Reading French Feminism in Post Apartheid South Africa

“She says: The only interesting thing is to try and speak the language of another that you don’t understand”- J.F. Lyotard Postmodern Fables, 61.  Can we relate this to how Coetzee portrays his female characters (namely Lucy and Magda) and how their identities (and understanding of gender/feminism) contributes to the larger patriarchal problems of  the socio-political world of Post Apartheid South Africa? Read “Provoking Patriarchy: The Connection Between Gender/Feminism and Life in Coetzee’s South Africa”, my final linked above, to find out. Step 1: Click “Provoking Patriarchy” for the table of contents.  Step 2: Click “Introduction” and rest of the tabs for the rest of the paper. Enjoy!

The Passions of Disgrace

As the abundance of the scholarship illustrates “Disgrace is a complex exploration of the collision between private public words; intellect and body; desire and love; and public disgrace or shame and the idea of individual grace or salvation…the refashioning of identities caught between status and change” (Kossew 155).  At the heart of the novel is David Lurie, our tragic yet brilliant protagonist; a man that it seems envisions himself into the work he longs to do.  A self described ‘slave to his eros’ Lurie appears (at least in the first half of the novel) to be stuck in the role he constantly performs, lecturing  on Byron and Romanticism; of a literary Lucifer that he very much seems to encapsulate in his affair with his student Melanie.  Lurie lectures  “So what kind of creature is this Lucifer…He does what he feels like.  He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad.  He just does it.  Exactly.  Good or bad, he just does it.  He doesn’t act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him” (33).  This vision of Lucifer, personified in the character of David Lurie (and later I feel Lucy’s rapists), is portrayed throughout the novel.  Lurie is a slave to his passions, specifically in regards to his relationships with the women in his life.  He is unable to come to terms, and I believe care, if things are “Good or bad.  He just does it” particularly in regards to the sex and seduction of Melanie Issacs.  It is not until Lucy’s rape by three black men on her farm in Eastern South Africa (and his brutal treatment, they pour gasoline over his eye and ear and lock him in the bathroom) that David Lurie begins to see things—life differently.

Whether or not Lurie changes, whether he values/devalues one rape while justifying the other, what the purpose of the rapes are a great contention of scholarships of the novel.  Lurie, from the onset, maintains that Melanie’s rape was not rape, that it was “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired t the core” (25).  Melanie, Coetzee describes, appears to be accepting yet uninterested.  It is not something she wants, yet not something she fights off.  The texts suggests that their affair can be justified– as if suggesting that the first rape is a mere matter of Melanie’s complacency; that is until Lucy’s rape.  The point of contention then appears to be what and IF Lurie learns and grows through Lucy’s rape.  Marais shows that since he is not there for Lucy’s rape, because he is literally locked in a bathroom, he is left to imagine the place and the brutal treatment of the other, the women, in this case his daughter.  His imagination, Marais concludes leads him to a sense of sympathy and remorse for his own actions.  Because he wasn’t there for Lucy, he sympathizes with what it must have been like for Melanie.  Marais explains: “…he is discovering the effect of his rape on Melanie on her family because now he finds himself in their position.  Hence, after Lucy’s rape, Lurie begins to find it possible to sympathize with Melanie’s father (164-174).  Because he finds himself in a similar position to Mr. Issac’s, he can now understand what the latter is going through, and that is why he asks his forgiveness.  The irony is patent: David Lurie comes to sympathize with the parents of a girl whom he he used in much the same way as the gang rapists used his own daughter” (77-78).  Critic Carine Mardorossian describes the rapes very different, addressing that Lurie’s anger at his daughter’s rape pale in comparison to his understanding of his own actions.  Mardorossian than suggests that “The contrast in his response to each instance of sexual violence shows that it is his investment in racist ideology that allows him to do what his investment in sexist norms prevented him from doing earlier, namely, call rape “rape.” He can only see rape as what black men do to white women..” (79-80). Thus she concludes that the rapes, Lurie’s inabilities to see the ramifications of his actions, are part of a larger commentary on the racism, sexism, and brutality Post-Apartheid South Africa.

