J. M. Coetzee

The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronje (1907- )

Geoffrey Cronje was an influential figure in radical Afrikaner Nationalist circles in the 1940s, and a seminal contributor to the theory of apartheid. His published writings of the 1940s display a concern with “race‐mixing” that can properly be called obsessive. Where do obsessions such as Cronjes come from, and how do they spread themselves through the social body? Is a serious and productive analysis of the madness of apartheid possible, or is “madness” in a socio‐historical context merely a metaphor? In what ways may historiography have to extend the terms of its discourse in order to take account of irrational forces in social life?

Idleness in South Africa

In the records of the early Cape, the Hottentots are everywhere censured for their idleness. Though to some extent conditioned by contemporary European moral standards, this censure also reflects the frustration of a proto‐anthropology to whose cultural categories the Hottentot presents too many blanks. After 1795 the idleness of the frontier farmers is condemned equally harshly. There is no record of observers being seduced into seeing Hottentot or Boor life in terms of the Eden myth. While it is tempting to dismiss the strictures of these early writers, we might wonder whether the present‐day anthropologist seeking signs of a culture at work in social life would fare any better with the scandal of pervasive idleness.

The rhetoric of the passive in English

In contemporary stylistics, syntactic oppositions such as those between conjoined and embedded clauses, and active and passive sentences, are often given a rhetorical status, with the marked form (in the latter case the passive) taking the status of rhetorical device. The classical rhetorical tradition, on the other hand, nowhere gives passivization this status, treating it instead as a subsidiary step within larger rhetorical operations. Analysis of rhetorically complex uses of the passive in English tends to justify the classical tradition: passivization is (most of the time) a topicalization operation which can be analyzed as part of one or other welldefined rhetorical figure. However, certain rhetorical functions of the passive, particularly in agentless sentences, are not covered by classical taxonomies. These functions are most clearly exhibited in formal English prose, literary and scientific, of the eighteenth century. Here we find writers who use the passive with clear rhetorical ends in view and who appear to have an understanding of the grammar of passivization, however unformalized and perhaps unconscious, which differs from present-day transformational analysis. Intuitions of this kind, whether formalized by their users or not, constitute a variety of linguistic knowledge. Furthermore, they come to assume the status of shared syntactic conventions between writer and reader. They are therefore more than historical curiosities and deserve explication.

He and His Man

of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun. The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys. Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Eu rope, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate. These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have sea shores full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very light. By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck lan guage, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them down in their decoy ponds J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940. After receiv

The master of Petersburg

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepsons landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavels life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepsons ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

The Master of Petersburg

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepsons landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavels life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepsons ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

A POET IN PRISON

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist by Breyten Breytenbach. Mouroir by Breyten Breytenbach.