Godard in the Karoo: J. M.

Coetzee's Screenplay Adaptation of "In the Heart of the

Country"
Author(s): Hermann Wittenberg
Source: English in Africa , OCTOBER 2014, Vol. 41, No. 2 (OCTOBER 2014), pp. 13-33
Published by: Rhodes University

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24389454

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 Godard in the Karoo: J. M. Coetzee's
Screenplay Adaptation of In the Heart
of the Country1

Hermann Wittenberg

In an important early study of the relationship between literature and film,

Keith Cohen argues persuasively that the emergence of European modernist
fiction in the early twentieth century does not stem solely from a
disenchantment with the tired realism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois
novel. It also drew on the stylistic inventiveness of an entirely new art form:
cinema. A "rapidly developing cinematic language" in the early silent film
era (Eisenstein, Bunuel, Griffith) fed a similar inventiveness in the novel,
catalysing a "dynamic handling of space and time, the radical shifting of
point of view, and the reconstituted patterning (montage) of fragmented
narration" (Cohenl08). Cohen's argument involves a close reading of key
works by Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Stein, showing how these texts drew
from the innovative representational techniques of the new medium of film.
Literature and film fed off each other to create the aesthetic revolution that
constituted the cultural modernity of the early twentieth century.
In an argument that parallels Cohen's analysis, J.M. Coetzee makes the
point that the innovations in film editing had effects on novelistic narration:

There was a moment in high modernism when first poets, then

novelists, realized how rapidly narration could be carried out:
films that used montage effectively were connecting short
narrative sequences into longer narratives much more swiftly and
deftly than the nineteenth-century novelist had thought possible,
and they were educating their younger audience too into following
rapid transitions, an audience that then carried this skill back into
the reading of printed texts.
(Doubling the Point 59)

English in Africa 41 No. 2 (October 2014): 13—33

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v41i2.1

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14 HERMANN WITTENBERG

In a way similar to that in which European modemist literature drew

early film experimentation to achieve a non-realist aesthetic, it may
argued that J.M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country (1977)
influenced by avant-garde film of the 1960s. In this period, during which
young Coetzee spent time in London working as a computer programmer
IBM, he "went to the cinema often and avidly" (Coetzee, "Homage"
"The dominating presence," wrote Coetzee, "was Ingmar Bergman; J
Luc Godard and the French nouvelle vague were just appearing on
horizon" ("Homage" 5). In the autobiographical memoir Youth, Coet
similarly refers to the effect of contemporary avant-garde cinema on h
twenty-one-year-old self: "At the Everyman in Hampstead his eyes
opened to films from all over the world, made by directors whose names
quite new to him" (48).
The influence of the French new wave cinema, or nouvelle vagu
associated with names such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard a
Claude Chabrol, was particularly formative in the construction of In
Heart of the Country, in effect rewriting a late nineteenth-century tale se
the South African Karoo with the aesthetic vocabulary of the French ava
garde. With his second novel, Coetzee forged a non-realist style an
montage-like patterning in his prose that was unprecedented in Sou
African literature.2 As he told David Attwell in an interview, there
"similarities between [In the Heart of the Country] and the French nouv
roman, but behind both there is, I think, a more fundamental influence: f
and/or photography" (Doubling the Point 59). In this article I intend
explore aspects of this notion, drawing on archival resources to illuminat
the origins of Coetzee's cinematic style and its effects in his prose. I sha
then look in some detail at the screenplay version that Coetzee later wrote
his novel. This version is part of a miscellaneous collection of adaptat
deposited by the author at NELM in 2001. The fact that Coetzee wrote hi
own full screenplay for In the Heart of the Country is not widely know
especially since Marion Hänsel's film Dust (1985) is generally regarded
the novel's film adaptation. Coetzee's original film version, discarded
Hänsel in favour of her own screenplay, is briefly mentioned by J.
Kannemeyer in his account of Coetzee's interactions with film make
(312-19), but overall, the complex story of Coetzee's relationship to cinem
has only partially been told.3

Coetzee began writing In the Heart of the Country on 1 December 1974,

yellow UCT exam booklet bearing the novel's provisional title, "Hom

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 15

The manuscript shows evidence of fluent writing, unlike the halting m

Dusklands with its multiple corrections and false starts. Coetzee wrote
two pages a day, sometimes as little as a single paragraph, each day's w
carefully dated. Sometimes the writing stops in mid-sentence on one
only to be completed on the following morning. The narrating protag
Magda, is still a prolific writer in this early version, and there are mom
of authorial self-reflection inserted into the fiction, blending her wi
author: "Things jerk forward as much in life as in my account of it.
do I, so to speak, know what is going to happen three sentences ahead o
pen" (HRC, Box 3, 16).4 The opening sentence of the novel from the o
reveals a strategy of presenting multiple perspectives that dest
narrative realism:

Today my father came home with his new bride. They came
chugging across the veld in father's Model T Ford, for in South
Africa such things are possible; or perhaps it was not the Model T,
perhaps they came clip-clopping across the veld in his dog-cart,
drawn by two smartly turned out horses with white ostrich-feather
plumes waving on their heads, or perhaps they were mules, such
things are also possible.
(HRC, Box 3, 1)

