Mini Coetzee1

Rhodes University
Language and Identity in the Narrative of J. M. Coetzee

Author(s): Michela Canepari-Labib
Source: English in Africa, Vol. 27, No. 1 (May, 2000), pp. 105-130
Published by: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University
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Language and Identity in the Narrative
of J. M. Coetzee
Michela Canepari-Labib
In reading any of the novels J. M. Coetzee has produced over the last
twenty-five years, one is struck by the prominence in these works of
issues relating to language and the way language affects the human mind.
Although each novel has unique characteristics, in all of his texts the
author sets out to investigate the role language plays in the constitution of
identity (whether of an individual, a nation or a race).
Because of the centrality this aspect assumes in Coetzee's work, my
article centres on the way each novel stages the confrontation between the
"I," the "You"and the "Other"1- the basis of the achievement of iden-
tity. As Teresa Dovey suggested in 1988, Coetzee seems to follow Lacan
and the general philosophy of the genesis of the individual as a human
being he developed by applying the linguistic models elaborated by struc-
turalism to the data of psychoanalysis, in particularto Freud's theory of
the unconscious.
In Lacan's theory not only is the unconscious assimilated in its struc-
ture to language, but it is also created by language, just as "human being"
as such is only born in and because of language. For Lacan it is in fact
only when the individual enters into the Symbolic Orderof language that
s/he can perceive him / herself as a distinct individuality and, by being
provided with the grammaticalcategories of the personal pronouns which
offer a reference for his / her identity, can become a social human being
as opposed to the biological being s/he was born as. Before the advent of
language, the infant subject is trapped in what Lacan calls the Mirror
Phase (during which the child merges and identifies with the Other in an
immediate, non-distanced dual relationship and, by falsely recognising
Englishin Africa27 No. 1 (May2000)

106 MICHELA CANEPARI-LABIB
him / herself in what is nothing more than a reflection, first articulatesthe

T' in the realm of alienation), and it is only throughthe insertion of a third
term (the Oedipal father who, representingthe Law, intervenes in the dual,
unmediated relationship of mother and child) that the child can achieve
subjectivity.
As I will argue below, in all of his novels Coetzee stages precisely the
struggle which each individual (just like the Oedipal father who must have
his language recognised as the lawful language of authority),enacts in the
attempt to be recognised by Others and achieve an identity. Clearly, for
reasons of space I cannot grant each novel the attention it deserves, but
nonetheless I hope that this article will offer some sense of the complexity
and multiplicity of Coetzee's work. As I hope will be clear throughout,
Coetzee's novels can in fact be read in many different ways, and because
their implications on political, linguistic and philosophical levels seem
endless, they will reveal different meanings according to the perspective
the readeradopts. For this reason, the line of analysis I adopt in this article
is only one amongst many possible, and by tackling some of the concerns
the authorposits as central in all his work, not only does my paperempha-
sise the importanceof the novels' South African context, but it also under-
lines that, due to the allegorical and ambiguous nature of Coetzee's
fiction, his novels could and should be placed within a larger discourse
which transcendsapartheid South Africa.
In fact, not only should his novels be considered as articulatinga more
general investigation of colonialism, the practice of racial discrimination
and the relationship of mastery and servitude in different political, histor-
ical and social contexts, but they should also be regarded as explorations
of the human psyche, in particularof the impact that language has on it
and the way communication and identity are or are not achieved by human
beings. In Coetzee's work, the two aspects actually go hand in hand, and
in the same way that his charactersact as a mirrorof South Africa, his dis-
cussion of colonial practices can be read as a magnification of a particular
character's experience. Consequently, microcosm and macrocosm pene-
trateone anotherand, as I will discuss later, through the continuous shifts
from one to the other Coetzee seems to suggest that if these two spheres
can actually be equated, it is because the mechanisms which shape and
determine them are identical.

THE NARRATIVE OF J. M. COETZEE 107
Replicas of Empire: the Repetition of History

When Coetzee published his first novel in 1974, the war in Vietnam was
coming to an end (the final withdrawal of US troops would be completed
in 1975), and apartheidSouth Africa was witnessing an increase in state
violence and censorship which, for example, in 1973 resulted in the ban-
ishment of Stephen Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement.2
However, although in "The Vietnam Project" (the first novella in Dusk-
lands) Coetzee refers to the USA of the Vietnam years, he sets "The Nar-
rative of Jacobus Coetzee" in eighteenth-century South Africa, and it is
precisely in the differences between the spatial and temporal settings of
the two novellas that one of the notions that constantly recurs in Coetzee's
fiction finds a voice.
While trying to find in his past an explanation for his present condition
and psychotic behaviour (made obvious by his attempted murder of his
son and his call for a total annihilationof Vietnam and its inhabitants), the
protagonist of the first novella creates, in fact, "The Narrative of Jacobus
Coetzee," thus ascribing the "fault" with which he believes his life coin-
cides, not only to his upbringing and, as Freud would have it, to his rela-
tionship with the mother figure we find mentioned in the last paragraphs
of the novella, but also to the Coloniser mentality which, Coetzee seems
to suggest in this text, has remainedunchangedsince the eighteenth century.
In particular- and this is evident in his very first novel - Coetzee
seems to hold language (specifically the scientific language of the mathe-
matical formulae used by Eugene Dawn in "The Vietnam Project,"and the
language of colonialist propagandainvoked by Jacobus in "The Narrative
of Jacobus Coetzee") responsible not only for the concealment of the
horrors perpetrated,but also, and more importantly,for their very perpe-
tration. As Said acknowledges (1993, 241), in fact, culture not only
predisposes, but actively prepares one society for the domination of
another.Thus, it was through the exploitation of culture and the language
of propagandathat, despite their historical, political and economic differ-
ences, regimes like apartheid,Fascism and Nazism were able to impose
their myths and mobilise the masses. It is precisely this power inherent in
all language that, beginning with his first novel (in which he focuses on
the politics of cultural domination in eighteenth-century South Africa and
the USA of the Vietnamese war), Coetzee denounces, suggesting that
when this language is spoken by an entire class, country, or race, it gives
rise to the concrete horrorshumanity has witnessed throughout history.

CANEPARI-LABIB
108 MICHELA
Furthermore,as critics such as Michael Valdez Moses have argued,

