Mike Kissack

Humility in a Godless World: Shame, Defiance and Dignity in Coetzee’s Disgrace

In the critical literature elicited by the publication of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in 1999, many of the authors address the issue of ethical responsibility in a context of diminished agency. In his article on perversity as a narrative principle, Michiel Heyns reflects upon Coetzee’s protagonist in Disgrace, David Lurie, as a character responding to situations initiated by his free will, but which always produce negative consequences. The perversity of life, its tendency to engender situational irony, the (negative) opposite of our intentions, appears as its most conspicuous feature. A human agent, such as David, may have the freedom to initiate a course of action, but he/she has very little control over its development. For Heyns, there is a metaphysical perspective permeating Coetzee’s novels, namely the assumption that neither history, nor the gods, is responsible for our experiences, which evolve randomly and invariably in a negative (perverse) direction. Recurrent frustrations, disappointments and defeats can only diminish the individual’s sense of effective agency. Heyns’s observations are reminiscent of the concerns of the ancient Greek Stoics, for whom one’s control was confined to one’s responses to circumstances. If one could not fashion them, then at least one could try to control and direct one’s reactions to life’s frequent misfortunes For Heyns, David’s multiple personal disasters produce a personal fall, to which he responds (quite stoically) with a ‘‘sympathetic imagination’’. This notion is one that is explicated thoroughly in Coetzee’s book, The Lives of Animals, in which the fictional animal rights advocate, Elizabeth Costello, delivers a series of lectures and

The persistent castaway in South African writing

There is a small bundle of letters in the archives of the National Library in Cape Town that was assembled and dispatched, with a detailed explanation, by the black Presbyterian priest, John Knox Bokwe. At some point between 1907 and 1920, when he retired closer to his alma mater Lovedale Mission due to failing health, Bokwe wrote from his congregational seat, the United Free Church of Scotland at Ugie, East Griqualand (in the then Cape Colony), to Professor George Edward Cory at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. While appointed to the university as a professor of Chemistry, Cory sustained an avid interest in the history of the Eastern Cape frontier area, and assembled a wealth of documentation and information that was eventually published as the multi-volume work, The Rise of South Africa (191

Secular improvisations: the poetics of invention in Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view

Abstract Each of the four protagonists in The exploded view (2004) attempts to negotiate the field of post-apartheid signs, material objects and ideological possibilities and limits. In this article we analyse the limited capacity of each protagonist to make sense of the transforming world he inhabits. We characterize this limited capacity to make meaning by relating the four narratives comprising the novel to certain theoretical moves in the work of Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu respectively. We conclude that Vladislavić develops a sense of the ineluctably contingent nature of the quotidian based in a secular epistemology. That is, his protagonists experience simultaneously the failed promise of transcendence and their agency as dramatically qualified in the postcolonial context in which they live.

The Secularization of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry

In this article we read Mike Nicols The Ibis Tapestry (1998) as an intertextual novel that brings a postmodern inflection to its interrogation of the principles and practices of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Using the distant mirror of the life, work, and death of Christopher Marlowe, the novel unravels aspects of the ethical ideology and epistemological framing of the Commission in a way that, we argue, amounts to its secularization. This does not mean that Nicol presents a conservative subversion of attempts to accomplish postapartheid nation building. Rather, his novel is one of those literary works that deepens, extends, complicates, and intensifies the work of the TRC by casting doubt on its ecclesiastical framing and its foundational teleology. Further, this article is an attempt to redress the degree to which The Ibis Tapestry has been ignored in the study of South African literature. We argue that its unsettling dynamic needs to be considered if we are to do justice to the literary imprint of the Commission.

Hospitality in Karel Schoeman's Promised Land and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

Summary This essay places Karel Schoemans representation of an ethically stunted and uncompromising Afrikaner community in his novel, Promised Land (1978) in counterpoint to Antjie Krogs efforts, in Country of My Skull (1999), to inaugurate a new ethics of representation in response to the demands and opportunities of the post-apartheid dispensation. We relate the two texts by reading them through the lens of Derridas seminar on the ethics of hospitality. First, we discuss Krogs version of hospitality as an implicit response to the dynamics of moral myopia captured so vividly in Schoemans dystopian portrait of Afrikanerdom. Second, we address the purported plagiarism in Country of My Skull in the context of the protocols for hosting the voice of the other in those works defined as “creative non-fiction”. In our concluding discussion we shift our attention to the ethical implications of various practices of citation.

A wrecked life: allegorical transcendence in André Brink's An instant in the wind

Abstract André Brinks An instant in the wind (1976) is most commonly interpreted as presenting a Utopian alternative to apartheids politics of race. This alternative is constructed as an Edenic allegory in which Elizabeth Larsson, who is abandoned in the interior of South Africa, and Adam Mantoor, an escaped slave, discover a genuinely liberated libidinal mutuality unconstrained by colonial ideology. We are concerned to investigate Brinks presentation of the failure of this allegorical escape, and the reintroduction of the two castaways into colonial social history, represented in the text as “the Cape”. The novels self-referential enquiry into the possibility of extrication from the social and political suggests that it might be read as a metafictional interrogation of particular practices of representation. In order to come to terms with these practices, we place An instant in the wind in the context of the genre of shipwreck and castaway narrative, and then consider the basis of Karl Marxs criticism of the use of this genre in attempts to explain social, economic and historical realities.

