Abstract
Anat Pick
Counter Historicity in J. M. Coetzee and William Golding
J. M. Coetzee's fiction has been at the centre of debates in South Africa and beyond concerning authorial responsibility,and the mode of writing which this responsibility calls for during politically savage times. The debate distinguished between the so-called “realistic” or historical novel (supported by Nadine Gordimer), and the so-called allegorical mode of Coetzee's fiction. It reached its peak with the publication of Disgrace , an ostensibly and yet unsatisfactorily historical novel on post-Apartheid South Africa.
This paper examines Coetzee's representation of animals, in Disgrace , The Lives of Animals , and Waiting for the Barbarians , as a disruption of history. I argue that Coetzee's fiction stages our encounter with animal alterity as a motioning away from the exclusively humanist narrative of history and towards a non- or post-humanist ethics. Using Derrida's notion of history as the autobiography of man, developed in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” I show how Coetzee's insertion of animal presence into South African “autobiography” allows literature to question the humanist bias of history. “As for history, historicity, even historicality,” writes Derrida,
those motifs belong precisely […] to this auto-definition, this auto-apprehension, this auto-situation of man or of the human Dasein with respect to what is living and with respect to animal life; they belong to this auto-biography of man that I wish to call into question today. ( Critical Inquiry 393)
Because the dogs in Disgrace cannot be assimilated into the narrative of South African history, critics tend to regard their presence in the book as merely allegorical. This runs counter to Elizabeth Costello's insistence in The Lives of Animals on the non-allegorical presence of animals in literature.
Coetzee's rejection of the historical mode can be read as a response to history's own exclusion of non-humans from its contemplation of the world. A similar rejection of (humanist) history in favour of a (non-humanist) ethics is at the centre of an earlier “postcolonial” text, William Golding's 1955 The Inheritors , which fictionally recounts the “genocide” of prehistoric Neanderthals by modern man. The Inheritors in its entirety is posited against H. G. Wells' humanist teleology of the “ascent of man” which serves as the novel's epigraph. Both Coetzee and Golding, then, fictionalise rather than historicize, and in so doing break away from the (auto-biographical and auto-erotic) constraints of a strictly humanoid “reality.”