beginning with Waiting for the Barbarians Coetzee more explicitly
explores the relationship between state oppression and the language that,
throughtorture,the systems of various countries write on the body of their
victims. In his study on the birthof the prison, Foucault writes that torture
is a form of writing the soulhood on the body throughpain (1975, 34), and
by leaving the individual with just an injured body (the material body
Descartes identified with the primaryOther), it deprives the person of the
"essence of humanity,"thus creating his / her Otherness and turning full
human beings into the "sub-humans"the systems have been waiting for.
As Coetzee indicates in Waitingfor the Barbarians, Foe and Age of Iron
(where he exposes the perverse voyeurism and fascination with violence
that he recognises in each person, and implies that everybody, to a greater
or lesser extent, makes a coercive use of language), it is precisely this
ability and tendency to exploit the power inherent in all language that
characteriseshuman beings as such.
Centralhere is the notion of historical corso and ricorso Vico proposed
in 1725, which Coetzee suggests regulates the history of humanity. It is
precisely to develop his investigation of this notion that Coetzee exploits
the relationshipbetween the two novellas of Dusklands, the discrepancies
between the narrativeproduced by the historical characterJacobus Coetsé
(which, edited by Mossop in 1935, clearly works as the intertextof Dusk-
land's second novella),3 and "The Narrrativeof Jacobus Coetzee," and the
allegorical nature of Waitingfor the Barbarians, whose intertext (the
poem "Waitingfor the Barbarians"by the Greek Cavafy) refers the reader
back to the Roman Empire.
Despite the historical contextualisation Coetzee gives to Dusklands,
his representationof the historical ricorso in this as well as in his more
allegorical novels seems to suggest that, for him, if history can and does
repeat itself, it is because the processes involved are universal. As I have
argued above, Coetzee acknowledges in fact the alienation which, in
Lacan's theory, is provoked by language. He follows Lacan's structuralist
theory of the birthof the individual as a human being (according to which
the language which makes a biological being into a human being is always
a language of authority intrinsically disposed to coercion and colonisa-
tion), and in his novels he seems to illustrate the Lacanian notion that -
because the individual is subjected to the Other, because s/he has to
fashion him / herself with reference to and (owing to the Oedipal drama)
in rivalry with the Other, and because s/he has to wait for the Other's

OFJ. M. COETZEE109
THENARRATIVE
recognition in order to posit him / herself as a subjectivity - every human

discourse fundamentally derives from a demand for recognition by the
Other, and therefore tends towards aggression and coercion.
When analysing his fiction we obviously cannot deny that Coetzee
often centres his novels on southern African circumstances. His autobio-
graphical novel Boyhood: A Memoir, for example, vividly recreates the
way in which, as a boy, he experienced the South Africa of half a century
ago, with all its terrors,rules, conflicts and prejudices.4After having dealt
with the origins of Afrikaner society through the adventures of Jacobus
Coetzee in the second novella of Dusklands, in In the Heart of the Country
he develops the theme of the formation of Afrikaner national identity
through the search for personal identity enacted by Magda, culminating,
in Waitingfor the Barbarians, with an analysis of the practice of torture
which, in spite of the allegoricalnatureof this novel (which activates refer-
ences to othercolonial situations)clearly stems fromthe unparalleledviolence
between the state securityforces and sections of the black townships South
Africa witnessed in the years immediately priorto the novel's publication.5
Furthermore, in both of the novels that followed, Life and Times of
Michael and Age of Iron, Coetzee no longer sets his novels in a nowhere
/ anywhere land, apartfrom time and space, but explicitly refers to South
Africa,6 depicting his vision of the immediate future as conditioned by the
broaderpolitical events occurring between 1978 and the end of the 1980s,
and forcefully exposing the corruption of state power and the militarisa-
tion of the country (see for example the references made in both novels to
the imposition of curfew, the organisation of roadblocks, the constant
fighting and so on). Foe (which mainly focuses on problems of intertex-
tuality and metafictionality) and The Master of Petersburg (set in Russia
at the end of the nineteenth century) representpartial exceptions. Yet, we
can see how in the former the interlocking thematics of the attempted
colonisation of Friday by Susan and Mr Foe - together with the correl-
ative question of power (that is the exposure of the liberal coloniser's
racist and paternalistic attitudes towards the "savage" and his muteness,
on which the novel focuses) - closely associates the novel with the cir-
cumstances of the South African blacks, urgently attempting to give them
a voice in a period when they seemed to have lost all power over their
lives and souls. Similarly, in the latter the fight against the central gov-
ernment enacted by the anarchist-nihilistNechaev parallels South African
reality and the blacks' opposition to the apartheid policy of racial dis-
crimination.

1 10 MICHELA CANEPARI-LABIB
However, although the author has set his novels explicitly in contem-
porary South Africa, taken as a whole, his works represent an attempt to
formulate more general propositions about human reality which transcend
their South African settings and could be considered as a narrativeinves-
tigation of the same problematics that have been the focus of much theo-
retical discussion (structuralistand post-structuralistin particular)during
the last decades.7 Indeed, because what is at stake in Coetzee's novels is
the will to power inherent in any use of language, as well as the impact
that language has on any individual's mind and the process throughwhich
the identity of any individual is constituted, his novels can be read as a
powerful and incisive statement about human nature and the way it is
determined and moulded by language.
Consequently, even the most metafictional and self-reflexive aspect of
Coetzee's novels, together with any reference to apartheidSouth Africa,
must be placed in a larger discourse, in so far as the self-reflexivity of the
novels and the questions of colonialism they raise must also be seen as a
broadermeditation on humanity,in particularon the way communication
and identity are or are not achieved by human beings.
Shadows of the Self: The Loss of Identity through Language
Coetzee deals with the formation of identity perhaps most explicitly in

Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country and Waitingfor the Barbarians,
where either single individuals or entire empires try to achieve recognition
from the Other. In spite of this, though, this theme is present in all his
novels, and the way in which Coetzee approaches this subject strongly
suggests that he follows the structuralists and the post-structuralistsin
their belief that identity is achieved through language and throughthe con-
frontationof the subject with the Other, and that the reality as we know it
is actually a linguistic construct. Although Coetzee occasionally assumes
more personal positions and, as I will discuss, proposes variations on
Lacan's theory, he nonetheless seems to accept both structuralism'sfun-
damental assertion that any humanphenomenon is the productof a system
of conventions and that the meanings we give to the world are historically
and socially determined(which consequently reveals whatever is taken as
natural- for example the blacks' inferiority in apartheidSouth Africa -
to be a construction of language), and post-structuralism'sinsistence on
the rhetoricity of reality, its rejection of all dogmatism, and its continuous
questioning of the naturalnessof our received conceptions of truth.

OFJ. M. COETZEE111
THENARRATIVE
In particular, following Lacan, Coetzee openly acknowledges the

alienation provoked by language and the necessary distance language
interposes between reality and its linguistic substitution. Although this
aspect is explicitly tackled in In the Heart of the Country - where, for
example, the protagonist states "Wordsalienate. Language is no medium
for desire .... It is only by alienating the desired that language masters
it." (26) and "Pooh! It is a world of words that creates a world of things.
Pah!" (134) - it is present in all of his novels.8 Throughout his oeuvre,
Coetzee, recognising that the split between signifier and signified will
never be overcome, expresses his suspicion of all languages and his
Utopianlonging for "... a naturalor Adamic language ... in which there
is no split between signifier and signified, and things are their names"
(1988,9).
In spite of the prominence given to the search for such ideal and ide-
alistic language, however,9 Coetzee acknowledges the fact that it is only
through the alienating language human beings have at their disposal that
the identity of any individual (and of any nation) can be constructed, as it
is only throughentrance into the Symbolic Orderof language that the sub-
ject can posit him / herself as an "I" in relation to the "You" and the
"Other"s/he is surrounded by, thus acquiring his / her role as a member
of the society to which s/he belongs. By suggesting, as he does in Dusk-
lands in particular,that the rejection of language as a representativeof the
Law can only lead to a complete withdrawal from human reality and the
elimination of any link with that reality (represented for example in "The
Vietnam Project" by Eugene Dawn's attempted murder of his son, the
reminder of his social and family life), Coetzee acknowledges the funda-
mental function that language performs in the constitution of human
society.
While accepting the crucial role language plays in the institution of
human society and in the "humanisation"of the biological being every
individual was born as, Coetzee also emphasises that, through the
exploitation of language, in particularthe will to power that distinguishes
language, a full human being can be deprived of his / her "humanity"and
turned into a sub-human Other. In all of his novels, he suggests that the
consequences of this power of language can be witnessed in any situation
where totalitarian and colonial systems are involved. From the Roman
Empire and other oppressive systems such as Fascism and Nazism,
implicitly invoked by the allegorical natureof Waitingfor the Barbarians,
to the USA of the Vietnam war representedin "The Vietnam Project," and

