Abstracts

‘a text with uncertain quotation marks’ – Carrol Clarkson (plenary)

In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the author speaks about his own text as a staging of an ‘image-repertoire.’ What would save parts of his text from embarrassment, he writes, is the discreet use of metalinguistic operators, such as quotation marks, parentheses, or the framing device of a dictation scene, ‘in order to be cleared of having written it.’ But in practice, the image-system gently skates over a verb tense, a pronoun, a memory, gathering the text together under ‘Me, myself, I.’  ‘Hence the ideal would be’, Barthes continues, ‘neither a text of vanity, nor a text of lucidity, but a text with uncertain quotation marks.’

        This paper explores Coetzee’s ethics of writing with reference to a tension between metalinguistic devices of subjective displacement on the one hand, and the allusive absence of quotation marks on the other.

 

Coetzee on Translation: On Translating Coetzee – Chull Wang

JM Coetzee notes that translation is riddled with “problems for which the perfect solution is impossible and for which partial solutions constitute critical acts.” “When form is disrupted, meaning is also disrupted. Such disruption is inevitable, for there is never enough closeness of fit between languages to another without shifts of value.” He thinks that “[s]omething must be ‘lost’” in translation. In other words, betrayal is inevitable and absolute fidelity is impossible. The “translator chooses in accordance with his conception of the whole—there is no way of simply translating the words. These choices are based, literally, on preconception, prejudgment, prejudice.” He sounds almost rueful in the sense that something of what the author tries to convey in original text always gets “lost.” So “all translation is criticism.”

Coetzee seems to be more concerned about what happens to the original text than anything else. His essays on translation such as “Kafka Translation” and “Roads to Translation” testify to this. “Translation seems to me a craft in a way that cabinet-making is a craft. There is no substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of being a good cabinetmaker, plus a few precepts relating to tools and to types of wood. For the rest, what there is to be learned must be learned by observation and practice.” By comparing translator to cabinetmaker, Coetzee seems to suggest that the translator aspires to “being a good cabinetmaker,” that is, perfect translation.

The translator, however, is someone who Paul Ricoeur aptly describes needs “to take on the two supposedly conflicting tasks of ‘bringing the author to the reader’ and ‘bringing the reader to the author.” The two tasks are so much in conflict with each other that it is impossible for translator to simultaneously satisfy the author and the reader. Then, one should be able to “give up the ideal of the perfect translation.” So translation is for Ricoeur going through “the work of mourning.” My own experience in translation testifies to “the impossibility of serving two masters.” Translating Coetzee seems almost impossible unless I “give up the ideal of the perfect translation.” One works within “agreed deficiency” which makes one humble. Is translation an act of mourning? Is it good craftsmanship? Is it criticism? How is the translator to manage the two tasks of bringing the author to the reader and the reader to the author?

 

J.M. Coetzee & the Colonial Archive: Intertextual Travels – Kai Easton

The final stages of my monograph on the acclaimed South African writer and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee include a lively and illustrated introduction entitled, ‘TOURING THE CAPE WITH COETZEE’ (the idea of ‘touring’ being an ironic nod to the Cape as colonial and contemporary commodity), and an afterword on his memoir-fiction trilogy. (There is something of an overlap here with my work on Zoë Wicomb: see ‘The Cape & the Cosmopolitan or Travels Around Wicomb on a Journey to the Cederberg’, forthcoming in our special double issue on Wicomb in SAFUNDI, July 2011). The trilogy concluded with Summertime in 2009, and brings my work on Coetzee and the Cape wonderfully up to date.  Since his emigration in 2002, his work post-Disgrace has shown only traces of the Cape. With Summertime we come full circle: we are back in the Cape, with a fictionalized version of the author at the time of the writing of his first novel, Dusklands (1974) – a novel which travels between America at the time of Nixon’s Watergate and Southern Africa in the eighteenth century.