If we consider Coetzee's acknowledgement of the influence of film on

composition of the novel, we can interpret these mutually incomp
variants as analogous to the multiple takes a film director might shoo
particular scene and eventually discard in favour of the preferred vers
the "final cut" version of the printed novel, this denaturalising strate
deployed in a more muted manner:

Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip
clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an
ostrich-plume waving on the forehead, dusty after the long haul.
Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also
possible.
(Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country 1)

Instead of the multiple competing takes of the bride's arrival on the farm in
the first version (first car, then horses, lastly mules), the substitution of
donkeys for horses in the final print version could be construed by readers as
a lapse in memory by the narrator, and therefore less radically disruptive of
realist conventions.5 Apart from this strategy of multiple perspectives, there
are several moments in the novel when narration is overtly cinematic in its

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16 HERMANN WITTENBERG

self-conscious staging of point of view, for example when Ma

narrator, observes the arrival of the farm labourer's new wife:

The great beam of my vision swings and for a spell Hendrik's

child-bride is illuminated, stepping down from the donkey-cart.
Then, like the lighthouse-keeper strapped into his chair against the
treacherous seventh wave, I watch the girl slip back into the dark,
hear the grinding of the cogs that tum the lamp [. . .].
(25)

The narrator's point of view is here concretised as an illuminating beam of

light (like a panning camera sweeping across the set) that intermittently
makes parts of the scene visible, revealing a brief moment in a flash of light,
before the scene again becomes cloaked in darkness.
But the most fundamental influence of film is seen in the novel's
montage-like construction, where the numbered sections function as scene
divisions and can sometimes, when very short, even be thought to be
analogous to camera shots. The different manuscript versions show that
Coetzee came to this form fairly late, in a holograph version dated 26
November 1975. Earlier in the year, after a fluent period of composition
during the summer university recess, the sixth version of "Home" was
abruptly broken off, the last entry dated 19 January 1975. Coetzee only
seems to have taken up the novel again half a year later, on 12 August 1975.
The notebook6 that Coetzee kept during this period shows evidence of
several false starts and digressions, but then a crucial break-through that was
to have major consequences for the shape that the book would soon take. In
a brief entry dated 29 July 1975, Coetzee recorded the impact of a film he
had seen: "Fascinated by the counterpoint of light, image, sound, sense in
Godard's Alphaville. Quite possible to work with slide projector and two
tape recorders" (HRC, Box 33).
Jean-Luc Godard's black-and-white film, made in 1965, depicts a future
society ruled by a powerful all-knowing computer called Alpha 60. In this
über-rational technocratic dictatorship, all emotion and feeling is outlawed,
but the computer is eventually disabled when the hero feeds it code (lines of
modernist poetry) which it cannot comprehend. On the face of it, the film
has little or no connection to the plot and Karoo setting of In the Heart of the
Country, but Coetzee would find it catalytic for his creative practice.
In Doubling the Point, Coetzee subsequently made two related points
that allow us to gauge the impact of Godard: firstly, his films displayed a
"great economy of narration" and even "more than economy: a rapidity,
even a forward plunging quality" (60). Stuck in the middle of a novel that
was not proceeding satisfactorily, Coetzee may have glimpsed a mode of

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 17

narration here that could allow him to write himself out of an im

of the titles proposed at this stage, "The Story of an Afric
identifies the literary form that Coetzee was attempting radicall
The revision involved not only narrative content and plot, bu
especially, form: Coetzee was attempting to write modemist ficti
different pace and rhythm to the slow, often drawn-out prose of
late nineteenth-century realism.
The other idea which attracted him to Godard (and also to the
Chris Marker and Andrej Münk) is encapsulated in the word "cou

What impressed me most about films like these was,

paradoxically, what they could achieve through stills with voice
over commentary: a remarkable intensity of vision (because the
eye searches the still image in a way it cannot search the moving
image).
(Doubling the Point 60)

In abandoning naturalistic lip-synched dialogue on the screen and replacing

it with voice-over that functioned contrapuntally to the image, Godard could
achieve juxtapositions and estranging effects which Coetzee responded to
strongly. As a result of his encounter with Alphaville, Coetzee worked out
solutions for his own creative practice that were at once innocuously simple
and aesthetically radical. In proposing to work with a "slide projector and
two tape recorders," Coetzee was imagining a mode of writing modelled on
the effect achieved by rapidly and sequentially displayed still images
projected onto a screen, accompanied by a pre-recorded voice (Magda, on
one tape recorder) and possibly other voices, music and wild sound (on the
other tape recorder). We can also imagine the added superimposed audio
effects derived from the machinery employed: the characteristic sound of the
projector transporting the photographic slides in and out of the cartridge; the
mechanical sound of the "Stop" and "Play" buttons being actuated on the
tape recorder, and perhaps the whirr of the cassette in fast-forward or rewind
mode when the retake of a particular scene necessitated it. Coetzee was
obviously not about to embark on putting together an actual audio-visual
show utilising these mechanical devices, but was imagining how his writing
could somehow mimic this mode of punctuated, pictorial narration. What
Coetzee was in effect attempting to visualise was a form of discontinuous,
snap-shot narration or montage that dispensed with the paraphernalia of
realism, akin to swiftly flicking through a series of images. Instead of the
continuity editing in conventional film which produced the illusion of a
seamless, naturally unfolding narrative, Coetzee was interested in the
disjunctive effects that could be achieved by presenting a succession of still

