J M Coetzee and African Studies

Abstract

Turning to the archive to consider J M Coetzee's early teaching career and his notes on his first novel, Dusklands, this article argues that the writer's early engagement with the works of Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon and his preparations to teach African Studies had a shaping effect on his fiction.

Keywords:

• Dusklands
• Foe
• Research in African Literatures
• African Studies
• negritude

If, to make his book convincing, there needs to be a grease-pot swinging under the bed of the wagon as it bumps across the stones of the Karoo, he will do the grease-pot. If there have to be cicadas trilling in the tree under which they stop at noon, he will do the cicadas. The creak of the grease-pot, the trilling of the cicadas — those he is confident he can bring off. The difficult part will be to give to the whole the aura that will get it onto the shelves and thus into the history of the world: the aura of truth.

J M Coetzee, Youth 138

This is how J M Coetzee, in the second of his semi-fictionalised autobiographies, narrates a life-changing decision in late 1962 or early 1963, when he was in his early twenties: to abandon the career in poetry that he had been pursuing until then and devote himself to prose fiction about his native country. The poetry of that early phase now seems self-conscious to a fault – anxious and cryptic – perhaps inevitably so for a young writer from a cultural colony determinedly following the high modernist paths that had been marked out by Ezra Pound and T S Eliot.

In the Reading Room of the British Museum, Coetzee had allowed himself to be distracted from his research for a Master’s degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on Ford Madox Ford by drawing down the two quarto volumes of the explorer, naturalist, and artist William John Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822 and 1824). So far from Parade’s End did Coetzee’s mind wander, that he traced on pink paper Burchell’s map, a document that now resides in his archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Coetzee was homesick but it was unacceptable to be homesick for South Africa. He had left the country, feeling tainted by it. The problem was personal and ethical, but it was also artistic: how would he make the entry into fiction about South Africa starting out from high modernism — from Pound, Eliot, Ford, and, especially, from Samuel Beckett, the writer who seems to have made the strongest impression on him, since he would soon become the subject of a doctoral dissertation? Intellectually scrupulous, resisting naive forms of realism, Coetzee was resigning himself to a long struggle. He might be able to do the creaking of the grease-pot and the trilling of the cicadas, but how was he to capture the ‘aura of truth’ that would be a condition of success, success that would be measured by whether or not the book was good enough to be placed near Burchell’s, in the library of all libraries?

From this exacting entry point Coetzee started by reading his way towards a solution, but it would take over a decade. Dusklands, consisting of two loosely connected novellas, was published in 1974. Going well beyond Burchell, as well as John Barrow and other English counterparts, he read the vast library of travel and ethnography of southern Africa by Dutch, Swedish, German, and French explorers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. His note-taking was fastidious but it does not seem to have been useful preparation for fiction. It included a chronology starting with the Portuguese mercantile adventures in 1470 and continuing to 1955, when he was fifteen. In George McCall Theal’s History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi he found the story of a near-ancestor Jacobus Coetzee’s expedition from the Cape to what is now Namibia, on which the South African half of Dusklands would be built. The other half involved the war in, or on, Vietnam in the years when he was completing his doctorate in Austin, Texas and took his first job at SUNY, Buffalo.

But the colonial archive did not give Coetzee the ‘aura of truth’ that he was after. In fact, the earliest draft of Dusklands was called ‘Lies’. Dusklands is the work of a writer who has no ready-to-hand tradition, meaning that Coetzee could not imagine being positioned in the lineages established by his forebears in South African literature, English or Afrikaans. Like American writers of the late nineteenth century, he was inventing a place for himself from the unlikeliest of sources. But Dusklands is a powerful work and what gives it its power is its anger, the anger of a prodigiously talented writer starting out with a sense of vocation but finding himself adrift. South Africa would give him the grease-pot, the trilling cicadas, and much else, but its ethical torsions had left him bereft.

