Journal of Southern African Studies

Constructions of Apartheid in the International Reception of the Novels of J. M. Coetzee

Author(s): J. M. Coetzee and Clive Barnett
Source: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 287-301
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, Volume 25, Number 2, June 1999, pp. 287-301

Constructions of Apartheid in the

International Reception of the
Novels of J. M. Coetzee
CLIVE BARNETT
(Departmentof Geography, University of Reading)

This paper discusses the international reception of the fiction of South African novelist and
critic, J. M. Coet.zee, in order to examine the institutional and rhetorical conventions which
shaped the selection and circulation of particular forms of ivriting as exemplars of 'South
African literature' from the 1970s through to the 1990s. The representation of Coetzee's
novels in two reading-formations is critically addressed: in non-academic literary reviews;
and in the emergent academic paradigm of post-colonial literary theory. It is argued that
in both cases, South Affican literary writinig has often been re-inscribed into new contexts
according to abstract and moralised understandings of the nature of apartheid.

I sometimes wonder if it isn't simply that vast and wholly ideological superstructureconstituted
by publishing, reviewing and criticism that is forcing on me the fate of being a 'South African
novelist'.
J. M. Coetzeel

Literature and the Moralisation of Apartheid

South Africa has been made available as an object of knowledge in particularways. The
presentationof apartheidon an internationalstage was culturallymediatedthroughvarious
discourses and institutions. This process of mediation solicited specific forms of political
commitmentand moral approbationthat were crucial to the maintenanceof the anti-apart-
heid struggle at the internationalscale. LauraChrismanhas recently argued that the sense
that South Africa is an immediatelyand transparentlyknowable society continues to support
a particular relation of 'sanctioned ignorance' amongst commentators in the West.2
Remedying this situation requires that attentionibe paid to critically questioning the
discourses which secure the representativenessof particularaccounts of South African
culture and politics. In this paper I want to examine the cultural mediation of apartheid
throughthe internationalreception of South African literaryfiction. The particularfocus of
my discussion will be the different contexts of reception for the work of J. M. Coetzee.
Rob Nixon argues that the mobilisation of opposition to apartheidin the West had to
negotiate fundamental incompatibilities between the political radicalism of organised
opposition in South Africa, where liberalism was at best a beleaguered tradition,and the
need to mobilise an essentially liberal constituency in the West.3 Campaigns to mobilise

1 T. Morphet,'Two Interviewswith J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987', in D. Bunn and J. Taylor (eds), From South
Africa: Writing,Photographyand Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988).
2 L. Chrisnman, 'QuestioningRobertYoung's Post-ColonialCriticism', TextualPractice, 11, 1 (1997), pp. 39-45.
3 R. Nixon, Homelands,Harlemand HollywZood: SouthAfr-icanCultureand the WorldBeyond(London,Routledge,
1994), p. 78.

0305-7070/99/020287-15 $7.00 ? 1999 Journal of Southern African Studies

288 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

internationalopposition to apartheidtherefore required a certain degree of 'cross-cultural

flexibility' in terms of what was politically serviceable.4The successful internationalisation
of anti-apartheidmovements was dependent on the discursive transformationof apartheid
into an essentially moral issue: 'The successful conversion of the anti-apartheidcause into
a world movement was in large part proportionateto the Manicheanclarity of the issues at
stake, as a showdown between good and evil, victims and villains, black and white,
oppressed and oppressors, the masses and a racist minority'.
Literatureacquireda peculiar importancein shaping internationalunderstandingsof the
nature of apartheid.From the late 1940s through to the 1990s, South Africa acquired 'a
notorious centrality in the contemporarypolitical and ethical imaginationwhich [gave] its
writers a special claim on the world's attention'.6Literarywriting by white South Africans
was inserted into a moralised frame through which apartheid was constructed as an
internationalissue. White South African writers were received into an internationalcircuit
of literaiy celebrity according to particularimperativeswhich determinedthe selection and
evaluation of different texts and authors.7The work of white writers such as Alan Paton,
Nadine Gordimer,Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbachand J. M. Coetzee, came to hold a
central place in defining an internationalcanon of respectable, morally robust and liberal
oppositional literature.Writing by white South African authorswas grafted into particular
circuits of internationalliteraryevaluation shaped by liberal humanist values. The regular
identificationof apartheidwith EasternEuropeancommunism was based upon the fact that
the success of anti-apartheidmovements in the West rested on the constructionof a cause
of apparently'epic moral clarity'.8
This paper aims to draw into focus the frames of reference into which literary works
were translatedin the course of constructingliteratureitself as part of a struggle for liberal,
non-racial values. Lewis Nkosi lhas developed the notion of the 'cross-borderreader' in
order to understandthe ways in which South African literary writing has been shaped by
the necessity to address dispersed, divided and fragmented audiences.9The cross-border
readeris constitutiveof the very form of South African writing. The fracturedand multiple
audiences for South African writing imposes limitationas both the condition and subject of
much of that literature, and produces writing characterisedby an uncertain address to
'virtual audiences'.'0This is exemplified by the frequentrecourse to epistolary forms such
as letters,journals or diaries, forms which make visible the act of writing for a fictionalised
audience.1' Fiction by South African writers has, then, in no small part been constituted
from the outside in, shaped by the internationalaudiences upon which it depended as the

4 Nixon, Homelands, p. 94.

5 Nixon, Homelands, p. 204.
6 D. Attridge, 'Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of the Canon', in K. R. Lawrence (ed),
Decolonising Tradition:New Viewsof Tventielh-Century'British'LileraryCanons(Urbana,Universityof Illinois
Press, 1992), p. 216.
7 On the canonisation of 'third world' literary celebrities, see T. Brennan, 'Cosmopolitans and Celebrities',
Race and Class, 31, 1 (1989), pp. 1-19.
8 Nixon, Homelands, p. 205.
9 L. Nkosi, 'A Countryof Borders', SouthernAfricanReview of Books (June/July1990), pp. 19-20; and L. Nkosi,
'Constructingthe "Cross-Border" Reader',in E. Boehrner,L. ChrismanandK. Parker(eds), AlteredState?Writing
and SouthAfrica(Sydney,DangarooPress, 1994), pp. 37-50. Forfurtherconsiderationsof the centralityof borders
and boundariesas emblems of social differentiationin South African cultureand politics, see J. A. Stotesbury,
'The Functionof Bordersin the PopularNovel in South Africa', English In Africa, 17, 2 (1990), pp. 71-89, and
R. Thornton,'The Potentials of Boundariesin South Africa: Steps Towards a Theory of the Social Edge', in
R. Werbnerand T. Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Encounters in Africa (London, Zed Press, 1996), pp. 136-161.
10 S. Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer(London, Allen and Unwin, 1986).
11 W. Ong, 'The Writer'sAudience is Always a Fiction', Publications of the ModernLanguagesAssociation, 90,1
(1975), pp. 9-21.
 Apartheidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 289