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 18 HERMANN WITTENBERG

images that were not necessarily connected to each other sequentially or

way of content.
The division of the stream of prose in his novel into 266 section
prefaced by numbers on the left side margin, analogous to the numbere
scenes of a screenplay, was the solution that he drew from the sli
projector/tape-recorder idea. As he explained in an interview with Joann
Scott,

the enabling device in In the Heart of the Country turned out to be

the numbering of the sections, because that enabled me to drop all
pretense of continuity. After a few hundred words of prose, there
comes a break - a three-digit number [. . .]. They enable a certain
sharpness of transition, or lack of smooth transition.
(Scott 89-90)

Paradoxically, it was precisely these breaks in narration that enabled Coetzee

to achieve flow, rhythm and pace in his prose.8
Like the individual images in a slide-show, the sections in the novel
function as self-contained units of meaning. Their length varies, from
complex scenes with dialogue and action running over several pages, to a
single sentence, for example "The cups have not been washed" (65). These
short sections function similarly to close-up insert or cut-away shots in
cinema that break the flow of the master scene. The assemblage of the
different sections is also partly arbitrary. Several sections, especially those
that feature Magda's tortured consciousness, could be placed elsewhere in
the novel, without significantly affecting overall meaning. Coetzee also
frames each section similarly to the way a film scene is constructed, always
keeping the narration/camera in one location, and freezing the time to a
particular moment. There are no sections that narrate continuous action over
a longer period of time than a minute or two; rather, they break up narrative
temporality to record separate discontinuous moments in snap-shot fashion
which are then "edited" together in a jump-cut manner. Although there is a
mostly discernible chronological sequence in the way the sections have been
assembled - which broadly follows the unfolding of the plot - there are
gaps, overlaps and repetitions which complicate a simple narrative
progression. The awareness of narrative breaks and other discontinuities is
self-consciously registered in the novel, for example when Magda at one
point says:

A day must have intervened here. [. . .] I suspect that the day the
day was missing I was not there; and if that is so I shall never

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 GOD ARD IN THE KAROO 19

know how the day was filled. For I seem to exist more and more
intermittently. Whole hours, whole afternoons go missing.
(79, 80)

The disruption of chronicity is also evident in the manner in which some

scenes are repeated, for example the sexual assault of Magda, with each of
the three sections that narrate the event being "shot" from a slightly different
point of view. In several instances, Coetzee also constructs narrative
discontinuity, or to put it in filmic terms, commits deliberate continuity
errors. For example in section 25, the narrator sees that the father and the
new bride "sleep the sleep of the blissfully sated, she on her back, her
nightdress rucked about her hips, he face down, his left hand folded in
hers" (11). In the next section, a few lines down, the same scene is narrated,
though here the "father lies on his back" (11).
The overall effect of the novel depends on scenes that are edited
together in such a way that they clash and jar with each other, with
subsequent sections revising previous episodes, and sometimes even
invalidating them. We read, for example, of Magda's murderous hatchet
rampage in which the father is killed (section 26), but this is subsequently
followed by a section in which he calmly sits down for dinner (section 36).
Similarly, the second parricide where Magda mortally wounds her father
(section 119) is put under erasure by the novel's ending, where we see him
alive and cared for. Altogether, then, Coetzee stages narrative discontinuity
and lack of coherence where meaning does not reside in an individual scene
or section, but rather arises in a more complex way in the overall montage
like patterning of the narrative assemblage.
It is also noticeable that Coetzee often sets up scenes in the novel like a
scriptwriter, elaborating on the information which would have been
described in a typical script slugline, specifying exteriority or interiority,
location, and day or night time. We can therefore see Coetzee giving
especial attention to lighting the scene in the sections. The word
"photography" of course literally means "writing with light," and Coetzee
writes with light conspicuously, often specifying illumination in the first
lines of a section, as if constituting a slugline: for example "the light of a
storm-lantern" (11), "the shadowy hallway" (3), "candlelight" (110),
Hendrik being backlit by the "fire" (27), the stars shining "clear as ice" (27).
The text is pervaded by such light effects, ranging from the pointillist "glint"
on the windmill blades to the chiaroscuro achieved by Hendrik's face
"shadowed by his hat" (62).9

