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Abstract
This article examines the impact of two authors who wrote in German, Franz Kafka and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, on the work of J. M. Coetzee. Focusing on Elizabeth Costello, the author explores the ways Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz and Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief are deployed within this novel as part of the intertextual fabric of the titular character’s persecuted imagination. Finding herself unwittingly caught in the imaginary worlds suggested by her European literary influences, Costello faces the problem of accounting for herself as a writer. Investigating questions of otherness, violence and authority, this article argues that Coetzee’s work reflects the struggles of a writer in the context of settler colonialism.
Notes
1. Coetzee’s familiarity with early twentieth-century German modernism is well documented. He read the works in their original German (as demonstrated in Coetzee, Citation1981, and Coetzee, Citation2001).
2. ‘What Hofmannsthal has achieved … is the first representation in literature of the inside of a gas chamber, before the fact, of course’ (Santner, Citation2011: 170). (On Kafka, see Coetzee, Citation2003: 71; Miller, Citation2011).
3. This outsider status might have appealed to Coetzee, as a South African writer writing in English, the dominant colonial language. As Coetzee has pointed out, ‘English in South Africa is what one might call a deeply entrenched foreign language’ (Coetzee, Citation1993: 7).
4. ‘Translating Kafka’ offers a close comparison between elements of Mark Harman’s (then) new translation of Das Schloss (The Castle), alongside the older translation by the Muirs (Coetzee, Citation2001). Coetzee’s other essay on Kafka attends to technical aspects of the narrative time in Kafka’s Der Bau (Coetzee, Citation1981).
5. Hence why some critics have seen in the book dialogical and polyvocal dimensions as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin (see Kochin, Citation2007).
6. Spivak (Citation1988).
7. Like his character, Coetzee has long expressed a deep ambivalence towards the position of being identified as a national writer (see Barnett, Citation1999).
8. The date of her letter is exactly 398 years before the attack on the World Trade Center to the day, a provocative allusion to an event associated with another kind of experience of terror and suffering. It is also 400 years before the publication of Elizabeth Costello.
9. Harald Leusmann has described the controversies Coetzee incited after apartheid, where he attempted to ‘maintain the position of a language that avoids taking sides’ (Leusmann, Citation2004: 61). Some have even interpreted Coetzee’s move to Australia as a sign that he has turned his back on South African politics and its future (see Donadio, Citation2007).
10. This has led Benita Parry to argue that Coetzee’s fiction embodies a ‘powerful moral critique of apartheid’ (quoted in Barnett, Citation1999: 289).
11. For example, consider Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos or Kafka’s change of each first-person pronoun ‘Ich’ to the third person ‘Er’ or ‘K.’ in the early drafts of his Das Schloss.