CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................................................. 2
I. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 3
II. THE THEORIES OF INTERTEXTUALITY ............................................................. 7
III. MAGDA AND THE WESTERN LITERARY HERITAGE ..................................... 17
IV. PARODY IN FOE ................................................................................................ 33
V. DISGRACE AND THE ROMANTIC POETS ........................................................ 48
VI. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 54
WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................ 58
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Acknowledgments
Once again I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my teacher and supervisor Dr. Paul
Franssen for his assistance, kindness, valuable advice, constructive criticism and his
continuous encouragement in order to bring this work to a better conclusion than it would
otherwise have been.
My sincere thanks go also to Dr. Ton Hoenselaars for accepting to read and comment on this
work.
My special thanks go to Loes Vleeming for being generous and passionate with me these
years.
Last but not least I would like to thank my father for all he did for me and to whose soul
I dedicate this humble paper.
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I. Introduction
The concept of intertextuality, which emerged during the 1960s, is one of the principal
critical tools in literary criticism. Its purpose is to explain the process that makes any text to
be read as an assimilation and transformation of another text or group of other texts. For Julia
Kristeva, “each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word
(text) can be read. Any text […] is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the
absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of
intersubjectivity, and a poetic language is read as at least double” (Kristeva quoted in
Friedman 147). One has to agree with Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality which considers
every writing as a major form of inter-art or intertext. In this respect, any work of art does not
emerge from nothingness, but rather interacts with, rewrites or parodies other texts.
The works of J. M. Coetzee provide an example of this complex phenomenon of
intertextuality as defined by Kristeva. In his novels, Coetzee cites, refers to and alludes to,
implicitly and explicitly, other texts, thereby creating a sort of dialectic relationship between
his texts and his sources. In the Heart of the Country (1977), for instance, reveals Coetzee’s
strategy of intertextuality. The very idea behind Coetzee’s use of intertextual references is to
establish a sort of affinity between the conditions of his characters and his source texts, so as
to uncover women’s and racial others’ oppression by questioning the structures of power. The
novel attempts to create a dialogue between the female protagonist, Magda, and “another
outside the self with whom a dialogue must be established in order to create a saving
plurivocity” (Durrant 59). In the text, we actually find various direct and indirect hints to the
Bible, Freud, Lacan, French theorists, Greek mythology, all of which have to do with
Magda’s psychological disorder and weak position as a woman in male dominated society. To
put it in Head’s words, “the construction of Magda is ultimately a textual problem, in the
sense that she is shown to be the product of different textual influences. Her narrative is
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peppered with quotations from, or allusions to, many important figures in modern Western
literature and philosophy, including Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Kafka, Sartre and
Beckett” (59).
Intertextuality is more than the presence of a text in another text. It is in fact, like
parody, “one of the major forms of modern self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse”
(Hutcheon, A Theory 2). In his essay “Game Hunting in In the Heart of the Country,” Ian
Glenn tries to draw a link between Coetzee and his protagonist, Magda. Unlike most of
Coetzee’s critics, such as Gallager, Penner, Dodd and others, Glenn reads the character of
Magda not as an embodiment of a typical Afrikaner female, nor as an insane colonial spinster,
but rather as self-reflexive. He argues that Magda’s story, in some respects, is an allegory, or
an echo, of Coetzee’s own position, the “implied author’s” to be more precise, concerning
important issues, such as that of class, gender and colonial position. To illustrate this point,
Glenn points out that Magda’s early fragments are not well structured as if she were a
neophyte authoress. He asserts that the style she uses “takes on the effect of school essay or
literary exercise on a set topic (the New Wife) that comes out overburdened by descriptives
and similes” (Glenn 124).
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), is a novel which retells Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century
classic Robinson Crusoe (1719) from the perspective of a female persona called Susan
Barton. Coetzee employs a radical departure from the original text, Robinson Crusoe, so as to
subvert the text for postcolonial and postmodern purposes. According to Helen Tiffin, Foe is
a perfect example of postcolonial texts that foreground a cultural conflict and put into
question the very relationship between the centre and the periphery; the coloniser and the
colonised; the European self and the racial other. She argues that Foe succeeds not only “to
write back […] to an English canonical text, but also to the whole of the discursive field
within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds” (98).
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Like In the Heart of the Country and Foe, J. M. Coetzee’s eighth novel, Disgrace
(1999), is not only intertextually related with other novels and works, but also reacts against
them. The most important borrowings are those from the English Romantic poets, especially
Byron and Wordsworth. Unlike Magda, who seems to be unaware of the fact that she is
quoting from the Bible, Hegel, Blake and others, David Lurie, the novel’s protagonist and a
university teacher, is fully aware of his sources and the kind of relationship that he shares with
them. In other words, David Lurie’s relationship with the Romantic poets is not that of
borrowing words to convey his message or support his ideas, but of influence to the extent
that he identifies himself with them and adopts their views towards women, desire, life and
history: “Having published three books of criticism, Lurie is seized—several years before the
novel opens—by the idea of writing a musical work based on the life of a poet with whom he
identifies (an identification that is hardly surprising given his history of sexual adventuring):
‘Byron in Italy’: a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera”
(Attridge, Age 5). Lurie, however, occasionally reacts against his sources, especially towards
the end of the novel, when he admits that they were bad guides: “So much for the poets, so
much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well” (Coetzee, Disgrace
179).
In this MA research project, I will discuss the strategy of intertextuality in J. M.
Coetzee’s works, focusing more particularly on his novels: In the Heart of the Country, Foe
and Disgrace. I will also try to show that Coetzee’s use of intertextuality serves many
purposes, some of which are to establish a dialogue between his works and those from the
major Western and Eastern literatures as well as reacting against them. The theories of
intertextuality and parody will form the theoretical material on which I will rely in my
analysis and discussion. In this respect, four issues will be highlighted, namely (a) the
Theories of Intertextuality, (b) Magda and the Western Literary Heritage, (c) the Function of
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Parody in Foe, and (d) Disgrace and the Romantic Poets. In “Theories of Intertextuality,” I
will try to throw light on the concept of intertextuality and its different forms. The
achievements of the French theoreticians, like Julia Kristeva and others, will be central to this
chapter. I will also discuss in detail the theory of parody as developed by Linda Hutcheon. As
for “Magda and the Western Literary Heritage,” there I will try to find an affinity between
Magda’s situation and the sources she cites or quotes from. By the “Function of Parody in
Foe” is meant that Coetzee’s choice to rework Defoe’s text is to exploit the tension between
the centre and the margin, by challenging the primacy of the Western standards that assume
universality and reversing the function of the original text so that what is true becomes false
and what is false becomes true and so on. The fourth and the last chapter entitled “Disgrace
and the Romantic Poets,” focuses on the relationship between the novel’s protagonist, David
Lurie, and the Romantic poets, especially Lord Byron and William Wordsworth.
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II. The Theories of Intertextuality
Since its emergence in the 1960s, intertextuality has increasingly become influential and
important in the field of literary criticism. The strategies which intertextuality has developed
during the last fifty years have helped in reading literary texts in relation with other texts or
groups of other texts. This relation is generally characterised by transforming and reworking
some features of the original text(s) to create special effects or serve certain purposes. The
concept of intertextuality, however, raised a large debate and it did not become widely
accepted until it had been formulated many times. It might be difficult to separate
intertextuality in its beginning from the theoretical achievements of the Tel Quel group and
the journal having the same title, founded in 1960. In the golden period of Tel Quel (196669), intertextuality appeared officially among literary terms due to the publication of two
influential books.
The first of these books was written by Julia Kristeva, Séméiotike: Recherches pour une
Sémanalyse (1969), in which she studied the instance of the grotesque novel Petit Jehn de
Sainte for the sake of fixing what must be understood about intertextuality. The term
intertextuality occurred for the first time in one of the book’s articles, “Le Mot, le Dialogue, le
Roman” (Word, Dialogue, Novel) — this article was published first in 1966 — where she
introduced the Russian theoretician and critic Mikhail Bakhtin to the French public. In
another article of the Book, “Le Texte Clos” (The Bounded Text) — first published in 1967
— Julia Kristeva provided a complete definition of the term as “an intersection of textual
surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings”
(Kristeva quoted in Friedman 147).
Kristeva’s development of the concept of intertextuality owes much to the achievements
of Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristeva’s familiarity with the Russian language and culture, as a
Bulgarian living in France, helped her to develop the theoretical foundations of intertextuality.
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She derives the idea for her definition of the term from the works of Bakhtin: “Le mot (le
texte) est un croisement de mots (de textes) où on lit au moins un autre mot (texte) […] tout
texte se construit comme une mosaïque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation
d’un autre texte” (each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other
word (text) can be read. Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the
absorption and transformation of another) (Kristeva quoted in Samoyault 9; and in Friedman
147).
The second book bears the signature of Jacques Derrida’s, Of Grammatology (1967), in
which he investigated Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational concepts of semiotics, signifier
and signified. The basic premise of Derrida’s notion of intertextuality is that “no element can
function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This
interweaving results in each ‘element’ … being constituted on the basis of the trace within it
of other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced
only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, … is anywhere ever simply present or
absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces” (Derrida 26). Differently
put, a text is not a closed system, but rather interrelated and involved in a dialogue with other
texts. Understandably, then, the multiple ways that link a text with other text(s) is not a
matter of influence, but an infinite network of codes that makes it to be meaningful.
No concept has given rise to so much discussion among modern literary critics as that of
intertextuality. Whereas the prefix “inter” of intertextuality can be easily defined as
“between,” the other component, “textuality,” needs an elaborate explanation. In literary
theory, textuality is often connected with the French Structuralists. For them, textuality is “a
mode of writing constituted by a play of component elements according to specifically literary
conventions and codes. These factors may generate an illusion of reality, but have no truthvalue, nor even reference to a reality existing outside the literary system itself” (Abrams,
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Glossary 301). Textuality, in short, means that the literary text is a closed signifying system
which can only be analysed and interpreted in the light of its relation with the structural
system of language, the typical system which designs its rules and to which it belongs.
Intertextuality, however, considers the literary work not as a closed network, but as an
open product which contains traces of other texts. In this intertextual process, the reader
obtains an important position, for he or she comes to the text with his or her horizon of
expectations formed by his or her earlier readings. This means that there is no text which
exists in isolation, but texts are intertextually related with each other. To put it in Roland
Barthes’ words:
We know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning ( ‘the
message’ of the author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture…the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always
anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the
others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself,
he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is only a readyformed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.
(Barthes quoted in Allen 13)
The origins of intertextuality lie in the theories and philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin. For
Bakhtin, every text is engaged in a dialogue with other texts. In his works, Bakhtin did not use
the term intertextuality, but his different studies helped in introducing the idea of the
multiplicity of discourses transmitted through words. The text appears then as the space of
exchange between multiple voices or discourses conditioned by the different social
institutions of the community. Bakhtin does not speak here about intertextuality, but rather
about the dialogical dimension of the word and the text. Bakhtin argues that “every word is
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directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word
that it anticipates” (Bakhtin quoted in Clayton 18). This account of words as dialogic assumes
that they must be examined and interpreted as elements of this dialogue (it is important to
note here that dialogue for Bakhtin does not mean literally the conversation between
characters in the novel).