from the South Africa of the segregation and apartheidperiods described

in the second novella of Dusklands and subsequent novels10to the Tsarist
Russia of 1869 reproduced in The Master of Petersburg, the "I" of the
coloniser countries turns to these inferior Others in order to be recognised
as master and - once he has achieved the "superior"identity which, he
believes, the position of mastery entails - to assure his own survival.
It is precisely because this survival is what human beings naturally
aspire to, that Coetzee's works transcend the case of a particulartotali-
tarian system such as apartheid.As Barthes stated, every use of language
is the expression of a will to power, an act of propagandaand an attempt
at colonisation (1994a, 994, 1508). Furthermore,because for Lacan iden-
tity is achieved in and through language, it is reduced to a linguistic con-
struction which can be easily deconstructed and re-constructedaccording
to every speech act the individual performs or is subjected to. Conse-
quently, the war of languages Barthes wrote about in 1973 can be consid-
ered as equivalent to the war of (individual, national or racial)
identities we witness in everyday life and, on a macroscopic level, in
colonial situations.
In the attemptto achieve an identity, everybody makes use of lan-
guage a more or less coercive manner, and, as Coetzee submits in his
in
novels, this makes everybody at least partially guilty of the consequences
to which this process leads in oppressive regimes. In Dusklands, for
example, he strongly suggests that everybody shares the responsibility for
the suffering of the victims of colonisation: the sign "X" with which
Jacobus signs his official deposition, in fact, surely evidence that he him-
self could not write, not only points to the existence of different authorsof
this text (thus giving rise to issues of authority) but, because "X" is a sign
which can be infinitely imitated and iterated, it alludes to the responsi-
bility which, the author suggests, the entire Western world is required to
share. Furthermore, in Waitingfor the Barbarians, Life and Times of
Michael and Foe, Coetzee suggests that everybody who is responsible,
in one way or another,for turning a person into the different and inferior
Other- for example by continuing to perceive him / her as different and
by concentrating on his / her deformity - is as much to blame for the
racist policies adopted by various systems as those who, although not
actively taking part in the oppression of the victims, help the system to
perpetrateits violence, either by passively accepting it, or, like Mrs Curren
in Coetzee's Age of Iron, by helping to create the conditions in which it
became possible.11

VEOFJ. M. COETZEE113
THENARRATI
As Coetzee suggests in his autobiographicalnovel, this is why in those

societies where the will to power of languageis made concretein the violence
perpetrated by the system, values get reversed,12love becomes itself a
"furtheract of violence" (Laing 1967, 62), and is ". . . turned inside out
like a glove to reveal its ugly stitching" (Coetzee 1994, 125). This is also
the reason why Coetzee seems to suggest that the responsibility for the
atrocities committed in colonial situations must be partially shared by the
liberal humanist, of whom the magistrate in Waitingfor the Barbarians,
Susan in Foe and Mrs Curren in Age of Iron stand as examples.
Coetzee seems to follow Fanon when he claims that if the main effect
of colonialism is to dehumanise the native, then this process finds its jus-
tification precisely in humanism's assumption of a "universal man" (the
coherent "I" structuralismunveiled as a product of language), which nec-
essarily produces the "non-human"Other against which "Man" may be
defined. Because to exist means to be called into being in relation to an
Other, in the struggle for recognition s/he enacts, the individual (and, on a
macroscopic level, each system) demands and desires the Other and its
consideration, and because the individual searches for identity in the place
of the Other, this very identity (understood as the Cartesian notion of an
intrinsic and fixed identity) is negated. As Hegel teaches, the Master
always needs a Servant in order to be recognised as Master, and it is
because of this that the various systems must turn all others into the Other,
the one who can endorse their position and acknowledge their language as
dominant.
However, even the positing of an enemy (which, especially when the
enemy chosen is weak and powerless, gives the impression of making the
individual / system strong and enables them to achieve what Western
tradition has defined as identity),13 only leads to a realisation of social
sovereignty in the order of Otherness. On the one hand, then, oppressive
regimes are frightened by anyone who is different because these elements
are, they believe, more difficult to control (hence the systems' tendency to
shelter within the language they recognise as theirs, fighting against all
outsiders and turning them into the Others, the carriersof other models of
intelligibility which must be assumed to be trying as hard to impose their
own language).14Yet, on the other hand, as Coetzee exemplifies in his
novels, they need these different elements in order to have their mastery,
their identity and their very existence recognised.
For example, both protagonists of the two novellas constituting Dusk-
lands have an extremely contradictory relationship with the natives, as

they both share irreconcilable feelings of love and hatred towards the
"savages." Unconsciously, both Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee
would like to be the "savages" themselves,15yet on a conscious level they
totally reject this desired penetration by, and contiguity with, the aborig-
ines. In their ontological search for identity, Coetzee's charactersare actu-
ally compelled to eliminate the natives: by killing them, they draw a
precise distinction between themselves and the natives, and thus obtain
evidence of their "being" which, by surviving the death of the "savages,"
can be perceived as an independent reality and therefore provides them
with a sense of identity.16
In spite of their conscious contempt, though, both protagonists have a
secret, romantic and mythicised vision of the natives,17 by whom they
would like to be accepted and recognised,18and with whom they would
like to live in what they perceive as an Eden. Yet, they realise the impos-
sibility of gaining access to "Paradise":they have both seen the "savages"
die and, as Eugene Dawn remarks in "The Vietnam Project," their death
"provedto our sad selves that they were not the dark-eyed gods who walk
our dreams"(1974, 18). Consequently, recognising that the natives were
not the semi-gods they were seeking, they were not the "noble savages"
they had hoped for, both Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee blame them
for their loss of Paradise and, now driven merely by a hatred grown "out
of broken hopes" (17), they long to kill them, in so far as it is only through
a purgatoryof violence that, from the protagonists' perverse perspective,
Paradise might be re-attained.
Similarly, in In the Heart of the Country Magda, the Afrikaner land-
holder, begs for the recognition of her black servants, and throughoutthe
novel she lures them into acknowledging her existence as an individual
being; in Waitingfor the Barbarians the magistrate's need for the girl's
recognition is paralleled by the Empire's need for the Barbarians'
acknowledgement of its mastery, and in both Life and Timesof Michael
and Foe, Michael and Friday are perceived as the Others by the medical
officer and Susan respectively, who therefore turn to them in order to
obtain recognition and achieve the identity that supposedly follows.
In his novels, however, Coetzee exposes the "identity" the individual
may reach by his / her confrontation with the Other as simply a
metaphoric substitution for what the Western philosophical traditionhas
accustomed us to think of as the individual's "real" and "fundamental"
identity, and which Coetzee shows as non-existent. As a consequence of
the very natureof language, which replaces the real thing with a linguistic