The question then is IF we believe Lurie has changed.  Has he, by the end of the novel, apologized for treatment of Melanie and resolved that he is now older and can no longer be a slave to his passions?  Or rather are his acts of sympathy a result of his compassion for her father, Mr. Issacs, for whom he now finds himself in the same place?  Are the passions of Disgrace resolved in the end, laid to sleep like the favored dog that Lurie puts down, or is Lurie still the same as he once was, illustrating the larger ramifications of a world met with rape, brutality and violence.

Works Cited:

Coetzee, J.M.  Disgrace.

Kossew, Sue.  “The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J.M. Coetzee’sDisgrace” Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 155-162.  Web.  JSTOR.

Marais, Mike.  “’J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’ and the Task of the Imagination” Journal of Modern Literature 29.2 (Winter 2006):  75-93.  Web. JSTOR.  5 November 2011.

Mardorossian, Carine M.  “Rape and Violence of Representation in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” Research in African Literatures 42.4.  Project Muse.  2 November 2011.

The Problem of Good and Evil: The Lives of Animals

In The Lives of Animals Coetzee, through his fictional character Elizabeth Costello, poses an idea he references throughout a majority of novels, the problem and question of good and evil, of human nature and right vs wrong.  In ways that complicate the feeling so human nature Coetzee brings to light our own understands of right versus wrong.  Through the topic of animal treatment (at the hands of humanity) Costello’s speeches illustrate the problems of humanity and our inabilities to “humanize” our victims.

The text of the novel is dedicated to two lectures Elizabeth Costello makes at Appleton College on the themes of animal rights and treatment. Throughout her lectures Costello references how humans mistreat the ‘lives’ of animals, effectively suggesting that human beings should treat animals as creatures with souls and beings, just as they (humans) would treat other beings.  What Costello/Coetzee is suggesting beyond the theme of animal/human treatment is the problem of good and evil and the very core of human nature.  Coetzee/Costello suggests that we should not eat animals because they are beings, like us.  This claim is appealing a sense of pathos– feeling– within each of us.  Costello is claiming that humans know, and act, with a moral sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and what is evil.  She asserts that the question should not be: “Do we have something in common– reason, self-consciousness, a soul–with other animals…{instead we should see} The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else” (34).  Thus in the controversial analogy to the Holocaust, an earlier claim made by Coetzee/Costello that humans killing animals was similar to the Nazi’s treatment of Jews (see pages 20-21), Costello is suggesting that the horrors of evil are the inabilities of the perpetrators to see themselves in the place of their victims.  Thus the perpetrators are creating a place for their victims that is sub-human, essentially dehumanizing the victim in order to create evil.  As Costello states in her speech “The Philosophers and Animals”: “Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for comparison I am about to make.  The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people animals” (20).  Thus Costello envisions that the world of Nazi Germany (and the treatment of Europe’s Jews) is similar to our present day treatment of animals.  Like the fictional Professor Stern however, who writes that he did not attend Elizabeth’s lecture (theoretically) because of her analogy, I find the analogy hard to believe.  I understand the analogy, that being said, comparing the genocide of the Jewish people to inhumane animal treatment seems to be almost too much; as Stern concludes (49)”The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say.  That is a trick with words which I will not accept…If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews” (49-50).  As Marjorie Garber concludes “The Holocaust is one profound challenge to the use of analogy” (82), emphasizing once again, the complex push of Coetzee’s language, perhaps questioning how far language, example, human nature can be pushed. As Primo Levi once concluded he was a human “who happened to be a Jew, but that he was human (he participated “for himself” in the universal function of humanity)…” (qtd in “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”) as Stern concludes in The Lives of Animals to say that humans (Jews) were treated like cattle, does not follow that cattle were treated like Jews, similarly to say one’s identity is linked to their ethnicity/heritage is not to say an animals identities are profoundly linked to their sense of being (for as many people question Elizabeth Costello in her audience, do animals have the same complex senses of being and identities that humans have?)