The Carnivalesque or Carnival proposed also by Bakhtin is another concept which
allowed Kristeva and others to elaborate their views about intertextuality. The literary text,
Bakhtin argues, resembles the carnival celebrations where the state authorities and the social
institutions are mocked and ridiculed. This complex comparison between carnival and literary
modes manifests itself in their tendencies to mingle everything together: the low culture with
the high as well as the official discourse with the unofficial one. In his study on Rabelais,
Bakhtin tries to investigate “the manner in which ancient traditions of the carnival act as a
centrifugal force promoting ‘unofficial’ dimensions of society and human life and does so
through a profane language and drama of ‘the lower bodily stratum’: images of huge bodies,
bloated stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity are all ‘carnivalesque’
images” (Allen 22). These carnivalesque images seem to devalue the official discourse,
especially the political and the religious, in favour of the unofficial one. The notion of the text
as an open carnival implies that a text does not stand on its own, but echoes other texts and is
governed by the social organisations of the participants. The philosophy of Bakhtin is based
on three principles, the most important of which is the “open-endedness” of the text. This idea
of the open-endedness of the text became the essence of the literary theory known as
Deconstruction.
Now we need to turn to the concept of intertextuality as practiced and defined by Julia
Kristeva and other proponents of Deconstruction, like Derrida, Barthes, Bloom and Riddle.
With these critics, intertextuality took a more complex dimension than Bakhtin’s simple form
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of the carnival or the grotesque. Kristeva’s two early articles, “The Bounded Text” and
“Word, Dialogue, Novel” published later together in Séméiotike, complete each other in
showing the impact of Bakhtin on Kristeva and the way in which she read his works and
developed his ideas. In her article “The Bounded Text,” Kristeva studied the way in which
texts come to be seen as constructions of other pre-existing texts or discourses. According to
her, a pure text does not exist, for everything that an author creates originates from his or her
previous readings. The new text, therefore, becomes a “permutation of texts, an intertextuality
in the space of a given text in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and
neutralise one another” (Allen 34).
Like Bakhtin, Kristeva believes that texts are culturally and ideologically conditioned.
In this respect, texts do not exist in isolation, but intersect with each other since they originate
from the same textual and cultural material and conditions. Both Bakhtin and Kristeva share
the same views about the strong affinity between the text and its cultural and ideological
context. Texts, in this sense, are seen as a complex network which contains beneath its surface
power relations, ideological structures and translingual relations.
Jacques Derrida is another literary philosopher whose achievements have helped in
establishing the concept of intertextuality. The importance of his theories can be seen in their
tendencies to give a broader dimension to textual analysis. For him, the literary text contains
no origins and no boundaries because meaning and language have no beginning and no end.
Derrida argues that there is no final reading of a text since every reading brings about another
reading and so on. This open-endedness of reading (of the text boundaries as well) which he
called the “transcendental signified” refers “in and of itself, in its essence,… to no signified,
would exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier” (Allen
32).
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No doubt the achievements of Derrida in the field of intertextuality and literary theory
at large are interesting and revolutionary. Yet, his argument that intertextuality means that any
word the text presents has already been used in another text or context is arguable. Derrida
does not speak here about citing or quoting, for instance, prose sentences or lines of poetry,
but words which have been utilised before. It is true that by postulating this extreme form of
intertextuality, Derrida wants to assert the idea of the infinity of intertextuality and
interpretation, but things become definitely absurd and arbitrary as Vincent Leitch points out:
Pushed to its extreme, the Derridean notion of citation meets the broader theory of
intertextuality. To employ any previously used word is to practice ‘citation.’ Since
every word in our unabridged dictionaries has always undergone usage, possessing its
own intertextual history, every word embodies and renews a potential for being cited
on each occasion that it is pronounced or written. The appearance of a word extends
and reactivates a history. Every word in a text holds this potential. The lines of
itertextuality, when multiplied in correlation with citability, surpass all possibility of
representation. The dream image of an immense cosmic network only hints at the
proper model. Our formula is: the total history of citation (repetition) of each word
multiplied by the number of words in a text, equals the quantity of intertextuality.
Because we cannot determine the history of citation, our fake formula is useless. (161)
With Roland Barthes, the situation does not differ that much from that of Derrida.
Barthes asserts that there is no meaning without intertextuality. In effect this means that every
text is an intertext. In his foundational article, “The Death of the Author” (1968), Barthes
reduces the role of the author merely to a user of an already existing linguistic system which
s/he did not invent, but had inherited as others did. The author is no longer seen as the
originator and the creator of his own text, “instead the conscious ‘self’ is declared to be a
construct that is itself the product of the workings of the linguistic system, and the mind of an
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author is described as an imputed ‘space’ within which the impersonal, ‘always-already’
existing system of literary language, conventions, codes, and rules of combination gets
precipitated into a particular text” (Abrams, Glossary 301).
For Roland Barthes, the author functions as a scribe, an agent who relies on a huge body
of inherited knowledge, citations and indications. Thus, the text becomes the space where
multiple voices meet and different writings interact with each other. The text is seen by
Barthes as a disordered dictionary whose words are arranged in a sequence of signs and
indications that the author is forced to respect. Barthes expresses that meaning does not
originate from the author’s self, but from a larger linguistic and cultural system. Denied the
privilege of being the source of the text, the author is reduced to a collector and organiser of
already-existing forms within a particular linguistic system. These ideas are what led to the
death of the author and the birth of intertextuality.
Harold Bloom is best known for his linkage between intertextuality and influence. In his
own theory of the Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argues that every poet suffers from an anxiety
caused by his or her feeling of coming after predecessor poets. In this sense, the relationship
between the poet and his or her literary tradition is labelled as an uneasy and antagonistic one.
This anxiety of influence which characterises the relationship between the new and the old
poets is revisionist in the sense that a poet borrows, assimilates, reinterprets, re-evaluates and
revises the works written by the earlier poets. Bloom believes that this process is conducted
by poets so as to rise above the anxiety of the predecessors’ influence and their feeling of
belatedness.
Bloom’s version of intertextuality corresponds with his views of the anxiety of
influence. The very notion of resisting and struggling against the influence of the predecessors
implies the inevitable presence of the latter in the texts produced by the new poets. The
individual dimension takes an essential role in Bloom’s theory. He describes the traditional
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history of poetry as a struggle; an (inter)textual embattlement between creative selves or
creative persons. In Bloom’s opinion, intertextuality does not refer to the relationship that
exists between texts, but rather it is the principle which gives rise to the text. Bloom claims
that there is nothing called poem, but inter-poems; nothing called poet but inter-poets.
With Joseph Riddel, intertextuality took a deconstructive turn. Riddel’s theory
situates the text within other texts by combining intertextuality together with textuality. For
Riddel, the text’s use of language, rhetoric and themes is the outcome of the preceding text’s
influences. The preceding texts, Riddel argues, invade the borders of the actual text by
transforming it into an intertext. Actually, these pre-existing texts are in their turn incomplete,
for they are related and influenced by other texts and so on. In a word, there is no first text,
but all texts are invaded by other texts. To put it in Leitch’s words:
The resident earlier texts open out the present text to an uncontrollable play of
historical predecessors. The predecessor-texts themselves operate intertextually,
meaning that no first, pure, or original text ever can or did rule over or delimit the
historical oscillations at play in texts. Thus all texts appear doubled: they are
uncontrollably permeated with previous texts….The forces of intertextuality, in
Riddel’s view, fundamentally infiltrate the operations of the sign, disallowing any
notion of pure or nonintertextual textuality. (98).
Like intertextuality, parody – known also as ironic quotation, burlesque or pastiche —
refers to the way present representations are derived from past ones by reversing their
functions so that what is received as truth becomes fiction and what is fiction becomes truth
etc. Parody then must “imitate the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular
literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other
features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a
lowly or comically inappropriate subject” (Abrams, Glossary 26).
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In addition to these stylistic features, parody has been stretched to cover almost any
intertext that is antagonistic to the original. When a text adopts the characteristics of a specific
literary genre or parodies its features, the interpretive and reading process moves to a higher
level of interpretation. This operation dictates the way of reading the text, mainly as an
imitation and at the same time an exaggeration of the source text. By doing so, parody takes
the authentic characteristics of the original and tries to rework, problematise and subvert
them, so as to create an aesthetic distance between the original text and the new one. This
parodic strategy makes the serious elements of the original become funny and odd. In this
sense, parody presents two possibilities of reading and representation: the possibilities offered
by the original text and those the parody presents through imitation.
Whatever transformation or deformation parody adopts, it keeps a strong link with the
original text. Parody does not aim to bring these two distinct forms together nor to “wrest past
art from its original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle.
Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present
representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both
continuity and difference” (Hutcheon, The Politics 89). Eventually, parody constitutes a
reaction against the classical belief that the artistic creation is unique and original. The
ultimate goal of the subversive strategy of parody is surely not to underestimate the role and
the importance of art, but rather to give it a different meaning and a new life.
The works of J. M. Coetzee offer a good example of what I have discussed so far of
the concept of intertextuality and its variations. In all his novels, Coetzee cites, quotes,
imitates, alludes, parodies and engages in a dialectic relationship with other texts from the
major Western as well as Eastern literatures. J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), for instance, is
generally described by critics as a parody of Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century classic,
Robinson Crusoe (1917). In this novel, Coetzee takes a radical departure from Defoe’s
15
account by telling the whole from the perspective of a woman, Susan Barton. In Foe, Coetzee
does not only write back to Daniel Defoe and his canonical text, but also aims at interrogating
and challenging Western cultural patterns of knowledge.
Coetzee’s Life and Time of Michael K (1983) is another novel which is engaged in a
strong relationship with other texts. Like Foe, Michael K echoes and alludes to Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe. Both texts tell the story of unfortunate outcasts who find themselves
conducting a difficult life and trying to survive amongst hostile and harsh conditions, by
taming goats and building shelters (caves/holes). In addition to Robinson Crusoe, the novel is
involved also in a direct intertextual relationship with Kafka and a number of his works. For
many critics, the “K” of the title is an abridgment of the name Kafka as it can be a borrowing
from Kafka’s Das Schloss and Der Prozess. There are also indirect references to other works
of Kafka, namely “The Hunger Artist” and “The Burrow.”
Coetzee’s novels, in short, presents a whole range of textual and intertextual practices
which Coetzee considers indispensable to create a dialogue between the past and the present
and also to provide a better understanding of how these texts function and continue to affect
one’s views. The use of intertextuality for Coetzee is not a matter of borrowing or lack of
inspiration, but a conscious choice through which he puts into question the power structures
and its discourses wherever found. His strategy of rereading, reconsidering, rewriting and
borrowing from texts that are considered part of the European canonical heritage serves to
subvert these texts and through them the whole discursive field in which these texts have been
produced, operated and transmitted. This subversive strategy “does not seek to subvert the
dominant with a view to taking its place, but, in Wilson Harris’ formula, to evolve textual
strategies which continually ‘consume’ their ‘own biases’ at the same time as they expose and
erode those of the dominant discourse” (Tiffin 96).