***

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20 HERMANN WITTENBERG

The most significant influence of film on In the Heart of the Cou

however, not found in the novelistic text itself, but outside of th
the form of a screenplay adaptation that Coetzee wrote in 1980
The screenplay can be understood as a form of creative reverse-en
that effectively inverted the flow of influence: the novel which wa
by cinema was in turn reshaped into a film script. In the Hear
Country thus represents a curious situation rarely encountered in ad
studies: a novel evincing the stylistic influence of film itself giving
screenplay, with both texts written by the same author. The relat
between the two texts and their relationship to cinema is complicate
fact that that Coetzee also claimed that "In the Heart of the Country
novel on the model of a screenplay" (Doubling the Point 59). What
may have tried to say with the hindsight of having already written
and screenplay versions, was that the novel, even more so
screenplay, functioned cinematically in the sense that its assem
narrative material approximated the nonlinear, anti-realist edi
modemist film. Teresa and Lindiwe Dovey, without being
Coetzee's screenplay, gloss the remark similarly, explaining that th
"is closer to film than the screenplay's verbal mapping of dial
setting" (64).
As in the case of the novel, Coetzee's approach to the screen
influenced by the French nouvelle vague, particularly Godard's film
before he could proceed with a cinematically avant-garde project, h
fend off plans to produce the film in a more popular format. Coet
initially approached by James Polley (who directed the UCT Film E
Unit) and the film-maker Manie van Rensburg to make a film suit
television in South Africa and Germany. Coetzee clearly ha
ambitions for his film than mass entertainment, for he wrote to Poll
was not enamoured of the plan to "make a version for local con
which will not offend the man in the street" (KP, 6 December 1979).
lengthy contractual negotiations, Coetzee then entered into an agr
with the Johannesburg film producer Clive Levinson, offering to wr
script. "The models I have at the back of my mind," wrote Coe
Godard's Petit Soldat and Alphaville" (KP, 2 March 1980). As de
Kannemeyer's account (313-16), Coetzee and Levinson soon fell
the direction which the project was taking, with particularly
disagreements about the utilisation of voice-over, and Coe
completed his screenplay in collaboration with the UK-based fi
Francis Gerard.
But the interactions with Levinson and the early drafts of the screenplay
nevertheless help us to understand the approach that Coetzee was taking in

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 21

adapting his novel for the screen. Coetzee was initially unsur
tackle the new medium, expressing to Levinson his concerns abo

I simply don't know what the treatment I give adds up to in tim

The answer obviously depends heavily on the general pacing
think of what I give here as the bare bones. If it turns out to
possible to remain close to the bones, I would be happy. There
undoubtedly flesh that can be added from the book; but on
doesn't want it to be padding.
(KP, 17 February 1980)

Soon, though, he had produced an eight-page draft film treatmen

with cast list, a description of setting and milieu ("as a point of
use styles circa 1910" ["Treatment," HRC]), as well as hand-drawn
of the farm yard and the interior plan of the farmhouse. In furth
notes, it is again clear that questions of pace, rhythm and flow we
in Coetzee's mind:

The problem with tempo is that the book tends to be meditative,

and therefore in filmic terms static. The solution is not to speed
things up but to create variety of tempo and also to maintain a
sense of direction and urgency even when the physical tempo of
events on the screen is slow. In other words, there must be
something going on all the time on the level of either action or
words. Also there must be some variety between scenes of short
clock-duration and longer scenes where there is some complexity
or choreography of movement.
(HRC, Box 4)

The question of the imagined film's tempo was crucial for Coetzee, and
explains his subsequent disappointment with Hänsel's film, remarking later
that Dust "retains virtually none of the sequence divisions and indeed none
of the quite swift pacing of the novel. It loses a lot of vitality thereby, in my
opinion" {Doubling the Point 60). Indeed, the Doveys' detailed study of the
film concludes that the "pacing of the film is, in fact, very slow, and the film
progresses from one carefully composed mise en scène to the next, each shot
framed so as to stage a particular action or emotion" (62).
In adapting a book such as In the Heart of the Country to the screen,
Coetzee faced several formidable challenges. The novel had a plot that
destabilised naturalistic story-telling conventions, with characters murdered
in graphic detail later appearing to be very much alive. Recognising these
problems, Coetzee saw at the outset that a film which relied on
representational realism was not feasible:

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22 HERMANN WITTENBERG

With regard to the 'reality' of the murder of the father and his
woman-friend, the rape of Magda, the restoration of the father at
the end: one must recognize that, for elementary reasons of
plotting, it is impossible to rewrite the book naturalistically.
(HRC, Box 4)

As he wrote to Levinson later, "the book is a very thin affair indee

gaps and self-contradictions, if one tries to lay it out as a nat
narrative" (Kannemeyer 314), and therefore a very different appro
needed. Indeed, in Magda's highly charged subjective narration
events and her violent and erotic fantasies are not neatly distinguis
posing problems of how to represent different orders of the fiction
on the screen. In his early comments to Levinson, Coetzee prefe
these lines should remain blurred and indistinct:

Magda's life unrolls before our eyes, sometimes an outer, 'real'

life, sometimes an inner 'fantasy' life. [. . .] But only the most
minor of technical signals (e.g., the quality of the lighting, a
change in pitch-level of the soundtrack, or in the last resort a
musical motif), I am convinced, is needed to make an audience
understand which sequences are best read as fantasy, which not.
This can in fact be done more easily on the screen than on the
page.
(HRC, Box 4)11

