In the Heart of the Country

16/03/2025

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Earned Bitterness

    In In the Heart of the Country, J. M. Coetzee looks at a life simultaneously privileged and deprived, one with status but no purpose, possessing mastery but no control. Its central character is off-centre, an askew woman looking for coordinates to live by but lost in the farmlands of a remote place Coetzee does little to locate. What matters is that it isn’t near anywhere in particular, and if it were, the narrator might have had some home hope of finding the like-minded. She says, “I should have lived in the city; greed, there is a vice I can understand. In the city, I would have room to expand; perhaps it is not too late, perhaps I can still run away to the city…” In Coetzee’s novel, to have a mind of one’s own isn’t a positive: Magda’s is so much in hers that she struggles to share thoughts with others as the novel becomes a muddle of self-absorption. Coetzee’s purpose is like many a modernist work: to find a balance between the coherence of the text and the incoherence of its narrator. If such was the project in quite different ways of William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf, might it seem that Coetzee has just arrived very late to this party? 

         This would be ungenerous for various reasons, even if some would see that a novel written in 1976 should have been more inclined to play with the self-reflexive over the reflective, with the post-modern over the modernist. Coetzee would come to that in good time, and most especially Summertime, where the central character is called John Coetzee and the book plays constantly with the autobiographical while resisting its suppositions in a work that combines the autofictional with the teasingly ironic, the apparently sincere with the devices of the metafictional. Who is this man we may wonder that is described as someone “with no sexual presence whatsoever”? Whether this is Coetzee or not, the person who wrote the sentence happens to be. The novel was written in the 2000s. Again, it could appear that Coetzee had arrived after closing time. Yet perhaps many a great writer doesn’t coincide with a given literary movement, but finds in it the porous and unachieved elements, making anew what can seem stale because the hasty have moved on too quickly. In ‘What is a Classic?’, Coetzee speaks of TS Eliot and, “the feeling of being out of date, of having been born into too late an epoch, or of surviving unnaturally beyond one’s term.” Coetzee sees this in much of Eliot’s early poetry, and adds, “this is not an uncommon sense of the self among colonials — whom Eliot subsumes under what he calls provincials — particularly young colonials struggling to match their inherited culture to their daily experience.” (Stranger Shores) 

    Coetzee might be speaking more about himself here than in Summertime, and what we wish to extract from the statement is the problem a writer potentially has if circumstances indicate they are out of their epoch. A competent writer might try very hard to fit into their moment, denying the reality of their life and circumstances all the better to conform to literary expectation. But a superior one may sense that the accident of their situation which leaves them peripheral both to the cultural demands of the era, and the geographic expectation of writing from a given hub (London, New York, Paris) is part of a problem that cannot be resolved externally — by moving to a major city; fitting into the preoccupations of the age — but by examining their moment, their world. But even within that, there is a further danger: the exotic or the political, and sometimes both. The writer from the periphery absorbs the expectations of the centre and produces work that conforms to its prejudices. It might be what distinguishes the great works of Marquez from Isabelle Allende's, and perhaps too in a less pronounced way illustrates the difference between Coetzee and other South African writers who were much keener than Coetzee to see their writing within the context of Apartheid. 

        These then are some of the problems: to write within the literary expectation of the time, to accept that you are not well-placed to do this but are very well-placed to do something else: to comment on the peripheral and give significance to it by the exoticisation or the politicisation of the material. It would be unfair to say that fellow South African writer Nadine Gordimer fits too neatly into the politicisation as she became a key writer of Apartheid, someone who much more than Coetzee was publicly involved in denouncing it. But when she says of her Collected Short Stories that, “...the chronological order turns out to be a historical one. The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society — that is to say, history — and my apprehension of it…” we would be inclined to think that Coetzee wouldn’t make such a claim. Still less would he be likely to say: “I like to think that all decent people, whatever their religious or ethnic background, have an equal responsibility to fight what is evil. To say otherwise is to concede too much.” ('Nadine Gordimer: A Vocation to Write') Gordimer often spoke about, perhaps even for, the oppressed; Coetzee frequently writes about the oppressive, seeing in the oppressor a condition over an injustice. This doesn’t mean oppression isn’t unjust; what it does mean is that it cannot always easily be located in the politically liberated. If Coetzee is so important a writer, if he has managed to escape the various traps that awaited him, and in different ways await all writers, it lies in this.