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III. Magda and the Western Literary Heritage
In the Heart of the Country is a perfect example of Coetzee’s novels which are
involved in an intertextual relationship with other works so as to reflect a situation of
oppression, suffering and decay. Presenting the whole narrative from the perspective of a
crazed spinster, Magda, who leads a miserable life in one of the farms in the Cape at the turn
of the nineteenth century, Coetzee tries to reveal the South African colonial past as well as to
give voice to those who have been silenced and marginalised throughout history, including
women and the racial Others. Indeed, the novel’s 266 fragments do not only represent
Magda’s story and history, but also provide a harsh criticism of power structures in all forms
wherever and whenever they existed. In his writings and interviews, Coetzee adopts a position
that abstains from power. Coetzee’s novels are “contemporaneous in incorporating a radical
critique of language, of the forms of authority made possible by language, not only
questioning the latter, but challenging our right to such things as epistemological certitude”
(Huggan & al 5).
Coetzee’s use of the Western literary heritage is part and parcel of his critique of
language because it is made in language. This use manifests itself in the numerous quotations,
allusions and (in)direct references to many works which are considered essential parts of the
European canon. The relationship between Magda and her sources is a relationship of
dialogue in which attention is drawn to serious issues, such as those of colonialism, race,
gender and class. Functioning from a marginal position as a woman in a patriarchal South
African society, Magda is apt to speak about the sufferings of those who were subject to the
tyranny of the colonial aggressive tools and the cultural oppressing systems. As a white
person, she also has an insider’s knowledge of how oppression functions.
The strategy of intertextuality in In the Heart of the Country aims at re-reading,
bringing into question and recycling its source texts and theories in order to give them new
17
meanings and at the same time to subvert some of their hidden ideologies. Like many modern
thinkers, Coetzee believes that the Western literary canon is contaminated by ideological
viruses and male bias. The novel in fact succeeds in its strategy of describing the experience
of its protagonist through an intertextual relationship, thereby “stretch[ing] the boundaries of
realism, on the one hand, by taking the stuff for its story from literature, and, on the other, by
creating a narrator who is able to find evidence of her own existence only in her own writing”
(Briganti 34). I will discuss the strategy of intertextuality in the novel, by trying to draw a link
between Magda’s narrative and the fairy tales of Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, Daniel
Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Lacan’s theory of the symbolic function of
language, the South African farm novel, feminist theory and George Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel’s and other thinkers’ theories which can be applied to anti-colonialism.
The notion of oppression is what links Magda and the fairy tale of Cinderella because
they are both oppressed subjects. In her attempt to tell her own life, Magda on different
occasions draws a link between her experience and that of characters from fiction or fairy
tales. One of these famous figures is Cinderella, whom she identifies herself with:
“CINDRLA ES MI” (Coetzee, In the Heart 144). In the fairy tale, the life of Cinderella is a
continuous nightmare full of sufferings, misery and hard work. By the coming of her stepmother and her two vile daughters, shortly after her mother’s death, Cinderella’s bad time
begins. Fortunately, Cinderella does not end up doing nasty work all her life, but she is
rewarded by an easy and happy life close to the king’s son who chooses her to be his wife
when he discovers that she is the beautiful maiden who danced with him in the palace hall.
Like Cinderella, Magda’s life is not at all an easy life, for she also lost her mother
while she was still young; her father marries with another woman (we are never sure of that,
for it could have happened only in her fantasies); she takes care of the house and her father:
18
She is the new wife, therefore the old one is dead. The old wife was my mother, but
died so many years ago that I barely recall her…I should have been standing ready to
greet them [the father and his bride] with smiles and offers of tea, but I was not. I was
absent. I was not missed. My father pays no attention to my absence. To my father I
have been an absence all my life. Therefore instead of being the womanly warmth at
the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses
inward, a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors,
neglected, vengeful. (Coetzee, In the Heart 2)
Both Cinderella’s and Magda’s misery are the outcome of their father’s negligence. In the
case of Cinderella, the father did nothing to protect his daughter from the mistreatment by his
new wife and his step-daughters, but remained an absence throughout the story. Likewise,
Magda’s father is presented through her perception as the source of her problems. She
describes the relationship between her and him as an antagonistic one, for Magda sees him as
being responsible for her miserable life. As a white male in a patriarchal South African
society, Magda’s father represents a double power: the power that the male exerts over the
female and that which white colonisers exert over the natives. Magda’s father represents the
white coloniser and the dominating master, whom the servants are afraid of and address with
respect: “Hendrik, you must go now, the baas will be cross if he sees you hanging around
here” (Coetzee, In the Heart 33). Thus, Magda’s father as presented through her imagination
is the ruler of the farm and its inhabitants.
As still another link between the situation of Magda and fairy tale characters, one can
mention the story of Hansel and Gretel. Becoming an oppressor, like the wicked old witch in
Hansel and Gretel, is what links the two stories together. Close to the end of the novel,
Magda recreates one of Hansel and Gretel’s scenes, playing the role of the bad old witch with
the post boy in the role of Hansel:
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When no one answered his knock he left the house and went down to the orchard,
where the orange trees stood full of fruit. It was there that I crept up on him, an old
woman of the wilds. He jumped to his feet, trembling, trying to hide a half-eaten
orange behind his back.
‘And who is stealing my fruit?’ I said, the words dropping heavily from my lips, like
stones, how strange to speak real words again to a real listener, however petrified.
The child stared back goggle-eyed – let me recreate the scene – at the crone in the
black dress flecked with foodstains and verdigris, with the big teeth pointing in all
directions and the mad eyes and the mane of grey hair, knowing in that instant that all
the stories were true, that worse was true, that he would never see his mother again but
butchered like a lamb and his sweet flesh be roasted in the oven and his sinews boiled
down to glue and his eyeballs seethed in a potion and his clean bones thrown to the
dogs. (Coetzee, In the Heart 135)
The situation described in this scene is a recreation of the old tale of Hansel and Gretel, the
son and the daughter of a poor wood cutter whose second wife convinced him to leave his two
children in the middle of a forest because he could no longer procure daily bread for the four
of them. Trying to find their way back to the house of their father, they end up captives of an
old witch who lay in wait for children to fatten them and eat them.
Unlike the early example in which Magda associates herself with the helpless
Cinderella, in this reworking of Hansel and Gretel’s story, Magda describes herself as if she
were the bad old witch we recall from the original story. The very idea behind inscribing
herself in the role of the evil witch could be defined in terms of her personal life. In other
words, Magda fails to establish a reciprocal relationship with the society she lives in. Indeed,
she recounts that she is raped by the servant Hendrik, but we are never sure if that really
happened. These elements make her not at all at ease, but she finds herself in a complex
20
network of oppressive relationships. In her attempts to set herself free from being the weak
and the helpless victim, Magda attributes to herself wicked roles so as to claim power.
According to Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country is about “living among people without
reciprocity, so that there’s only an ‘I’ and the ‘You’ is not on the same basis, the ‘You’ is a
debased ‘You’” (Coetzee, Speaking 23). This unequal relationship between the ‘I’ and the
‘You’ is behind the aggressive and futile role that Magda imagines herself fulfilling.
Throughout the narrative, Magda sees herself as suffering, almost ruined by her father,
Hendrik and society. In her attempt to play the role of the bad witch, Magda proves to be a
duplicate version of the same oppressive system which was behind all troubles in her life. In
this respect, the novel is about power which “invades. That is its nature. It invades one’s life”
(Coetzee, Age 117). The structures of power and its tradition of oppressing the weak lead to
unequal relationships and hinder the establishment of a sound community where freedom,
peace, love and respect prevail.
Like Foe and Life and Times of Michael K, In the Heart of the Country is also another
novel which alludes to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. On the representative level, Magda
is not a castaway like Crusoe, but her life on the farm, all of which is spent in loneliness,
decreases her sense of belonging to a community and being surrounded by people. The feeling
she gets is more that of an outcast who lives in a world created by herself: “summers and
winters come and go. How they pass so swiftly, how many have passed I cannot say, not
having had the foresight long ago to start cutting notches in a pole or scratching marks on a
wall or keeping a journal like a good castaway” (Coetzee, In the Heart 134). The famous
example of a good castaway is Daniel Defoe’s protagonist Robinson Crusoe, who managed to
survive and build a small colony on a deserted island. He also represents the superiority of
European man and his ability to claim possession of and power over other races and places.
He makes the native Friday his servant and starts using the tools he has found in the wrecked
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ship and his European knowledge to build up terraces, cultivate the land and tame goats.
Crusoe manages to build up a colony on that virgin island. He also succeeds as a symbolic
and mythic figure of the glorious and powerful European man. This notion of Crusoe as a
successful empire builder is what Coetzee tries to call into question in his fifth novel Foe. In a
sense, the myth of the superiority of the European race is not always true because not all
Westerners are able to give directions. Westerners are superior because of their advanced
weapons and expertise.
Unlike Crusoe, Magda fails to become the substitute of her father and the ruler of the
farm and its inhabitants. Magda cannot fulfil the role of a white mistress, nor that of the
servants, but her position and role remain dubious. At the beginning, Magda is associated with
the inferior position of a servant when she declares that she used to play with their children
when she was a little child, though this was normal at least in rural areas in past times in
South Africa. In a later stage in the novel, Magda becomes more aware of class questions and
the differences between her and the servants. She no longer treats the servants as her equals,
but imposes her position as a white mistress who embodies authority. After her father’s
suspicious death, Magda tries to break the barriers between her and the servants, by inviting
Hendrik and his wife Anna to sleep with her in the same house. By doing so, Magda attempts
“to attain with them the dialogue that she was originally denied because of their different
social positions and a contact she could never hope to attain with her father because of his
temperament and authoritarianism” (Canepari-Labib 82). However, Magda failes to establish
intimacy and to create a dialogue between herself and the servants. Her relationship with the
servants echoes that of Crusoe and his servant Friday; an unequal relationship in which the
Other, the servants in these cases, is seen as alien, inferior, yet convenient to the self. Magda
also proves to be incapable of running the farm as her father did. Consequently, the life in the
22
farm collapses and things and her life go out of control, which increases her feeling of
loneliness.
As a solution to her problems, Magda wishes for a sort of regression. That is to say,
she wants to fall back into an inanimate condition; to the world where language is not needed.
