Kai Easton

Coetzee's Disgrace: Byron in Italy and the Eastern Cape c. 1820

Despite the prominence of Coetzees prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999) in discussions of “new” South African fiction, to date there has been little interest in examining either Coetzees choice of landscape in this novel, or the literary-biographical sub-plot of his Romantic scholar protagonist, David Lurie. What does the colonial history of British settlement have to do with Coetzees pointedly new South African novel? And how does the story of Byrons exile in Italy relate to the province that — since 1994 — we officially call the Eastern Cape? In this essay, I discuss these two seemingly unrelated plots, locating Disgrace in the “Discourse of the Cape” that he writes about in his seminal book of essays, White Writing (1988), together with selected and relevant facts from the life and times of Lord Byron. I argue that, by featuring Byron during his time in Italy, Coetzees novel highlights a radical romanticism, which offers a challenge to the British romantic tradition that simultaneously established itself at the Cape c. 1820, and still has resonance today.

Coetzee, the Cape and the question of history

ABSTRACT This essay reconsiders JM Coetzees much-cited “The novel today” address (1987), and argues that a return to the origins of his earliest fiction, Dusklands (1974), reveals a more complex and creative relationship to the discourses of history and historiography than Coetzee or his critics usually acknowledge (notable exceptions are Dovey 1988; Attwell 1993; and Green 1997). Beginning with the story of the nineteenth-century British naturalist and traveller William Burchell (whose influence on the writing of Dusklands will be discussed), the essay attempts to demonstrate something of the mutual adaptability and heterogeneity of history and fiction, of their textuality and transformation over the courseof history. More generally, this has implications for current disciplinary divisions and critical discourse; more specifically, it offers a challenge to our rather fixed configurations of Coetzee and the Cape.

Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has, in two novels (Davids Story [2000] and Playing in the Light [2006]), two collections of linked stories (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town [1987] and The One That Got Away [2008]), and a number of extraordinarily trenchant and insightful essays on South African literature and culture, established a reputation as one of the most far-sighted of contemporary postcolonial authors and critics. This essay introduces a special issue on Wicomb in relation to questions of locatedness and dislocation, home and exile, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, arising out of an international conference on Wicombs work held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010. Engaging with the complicated modernity of late-century and contemporary South Africa, Wicomb has long been concerned with anxieties about the ethics of speaking for, speaking over, the many voices of South Africas multiple communities, and of those who find a home in none of them. The various essays in this collection consider the issues at stake in considering Wicombs work in relation not only to the place in which much of her work is set, the Cape, but in attending, too, to the transnational and the cosmopolitan energies—and paradoxes—at work in her writing.

Introduction – Zoë Wicomb: Texts and Histories

The five articles in this first published collection of essays focusing on the work of Zoë Wicomb stem from a one-day colloquium, Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories, held in London in September 2008, jointly hosted by SOAS, the University of York and the Institute of English Studies, and generously supported by the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS). Conceived as a unique opportunity to bring together writers, critics and historians for a deliberately small but focused discussion on and around Wicomb’s writing, the London colloquium was composed of invited speakers and was the first of three events. The second was a follow-up conference held at the University of Stellenbosch in April 2010, and a third is planned for York in 2012. The London colloquium and the present cluster that flows from it inaugurate a new critical prospectus of Wicomb scholarship (to date, articles have appeared sporadically in disparate journals) and go some way towards fostering a genuine interdisciplinary exchange on history and contemporary literary writing in South Africa. Whilst the articles published here are all by scholars who are primarily literary critics, the colloquium and its follow-up conference in Stellenbosch in 2010 have both had significant support and involvement from delegates and participants in other disciplines. The absence of essays by historians in this particular cluster should not be seen as evidence of their marginality in the enterprise: it is expected that two forthcoming special issues of Safundi and Current Writing in 2011 (from papers given at the Stellenbosch conference) will address this gap. The audience of JSAS combined with our own conference theme has required a rigorous interdisciplinary approach and the conferences have been organised without parallel sessions so as to encourage as cohesive a discussion as possible. In fact, JSAS’s hosting of an interdisciplinary inquiry across history and literary studies reaches back at least fifteen years, and the present cluster is the third of such projects. Special issues appeared in 1995 and in 2004, the latter organised around ‘South African Writing in the Transition’, although both of the earlier events from which these sets of articles emanated had as their remit a larger focus on cultural forms and history in post-transition South Africa. What is the rationale for and what are the benefits of a more specific, author-based selection such as this one? Why focus on the work of Wicomb – a writer who straddles South Africa and Scotland (or the Cape and Glasgow) – to consider the possibilities for innovative, interdisciplinary dialogue in southern African studies? What do we mean by ‘texts and histories’, how are these terms implicated in one another, and how might this cluster expand and engage with current debates in South African history and fiction now, trans-nationally, regionally, and locally?

The Cape & the Cosmopolitan or Travels Around Wicomb on a Journey to the Cederberg

Travelling retrospectively of the conference at Stellenbosch in 2010, this visual essay explores “the Cape and the Cosmopolitan” via a journey from Cape Town up to the Cederberg. Readers will remember this scene from Wicombs 2006 novel, Playing in the Light. Following in the footsteps of Wicombs fictional characters -- both to Clanwilliam and the German mission station at Wupperthal (Wuppertal) -- the trip leads to unexpected encounters. It also follows familiar routes. Khoisan rock art, the grave of the well-known Afrikaans poet C. Louis Leipoldt, rooibos tea, and a companionable aunt all feature in this illustrated record. A whimsical narrative about travelling lightly, it is also a critical intervention in debates about how to read cosmopolitanism regionally, and what it might mean to find the cosmopolitan Cape outside the southern metropolis.

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandal

In a contentious article in South Africa’s Sunday Times, Colin Bower, a publisher in Cape Town, tried to argue that J.M. Coetzee is not as good a writer as everyone says he is: ‘I have searched in vain for evidence of literary craftsmanship in Coetzee’, he boldly wrote.1 His timing could not have been worse: a week or so later, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was October 2003. Bower’s article particularly highlights a local feature of Coetzee reception, for, mixed with great acclaim for the author and his work, there is also great displeasure. In the press, there is at least as much attention given to complaints about Coetzee’s elusiveness and the inaccessibility of his prose as there is to the achievement of his novels. And despite Coetzee’s quiet insistence on privacy, there are still those who persist in seeing the author as a public figure.