           Near the end of In the Heart of the Country, made up of 266 short passages, all numbered, Coetzee offers one in italics: “it is the slave’s consciousness that constitutes the master’s certainty of his own truth. So the master is not sure of the truth of his autonomy. But the slave’s consciousness is a dependent consciousness. His truth lies in an inessential consciousness of the inessential acts.” These are not the words of a philosopher, though there will be more than a few echoes of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, with Lois Parkinson Zamora saying "In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Life and Times of Michael K (1983). All of Coetzee's fiction reiterates the basic political allegory defined by Hegel in an essay entitled 'Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage', in The Phenomenology of Mind." "In this well-known essay," she says, "Hegel proposes that the master and the servant are mutually dependent, but that the servant, not the master, embodies the positive capacity for renewal in the community.” (''Allegories of Power in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee') The words offered in the novella are Magda’s as she tries to understand her father’s relationship with the servants, and sees that his domineering and forceful demands were secret pleas: that the servants knew that “they could hurt him most essentially by obeying him most slavishly.” 

     Coetzee seems to create an entangled combination of the slave and the master with the subject and the object, as if trying to find within the colonial question an ontological one in which it can be contained.  With an object, one doesn’t order it around, one moves it around, and with a subject usually you accept the person’s autonomy and ask them to do things. However, the servant has a status somewhere between the use of an object and the autonomy of the subject, and the crisis often comes

when the servant too strenuously claims their autonomy or too passively follows orders. They must remain without thoughts but be capable of feelings. To express a thought would be impertinent; to express a feeling would be to acknowledge they are more than objects. Magda says “did my father grow harsher and harsher toward them simply to provoke them out of their slavishness?”, as though to see in them a reaction would return an aspect of humanity to the father himself? 

        Magda has such thoughts in the context of Hendrik, a hand who takes his new wife to the farm, where Magda’s father sleeps with her. While it might seem to make sense that Hendrik would kill the father and rescue his wife, instead Magda murders her father and Hendrik beats his spouse. Within a certain power logic, this makes sense, as opposed to moral logic, where it doesn’t. A morally avenging story would show Hendrik well aware that Klein-Anna has been exploited and take out the father, but one based on power logic would be well aware that to kill the father would lead to Hendrik's capture, confinement and possible death. A black man killing a white man wouldn’t be ignored, no matter how far into the wilderness it takes place. But what he can do is exercise his power on Klein-Anna and does exactly this when, after Magda shoots her father, he beats her up. As Magda says: “Hendrik is kicking rhythmically at her with his soft shoes. He does not look up at me, his face is wet with sweat, he has work to do. If there were a stick to hand he would be using it, but there are not many sticks in this part of the world, his wife is fortunate.” This comes a couple of pages after Magda thinks through the implications of shooting her father, who is still alive. “So all of a sudden here I am at the centre of a field of moral tension, they are no less…What am I going to do? When he finds his balance, Hendrik will want to know whether the accident is an eccentricity of the ruling class or whether I am culpable and can be exploited.” Magda then wonders too what Klein-Anna thinks, whether Klein-Anna will see Magda as protecting her from Magda's father, who she will fear as he insists on further abusing her, or protecting her from Hendrik, who will attack her for sleeping with Magda’s father.  

    What In The Heart of the Country makes clear is that the power dynamic in a colonial country cannot be comprehended with the moral assertiveness Gordimer offers when speaking of decent people fighting evil. Coetzee wants to show a complex psychological breakdown that allows power to shift only because of the madness the system has invoked. Magda shoots her father out of perverse jealousy: her father banishes Magda to her room and locks the door, while he takes Klein-Anna to his. She doesn’t shoot him because he is abusing another, but what she sees as the way he has maltreated her. That she can think such thoughts come out of the harrowing loneliness she has endured for many years. “Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective.” Magda understands what her father tried to ignore: that she cannot quite exist in a world where one’s relations are those of power and weakness; power over the servants; weakness with her father. “If my father had been a weaker man he would have had a better daughter, But he had never needed anything. Enthralled by my need to be needed, I circle him like a moon.” Yet she adds, "such is my sole venture into the psychology of our debacle.” She is so psychologically damaged that she hardly trusts her own diagnosis.   