consequence of its own marginalisationfrom the everyday life and from the political and
cultural struggles of the majority of South Africans.
As a result of the need to negotiate multiple audiences and differentpolitical arenas,the
meanings of South African literature were produced through a series of translationsor
transcodings, as the same texts moved from one context into others characterised by
alternativeideological, political, and aesthetic imperatives. As a consequence, differences
in geographical location become crucial in shaping the readings made of South African
literary fiction.'2 This process can be understoodwith reference to the notion of 'reading-
formation', understood as a set of material and discursive practices which 'connect
texts and readers in specific relations to one another in constituting readers as reading
subjects of particulartypes and texts as objects as objects-to-be-readin particularways'.'3
South African literaturehas been differently constructedby dispersed and divided reading-
formations.In the rest of this paper, I want to focus attentionupon the reading-formations
through which the fiction of J. M. Coetzee has been read. Coetzee's novels have been
constructed in different ways by different audiences, and have thus been subjected to
alternativeand shifting aesthetic and political evaluations. These different audiences alight
upon different features of Coetzee's texts, and in turn they construct the 'context' of his
writings in differentways. And Coetzee is of interestnot least because his fiction is marked
by a highly developed reflexivity regardingpractices of canonisation.'4For this reason, we
might suppose that the reception of Coetzee's fiction would tend to make visible the norms
of canonisation through which his work has been constructed as exemplary of a certain
form of 'South African literature',and throughwhich certain moralised understandingsof
apartheidand the struggle against it were reproducedon an internationalstage.

Making Coetzee Available

Coetzee's novels are intemationally acclaimed within the mainstream English-speaking
literaryworld, having won major literaryawards in his native SoutlhAfrica, in Britain and
Europe, and beyond. Amongst this audience, his fiction has been received as embodying a
'powerful moral critique of apartheid'.'5Nkosi has suggested that the metropolitanjournal-
istic review has been constitutive of a particularnotion of 'South African literature'as the
product of white writers working in the English language.16The arena of non-academic
literary reviewing has considerable cultural authority in determining the selection and
transmissionof particulartexts and authors.17 This section traces the discursive dimensions
of this non-academic reading-formation,into which Coetzee's novels have been inscribed
and through which they have been made available for consumption by a more general
internationalliterarypublic. I want to examine the specific terms of reference which have
shaped the reception of Coetzee's fiction in this sphere in Britain and North America, and
how in turn certain understandingsof South African society and of apartheidwere put into
circulationthroughthis process of 'translation'.Given the dominantnotion of literatureas

12 L. Engle, 'Differences of Location', SouthernAfr-icanReview of Books (July/August 1995).

13 T. Bennett, 'Texts in History:the Determinationsof Readings and their Texts', in D. Attridge,G. Bennington
and R. Young (eds), Post-structuralismand the Question of Histoty (Cambridge,CambridgeUniversity Press,
1987), p. 70.
14 Attridge, 'Oppressive Silence'.
15 B. Parry,'Speech and Silence in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee', New Formations,21 (1993), p. 19. For a discussion
of Coetzee's fiction with respect to British literaryawards, see R. Todd, ConsumingFictions: the Booker Prize
and Fiction in Britain Today (London, Bloomsbury, 1996).
16 Nkosi, 'A Countryof Borders', p. 20.
17 M. Berube,Marginal Forces/CulturalCenters: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca,Cornell
University Press, 1992).
290 Journialof SouthernAfrican Studies

a repository of universal humanistic moral values that underwritesthis genre of criticism,

we might expect literatureto be understoodas a privileged medium for the articulationof
critiques of apartheidin a moral register.
My argument,in tracing the moral constructionof apartheidas it is registered in the
reception of Coetzee's novels, is that this moralisationis a way of negotiating the space
between the West and South Africa during apartheid,renderingit intelligible in universal
terms but simultaneouslykeeping it at a safe distance. This is dependentupon representa-
tions of the relations between a distant enclosed territory(South Africa) and its outside
(the internationalarena).I shall discuss three recurringthemes: that of South African writers
being trappedin a stifling and overly-politicised situation; the theme of allegory; and the
specific burdenof representationimposed upon South African literatureand writersby this
reading-formation.

The Political Saturation of South African Literature

A recurringtheme in reviews of literarywriting by white South African authorsduringthe
years of apartheidis that of South African writers being 'trapped' by their location into
dealing repeatedly with the same themes of living in an oppressive society. This theme
frames the commentaly on the first of Coetzee's novels to receive widespreadattentionin
metropolitanliteraiy circles, In the Heart of the Country, 18 published in Britain and USA
in 1977: 'One of the tragedies facing all serious SoutlhAfrican authors still living in that
countryis that they are trappedinto dealing with humanbeings who are almost exclusively
afflicted by racialism'.'9 South African society is presented here as a singularly and
uniquely racist society, such that race is identifiedas the only axis of power of significance.
In tum, racism is routinely understoodas an historical anachronism,the result of irrational
belief systems. The figure of Magda in this novel is understoodas 'a powerful image of
outdatedconventions and the struggle to erode them'.20This same theme of writers being
constrainedto write about the politics of aparthleid,and of this being an intrusionupon the
propertasks of the novelist's vocation, reappearin commentarieson Coetzee's Waitingfor
the Barbarianis.One review describes South Africa as a culturally isolated society, and
concludes that writers therefore find it difficult to 'address themselves to themes of any
wider significance than those representedby the tragic dilemma of their country'.21
The political nature of South Afiican fiction is at one and the same time the source of
its attractionfor internationalaudiences, yet also the source of disappointmentamongst
reader-reviewerswho prefer individual characterisationsratherthan typological characteri-
sations. According to this perspective,then, South African writing suffers fiom being forced
into being overtly political. The space for the propersubject-matterof the novel, for private
inter-personalrelationships, is squeezed in a society understoodto be uniquely saturated
with public, political significance.22Coetzee's novels are often valued to the extent that they
escape the received conventions of politically committed literature.This judgement is in
turnoften made throughcomparisonwitlhother white South African writers,and most often
with Nadine Gordirner.23The sense that the politics of South African society is too