THE N ARRÄTIVE OF J. M. COETZEE 1 15
sign, any identity achieved can in fact only be a fake, a pale shadow and
a representation. As a consequence, Coetzee strongly suggests that the
Other,just like the "I," simply corresponds to a dialectical position con-
structed by the language of authority spoken by the system, and it is pre-
cisely against this that some of his characters consciously try to rebel, not
only attempting to disrupt the language of authority they have to submit
to, but also, and more fundamentally, trying to evade language as such,
thus overcoming the split between signified and signifier.
For example, Eugene Dawn in Dusklands, the barbariangirl in Waiting
for the Barbarians, Michael in Life and Times of Michael K, Friday in Foe
and Mr Vercueil in Age of Iron all desperately try to re-appropriatetheir
substantialand material body.19Accordingly, these texts stage the struggle
of these characters against language and their rejection of the imposition
of a precise identity / categorisation.
A Case History: Magda's Rebellion against Language in In the

Heart of the Country
Although most of Coetzee's characters rebel, in one way or another,

against language, this aspect is most forcefully expressed in In the Heart
of the Country.
Throughout In the Heart of the Country we witness Magda's attempts
to communicate with those around her (first her father and then the two
black servants Hendrik and Klein-Anna) and her endeavours to obtain
recognition from them. In spite of her efforts, every attempt fails: her
father will remain a "silent father"(21) and Klein-Anna will never be able
to address Magda by her name (102). (By perceiving Magda only as her
mistress, she ". . . recognizes Magda only from her dependent position as
servant, which" - as Dovey acknowledges - "is, in Hegelian terms, no
recognition at all" (1988, 172) ). Furthermore, Hendrik, in spite of his
sexual encounters with the protagonist, will never speak to her (1 12).20
Magda desperately tries to be included and named as a "You" in the
Other's discourse, as from this, she believes, a first form of identity would
follow (as a daughter and, as explained below, as a lover in relation to her
father, and as a lover, a woman and a mistress in relation to the two ser-
vants). In fact, although it is virtually impossible for the reader to decide
what actually happens to Magda's father, since the various descriptions of
his death all contradict one another,21the very fact that Magda imagines

116 MICHELACANEPARI-LABIB
killing her father not only represents her attempt to subvert the language
of authority and the Law for which he stands, but also demonstrates,
according to Freud's analysis of neuroses, her incestuous desires for
him.22 It is therefore the need to be loved and included in her father's dis-
course, together with her rage at what she perceives as her father's attempt
to exclude her from his world (35) that, if we are to believe Magda and
take one of her versions of her father's killing as real, lead her to an
extreme and desperate attempt to gain the man's love and recognition:
Do you not see that it is only despair, love and despair, that
makes me talk this way? Speak to me! Do I have to call on
you in words of blood to make you speak? What horrorsmore
do you demand of me? Must I carve out my beseechings with
a knife on your flesh? (71/2)
Despite the need for communication, however, Magda also tries to reject
and escape from language completely. Hence, the reader is confronted
with an extremely contradictory character who would like to achieve a
position in the Symbolic Order, yet simultaneously tries to overcome lan-
guage, to go beyond it, in order to reach a state of "pure being" in which
she would be only a signifier and not a signified, and where she would
exist in her materiality, without necessarily having to assume a meaning.
Realising that "Words alienate" (26), Magda actually enacts a struggle
against language itself - the language that, in Lacanian philosophy, is the
primal factor of alienation and repression, that which, being a means of
thought, consciousness and reflection, poses a distance between the mind
and the lived experience - and tries to re-appropriate her essence, the
substance that she lost when she entered language, fighting the inauthen-
ticity of her life, her alienation from the real experience and the mediation
language provides:
I for one do not wish to be at the centre of the world, I wish

only to be at home in the world as the merest beast is at home.
Much, much less than all would satisfy me: to begin with, a life
unmediated by words: these stones, these bushes, this sky
experienced and known without question; and a quiet returnto
the dust. (135)
Magda's attempt to attain a life "unmediated by words" and her rejec-

tion of language (a language which, because it is always identified with

OFJ. M. COETZEE117
THENARRATIVE
the language of authority that the father, as a representative of the Law,

speaks, and hence becomes a vehicle of the Law), make the sexual desires
Magda voices in the text crucial.
Realising that she will never obtain real communication with other
human beings through the medium of language, Magda tries to go beyond
its mediations by attempting to achieve a "non-verbal"dialogue between
"substances" through sex (an intimate contact between real bodies,
unmediated by words, is, she thinks, the only possibility of overcoming
language). At the same time, the fact that Magda's sexual desires are
directed towards her father, Klein-Anna and Hendrik,23 becomes
extremely relevant to her struggle against the language of authority,as in
all these cases she is trying to overcome a taboo (something which is pro-
hibited and, more importantly,that cannot be spoken). Incest is recognised
as the oldest and most universal taboo in human society (see for example
Freud, 1912/3, and Lévi-Strauss, 1949); sexual relations between women
have long been judged unnaturaland were numbered by Freud among the
"sexual aberrations"he described (Freud 1905, 45); and, this being South
Africa, any relationship between a white woman and a Hottentot would be
seen as despicable by the society Magda belongs to, and would actually
be illegal in the apartheidyears.24
What Magda is trying to overcome, therefore, is the Law in its wider
meaning: it is the law of the Oedipal father who, with "his eternal NO"
(16), denies union with the daughter; the Law of the White / Coloniser
father who imposes his rules on the land and his servants. Above all, it is
the Law of the Symbolic order, of Culture, of Language, the discourse
which Althusser terms "the absolute precondition of any other discourse"
(1971, 196), that from which all other representationsof the Law derive.
Magda's attempts to overcome the Law and her wish for a regression
to the pre-linguistic stage of the baby's "long aaa" (84) and, going even
further, to the animal state (89), therefore stand for her wish to reach a
state of "pure being", the "lost world" (7) she is trying to attain or, more
precisely, re-attain. Here I would like to emphasise the importance of this
"re,"as this distinction indicates how Coetzee, contraryto what Dovey sug-
gested in 1988, stages a variantof the Lacanian theory of the unconscious.
Although Magda's statement "I was born into a language of hierarchy,
of distance and perspective" (91) suggests that she had entered (if only in
a passive way) her father's language first, her contradictory initial decla-
ration that she was born into the language of the servants and that she had
gained access to her father's language only later (6) denies the coincidence

