language and challenges masculine modes of representation.
Coetzee has successfully contributed a unique text to the project of discursive
historical revisionism by allowing a female character to object to and dismantle
systems of oppression-colonial and patriarchal-through a subversive language that
takes the body and its drives as a starting point. This real and fictionalized context of
relations situates female objectification and silence within the larger history of the
world. Coetzee's text incites us to rethink and modify prevailing gender-based
classifications, established belief systems, and concepts (often patriarchal in
orientation) that are obfuscated to further subdue oppressed women. Since
phallocenctric logic pervades language and culture, HC presents us with a diffuse
subversion of male biases and secure notions of selfhood. Critics have often
highlighted the postcolonial and historical/political dimensions of Coetzee's oeuvre
with relation to South Africa. However, his oeuvre-as evidenced by this novel-invites
gender-oriented interpretations, feminist commentaries, and poststructuralist
readings. Coetzee has given us insights into the necessary implication of language in
contested power relations and has provided us with a possible vision of language
transcending/transgressing gender norms.
Notes
(i) See J. M. Coetzee's article (1986) on "Farm Novel and 'Plaasroman' in South
Africa." In this article, Coetzee argues that the African farm in Schreiner's works
functions as a "microcosm of colonial South Africa: a tiny society in the middle
of the vastness of nature, living a closed-minded and self-satisfied existence"
(p. 2).
(ii) In his famous article on "Female Sexuality" (2000), Freud argues the sexual
development of children, stating that a male child finds an evidence of
castration in "the sight of female genitals" (p. 24), which ultimately resolves
Oedipus complex positively with the internalization of paternal authority and the
formation of the super-ego. Freud equally talks about "a certain amount of
disparagement" in the attitudes of men towards women "whom they regard as
being castrated" (p. 24). On the other hand, Freud speaks of the little girl's
discovery of "her organic inferiority" (p. 25) for lacking a penis. This tradition of
thinking renders women as inadequate, unsatisfactory versions of men.
(iii) For a cogent and simplified account of Lacan's theories, see Sean Homer's (2005)
guide entitled Jacques Lacan published as part of Routledge Critical Thinkers
series.
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