18 Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands, was published in South Africa in 1974, but only published in Britainin 1982,
and in the USA in 1985.
19 R. Harwood, 'An Astonishing First Novel', Sunday Times, 12 June 1977, p. 41.
20 B. Morrison,'Veldschmerz', Times Literary Supplement,22 July 1977, p. 900.
21 B. Levin, 'On the Edge of the Empire', SunidayTimes, 23 November 1980, p. 44.
22 P. J. Parrinder,'What his FatherGot up to', London Review of Books, 13 September 1990, pp. 17-18.
23 Gordimerand Coetzee are routinelycoupled in both academic and non-academiccriticism, often being taken as
exemplarsfor differentmodels of principledliteraryoppositionto apartheid.On this patternof interpretation,see
 Apartheidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 291

imposing a subject to make for truly great literatureis found, for example, in one review
of Coetzee's Age of Iron and Gordimer's My Son's Story. The allusive qualities of
Coetzee's allegory of illness, death and decay considered to be the qualities that 'raises it
above the level of a political novel or a roman a the'se'.24On the other hand, Gordimer's
novel is judged to be too weighed down by its author's urge to write explicitly about
politics in South Africa: 'it's a good read and good journalism.It informs and explains. But
it's too banal and too explicit to be good art.' Gordimer'spolitical urges are seen to impinge
upon the quality of the novel's writing. A dualism is set up in this sort of evaluation,
between the novels which escape the murky traps of a society saturated with political
significance, and novels which apparenitlysucceed in renderingpolitical reality but are, by
this very token, condemned to a lesser aesthetic judgement. This same economy of
judgement is used to compare Coetzee's Waitintgfor the Barbarians with Andre Brink's
A Chain of Voices. Coetzee's work, it is argued, is infused with 'artistic purpose', Brink's
merely with 'moral purpose', a distinction which, it is argued, is reflected in the relative
qualities of their respective writing styles. Coetzee's writing is judged to be the productof
slow, skilled, meticulous deliberation,whereas Brink is condeirnnedby the judgement that
he 'writes fast'.25In reviews, Coetzee is positioned both as part of a traditionof committed
anti-apartheidwriting, but also as a writerwhose work succeeds in escaping the conventions
of politically committed fiction and thus elevating itself to the status of 'art'.
Irving Howe's review of Life and Times of Michael K reiterates the theme of the
dilemma facing South African writers trappedby their location:
A great commanding subject haunts the South African imagination, yet this subject can also
turn into a kind of tyranniy,close, oppressive, even destructive. Imagine what it must be like
to live as a serious writer in South Afiica: an endless clamour of news about racial injustice,
the feeling that one's life is mortgagedto a society gone rotten with hatred,an indignationthat
exhausts itself into depression, the fear that one's anger may overwhelm and destroy one's
fiction. And except for silence or emigrationi, there can be no relief.26

Howe goes on to question whether the real significance of Coetzee's writing lies in an
apparentmove beyond politics to universal themes of art or morality. As he observes, one
of the effects of this sort of understandingis the implication that the realities of apartheid
society lay beyond a political solution.

The Allegorical Imperative

The notion of South Africa as an enclosed, isolated society underwritesa very particular
understandingof the allegorical qualities of Coetzee's fiction. For BernardLevin, Waiting
for the Barbarians Coetzee escapes the 'trap' imposed upon South African literarywriting
of having to deal with immediate political realities by literally 'dis-locating' his nairative.
The novel contains no specific reference to South Africa as such, and so Levin takes the
narrativeto be 'timeless, spaceless, nameless and universal'.27Allegory is understoodhere
as a trope that uses the particularsituation as a way of rendering general or universal
themes. This understandingof allegory often allows writers like Coetzee or Gordimerto be
salvaged for the humanist literary tradition,by arguing that they do not write exclusively
K. Hewson, 'Making the "RevolutionaryGesture":Nadine Gordimer,J. M. Coetzee and Some Variationson the
writer's responsibility',Ariel, 19, 4 (1988), pp. 55-72; and I. Glenn, 'Nadine Gordimer,J. M. Coetzee, and the
Politics of Interpretation',South Atlantic Quarterly,93, 1 (1994), pp. 11-32.
24 G. Annan, 'Love and Death in South Africa', The New YorkReview of Books, 8 November 1990, pp. 8-10.
25 J. Kramer,'In the Garrison',Newt,YorkReview of Books, 2 December 1982, pp. 8-12.
26 I. Howe, 'A StarkPolitical Fable of South Africa', TheNew Yor-kTimesBook Review, 18 April 1982, pp. 35-36.
27 Levin, 'On the Edge of the Empire'.
292 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

about a South African situationbut ratherabout the general humancondition: 'Mr. Coetzee
sees the heart of darkness in all societies, and gradually it becomes clear that he is not
dealing in politics at all, but inquiringinto the natureof the beast that lurks within each of
us, and needs no collective stimulus to turn and rend us'.28Any significance beyond South
Afiica is ascribed not to the realm of politics but to the realm of morality. For Levin, the
universalqualities of this novel lie in this move beyond politics, a move that is taken to be
the proper task of literature. The same sort of judgement is routinely made in those
commentaries on Coetzee's fictions that alight upon their qualities as 'allegories' or
'parables' of essentially moral principles. Coetzee's novels 'have a suggestion of parable
about them. Sometimes they imagine further forms of man's inhumanity to man ... and
sometimes we are allowed to interpretthem more specifically, their moral brought nearer
to home'.29This interpretationof the allegorical qualities of Coetzee's novels allows any
particularreferencethatthey containaboutcultureor politics in SouthAfrica to be re-written
as simply another lesson of general moral significance. If universal moral significance is
registered in and through a reading of 'South African literature'in this way, then in turn
'South Africa' is discursively transformedinto just a particularexample of a more general,
universal moralisedtheme of tyranny,suffering and individualartistic conscience.
Coetzee has himself observed that there is a persistent tendency to approachliterature
produced under conditions of state censorship as if it were necessarily allegorical. The
observation is true for the reading of South Africa under apartheid. Conceptions of
'allegory' are central to the readings undertakenof Coetzee's writing. And as Parryargues,
the self-reflexive theoreticalsoplhisticationof Coetzee's fiction suggests that readings of his
novels as simple political allegories are probablywide of the mark,and might be betterread
as commentaries on the impossibility of this form.30The genre of non-academic literary
review shares the same conception of allegory with much of the left-leaning academic
criticism of Coetzee's novels. According to this conception, texts are approachedin order
to measuretheir distance from a pre-existingconception of the dimensions of an essentially
extra-textualreality. In non-academic reviews, Coetzee's allegorising is understoodeither
as a politically duplicitous escape from historical reality, as in the case of Gordimer's
discussion of Coetzee's early novels,31 or alternatively, as with Levin, as a successful
elevation of the narrativeto a universal, moral level. In both cases, allegory is understood
in terms of the relation of the text to a historical reality that is already intelligible.
Amongst academic critics, Coetzee's writing becomes the ground for competing
conceptions of allegory, different conceptions which sustain different political evaluations
of that writing. Abdul JanMohammed,for whom allegory is understood mimetically in
terms of the relation between text and reality, finds that Coetzee's Waiting for the
Barbarians repeats the defining allegorical manoeuvres of classical colonial discourse.32
The recent re-evaluationof the political significance of Coetzee's fiction in no small part
revolves around an alternative conceptualisation of allegory, one which follows the
re-evaluationof allegory in post-modem and post-structuralistliterarytheory. Accordingly,
Slemon reads Waiting for the Barbarians as a post-colonial recuperation of allegory,
understoodas a relation between texts, thematisingthe inextricableentwinementof history

