Abstract
Pieter Vermeulen
Wordsworth's Disgrace: J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of a South African Prose in the Afterlife of The Prelude .
J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) can be read as the story of William Wordsworth's disgraced afterlife in South Africa in the person of his “disciple” David Lurie, the book's protagonist. The novel's own notion of an “afterlife” allows for a configuration of the relation between “Wordsworth” and Coetzee's post-apartheid South Africa that is far more nuanced than a simple opposition between colonial and postcolonial, England and South Africa , Romanticism and the novel. Whereas Disgrace of course configures all of these terms, I want to show how Coetzee's most recent books define their relation to “Wordsworth” in a way that situates the whole of Coetzee's writing practice in the afterlife of this disgraced name. Taking my cue from two earlier characterizations of Coetzee's novels as “situational metafiction” (David Attwell) - as “ an encounter in which the legacies of European modernism and modern linguistics enter the turbulent waters of colonialism and apartheid” - and as “Lacanian allegories” writing their own genesis out of traditional literary genres (Teresa Dovey), I show how “Wordsworth” is a crucial term in the topography (“situational”) and the generic history in which the recent work situates Coetzee's practice.
I first read the achievement of the English-language prose of Disgrace , in conjunction with Coetzee's remarks on Wordsworth in White Writing (1988), as the response to the novel's self-created imperative to overcome the impossibility of a wholesale South African translation of a Wordsworthian ethics and poetics (against the figure of Byron in the novel). I then read Coetzee's memoirs Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) as a counterperformance to Wordsworth's Prelude : following their itinerary along, first, a South Africa that is also an English enclave ( Boyhood ) and an England that fails to be that South Africa's wished-for other ( Youth ), and, second, along the temptations of poetry and of the genres of the Kunstlerroman and the confession the books negotiate in their own prose, I sketch the novels' development of, first, a distinctly South African notion of place that is more than a “spot of time,” and second, the intrinsic relation between this notion and the idea of prose that remembers “the harmonies of The Prelude ” in a way that is radically different from a poetic “recollection in tranquillity.”
In linking up the memoirs' opposition between prosaic water and poetical fire with the light-and-darkness isotopies centering around Wordsworth (and Lucy, and Lurie, and, by phonetic compulsion, Coetzee) in Disgrace , I show how these works situate the whole of Coetzee's practice as a distinctly South-African epilogue to the English literary tradition which the books construct as their prelude. Taking my cue from Geoffrey Hartman's recent juxtaposition of Wordsworth and Coetzee in relation to the literary conversion of trauma and “compulsive empathy” into sympathy, I conclude by showing how Coetzee's notions of place, prose, and remembrance manage to configure a way to address the traumas of apartheid and post-apartheid, a way that can, perhaps, still be called “Imagination.”