Coetzee’s stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness

Abstract

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.

Keywords:

• J. M. Coetzee
• testimony
• nonhuman
• objects
• ecocriticism
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgments

One last litany, in gratitude to those who commented on earlier versions of this essay: Elizabeth S. Anker, Marta Figlerowicz, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Marika Knowles, Yi-Ping Ong, Matthew Spellberg, Hannah Walser, and Moira Weigel.

Notes

¹ Latour, Pasteurization of France, 205; Coetzee, Dusklands, 118. References to Dusklands are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

² See Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 38–45, 50–2.

³ Psalm 98:4, 8.

⁴ Paradise Lost, 127–8.

⁵ The Thirteen-Book Prelude, 316.

⁶ See Wu and Forché, eds., Poetry of Witness; and Forché, ed., Against Forgetting.

⁷ For “thing” as a legal gathering space see Latour, Politics of Nature, 54.

⁸ Latour, Politics of Nature, and Bennett, Vibrant Matter, offer related discussions of “political ecology.”

⁹ For critiques of object-oriented ontology see Cole, “The Call of Things” and “Those Obscure Objects of Desire.”

¹⁰ Cohen, Stone, 9.

¹¹ See Attwell, “‘Labyrinth’”; Castillo, “The Mythic Punctum”; and Jolly, “The Gun as Copula.”

¹² The term “reality imperative” I draw from De Kock, “Splice,” 92; and “intimate enmity” from Twidle, “Literary Non-Fiction,” 18. For classic statements and later revisions of these concepts see Ndebele, “Redefining Relevance”; Mphahlele, “African Writers and Commitment”; Coetzee, “The Novel Today”; Bethlehem, “‘A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger’”; De Kock, “Splice”; and Twidle, “Literary Non-Fiction.”

¹³ On temporal continuity and disjunction in South African writing, and the “post-” and “anti-” in relation to apartheid, see De Kock, “Freedom on a Frontier?”

¹⁴ See Cohen, “Law, Folklore and Animal Lore”; and Dinzelbacher, “Animal Trials.”

¹⁵ See Pietz, “Death of the Deodand”; and Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 8–10 (on “legal actants”).

¹⁶ Webb, “The Law of Falling Objects,” 1066.

¹⁷ See Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? A founding text of ecocritical witness is Testimony (Trimble and Williams, comp.); see also Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. For an overview of the “trope of speaking nature” in ecocriticism, critiqued as “an essentially colonizing move” (53), see Gilcrest, Greening the Lyre, 37–60.

¹⁸ Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy,” 29. Generally brought together under these headings are the works of Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. For a cogent overview see Shaviro, Universe of Things.

¹⁹ Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5; see 1–27. For a systematic rejection see Golumbia, “‘Correlationism.’”

²⁰ Harman, “Aesthetics,” 23–4.

²¹ Bennett, “The Force of Things,” 348, 349. See also Vibrant Matter and “Systems and Things.”

²² Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 2, 126. For developing statements on ANT see also Politics of Nature and Reassembling the Social. Bennett, “Force of Things,” 354–6, discusses “thing-power” in relation to Latour’s “actancy” and “agency as a continuum” (355).

²³ See Brown, “Thing Theory” and A Sense of Things; Freedgood, The Ideas in Things; Morton, Ecology Without Nature and “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.”

²⁴ We Have Never Been Modern, 142. Cole exposes the idealist elements and mystical origins of this “convenient fiction […] enabling the philosopher to hear the call of things and to speak to and for them, despite the new rule that we cannot think of objects as being-for-us and must reject older philosophies smacking of ‘presence’ and traditional ontology or ontotheology” (“The Call of Things,” 107; see 111–13 for a critique of the trope of talking things).

²⁵ Derrida, Demeure, 51–2.

²⁶ Ibid., 32.

²⁷ Blanchot, Instant, 7.

²⁸ Derrida, Demeure, 80–1.

²⁹ Lyotard, Differend, 5, 28, 8.

³⁰ Ibid., 28.

³¹ Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17.

³² Quoted in ibid., 33.