In the Dust adaptation, by contrast, Hänsel attempted to produce a

naturalistic narrative by signalling Madga's fantasies more clearly, using
conventional cinematic devices to indicate the shift from 'real' to imaginary.
In the Doveys' analysis, "Hänsel provides a clear demarcation of her own
sense of the boundaries between the 'real' and the 'fantastical.' She signals
the transitions [...] by means of the conventions of a musical motif, and also
by embedding the 'fantasy' sequences within the sequences which depict
'real' events" (62). Dust is thus not ultimately disruptive of realist
conventions, unlike Coetzee's novel and proposed film.
Despite Coetzee's commitment to retain the formal qualities of his
novel in the film adaptation, qualities which had been directly derived from
film, he was not under any illusion that the book could be transferred to the
screen in an unproblematic manner. Coetzee was thus not working with a
simplistic concept of adaptive fidelity, a notion that has since been
interrogated extensively in adaptation theory.12 In thinking through the
complex relationship between book and film, Coetzee recognised the
autonomy of the adaptation, which had to succeed on its own merits:

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 23

It is futile to try to translate the book, insofar it is a meditation on

history, language, etc., into film. The ftlm must aim to be
something different. It must depend on the book for the dynamics
of human relationships, and it must suggest the mood of the book.
After that it is on its own.
(HRC, Box 4)

Coetzee's adaptation to a large extent achieves such an autonomy from

novel, and is not constructed as a derivative, page-by-page transp
from text to screen. The screenplay and the novel begin with very dif
scenes, a change which shifts the dominant point of view away
Magda's highly subjective narration by illustrating scenes on the farm
depicting the general setting of the story:

1. EXT. THE KAROO. HOT AFTERNOON. HEAT HAZE.

DAY.

Long tracking shot across the flat, barren countryside. Titles

over.

In the distance: HENDRIK and his dog herding a single sheep.

Man, dog and sheep crawl across the empty landscape.

2. EXT. THE VELD. SAME AFTERNOON. DAY.

Hendrik asleep in the shade of the thom tree. His jacket is

folded under his head, his hat is over his eyes. The dog lies
panting nearby.

He wears homemade velskoene without socks. One arm of his

shirt is torn off at the shoulder.

NOISE OF CICADAS.

{Two Screenplays 33)

As we can see already in Coetzee's brief but evocative depiction of th

isolated Karoo farm, the imagined film breaks out of the claustrophob
confines of Magda's consciousness. The landscape itself, and the farm
worker, Hendrik, are given much more prominence and centrality in this
version. The point of view staged by the camera is not Magda's (as in th
novel), but is effectively a more objective, third-person stance.
The book's philosophically dense interior monologue narrated by th
main character posed major challenges that only became resolved as th

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24 HERMANN WITTENBERG

screenplay took shape. Despite Coetzee's efforts to move away f

influence of his own novel, the initial versions of his screenplay
mostly dominated by large chunks of Magda's narration, in the
inserted voice-over sequences. In the treatment that Coetzee s
Levinson, we can see that he had proposed voice-over sequences t
more than 1800 words, in effect substantial verbatim quotations fro
novel which would have overlaid virtually the entire film with
voice. Levinson's response to Coetzee's film treatment was not enthu
he thought that Magda's extensive voice-over speeches function
extended "prose poem" with little appeal to viewers, and he asked fo
emphasis on the visual (see Kannemeyer 313-16). Levinson and
could not agree on the film, and Coetzee subsequently worked with
Gerard to write a full-length screenplay.
In the new version, Coetzee may have absorbed some of the criti
Levinson. In the Ransom Centre version of the text, the voice-over
sequences were significantly reduced, to a word count of 1400. From
Coetzee's correspondence, it is possible to reconstruct this process partially.
In the original treatment for Levinson, the proposed voice-over in scene 9
was taken almost verbatim from the novel:

I live, I suffer, I am here. The land full of melancholy spinsters

like me, blue as roaches in our ancestral home, keeping a high
shine on the copperware, and laying in jam. With cunning and
treachery, if necessary, I will fight against becoming one of the
forgotten ones in history.
(KP, 15 May 1980)

In the next version, Coetzee retained only the following words of voice-over
in scene 9: "A land full of spinsters like me, keeping a high shine on the
copperware, laying in jam."13 In the final version, there is even less reliance
on reproducing the stylised prose of the novel, and the voice-over becomes
more attuned to natural speech. The equivalent passage in this version reads
as follows: "I'm not going to spend my life keeping the copperware shining
and laying in jam" (Two Screenplays 42). Altogether, voice-over is reduced
from twenty-eight to twenty sequences, totalling only 840 words.
A comparison of the different versions thus shows that Coetzee
drastically reduced the number and length of voice-over occurrences, and in
this way brought much less text from his novel into the screenplay. But in
the pared-down voice-over sequences that remain, we can still discern the
influence of Godard's films in which Coetzee had found the disjuncture of
voice and image so striking. Voice-over in the screenplay accordingly

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 25

functions mostly contrapuntally, in order to bring out contrast betwe

filmed scene and the words of Magda. Image and voice do not cohere
and we can see Coetzee staging this disjuncture cinematically:

20. INT. THE PASSAGE OUTSIDE THE BEDROOM. DAY.

Magda and Anna pass the door adjacent to the bedroom,

which is closed (and locked). They proceed down the passage
and pass through the doorway into the next room.
The camera stays behind, with the locked door in the
foreground.

