Abstract
Laura Pechey
Reading the schepselboek : J. M. Coetzee and the Bible
No pen or literature, no mute book speaks of good morals and sins, the creature book alone eternally teaches us. Vondel
The publication in 1999 of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals has seen critical attention turning to Coetzee's figuring of the relationship between man and animal. The critical focus has been predominantly ethical and philosophical. Coetzee's interest in the animal can, however, open up other areas for our investigation: his conceptions of creaturality and Creation, and analysis of those instances of his direct textual borrowing from the Bible. In reading Coetzee, we are asked to see creatures, that is, humans and other animals, as referring always to one another: ‘each creature is key to all other creatures' ( Elizabeth Costello ). Coetzee asks us to open and read the schepselboek (“creature book”) . ‘Creature' contains, as Coetzee is crucially aware, the seeds of both exclusion and inclusion. While in its widest sense, we are all created beings, ‘creature' lends itself to dangerous delimitation. In his 1991 afterword to Daphne Rooke's Mittee, Coetzee tells his readers, those not acquainted with Afrikaans, that when the Afrikaans word ‘skepsel' is spoken to Mittee, a coloured girl, ‘more of a racist jab is intended than may be apparent'. The Dutch word schepsel (‘creature,' ‘created being,' ‘God's creature') came to be most often defined in South African usage in a telling collocation: ‘creature, native'. Non-whites were physically excluded from the South African citizenry into ‘tribal homelands' or ‘bantustans' and linguistically banished from humanity into creaturehood. Apartheid theology relegated unity to invisibility: in this ‘invisible unity', all are unified in Christ and equal in the eyes of God. The ‘visible church,' meanwhile, must herald ‘pluriformity' or, in laymen's terms, segregation and inequality.
Michael K lives a ‘bare life' (Agamben), the life of a skepsel. The white medical orderly at the ‘rehabilitation camp' tells K ‘you are not important' but urges him, by way of consolation, to ‘Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.' The ‘gopsel of the sparrow' appears in the Gospels of Luke (12:6-7) and Matthew (10: 29-31), and in two of Coetzee's novels, The Life and Times of Michael K and Dusklands. The sparrow's marginality, its cheapness and its creatureliness, define the only space offered to K and the Griquas of Dusklands, to, that is, the non-white. Such “creatures” are included only to be excluded: we are all God's creatures but it seems some are more creaturely than others.
Versions of the scriptural observation—‘It is not good for man to be alone' (Genesis 2:18)—enter the musings of Magda. This same phrase figures repeatedly in Desmond Tutu's Christianized version of ubuntu encapsulated in the Nguni saying—‘a person is a person through other persons'. Substitute ‘person' for creature and we come tantalizingly close to Elizabeth Costello's view of creatures as keys to one another. In this paper, I shall argue that the use of scripture is one of the many ways in which Coetzee critiques the hypocrisy of a supposedly Christian apartheid state and the damage it wrought on words and their meanings. I will track the racialisation of the skepsel and its return, by way of Coetzee and others, to its non-racial meanings, and the return to an exegetics that considers us as all ‘sparrows of equal weight' ( Master of Petersburg ).