of Coetzee's text and Lacan's "primalrepression," because the repression

intervenedonly when she entered her father's language of authority.
According to her account, during her infancy and childhood Magda
experienced the idyll of the community life of the servants, sharing their
culture and absorbing their language (6). Later (or, perhaps,concurrently),
however, she was obliged to take upon herself the cultural code of her
father and the corresponding language, thus creating the irreparable
schism between the two societies (and languages) she might have been
simultaneously (if only passively) born into. Her father's language of
authorityclashes in a traumatic way with the language of her childhood
- that which, being closer to what Magda romantically considers as the
real essence of things, remained in her unconscious as a "lost world," the
lost Paradise to which she tries to regain access - thus provoking the
repression of the latter and obliging her to live in what has now become
her secondary language, to which she is assigned in terms of culture, class
and race.
We can therefore see how the mechanism proposed by Coetzee repre-
sents a variant of the one proposed by Lacan, which is here split in two:
the first language of the servants (perceived by Magda as a "natural"lan-
guage in which the gap between signified and signifier is filled) is now
repressed, together with the primary experience, while the second lan-
guage (her father's) becomes the language of alienation and of the oblig-
atory "I"Magda is required to assume.
Having experienced the inadequacy of her father's language, and
having only two languages at her disposal, after her father's death Magda
tries to recover that of the servants, thereby abandoning her position of
mastery and its corresponding language. In spite of her attempts, though,
she is not able to restore the old Eden: Hendrik now assumes the position
of mastery,and as a consequence Magda, instead of experiencing the com-
munal life of her childhood, finds herself in the same submissive position
she already had to suffer because of her father. Not only this, but by
having Magda's attempts at communication fail also when these efforts
are directed towards both her father and Klein-Anna, Coetzee seems to
suggest that failure at communication constitutes a general human condi-
tion as such, independent of questions of racial and sexual difference. This
is why Magda's subsequent wish to abandon language altogetherremains
equally unfulfilled: since it is only with the advent of language that
humanity can begin, being human is in fact to be a user of language and,
as such, to be marked by alienation and mediation.

THE NARRATIVEOF J. M. COETZEE 119
Coetzee's view, then, seems completely pessimistic. Notwithstanding

Magda's various efforts (last of all her creation of the sky-gods, mythical
figures with whom she attempts to communicate in the last pages of the
novel), what is left in the end is just a "stony language." So, despite her
heroic and courageous resistance against the Law, Magda can finally only
retire to the silence that remains. It should, however, be noted that,
although at the end of the novel language loses its meaning for her, in that
it does not provide her with an adequate means of communication and,
consequently, an identity, she is nonetheless able to survive. She seems to
have got over her "frenzy"and to have found peace. Even though Coetzee
refuses to tell the reader whether this peace is due to the imminent
approach of death or to a more mature acceptance of her condition, the
protagonist appears in any event to have achieved a reconciliation of the
opposites. She has accepted her psychologically fragmented and fragmen-
tary life, taking upon herself the impossibility of language and defining
herself simply as an "inexplicable enigma" (138).
Textual and Political Resistance
The revolt against language enacted by Coetzee's characters, of which

Magda's case is an extreme example, finally coincides with the refusal of
both the fixed identity that language imposes upon the individual and of
the fixed and true meaning that supposedly lies at the heart of every nar-
rative, that is, the "elementary structure of signification" Greimas
described in 1966.25 It is precisely this notion that Coetzee has tried,
throughout his career as a writer, to invalidate by creating narratives
which, because of the spirit of resistance with which his texts are imbued,
cannot be accounted for in terms of this fundamentalnarrative structure.26
As Coetzee himself admits in an interview, he very consciously tries to
create texts which resist the attempts at categorisation made by the reader,
and in a sort of mise en abyme, he tries metafictionally to represent this
resistance in his texts.
As critics such as Dovey (1988), Olsen (1985), and Attwell (1993)
have suggested, some of Coetzee's characters actually become the very
personification of the textual resistance which hinders the reader's ability
to solve the mystery of his novels and to unveil their fundamental truths.
Consequently, they come to stand for the lack of the mystery or elemen-
tary structureof signification which the structuralistsassumed to be at the

heart of each narrative, and which Coetzee-the-deconstructionist unveils

as non-existent. In Dusklands, for example, the psychiatrists at the mental
hospital Eugene Dawn is confined to at the end of the novella cannot make
any sense of his behaviour; Magda, in In the Heart of the Country,finally
posits herself as "a crazy old queen . . . unexplained by and inexplicable
to the archaeologist"(138); the Barbariangirl in Waitingfor the Barbarians
is reduced to an impenetrabletext which the magistrate uselessly attempts
to interpret(1980, 43); Michael in Life and Times of Michael remains a
mystery to the doctor who is in charge of his treatment;in Foe neither Mr
Foe nor Susan are ever able to unveil the mystery surroundingFriday's
muteness, and Mrs Curren in Age of Iron never solves the mystery
embodied by Mr Vercueil.
Owing to their refusal or inability to speak (Coetzee's characters
symptomatically have great communication difficulties), all these charac-
ters come to stand for the resistant text which opposes the attemptsat pen-
etration and categorisation enacted by readers. In his novels, Coetzee
exposes the existence of a fixed and true meaning of the text to be a mys-
tification and a creation imposed by Others. In the case of the literarytext,
this is done by readers and critics (against whose habits Coetzee fights)
and, in the social reality human beings inhabit, it is perpetrated by the
various systems that speak the language of authority.
Through their rejection of the imposition of a single meaning,
Coetzee's characters, like his texts, remain ambiguous: in refusing to be
included in any specific category and thereby evading the structure
according to which the dominant systems depicted in the novels organise
society, the characters are perceived as threatening by the systems them-
selves, and therefore make their own resistance, and the resistance of the
texts they stand for, political. This force of resistance - both textual and
political - permeates all of Coetzee's novels, where the ambiguity which
hinges upon the story told in the text provides the fundamentalstructure:
the reader is never actually provided with any evidence which would
enable him / her to affirm or deny with any certainty the actual occurrence
of some of the events described (extreme cases of this are "The Narrative
of Jacobus Coetzee" and In the Heart of the Country, where the reader is
confronted with different versions of the same events and is therefore
unable to decide which one corresponds to the fictional reality of the
novel),27or how exactly the story ends (well exemplified by the open and
cryptic endings of Waitingfor the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael
and Foe).

THE NARRATIVE OF J. M. COETZEE 121
In a way, this ambiguity constitutes the main feature of the characters

themselves, who are presented as "pluri-dimensional"and "multivalent,"
- that is, extremely contradictory figures, subject to overlapping and
often conflicting desires. They are often "deformed,"either on a physical
level - as in the case of the Barbariangirl, Michael, Friday and even, to
a certain extent, Mrs Curren, whose being is rendered "less" by terminal
cancer - or psychologically (like Eugene Dawn, Jacobus Coetzee and
Magda), and they consequently appear to be marginalised from every
form of society available to them. Coetzee's characters are therefore
"derelicts" who, in spite of this, seem to achieve the status of "heroes,"
mythologised figures who, precisely because of their deformity, cannot
assume this role entirely.
Magda, for example, at the end of the novel has conquered the desert
and managed to survive. And although Coetzee is very careful not to turn
Michael into an angel or a saint (especially through the closing sequence
of the novel), his characternonetheless takes on Christ-like qualities, and
by becoming the one left with the duty of saving the seeds that will permit
the re-generation of human society after the holocaust, he emerges as a
28
shining symbol even in the middle of war, chaos and oppression(1983, 4).
Finally, Mr Vercueil,the drunkentramp,becomes an "angel"who accompa-
nies Mrs Currenon her last journey towards and throughdeath (1990, 153).
It is precisely because of this ambiguity that all of Coetzee's novels
offer so many possibilities for interpretation and different directions of
analysis: they stimulate the reader on different levels, raising various
questions; yet, in accordance with the notion of language's perpetual
deferral of meaning which Derrida proposed in Of Grammatology (1967,
157) they never offer definitive answers. Like the magistrate in Waiting
for the Barbarians - who, as Attwell points out, understands at the end
of the novel that none of the various options such as amoral existentialism
or liberalism which he had previously contemplated assuming in relation
to the issue of torture, is available as a final position (1993, 82-84) -
Coetzee, focusing his novels on marginal figures and attempting to
achieve the general displacement of the system which Derrida posed as
the aim of all Deconstruction (1972, 329), renounces a final position and,
going further, refuses the need for one, denying the presumption that
"truth,"as such, is attainable.
This is the reason that Coetzee's novels typically end without
achieving closure. Just as the magistrate of Waitingfor the Barbarians
cannot understandthe precise meaning of the wooden slips used by the