This makes us think of Lacan and his revolutionary concepts of the psychosexual formation of
the child’s patterns of personality. In his theory, Lacan distinguishes between two major
periods: the imaginary stage and the symbolic one. In the imaginary stage, which is also
known as the pre-linguistic, according to Lacan, the child cannot make any difference
between himself/subject and other selves/object(s). It is only in a later stage, in the mirror
stage, a transitory stage between the imaginary and the symbolic stages, that a child, unlike
young chimpanzees for instance, recognises his or her own image in a mirror. Here the infant
subject starts to construct an independent identity which alienates the self from the other. As
for the symbolic stage, which takes place after the acquisition of language, the child is
integrated into the symbolic order of language and its pre-existing symbols, such as
man/woman, master/slave etc1. In Lacan’s theory, “this symbolic realm of language […] is
the realm of the law of the father, in which the ‘phallus’ (in a symbolic sense) is ‘the
privileged signifier’ that serves to establish the mode for all other signifiers” (Abrams 252).
In Coetzee’s narrative, language plays an important role in constituting power.
According to Lacan, language constitutes social, legal and cultural prohibitions and
restrictions and it is intimately connected with power and its repressive and oppressive
processes. Magda’s indirect entrance into language — she says she first learned a pidgin or
even African language before learning Afrikaans (or English?) — marks the primal split
between her and the servant’s children: “I spoke like one of them [the servant’s children]
before I learned to speak like this” (Coetzee, In the Heart 7). In this respect, language, which
The discussion of Lacan’s theory is based on Abrams’ entry “ psychological and psychoanalytic criticism” in
his Glossary of Literary Terms.
1
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contains the father’s laws, restrictions and prohibitions, lead to the irredeemable rupture
between her and the servants; between the Self and the Other. Before getting access to the
father’s language, Magda says that she used to be herself, living in a sort of paradise in which
there is no distinction between slave and master.
As a reaction against her father’s laws, Magda tries to be free from the world of
language by regressing to a pre-linguistic state. She rejects the idea of being a product and a
consumer of language and its laws:
The lips are tired, I explain to him [Hendrik], they want to rest, they are tired of all the
articulating they have had to do since they were babies, since it was revealed to them
that there was a law, that they could simply part themselves to make way for the long
aaaa which has, if truth be told, always been enough for them, enough of an expression
of whatever this is that needs to be expressed, or clench themselves over the long
satisfying silence into which I shall still, I promise, one day retire. (Coetzee, In the
Heart 91)
Magda’s regression to a state of no language ties in with the idea of passing from the
imaginary, baby language, to a symbolic phase or adulthood. Differently put, in the prelinguistic state, the baby feels with the mother, whereas in the later stage the child follows the
law of the father. Language, thus, is central to ideology, manipulation, authority and power. In
the Heart of the Country is a novel which is deeply engaged with gender issues as it conveys a
direct criticism of the Afrikaner patriarchal system and through it to the whole discourse
which guarantees its hegemony and supremacy.
In a similar way, the novel in its very choice of setting its events in a deserted Cape
farm echoes the features of the South African traditional “plaasroman,” known also as farm
novel. In this type of fiction, rural life is presented as an ideal natural condition. In several of
his essays, Coetzee shows a great interest in the genre of the South African “plaasroman.” For
24
Coetzee, the main characteristic of the “plaasroman,” as he claimed in “Lineal Consciousness
in the Farm Novels of C. M. van den Heever,” is for the protagonist to go beyond time and
place and unite with nature and become part of a farmer’s long line of successors. Coetzee
points out that the plaasroman transcends:
[The] awareness of being doomed to die while the world lives on… [this] is attained
via conscious acceptance that the unit of life is the lineage, not the individual […] Into
the myth of the good farmer and his marriage with his farm are drawn many of the
energies of European Romanticism, many of the feelings of cosmic identification and
engulfment which in the first place were attributed to the relation not of farmer to farm
but of man to the wilderness, to forest and moor and mountain. (Coetzee quoted in
Dovey 183)
Being a woman, Magda is not the right person to be the holder of the plaasroman’s tradition
because she can be part of nature, but not one of the farmer’s successors.
The very choice of setting the action of the novel in a farm is in a way a parody of the
plaasroman, which can be traced back to Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm
(1883). According to Coetzee, the plaasroman is an aesthetic form of the coloniser’s
hegemonic discourse, which aims at associating the social conditions with the land as a
property concept. It is mainly this simplistic vision of this kind of novels and their very
usefulness in representing the South African conditions which Coetzee’s novel tries to call
into question. Paul Rich makes the point that “In the Heart of the Country emerges as an
‘anti-pastoral’ novel in that it takes an idealised rural situation…and subjects it to a merciless
scrutiny in order to try and reveal some inner truth about the nature of real social reality” (70).
According to Rich, the novel is an anti-pastoral, in a broader sense, and an anti-plaasroman, in
a narrow one, for it tries to suggest a more complex reading of the rural life, more particularly
the South African condition.
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Another thing worth mentioning is that Magda’s narrative is prototypical of l’Ecriture
Féminine, known in English as “feminine writing” or “writing the body,” which is associated
with a number of French theoreticians, such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and many
others. L’Ecriture féminine draws upon Lacanian achievements by developing a feminist
theory which tries to map out a possible feminine writing which has its origin in the
imaginary stage, the stage of the mother-child relation, before the infant gets access to the
father-oriented language. This pre-linguistic experience comes to be reflected in a later stage
in feminine writings by trying to disrupt the dominant rules and logic of the phallocentric
language. Magda challenges her father’s monolithic discourse by undermining the existing
oppressive systems of the “law-of-the-father,” which forced her to fulfil the role of the
subaltern, silenced and helpless victim. In her narrative, Magda expresses her rejection of the
role she is consigned to by the phalocentric culture.
Central to l’Ecriture féminine is the idea of writing the body or using bodily
identifications so as to communicate with the other. In the novel, Magda attempts to go
beyond the fixed signifying systems of language to the realm of the symbolic space of the prelinguistic stage:
Oh father, father, if I could only learn your secrets, creep through the honeycomb of
your bones, listen to the turmoil of your marrow, the singing of your nerves, float on
the tide of your blood, and come at last to the quiet sea where my countless brothers
and sisters swim, flicking their tails, smiling, whispering to me of a life to come! I
want a second chance! Let me annihilate myself in you and come forth a second time
clean and new. (Coetzee, In the Heart 77)
This example shows Magda’s ultimate wish to regress back to the pre-linguistic stage where
no language is needed. To do so, she tries a sort of physical unity with her father, by making a
journey back to her very beginning when she was still a sperm. In a similar example of
26
writing the body, Magda seeks to demolish the barriers between master and slave and
becomes one with Klein-Anna as she declares in this passage:
I want a cave, a hole to snuggle in, I want to block my ears against this chatter that
streams endlessly from and into me, I want a home somewhere else, if it has to be in
this body then on different terms in this body, if there is no other body, though there is
one I would far prefer, I cannot stop these words unless I cut my throat, I would like
to climb into Klein-Anna’s body, I would like to climb down her throat while she
sleeps and spread myself gently inside her, my hand in her hands, my feet in her feet,
my skull in the benign quiet of her skull where images of soap and flour and milk
revolve, the holes of my body sliding into place over the holes of hers, there to wait
mindlessly for whatever enters them, the song of birds, the smell of the dung, the parts
of a man, not angry now but gentle, rocking in my bloodwarmth, laving me with the
soapy seed, sleeping in my cave. (Coetzee, In the Heart 118)
Still another feminist image that can be traced in Magda’s account is the notion of the
mother’s womb. In many occasions in the narrative, Magda imagines herself playing the role
of the mother, though being unproductive. After her father’s dubious death, Magda describes
the removal of his body in maternal terminology as if she were giving birth to a new being, a
new life for herself: “how fortunate at times like these that there is only one problem, a
problem of cleanliness. Until this bloody afterbirth is gone there can be no new life for me”
(Coetzee, In the Heart 16). The mother as a symbolic image is not associated in the story with
Magda only, but with earth as an emblem of fertility and life. In the passage where Magda
dug up a grave to bury her father, she described the action as if she were bringing him back to
the mother’s womb: “The bundle, hauled out again, lies like a great larva at the graveside, and
I, its tireless mother, instinct-driven, set again about stowing it in the safe place I have
chosen” (Coetzee, In the Heart 101).
27
The portrayal of Magda’s character stems from the views of some feminists, such as
Luce Irigaray, who regards the displacement, subversion, of the phalocentric subject as
essential for the emergence of the suitable conditions for the expression of female thoughts.
Women’s position of inferiority makes them ideal for any attempt at subverting the dominant
patriarchal discourse. In one of Coetzee’s interviews, he noted that “one ought to question
[power] from its antagonist position, namely the position of weakness” (Coetzee quoted in
Martuz 90). In this context, the feminine turns out to be a form of resistance. Magda in her
narrative tries to write the self and to make her voice heard, though she knows that her words
are echoes of her father’s language: “I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and
perspective. It was my father-tongue. I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I
feel too much the pathos of its distance, but it is all we have” (Coetzee, In the Heart 106). It is
true that Magda is fully aware of the fact that she is the product of her father and his laws, but
she is at the same time eager to reverse roles and become the dominant in turn.
Magda’s insistence on describing her experience in terms of intertextual relationships
highlights this search for subjectivity and overcoming the limitations implicit in her situation.
In her stone messages to the sky-gods, for instance, Magda represents herself in a series of
broken languages, first, as a helpless Cinderella-like woman who is appealing for rescue and,
later, as a creative woman; an authoress who sees in poetry a medium, a signifying system,
through which she can assert her own existence. Her very aim behind her plea in stones is a
way to suggest a language of her own that differs from the language of the father and also to
add her own experience to other experiences which took place in “the land [of South Africa] a
page on which the generations write their story” (Coetzee, White 66).
Moreover, the adaptation of the white female perspective is relevant to the discussion
of the notion of marginality. The in-between position of white women in South Africa,
standing between the colonial masters and the colonised natives, makes them apt to
28
undermine the systems of power which do not only suppress women, but also, even more
intensely, the racial others. Coetzee’s treatment of the theme of race in this novel stems from
the achievements of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and, especially George
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic of the self and the Other or the master and the slave. For
Hegel, the relationship between master and slave is based on mutual dependency. The master
needs a slave to do the work for him, and the latter serves the former to save his life. So what
we get is two distinct self-consciousnesses: One “is the independent consciousness whose
essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential
nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman’”
(Steinhart 3).
Like women, the racial others are a repressed group; even more repressed than women,
in the novel, are the servants. The racial others, Hendrik and Anna, are represented as passive
figures, who belong to a different race, yet convenient to and wholly dependent on the ruling
and powerful Afrikaners. According to the British theoretician, Stuart Hall, any text contains
a discourse, a complex network of social, political and cultural relations in which become
apparent the ways by which language, at the level of signs, is produced as a representation,
carrying beneath its surface ideological and cultural implications. These ideological and
cultural representations in literary texts help in fixing, propagating and reproducing the power
structures of a particular society. In this respect, representation is a crucial element of “the
process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does
involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things” (Hall
15).
