J.M. Coetzee (review)

J. M. Coetzee, by Dominic Head. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. xvi + 192 pp. ISBN 0-521-48232-1 cloth.

Dominic Head's new book on J. M. Coetzee is compact, useful, and in many ways original. Like all the previous full-length studies of Coetzee's work, this text presents readings of the novels in a chronological sequence, with a chapter devoted to each novel: a format determined, in this case, by the aims of the Cambridge series, which requires an overview of each author's entire oeuvre. However, Head's work (while occasionally dry to read) is more than a critical exercise or primer. While his focus is largely on Coetzee's novels (up to and including The Master of Petersburg), Head sets the fiction in dialogue with Coetzee's critical essays--both those collected in Doubling the Point and the more recent ones gathered together in Giving Offense. The connections he makes are frequently inventive (as, for instance, when he uses Coetzee's essay on Breyten Breytenbach to illuminate the treatment of confession and dialogue in The Master of Petersburg).

J. M. Coetzee is elegantly framed with discussions of Coetzee's meditations on the work of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. These discussions, in which the key concerns of the study are articulated, have to do with Coetzee's relation to history and to realism. Head's inquiry resonates with a passage in Doubling the Point where Coetzee addresses the relationship between self-reflexive postmodern writing and history in a highly idiosyncratic way. The position of the postmodern writer, Coetzee argues, is full of a sort of humdrum pathos: a pathos like that of "children shut in the playroom, the room of textual play, looking out wistfully through the bars at the enticing world of the grownups, one that we have been instructed to think of as the mere phantasmal world of realism but that we stubbornly can't help thinking of as the real" (63). Head's take on Coetzee is sensitive to the dual impulses captured in this curious statement with its nostalgia for the world of older writers, its questioning of ideas of freedom and play, and its sense of the fascinating seriousness of "the real." Several of Coetzee's critics have minimized this duality. He has often been presented as a metafictionist, breaking decisively with South Africa's realist tradition, eschewing political engagements, and offering fictional allegories of certain critical positions. Head, while recognizing these aspects of Coetzee's work, also emphasizes the novelist's contrary, but equally persistent fascination with the referential and substantial. His readings situate Coetzee's work in a space between metafictional self-consciousness and realist illusion, between allegory and materiality, between metaphor and metonymy. The novelist's ongoing project--a gestural and utopian one--is seen as one of reconstructing the bridge between world and text, of imagining a "reconstituted realism," in which a writer may (among other things) speak about, while not speaking for, the Other.

This view of Coetzee is exemplified in several chapters, perhaps most cogently in the chapter on Life and Times of Michael K. This novel is seen as presenting "a deconstruction of its own evocation of deconstruction," by playing off its obvious Derridean textual thematics against a Heideggerian thematics of being: of substance, the earth, and the body. It is in this emphasis on being, Head argues, that the novel's political dimension is most clearly visible: apartheid's cruel geopolitical project was, after all, most effectively challenged by the unavoidable presence of a black majority on the land. Through nuanced, dialogic readings of the novels, this new study allows us to conceptualize their formal and political contribtions afresh. J. M. Coetzee will be valuable reading for scholars and students alike.

Rita Barnar

Rita Barnard is Associate Professor of English and Acting Chair of Comaprative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

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