Below is the note I wrote to the first version of my book on Coetzee: a book which had quite different parameters and which I kept trying to circumvent. It was written pre-Summertime. The new book is an old book: I return to my original thesis which looks at Coetzee’s early novels leading up to White Writing.  With its focus on textuality and the land, it explores how ‘the discourse of the Cape’ is played out in Coetzee’s own fiction. The colonial archive, but also Coetzee’s own Harvard archives, are integral to the book.

Additional reading is provided:  1) an (illustrated) pedagogical essay ‘Teaching Foe and Disgrace: Intertextuality and the Question of Canonicity’ (unpublished); and 2) my article in Scrutiny2, ‘Coetzee, the Cape and the Question of History’, to provide some background to my archival work and the project more generally.

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First you give yourself to (or throw yourself into) the writing, and go where it takes you.  Then you step back and ask yourself where you are, whether you really want to be there.[1]

This book has taken a great deal longer to write than I expected. The more I thought about how to approach his work, the more Coetzee produced on Elizabeth Costello. As a colleague reminded me recently, ‘There is a game going on between the covers of the book, but it is not necessarily the game you are thinking of’.  These are Coetzee’s own words.  I borrow them not because they issue a fair warning to the reader from the author (this would in any case assume an authoritative position for the author – something Coetzee has consistently rejected), but because his fiction constantly anticipates, self-reflexively addresses, issues of interpretation:  of writing as play, writing as ethics.   There is a veritable library of articles and dissertations on his work now, and several monographs, one of the more recent being Derek Attridge’s excellent study.  Attridge’s argument regarding the singularity of literature certainly rings true in as much as I agree with the idea that we perform the novel, or the novel performs us, with each reading.  However, you will find here a more interdisciplinary focus, a less strictly literary emphasis, which also, despite my reservations and   – as my preface goes on to describe – has an overarching framework:  what I want to call archival intertextuality.   This is certainly not to contain or limit the reader’s readings of Coetzee, but rather the opposite:  to introduce Coetzee in a way that engages with Barthes’s notion of the writerly text, for all of Coetzee’s novels have a narrative openness and demand the active participation of the reader.  The following chapters set out to illustrate some of the discourses at play, some of the novels’ pre-texts (for example, literally, in his manuscripts, storylines not followed); but we will also be looking at sub-texts – to the writing process itself:  to the generic, historical, and geographical choices posed in Coetzee’s fiction.

 

Corporeal Community: Coetzee’s Resembling Bodies – Sam Durrant

In this panel we will ask: what is that Coetzee’s novels do? My suggestion is that they enact the grounds of what I would term corporeal community by setting in motion a series of identifications between, for instance, the free and the incarcerated (Waiting for the Barbarians), the living and the dead (Life and Times of Michael K), the housed and the unhoused (Age of Iron), the human and the animal (Disgrace).  Moving away from the neo-Platonic account of mimesis as realistic representation, I will suggest that Coetzee’s novels are mimetic in the dynamic sense nascent in Aristotle’s Poetics and taken up by psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School Marxism in their respective accounts of mimesis as bodily identification. Identification is of course at the heart of Elizabeth Costello’s account of the sympathetic imagination. However, contra Costello’s claim that there are no limits to the sympathetic imagination, I will suggest that Coetzee’s novels are precisely an experience of that limit, the limit of our imaginative becoming-similar. Coetzee’s corporeal community is thus the experience of our proximity to other lives but also our reconciliation to the fact of our non-identity. The question thus becomes: what is the political import of this aesthetic experience of our non-identical similarity? How does our aesthetic experience of corporeal community disrupt or extend our experience of political community?

 

“No words but the words of others”: the Precursor as Discursive Tradition – Patrick Hayes

In his 1991 essay entitled simply ‘Homage’, Coetzee addressed the question of influence at the level of admired individuals – that is to say, authors he chose to be his precursors. But this should be set alongside his longstanding insistence upon the way the authorial self is always already immersed in discursive traditions – what Beckett calls “the words of others” – which in their very unchosenness may at times be the more powerful precursors.

