Abstract
Jarad Zimbler
Reading Coetzee in Context: Separating Literature from History
In his widely quoted address ‘The Novel Today', J. M. Coetzee insists vehemently on the distinction between literary and historical discourses. This distinction notably re-appears in Elizabeth Costello , but it is a discernible feature of all of Coetzee's fictional works, and sets a challenge for critical studies of Coetzee, since it rejects any simple relation of text to context, any too-easy reduction of the literary work to historical document. Yet, in view of the enormous shadow that apartheid casts over all of South African life, coming to terms with socio-political factors seems essential to any study of South African literature. I propose to begin my paper by exploring some of the contextual analyses that have been carried out on Coetzee's works and which continue to influence contemporary perspectives on Coetzee and other South African writers.
I intend to focus in particular on Susan VanZanten Gallagher's A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context and ‘The Backward Glance: History and the Novel in Post-Apartheid South Africa'. I will begin by examining the extent to which Gallagher ignores Coetzee's assertion that literary discourse and historical discourse are two different kinds of textual production, neither of which has a privileged position from which to describe reality. I believe that, in reducing Coetzee's fictions to historical testimonies recording the depravations and degradations of apartheid, Gallagher fails to account for the highly significant formal aspects of Coetzee's works. Having sketched some of the shortcomings of Gallagher's analyses, I hope to demonstrate the manner in which Pierre Bourdieu's theories of artistic production may answer Coetzee's challenge. Bourdieu's ‘field of cultural production', which is relatively autonomous but which is nonetheless impacted upon by the fields of social relations and power, seems to offer the conceptual foundation necessary for a methodology which is able to avoid collapsing the category of the literary into that of the historical.
In the final section of my paper, I hope to suggest further ways in which the framework offered by Bourdieu may benefit studies of South African literature. For example, in insisting upon the ‘relational' analysis of a given field, Bourdieu encourages a re-orientation of Coetzee which positions his works within a specifically South African cultural context. Such a re-positioning allows for a reading of Coetzee's works in relation to other South African writers, including, in particular, the many black South African writers not normally associated with Coetzee. In order to demonstrate the importance of thinking about such a relationship, I intend to draw on a forthcoming publication, in which I suggest the importance of Foe 's South African publishing context to an understanding of the novel. I hope, finally, to show how Coetzee's distinction between literary and historical discourses, which lies at the heart of this paper, may itself be located in a South African cultural milieu, one attempt among many to claim legitimacy for a particular idea of literature.