Carrol Clarkson

J.M. Coetzee : countervoices

Acknowledgements Introduction Not I You Voice Voiceless Names Etymologies Conclusion: We Bibliography Index

J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language

Summary In this article, with particular reference to Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980]2000) and Disgrace (1999), I explore the ways in which Coetzees texts confront the difficulty of bringing meaningfully into linguistic range that which appears without precedent in given language. The irruption caused by the not-yet-said has the capacity to disturb the assumption that a meaningful language, recognised and shared by addressor and addressee, is being spoken at all. Yet the enquiries set up in the worlds of Coetzees fiction never end with the first thought that something may be beyond discursive limits, even in the recognition that the effect of subsuming difference under the homogenising effect of a dominant discourse can be just as ethically fraught. In the course of the article I suggest a link between Coetzees ethical enquiry about the limits of language, and that of Holocaust writer, Jean Améry, in his book, At the Minds Limits ([1966]1980).

Verbal and visual: the restless view

Abstract This essay is a review of Ivan Vladislavićs recent book on the artist, Willem Boshoff. Vladislavić and Boshoff share a philosophical interest in the linguistic tensions between abstract meanings and material signs. Where Boshoffs sculptures and installations often appear as three-dimensional texts, the letters and words in Vladislavićs books have all the materiality of Duchamps ready-mades. In his engagement with Boshoffs work, as much as in his own fiction, Vladislavić explores the ethical implications of human attempts to consolidate meaning as it surfaces in the patterned media of language.

Photo Essay: Welcome to Our Hillbrow

When Welcome To Our Hillbrow came out in 2001, I asked Phaswane Mpe to sign my copy: ‘‘Welcome to our Heaven of fictions!’’ he wrote, alluding to our earlier joking conversation about the novel’s Heaven TV lounge. I was pleased by this inscription. Certainly, ‘‘our Heaven of fictions’’ seemed a more congenial place to be welcomed to than our Hillbrow at the turn of the twenty-first century. The inner-city area of Johannesburg has undergone momentous social change in the last hundred years or so: gold claims on this ground were first sold off as residential properties in 1895, and according to The Standard and Diggers’ News of 25 July of the same year, Hillbrow was set to become ‘‘Johannesburg’s chief and most fashionable suburb.’’ In 1896, the estimated population of Hillbrow was 300; by 1993 it was approximately 30,000, and by 2003, the population was estimated to be over 100,000 during the week, and possibly over 200,000 during weekends. These figures become more striking with the realization that Hillbrow comprises less than one square kilometre. Increasingly today, the population of Hillbrow consists of immigrants from other parts of Africa. Until 1991, when the Group Areas Act of 1950 was scrapped, Hillbrow was the legal preserve of white residents, but by 1970, people classified as Indian and Coloured had started moving into the neighbourhood, and by mid-1993, approximately 85 percent of Hillbrow’s population was black. Thus, as Alan Morris points out, ‘‘Hillbrow is one of the very few neighbourhoods in South Africa that, despite the Group Areas Act, moved from being an all-white neighbourhood (in terms of the flat-dwellers) to being predominantly black.’’

Embodying you : Levinas and a question of the second person

Abstract In this paper I examine the effects of considering Levinas’s philosophy of the relation to the Other as a relation to a second person “you,” rather than to a third person “he.” To think of the Other as “you” sheds further light on the ethical encounter that Levinas terms the “Saying:” it provokes us to think of the event of reading a literary text as an event of the Saying. In the dynamic potential of the literary text to instantiate an “I” and a “you” (which is to say, an addresser and an addressee) each time it is read, and in ways that cannot be exhaustively predicted or epistemologically saturated in advance, the artwork effects an open yet responsive encounter with the Other.

Writing and Reading: Boundaries of Identity

A turning point in my life occurred when I discovered a treasure trove of banned books in my father’s garage. One day, alone at home and bored during the school holidays in the mid-1960s, I began to explore my home. There was that wooden crate at the front right corner of the garage [...]. Once I had removed everything from the top of the box, I opened it. Inside were many books on music, art, and poetry, and others that I thought my father must have used for his degree studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. But as I got closer to the bottom of the box, my heart leapt with disbelief! Here was Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele; and Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson; and Blame Me on History by Bloke Modisane [...].

Towards an Aesthetics of Law

In this seminal discussion of the relationship between law and literature, between the philosophers and the poets, Socrates and his interlocutors decide to banish the artists from their own intricately worked-out—if ironically imagined—just state. The main trouble is that ‘‘all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of truth but merely produce a superficial likeness of any subject they treat;’’ to the extent that ‘‘the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and that the art of representation is something that has no serious value.’’

Derek Attridge in the event : review article

The Singularity of Literature. Attridge, Derek, 2004. London & New York: Routledge. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. {Literature in the Event}. Attridge, Derek, 2005. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu‐Natal Press.