VOICE OVER: MAGDA

My mother was a frail, gentle, loving woman. Her husband
never forgave her for failing to bear him a son.

Magda's voice continues, off.

MAGDA
Then when you have finished with the bedroom, you can at
least dust and polish the furniture here - I don't think there
will be time for the floor, you can do that tomorrow. And
change the table-cloth, Anna.

ANNA
The table-cloth, miss.
{Two Screenplays 39-40)

As the above extract illustrates, Coetzee stages a lack of coherence between

the filmed image and recorded speech, in this case both voice-over and
conventional dialogue. The camera direction here creates a tension between
what is heard out of shot, and what is seen (a cinematically self-conscious
extended shot of a virtually still image depicting a locked door). Instead of
the camera giving us a visually rich image of the room in which Magda and
Anna converse and in this way illustrate their talk, the materiality of the
setting is evoked purely verbally: "dust and polish the furniture," "floor,"
"table-cloth." Words, rather than the frozen image, here have the primary
illustrative function. The scene above also neatly exemplifies the persistent
influence of Coetzee's slide projector/tape recorder model derived from
Alphaville.
As Coetzee was beginning to explore the cinematic potential of his
story and reduce the influence of the prose of his book, the screenplay
evolved into a markedly independent text. A comparison of the endings of

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26 HERMANN WITTENBERG

the two texts illustrates the differences clearly. In both the novel and t
screenplay, Magda's dead father makes his appearance again, but the for
that this restoration takes is different. In the novel, the father's appear
functions more as a device to illustrate Magda's increasingly tenuous gri
reality. Coetzee's prose makes it clear that the father is more a figure in
imagination and does not have a substantial physical materiality: "Of me
knows nothing. I pick him up without difficulty, a manikin of dry bones
together by cobwebs, so neat that I could fold him up and pack him awa
a suitcase" {In the Heart of the Country 136). In the screenplay, on the ot
hand, the father is depicted as a very tangible, flesh and blood presence:

140. EXT. THE STOEP. DUSK.

Magda emerges from the house with the tray. Her father sits
on the stoep in an armchair. He is old, white-haired, frail. He
trembles with Parkinson's disease. He wears a hat and
nightshirt. There is a rug over his knees. He stares out into
the gathering dark. Magda tucks the napkin under his chin
and feeds him. He dribbles. He gives no sign of recognising
her. Having fed him, she puts the tray aside. She lifts the rug
away to reveal that he wears a diaper and socks. His legs are
bare. She feels the diaper for wetness. Then she replaces the
rug.
{Two Screenplays 92—93)

The poignant closing scene of the screenplay also emphasises Magda's

physicality and her actions, instead of foregrounding an interior
consciousness that spins its thoughts interminably throughout the novel. In
place of the ceaseless flow of monologic, existential philosophy, Coetzee
allows her two simple, short sentences addressed to the father:

MAGDA
Come. It is late.

She takes off her father's hat, tilts his chair backwards, and
with a series of surprisingly powerful heaves begins dragging
it on its two feet through the front door and into the dark
house.

End credits roll on an empty scene.

{Two Screenplays 93)

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 27

Comparison of the novel to the screenplay reveals significant dif

the way Coetzee shaped and adapted his book. The manner in
screenplay re-imagines the story of the novel therefore offers n
and interpretive possibilities, some of which have been outlined h
the same time, one should be wary of regarding the film version a
authorial self-interpretation, an argument advanced by the Dovey
that the act of translating a novel to the filmic medium involves
interpretation, the nature of these terms can provide valuable in
the novels" (58). Such an approach is particularly tempting,
paucity of authorial explication in the case of Coetzee. If we, for
consider the cast list for the film, we can see how Coetzee spells
which are only implied or vaguely sketched in the novel. The
appearances of characters in the prose version harden here into a
physicality:

Magda: A spinster in her early 30s. Bony, unattractive.

Thin features, incipient moustache, severe hairstyle.
Wears shapeless black dress % way to her ankles,
and shiny black shoes.

Her Father: About 60. Handsome, imposing, taciturn.

Moustache, no beard. Dresses fastidiously for a
farmer (jacket, tie, riding-boots, hat).

Hendrik: About 30. Khoi rather than European or African

features. Clean shaven, good looking. Wears castoff
clothes, hat, home-made velskoene.
(HRC, Box 4)

But one needs to be cautious about treating the screenplay as a privileged

form of authorial interpretation, as in 'this is how Coetzee actually imagines
his novel.' While there may be a significant overlap in dialogue, setting and
narrative material, we need to consider that Coetzee wrote his screenplay
several years after the writing and publication of his novel, and that he
would consequently have come to the material with a different frame of
mind. In this regard it may be helpful to consider Coetzee's comments to
Nadine Gordimer (a letter written in the context of the Disgrace
controversies):

I've always found it difficult, first to live inside a book during the
years-long process of writing it, then to send it off (cast it of!) and
free oneself for other tasks, yet then, when a year or more later the
book emerges in print, to be expected (by interviewers, the public)

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28 HERMANN WITTENBERG

to inhabit its world. One writes, most of the time, in order to move
beyond whatever it is that grips one's imagination, to purge
oneself of that particular set of obsessions.
(KP, 9 December 1999)

