Mattering bodies: women and corporeal violence in Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and their filmic adaptations

† This was the author's affiliation during her doctoral studies (2009–2013), which formed the basis for this paper.

Abstract

Against a backdrop of increasing academic interest in the pervasiveness and mutability of violence in African contexts, this paper explores how violence on women's bodies, including punitive rape, partners’ violence, invasive state surveillance and medicalization, is dramatized in works by the South African authors Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and in their filmic adaptations. While Gordimer's short stories City Lovers and Country Lovers (both 1974) are mostly concerned with the corporeal transformations women undergo because of simultaneous race, class and gender violence, Coeztee's post-apartheid Disgrace (1999) more explicitly interrogates the possibilities of undermining violence through corporeal resistance to documentation, medicalization and displacement. Drawing on a Deleuzian notion of the body as a relational and ever-changing ‘assemblage’, I contend that a comparison between these literary texts and their filmic adaptations, rather than leading to a sterile debate on trans-media ‘fidelity’, allows a further, deeper understanding of women's violated corporealities: one which entails moving beyond the pervasive idea of violence as an inevitable facet of (South) African societies, and pushes us towards a vision of violated bodies as always self-inventive and potentially revolutionary forces. The irreducible materiality of the screened bodies will moreover be seen as intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally, interrogating the spectators’ own sense of vulnerability and responsibility.

Sur toile de fond d'intérêt académique grandissant pour l'omniprésence et la mutabilité de la violence dans les contextes africains, cet article explore comment la violence sur le corps des femmes, y compris le viol punitif, la violence des partenaires, la surveillance d’État intrusive et la médicalisation, est dramatisée dans les œuvres d'auteurs sud-africains Nadine Gordimer et JM Coetzee, ainsi que dans leurs adaptations cinématographiques. Alors que les nouvelles de Gordimer City Lovers et Country Lovers (1974 pour les deux) sont surtout préoccupées par les transformations corporelles que les femmes subissent en raison des violences simultanées de race, classe et genre, le roman d'après apartheid de Coeztee Disgrace (1999) interroge de manière plus explicite les possibilités d’ébranler la violence par la résistance corporelle à la documentation, la médicalisation et de déplacement. En m'appuyant sur la notion deleuzienne du corps comme «assemblage» relationnel et en constante évolution, je soutiens qu'une comparaison entre ces textes littéraires et leurs adaptations filmiques, plutôt que de mener à un débat stérile sur la «fidélité» transmédia, permet une compréhension meilleur et plus en profondeur des corporéités violés des femmes: une telle compréhension nécessite d'aller au-delà de l'idée omniprésente de la violence comme facette inévitable des sociétés d'Afrique (du Sud), et nous pousse vers une vision des corps violés comme toujours des forces auto-inventives et potentiellement révolutionnaires. La matérialité irréductible des corps dépeints sera d'ailleurs considérée comme intentionnellement, ou parfois involontairement, interrogeant les propres sentiments de vulnérabilité et de responsabilité des spectateurs.

Keywords:

• Nadine Gordimer
• J. M. Coetzee
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• gender violence
• corporeality
• filmic adaptation

Mots-clés:

• Nadine Gordimer
• J. M. Coetzee
• Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari
• violence de genre
• corporéité
• adaptation cinématographique

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Joost Fontein for his invitation to participate in this special issue, and for his advice throughout the process. I am also indebted to Steffen Jensen, Mariaconcetta Costantini and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on various versions of this paper, and to Sandro Del Rosario for his precious help with the films stills.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

† This was the author's affiliation during her doctoral studies (2009–2013), which formed the basis for this paper.

1. For a critical perspective on the ‘fidelity debate’, see, among the others, McFarlane (1996) and Raengo and Stam (2005). On the widespread suspicion towards film as an adaptation of literature, Robert Stam (2005, 6–7) lists the multiple hierarchical tendencies of traditional Western culture, and denounces that for most spectators ‘the cinema's engagement with bodies – the body of the performer, the body of the spectator, and even the “skin” and the “haptic visuality” of the “body” of the film itself – discredits it as a serious, transcendent, art form’.

2. The alleged inertia of things is variously contested in neo-materialist and post-humanist discourses. Jane Bennet, for example, states in her Vibrant Matter that ‘this habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is a “partition of the sensible”, to use Jacques Rancière's phrase’, and that ‘the quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations’ (2010, vii).

3. Such a notion of ‘supplemental materiality’ bears a striking resemblance to Roland Barthes's idea of a ‘third meaning’, or ‘a supplement [one's] intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive’ (1985, 44), which finally exceeds all coded signification in film. Grounded in the materiality of the cinematic medium itself, this ‘obtuse meaning’ is to be found in details of the image which reveal the filmic artifice, such as the stubborn thickness of a nose under the make-up or the rigid shape of a fake beard on an actor's face. In short, it is connected to the persistence of the performers’ corporeal realities beside, and despite, the film's intended signification.

