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Abstract
Best known as a writer of fiction, J.M. Coetzee has, on occasion, turned to politics in his critical writing. In a 1991 essay, Coetzee analyzes the works of Geoffrey Cronjé, who was influential in debates on apartheid among Afrikaner nationalists in the 1940s. Cronjé’s apartheid thinking is, according to Coetzee, a defensive reaction that turns law against desire. In Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), Coetzee views censorship in identical terms. Although Coetzee himself does not explicitly link apartheid and censorship, it may be fruitful to do so because of the shared underlying dynamics, and because from 1954 to 1956 Cronjé chaired a state Commission of Enquiry in Regard to Undesirable Publications. The Cronjé Commissions report, which shaped censorship measures well into the 1970s, brought the “undesirable” into South African discourse on censorship, where it became the dominant concept. Attending to the Afrikaans language, and to the particular idiom subscribed to by the commissioners, shows that pivotal formulations on undesirability in the commission report are tightly linked with those against blood-mixing in Cronjé’s books on apartheid. If the “undesirable” is arguably not unique to the conceptual idiom of apartheid, it reveals the inner logic (or pathology) of any censorship based upon the control of desire and its institution in law. Apartheid thinking would, in effect, lie at the heart of all the categories of such a censorship, whatever their names.
Notes
* The author thanks Peter McDonald for his critical suggestions, a number of which have been incorporated into this article.
1. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly [1510], in The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, Robert Adams, trans. (New York: Norton, 1989)
, esp.12–13, 38–39. Erasmus is a touchstone for Coetzee throughout his writings on censorship.2. J.M. Coetzee’s critical prose is collected in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)
; Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, David Attwell, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) ; Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) ; and Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (New York: Viking, 2001).3. J.M. Coetzee, “The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907–),” 17.1 Social Dynamics 1–35 (1991)
. A revised version of this work appears as “Apartheid Thinking,” in Giving Offense, id., at 163–84. Hereinafter, references to this work will include page numbers from the original article followed by page numbers from the revision in square brackets. For details of apartheid debates, see Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) ; and Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) .4. Although most proponents of apartheid later distanced themselves from Cronjé’s overtly racist framework, his unacknowledged influence can be clearly discerned in the political essays of N.P. van Wyk Louw, who defended apartheid “separate development” as a liberal multi-nationalism. See Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 76
.5. See Dubow, supra note 3 at 248.
6. Coetzee, supra note 3 at 18 [178].
7. Geoffrey Cronjé, n Tuiste vir die nageslag: Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se rassevraagstukke [A Home for Posterity: The Lasting Solution of South Africa’s Race Questions] (Johannesburg: Publicité, 1945)
.8. Coetzee, supra note 3 at 6–7 [168].
9. Cronjé, supra note 7 at 47; quoted in Coetzee, supra note 3 at 10 [172].
10. Coetzee, supra note 3 at 11.
11. Geoffrey Cronjé, E.P. Groenewald, and W. Nicol, Regverdige rasse-apartheid [Just Race-Apartheid] (Stellenbosch: CSV Boekhandel, 1947)
.12. Coetzee, supra note 3 at 13–14 [175].
13. Geoffrey Cronjé, Voogdyskap en apartheid [Guardianship and Apartheid] (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1948)
; discussed in Coetzee, id., at 14 [175].14. Cronjé, id., as quoted in Coetzee, id., at 15 [176]. In the Giving Offense version, the final sentence of this passage reads: “It will also remove the black from the view of the white and prevent the black from becoming the object of white sexual desire.” Whereas the original version appears to introduce homosexual desire—in a way that, arguably, does not simply reduce it to a subordinate moment in rivalrous mimetic male desire for the woman—the possibilities that it suggests for further analysis of the nature of apartheid as a “counterattack on desire” are not developed in Coetzee’s essay.
15. J.M. Coetzee, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” in Giving Offense, supra note 2, vii–xi, at vii–viii.
16. Id., at ix.
17. I hereby take up a task identified in my review of Giving Offense in Boston Review 44–45 (October/ November 1996).
18. Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission of Enquiry in regard to Undesirable Publications [Verslag van die Kommissie van Ondersoek insake Ongewenste Publikasies] UG 42 (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1957), 135–40 [129–34]. Published simultaneously in English and Afrikaans, page numbers of the Afrikaans report appear in brackets here and in subsequent citations.
19. Id., at iv [iv]
20. Id., at 25, see also 41, 51.
21. See Sanders, supra note 4 at 57–92.
22. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 24.
23. Id., at 7ff, 32.
24. Id., at 32.
25. Id., at 23.
26. Id., at 142ff.
27. Quoted in Christopher Merrett, A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1994), 35
.28. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 52–53.
29. Id., at 52.
30. Id., at 53 [50].
31. Whereas “in regard to” translates insake in the title of the report, here “how matters stand in regard to” translates the phrase hoe dit gesteld is met, a choice that, incidentally, echoes the presence of the word saak (matter) in the bureaucratic insake. This difference, although worth noting for the new resonances that may inadvertently be produced when a text is translated, does not affect my argument in its substance. If anything, it reinforces the sense of a deep link between the mandated task of the commission and the racial soul-searching that its members advocate in the report.
32. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 53 [50–51].
33. Id., at v.
34. Id., at 62–63 [59].
35. Id., at 63 [59].
36. Id., at 63 [60].
37. Id., at 52 [50]. Cronjé’s reasoning appears to accept the traditional view of masturbation (to which I take “suggestive titillation of the purely sensual emotions” [suggestiewe prikkeling van die bloot sinlike] to allude) as simply a substitute for, or precursor to, sexual intercourse (id.). Were Cronjé to have followed Kraus and Freud in radically questioning this view, would his motivations for censorship in order to prevent “blood-mixing” have had any coherence?
38. Id., at 142 [136].
39. Coetzee, supra note 3 at 10 [171].
40. Cronjé, supra note 13 at 27; quoted in Coetzee, supra note 3 at 15 [176].
41. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 137 [131].
42. Id., at 63 [59]. The use in this section of the report, not of the word skadelik, but of nadelig, which may also be translated as “disadvantageous” (nadeel = disadvantage) would reinforce the latter sense of “harmful.”
43. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 261 [252].
44. This is the racist obverse of Frantz Fanon’s much-criticized chapters on the black man and the white woman, and the black woman and the white man, in Black Skin, White Masks [1952], Charles Lam Markmann, trans. (London: Pluto, 1986).
45. Union of South Africa, supra note 18 at 17.
46. Coetzee, supra note 15 at viii.
47. Coetzee, “Emerging from Censorship,” in Giving Offense, supra note 2, 34–47
, at 38. I allude, of course, to Coetzee’s description of the figure of the censor.