        By the same reckoning, we need to extend this to the novel itself, and thus to the potential narrative incoherence Woolf and others flirted with in the 1920s. How much of what happens is Magda’s projections, fantasies and hallucinations? Three comments from Coetzee are useful here. Discussing various literary developments and his place within them, he says, “from what you call poststructuralism I have taken what I can — what I can understand, what I can adopt. How to decide whether a historical moment has passed is a task beyond me, particularly from my position at the southern tip of Africa.”  (Contemporary Literature) The second concerns the ordinary, and Coetzee believes that while he doesn’t object to writing about ordinary lives he does wonder what constitutes the ordinary and this would for him include writers who might be deemed extra-ordinary: “in the deepest sense Kafka and Beckett are writers of the ordinary. To make this point it doesn’t seem to me necessary to invoke the notion of the universal.” (Contemporary Literature) The third is the writer’s claim that Magda and Jacobus (in Dusklands) are characters who “lack the stature to transform the 'It' into a 'You', to create a society in which reciprocity exists; and therefore condemn themselves to desperate gestures towards establishing intimacy.” (Speak)  

    If a central feature of post-structuralism is the dissolution of the subject, then this can take a post-modern or modernist form.Ddoes it feature the fragility of character or the fragility of fiction, do the devices used indicate a form that will struggle to remain coherent because of the character perspective, or will the notion of character become weakened by the awareness that literature itself is a construct? These may be broad-brush approaches to the difference, and risks a too-easy conflation of the postmodern and the post-structuralist, while also insisting on features evident in modernism and not exclusive to the postmodern. As Fredric Jameson notes, there are those for whom “postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper…it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown in this or that preceding modernism.” He names, for example, Gertrude Stein and Raymond Roussel. Jameson then lists the various features he sees as postmodern: a weakening of affect, pastiche replacing parody, a nostalgic mode and the loss of a radical past that has no base upon which to act. Jameson sees in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, that “this historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past…” (Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) Ragtime was published a couple of years before In the Heart of the Country, yet Coetzee’s work doesn’t weaken affect, it doesn’t put the historical past in quotation marks and hardly suggests nostalgia. 

       Does this mean Coetzee has missed the boat and misses the point: that literature by the mid-seventies was representatively diminished: post-structuralist philosophers and postmodern artist had destroyed the signs that literature was predicated upon? However, in his remark about using post-structuralism for his own ends, Coetzee replenishes the modernist and all but bypasses the postmodern. But this only is of value if there is some residual issue in an earlier problematic that can be taken up and renewed. In the loosest sense, this would be the post-colonial. It isn’t so much that Coetzee hasn’t got on board with the postmodern; it is instead that the post-colonial is too big a question to be readily absorbed into a given literary movement, or rather that two literary movements can coincide in time but, because of the different concerns and preoccupations of one culture or another, the literary presuppositions are quite distinct. If postmodernism often wishes to undermine the sign and turn it into play, a post-colonial might wish to turn the sign against the oppressor. They might take it lightly enough to know it isn’t set, but seriously enough to know that the sign involves a proper power struggle and not simply a ludic, semiotic game. 

            We’re offering some broad generalisations here, but what we wish to extract from them is the pertinence of Coetzee’s work, and at the same time propose its importance is both because of and in defiance of its status as post-colonial literature. Coetzee is of course a white man who for many years and while writing In the Heart of the Country, was living in a nation notorious for its Apartheid policies. The most obvious risk for a white writer would have been to condemn the regime and this might seem paradoxical in a country when the greater one would have been of course to fight it — as Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko well knew and, too, Breyten Breytenbach, a poet and artist who was jailed for seven years when he returned from Paris to South Africa in the 1970s after recruiting saboteurs for the ANC. Coetzee writes well on Breytenbach in the New York Review of Books, saying his novel Dog Heart does not pretend to be “…a report on the state of the South African nation in the 1990s. Breytenbach’s Heartland is not a microcosm of South Africa; Dog Heart has little to say about politics or black-white relations on a national scale. What it does report on, with intimate attention, is power relations between white and brown in the countryside.” Coetzee could almost be talking about In The Heart of the Country. Breytanbach was arrested for his actions, not his views, and it seems white intellectuals could speak with relative freedom (though books were banned like Andre Brink’s Kennis van die Aand) but not act with the equivalent autonomy. Yet in which country could someone actively undermine a government and escape jail, no matter if that government deserves to be undermined? Its purpose is to perpetuate itself and while it may tolerate those who disagree with it, none would be inclined to leave free those who wanted conspicuously to destroy it. 