barbariansto communicate, because they could be read in various orders

(1980, 112), so too reader is confronted with texts which can be read in
many different ways. Critical analysis can consequently concentrate on
many different aspects (Coetzee's reformulationof Lacanianconcepts, the
historical backgroundof the texts, their political impact, their relationship
to structuralism/ post-structuralismand so on), and although the novels
often appearto depict a particularsituation or a personal story determined
by the cultural, political and social circumstances of South Africa, they
speak of more fundamental human and psychological realities. Amongst
these are the psychological and political mechanisms behind the practice
of torture,human fascination with violence, the status of human language,
the devices and motivations involved in the process of story-telling, the
role writers have in society,29 and the way in which human beings can
achieve (or fail to achieve) an idea of identity.
Conclusions
As I have argued, following the post-structuralist equation of "world"

with "word," Coetzee's novels become emblematic of the human condi-
tion: like his characters, human beings are constituted by ambiguous and
often contradictorydrives, and, in the same way that these charactershave
to accept their de-construction and renounce the search for their fixed
meaning / identity, so human beings also have to accept their contradic-
tions and their status as alienated beings. If the writer depicted in The
Master of Petersburg must give up his soul in order to write, and becomes
literally composed of other people's stories (1994, 250), so then human
beings are simply a mosaic of their and other people's experiences. Further-
more, precisely because human beings, just like charactersin a novel, are
constructed by the language (written or spoken) of others who try to
impose different meanings on them, these human mosaics change with
time, thus rendering the idea of a fixed identity completely obsolete.
Coetzee's novels expose the fact that identity, understoodas the Carte-
sian notion of a fixed meaning or a fundamentaltruthabout the individual,
does not exist. Because identity is achieved in language, it is simply a rep-
resentation, a mediation, and just as the meaning of the literary text
changes according to the reader,the individual's identity is determinedby
the context the person finds him / herself in.
In Coetzee this context also becomes the intertext which lies at the
heartof both our lives and the work of art. This aspect is openly suggested

in Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waitingfor the Barbarians,

Foe and The Master of Petersburg, which all have at their core precise
intertexts such as (respectively), Coetsé's Het Relaas, Schreiner's The
Story of an African Farm, Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians,"
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and the chapter "At Tikhon's" from Dosto-
evsky's Demons. For this reason, Coetzee's most self-reflexive novels can
and must also be read as part of a larger discourse on humanity, in so far
as what is suggested by the author in relation to the creative writer could
be applied to each individual as a user of language.
Since human beings can escape neither their context nor their intertext,
their identity is constructed by their surroundingreality and the preceding
reality which constitutes the history of humanity. Furthermore, because
- that who must
identity is always achieved in the place of the Other
- identity is intrinsically
acknowledge our existence and recognise us
negated, as the process through which it is achieved leads only to an evac-
uation of the "I." Any idea of identity as a fixed meaning is thus destroyed
in Coetzee, and in its place we find an identity which is deconstructed
piece by piece. It is therefore only by recognising that the sum of these dif-
ferent fragments, their interaction, the empty spaces between them and
their ever-changing condition is what composes identity that, Coetzee
seems to suggest, the only truth about the individual may be found.
We can see in Coetzee's novels how the deconstruction of identity in
the broader sense also implies the destruction of what has been labelled
racial and sexual identity. Any definition of the individual's subjectivity,
his / her race or gender, is therefore suggested by the author to be unat-
tainable, in so far as it would always remain in the domain of language
and, as such, it would always be simply a mediation and a representation.
Any attemptat definition, in fact, is just a repetition of this representation,
resulting in an increasing distance between language and the real thing
language stands for, which consequently becomes more and more remote.
Coetzee therefore seems to hold language responsible for the alien-
ation of humanity, and because during the process which should provide
us with a form of identity we are forced to refer and project ourselves onto
the Other, this same process contradictorily becomes the cause of the
evacuation of the "I." Given that this process is at work both in the private
sphere of the individual and, on a granderscale, in the experience of entire
countries, what Coetzee seems to suggest is that until we put the very idea
of identity thatWesternphilosophical traditionhas forged under discussion,

this evacuation of the "I" will be endlessly repeated and will lead the
Western world to destruction.
Since Coetzee acknowledges that language is the only means human
beings have at their disposal for communication, the view of human
destiny he puts forward in his novels is clearly pessimistic, as real and
"deep" communication is always negated. Yet, in spite of the dark and
gloomy atmospherein his texts, the authorseems to leave a sort of morbid
hope alive, as the open endings of some of his novels suggest. Although
Coetzee is well aware of the contradictions of our world and the ludicrous
effects which Western"civilisation" has produced throughouthistory, and
although his view of the near future often seems apocalyptic, he also
seems to suggest that somewhere in the future - maybe before or, more
likely, after the "holocaust"that he seems to believe the Western world is
approaching- theremight still be a glimmer:the pale light of a new dawn.
In most of his novels Coetzee gives the impression that it is already too
late for our society to reach the future, as the threat of extinction is too
imminent to leave room for hope. Yet this hope is a possibility. Perhaps
the Western world will be able to start the process of its own reconstruc-
tion only from the ashes left by the complete destructionof our society; or
perhaps there is still time, and in his work Coetzee urges readers to try and
exploit every single moment they have at their disposal, because even if
no general destructionof humankindwill occur, there will still be the need
for an intellectual holocaust, when old ways of thought are abandoned and
new ones developed. For this reason, in his work he tries to give readers
of our post-colonial and post-modern times new tools which, by stimu-
lating their discovery of a new perspective from which they would be able
to look at reality in a different way, would hopefully enable them to find
more suitable and adequate ways to relate to it.
In order to do this, he first destroys some of the notions and myths the
Western world has fed upon for centuries. For example, in addition to the
myth of the "noble savage" I have discussed above, in both the novellas
of Dusklands the myth of the father / coloniser is denounced in all its
absurdity and psychotic reality. Similarly, in In the Heart of the Country,
Coetzee plays with the myth of "the old Eden" - the idyllic past Magda
refers to - and that of the Oedipal father figure, intended in a more
Lacanian and Freudian sense than in the previous novel (although the
dimension of the father / coloniser is equally present). In Waitingfor the
Barbarians he posits at the centre of the novel the myth of the enemy, that
of the torturerand, once again, of the father / coloniser, whereas in Life

OFJ. M. COETZEE125
THENARRATIVE
and Timesof Michael K, as Gallagher recognises, "At least three different