The difference between the self and the other occurs also in terms of language. As
stated by Magda, the language of the servant is a language which is different than the one the
whites speak. This kind of division creates a sort of hierarchy in terms of binary oppositions:
29
white versus black; servant versus master; coloniser versus colonised. In many occasions in
the novel, Magda expresses her discomfort with this ideological construction, created by
language and power structures: “At the feet of an old man I have drunk in a myth of a past
when beast and man and master lived a common life as innocent as the stars in the sky, and I
am far from laughing” (Coetzee, In the Heart 7).
In the narrative, there is no room for compromise between the self and the other. The
gap between the novel’s two races, Afrikaners and Hottentots, remains unbridged, despite
Magda’s many efforts. Magda’s attempts to be close to Anna and to eliminate the formalities
between them were doomed to failure, since the distinction between their distinct categories is
irrecoverable: “‘We are all little to begin with, aren’t we. I was once also little Magda. But
now I am just Magda, and you are just Anna. Can you say Magda? Come Say Magda for me.’
‘No, miss, I can’t’” (Coetzee, In the Heart 111). Likewise, Magda fails to transform her
relationship with Hendrik from a merely sexual one into an emotional level. In other words,
she fails to make him think of her in the same way he does about Anna. Coetzee’s very choice
to stress Magda's failure in bringing the two races together recalls the diseased South African
situation under Apartheid. In an interview with J. M. Coetzee, he declares that his protagonist
fails because she “lack[s] the stature to transform [the] 'I' into a 'You,' to, so to speak, create a
society in which reciprocity exists; and therefore condemn[s herself] to desperate gestures
towards establishing intimacy” (Coetzee quoted in Attwell 68).
Many critics, however, find Coetzee’s use of recent theoretical issues debatable. For
one thing, at the representational level Magda is described as a farmer’s daughter who has no
academic degrees or strong intellectual knowledge of the major European languages or
theoretical achievements. For another thing, the action of the novel, which may be situated
between the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century, precedes these
30
theoretical achievements and some of the intertextual references. Dominique Head summed
up the situation as follows:
The construction of Magda is ultimately a textual problem, in the sense that she is
shown to be the product of different textual influences. Her narrative is peppered with
quotations from, or allusions to, many important figures in modern Western literature
and philosophy, including Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Kafka, Sartre and
Beckett. The fact that she is versed in contemporary literary theory makes her seem, in
the words of Ian Glenn, ‘a kind of Emily Dickinson with Therapy and a thesis in
critical theory.’ (59)
Clearly, the use of intertextuality helps in highlighting the dominant themes of the
novels. I have argued that the intertextual references, allusions and citations are not the
outcome of Coetzee’s lack of inspiration or imagination, but rather a way to engage in
dialogue with these source texts as well as to reveal their underlying ideologies. I showed that
part of Magda’s problem is her gender; being a woman in patriarchal South Africa. Magda’s
narrative involves a critical questioning of the power structures of the dominant patriarchal
culture. Magda’s struggle to liberate herself from her father’s laws and restriction is meant to
challenge the existing patterns of domination which govern the relationship between sexes as
well as races. Magda fails in establishing her own identity without being dependent on her
father. She fails also in inhabiting the position of powerful mistress, the position left empty
after the death of her father. In the short period when she possesses a powerful position after
the alleged death of her father, she proves to be a product and a duplication of him in dealing
with those who are under her rule. The representation of the racial other supports Fanon,
Sartre and Hegel’s theories of master/slave dialectic. I have showed how the racial others
have been seen and dealt with as inferior beings who are dependent on Whites and are there to
serve them and to satisfy their desires. The novel stresses the idea that the dichotomies
31
between self/other, servant/master govern the power structures, and any attempt to bring the
two extremes together is doomed to failure. In the novel, the servants are completely silenced
as they are only seen through Magda’s point of view. They are not allowed any space to speak
about their experience or to comment about the narrative’s events. Coetzee’s reliance on
modern texts and theories, which take place after the novel’s main events, is what made him
subject to harsh criticism. Yet, In the Heart of the Country, like all Coetzee’s works, is a
landmark in the contemporary English literature which succeeds in profiting from the Western
literary heritage and at the same time questions its hidden discourses, by putting under
scrutiny the power structures of patriarchy as well as the colonial enterprise and its processes.
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IV. Parody in Foe
In the previous chapter, I have argued that Coetzee in In the Heart of the Country tries
to subvert, among other things, the South African literary genre known as the plaasroman. In
Foe, he deals with a broader issue, namely the question of the rise of the novel. To do so, he
writes back to Daniel Defoe’s classical work Robinson Crusoe, retelling Crusoe’s story and
history from the viewpoint of a female castaway called Susan Barton. Sharing with Crusoe
and Friday the experience of the island, Susan tells the story anew. This radical departure
from the original text aims at putting under scrutiny the basic assumptions of the British
canonical text, Robinson Crusoe, and examining the text’s many complexities such as the
issue of (hi)story, credibility, representation and the notion of authority.
Foe is widely regarded as a parody of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Central to my
discussion in this research paper is the function of parody in Foe. By the function of parody, I
mean that Coetzee’s reason to rework Defoe’s text is to exploit the tension between the centre
and the margin. In other words, Coetzee in Foe challenges the primacy of the Western
standards that assume universality. It comes to mean that present representations which are
derived from past ones tend to reverse the function of the original text so that what is “true”
becomes “false” and what is “false” becomes “true.”
To Coetzee’s critics, Foe is a good instance of postcolonial texts that put into question
the very relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. For Helene Tiffin, Foe
manages to write back not only to Robinson Crusoe, but also to the entire discursive system
that guarantees the supremacy of Western canonical works (98). Likewise, Dominic Head in
his article “The Maze of Doubting: Foe” states that Coetzee has tried in Foe to write back also
to Ian Watt and his classic work, The Rise of the Novel, which regards Defoe as the first
novelist in the English history of the genre. Head argues that Robinson Crusoe is seen by
Coetzee “not as a canonical English text – Defoe is the father of the English novel in
33
conventional accounts – but as an embodiment of the great myth of Western imperialism, an
enthusiastic narrative of the project of ‘civilizing’ virgin territories against indigenous
peoples, even against all odds” (113).
In The Rise of the Novel, Watt discusses the achievements of the founding fathers of
the English novel, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, as well as the
different elements which contribute to the rise of the English novel at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, especially the increase of the middle class reading public. The enrichment
of the social groups which were concerned with commerce and industry, Watt argues, “have
altered the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficiently to place the middle class as a
whole in a dominating position for the first time” (Watt 53). Watt believes that Defoe’s
success in establishing his literary career and becoming a representative of the emerging
reading public has to do with the fact that he belonged to this middle-class category, which
made him able to come up with stories which attracted their attention.
Watt’s choice to devote the opening chapter of his book to the discussion of Realism
as a predominant novelistic expression during the beginning of the eighteenth century is
significant. According to Watt, Defoe’s main achievement in Robinson Crusoe is his attempt
to create a world with a realist effect, by presenting the whole in the form of an
autobiographical memoir. As stated in the preface to Robinson Crusoe, the account of the
story is supposed to be a real one: ‘the editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact;
neither is there any appearance of fiction in it” (7). The suggestion here is that the story is a
real historical account of an adventurous shipwrecked person. The story of this shipwrecked
man referred to as Robinson Crusoe, Watt claims, is used allegorically by Defoe to describe
his own life experience. Watt states that:
the story though allegorical, is also historical: it is based on the life of a man alive, and
well-known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes, and to
34
whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes; and Defoe hints that he is
himself the ‘original’ of which Robinson Crusoe is the ‘emblem’; that it is his own life
which he is portraying allegorically. (100)
Foe is a novel that examines this very notion of veracity in Defoe’s account. Foe
marks a metafictional journey back to the island to reveal the hidden terrain of his source text
and to question the claim that the novel represents true events. To illustrate this idea, Coetzee
deprives his Cruso the heroic qualities of the original character we recall from the original
story. Derek Attridge mentions that Coetzee’s Cruso is a parodic version of Defoe’s Crusoe
because Cruso has “made only minimal attempts to improve the quality of his life, he has kept
no journal (he does not even notch the passing days on a stick) and has no desire to leave the
island. He spends most of his time levelling the island’s hill into terraces” (175). Taking this
claim into consideration, Foe is going to problematise Defoe’s tale by accusing Foe of telling
lies and lacking logic:
I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from
his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one
with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken
their toll on his memory, and no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy. (1112)
What is worth mentioning in this extract is that Susan Barton, Coetzee’s narrator, finds what
is supposed to be Cruso’s hidden stories “so various” and “hard to reconcile one with another”
because of the psychological disunity of the many years he spent on the island, particularly
those spent in isolation. Moreover, the stress of age “on his memory” makes Cruso unreliable
as he is unable to distinguish between “what is truth, what is fancy.”
Coetzee’s most significant deviation from Defoe’s texts is the use of the female
narrator. Marni Gautier points out that what brings fiction and history together is the fact that
35
they are both narrative discourses and man-made constructs. As such, the writing of fiction
and history is selective and subjective at the same time. Gautier attests that “J. M. Coetzee’s
novel Foe foregrounds the absence of the female voice and the irretrievability of the subaltern
voice from the largest part of written history” (1). This suggests that Coetzee significantly and
consciously puts into question the very notion of veracity in Defoe’s account. Gautier
suggests that Defoe is in a sense symbolic of a wider phenomenon that is of “the largest part
of written history.” Foe is a reaction against those texts which are considered as “part of the
process of ‘fixing’ relations between Europe and its ‘others,’ of establishing patterns of
reading alterity at the same time as it inscribed the ‘fixity’ of that alterity, naturalising
difference within its own cognitive codes” (Tiffin 98).
The reception of Robinson Crusoe in Europe and elsewhere in the world was various
and distinct. The traditional receptions, Watt argues, have highly estimated the work as an
evidence of the greatness and superiority of European man. Robinson Crusoe has been seen
and received as “homo economicus…so ‘economic man’ symbolized the new outlook of
individualism in its economic aspects,” for he succeeds in building a successful empire even
in isolation thanks to the tools he recovered from the shipwreck and also to his stock of
knowledge and skills (Watt 69). Gallagher points out that Defoe’s story has been considered
as “an eighteenth-century testament to the superiority of rational civilization over nature and
savagery, a dramatization of the Puritan spiritual autobiography, and a celebration of the value
of hard work and faith” (169). This tendency to mythologize Crusoe’s experience is meant to
set him as the new model of the successful European man – enterprise – with the mission and
ambition of civilising brutes, exploring new colonies and cultivating virgin territories.
The modern reception, however, rejects the supremacy and the peculiarity of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe as part of the Western canon and with it the long history of colonial and
imperial practices. In challenging this centrality of the European models, the use of parody
36
seeks to destabilise the fences that these models surround themselves with to guarantee their
hegemonic force and the self-evidence of their patterns. For many postcolonial critics, such as
Lewis Nkosi, Gayatri Spivak and many others, Robinson Crusoe is a colonialist and
imperialist text that praises the culture of racism, oppression and colonisation. Nkosi claims
that “in Robinson Crusoe the element of myth regarding the painstaking industry of building a
civilization from nothing, ex nihilo, is inseparable from the story of colonization, of
subjugation, exploitation, and finally Christianization” (Nkosi quoted in Ghallagher 170).