None of this response is meant to make light of the theme of The Lives of Animals, that is, the inhumane treatment of animals at the hands of humanity.  However, maybe there is a deeper “problem” here beyond discussing animal cruelty, the inhumane treatment of humanity at large, a theme evident in other works by Coetzee (consider the torturing in Waiting For the Barbarians, Magda’s violence in In the Heart of The Country, Michael’s violence in Michael K. just to name a few) both to fellow humans and animals.  As Barbara Smuts references “For the heart to truly share another’s being, it must be an embodied  hear, prepared to encounter directly the embodied heart of another” (103).  As Smuts references the idea of empathy is evident throughout the lectures by Elizabeth Costello, alongside it the want for love and humanity.  However, I believe the problem of good and evil, however cynical it may be, is that love and empathy are rarely here.  And maybe this is Costello/Coetzee’s point, the problem with our treatment of animals is a larger problem with society at a large– the fact that we don’t see our treatment of OTHERS as a problem at all.

 

Works Cited:

Zizek, Slavoj. “Tolerance as an Ideological Category” Critical Inquiry 2007.  http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html.

A Question of Silence: The Life and Times of Michael K

In a previous course I viewed a film called ‘A Question of Silence’. To sum up the gist of the film three women, all appearing to be middle class average women, kill a shop owner.  Following his murder the ‘question of silence’ (as the title suggests) arises as all three women, through their trial and questioning by a female psychologist refuse to speak about why/how they committed such a crime.  Aside from lending to the theme of feminism the film to me seems to suggest that sometimes there are no words for brutality.  Simultaneously, it seems to suggests that sometimes there are no words that we can use to speak out against oppression, and that the only solution, and perhaps the most powerful tool one can use is silence.

All of this seems to me to to connect to the theme of Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.  Michael/Michaels/K, like the women in ‘A Question of Silence’ , are placed in a brutal world.  Like the women in the film a great emphasis throughout the film is placed on Michael choosing silence.  The emphasis on his mouth, his hare lip, and his disability (ironically referenced later as the “mouth that would wholly never shut” (119)) is stressed from the beginning of the novel.  Throughout the book people beseech Michael to speak and to take action.  The book starts with the initial trip with his Mother to return her to her hometown; later in his first camp he attempts to find a place between friendship and otherness (as people fear/shun him because of his mouth), after he escapes he finds himself once again alone on a farm, hiding and silent, and in the last half of the book he finds himself in an infirmary in a work camp.

Through all of his locations the question of silence is pivotal, most importantly in his interaction with the doctor in the last work camp.   The doctor writes: “We ought to value you and celebrate you..the truth is that you are to perish in obscurity and be buriedin a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse…and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels, yield!” (152). However, Michael has no desire to be remembered.  Michael, unlike the women in ‘A Question of Silence’, is happy, or at the very least, complacent, with the ability to simply survive.  Additionally, Michael has no desire to be put down in the records, to be ‘celebrated’ or have a shrine in a museum built to him.  Michael simply wants to survive.  I personally believe he would’ve been happy enough to be left alone in a farm in the mountains somewhere, simply left alone to survive.  Unlike the Magistrate of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and many other fictional and real men Michael does not want to be remembered and referenced as a figure in history.  He simply wants to live alone, perhaps outside of what is considered a normal human existence.  He doesn’t seem to be one concerned with government, existence, politics or war, stating “I am not in the war” (138) when they are questioning him about his activities or where he has been before his arrival in the second camp.

In all a question of silence for Michael K. seems to represent where he is most content.  He feels silence best exemplifies his persona: “I am more like an earthworm, he thought.  Which is also a kind of gardener.  Or a mole, also a gardner, that does not tell stories because it lives in silence.  But a mole or an earthworm on a cement floor” (182).  I feel like that this best exemplifies his understanding of himself, the world, and life.  He feels he is part of the Earth, perhaps out of place ‘on a cement floor’ but this is the best place for him.  He does not “tell stories” because he sees things as they are, and perhaps the world he lives in, a world of civil and political unrest, is unable to deal with things as he sees them.  Therefore because of oppression, because of the ways in which he contrasts with the brutal world he lives in, he (like the women in ‘A Question of Silence’) choses silence to best portray who he is.  Michael K.  is a silent earthworm or mole on a cement floor.  He is something natural, earthly, in an unnatural world.