28 Ibid.
29 D. Donoghue, 'Her Man Friday', The New YorkTimesBook Review, 22 February1987, pp. 1 and 26-27.
30 See J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense(Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press), p. 151; and B. Parry.'Thanatophany
for South Africa: Death With/outTransfiguration',SouthernAfricanReview of Books (January/February 1991),
pp. 10-11.
31 N. Gordimer,'The Idea of Gardening',The New YorkReview of Books, 2 February1984, pp. 3-6.
32 A. R. JanMohamed,'The Economy of ManicheanAllegory: the Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist
Literature',Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), pp. 59-87.
 Apartheidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 293

and fiction.33On this post-structuralistreading, allegory is not a means of escaping history,

but ratherthe trope where the place of language in history becomes the subject of narration
itself. This alternativeconception of allegory does not enter into considerationin the genre
of the literaryreview, in which Coetzee's inter-textualinscriptionsof other canonical works
is met with suspicion. Each of Coetzee's novels can be read as a meta-fictionalcommentary
on particularsub-genres of 'white writing', whether fiction or non-fiction - the pastoral
novel, colonial travel writing, historiography or various canonical novels. This inter-
textuality is recognised by reviewers, who locate Coetzee on the margins of a traditionof
Europeanand North American avant-gardemodernism through frequent references to the
similarities of his work and that of writers such as Kafka, Conrad or Nabakov. And yet
the challenge that his fiction presents to this traditionis barely registered in this genre of
reviewing. Rather,when his fiction presents the conventions of the Western novel with its
formal, ethical or political limits, one sees the emergence of an impatiencewith formalistic
licence. In particular,Coetzee's re-writingof classic, canonical works (of Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe in Foe, and Dostoevsky's The Devils in The Master of Petersburg) is met with a
certain degree of unease. One reviewer regrets that Coetzee chooses to sexualise the
Robinson Crusoe story in Foe,34 anotherconsideredhis revision 'a static and anaemic affair,
despite the elegance of the writing'.35Likewise, The Master of Petersburg is considered a
mere 'literarypastiche' of Dostoevsky's novel, is called to task for juggling with the known
historical facts, and is finally dismissed as an 'act of literary terrorism'.36
The mimetic conception of allegory at work in the non-academic review allows
Coetzee's novels to be located as 'South African' in relation to a stable, extra-textual
referent synonymous with racism. 'Allegorical' readings, in this reading formation,
re-anchorthe novels to a familiar model of South Africa as an enclosed teirain, but at the
same time, and conversely, once so located they can be read as having a universal moral
significance, rather than a specific political one either with reference to alternative
understandingsof South Africa or to the politics of writing. This double movement is
recognisable in commentarieson those novels in which South Africa is an indirectreferent,
such as Life and Times of Michael K, where 'there is a certain fictional haze between the
events and their local reference',37but also on those novels in which the narrativeis not
located in any specific time or place, or in a non-South African location, such as Foe,
Waiting for the Barbarians, and most recently The Master of Petersburg. In reviews of his
latest novel, Coetzee's re-writing of Dostoevsky's The Devils is routinely re-attachedto
'South Africa', a re-attachmentthat allows the incorporationof apartheidinto a general
paradigm of tyrannical regimes in decline: 'The relevance of this political allegory to
apartheid-eraSouth Africa, and the increasingly vicious response of a doomed regime to
what it perceives as the enemy at its gates, is clear at once'.38South Africa underapartheid
and nineteenth-centuryRussia are both taken to be emblematic of a general form of
'historical tyranny'.39Apartheidis constructedas simply a variant of an a historical form
of totalitarianism.Waiting for the Barbarians, for example, is inserted into a sub-genre of
'the political allegory or fable dealing with modern totalitarianism'.40An 'allegorical'

33 S. Slemon, 'Post-ColonialAllegory and the Transformationof History', Journal of CommonwealthLiterature,

22,1 (1988), pp. 157-168; see also T. Dovey, 'Allegory vs Allegory:the Divorce of DifferentModes of Allegorical
Perceptionin Coetzee's "Waitingfor the Barbarians"',Journal of Literary Studies, 4, 2, (1988), pp. 133-143.
34 P. N. Furbank,'Mistress, Muse and Begetter', Times Literary Supplement,12 September 1986, p. 995.
35 D. J. Enright, 'Visions and Revisions', The New YorkReview of Books, 28 May 1987, pp. 18-20.
36 Z. Zinik, 'The Master of Petersburg',Times Literary Supplement,4 March 1994, p. 19.
37 Donoghue, 'Her Man Friday'.
38 P. McGrath,'To be Conscious is to Suffer', The New YorkTimesBook Review, 20 November 1994, p. 9.
39 J. Bayley, 'Doubles', The New YorkReview of Books, 17 November 1994, pp. 35-36.
40 P. Lewis, 'Types of Tyranny', Times Literary Supplement,7 November 1980, p. 1270.
294 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

reading enables South Africa to be understood as the refeIent of the novel, but a South
Africa which is alreadyconstructedin terms of tyrannyand totalitarianism,allowing a more
general and de-politicised significance to be drawn from the novel. In the discourse of the
general literaryreview, South Africa is concretised and named as the context and referent
of Coetzee's novels, but at the same time and in the same move, it is idealised as a stage
for more general moral dramas of human suffering and violence.