Like Nkosi, Coetzee’s very attempt to rework the story of Crusoe aims at rereading,
reconsidering and rewriting one of the famous examples of European historical and fictional
records in order to dismantle its hegemonic process and to problematise the whole discursive
field in which this record has been produced, operated and transmitted. This subversive
strategy “does not seek to subvert the dominant with a view to taking its place, but, in Wilson
Harris’s formulation, to evolve textual strategies which continually ‘consume’ their ‘own
biases’ at the same time as they expose and erode those of the dominant discourse” (Tiffin
96).
The element of parody in Foe is manifested in the experience of the island. That is to
say, parody connects a story which is supposed to be of a “true” account (Robinson Crusoe)
with another one which is symbolic (that of Susan Barton). This is achieved through reversing
the content of the original:
Crusoe
versus
Cruso
Friday
versus
Friday
The island
versus
The island
Robinson Crusoe
versus
Foe
Defoe
versus
Foe
37
To illustrate this point, Coetzee brings his reader in a journey from Crusoe’s island to Cruso’s
island.
Through the perspective of Susan Barton, the white English female, Coetzee expresses
his opinion about the complex relationship between history and truth. During the various
stages of the narrative, Susan is seen to be haunted with telling the truth. As an example,
Susan tells Cruso in a vociferous quarrel that it is not worth-while to try to remember the past
events because it will not help, and if it helps it will lack authenticity as he has no written
records: “you are mistaken!...the truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart
from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of the sea-monster and mermaids, resides
in a thousand touches which totally may seem of no importance” (17-18). Susan demands
realism, too. She insists that truth must be documented with a detailed registration to be
considered as truth otherwise it is no truth. Thus, the relationship between history and truth is
is problematic.
As a parody, Foe reverses not only the content of the original text, but also challenges
our conception of certain issues, such as that of Otherness. A case in point is Defoe’s Friday,
who is described as tawny with rather delicate features: “the colour of his skin was not quite
black, but very tawny…his hair was long and black, not curled like wool” (202). This
statement is the source of Coetzee’s description of Friday as being black: “a Negro with a
head of fuzzy wool” (5). Part of the parody here is that the reader knows Defoe’s Friday with
an agreeable face, thin lips, white teeth and very good mouth almost as a European, whereas
Coetzee’s Friday is described with the characteristics of a non-European Other. Foe’s
deviation from Defoe’s representation of Friday is to assert his reality as a black African.
Gallagher comments that “Coetzee’s transformation of the light-skinned, European-featured
native of Robinson Crusoe into a woolly-haired, thick-lipped, dark-complexioned Negro both
38
reveals the true African hidden in Defoe’s account and suggests Friday’s kinship with the
indigenous people of South Africa” (181).
As Foe points out, what is lacking in Defoe’s book is a sexual element. This leads one
to say that there is an implicit sexual connotation in the original text. Watt mentions that love
of women plays a subordinate role in Crusoe’s narrative and that he seems to be satisfied with
the company of a slave man rather than of a woman: “When Crusoe does notice the lack of
‘society’ there, he prays for the solace of company, but we observe that what he desires is a
male-slave. Then, with Friday, he enjoys an idyll without benefit of woman” (77). To take
Friday as a common point between the two texts, one can wonder why is Foe’s Friday
impotent? To come back to Defoe’s description of Friday: “he was a comely, handsome
fellow […] his hair was long and black […] he had a very good mouth […] yet he had all the
sweetness and softness of a European” (Defoe 202). One can notice that this Friday is
“feminised” to please Crusoe’s unconscious sexual desires. In showing Friday as “a slave
unmanned,” Coetzee wants to draw attention to the absence of Friday’s phallus and,
ironically, to his passivity and powerlessness (119).
The choice of giving Friday no voice highlights the idea of the lost truth. In an
interview, Coetzee was asked why Friday has no tongue. Coetzee answers that “nobody seems
to have sufficient authority to say for sure how it is that Friday has no tongue” (Coetzee
quoted in Martuz 90). Coetzee’s statement sheds light on the concept of authority, which is
part of the problem. Friday’s coming to the island is covered in mystery, as that of his roots
and his desires. In the narrative, Friday is seen through the eyes of Susan Barton. Susan tries
unsuccessfully to communicate with Friday by using pictures, music and signs, in the hope
that he can tell something of his story. Being unable to respond to Susan’s actions, Friday is
going to lead Susan and the writer Foe to fabricate a story for him because his silence poses
difficulties for Susan’s and Foe’s project of telling the story of the island: “Friday has no
39
command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in
conformity with the desires of others” (Coetzee, Foe 121). Friday’s silence, as a sign of his
powerlessness, is used as a justification of hierarchal authority: “For as long as he is dumb we
can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish” (Coetzee,
Foe 148).
Unlike Susan who wants to decipher the silence of Friday so as to tell or let him tell
his reality, the writer Foe thinks that Friday’s silence is simply a puzzle that exists in the heart
of every story and all they need is to solve it in their own way. Susan disagrees with Foe’s
suggestion. She believes that it is their duty to interpret the silence of Friday in a proper way.
In his discussion of the politics of canonisation in Foe, Derek Attridge argues that Friday’s
silence is not a passive silence, but a resistant one to all efforts of the dominant discourse to
describe this silence in linguistic figures. He says: “For her [Susan Barton], there can be no
assurance that all silences will eventually be made to resound with the words of the dominant
language, and to tell their stories in canonised narratives – not because there is an inviolable
core of silence to which the dominant discourse can never penetrate, but because the most
fundamental silence is itself produced by – at the same time as it makes possible – the
dominant discourse” (181).
Foe’s most significant challenge to Defoe’s canonical account is not only the rejection
of the ego- and Eurocentric representation of the racial Other, Friday, but also the exclusion of
women from most parts of the original story. For Crusoe, everything is based on the notion of
profit. A male slave is more beneficial in a deserted island than a woman. It is this notion of
marginalising and silencing women, as well as racial others, and treating them as inferiors, yet
convenient to the male self, that Coetzee reconsiders in Foe. The logic of exclusion that
characterises the original story and with it a great deal of human intellectual heritage is central
to Coetzee’s arguments in Foe.
40
In the novel, Susan is seen struggling to make her story told, by seeking help from the
professional writer Foe to do the work for her. Susan, however, ends up writing a narrative of
her own. This option is meant to challenge Foe’s literary power and through him the author’s
authority which has systematically and (un)consciously excluded women from the rights of
subjectivity in a great deal of their written records. As Gallagher puts it:
Susan’s and Friday’s inability to tell their own stories demonstrates how the literary
tradition has long silenced and marginalised those defined as Other. In one sense,
Coetzee’s Foe grants voice to the silenced through writing and the word: Susan Barton
has been written out of Robinson Crusoe in the same way that women have been written
out of literary history, but in Coetzee’s fictional world she appears and relates her own
story. (186)
Throughout the narrative, Susan resists being treated as a helpless victim. This resistance
manifests itself in her strong will not to fulfil the traditional role of woman by refusing to be
the captain’s mistress and to provide free labour for Cruso and be a fictitious character in
Foe’s story. She insists that she is a “free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story
according to her own desire” (Coetzee, Foe 131).
The use of names adds to the discussion of authority in the novel. To start with the title
“Foe,” one can notice that the word “foe” is generally described in English language
dictionaries as the equivalent of “enemy.” In addition to this denotative significance, the label
“Foe” contains a symbolic function as it refers to the real name of Daniel Defoe before he
added the prefix (De) to his name in 1695 (Gallagher 171; Attridge 177). (De)Foe’s position
as author and holder of authority makes him a foe par excellence not only of Susan and
Friday, but of all liberal humanists, including Coetzee himself. The very idea behind reducing
the father of the English novel into a mere fictive character in a story highlights the
discrepancy between truth and representation; between what Coetzee calls “illusionism”
41
(realism) and “anti-illusionism” (Coetzee, Doubling 27). To put it differently, Coetzee’s
inscription of the famous author Daniel Defoe under his real name aims at dispossessing him
of the status of author, a symbol of authority, subjectivity and power.
Another instance which highlights this relationship between naming and authority, is
the name “Susan.” Most of Coetzee’s critics agree that Foe’s protagonist’s name echoes
“Susan,” the hidden name of Roxana, who is the heroine of another novel by Daniel Defoe
(Durrant 33-34; Attridge 188). Like Susan Barton, Roxana is a mother who denies
motherhood. She abandons her daughter and in a later stage she looks for her daughter to
recover her. When the found daughter tries to uncover Roxana’s reality as a prostitute,
Roxana gets rid of her. She is murdered by the maid, Amy, who appears in the third chapter of
Foe: “then Mrs Amy looked at her watch and exclaimed how late it was” (Coetzee, Foe 136).
The analogy between the characters of Susan and Roxana serves as a reaction against the
negative representation of Roxana in Defoe’s novel and through it the questioning of the
position of women and the power of discourse in the Western canon at large.
In Coetzee’s narrative, Mr. Foe wants Susan Barton’s story to be told from his own
point of view. In telling the story, he is tempted to provide events which never happened in
order to highlight the tale’s credibility for the sake of literary fascination and also to satisfy
his own desires. Moreover, the pen as a symbol of the phallus is used as a metaphor for
authorship. Susan manages to overcome her anxiety of authorship only when she uses Mr.
Foe’s pen: “your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine when I write
with it, as growing out of
my hand” (Coetzee, Foe 66-67). Her claim of possession of Mr. Foe’s pen as a phallus opens
for her the realm of literary power. Susan’s success as the authoress of her own story
challenges (De)Foe’s authority which has negatively affected women, by reducing them to
mere subjects to the various forms of male-oriented systems of manipulation. Susan’s success
42
becomes Roxana’s success and “Susan Barton’s story– the one she does not want told –”
Derek Attridge argues, “becomes Defoe’s Roxana” (177).
Susan interrogates not only (De)Foe’s authority, but also Cruso(e)’s. In both Coetzee’s
and Defoe’s accounts, the image we have of Cruso(e) is prototypical of a successful European
man who manages to establish an empire by building a colony on a deserted island in line
with modern European models and by using the colonial Other, Friday, as a labour force
which costs him nothing. Cruso(e)’s very act of appropriating the island’s space and the
enslavement of Friday makes him stand as a symbolic figure of colonial and imperial
processes which utilise their military, cultural and intellectual authority to dehumanise,
Europeanise and Christanise the natives and defamilarise and demolish their territories and
culture. In this context, authority becomes not only a property of authors’ subjectivity, but
also of a larger scale of imperialistic practices that characterises modern human history.
