Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and Andre Brink, and: A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa (review)

Sue Kossew’s book on J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, quietly published in an imprint slowly gaining recognition, is one of the more significant books yet to appear in the burgeoning field devoted to South African literature. The particular kind of complicity treated in the works of Coetzee and Brink contributes much to our understanding of the culture of the new South Africa, and also necessitates a re-evaluation of the postcolonial. These are important matters, and it is to be hoped that this Rodopi paperback reaches the wide audience it deserves.

The decision to structure the book as a series of comparisons between Brink and Coetzee is productive. In the monographs only Rosemary Jolly—in Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing—has considered these authors together. (Jolly’s book, as Kossew points out, appeared after Pen and Power had been completed, 3). The success of Kossew’s organization, her systematic process of comparison, is to bring into sharp relief the sensitivity of her readings. Without losing sight of the essential differences between postmodernist Coetzee and the social-realist Brink, Kossew subjects these simple categorizations to extended scrutiny, demonstrating that Coetzee is more politically engaged, and Brink more alert to the implications of language and textuality, than is sometimes assumed.

The broader significance of Kossew’s study is indicated by her understanding of how Brink “writ[es] back to Afrikanerdom” (6): his decision to switch from writing in Afrikaans to English (in order to evade censorship) means he straddles two traditions, raising complex questions about white identity and affiliation. Michael Chapman has wondered whether Brink, in translating (or, rather, “re-writing”) his books into English, and reducing their emotional impact, “risks losing the temper of cultural anxiety that characterises the Afrikaner rebel seeking solidarity with the Africa that his volk has abused” (Southern African Literature 404). However, if, through this language crisis, Brink’s rebelliousness is diluted, his importance in the definition of postcoloniality (where language inscribes power) is thereby underscored.

As there is no book-length survey of Brink extant, the solidity of Kossew’s readings may be seen to set a standard. Yet she fares equally well in the field of Coetzee studies, where there are several books to set against her achievements. Pen and Power, in fact, offers an informed understanding of Coetzee’s contribution to postcolonial writing, something that has not always been sufficiently acknowledged, but which is becoming clearer (as Kossew suggests) in the post-apartheid era. There is much to be applauded in the successive analyses. Kossew has properly understood, for example, the unity of Dusklands and its revisionism; the de-poeticizing impetus of In the Heart of the Country; the authenticity of Michael K’s “voice”; and the dubious authority of Susan Barton in Foe. I am wholly in agreement with these readings, for which there is certainly no critical consensus, but which are entirely faithful to the responsibility of Coetzee’s vision, and the pointedness of his “ambivalence.” Even so, there are odd moments where Kossew fails fully to excavate the positive in Coetzee. Her reading of the dream motif in Waiting for the Barbarian is a case in point: she sees the dream as simply one of many wrong turnings for the magistrate (his view), whereas it is possible to read the dream sequence as an alternative history, an accreted narrative of sublimation and advancement that belies the apparent negativity of the novel’s end. Coetzee is constantly in pursuit of such alternative narratives that might circumvent the situation of impasse faced by the post-colonizer.

Another minor quibble: that term, “post-colonizer,” is, perhaps, one...