Burdens of Representation
The 'allegorical' re-anchoring of Coetzee's novels enables them to be assimilated to
familiar paradigmsfor understandingapartheid.One of the features of reception of South
African fiction amongst metropolitanreading publics has been the routine treatment of
literatureas a source of knowledge about South Afiican reality. South African writers have
been expected, and in turn were read, to provide informationabout a particularreality at
specific conjuinctures. In paiticular, Soutlh African literature is regularly read in terms of a
pre-existing set of understandingsof a society polarised along stark lines of racialised
division. Being able to place charactersillto a racialised drama is essential to the reading
of South African fiction in this genre of criticism. Reviews of Life and Times of Michael
K and Age of Iron aIe characterisedby a desire to be able to place both Michael K and
Vercueil into a manageableframe of radicalisedreference. Thus, Vercueil is reportedto be
a 'white down-and-out'4'or 'a white vagrant'.42Alternatively,anotherreviewer admits that
'I thought he was meant to be a Coloured',43admittingthat Coetzee might be engaging in
an intentional ruse in this respect. If characters are expected to accord to a racialised
understandinigof South African society, then in tum this racialised lens is understoodin
strictly polarised, binary terms. Accordingly, Age of Iron is understood to be a novel
treating 'the effects of apartheidon the psyches of both the oppressorand the oppressed'.44
Such an understandinigfails to register the ways in which the protagonists of Coetzee's
novels rarelybelong to this sort of easy binaty division. Rather, they tend to be figures oIn
the marginof the defining axis of racialisedconflict whiclhdefined apartheidin the Western
imagination.This explorationof the multiplicity of positioIls and identities in South Africa
is one of the features that recommends Coetzee's novels as distinctively 'post-apartheid'
naiTatives.4
The inscription of literary writing by white South Africans into an international
framework involved the imposition of a peculiar 'burden of represenltation' uponl those
writers. They are positioned on the margins of Western literary canons as representatives
who can speak of and against a racist system, in the name of universalvalues of justice and
equality. They are asked to represent life under apartheid, and present a principled
resistance or refusal to it, yet they do not and cannot represent its principal targets and
victims, the majorityof black South Africans. Black South African writerswere much more
effectively silenced or severed from their main audience, and have never been accordedthe
same degree of critical acclaim amongst the mainstreamliterary establishment in North
America or Europe. On an intemationalstage, white South African writers were invited to
serve as proxies for the black South African majority. Yet, at the same time as South
African literarywriting was inserted into this regime of value, white novelists increasingly

41 P. Parrinder'What his FatherGets up to', London Review of Books, 13 September 1990, pp. 17-18.
42 S. French, 'Writingand Action', New Statesman,21 September 1990, p. 40.
43 Annan, 'Love and Death in South Africa'.
44 L. Thornton,'Apartheid'sLast Vicious Gasps', The New YorkReview of Books, September 1990, p. 7.
45 See T. Kai NorrisEaston, 'Text and Hinterland:J. M. Coetzee and the SoutlhAfrican Novel', Journal of Southern
African Studies, 21, 4 (1995), pp. 585-599.
 Apartheidanidthe Novels of J. M. Coetzee 295

come to focus upon, in the content and form of their writing, their own marginalisation
from the main sites of conflict and struggle in South African society. In so doing, writers
such as Coetzee and Gordimer inteirogated in their novels the representativestatus that
continued to be unproblematicallyascribed to them on an intemational stage.
From the late 1970s onwards, the culturalwork that such fiction is made to do on this
internationalstage is thereforeincreasinglyat odds with the domestic concems whiclhshape
it. The emergence of black consciousness movements and the upsurge of all forms of
resistance from black communities after 1976, precipitateda terminal crisis of liberalism
as both political ideology and literary aesthetic. This accounts for the characteristic
introspectionof white South African writing in the 1980s:
It is an obsessionalliterature,hauntedand introspective,urgentand compulsive.It tracks
relentlesslyandmoreor less pitilesslyoverthe evermorerestrictedterrainto whlich,by virtue
of its situation,it is condemned.It is a literature
of parsimonyandnarrowdepiction,in which
the motionsof generosityandexpansivenesshavehadto be stilled,as unaffordable luxuries.46
Forced to concede the limits that bound their writing and its relevance, white South African
writerstook on the task of imagining the contoursof post-apartheididentities.The resulting
deconstructionof white subjectivityin the novels of Gordimner and Coetzee has been hailed
as a 'post-liberal' project that parallels the 'post-nationalist'writings of Njabulo Ndebele.47
As white South African writing becomes acutely self-reflexive about its own marginalisa-
tion and the problem of its own authority during the 1980s, one might expect that it
becomes more difficult to contain within the frame of reference through which it was
mediated for mainstreaminternationalliterary publics. Tllis is likely to be particularlythe
case with Coetzee's texts, in whiclh this inteiTogationof white authority is articulated
through a rigorous textual experimentationwith generic and nairative forms. This formal
radicalism is met with increasing impatience in literaryjournalism.
We can see this tension emerging in responses to Life and Times of Michael K. This
novel makes visible the specific horizon of meaning through whiclhSouth African writing
is made intelligible. Michael K's social position is carefully delineated in the course of the
narrative,but without recourse to the signifiers of race that are a standardfeature of most
South African writing. Michael K remains unclassified by racialised signifiers throughout
the novel. The only occasions when the routine vocabularyof racial classification appears
is when Michael K is addressed by figures of authority.Racialisation is presented in the
novel as a process of interpellationinto institutionallysupporteddiscourses of hierarchical
differentiation. Furthermore,not only is race the absent signifier in the novel, but the
eponymous 'hero' of this novel is a singularly passive figure. One commentatorsuggested
that, if the theme of Coetzee's novel was passive suffering, then this was an inadequate
theme for a novel.48Comparedboth to standardfigures of black resistance in South African
literature,and to the heroes in the work of Kafka, with whom Coetzee is routinely related
in literaryreviews, Michael K is thought to be simply not heroic enough. The charge that
Coetzee fails to adequatelyrepresentblack South African political struggle is most forcibly
articulatedin Gordimer'sreview of the novel. For her, Coetzee's novel representsa retreat
from a commitmentto political solutions and is markedby a refusal to see an active black
presence in South African society. The oppositional thrust of the novel is diluted by

46 N. Lazarus, 'Modernism and Modernity:T. W. Adorno and ContemporaryWhite South African Literature',
Cultural Critique,5 (1987), p. 131.
47 G. Pechey, 'Introduction',in N. Ndebele, South African Literatureand Culture:Rediscovery of the Ordinary
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1-16; and G.Pechey, 'Post-ApartheidNarratives', in
F. Barker,P. Hulme and M. Iverson (eds), Colonial DiscourselPostcolonial Theory (Manchester,Manchester
University Press, 1994), pp. 151-171.
48 D. J. Enright, 'The Thing Itself', Times Literary Supplement,30 September 1983, p. 1037.
296 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

fashioning an account aroundsuch an ambivalentcentralcharacter,and Gordimerconcludes