The dynamics of discontent: containing desire and aggression in Coetzee's Disgrace

In this article we explore the experiences of David Lurie and his daughter Lucy, the main protagonists in J. M. Coetzees novel Disgrace, in terms of the tensions in modern society analysed so trenchantly by Sigmund Freud in his short investigation, Civilisation and its Discontents. We demonstrate how Davids self‐understanding and internal conflicts are a reflection of the fundamental conflict between impulse and social constraint, the basis upon which, according to Freud, civilised existence is established. We also indicate how Davids daughter, Lucy, is compromised by the nexus of changing political relations within which she is located on her farm in the Eastern Cape Province; such frustrating concessions again constitute a basic element of social life. In presenting this portrayal, we suggest that Coetzees novel is a South African exploration of the kind of irresolvable tensions that Freud identifies as a general feature of organised social existence, and that an appreciation of these offers a comprehensive interpretative framework within which one can understand the cultural, personal and political specificities of Coetzees South African context.

Context, representation and critique: some reflections on the selection of literary syllabi

Abstract This article argues that curriculum planners should incorporate into literary syllabi works which challenge the ethos of contemporary liberal multicultural values. It suggests that such works are a stimulus to educational debate within an inherently cultural conflictual context. It also emphasises that since literature is a form of linguistic representation and such representation is semantically unstable, teachers can exploit ambiguity and interpretative alternatives to challenge texts that offend contemporary norms. These abstract issues are explored in a critical assessment of Achebes negative evaluation of Conrads Heart of Darkness to provide a concrete example of how issues in cultural studies and philosophy of language can inform and enhance classroom teaching.

Review of Peter Anderson's The Unspeakable

In viewing the shelves in any major bookshop containing publications on South Africa’s recent and more distant past, one observes a proliferating range of titles reflecting the current vogue for memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, cultural studies that examine the complexities of urban transformation and the changing dynamics of post-Apartheid race relations, reviews and analyses of political developments since the momentous month of April 1994, as well as conventional historical studies on the spectrum of South Africa’s colonial and conflictual past. Within such an array of engaging titles on South Africa’s complex and fraught experience, Peter Anderson’s debut novel The Unspeakable may appear as something of an anomaly, for it is a fictional account of a few days in the lives of four people in the north of South Africa, near the Zimbabwean border, in the middle of 1984, during a critical decade of the anti-apartheid struggle. With its narration of intense personal conflict, including racial tension against the background of the apartheid era’s military and political oppression, is this novel a belated contribution to the kind of ‘struggle literature’ that contributed towards the sustained opposition to apartheid between the 1960s and the early 1990s? Given the current focus of writing in and on South Africa, is Anderson’s novel an anachronism, whose tale has been superseded and eclipsed by the literary developments of the past 20 years? Clearly it is not. Anderson structures his novel around the first person narrative of Rian Erasmus, a cameraman who accompanies a discredited paleontologist, Digby Bamford, to film him at the site of his alleged discovery of a hominid skull, which he calls ‘Wonderboy’, in the Northern Transvaal in July 1984. Bamford wants to have himself filmed holding the ‘Wonderboy’, presenting an account of the evolutionary significance of his finding for undergraduate paleontology students. Bamford’s female companion, Vicky Daintree, is one of Erasmus’s former girlfriends, and the black South African, Bucs, is Erasmus’s technical assistant. This group of four develops an explosive and ultimately homicidal relationship. Bamford has been discredited within the paleontological community because of his pseudoscientific approach to his research, and because of his preposterous claim that his ‘Wonderboy’ discovery is evidence that ‘modern man’ predated the creatures from whom orthodox evolutionary science claims he has descended. There is, of course, a combination of pathos and absurdity in the development of this character’s perverse insistence on the truth of his claims, but it is the emblematic, if muted, presence of the ‘Wonderboy’ that plays such an important role in this novel, for it represents the nature, constraints, and intractable emotional and ethical complexity that define human experience. The experience of these four protagonists, whose gender and racial conflicts are located within a particular decade of the apartheid era, transcends their time

The Antinomies of a Liberal Identity: Reason, Emotion and Volition in the Work of R.F.A. Hoernlé and W.M. Macmillan

ABSTRACT This article reassesses the complex and controversial phenomenon of white liberalism in South Africa between 1920 and 1940 through a re-examination of the work of the philosopher, R.F.A. Hoernlé, and economic historian, W.M. Macmillan, both of whom worked at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. These two men considered their analyses and recommendations to be embodiments of a Western liberal tradition, thereby contributing a particular dimension to the evolution of white identity in South Africa. Informed by aspects of Isaiah Berlins critique of Western liberalism, we indicate how Hoernlé and Macmillans emphasis on the rational nature of Western liberalism had to confront, and accommodate, the realities of intransigent white emotion and resolute volition that maintained white supremacy in South Africa. As white dissidents, their work reflects the antinomous nature of their particular liberal white South African identity, which had to grapple perennially with the often incompatible relationship between reason, emotion and volition in its formulation of an encompassing vision of an integrated and just future for this society.