Hero and Bad Motherland: J. M. Coetzee's Computational Critique

In March 1978, along with Miriam Tlali's "Soweto Speaking" column and an article by Studs Terkel, the inaugural issue of the South African literary journal Staffrider included the contribution "Hero and Bad Mother in Epic, a Poem" by J. M. Coetzee. An exercise in computer-generated literature, the poem—one of only two Coetzee would publish¹—might seem a misstep in the career of an author known at that time for his fictions Dusklands (1974) and In the Heart of the Country (1976/77) and who would, two years later, win international recognition for the novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). However appearances can be deceiving. The poem has its origins in the line-generation programs that Coetzee composed during his time working for the computer firms International Business Machines (IBM) and International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in Britain in the mid 1960s, experiences recounted in Coetzee's fictional autobiography Youth (2002). Leaving Britain to pursue a PhD in Austin, Texas, later moving to Buffalo, New York, for his first academic position, and then back to South Africa in 1971 after his U.S. visa application was rejected, Coetzee carried the program outputs with him. He would then spend half a decade selecting and editing the output into its published format while an early career academic at the University of Cape Town (UCT), in between writing criticism and his longer works of fiction. Twenty years later Coetzee would confess to it being "a piece I'm quite fond of" (Doubling 22).

Far from a misstep, Coetzee's own fondness for "Hero and Bad Mother" indicates the importance of this poem and computing in general for the author across his career. In what follows, I demonstrate that Coetzee used computing and the cultural myths that have propagated around the "universal machine" as a means to articulate his own fraught commitment to modernist aesthetic autonomy (Turing 441). Attending to his engagement with computing (both his use and representations of computers and their associated processes) from the 1960s onwards reminds us that the Digital Humanities is neither a new phenomenon, nor always situated within a history of neoliberal politics. Moreover, I contend that in Coetzee's creative and critical writings we can trace the development of a platform of "aesthetic automatism." My phrase plays on the Russian formalists' concept of "automatization," or the process by which, through repeated use, language and form become familiar, while describing a perceived demand for aesthetic autonomy in a postwar age of automation. Coetzee's "aesthetic automatism" as I conceive it, was envisaged as autonomy from the dominance of "binary" or "computational thinking."² As he would explain in 2016, "it is up to the poets" to keep us from "binary thinking, and the corresponding spread of a form of mental constraint that conceives of itself quite innocently as freedom" ("On Literary Thinking" 1152).

Distinct from the machines that Coetzee programmed, computational thinking is "the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes" (Golumbia 8). Conceived as universal machines, computers would become, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has noted, "metaphors for metaphor itself: they embody a logic of substitution" under which important cultural distinctions could be dissolved (56). In the postwar era, rapid advances in computing technologies were accompanied by similar advances in the application of computational thinking across the cultural and social domain: whether Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar in linguistics or Hilary Putnam's classical computational theory of mind in philosophy. Often stripping away its own metaphorical origins, what N. Katherine Hayles has called the "regime of computation" (17) and David Golumbia terms "the cultural logic of computation," computational thinking offered a technological update to a longer tradition of the rationalist theory of mind. In so doing, computational thinking has helped to promote a set of beliefs that, as Golumbia makes clear, benefits existing structures of institutional power: "computationalism meshes all too easily with … instrumental reason" (5).

This set of beliefs, rather than computers themselves, would be the target of Coetzee's literary...