           Coetzee was neither actively involved in fighting against the regime, nor a writer known like Gordimer and Andre Brink known for writings consistently pushing to undermine the Apartheid government. It was as if he understood that while equal rights for all might have been just, this wasn’t a question his work wished to address, as if to be caught in the history of his nation thematically would have compromised the fiction he wished to produce. The question then became one of accepting the inevitability of one’s moment, while resisting the expectations placed upon the writer by the time and space they are living in. In In The Heart of the Country, it becomes one of alienation within the context of racial injustice, but where the alienated is more important than the unjust. What Coetzee reveals is an extreme example of solitude when inequality cannot allow for mutual subjectivity, and watches as the system collapses at the same time as a person’s mind. Magda is one of many colonialist women who “stays in her room, reading or writing or fighting migraines. The colonies are full of girls like that, but none, I think so extreme as I.” She offers these remarks just after conjuring up a new bride for her father, someone who exists on the page until note 36. Here she acknowledges he hasn’t taken home a new spouse and that she consequently hasn’t murdered them with an axe. This might seem a trick better suited to a horror movie than a work of literature but Coetzee doesn’t offer it as an opportunity for gratuitous suspense; it reveals much more the intensity of Magda’s reverie. It details how far this woman has disappeared inside her head. 

     Again, this would seem a modernist problem, if we accept Saul Bellow’s claim in 1963 that “the private and inner life which was the subject of serious books until very recently now begins to have an antique and funny look.” Bellow compares the similar obsessions found in Death in Venice and Lolita and sees the seriousness of Mann’s book giving way to the mockery of Nabokov’s as “the same subject [becomes]... sadly and maliciously comical.” Bellow links this to the broader socio-political milieu and sees in many a writer that they are “…viewing modern life with a bitterness to which they themselves have not established clear title, and it is unearned bitterness that I speak of.” (The Novel Today) Magda would have an earned bitterness, no matter if she is the daughter of a colonial farmer. Coetzee shows how her life has been destroyed by colonialism and this needn’t rest on special pleading for white African citizens, but of course that colonialism destroys everyone involved in its practice. Magda may be free from back-breaking work, exploitation and imposed degradation, but she is no less the product of colonialism than Hendrik. 

     From one perspective, this can seem like a terrible conflation. But from another, a necessary aggregation — that this is two sides of the same coin no matter if one is heads and the other tails; one a position of apparent strength and the other of inevitable weakness. Yet if we are making much of the comment Coetzee offers about the consciousness of the slave and the master, it is for at least two reasons: to see the sort of liberal decency Gordimer offers in her remark (which isn’t to say this is quite the same as the position she will necessarily take in her work), and Bellow’s understandable claim that modern literature was no longer concerned with the intricacy of an inner, life can be contested. Some would say in the context of Bellow’s comment that this inner life is still valid if the outer life demands its examination. When Bellow invokes the bad faith of the modern middle-classes he adds that very little seems to be at stake. “They can live dangerously while managing somehow to remain safe. They can be both bureaucrats and Bohemians, they can be executives but use pot, they can observe the laws while in their hearts and in their social attitudes they may be as subversive as they like.” (The Novel Today) To explore such an inner life is to reveal little more than superficial hypocrisy; not the texture of internal contradiction. It is these textured internal contradictions black African writers could offer aware that there was an enormous difference between white rule and black freedom; colonial oppression and post-colonial emancipation. Whether it would be Wole Soyinka in Ake: The Years of Childhood where a character wonders if the whites would feed and educate “a native who will only get strength to chop his head off with a cutlass?”, or a character in Ousmane Sembene’s The Money Order misguidedly trusting a fellow black because he is elegantly dressed and knows France well, many an African novel has mused over the ambivalence one may feel about a white man’s authority even it comes in a potentially positive form or an indirectly pernicious one. In Ake, Soyinka can receive a certain type of education thanks to the whites; in The Money Order, the central character can do likewise indirectly: by realising that trusting those who have been to France isn’t always a good idea. How interior the writer chooses to go is a choice within a bigger one: the colonial problematic of distancing oneself or otherwise from an oppressor who may become an educator, or from a fellow black who is nevertheless your new exploiter, are hardly thematically enervated explorations. The potential problem Bellow sees in an interior viewpoint in much fiction of the post-war years is that the characters are making the most banal of choices and so many writers keep their distance, ironising their texts or making them self-reflexive, thus making them works that fit neatly into the postmodern. 

