White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa by J. M. Coetzee (review)

Book Reviews85 Euripides' inverted versions of these in the Phoenissae and the Bacchae. This epilogue brightly illuminates the differing visions of Sophoclean and Euripidean drama, and offers further support for the image of Euripides as doubter and ironist. Bushnell's book is a useful addition to the list of works applying current linguistic and literary theories to the classics. Its greater value, however, lies in its demonstration of the importance of prophetic incident in the dynamics of Greek tragedy and its elucidation ofthe changing forms of "sign" and "voice" from Homer to Euripides. NANCY W. NOLTE University of Colorado J. M. COETZEE. White Writing: On the Culture ofLetters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 193 p. J. M. Coetzee looks back as far as the writings of European travelers ofthe late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to seek the foundations and attitudes that influenced the consciousnesses of the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury white South African writers. He claims to have two concerns: one with the influence ofcertain European ideas that shaped attitudes about South Africa—the idea of Man, of cultural progress, of "natural" racial divisions, and ofpeople in harmony with their landscape; the other with the South African landscape and landed property itself. These concerns attempt to unite thematically what often seem rather disparate essays, many of which have been published previously in some form or other. Coetzee begins by considering the major European idea ofthe garden myth, or the new Eden, so popular with travelers in the New World. He notes that this myth failed to take hold in South Africa, and blames this failure on the fact that Africa was regarded as the old world, rather than the new, which wrought, in Conradian fashion, a degeneration from man to brute. Travelers' disgust with the Hottentots' habits, particularly their seeming idleness, confirmed the idea of degeneration. While the "new Eden" myth failed, what did take hold among South Africa's early white writers was the Western genre of pastoral writing, though it took a conservative and nostalgic form. South African writers ofthe early twentieth century hearkened back to a rural patriarchal social order found on early Afrikaner farms. Afrikaans novelists adapted the Blut-und-Boden romantic earth mysticism of Germany to create the South African farm novel, while English novelist Pauline Smith drew on the great country house of the Tbry tradition to endorse the same rural patriarchal order in her works. Coetzee's extensive discussion of Afrikaans farm novelist CM. van den Heever, whose use ofthe pastoral promotes Afrikaner ideology, will be of sociological interest. The essay demonstrates that the Afrikaners viewed themselves as a nation 86Rocky Mountain Review whose rule as family farm owners and patriarchs was God-given. Coetzee points out that the notion of ennobling labor so significant to the pastoral genre, and the notion of degenerative idleness perceived in Hottentot and black lifestyles, became obsessive issues in white writing. He traces the seeds of this preoccupation to the European post-Reformation attitudes that idleness is sinful, and to the Enlightenment views that idleness betrays one's humanity. These culture-bound attitudes led to a denunciation of the native Hottentots, who refused to be drawn into the colonial economy as laborers, because colonists could not conceive of "idleness" as a sign of fulfilled desire. Linked to the issues of idleness and labor is man's relationship to the land. No longer of Europe yet burdened with its notions, and not yet African, the colonial writers struggled to express the experience of their new land. They sought a voice to make Africa speak authentically through their art as the English landscape spoke through Wordsworth's. Besides the adopted pastoral genre which seeks to humanize the land through hand and plough, Coetzee identifies a portrayal of the landscape as "alien, impenetrable, a land of rock and sun" (7). We see this portrayal in English writer Olive Schreiner's bitterly antipastoral novel, Story of an African Farm, and in the English poets of landscape who listen for an African voice but hear only silence. Coetzee traces the poets' struggle out of silence, as well as their efforts to break free of the inappropriate picturesque language...