that Coetzee fails to acknowledge the agency of black South Africans in resisting apartheid,
the novel being markedby a 'revulsion against all political and revolutionarysolutions'.49
This same charge is echoed in other reviews of the novel. As soon as Michael K is read
as a figure for black South Africa, a reading that effaces the ambiguous non-inscriptionof
race in the narrative,then he appears as a model of passive suffering rather than active
struggle and resistance, a representationthat causes a certain degree of bewilderment:
'Surely he does not representthe spirit of Africa? I see no point in this prolonged tale of
woe'. 50 In failing to accord to the 'burdenof representation'imposed upon South African
literaty writing, the novel brings in to the open the conventions which framed the reading
of such writing around an expectation of clear, binary protagonists who fell into simple
categories of good and evil.
If the burden of representationimposed upon white South African writers by inter-
national audiences is more and more at odds with their own self-conscious reflection on
questions of marginalityand authority,then this accounts for the frustrationand impatience
felt towards the formal experiments undertakenin Coetzee's novels. While the reading of
Coetzee's novels as allegories and parables allows a particularmoral utniversalisationof
South Africa, nonetheless for many reviewers the allegorical qualities of Coetzee's writing
do not accord with notions of what good literary writing should be and of what South
African writing in particularshould deliver. The notion that Coetzee's persistent allegoris-
ing gets in the way of what should be clearly identifiable realities is a recurringtheme:
'Coetzee's urge to allegorise intrudesupon his narrativegifts'.51 This genre of criticism is
somewhat intolerantof Coetzee's stylistic and narrativeexperimentation,ascribing these to
a certain 'academicism' that intrudesinto his writing. Age of Iron, with 'its didactic urges
everywhere apparent', is found to be 'formulaic' and 'obvious' in its allegorising about
death and illness.52What is most importantin this arena of judgement is, above all, the
quality of the naTrative,and Coetzee's fiction is often found to be too 'contrived' to support
what are often considered to be thin stories. The aversion to Coetzee's formal radicalism
is a recurrenttheme - one reviewer invoking the same remarkin two separatereviews to
express his discomfort: 'We are repelled by any sort of writing that, in Keats' phrase, "has
a palpable design on us"'.53 The same discomfort and impatience with the formal features
of Coetzee's novels is evidenit in Cynthia Ozick's commentary on Life and Times of
Michael K. Hers is just one review which is unhappywith the intrusioninto the nalTative
of Michael K's adventuresof the reflections of the Doctor, who provides a second-order
commentaryon the difficulty of placing Michael K in any system of meaning. This section
of the novel serves as the point at which the novel stages the necessity of its own
(imis)reading.The temptation to make Michael K speak, to read him as symbolic of
something, even as a figure of non-meaning, is made explicit within the narrativethrough
the Doctor's account. This section of the novel is regardedby Ozick as an unnecessaryand
'self-indulgent' intrusion into Michael K's otherwise 'authentic' inner dialogue: 'the
doctor's commentaryis superfluous;he thickens the clear tongue of the novel by naming
its "message"and thumpingout ironies'.54This intoleranceof a stylistic 'flaw' succeeds in
neutralisingthat part of the novel in which the question of interpretativeauthorityis made
most explicit. For Ozick, this self-reflexivity is judged 'redundant',a judgement which

49 Gordimer,'The Idea of Gardening'.

50 D. A. N. Jones, 'Saint Jane', London Review of Books, 20 October 1983, pp. 17-18.
51 N. Shrimpton,Sunday Times, 25 September 1983, p. 43.
52 D. J. Taylor, 'Death of a Nation', Sunday Times, 16 September 1990.
53 Enright, 'The Thing Itself', and 'Visions and Revisions'.
54 C. Ozick, 'A Tale of Heroic Anonymity', The New YorkTimesBook Review, 11 December 1983, pp. 1, 26, 28.
 Apar-theidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 297

neatly enables her to place the rest of the novel, understood simply as the rendition of
Michael K's story, within an established system of moral interpretationsof apartheid.

Reading Coetzee Politically

In addition to general literaryjournalism,there is anotherreading-formationthroughwhich
South African literaturehas circulated.This is the realm of professional academic literary
criticism. In this reading-formation,it is the political value of literary fiction that is
emphasised. Within the dominant frameworks for assessing the political credentials of
South African fiction during the 1970s and much of the 1980s, radical academic critics
found it difficult to ascribe an unambiguously positive political evaluation to Coetzee's
work.55His novels have been the subject of charges that they do not deal adequatelywith
the urgent demands of representingthe reality of life under apartheidand articulatingan
appropriatepolitical response to it. Coetzee's novels de-familiarisecommon representations
of South Africa by re-inscribingthis 'place' into diffuse networksof overlappinggeograph-
ical linkages and historical layers. As a consequence, they do not easily fit into the
dominant realist aesthetic characteristicof much post-war South Africa literature. This
difficulty in pinning down the political perspective of Coetzee's novels is in no small part
a deliberateeffect. Political and ethical ambivalenceis a theme of all of his fiction. Coetzee
steadfastly refuses to provide authoritativeinterpretationsof his novels or to reduce them
to political statements. In interviews, he cultivates a careful resistance to the standard
gestures of the writer's political responsibility. In his critical essays he has explicitly
marked his distance from instrumentalistconceptions of writing, and from understandings
of the subordinaterelation of fiction to history which have shaped the realist aesthetics of
mainstream oppositional South African literature.56And in his most recent collection
of essays, Coetzee directly affirms the responsibilityof writers to try and push beyond the
aesthetic constraintsimposed by existing political antagonisms.57
If Coetzee's novels have in the past been met with some suspicion amongst South
Afiican critics, then it is nonetheless importantto emphasise that there is no simple division
to be drawn between the reception of his fiction inside and outside of South Africa. The
evaluations of Coetzee's work have been significantly revised within South Africa more
recently.58His fiction has been re-evaluated by academic critics in large part because of
their interrogationof the dominant realist aesthetic previously characteristicof so much
South African literature.Novels previously found to be lacking in an appropriatepolitical
agenda are now found to indeed have political significance. This positive re-evaluation
coincides with the ascendancy of post-structuralisttheories of inteipretation.In particular,
it rests on a recognition of the value of formal radicalism, which had previously been
overlooked or disdained by critics of his early work. There is now an increasing
acknowledgement of the value of formal pluralism in current cultural debates in South
Africa.59Furthermore,this process of re-evaluationis not merely a feature of Europeanand
North American discussions, but has been pioneered in South Africa. David Atwell
identifies Teresa Dovey's The Novels of J. M. Coetzee, published in 1988, as marking a