        But where does this leave a white African writer who doesn’t want to offer right-thinking whites trying to help black characters attain greater rights and freedoms, evident in Gordimer's comment, but wishes to find a principle of ontological justice over individual, national or racial justice? Coetzee often investigates white lives fraught with crisis and collapse, people wondering what the right thing is rather than doing it. There might be a world of a difference between the titular character in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Magda, but what they both possess is a dysfunctional despair over a functional hope, even if Costello is the writer and vegetarian who gives numerous talks about the lives of animals, while Magda speaks mainly to herself. When Costello reads a book about Nazi atrocities by Paul West (both a fictional character within the novel and an actual writer), she is more than affected by the book and thinks: “Obscene! She wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes.” Anybody extracting from the novel a liberal plea would be ignoring how much despair there is in Costello as a human, as though the horror she reads about is simply augmenting the ontological terror she feels. This can be self-regard or self-abnegation according to taste but this is often the place Coetzee’s writing occupies. John Lurie in Disgrace is the complicated character Coetzee uses to navigate black rights, white entitlements and women’s bodies, a man who can say early on when seducing a student: “…a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” He also says later in the book, “the truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman and a plain one at that…” But while the reader might wish to see a pest and a misogynist, a middle-aged white man awaiting his rightful fall, Adam Mars-Jones notes that it is a book that wants to show Lurie as both a figure of ruin and one of salvation: “what follows is somehow simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse.” (Guardian)

     It is this tension Coetzee often insists upon: that self-improvement isn’t easily separated from self-hatred and anyone who proposes the former, without incorporating an aspect of the latter isn’t quite to be trusted. In an essay on Alan Paton and Helen Suzman, he notes how Suzman describes various South African politicians. “P. W. Botha was an irascible bully…spiteful and retributive”, while F. W. De Clerk was “a pragmatic, intelligent man.” While admiring Suzman’s huge importance, Coetzee also says that in her memoir In No Uncertain Terms she isn't one for analysis when offering such descriptions. What is missing is “…an insider’s insight into how pious, respectable family men could decade after decade have hardened their hearts to the daily suffering they were causing…” (Stranger Shores) It is this type of inner contradiction Coetzee often explores and partly why he would be unlikely to give up on the interiority Bellow believes became ridiculed. He isn’t interested in the hypocrisy of character that Bellow recognises, but in the contradictions of self that may lead one to be both capable of the best and unlikely to avoid the worst. When Costello is horrified by the Nazi deeds, this isn’t assured despair but culpable outrage: the difference between an awareness of others’ misdeeds and the recognition that we are part of the same DNA. Anybody who wants to claim very understandably that we are all part of the same family, going back 300,000 years, and wishes to feel the warm glow of collective genealogical existence, also needs to accept that we share the same nerve tissue with the rapists, murderers and terrorists, all part of this homo sapien heritage. Coetzee’s interest in the ambivalence of human morality is exemplified in that Hegelian passage. 

     But where does this leave Magda? In the final note, she says “I am corrupted to the bone  with the beauty of this forsaken world” and concludes with “I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy.” It is as though the hymn can only cover half the self and how could someone corrupted to the bone begin to countenance a being that isn’t internally divided? This might be a question for many a text caught between the righteous and the damned, but Coetzee isn’t chiefly a theological writer, even if his concerns may coincide with them. He is better understood as a figure living with Apartheid who wrote texts that neither, of course, praised its existence nor, however, determined to prioritise the condemning of it. To do the latter might have been a little like the hymns Magda refuses to write. Instead, Coetzee wrote novels determined to comprehend the internal mechanisms of power over its unequal distribution. This doesn't leave the writing any less critical of Apartheid, but it does insist upon trying to understand the principles that could allow such divisions to take place. It is as if Coetzee was never first and foremost interested in Apartheid South Africa, nor even chiefly interested in colonialism. But he was interested in using the facts of his existence, his reality as a white man in Africa, and more specifically South Africa, to make pertinent notions that could seem superfluous in another late 20th-century context. 