Afrikaner Myths are retold ... the Afrikaner's heroic independence and
alienation from modernity, the tragic suffering endured in the concentra-
tion camps of the Anglo-Boer War, and the personal return to the land."
(1991, 151).30
Coetzee exposes the myths of Western society precisely as myths -
that is, constructions of language which do not bear any resemblance to
the real thing, and he denounces the complicity of language with power.
Starting with his first novel and again with each new work, Coetzee
explores the dangers inherent in the use of language: because language, as
Foucault states, "can be both an instrumentand an effect of power" (Fou-
cault 1976, 101), any act of language becomes an instrument for manipu-
lation and control, a powerful tool which can create what it represents and,
by so doing, becomes complicit in the perpetrationof the system's power.
Language, in fact, not only creates the Other as a menacing presence, but
also - as Coetzee suggests in Boyhood (62) and openly denounces in
Dusklands, Waitingfor the Barbarians and A Land Apart (1986)31 -
hides the brutality exercised by power, creates the myths on which power
feeds, and "depraves"people, leading them to believe in these myths as
though they were real. Because of the distance language interposes
between lived experience and individuals, they become alienated from
their "real selves" and the surroundingreality. The isolation and inability
to communicate on a deep level that are induced by their alienation lead
them to a withdrawal into themselves which Coetzee seems to believe is
at the basis of any policy of racial, sexual or other discrimination.
After this negative phase of denunciation, however, Coetzee's novels
shift towards a more "positive" conclusion, and in spite of their represen-
tation of the potential extinction of humanity,they admit the possibility of
survival.
We can therefore see how in his novels Coetzee demonstrates that the
idea the Western world and its philosophical tradition have of identity is
inadequate in all respects, and tries to stimulate the reader to search for
new ways of relating to reality, in so far as, the author suggests, it is only
by radically changing our perspective and our approach to our sur-
rounding reality, other human beings and, finally, to our "selves," that the
total extinction of humanity may be avoided.

NOTES
1. Whereas the term "other"in this article indicates "someone other than the
I," the word "Other"is used more specifically to indicate the person to whom the
individual turns in order to be recognised and achieve an identity. Because to
survive the individual has to achieve a position of dominance, the Other must be
created as the "inferior"element who, from his or her position of subordination,
grants adequate recognition. As will be made clear below, the expression "Other"
is therefore closely related to the use that Lacan made of it (see 1966).
2. The first draft of the novel was written while Coetzee was in the USA,
where he lived from 1965 to 1971, when he finally returnedto South Africa. The
text therefore bears the mark not only of American military involvement in the
Vietnam war, but also of the situation in South Africa during the first half of the
'60s (for example, the incident in 1960 known as the Sharpeville Massacre, in
which South African police killed many people who were peacefully protesting
against the pass laws, and in 1964 Nelson Mandela's sentencing to life imprison-
ment).
3. With the exception of Gallagher, Mossop's text has hardly ever been men-
tioned by critics.
4. I use the expression "autobiographicalnovel" to underline the fact that in
this novel the author's recasting of his personal experiences and his recollections
of events that actually occurred produce not a text which faithfully and realisti-
cally reproducesa life, but a text in which that raw materialis turnedinto a fiction.
This notion of the fictionality of all autobiography goes hand in hand with the
notion of the fictionality of all historical reports that Coetzee proposes in his
novels, for example by exposing how the description of horrors perpetrated in
colonial situations is regularly omitted from the official reports (see for example
Dusklands and the discrepancies between "The Narrativeof Jacobus Coetzee" and
the deposition Jacobus Coetzee gave in 1760 which, being formally based on the
historical Het Relaas van Jacobus Coetzee, Janszoon, is reported in the
"Appendix"), and his fundamental mistrust of language, its representational
powers and its potential for illusion.
5. In 1976 the reaction of the state apparatusto the Soweto uprising was
unprecedented in its brutality. The general crisis of apartheid resulted in
increasing militarisation,the extra-judicial execution of school children and rou-
tine forms of arbitraryarrestand detention. It was the massive number of "deaths
in mysterious circumstances," suicides and the recording of "fatal accidents"
which appearedin official reports (in particularthe death in detention of Stephen
Biko in 1977), that led to the investigation of the ill-treatmentof prisoners and to
the growth of the internationaldebate on torture.
6. In spite of this, the geography of Coetzee 's novels is not completely trust-
worthy. This is particularlytrue in Life and Timesof Michael K, where the author
alters the reality of Sea Point and Prince Albert, once again demonstrating how

his main interest lies in something quite other than a faithful reproduction of the
world, so dear to the realist tradition of nineteenth-century narrative.
7. Although Tony Morphet is tempted to define Coetzee as a structuralist
(1987, 458), generally speaking I agree with Lance Olsen (1985) when he empha-
sises Coetzee's post-structuralism.
8. See for example Foe and the emphasis in this novel on the alienating
effects of language which, Coetzee suggests, is able to turn real bodies and sub-
stances into incorporeal, fictional ghosts.
9. Besides the attempts Magda makes in In the Heart of the Country, which
I will analyse shortly, both Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee in Dusklands try
to refuse the language they were born in, but in the attempt to find a more suitable
language which would finally enable them to obtain the Other's recognition, they
only succeed in replacing their first language of authority with an even more vio-
lent and brutal language.
10. According to Thompson, the Segregation Era extended from 1910 to
1948, when the National Party won the elections and began the Apartheid Era,
which ended only in 1978 (1990, 154, 220).
11. Recognising her complicity in the economic exploitation of her servant's
husband, she says: "A crime was committed long ago .... It is part of my inher-
itance ... I am part of it" (AI 164).
12. In Boyhood Coetzee describes how the protagonist (his younger self)
perceives his family as "an unnatural and shameful family" simply because his
parents were not in the habit of beating their children (6-7) and hopes his mother
will finally give him a chance to develop into a normal boy by not caring so much
about him (38).
13. Turning a country, a part of the population, or a single individual into
the Other not only gives the Master / System the Servants required for their recog-
nition, but also provides them with a common enemy to fight, thus strengthening
the sense of belonging to a group in which their need to merge with the collective
and act in harmony with the whole might be satisfied.
14. This was the leading principle of Fascism, summarised by Mussolini as
"Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State"
(1935,40).
15. Both characters' attitudes thus exemplify the kind of sadism that in 1943
Sartredefined as "an effort to incarnate the other" (1966, 518).
16. Eugene Dawn remarks: "We brought with us weapons, the gun and its
metaphors,the only copulas we knew of between ourselves and our objects. From
this tragic ignorance we sought deliverance. Our nightmare was that since what-
ever we reached slipped like smoke through our fingers, we did not exist; that
since whatever we embraced wilted, we were all that existed" (DL 17).
17. See for example Eugene Dawn's words: "We could have loved them" -
referring to the Vietnamese population (DL 17), and Jacobus Coetzee's admira-
tion for the dying Hottentots (DL 105-6).