Returning to the material of the novel several years later would thu
a very different relationship with the narrative, allowing Co
distance and freedom to interpret the material in ways not ne
constrained by the consciousness and "particular set of obsessi
shaped the original prose version. Indeed, a close look at the evolut
screenplay has shown how the successive versions developed an inc
independence from the novel.
Instead of seeing the screenplay as a privileged authorial 'take' o
meaning of the novel, it is then more profitable to regard both tex
autonomous versions of a shared fictional world. The divergence ca
in small details (an H-shaped Cape-Dutch house in the novel; C
architecture in the screenplay), but also in a re-ordered narrative
invention of new scenes not found in the book. Curiously, one of
scenes used in the screenplay was an episode that Coetzee had earlie
to accommodate in the novel that could now be restored to the sto
last entry of the notebook that he kept during the writing of In th
the Country, Coetzee had the following thought:

I can't just let Hendrik and Anna drift out. There must be a § in
which he is brought to the farm, standing bound on the bed of a
truck, with Anna covering herself with a bag in a corner. A cold
day. They are taking him to work on the breakwater, on the
Swartberg Pass, on the salt mines. He screams foulmouthed abuse
at the woman. A man leaps on to the truck and punches and kicks
him furiously. He goes on shouting.
("Notebook," Box 33, 9 February 1976)

The episode that Coetzee was imagining in rough outline here

fleshed out in the novel, and it is perhaps fitting that the screenpla
an opportunity to reinstate the missing scene:

131. EXT. AREA IN FRONT OF FARMHOUSE. DAY.

A cart is approaching the farmhouse, drawn by two horses.

In the cart, behind the driver, standing, his hands tied to the
rails at either side, is Hendrik. His attitude is defiant.

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 29

The cart is accompanied by men on horseback with rifles,

including the two men who have earlier visited the farm.

The cart sweeps around and pulls up facing the way it came.
During this process Hendrik stumbles but regains his
balance.

132. EXT. MAGDA'S POINT OF VIEW, IN FRONT OF THE

FARMHOUSE. DAY.

Magda hurries down the steps towards the cart. It is now

apparent that there is a man behind her directing her steps.
From a short distance away Magda is forced to confront
Hendrik.

They exchange looks. Then Magda drops her gaze, half

turns to the man behind her, and nods.

The man makes a gesture. At once the driver whips up the

horses, the accompanying horsemen turn.

Hendrik turns to shout something back to Magda, but the

word does not come. He is jerked from his feet. The cart
drives off in a cloud of dust.

{Two Screenplays 87-88)

The screenplay thus gave Coetzee the opportunity to use scenes that we
originally intended for inclusion in the novel.
Furthermore, the complex relationship between the novel and t
screenplay also needs to take into account the effect of and on Coe
subsequent fictions. Waiting for the Barbarians had by this time b
written and published, and Coetzee was busy writing Life & Time
Michael K during the time that the screenplay took shape. Both these t
were now possibly influencing the 're-take' of the earlier novel in a com
form of forward-looking retrospection. In a notebook entry date
December 1980, we can clearly see that In the Heart of the Country wa
Coetzee's mind during the drafting process of Life & Times of Michael
was the case with the slide projector/tape-recorder idea referred to ear
Coetzee was again searching for a mode of composition that would
discontinuous episode narration; a mode of representation that may
been suggested by the concurrent composition of the screenplay:

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30 HERMANN WITTENBERG

Formal remedy: to produce a text in blocks, somewhat like In the

Heart [. . .] but more radical. Think for the moment of a pictorial
text, an exposition in which one moves along a wall from one
block to the next. The order of blocks might as well be the order
of composition as any other order.
(HRC, Box 33)

In a possible reversal of influence, it seems likely that the writing

screenplay had an impact on the novel, affecting Coetzee's sty
possibly even the final choice of Michael K's destination. Orig
Michael had been attempting to reach the village of Genadendal
southern Cape, but both texts eventually came to share a more auster
setting.14
It is clear that Coetzee's relationship to film is a complex one and that
his exploration of cinematic modes of writing is not limited to the two
screenplay versions of his novels In the Heart of the Country and Waiting
for the Barbarians. Film is also, as we have seen, a major influence on the
prose forms, particularly In the Heart of the Country, but not only this novel.
In an early interview with Coetzee, Peter Temple claimed that the debut
novel Dusklands had an overtly filmic style:

The product is lucid, compelling, intensely graphic prose. His

images linger, his scenes have a frozen, cinematic quality. He has
the ability to halt his story, as it were, in mid-frame, to zoom the
narrative in from a great height to capture and hold the single
moment.

(Temple 3)

The fact that Coetzee wrote screenplays is perhaps not altogether surprising,
given his interest in the medium and the incorporation of cinematic devices
in his novels. Although he was working in a new medium very distinct from
the prose forms which he had mastered so successfully, Coetzee's
screenplays were able to draw from a cinematic style that was already
embedded in his books. Although neither of the film projects was realised,
the two screenplays are nevertheless fascinating experiments in adaptation
that show Coetzee grappling with the demands of cinema, and thinking
through the relationship between text and image.