What distinguishes Coetzee from other writers on this theme is the unusually self-conscious way he uses his fiction to scrutinise inherited discursive traditions: among the manifold cultural discourses staged in his work the particular moral and political legacies intertwined with of the form of the novel itself have been a longstanding concern, and more recently the figure of the public moralist – in particular what Francis Mulhern has defined as the tradition of Kulturkritik (Culture/Metaculture (2000)) – has come to the fore. I will start the session off with an example of how Coetzee has explored his discursive precursors: either at the level of genre (the novel of sensibility in Age of Iron), or at the level of moral discourse (cultural criticism in Diary of a Bad Year). What I will argue is that Coetzee explores the meaning and value of these important traditions with a distinctive mix of desire and distrust that cannot be defined by concepts of parody or defamiliarisation: his fiction treats discursive traditions as precursors in the fullest sense – as potential heralds or harbingers of something new. The essay underpinning my thoughts here is ‘Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry’ in Giving Offense, and its concept of the literary as a ‘nonpositioned’ experience that plays with the rules that govern other discourses.

It may be interesting for those participating to respond by proposing other examples of precursors in the sense I have defined, either at the level of genre or more broadly at the level of cultural / intellectual tradition (e.g. the various moral or political traditions with which Coetzee is engaging), so as to either challenge or extend the above claims. Broader questions that we might address include: Are there any significant precursor discourses that are left unexamined – that is to say, treated only as pervasive assumptions – by Coetzee’s fiction? If I am right to think of Coetzee’s fiction as a disorienting space that renders the rules governing precursor discourses unstable, by what standard of judgement is it valuable?

 

 

Coetzee and Joyce – Derek Attridge

I would like to raise the question of Coetzee’s relationship with James Joyce. His alter ego Elizabeth Costello has written a novel based on *Ulysses*, but Coetzee himself has said very little about the importance of Joyce to his writing. Are there unacknowledged debts to be elucidated? Or a strategy of avoidance to be deduced? What is the relation between Coetzee’s memoirs and *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*? Is Coetzee’s stance towards South Africa – especially since his departure – anything like Joyce’s stance towards Ireland? Do Coetzee’s more experimental novels constitute developments of Joyce’s innovations?

 

Coetzee and Woolf – Lucy Graham

As David Attwell notes, Coetzee’s oeuvre “draws significantly on modernism” and may be said to “test its absorption in European traditions” by bringing European avant-gardism into an “ethically and politically fraught arena” marked by colonialism and apartheid. Kafka and Beckett are among the modernists Coetzee is acknowledged to “create” as his precursors. Here I shall argue that another of the great modernist writers, namely Virginia Woolf, is present as a ghostly foremother in Coetzee’s fictions, particularly in those works that deploy or focus on a woman’s voice. In the Heart of the Country, Foe, and Elizabeth Costello are novels that allude to incidents in Woolf’s life, that invoke and reterritorialise Woolf’s ideas about women and writing, and that draw on her methodology in addressing the dilemma of speaking as a public figure. The Woolf texts that I shall bring into conversation with Coetzee’s fiction are “A Room of One’s Own”, “Killing the Angel in the House” and The Waves.

            Additional points for a more enquiring abstract: I have been thinking that I would like to use theories of the new modernist studies (Susan Suleiman, Rita Felski, Rita Barnard etc) to ask some questions about Coetzee’s relation to modernism. The dilemma for me seems to be whether Coetzee is a late modernist (Attridge), a postmodernist (Attwell), or maybe something else. And I would like to ask what his engagement with certain literary precursors seems to suggest about this question. Also I have some questions about his use of a female voice in some of his fiction.

 

 

 

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[1]J. M. Coetzee, ‘Thematizing’, 289. In The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Werner Sollors. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.