18. Eugene Dawn wonders: "Why could they not accept us? ... We brought
them our pitiable selves, trembling on the edge of inexistence, and asked only that
they acknowledged us" (1974, 17).
19. This aspect is particularlyevident in Foe, where not only does Friday
oppose the attempts made by Susan and Mr Foe to reduce him to a mere linguistic
sign (for example by trying to teach him to write), but Susan also feels the burden
of the insubstantialityto which her presence as a characterin someone else's story
(Mr Foe's and, beyond that, Coetzee's himself) confines her.
20. Like Magda's alleged killing of her father, so the sexual encounters she
claims to have had with Hendrik might well be one of her fantasies. Through
small variations in her repetitive descriptions of this event, what is first clearly a
rape (1977, 104-5), turns into an account of a normal first sexual encounter
between a man and a woman (106-7). Although we cannot discount the possi-
bility that Magda's alternative versions of the same event are the means she uses
to cope with an actual rape, her encounters with Hendrik might simply be imagi-
nary enactments of her desire for the man.
21 . Magda first claims to have killed her fatherand his new wife with an axe
(1977, 11); then, after having denied the existence of a new wife (16), she claims
to have shot him while he was in bed with Klein-Anna (61); finally, she suggests
that her father died not by her hand but from some unspecified sickness (79-80).
22. 'The obsessional idea should like to kill you,' when it has been freed
from certain additions which are not a matter of chance but are indispensable,
means at bottom nothing other than should like to enjoy you in love'" (Freud
1916/7, 388).
23. Furtherto the hint given by the Freudian "I should like to kill you" dis-
cussed in note 22, Magda's incestuous desires are confirmed by her day-dream of
the "burningbush"described on page 73 which, if analysed according to the indi-
cations Freud gave in both his Introductory Lectures and The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900), together with her reference to "The childhood rape" (1977, 3),
confirms the protagonist'sdesire for a real seduction on the partof her father (typ-
ical, according to Freud, of the female's Oedipal complex). In addition, Magda's
desire for a deep communication with Klein-Anna also assumes the appearanceof
sexual desire (see Magda's attempted seduction of Klein-Anna on pages 101 and
114).
24. Immediately after coming to power in 1948, the National Party Govern-
ment promulgated the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the
Immorality Act (1950), which made "sexual relations illegal across the colour
line" (Thompson 1990, 185).
25. Coetzee's questioning of the concept of the "elementarystructureof sig-
nification" elaborated by the structuralists, seems to justify my emphasis on his
post-structuralism.

26. "I hope that a certain spirit of resistance is ingrained in my books; ulti-
mately, I hope they have the strength to resist whatever readings [are imposed] on
them" (interview with Morphet 1987, 464).
27. See Dusklands, 93-5 and In the Heart of the Country, 1,61.
28. In Life and Times of Michael Coetzee proposes a semi-idyllic image
of the farm (where the farm / garden is opposed to the camp / prison), similar to
that in Boyhood, where farms are defined as "places of freedom, of life" (22)
which will exist "from eternity to eternity" (96).
29. Although this aspect is the focus of Foe and The Master of Petersburg
(which not only revolves around the figure of Dostoevsky, but also focuses on his
step-son's papers), it is also tackled in previous novels through the representation
of the official writing of Eugene and Jacobus in Dusklands, Magda's spoken diary
in In the Heart of the Country,the magistrate'sattemptto write a history of the fron-
tier in Waitingfor the Barbarians and Mrs Curren'stestament letter in Age of Iron.
30. In Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg and Boyhood, Coetzee also
offers the representationof the destruction of the myth of an innocent and idyllic
childhood (renderedobsolete by the states' policies). Furthermore,in the first sec-
tion of Foe he proposes the demolition of the myth of Robinson Crusoe through
the figure of Cruso, who is determined not to become another emblem of homo
economicus. In this novel the author also inserts the myth of the writer, whose
inspiration is questioned, in this text as well as in The Master of Petersburg, and
who is presented as simply the trait d'union between the story-teller (the one who
inspires, the Muse) and the reader.
3 1. On page 50 of this text Coetzee quotes Christopher van Wyk's poem In
Detention," which exposes the fact that the official reports produced on the death
of prisoners consisted of a mixture of euphemisms, pseudo-scientific descriptions
and bureaucraticformulas concealing the horrors perpetrated.
WORKS CITED
Althusser, Louis. 197 1. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review.
Attwell, David. 1993. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing.
Berkeley: U of California P.
Barthes, Roland. 1994a (1973). "La division des langages." Oeuvres Complètes
. Paris: Du Seuil.
. 1994b (1973). "La guerre des langages." Oeuvres Complètes . Paris: Du
Seuil.
Coetzee, J.M. 1974. Dusklands. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1983.
. 1977. In the Heart of the Country. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1982.
. 1980. Waitingfor the Barbarians. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1982.
. 1983. Life and Times of Michael K. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1985.
. 1986a. Foe. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1987.

. 1986b. A Land Apart: A South African Reader. Ed. Coetzee and André
Brink. London: Faber and Faber.
. 1988. White Writing.London: Yale UP.
. 1990. Age of Iron. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
. 1994. The Master of Petersburg. London: Seeker and Warburg.
. 1997. Boyhood. London: Vintage, 1998.
Derrida,Jacques. 1967 (1976). Of Grammatology. London: Johns Hopkins UP.
. 1982 (1972). Margins of Philosophy. London: HarvesterPress.
Dovey, Teresa. 1988. The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories.
Johannesburg:Ad. Donker.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir - Naissance de la prison. Paris:
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Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. 1991. A History of South Africa. J.M. Coetzee s
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Greimas, A. J. 1966. Sémantique structurale: Recherche de méthode. Paris:
Larousse.
Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Ecrits. Paris: Du Seuil.
Laing, R. D. 1967. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise.
Harmondsworth:Penguin.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1949. Les structuresélémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Pion.
Morphet, Tony. 1987. "Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee." TriQuarterly69:
454-461.
Moses, Michael Valdez. 1993. "The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and
Torturein Coetzee's Waitingfor the Barbarians:' The Kenyon Review 15.1.
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Olsen, Lance. 1985. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waitingfor the
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Square Press.
Thompson, Leonard. 1990. A History of South Africa. London: Yale UP.
Vico, Giambattista. 1976 (1725). Principi di scienza nuova. Torino: Einaudi.


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Rhodes University

Language and Identity in the Narrative of J. M. Coetzee

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Englishin Africa27 No. 1 (May2000)

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him / herself in what is nothing more than a reflection, first articulatesthe

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Replicas of Empire: the Repetition of History

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Furthermore,as critics such as Michael Valdez Moses have argued,

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recognition in order to posit him / herself as a subjectivity - every human

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Shadows of the Self: The Loss of Identity through Language

Coetzee deals with the formation of identity perhaps most explicitly in

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In particular, following Lacan, Coetzee openly acknowledges the

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from the South Africa of the segregation and apartheidperiods described

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As Coetzee suggests in his autobiographicalnovel, this is why in those

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A Case History: Magda's Rebellion against Language in In the

Although most of Coetzee's characters rebel, in one way or another,

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I for one do not wish to be at the centre of the world, I wish

Magda's attempt to attain a life "unmediated by words" and her rejec-

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the language of authority that the father, as a representative of the Law,

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of Coetzee's text and Lacan's "primalrepression," because the repression

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Coetzee's view, then, seems completely pessimistic. Notwithstanding

Textual and Political Resistance

The revolt against language enacted by Coetzee's characters, of which

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heart of each narrative, and which Coetzee-the-deconstructionist unveils

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In a way, this ambiguity constitutes the main feature of the characters

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barbariansto communicate, because they could be read in various orders

As I have argued, following the post-structuralist equation of "world"

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in Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waitingfor the Barbarians,

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and Timesof Michael K, as Gallagher recognises, "At least three different

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