The Agony and the Allegory: The Concept of the Foreign, the Language of Apartheid, and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
- The Agony and the Allegory:The Concept of the Foreign, the Language of Apartheid, and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Rebecca Saunders is assistant professor in the department of English at Illinois State University. She has published articles on Mallarmé, Faulkner, Hatzis, and Woolf, and is the editor of the forthcoming book The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Saunders is currently completing a book manuscript entitled At God's Funeral: Lamentation and the Culture of Modernity.
Notes
1. Endorsements of this distinction can, for example, be found in the work of Abdul JanMohamed, Benita Parry and Helen Tiffin. While JanMohamed acknowledges that "we can observe a profound symbiotic relationship between the discursive and the material practices of imperialism," he nonetheless treats [End Page 248] them as theoretically and phenomenally distinguishable categories: "the discursive practices do to the symbolic, linguistic presence of the native what the material practices do to his physical presence" (83). I wish to revise this position to insist that discursive practices also act on physical presence. Gayatari Spivak and Homi Bhabha top the list of those whose work is charged with, in Parry's words, an "exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socioeconomic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis" (43).
2. This idea has been hotly contested, primarily in the form of debates over figural language. I wish neither to maintain the "literary" as a value-laden term nor to make "everyday" and "literary" into essentialized categories that function as a mechanism of exclusion. I would rather describe literary and everyday language as differing in degree rather than in kind and read the figurality often associated with "literariness" as an intensified version of the foreignness in all language that tends to be sublimated in ordinary speech. On the argument for the distinctive nature of "literariness," see Shklovsky; Erlich; and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. For arguments that the everyday is (or can be read as the) literary, see Lakoff and Johnson; and Fish. On the literariness of philosophical language, see Derrida, "White Mythology."
3. On Russian formalism, see Shklovsky; Erlich; and Jameson.
4. The product of contact with foreigners—of a German viewing Chinese theater in Russia—Verfremdungseffekt first appears in Brecht's writings after his attendance at a 1935 performance by Mei Lan-fang's company in Moscow and is, ironically, deployed in the service of precisely the political theory (Marxism) that the formalists wished to oppose through ostranenie.
5. This project, I should perhaps emphasize, differs from that of theorists such as Homi Bhabha who investigate the discursive practices of colonialism but implicitly rely on a transparent model of language, employ linguistics metaphorically (see, for example, Bhabha's discussion of "the language metaphor" [176 ff.]), and concentrate on the play of the signified. While I have no argument with these projects, they do, I believe, leave open the crucial question of (what I am calling) the "foreignness" in language. That is, even those postcolonial studies that deploy deconstructive practices theoretically tend to sidestep the foreignness that deconstructive practices let loose linguistically.
6. Etranger and extranjero both derive from a Latin root (extraneus) that simultaneously signifies externality, impropriety, and irrelevance.
7. This prohibition may take the form of law, economic exclusion, or milder forms of social disapprobation: disparagement for taking away what "rightly belongs" to natives or citizens, or for using property improperly (e.g., furnishing the home, business, or body in "poor taste"). This figure of the improper, it should be noted, corresponds to, and is a specific version of, the Manichaean allegory identified by Frantz Fanon and elaborated by JanMohamed as "a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object" (82). [End Page 249]
8. Significantly, Aristotle's terms for what we call the literal and the figural are, respectively, the (kurios: authoritative [or, substantively, an owner, possessor]) and the (xenos: foreign). See Rhetoric, book 2. Moreover, if metaphor is, as Du Marsais would have it, a concept "in a borrowed dwelling" (quoted in Derrida...