The solution was to turn to dark parodies directed at the narratives that had formed him. It was not until the third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), that Coetzee began to make peace with the form and materials that he had chosen. But why was Dusklands, a text made out of the colonial archive, quite so agonistic and aggressive? A substantial part of Coetzee’s preparation involved studying literature via linguistics and stylistics at Texas in the mid-1960s. In academic terms, he then remained a writer rooted in the ‘linguistic turn’, in the scepticism about referential language that was to be found in Barthes and Derrida, but that does not explain the energy, scale, and indeed the violence of Dusklands.

It is not generally known that while he was teaching at SUNY, Buffalo (1968–1971) Coetzee was also immersed in African literature and history.¹ In Doubling the Point (1992) he plays down this aspect of his teaching, saying that he taught it by invitation:

I had left South Africa to be part of a wider world. But now I discovered that my novelty value, to the extent that I had any novelty value, was that I came from Africa. (336)

The account is tired. He re-read the better-known South African writers, ‘none of whom [he] regarded as of world status’, and he read ‘what was available in the United States of the literature of the rest of Africa’ (336). (It was too early for the global impact of the London-based Heinemann African Writers Series to be felt in the United States.) He found West African drama more interesting than the poetry and fiction but ‘nothing truly gripped me … Nevertheless, I taught the course — in fact taught it a couple of times. I doubt that it changed any of my students’ lives.’²

This is not the whole picture.

In Buffalo, anyhow, I tried to find an imaginative (an imaginary) place for myself in the Third World and its narratives of itself. I read Césaire and Senghor and Fanon; I read Lukács on the duties of realism; I even read Chairman Mao. (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 338)

Lukács and Mao, he adds, were no help in writing Dusklands, which begs the question whether Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon were. He published essays on Alex La Guma, fully sympathetic to La Guma’s critical realism and its Marxist undercarriage. Looking back, he discerns in these essays a ‘tension between wanting to validate the profession of Africanist and wanting to create a space in African studies for a person with my rather European tastes’, and comes to the

resigned perception that, if I were going to stay on in the United States, it might well have to be as an Africanist, that is, as a specialist in a peripheral and not very highly regarded body of literature. (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 336)

The last comment is jarring now but it should be taken as a statement of fact — the field was not highly regarded. It was only in 1971 that Bernth Lindfors founded the flagship journal Research in African Literatures (RAL) to address the situation Coetzee describes. After he left Buffalo, having been unable to secure permanent residence (he had been arrested during anti-Vietnam protest action), from a remote Karoo farmhouse he wrote to his former programme chair to say that he was busy on a project in African Studies (Kannemeyer 203). This was Dusklands.

The record doesn’t confirm the desultory account that Coetzee gives of this period in Doubling the Point.³ Recognising that the knowledge base for African literature as represented by the holdings of the university’s Lockwood Library was inadequate, he presented the librarians with a list of 154 literary works by African authors in English and French, including works translated from African languages, that ought to be on the shelves (he estimated that no more than 30 per cent were there already), using as his sources Janheinz Jahn’s Die neoafrikanische Literatur (1965), the annual bibliographies of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (from 1965) and Présence Africaine. He taught courses in African literature and history to seniors, providing detailed guidance with reading lists for the weekly seminars and lists of possible topics for term papers. These are especially useful as indicators of the issues he thought students should be interested in:

The social function of Yoruba-language literature

The social function of traditional Zulu poetry

Attitudes towards traditional culture in Nigerian literature

Speculations on the popularity of biography among South African writers

The treatment of the missionary in African writing in French; ditto in English (easier)

Urbanisation in African literature

The exposure of the colonial mind in African literature

Poets of African liberation in French

The experience of the African intellectual in the West, as treated in biography and fiction

Some treatments of the impact of Western education in Africa

Mofolo’s Chaka and the historical Shaka

Mhudi [Sol Plaatje] and Wild Conquest [Peter Abrahams]

[Alan] Paton and Frans Venter (Swart Pelgrim)

Plomer, Paton and Abrahams on miscegenation

Individual and Society in [a list of writers]

Social philosophy in Birago Diop

The social background to Story of an African Farm

Social structure of Pauline Smith’s world

Conservatism and its antithesis in Camara Laye

Social reality in Etienne Leroux

SA society in the fiction of Jack Cope

Mphahlele and negritude

The CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, African intellectual life

