Speaking of Human Rights: Narrative Voice and the Paradox of the Unspeakable in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Disgrace

Human Rights discourse recognizes storytelling as a technology of both empowerment and subordination. It situates literature as an important site from which to assert one’s rights and plots individuals within a narrative of universal humanism. In order to lay claim to human rights, individuals must write themselves into the humanist narrative by successfully articulating themselves as fully developed human persons. In this article I analyze narrative voice in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Disgrace. Both novels acknowledge the implications of speaking and being spoken in a story: Foe conceptually and historically in relation to structures of imperialism and patriarchy and Disgrace in the contemporary, ethically and politically complicated context of post-apartheid South Africa. I frame my reading of these texts through the problematics of testimony and discuss how this discursive apparatus for achieving the “right to have rights” structures the way stories addressing political violence and inequality may and may not be told.¹ I elaborate on the way each of these novels rejects a testimonial function for literature by declining to make silenced voices speak and by forcing the reader to dwell within the unsettling paradox of the unspeakable. Both novels depict fragments and offer glimpses of voices that cannot be fully articulated within current discursive structures. Rather than forcing the encapsulation of a voice that is made to speak according to a fixed rights framework, Foe and Disgrace call attention to the inadequacy of the testimonial narrative voice to transform the conditions about which it speaks.

Coetzee’s writing in these two novels aims not to develop and introduce subaltern voices so as to supplement or broaden a narrow humanist universal, but instead to interrogate this universal and appeal for a posthumanist articulation of political violence. Foe reveals the ultimate futility of attempting to insert new narrators within the framework of human rights to expand the notion of the universal human. The novel suggests it is necessary instead to question the way narrative functions within this framework. As it encounters the limitations of the postcolonial project of writing back to master narratives, Foe casts doubt on the cathartic and political potential of articulating one’s experiences of oppression and trauma. In refusing to conform to the universal humanist framework that Foe challenges, Disgrace demonstrates the need for a posthumanist implementation of justice. Rather than concentrating on developing and integrating hitherto silenced narrative voices to inflate the humanist universal, the posthumanist approach toward which Disgrace gestures problematizes the application of narrative voice as a determinant of one’s right to have rights. It thereby rejects the humanist ideal of personality development as a way to define proper subject formation.²

Written in late-apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, respectively, Foe (1986) and Disgrace (1999) not only comment on the power dynamics of storytelling but are also caught up in arguments over the political responsibilities that literature should fulfill. In fact, the most prominent debate that structures analyses of Coetzee’s fiction is whether or not it appropriately addresses apartheid. As Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran explain, “The charge most commonly leveled against Coetzee by South African critics is that of political quiescence, of producing novels that neither sufficiently address nor affirm the contiguities between the literary domain and historical-economic political realities” (432). Michael Marais seconds this evaluation, specifying, “During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee’s fiction was that it did not engage with the depredations of apartheid” (“From the Standpoint” 229).³ A considerable amount of scholarship is also devoted to responding to this contention.⁴ Samuel Durrant insists the fiction Coetzee writes is in conversation with the political reality of apartheid. He suggests, “Coetzee’s novels testify to the suffering engendered by apartheid precisely by refusing to translate that suffering into narrative” (430–1). As a white South African of a relatively privileged class, Coetzee perhaps self-consciously does not attempt to narrate the perspectives of black or coloured South Africans. Instead, he presents metanarratives that comment on the complications of trying...