4. As will become evident, a constructivist understanding of the body such as Deleuze's one, with its accent on the interrelatedness of physical materiality and social relations, also helps to avoid the risk voiced by Lindiwe Dovey when she remarks that African filmmakers cannot be expected to simply celebrate the bodily at the expense of rationality, since this would mean to perpetuate the historical European description of the African as a mere (savage) body. By overcoming an idea of corporeality as solely made up of organs and biological functions, a Deleuzian approach to what bodies are calls attention to self-invention and transformative potential rather than to an object's knowability to a presumably superior subject (Dovey 2009, 17–18).

5. The original magazine versions of the twin stories, titled Town and Country Lovers (part One and part Two), also appeared in the New Yorker in 1975. Both tales were later re-published in Gordimer's collection A Soldier's Embrace (1980), as well as in her volume Six Feet of the Country (1982). The latter edition is the one referred to in this paper.

6. The other films included in the series are Six Feet of the Country (Stephenson 1977, pilot film), A Chip of Glass Ruby (Devenish 1982), Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants (Stephenson 1982), Oral History (Chappell 1982) and Praise (Green 1982).

7. This short story, as well as its twin narrative Country Lovers, has so far received little attention from the specialized critics, who have mostly focused on Gordimer's novels. One of the few exceptions is to be found in Alan Lomberg's Once More Into the Burrows: Nadine Gordimer's Later Short Fiction (1993). However, Lomberg here limits himself to mention Gordimer's narratives as instances of ‘ex post facto rejection’ (1993, 232) of interracial desire, thus failing to see the semantic richness and multi-layered social critique which the present analysis tries to highlight in these stories.

8. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1957), intended at preventing all sexual contacts among South Africans across racial barriers, were, not surprisingly, among the first measures taken by the National Party as the inaugural acts of the apartheid era. It can be argued that the field of sexuality, as especially connected with the danger of ‘miscegenation’, was perceived as the most politically charged and the one most urgently needing regulation (Graham 2012; on the idea of interracial mingling as ‘disease’, see Coetzee 1996).

9. It will maybe be useful to note here that the traditional Western hierarchy of silence and speech is successfully questioned by Motsemme (2004) in her reading of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the context of the hearings, women's recurrent silences around episodes of violence they suffered can be reinterpreted, according to Motsemme, as ‘another language through which women speak volumes’, and one allowing social scientists to ‘explore other, perhaps hidden meanings regarding the struggle to live under apartheid’ (2004, 910). In this context, if compared with Lucy's ‘silence’, Melanie's official unveiling of her experience (i.e. her complaint to the academic authorities) does not paradoxically endow her with more rights to express her own viewpoint. Sadly enough, hers translates into a case of an angry boyfriend and of an indignant father intervening to face her distress: in other words, she is till the end being spoken for and about by men.

10. Some (mostly white) commentators have protested that Coetzee might be suggesting the necessity for post-apartheid white South Africans to pay any price to atone for the crimes of a centuries-long history of colonial wrong (Marais 2001). This in turn prompted the indignant reactions of some members of the black intelligentsia, which resulted in the novel being mentioned by some ANC high-rank politicians as a proof that white South Africans’ racists attitudes were still widespread in the country's media as of 2000.

11. In his The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film, Keyan Tomaselli reported some critics remarking that ‘because the farmer's son falls in love with the black woman, she becomes the object of his desire and in so far as the audience is positioned to view from his perspective, she becomes the object of its gaze. This is a male gaze, as all the sexual or vaguely erotic scenes are filmed to stimulate male desire’ (1988, 208).

12. Gordimer's personal engagement in this adaptation as the official author of the screenplay makes it however clear that the film should not be read as a critical reinterpretation of the short story, but rather as an ideal extension of it as envisioned by the writer herself.

13. The original verses written by Metastasio are: ‘Di questa cetra in seno/ pien di dolcezza/ e pieno/ d'amabili deliri/ vieni, e t'ascondi, Amor./ E tal di questa or sia/ la tenera armonia/ Che immerso ognun sospiri/ nel tuo felice ardor’. A rough translation from Italian is as follows: ‘O Love, full of sweetness and amorous frenzy, come and hide deep into the bosom of this zither. Let this hour's harmony be so tender that everybody sighs, while plunged in your happy passion’. A further scene where David's misleading take on reality is staged through music is the one following his academic ‘trial’. Here the man lies still in his bath listening to the Va Pensiero choir, originally sang by the Jewish slaves in Verdi's Nabucco. The music grows in intensity while he prepares for his trip to Lucy's farm, and finally reaches a climax while he drives away across the mountains. The lyrics plea for a divine intervention that strengthens one's virtue across tribulations ironically matches David's search for atonement after his abusive seduction of Melanie.