The economics of literary publication in specific African countries

The mechanics of publishing African writers in the Soviet Union

The reception of Amos Tutuola in Africa

Conceptions of Africa in French Caribbean, Cuban literature, and in Aime Césaire

African society in Haggard, Greene, Cary, Céline [and other contemporary British authors]

This was in 1969–1970. Most of these topics were still current twenty years later. (I wrote a paper, self-devised, for Bernth Lindfors’s course on Major African Novelists at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 on Mofolo’s Chaka and the historical Shaka, published in RAL the following year.) Esk’ia Mphahlele on negritude, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom which Mphahlele headed up not knowing that it was a front for the CIA (via the Farfield Foundation), were certainly news.

Of particular interest is a graduate-level programme of research Coetzee devised for independent study on ‘Historical background to political systems of southern Africa’. Along with the standard liberal and left-liberal historians and historiographers of the period, he had students read Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Having described in broad introductory terms demographics, history, economy, and social structures, he quickly moved into literary terrain, foregrounding ‘South African Literature Today’ with the emphasis on black authors: Sol Plaatje, Thomas Mofolo, Mazisi Kunene, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Esk’ia Mphahlele, Dugmore Boetie. Readings were organised into themes: ‘Literature of the past’, ‘Escapist literature and fantasy’ (including the ‘yellow press’ magazines Drum and Golden City Post), ‘The realist sketch and autobiography’, and ‘Naturalistic tragedy’. On the latter theme he quoted Nadine Gordimer:

[The] South African color system ‘is far more than a question or a matter of prejudice or discrimination or conflict of loyalties — we have built a morality on it. We have gone even deeper; we have built our own sense of sin, and our own form of tragedy.’

Coetzee took a hard line on tragedy. He was keen for students to note the absence of a revolutionary literature in South Africa, and to think about what it would take to build one. He prepares the ground by highlighting ‘Some capacities of revolutionary literature’ with quotations from Trotsky, Engels, Lukács, and Soyinka (‘The Writer in an African State’ from Transition in 1967) before turning to South Africa with reflections on reasons external to the writer (education policies, censorship, overseas publication — though noting ‘publication in the USSR’, presumably in La Guma’s case) then ‘internal reasons’, which are ‘influence of the individualist Western tradition’, ‘disintegration of the psyche’ (with a quotation from Lewis Nkosi), and ‘Subordination to the mode of tragedy’. On the influence of Western individualism he pencils in ‘silence, exile, cunning’ — a surprising addition, since later developments would see a Coetzee less sceptical of the position Joyce reaches at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He concedes that a shift away from the printed word to radio and song might be more conducive to revolutionary energies. Fanon is prominently quoted: ‘During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.’

There is more than enough evidence, then, that coloniality as a structural and psychic prison house was part of Coetzee’s thinking in the years immediately preceding Dusklands, and that southern African history and African expressions of the condition must have played a part in the preparation for writing his first novel. The psychic drama that eventuates in extreme violence on the part of the coloniser is what unites the two halves of Dusklands, and the point of Coetzee’s parody is to put the violence back where colonial discourse had erased it from the record. While an anti-rationalist and Freudian reading, or counter-reading, of the colonial archive made this possible, Fanon and others were in the background. He had absorbed his reading in African Studies into what became a powerful autocritique.

An odd version of the story is told in the last of Coetzee’s fictional autobiographies, Summertime. The political optimism of the 1968 generation ended for Coetzee when he was forced to return to South Africa. He taught African literature at the University of Cape Town thereafter, but somewhat at arm’s length, by Summertime’s account (221–24). By the 1980s, his teaching had come to centre on ‘The Book in Africa’, a book-historical programme of reading which, for all its rigour, did not resonate with students seeking to understand their existential connection to the continent via its literature.⁴

The problem had to do with self-positioning: paradoxically, an Africa that had seemed at least intellectually attainable in Buffalo, had receded from view in Cape Town. Summertime’s self-diagnosis in the voice of Sophie Denoël is that while John was circumspect with students at UCT, and his preparations were never less than professional, privately he held Romantic primitivist ideas that had become old fashioned in the postcolonial situation:

He saw Africa through a romantic haze. He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe. … He had a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance, which I can’t reproduce, but which seemed to me, even then – how shall I say? – unhelpful. Politically unhelpful. (231)

This is a curious revisionism. There is no evidence of such Romantic primitivism, at least not in the Buffalo record; on the contrary, he was arguing there that black writing in South Africa was struggling to discover its proper theme, which was revolution. In the late 1960s that view might have been unexceptional, but Coetzee held it and then later sought to downplay it.