55 For example, M. Vaughan, 'Literatureand Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies',
Journal of South African Studies, 9 (1982), pp. 18-138.
56 J. M. Coetzee, 'A Note on Writing',in Doubling thePoint, pp. 94-95; and 'The Novel Today', Upstream,6(1988),
pp. 2-5.
57 Coetzee, GivinigOffense.
58 See D. Atwell, J. M. Coetzee: SouthAfrica and the Politics of Writing(Berkeley, Universityof CaliforniaPress,
1993); and M. Chapman, 1996, South Af-ican Literatures(London, Longman, 1996), pp. 385-391.
59 B. Parry,'Some ProvisionalSpeculationson the Critiqueof "Resistance"Literature',in Boehmer, Chrismanand
Parker(eds), Altered State?, pp. 11-24.
298 Journal of SoutherniAfrican Studies

clear break with previous readings. Dovey reads Coetzee's early novels as allegories of
psychoanalytic processes of identity formation.60Her work also calls into question the
frames of evaluation tlhroughwhich Coetzee's writing has been ascribed political value by
South African critics. She has gone so far as to argue that Coetzee's novels effectively cut
the ground from under those critics who have found his fiction lacking sufficient signs of
appropriatepolitical commitment. Dovey's interventionand responses to it have fostered
increasingly divergent evaluations of Coetzee's novels amongst South African critics.61
These increasingly contested evaluations of the 'political' significance of Coetzee's
fiction in South Africa are wrapped up in a more widespread transformationduring the
1990s which has destabilised anti-apartheiddiscourses which were previously hegemonic.
In the field of cultural politics, a thorough-goingrevision of previous paradigmswas first
triggeredby the controversialinterventionof ANC activist Albie Sachs.62Sachs called for
the revision of received notions of the relationshipbetween culture and the struggle against
apartheidthat had become normalised during the 1970s and 1980s. The ensuing debates
about the relation between culture and politics must be considered as one of the main
'contexts' from which Coetzee's fiction departs.63South African cultural debates in the
1990s are characterisedby an attempt to find a new 'settlement' between domestic and
internationaldiscourses.64
The re-thinking of the relationships between South African cultural production and
international theoretical and aesthetic paradigms has opened a space for the positive
re-evaluation of Coetzee's fiction in political terms. This process of revision is shared
between metropolitan and local academic critics who orient themselves towards post-
structuralisttheoreticalperspectives.In particular,the most recent phase of the international
reception of Coetzee's fiction is intimately connected to the emnergenceof post-coloniial
theories of culture, difference and identity. Like all literary theory, post-colonial theory is
characterisedby a tendency to select certain texts, genres, authors, and formalistic or
stylistic features and elevate these to the status of defining featuresof a singular 'tradition'
of 'post-colonial writing'.65 For example, Slemnon'sdiscussion of the inscription of
resistance in post-colonial literatureexplicitly privileges writings from what he calls the
'second world', by predominantlywhite writers from former settler colonies like Australia,
New Zealand and Canada.66In tum, the textual inscription of ambivalence and ambiguity
is identifiedas the exemplaryfeatureof post-colonial literature.It is this soIt of construction
of literary 'post-coloniality' which elevates the writing of Coetzee, characterisedas it is by
its overt inter-textualreferencesto canonical novels, by tropes of allegoiy and mimicry, and
by a studied ambivalence of narTation,into the canon of post-colonial literature.

60 T. Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Johannesburg,Ad Donker, 1998).

61 See T. Dovey, 'Coetzee and his Critics:the case of Dusklands', English in Africa, 14, 2 (1987), pp. 15-30. For
responsesto Dovey's readingof Coetzee, see B. Parry,'TlheHiolein the Narrative:Coetzee's Fiction', Southern
AfricanReview of Books, April/May 1989, pp. 18-20; M. Chapman'The Writingof Politics and the Politics of
Writing:on ReadingDovey on ReadingLacanon ReadingCoetzee on Reading ....(?)', Journalof LiteraryStudies,
4, 3 (1988), pp. 327-341.
62 See I. de Kok and K. Press (eds), Spring is Rebellious: Argulments about CulturalFreedom (Cape Town, Buchu
Books, 1990).
63 Atwell, J. M. Coetzee; and Atwell, 'The Problemof History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee', in M. Trump(ed),
Rendering Things Visible: Essays on Sout/hAftican Literary Culture (Johannesburg,Ravan Press, 1990),
pp. 94-132.
64 T. Morphet,'CulturalImaginationand CulturalSettlement:Albie Sachs and Njabulo Ndebele', in de Kok and
Press (eds), Spring is Rebellious, pp. 131-144.
65 For furtherdiscussion of the structureof exemplarity character-isticof all literary theory, see J. H. Miller,
Topog-aphies (Stanford,StanfordUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 316-337.
66 S. Slemon, 'Unsettlingthe Empire:ResistanceTheoryfor the Second World', World Liter-atureWrittenin English,
30, 2 (1990), pp. 30-41.
 Apartheidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 299

The relevance of post-colonialism to South African society and culturehas been widely
discussed.67These discussions are of interest here not least because of the place that
Coetzee's fiction has come to hold in the working up of an international canon of
post-colonial literary writing.68Coetzee's writing exemplifies the increasing convergence
between post-structuralisttheories of language and post-colonial literary genres,69and his
fiction has been easily fitted into academic discussions of post-colonialism, not least
because of his position as both a novelist as well as a professional theorist and critic.
Coetzee's novels are frequentlyapproachedas if they were essentially allegories of certain
theoretical principles drawn from post-structuralismor deconstruction.70 The clearest
example of this sort of appropriationis in the work of Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, one of
the centraltheoristsof contemporarypost-colonialism.Spivak has used Coetzee's re-writing
of Robinson Crusoe in Foe as an exemplarof her theoreticalconcerns. For her, in the figure
of the tongue-less Friday who resists all attempts to make him tell his story, the novel
thematisesprocesses of colonial inscriptionand silencing.71Benita Parry'scommentarieson
Coetzee's novels can be read in turn as an oblique response to Spivak's position. From
Parry's more sceptical perspective, Coetzee's fiction tends to reproduceeffects of silencing
by refusing to represent the voices of resistance. Coetzee's novels have thus become the
ground for theoretical exposition in colonial discourse and post-colonial theory, and not
least the basis for a continuationof debates sparkedby Spivak's much contested statement
that 'the subalterncannot speak'.72
Atwell suggests that Coetzee's concentrationon issues of race and colonialism to the
exclusion of other themes is the markof his being primarily'a regional writer within South
Africa'.73Coetzee's novels are therefore particularlyaccommodating to incorporationby
contemporarytheories of colonial discourse, in so far as they addressthe colonial traces not
so much of South Africa as a whole, but of the Cape in particular.74Furthermore,in the
post-colonial reading of Coetzee's novels, a quite distinctive undeistandingof colonialism
is privileged as the frameworkfor understandingcontemporarySouth African society. In
readings of Coetzee's work framed by contemporarytheories of colonial discourse and
post-colonialism, South Africa is not only constructedas a particularvariantof colonialism,
but of colonialism theorised primarilyas a set of discursive practices for the construction