NOTES

1. Permission to cite from the screenplay and correspondence was kindly given
by J.M. Coetzee and the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin
TTie support of the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Research Fund of
the University of the Western Cape is gratefully acknowledged. I am especially

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 GODARD IN THE KAROO 31

grateful to the assistance of the archival staff at the National Engli

Museum in Grahamstown and at the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin.
2. The state of English-language literature in South Africa at the time w
moribund, with an aesthetic vocabulary that went little beyond liberal rea
on the one hand, and social realist struggle agit-prop on the other. F
discussion, see David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the
Writing, pp. 30-33.
3. Coetzee's screenplay of In the Heart of the Country, together w
screenplay of Waiting for the Barbarians (1995) is being published by
under the title Two Screenplays (forthcoming, 2014). See my "Introduc
more detailed discussion of the history of these texts, and the multiple
make them into films.
4. For ease of reference, the archival source, the Harry Ransom
abbreviated as HRC.
5. Coetzee's strategy is similar to a mode employed embryonically already in
Dusklands (1974), where one of the characters, Klawer, dies twice. Pressed to
explain by his editor, Coetzee suggested that the person relating the "The Narrative
of Jacobus Coetzee" "has been caught up with the edges of revision
showing" (National English Literary Museum, letter by J.M. Coetzee to Peter
Randall, 22 February 1974).
6. When Coetzee was beginning to write his second novel, he started keeping
private notebooks in which he recorded personal reflections, ideas for writing,
quotations and, most importantly, commentary on the creative project he was
engaged in at the time, sketching out possible plot outlines and giving much thought
to character development. The notebooks offer a remarkable insight into Coetzee's
thinking as his fictions unfolded, giving details of the ideas that influenced his
books, and the complex evolution of his stories. Read together with the multiple
manuscript versions of the novels, the notebooks constitute an important paratextual
resource.

7. Other titles proposed were "Ordentlike Mense," "In the Desert"

the Desert," before "In the Heart of the Country" was finally set
October 1975 (draft manuscript of In the Heart of the Country, Coet
Box 3, HRC).
8. The importance of the section breaks to the overall conception o
also evident in the publishing history of the Afrikaans-dialogue ver
Press in 1978. The typesetter had summarily deleted all the numbers
text to a work of continuous prose. Coetzee was incensed when he re
proofs, demanding the reinstatement of the numbers. For a more det
of the episode, see my article, "The Taint of the Censor: J.M. Co
Making of In the Heart of the Country."
9.1 am indebted for this insight to Iona Gilburt.
10. All references to KP indicate the Kannemeyer Papers, recently
NELM. In pursuance of his biographical project, Kannemeyer had ass
volume of material, sourced from Coetzee's private papers and public

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32 HERMANN WITTENBERG

11. See also Coetzee's letter to Levinson, reproduced in Kannemeyer (3

which covers these debates in much the same terms.
12. In this fairly new branch of cultural studies that has emerged in the nexus of
film theory and literary criticism, the commonly posited ideal of fidelity to the
source text is problematised. In adaptation theory, fidelity is generally regarded with
suspicion as a simplistic and uncritical way of understanding the complex
relationship between text and film. Robert Stam, for example, critiques "fidelity
criticism's discourse of loss" (20). Brian McFarlane's Novel to Film: An
Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996) is an important early study. See also
Kamilla Elliot's complex and rich contribution to the field, Rethinking the Novel/
Film Debate (2003). Adaptation studies had not yet emerged as a distinct field of
academic enquiry at the time that Coetzee was writing the screenplay.
13. "In the Heart of the Country," unrealised screenplay, undated, container 4.9,
HRC.
14. The intersection between Coetzee's other novels and the screenplays is a
potentially fascinating area of study. One of the early manuscript versions of Life &
Times of Michael K employs screenplay conventions, showing the influence of the In
the Heart of the Country film version. The texts were written concurrently. See my
forthcoming paper, "Cinematic Modes in Life & Times of Michael K," for more
detailed discussion.

WORKS CITED

Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkele
of California P, 1993.
Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 198
. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambrid
MA: Harvard UP, 1992.
. "Homage." The Threepenny Review 53 (1993): 5-7.
. Youth. London: Seeker & Warburg, 2002.
. Two Screenplays. Ed. Hermann Wittenberg. Cape Town: U of Cape Tow
P, 2014.
. "In the Heart of the Country." Unrealised screenplay. Austin, University
Texas, Harry Ransom Centre: Box 4, undated.
"In the Heart of the Country," unrealised screenplay. Grahamstown
National English Literary Museum, undated.
Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven: Yale
1979.
Dovey, Teresa, and Lindiwe Dovey. "Coetzee on Film." J.M. Coetzee's Austeri
Ed. G. Bradshaw and M. Neill. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010
57-78.
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
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Kannemeyer Papers. National English Literary Museum. Grahamstown.

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Kannemeyer, J. C. J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Johannesburg: Jo

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McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation.

Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.
Scott, Joanna. "Voice and Trajectory: An Interview with J.M. Coetzee." Salmagundi
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Temple, Peter. "J. M. Coetzee: Major Talent on S African Literary Scene." The
Argus, Literary Review Supplement, 19 June 1974: 3.
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