The negative impact of both authorial and imperial authority is harshly condemned in
Foe. In his interviews and writings, Coetzee constantly opposes the negative use of power,
and objects to being classed with authors such as Daniel Defoe. As a reaction against Tony
Morphet’s hints of associating him with the authoritative Foe, Coetzee claims that: “Foe in the
book, or Daniel Defoe in ‘real’ life, is the type of successful author. Am I being classed with
Foe, though my interest clearly lies with Foe’s foe, the unsuccessful author – worse authoress
– Susan Barton” (Coetzee quoted in Martuz 90). The very act of describing authorship in
parallel with colonialism and imperialism implies that subjective and textual as well as
institutional and operational authority which produces and naturalises the structures of power
is to be questioned and challenged. To elaborate on this idea in the novel, I will use Stephen
Slemon’s diagram representing the debate over the nature of colonialism (46):
43
Institutional Regulators (colonialist educational apparatuses)
Ө
Susan Barton
(De)Foe
Authorial &Imperial power
Cruso(e) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Friday
Robinson Crusoe
Foe
The semiotic field (‘textuality’)
In Stephen Slemon’s discussion of the problematic of post-colonialism, he mentions
that colonialism is a left-to-right process of domination. With the line Cruso(e), standing for
both Defoe’s and Coetzee’s Cruso(e), Slemon represents the coloniser who oppresses and
claims power over the colonised, the representative of which is Friday. The role (De)Foe, as
subjective authority, serves the function of manufacturing and representing the colonised
subject. The danger of this systematic strategy of producing theories which glorify the Self at
the expense of the Other is a double edged operation. The two arrows placed close to authorial
and imperial power indicate that the relation between institutional and intellectual authorities
(placed at the top of the diagram) and the whole field of representation (placed at the bottom
of the diagram) are intimately connected. In the novel, (De)Foe uses his literary and cultural
knowledge and skills (the top of the line) so as to produce textual representations – Robinson
Crusoe – of racial Others (bottom of the line) as aliens, inferiors and dependent on the
European Self.
As a parody of Defoe’s text, Foe, re-using the same semiotic field of Robinson
Crusoe, reverses the content of the original text, so what is “real” becomes “false” and vice
44
versa. To fulfil its function, Foe follows the same patterns as Robinson Crusoe, but this time
the whole is told from the perspective of a woman, a voice elided in the original. I referred in
the diagram to the absence of the female voice by the sign Ө. Central to the character of Susan
is not only the revelation of women’s oppression and the exclusion of the feminine from
Defoe’s account, but also the interrogation of power and the challenge of authority. Unlike
(De)Foe, Susan, as an author, uses her knowledge to tell the “true” story of the island and try
to make Friday tell his own by trying to be in contact with him through the use of different
forms of communication, such as music, words, pictures, but with no success. The inclusion
of Susan as a new character in Crusoe’s story affects Coetzee’s Cruso’s credibility, for he
becomes no longer “that confident island dweller we recall from Daniel Defoe’s earlier novel
on the same subject” (Nichols 95). Consequently, Foe addresses the question of who get(s)
left out, silenced and exploited for artistic, cultural and ideological sake.
Nonetheless, the claim that Foe is an ironic and exaggerating imitation and revision of
Daniel Defoe’s island story is not always applicable. That is to say that the story of Foe on
many occasions becomes puzzling by creating its own and dependent world, thereby resisting
the idea of being read only as an ironic exaggeration of the features of the original story. This
notion of puzzlement is manifested basically in ambiguity, which is not a characteristic of Foe
alone, but also of all of Coetzee’s writings. Coetzee in one of his conversations said: “Yes, I
am indeed cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers, nevertheless, what I am engaged
in doing is more important than maintaining contact” (Coetzee quoted in Easton 587). This
unfulfilled contact with Coetzee’s characters is what is striking in Foe. It might seem to the
reader that Coetzee enacts the meaning of his novel by asking: who is (s)he? To some extent,
Coetzee succeeds in Foe to give an answer to the question of who is “she,” Susan, but not of
who is “he,” Friday. I argue that the whole project of Foe is based on providing a voice and
powerful position to its protagonist to become the author of her own story so as to assert her
45
own freedom and identity. Yet, nothing is heard of Friday, for all we know about him is
presented through the gaze and the views of others. This makes him unable to present his
version of his own reality as well as that of the island.
The big and still open question of the story is whether Friday’s silence is a negative
element or a positive one. On the one hand, the very choice of presenting Friday as a mute
character makes him helpless against all attempts to claim authorising views of him and being
reshaped according to the desires of others. In this sense, he turns into a symbol of the Others,
[Those] other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and
retarded, the [Others] were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological
determinism and moral political admonishment. The [Other] was linked thus to
elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in
common an identity best described as lamentably alien. [Others] were rarely seen or
looked at: they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as
problems to be solved or confined, or ─ as the colonial powers openly coveted their
territory ─ taken over. (Said 207)
On the other hand, Friday’s lack of linguistic abilities can be read as a form of resistance
against all forms of assimilating him into Western norms. Differently put, the acquisition and
use of the language of the coloniser by the colonial subject makes the latter become part of the
imperialist system and its rules, as Michael Marais points out: “as soon as [the Other]
attempts to recapture selfhood by appropriating the language of the coloniser, [it] loses its
alterior status and reinscribes itself within imperialist discourse” (74). In this sense, Friday’s
mutilation becomes a positive and powerful silence, for his reality and identity remain his
own, outside the reach of any form of expression.
To sum up, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe succeeds in providing a radical revision of Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and revealing the complex discursive field surrounding Defoe’s
46
narrative. It has been argued that Coetzee in Foe was concerned with issues of dominance,
power and truth. The function of parody as a discursive strategy adopted in analysing this
work helps to interrogate one of the founding texts of the British canon through the vantage
point of a woman. Likewise, the investigation of the novel’s structure reveals the hidden
terrain of Defoe’s narrative, by exposing Robinson Crusoe’s underlying assumptions and
dismantling them. The representation of Friday as a powerless, mute and mysterious character
makes him an emblem of those who have been silenced by the power structures wherever and
whenever they existed. The discussion of authority in its different forms shows how
subjective as well as institutional authorities use their power so as to manipulate and
subordinate those who are described as Others, including women and colonial subjects. It has
been argued that Susan’s struggle to write her story and that of Roxana is a way to assert her
and women’s freedom as free beings and challenge this very notion of authority which is one
of the properties of male subjectivity. I have mentioned that the text of Foe becomes
sometimes perplexing as it resists being dealt with in relation to Defoe’s original texts. I have
expressed my inquiry about the representation of the silence of Friday which carries positive
and negative significance. This does not mean that the book has failed to choose a clear
position, but rather adds to its literary value, for it deliberately succeeds in raising gender and
racial issues as well as criticising the European colonial enterprise and its institutio
47
V. Disgrace and the Romantic Poets
In my discussions of In the Heart of the Country and Foe, I have argued that the strategy
of intertextuality serves specific purposes. In the case of In the Heart of the Country, for
instance, the relationship between Magda and her source texts lies in the situation of decay
and suffering that she shares with other fictional characters. It has also been noticed that
Magda seems to be unable to figure out what brings her together with the texts she cites.
Likewise, Susan Barton’s struggle to bring to light her own experience of the island story is
marked by an antagonistic struggle with those who possess power and authority, namely the
writer Foe and the island dweller Cruso. The relationship between Lurie and the Romantic
poets, however, is neither of ignorance nor of antagonism, but based on influence and
identification. Differently put, the impact of the Romantic poets on Lurie goes beyond the
literary and aesthetic function of art in general to the adoption of their ideas and views about
major life issues, such as women, desire and society.
J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel, Disgrace (1999), is the first which deals
with the post-Apartheid South Africa and the sensibilities and complexities of the Apartheid
era. The use of intertextuality helps to establish a link between the world of the novel and its
sources, so as to comment on this transitional phase of post-Apartheid South Africa. Central
to this debate is the association made between the protagonist, David Lurie, and the English
Romantic poets, especially Byron and Wordsworth. Being an expert in Romanticism, Lurie is
intending to write an opera about Byron in Italy, which celebrates the relationship between
Byron and one of his mistresses, namely the young Teresa Guiccioli. Lurie’s artistic project
also reflects on his identification with Byron, who was passionate and often surrounded by
women, for he was a good-looking fellow. What brings them together, is that they “act [not]
on principle but on impulse” (Coetzee, Disgrace 33). In this sense, Lurie, like Byron, comes
48
to see himself as a servant of desire; immensely superior in his passions and wholly
manipulated by his uncontrollable impulses.
At the core of Coetzee’s Disgrace is the impact of desire characterised in Lurie’s ideas
about love and sex. In the narrative, Lurie is seen as being wholly self-centred in his relations
with others, especially women. For him, women are passive creatures and objects of desire.
His feeling towards them is described as snake-like, impassionate, dry and cold: “In the field
of sex his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate. Were he to choose a
totem, it would be the snake. Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines,
rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at
its hottest” (Coetzee, Disgrace 2-3). Sex is seen not as an intimate act, but rather as a physical
need that must be obeyed and satisfied and a problem to be solved.
For one thing, Lurie’s relationship with the Moslem prostitute, Soraya, conveys this
idea of passivity. In the opening statements of the narrative, we are told that Lurie used to
visit Soraya every Thursday at two p.m. These customary visits, Lurie thinks, provide the best
solution to his “problem of sex” (Coetzee, Disgrace 1). In his sexual relation with Soraya, no
emotions are involved, for he “has never been passionate,” and she has been not emotionally
engaged with him either, but “quiet and docile” (Coetzee, Disgrace 1). Even worse, Lurie’s
sexual experience with Melanie, a student in his Byron class, is suggestive of rape. Like
Soraya, Melanie is quite passive in bed. Besides, she is too young, unwilling and
inexperienced. These elements make Lurie enjoy love with her very much because what he
looks for is to exercise his male power and domination: “Though she is passive throughout, he
finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion”
(Coetzee, Disgrace 19). Lurie’s self-satisfaction governs his relationship with women; what
he desires is neither passion nor reciprocity, but domination.
49
Lurie’s domineering personality causes him big troubles in his life. As the outcome of
his immoral relationship with Melanie, Lurie loses his reputation and his job at the university.
He moves to live with his daughter in her farm in Salem near the Cape. Again we find parallel
with Byron, who was forced to flee overseas on April 25, 1816. He was ostracised because of
his “incestuous relations with his half sister, Augusta Leigh” (Abrams, Norton 482). In his
refuge, Lurie does not only seek peace and quiet, but also tries to finish his opera on Byron.
Neither of these wishes is realised. Lurie and Lucy are attacked by three black men and the
opera shows no signs of progress. In fact, the project of “Byron in Italy is going nowhere.