 

Work cited: (film):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086369/

 

 

The Role of the Cockroach: Language/Symbolism in ‘Waiting For the Barbarians’

In trying to find just one thing to discuss in Waiting For the Barbarians I found it quite difficult.  Coetzee once again offers a world full of imagery, language and description; a world where the concept of ‘civilized’ and uncivilized seem to be often interchangeable.  Though the text itself is, without a doubt, full of rich quotes that illustrate the Magistrate’s fall from grace, what I’d like to do is offer one passage that I feel elucidates the theme of the text.  Through the use of imagery and language, I feel that the following passage provides an illustration of the general context of Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians.  I will provide the passage and then address why I feel it addresses the themes of the text:

“At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore.  I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry of their feet across the paved floor.  They are lured by the smell of the bucket in the corner, the morsels of food on the floor; no doubt too by this mountain of flesh giving off its mulifarious odours of life and decay.  …  Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes.  From such beginnings grow obsessions. I am warned” (Coetzee 79).

I picked this passage for a reason, the language itself provides insight to the novel as a whole.  Though Coetzee is quite literally discussing a cockroach and it’s journey across the floor where he is held, the undertones of the passage provide much more.  It seems that he discusses the cockroach as the people of authority in the Empire judge the barbarians; they too appear as pesky, bugs that come out in darkness. To me at least it seems that there is little of the concept of light in the novel.  Everything appears dark, dreary, perhaps even a bit apocalyptic with little if any hints that the “Empire” is doing anything correctly; rather it seems that they are all following BLIND orders from a higher authority or Colonel Joll.

Next the undertones in the language of the text seem to suggest that he himself is analogous to what the cockroach represents.  He  describes the cockroach and the “horny clicking of their wings”.  I find the word choice to be interesting; and feel that this reflects his own sexual relationships throughout the book (horny reflecting his own drive and wings reflecting his own parts and need to be fulfilled).

Further, the cockroaches, like himself, are drawn to the flesh, gluttony, food and decay (though their standards are different than his own the principle is the same).  At the start of the novel he seems to bask in all that the role of Magistrate has given him: women, sex, a home, food; all of it seem to feed his own purposes; just as he now, in his fallen state, seem to feed the purposes of his cockroaches.

Lastly, the final sentences, at least on the level of language, seems to me to contrast his readiness to anticipate the cockroaches with his inabilities to anticipate the realities of his life under the Empire.  It also seems to rival his inabilities to accept realities; he likes that he can function in a position of power until he makes the decision to free the barbarian girl, his mistress.  It seems that he fails to see the consequences of his actions.

Lastly in, “From such beginnings grow obsessions. I am warned”, it seems he is only warned in reference to how he should anticipate the cockroaches.  It seems as if in any other regard he is obsessed, whether with punishing barbarians or his sexual satisfaction, and yet he continues (in contrast to his interaction with the cockroaches) to be unwarned.  Thus, we find him at the start of the book following orders under the Empire, in the middle of the book imprisoned because he let his mistress be free, and at the end of the book still unable to see the road in front of him “I think: I see something in front of my face and I still don’t see it” (155).  It seems, he is the cockroach, like the bug shooting across the floor he wants to be something else, something running away and “outside history” (154).  Yet in his world he does not know how to be. In his world it is impossible.  Perhaps this is life under the “Empire” whatever world that is that the Empire represent.  Unfortunate as it is our Magistrate, fallen and over sexualized protagonist of the novel, is not allowed to be anything other than a cockroach.

