Writing as Penance: National Guilt and J. M. Coetzee

In company with samuel clemens and gunter Grass—writers I have discussed comparatively in an earlier essay (Robinson)—South African novelist and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has wrestled in his writing with a sense of anguished moral entanglement in his country's crimes against humanity. In their very different ways, all three writers answer potently competing impulses to confess and to conceal their accusing self-knowledge. Clemens is the least conscious in his literary negotiations with conscience. Repressed memories of slavery surface unsummoned in his writing, where they give rise to bad faith evasions or baffled retreats into silence. Grass, by contrast, has been shrewdly knowing in his fictional dissections of national guilt in post-Holocaust Germany, but failed until very recently to disclose the damaging truth of his own involvement in the moral debacle. In a very real sense, I believe, we owe the gift of his insights into national guilt to his own half-century of public denial. Coetzee's writing is similarly torn on the topic of apartheid, but in ways so various and seemingly contradictory as to suggest a desire on his part to invite and at the same time to frustrate critical scrutiny. Over the course of a long career, his attention has been less focused on the actual horrors of modern South African history than on the moral challenges faced by white people entangled in them. The need to intimate the worst of himself in several of his novels may appear to be a kind of grudging penance for feelings of moral complicity endured—and resented—as the unjust accidents of historical circumstance. As Sam Durrant has argued in a rather different critical framework, Coetzee's "novels seem to replay the agony of his implication in apartheid" even as they "are modes of protesting this affiliation" (19).

Yet Coetzee's attention to historical guilt is seldom direct. Rather, the topic is most often broached obliquely, as a consideration submerged in or apparently secondary to a diverse array of more open agendas—literary theory, autobiography, the problem of confession, and anti-Americanism prominent among them. Indeed, it is testimony to the simultaneous urgency and moral delicacy of the issue of historical guilt that it is so widely and yet so guardedly at large in Coetzee's work. His approach to the subject is characteristically ambiguous, at once a revelation and a concealment, an elusive crossing of signals that seems to express both his compulsion to show himself and an answering resistance to compromising disclosure. In a double movement clearly akin to the dynamics of bad faith, his work may be said to resist its own drive toward confession.

Viewed in this way, Coetzee's novels may appear to be the work of a "colonizer who refuses" to endorse or support colonialism, but who is nonetheless, in Albert Memmi's characterization, deprived of moral tranquility because he "suspects, even if he is in no way guilty as an individual, that he shares a collective responsibility by the fact of membership in a national oppressor group." A white South African of Afrikaner descent, educated among Afrikaners and fluent in Afrikaans, but opposed as an adult to the inhuman apartheid regime created and enforced by his kin, Coetzee may appear to be a "benevolent colonizer" who, by Memmi's reckoning, "can never attain the good, for his choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness" (39, 43). The novelist's predicament, as Stephen Watson has persuasively argued, registers clearly in the "dominant moral impulse at work" in his early fiction: the "insatiable hunger of all his protagonists" to escape the "shackles of their historical position" as colonizers (23). "I never wished to be drawn into this," complains the magistrate, a horrified witness to state torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). But he is also an agent of the state, and therefore complicit in its crimes. Little wonder that he wants "to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects," and wonders how such a wish can be a "cause for shame" (8, 154). In...