       When Magda says “all my life there has been enough time, more than enough time, too much time, I have panted for the breath of life in the thin medium of our time”, this isn’t the bored interiority of an American suburban housewife the novelist can mock. It is the desperate subjectivity of a woman whose life has been predicated on an injustice that she hasn’t only been practising but has also been subject to: a broader oppression that might leave the black as its unequivocal victim, but leaves equivocal victims as well. Magda would be an ostensibly freer person than Hendrik or Klein-Anna, capable of what might seem the relative liberty of a white woman in South Africa, but this is where Coetzee needs to offer her from the inside. One understands just how difficult her life has been given the useless thoughts it has accumulated in the context of an existence which has been of little use. This doesn’t only include an extended reverie about her father taking a new wife and Magda killing them both, it is in the constant asides that show how much time she has on her hands that become thoughts she has in her head, and often resentful, self-hating ones. “All my life I have been left lying about, forgotten, dusty, like an old show, or when I have been used, used as a tool, to bring the house in order, to regiment the servants.” “I toss about in the dark whipping myself into distraction. Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective.” 

      A country that has created first and second-class citizens, also produces a communicative limitation and an addled subjectivity. Over the years, it is clear Magda hasn’t had people to talk to but only to talk down to, and the result is evident in the book Coetzee has written. It isn’t at all a blistering attack on white oppression (that would be taken as a given). It is an account of a woman’s collapse in the face of a system that perpetuates injustices and that manifest themselves as psychoses. If a system of inequality creates winners and losers that is one thing, and can at least be defended by the winners. But Coetzee proposes that in such a system there are no winners or losers, just reified objects, people alienated from each other, and likely to find themselves rattling around in their heads even when they are oppressors. In that italicised quote, it may be the slave’s consciousness that constitutes the master’s certainty of his truth but, at the same time, there is a constant threat of its failure. This needn’t only come about through the oppressed comprehending their power but, too, from weaknesses of mind that the oppressor has helped generate by the very alienation from others they have insisted upon. Magda isn’t a victim as many blacks in Africa under white rule have been. But she is a victim nevertheless, and Coetzee explores this inevitability with a recognition that the type of interiority no longer deemed relevant to modern literature was very relevant indeed. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

In the Heart of the Country

Earned Bitterness

    In In the Heart of the Country, J. M. Coetzee looks at a life simultaneously privileged and deprived, one with status but no purpose, possessing mastery but no control. Its central character is off-centre, an askew woman looking for coordinates to live by but lost in the farmlands of a remote place Coetzee does little to locate. What matters is that it isn’t near anywhere in particular, and if it were, the narrator might have had some home hope of finding the like-minded. She says, “I should have lived in the city; greed, there is a vice I can understand. In the city, I would have room to expand; perhaps it is not too late, perhaps I can still run away to the city…” In Coetzee’s novel, to have a mind of one’s own isn’t a positive: Magda’s is so much in hers that she struggles to share thoughts with others as the novel becomes a muddle of self-absorption. Coetzee’s purpose is like many a modernist work: to find a balance between the coherence of the text and the incoherence of its narrator. If such was the project in quite different ways of William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf, might it seem that Coetzee has just arrived very late to this party? 

         This would be ungenerous for various reasons, even if some would see that a novel written in 1976 should have been more inclined to play with the self-reflexive over the reflective, with the post-modern over the modernist. Coetzee would come to that in good time, and most especially Summertime, where the central character is called John Coetzee and the book plays constantly with the autobiographical while resisting its suppositions in a work that combines the autofictional with the teasingly ironic, the apparently sincere with the devices of the metafictional. Who is this man we may wonder that is described as someone “with no sexual presence whatsoever”? Whether this is Coetzee or not, the person who wrote the sentence happens to be. The novel was written in the 2000s. Again, it could appear that Coetzee had arrived after closing time. Yet perhaps many a great writer doesn’t coincide with a given literary movement, but finds in it the porous and unachieved elements, making anew what can seem stale because the hasty have moved on too quickly. In ‘What is a Classic?’, Coetzee speaks of TS Eliot and, “the feeling of being out of date, of having been born into too late an epoch, or of surviving unnaturally beyond one’s term.” Coetzee sees this in much of Eliot’s early poetry, and adds, “this is not an uncommon sense of the self among colonials — whom Eliot subsumes under what he calls provincials — particularly young colonials struggling to match their inherited culture to their daily experience.” (Stranger Shores) 