³³ Ibid., 82, 39.

³⁴ Ibid., 44, 51.

³⁵ Ibid., 54.

³⁶ Poetry of Witness, 21.

³⁷ Unclaimed Experience, 3.

³⁸ On this phrase in Anglo-American law, and the rise of circumstantial evidence, see Shapiro, Historical Perspectives, 200–41.

³⁹ OED, “witness, n.,” def. 2.a, quoted in Gordimer, “Witness,” 86.

⁴⁰ OED, “witness, n.,” def. 3–6.

⁴¹ Ibid., def. 7a.

⁴² Meillassoux, After Finitude, 19–21. Compare Harman, Prince of Networks, 122–34, 185–7.

⁴³ For example, the “parliament of things”: Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142–5. Latour here also discusses the scientific “testimony of nonhumans” (22–4).

⁴⁴ Attwell, “‘Labyrinth,’” 21, 7. For readings of Coetzee that analogize metaphysical (or psychological) and sociopolitical critique see Wood, “Dusklands and ‘The Impregnable Stronghold of the Intellect’”; Gardiner, “Colonial Encounters”; Dovey, “Coetzee and His Critics”; Knox-Shaw, “A Metaphysics of Violence”; and Hamilton, “The Meaning of Suffering.”

⁴⁵ Limits of Critique, 3, 9; for a defense of “postcritical reading” see 151–85.

⁴⁶ See Belknap, “The Literary List”; Von Contzen, “Limits of Narration”; Fludernik, “Descriptive Lists”; Richardson, “Modern Fiction”; and Alber, “Absurd Catalogues.”

⁴⁷ For a discussion of these two senses of parody – “beside” and “against” (the song) – in literary tradition, see Agamben, Profanations, 38–41.

⁴⁸ For example, Attridge, “Ethical Modernism”; and Marais, “Ethics, Engagement, and Change.”

⁴⁹ This document, in Dutch, is reproduced with facing translation in the edition on which Coetzee relies, The Journals of Jacobus Coetsé Jansz. (Mossop, ed.).

⁵⁰ Although Coetzee includes signature – an “X” made before two “witnesses” (125) – he significantly removes the Dutch countersignature “Acordeert”/“Agrees with original” (Mossop, ed., Journals, 290–1). For an assessment of other omissions and additions see Attwell, “‘Labyrinth,’” 16–17.

⁵¹ For instance, Knox-Shaw, “A Metaphysics of Violence”; Gardiner, “Colonial Encounters”; Jolly, “The Gun as Copula”; Attridge, “Ethical Modernism”; Castillo, “The Mythic Punctum”; and Collingwood-Whittick, “Colonialist Myth.”

⁵² Wittenberg, “Towards an Archaeology of Dusklands,” 74.

⁵³ Ashcroft, “Habitation,” 37; Dovey, “Coetzee and His Critics,” 22; Attwell, “‘Labyrinth,’” 7.

⁵⁴ See Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

⁵⁵ See Fludernik, “Descriptive Lists,” 310–12.

⁵⁶ Waldo asks Lyndall: “has it never seemed to you that the stones were talking with you? Sometimes […] I lie under there with my sheep, and it seems that the stones are really speaking” (The Story of an African Farm, 49).

⁵⁷ Eliot, The Waste Land, I, ll. 24–6.

⁵⁸ Doubling the Point, 97.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 98.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 370.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Von Contzen, “Limits of Narration,” 244, 245.

⁶³ Dovey, “Coetzee and His Critics,” 21.

⁶⁴ Countervoices, 149. On the Afterword’s style see Zimbler, Politics of Style, 46–8.

⁶⁵ “Coetzee’s Estrangements,” 238.

⁶⁶ For a reflection on these terms in contemporary criticism see Felski, Limits of Critique, 14–51. Alongside Attwell, “‘Labyrinth,’” see Head, J. M. Coetzee, 28–48, and Poyner, J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, 15–31. Language and style do, in some exceptions, trump diagnosis: see Clarkson, Countervoices, 141–4, 146–51; and Zimbler, Politics of Style, 25–55.