 

 

Daddy Knows Best: The Father/Son Colonizer/Colonizee Paradigm in “Dusklands”

There were a variety of different elements that struck me within the text of Dusklands.  Coetzee’s ability to span between two different time periods, the 1970s and the 1760s, and  yet offer the same theme of pain between the oppressor and the oppressed was particularly interesting.  However what seemed even more thought provoking in the text was the relationship, in both narratives between the Colonizer and the Colonized.  I saw this, in many respects as a sort of Father-Son relationship one where it was often stressed that the Father/Colonizer knew what best for the Son/Colonizee.  Though this is most likely typical of Post-Colonial narratives (I’ll admit my knowledge is limited, my literature focus has always been Shakespeare’s tragedies, not many of which can fit under the banner of Post Colonial Lit), what struck me as the most interesting was the way that Coetzee describes how the oppressor is also affected.  Focusing his two narratives on the Colonizer (e.g.  the Narrator in ‘The Vietnam Project’ and Jacobus Coetzee in his narrative) Coetzee portrays a world that is just as brutal for his oppressors as those being oppressed.  Although the two novellas offered comparable similarities between the Father/Son Colonizer/Colonizee dynamic I would like to focus my response on this reading on the first half described in “The Vietnam Project” because I found that to be the most thought provoking.

Our Narrator, Eugene Dawn,  in “The Vietnam Project” seems to be so completely engulfed in his need to impress Coetzee (the character/supervisor not the author of the text) that he seems unable to function in what should be the world of his reality.  As his narrative draws to an end we see that his world has been almost completely destroyed due to his work in the Vietnam project.  Dawn has attacked his young son, yet however unsound he is judged by others he seems (in his writing) to be able to rationalize his actions.  By the end we leave him to move onto the second narrative in Dusklands Dawn is left in an insane asylum, where he calmly awaits the next round of medications from his doctors and nurses.

And what has led Dawn to the state he is in?  Although it seems through his narratives that he feels he is calm and rational, peaceful in the ordered place he is in, it seems that Coetzee (the author) is suggesting that this is what happens when you are surrounded by war/oppression/brutality and the need for colonization.  The underlined message suggests that brutality can only render more brutality.

Further to get back to the theme of the father figure in the text what has led Eugene Dawn to the place he ends up in is undying need to impress Coetzee (his general/boss/superior). Coetzee the character seems to represent all to him that Colonizer must represent to those being colonized.  Dawn states “He is going to reject me.  He fears vision, has no sympathy for passion or despair.  Power speaks only to power.  Sentences queueing behind his neat red lips.  I will be dismissed, and dismissed according to form…” (3).  Simultaneously what Dawn is referencing  here is his need to be praised by Coetzee (suggested in his fears of rejection) and his acknowledgment that all Coetzee seeks is power, a power that Dawn himself also seeks.  I feel that this is an interesting contradiction, he seems to be able to understand the threats and fears of power, all that is represented in the character of Coetzee, yet at the same time he (Dawn) wants it for himself.  He seems to want the coldness, coolness, power that he portrays in his narrative as Coetzee.  In many ways this is what leads me to believe in the representation of a Father/Son Paradigm in the text, despite a subtle hint that Dawn feels Coetzee is consumed by Power he still wants it for himself; like a son replicating his father he wants to be like Coetzee, impress him and show him that he too can be cool, calm, powerful and collected.  I feel that these are the reasons, throughout his narrative, that Dawn revises again and again the efforts of the Vietnam Project.  These are the reasons that through loosing his wife (which he willingly gives up) and his jeopardizing his son, Dawn stays rationalize because his reality in his work for the Vietnam Project, his life in wanting to impress Coetzee, has replaced what should actually be his reality.

As Dawn states “He is in power over me.  I need his approval. I will not pretend that he cannot hurt me.  I would prefer his love to his hatred.  Disobedience does not come easily to me” (5).  It is thus that I think Coetzee (the author) is trying to suggest that these are the affects of oppression, these are the affects of the father/son relationship represented in Duskland, there is power, want, need for love over hatred, and in both halves of the book, a world where disobedience is not an option.

The Works of J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee is an Nobel Peace Prize winning author from South Africa.  Though the majority of his works may be set outside of South Africa one of the major themes in his novels are the racial and social issues placed on humanity.  My blog is an attempt to create an understanding of the themes and ideas within his texts.   I’m a 2nd year teaching associate and graduate student in English, part of my academic focus is understanding the role of evil in society, a theme which is shown through many of Coetzee’s works.  This blog is created for a course I am enrolled in the Fall of 2011. Enjoy!