The place where these issues come to a head in the fiction is in Foe, specifically in the representation of Friday. At a point when the drafting of the novel had become distinctly edgy and volatile, Coetzee considered the title, Friday.⁵

Judging by a luminous passage in the manuscripts, his thinking in December of 1983 was conflicted:

Friday is at the centre of this story; but I seem incapable of conceiving for him any role in the story. How much interest do I really have in Friday? By robbing him of his tongue (and hinting that it is Cruso, not I, who cut it out) I deny him a chance to speak for himself: because I cannot imagine how anything that Friday might say would have a place in my text. Defoe’s text is full of Friday’s Yes; now it is impossible to fantasize that Yes; all the ways in which Friday can say No seem not only stereotyped (i.e. rehearsed over and over again in the texts of our times) but so destructive (murder, rape, bloodthirsty tyranny). What is lacking to me is what is lacking to Africa since the death of Negritude: a vision of a future for Africa that is not a debased version of life in the West.⁶

It certainly appears from this that Coetzee’s reading, during the Buffalo years, of Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, and others in the negritude movement remained with him through the subsequent decades. When it came to writing Friday, he was unable to dissociate the character from these early encounters with negritude, but he was also unwilling or unable to ventriloquise Friday’s voice.⁷

The courses in African literature and history that Coetzee taught in Buffalo and then at UCT in the 1970s and 1980s were the pre-history of Friday, by this account. In the silent Friday, a tangled story of obligation and compromised participation in the history of African thought reaches an unhappy denouement. I read this as a sign that two of the key narratives at work in the making of Coetzee at the time, namely colonial travelogue and ethnography, and African diasporic cultural nationalism, simply could not be reconciled. The ghosts of Jacobus Coetzee, William Burchell, Francois Le Vaillant, Anders Sparrman, Léopold Senghor, Aime Césaire, and Frantz Fanon were not going to make peace with one another inside Coetzee. Better to leave them in their state of purgatory together and try to rethink this whole fraught history on completely different terms.

Notes

1 This is an updated version of the account I give in Tim Mehigan and Christian Moser, eds., The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J. M. Coetzee 277–81.

 

2 The late John Daniel, a distinguished South African social scientist and activist, contradicts this view, saying that he was first introduced to Marxist historiography by Coetzee at SUNY, Buffalo. Correspondence with Glenn Moss, 2 September 2014.

 

3 Here and throughout I rely on Coetzee’s lecture notes on his teaching at SUNY, Buffalo, which are held by the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature in Makhanda, South Africa.

 

4 Peter McDonald provides a detailed account of the course Coetzee offered at UCT, in ‘The Book in South Africa’ (see Attwell and Attridge 800–03).

 

5 J M Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Notebook, Foe, 2 November 1983.

 

6 J M Coetzee Papers, Notebook, Foe, 1 December 1983. I give a longer account of this in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 148–60.

 

7 Imraan Coovadia writes (with reference to my account of Foe in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing), ‘It is striking that Attwell describes a celebrated white writer – hesitating to express his misgivings about third world suffering – as the equivalent of a tongueless slave,’ adding ‘Coetzee makes no such claim in his own voice’ (206). I do not say anything so reductive. After much discussion, with evidence from the manuscripts, including this passage, I conclude that Friday’s silence is, among other things, an expression of Coetzee’s judgement about the failures of cultural nationalism. This failure leaves him with ‘neither the inclination nor the authority to supply the vision that is missing’ (158). In early drafts, Friday speaks, sometimes in mimicry.