67 A. Carusi,'Post, Post and Post: Or, Whereis SouthAfricanLiteraturein All This?' Ariel, 20, 4 (1989), pp. 79-95;
K. Parker,'J. M. Coetzee: "WhileWriting"',New Formation7s, 21 (1993), pp. 21-34; C. Clayton, 'White Writing
and Postcolonial Politics', Ariel, 25, 4 (1994), pp. 153-167; R. Jolly, 'Rehearsalsof Liberation:Conitemporary
Postcolonial Discourse and the New South Africa', Publications of the Modern Language Association, 110, 1
(1995), pp. 17-29; N. Visser, 'Postcolonialityof a Special Type: Theory and its Appropriationin South Africa',
The Yearbookof English Studies, Vol. 27 (1997), pp. 79-94.
68 For example, see J. Thieme (ed), TheArnoldAnthologyofPost-Colonial Literaturesin English (London,Arnold,
1996); and E. Benson and L. W. Connolly (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literaturesin English
(London, Routledge, 1994). For the use of Coetzee's work in theorising post-colonial literature,see H. Tiffin,
'Post-ColonialLiteraturesandCounter-Discourse',Kunapipi,9, 3 (1987), pp. 17-33; and B. Ashcroft,G. Griffiths
and H. Tiffin, The Empire WritesBack: TheoryanidPractice in Post-Colonial Literature(London, Routledge,
1989).
69 E. Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 223.
70 See Atwell's comments in Coetzee, Doubling the Point, p. 245.
71 G. C. Spivak, 'Theoryin the Margin:Coetzee's Foe ReadingDefoe's CrusoelRoxana',in J. Arac and B. Johnson
(eds), Consequences of Theoty (Baltimore,Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 154-180.
72 G. C. Spivak, 'Can the SubalternSpeak?', in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg(eds), Marxismand the Interpretation
of Culture(London,Macmillan,1988), pp. 271-313; Parry,'Speech and Silence in the Fictionsof J. M. Coetzee'.
For furtherdiscussion of theoreticalissues at stake in the differing positions of Spivak and Parrywith respect
to Coetzee's fiction, see C. Bamett, 'Sing Along with the Common People: Politics, Postcolonialism and Other
Figures', Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space, 15 (1997), pp. 137-154.
73 Atwell, J. M. Coetzee, p. 25.
74 For examples, see S. Watson, 'Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee', Research in African Literatures,
17 (1986), pp. 370-392; and S. Roberts, 'Post-Colonialism,or the House of Friday', WorldLiteratureWritten
in English, 31, 1 (1991), pp. 87-92.
300 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

of colonial subjectivities. The coloniser/colonised dyad, which is central to contemporary

theories of colonial discourse and post-colonialism, easily reproduces a representationof
South African society in terms of a Manicheanstrugglebetween the forces of good and evil.
South Africa thus becomes just one example of a generic colonialism, one which 'cannot
be historicised modally, and that ends up tilted towards a descriptionof all kinds of social
oppression and discursive control'.75The historical specificity of apartheidas a regime of
governance and accumulationis thus elided, as apartheidis assimilated to an essentially
de-historicised model of oppression.76

Conclusion
I have tried to identify some of the ways in which the meaning and referent of 'South
African literature' has been dependent upon the cultural mediation of texts through
institutionaliseddiscourses of criticism and theory. I have done so by looking in detail at
the contexts of reception for the work of J.M. Coetzee. I lhavearguedthat Coetzee's fiction
has been inserted into dominant moral representationsof apartheid, but also that the
receptionof such a rigorouslyself-reflexive body of fiction makes visible the norms of these
mediating discourses. In the genre of the journalistic literary review, the context of
Coetzee's novels is understoodaccordingto a particular,stabilised model of South African
reality under apartheid.On the other hand, within the emergent post-colonial paradigmof
academic literary criticism and theory, the contexts of the novels is understood to be an
array of other texts and discourses. In this reading-formation,the formal dimensions of
Coetzee's fiction have been acknowledged and accorded more positive value as the locus
of the political significance of the novels.
Focussing upon the mediating channels of discourse through which 'South African
literature'has been worked-up on an internationalstage enables the reformulationof the
problemof the 'politics of representation'as it applies to the interpretationof South African
cultural production.On the one hand, I have suggested that there is no simple distinction
between a domestic inside and an internationaloutside which might allow appeals to an
enclosed South African context as the basis for providing final judgement on the value of
Coetzee's fiction. The entanglement of inside and outside thus renders problematic any
judgement that appeals to the 'authenticity' of acts of representationunderstood either
mimetically or as the act of speaking on behalf of others. On the other hand, nor do I want
to suggest that questions of political judgement can simply be dissolved into an indetermi-
nate mass of individual acts of endlessly creative reception. Rather, attention should be
directed towards evaluating the relative influence and force of different interests and
institutions in shaping the discourses of mediation through which cultural products are
produced,circulatedand made available for consumption.The review, as a form of literary
journalism, is distinct from academic literary criticism: the two practices are regulated by
different imperativesand have a differentrelationshipto their object of analysis, even when
this is the same work.77Metropolitanliterary journalism has been highly influential, not
only in pre-selecting authorsand texts who are subsequentlymade the subject of academic
canonisation,but also as part of an arrayof discourses where the persistent representation

75 S. Slemon, 'The Scramble for Post-Colonialism', in C. Tiffin and A. Lawson (eds), De-Scribing Empire:
Post-colonialism and Textuality(London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 15-32.
76 For a critiqueof the 'colonialist paradigm'of oppressionin culturaltheory, see H. L. Gates, Jr., 'Tradingon the
Margin: Notes on the Culture of Criticism', in Loose Canons (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992),
pp. 173-194.
77 On the distinctive qualities of reviewing and criticism, see M. Morris, 'Indigestion:a Rhetoric of Reviewing',
in The Pirate's Fianc&e(London, Verso, 1988), pp. 105-121.
 Apartheidand the Novels of J. M. Coetzee 301

of South African society as a racial allegory is worked-up and maintained. The moral
framing of literaryfiction succeeded in keeping South Africa at a distance by assimilating
apartheidinto a stark moral dramaof good and evil which made it readily available as an
object of clear cut moral judgement. And, since this moralised staging of apartheid
continues in accounts of the transformationof post-apartheidSouth Africa, which focus
upon the activities of select individuals acting out an epic moral drama of reconciliation,
it remains an importanttask to critically question the channels of discourse throughwhich
particularrepresentationsof South African society are reproduced.

CLIVE BARNETT
Department of Geography, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading,
Berkshire, RG6 6AB, UK