There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the
empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage” (Coetzee,
Disgrace 214). Byron, especially in the first half of the novel, is seen as the role model for
Lurie, in his male egotism and disregard of all the rules. However, Lurie starts to think again
when he sees what the ultimate consequences of such behaviour are in his own daughter. The
latter was raped by three black men, who succeeded to get inside her house, by pretending
that they need to use her phone for an urgent call. As long as they got inside, the three young
men started beating Lurie and they locked him in the lavatory. After that they raped Lucy,
took few things from the house and left in Lurie’s car. This traumatic incident leads Lurie to
the conclusion that Byron and the other Romantic poets were not a good example because
they did not help him to get on in his life: “So much of the poets, so much for the dead
masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well” (Coetzee, Disgrace 179).
As post-Apartheid era , the Romantic period was also a turbulent and a transitional era.
Politically speaking, it is connected with the revolutionary and radical spirit of the French
Revolution: “Marked by the declaration of The Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille
to release imprisoned political offenders, [it] evoked enthusiastic support from English
liberals and radicals alike” (Abrams, Norton 1). Socially, it witnessed the change from an
50
agricultural society, where the power and wealth were in the hand of landowners, to an
industrial community, in which the working-class took the political, economic and social lead.
The association between the contemporary South Africa and the Romantic period is to be
traced in the novel, but in an implicit way. The message that the novel tries to transmit is that
in present South African society everything becomes possible and impossible at the same
time. That is to say, it is true that much has changed since the fall of the Apartheid system, yet
it seems difficult or impossible for whites and blacks to live together without being haunted
by the devastating memories of the past. In a broader sense, if the boundaries of everything
are changing, then, the whites are left with no other choice, but either to yield to the wind of
change, or give up everything and accept the new rules of the political game. At least,
Coetzee, like his protagonist, could not; therefore, he emigrated to Australia.
Another Romantic poet with whom the novel is involved in an intertextual connection
is Wordsworth. Among the books that Lurie has published during the course of his career is
one on Wordsworth, called Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past. Therefore, Lurie might
have taken the name of his daughter, Lucy, from one of the characters of Wordsworth. Lucy
shares with Wordsworth’s Lucy not only the name but also other affiliations, such as the
connection with nature and affinity with death. In 1799, during his stay in Germany,
Wordsworth wrote four poems that his critics gave the name of Lucy Poems: “Strange fits of
passion have I known;” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways;” “Three years she grew;” and
“A slumber did my spirit Seal.” In the same year, Wordsworth wrote a poem called “Lucy
Gray,” which commemorates the death of a young girl. This Lucy, however, is not necessarily
the same person as the one described in the Lucy Poems; all we have is speculations. The one
certainty is that Lucy is strongly associated with Nature. In the poems, Lucy dies at the age of
three as promised by Nature:
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
51
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own. (Abrams, Norton 154).
Like Wordsworth’s Lucy, Lucy in Disgrace is associated with nature, too. She is presented as
leading a simple life among the black locals at her farm.
The character of Lucy represents the new spirit and policies of a country in transition.
Being a woman, she becomes a victim of the male aggression, domination and supremacy
which marked South African history. Petrus, the black local, is a token of patriarchal culture
and a representative figure of those who possess power in post-Apartheid South Africa. The
suggestion is that he is behind the rape incident, so as to force Lucy to yield to his wishes and
to fulfil his material ambitions to add her farm to what he owns. She willingly accepts to
become one of his wives and properties:
Dear David, You have not been listening to me. I am not the person you know. I am a
dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life. All I know is that I
cannot go away […] Yes, the road I am following may be the wrong one. But if I leave
the farm now I will leave defeated, and will taste the defeat for the rest of my life.
(Coetzee, Disgrace 160).
The rape experience has broken Lucy’s life to such an extent that she comes to see herself as a
dead person. This affinity with death is a common point that Coetzee’s Lucy shares with that
of Wordsworth. Mike Marais points out that Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems signal the failure of
power of imagination and “its ability to grasp ‘the spiritual presences of absent things’ and to
‘arouse the sensual from their sleep/ Of Death’” (85). He mentions that what brings the two
figures together is the feeling of death in life or what he calls “the tension between presence
52
and absence” (85). In associating his Lucy with death — like Wordsworth’s Lucy — Coetzee
aims at commenting on the present-day South Africa and the difficulty of co-habitation
between Whites and Blacks without being ruined by the flaws of the past.
To conclude, Disgrace’s allusion to Romantic ideas and poets helps to define the
character of Lurie and to comment on the transitional phase of South African society. Lurie’s
views of women and desire are made compatible to that of Byron. Like Byron, Lurie does not
seek in women passion and mutuality, but to exercise his male power on them. For him, sex is
not a shared feeling and experience between a couple, but a problem that has to be solved.
These characteristics make him resemble Byron and also his heroes. It has been mentioned
that the events of the novel can be read symbolically. That is to say, as a reflection of
contemporary South Africa. Power systems in new South Africa are much the same as the old
ones, with a slight difference that the Blacks hold the power now. Racial struggle and the
ghost of the past will remain the country’s big foe that neither the Truth Commission, nor
democratic reformations can solve because disgrace and the flaws of the past reside deep in
the heart of the country.
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VI. Conclusion
Since the 1960s, intertextuality has increasingly influenced the field of literary
criticism. It has helped in dealing with literary texts in relation with other texts or groups of
other texts, by transforming and reworking some features of the original text(s) in order to
create special effects or serve certain aims. I have indicated how J. M. Coetzee in all his
novels engages in a relationship with other theoretical and literary works, by creating a strong
link between his texts and the ones he cites or alludes to; a link based, on the one hand, on a
dialogue and, on the other, on challenging and questioning the discursive field on which the
source texts operate.
In the section about In the Heart of the Country, I have discussed how the strategy of
intertextuality helps in accentuating the major themes of the novel. In this context, the
intertextual borrowings and allusions serve the function of engaging in a dialogue with
Magda’s narrative and different other texts, by uncovering their hidden ideologies and
discourses. I have also tried to illustrate that the gender of Magda forms an essential element
of her problem; being a female in a society based on the rule of patriarchy. Central to
Magda’s narrative is the interrogation of the patterns of domination that guarantee the
supremacy of male values and the subordination of the female. Magda’s very attempt to set
herself free from the chains of the law of the father and all its musts, restrictions and “Nos” is
meant to challenge the governing systems of power which regulate the relationship between
those who possess power and the rest.
Magda’s quixotic attempt to establish her own identity, independent from the rule of
the father, is doomed to failure. In the same way, her attempt to be in the position of power
after the dubious death of her father fails as well. Magda cannot manage to be anything else
but the product and other version of her father. When she takes over the farm after her father’s
alleged death, Magda becomes her father’s duplicate, for she treats the servants who are under
54
her rule in the same inappropriate way as her father. In addition to the questions of gender and
power, the issue of race is a dominant theme of the novel. The representation of the colonial
subjects is marked by an aggressive passivity. I have shown that the inferior position which
the racial others inhabit and their complete subjugation to and dependency on the powerful
Whites supports Hegel’s and others theories’ of master/slave relationships. The relationship
between the self and its other, or what Hegel calls lord and bondsman, is based on
dependency and inequality.
The novel, however, fails to do justice to the racial others, for they are not given much
— rather no — space to express themselves or to tell about what happens around them. Our
knowledge about them is wholly dependent on what the imagination of Magda allows.
Everything is presented through Magda’s perspective and gaze. This does not mean that the
novel shows no interest in racial otherness nor does it accentuate the long humanist tradition
of silencing those labelled as inferior and Other. It rather makes it clear that it is difficult, and
even inappropriate to speak on behalf of others. Part of the novel’s success is its choice to
bring into debate Western literary texts as well as theoretical ones, so as to put into scrutiny
their hidden discursive strategies, namely patriarchy and its rules and colonialism and its
mechanisms.
As for Foe, I have argued that Coetzee’s radical departure from and reworking of
Daniel Defoe’s famous novel Robinson Crusoe aims at interrogating the whole discursive
field in which such a text functions. It has also been mentioned that Coetzee’s main aim
behind the narrative of Foe is to question power and its systems of domination. Parody in
Foe, as a discursive strategy, helps in uncovering the text’s many embedded assumptions and
ideologies through the use of the female perspective. I have also tried to illustrate how
women, like any marginalised group, are affected and manipulated by the dominant
patriarchal culture. Like Magda, Susan Barton tries her best to make her version of the Island
55
story be heard without being dependent on the writer Foe. By doing this, she challenges male
authority and literary domination. Susan succeeds at the end not only in writing her own
experience, but also in freeing herself, particularly, from the chains of Foe’s dominance and,
broadly, from the power systems which have silenced women throughout history.
I have also argued that the issue of race is as important as that of gender. The
representation of Friday in Foe does not differ that much from that of the servants in In the
Heart of the Country or the rest of Coetzee’s novels. Being a racial Other, Friday represents
the oppressed and silenced group, for he is and remains the big absence of the novel.
Differently put, Friday’s missing tongue, story and history demonstrate how aggressive, brutal
and barbarian the systems of power can be. It is this devastating nature of power that Coetzee
sets himself against. Power, for Coetzee, remains power that has to be constantly criticised
and challenged. To apply this formula to the South African context, or any other one, one can
safely say that the struggle between Whites and Blacks is a vicious contest, for it is a struggle
to claim power. To claim power means the decline of an old power and the emergence of a
new one which in its turn will cultivate its own oppressive systems and rules; an idea which
forms the central theme of Coetzee’s post-Apartheid novel Disgrace.
Coetzee’s Disgrace is his first novel which deals with post-Apartheid South Africa
and the transition of power to the Black majority. I have mentioned that the relationship
drawn between the novel and Romanticism serves the function of spotlighting the character of
Lurie and his views about sentimental issues as well as reflecting on present-day South
Africa. I have said that Lurie is a sort of Byronic figure because he is emotionally disturbed.
His treatment of women fits within the traditional patriarchal frame in which women are
considered as inferior creatures and objects of desire. Part of Lurie’s problem is this feeling of
male superiority. What is important for him is not passion, but to satisfy his sexual desire,
which he considers as a “problem.” I have mentioned that women in the novel are associated
56
with the new spirit of post-Apartheid. The message that the novel tries to transmit is that in
present South African society everything is possible and impossible at the same time. That is
to say, it is true that much has changed since the fall of the Apartheid system, yet it seems
difficult or impossible for Whites and Blacks to live together without being haunted by the
devastating memories of the past.
To conclude, Coetzee’s engagement in intertextual dialogue with the European canon
shows that the relevance of the whole tradition is limited to the South African situation. For
Coetzee, Western civilisation is not that super human heritage that by necessity should be set
as a model and standard for the rest of the world. For Coetzee, the use of the European
heritage serves as a way to justify Whites exploitation of the land and the people. This does
not mean that European civilisation is a corrupt or evil one, but rather our dealing with it is so.
Often we take the European models and try to apply them to alien contexts and situations,
without taking into account historical, cultural, social, political differences and specificities.
This is mainly what Coetzee tries to say in these three books and in the rest of his novels. That
his views remain limited in time, space, gender and race.
57
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