⁶⁷ For early statements see Vaughan, “Literature and Politics”; and Watson, “Colonialism.” For Attwell, Coetzee’s “fictive displacement” and “imaginative relocation” embody “a struggle both to speak at all and to keep the country at arm’s length” (“Coetzee’s Estrangements,” 233).

⁶⁸ “That Coetzee’s novels interrogate colonialism’s discursive power is indisputable,” assumes Parry (“Speech and Silence,” 150). Attwell sees the text as satirizing the “scientific discourses” of Enlightenment, such as “mythography,” the “exploratory narrative, colonial adventure writing, landscape and manners-and-custom description, and frontier or pioneer history” (“‘Labyrinth,’” 11).

⁶⁹ Coetzee is elsewhere alert to how the colonial enterprise was literally freighted with baggage that left a material deposit in the language: in Boyhood, he describes Afrikaans as “weighed down with idioms that are supposed to come from the volksmond but seem to come only from the Great Trek, lumpish, nonsensical idioms about wagons and cattle and cattle-harness” (81).

⁷⁰ Love, “Close but not Deep,” 375, 387.

⁷¹ De Kock, “Splice,” 85, 88.

⁷² Green, “Social History,” 132; Marais, “Ethics, Engagement, and Change,” 160.

⁷³ Green, “Social History,” 125; De Kock, “Splice,” 92–3. For a more general statement see Attwell, “The Problem of History.”

⁷⁴ Easton suggests that Coetzee follows the more porous fact/fiction discourse of eighteenth-century writing (“Question of History,” 15). Zimbler, Politics of Style, 35–45, offers an engaging contrast between Coetzee’s “pared-down description […] oriented, in its very grammar, towards the world” (42) and Alex La Guma’s similar inventories that, in Coetzee’s critical assessment, “focus […] attention on the epiphenomena of a bad reality” (55) and catalogue the real as a way of fleeing it.

⁷⁵ Knox-Shaw, “Metaphysics of Violence,” 66.

⁷⁶ Love, “Close but not Deep,” 386.

⁷⁷ Harman, Prince of Networks, 102; Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 65.

⁷⁸ Adorno, “Parataxis,” 131.

⁷⁹ 1685, as the Afterword notes, is the date of Van der Stel’s expedition (112). Latour offers an account of guns as actants together with those who use them in Pandora’s Hope, 174–80.

⁸⁰ Describing his historical and anthropological reading for Dusklands, Coetzee mentions “makeshift grammars put together by missionaries” and “word lists compiled by seventeenth-century seafarers” (Doubling the Point, 52).

⁸¹ Harman, Prince of Networks, 16.

⁸² “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot,” 80. I owe this concept to Agamben, Time That Remains, 39–40.

⁸³ Agamben, Profanations, 35.

⁸⁴ Slow Violence, 1–44.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 16; Cohen, Stone, 85.

⁸⁶ Castillo, “The Mythic Punctum,” 1117.

⁸⁷ On jackals as vermin in South African history see Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 195–234.

⁸⁸ Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 238; Genesis 6:7.

⁸⁹ Forgotten Frontier, 35.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 81, 88.

⁹¹ Ibid., 102. For the analogies used to frame Khoikhoi and San see Voss, “The Image of the Bushman.” On the afterlife of such tropes see Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 92–182, 209–24.

⁹² For example, the essay on Sarah Gertrude Millin’s work and the figures of “Blood, Taint, Flaw, Degeneration,” in White Writing, 141–67.

⁹³ Castillo, “The Mythic Punctum,” 1111–12.

⁹⁴ See Time That Remains, 39–40; and Profanations, 35.

⁹⁵ Nixon, Slow Violence, 200.

⁹⁶ On Lewallen see ibid., 211.

⁹⁷ In the Heart of the Country, 12, 35, 26.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 114, 48.

⁹⁹ Life & Times of Michael K, 135.

¹⁰⁰ Waiting for the Barbarians, 79.

¹⁰¹ Age of Iron, 29.