    Coetzee might be speaking more about himself here than in Summertime, and what we wish to extract from the statement is the problem a writer potentially has if circumstances indicate they are out of their epoch. A competent writer might try very hard to fit into their moment, denying the reality of their life and circumstances all the better to conform to literary expectation. But a superior one may sense that the accident of their situation which leaves them peripheral both to the cultural demands of the era, and the geographic expectation of writing from a given hub (London, New York, Paris) is part of a problem that cannot be resolved externally — by moving to a major city; fitting into the preoccupations of the age — but by examining their moment, their world. But even within that, there is a further danger: the exotic or the political, and sometimes both. The writer from the periphery absorbs the expectations of the centre and produces work that conforms to its prejudices. It might be what distinguishes the great works of Marquez from Isabelle Allende's, and perhaps too in a less pronounced way illustrates the difference between Coetzee and other South African writers who were much keener than Coetzee to see their writing within the context of Apartheid. 

        These then are some of the problems: to write within the literary expectation of the time, to accept that you are not well-placed to do this but are very well-placed to do something else: to comment on the peripheral and give significance to it by the exoticisation or the politicisation of the material. It would be unfair to say that fellow South African writer Nadine Gordimer fits too neatly into the politicisation as she became a key writer of Apartheid, someone who much more than Coetzee was publicly involved in denouncing it. But when she says of her Collected Short Stories that, “...the chronological order turns out to be a historical one. The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society — that is to say, history — and my apprehension of it…” we would be inclined to think that Coetzee wouldn’t make such a claim. Still less would he be likely to say: “I like to think that all decent people, whatever their religious or ethnic background, have an equal responsibility to fight what is evil. To say otherwise is to concede too much.” ('Nadine Gordimer: A Vocation to Write') Gordimer often spoke about, perhaps even for, the oppressed; Coetzee frequently writes about the oppressive, seeing in the oppressor a condition over an injustice. This doesn’t mean oppression isn’t unjust; what it does mean is that it cannot always easily be located in the politically liberated. If Coetzee is so important a writer, if he has managed to escape the various traps that awaited him, and in different ways await all writers, it lies in this.

           Near the end of In the Heart of the Country, made up of 266 short passages, all numbered, Coetzee offers one in italics: “it is the slave’s consciousness that constitutes the master’s certainty of his own truth. So the master is not sure of the truth of his autonomy. But the slave’s consciousness is a dependent consciousness. His truth lies in an inessential consciousness of the inessential acts.” These are not the words of a philosopher, though there will be more than a few echoes of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, with Lois Parkinson Zamora saying "In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Life and Times of Michael K (1983). All of Coetzee's fiction reiterates the basic political allegory defined by Hegel in an essay entitled 'Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage', in The Phenomenology of Mind." "In this well-known essay," she says, "Hegel proposes that the master and the servant are mutually dependent, but that the servant, not the master, embodies the positive capacity for renewal in the community.” (''Allegories of Power in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee') The words offered in the novella are Magda’s as she tries to understand her father’s relationship with the servants, and sees that his domineering and forceful demands were secret pleas: that the servants knew that “they could hurt him most essentially by obeying him most slavishly.” 

     Coetzee seems to create an entangled combination of the slave and the master with the subject and the object, as if trying to find within the colonial question an ontological one in which it can be contained.  With an object, one doesn’t order it around, one moves it around, and with a subject usually you accept the person’s autonomy and ask them to do things. However, the servant has a status somewhere between the use of an object and the autonomy of the subject, and the crisis often comes

when the servant too strenuously claims their autonomy or too passively follows orders. They must remain without thoughts but be capable of feelings. To express a thought would be impertinent; to express a feeling would be to acknowledge they are more than objects. Magda says “did my father grow harsher and harsher toward them simply to provoke them out of their slavishness?”, as though to see in them a reaction would return an aspect of humanity to the father himself? 

        Magda has such thoughts in the context of Hendrik, a hand who takes his new wife to the farm, where Magda’s father sleeps with her. While it might seem to make sense that Hendrik would kill the father and rescue his wife, instead Magda murders her father and Hendrik beats his spouse. Within a certain power logic, this makes sense, as opposed to moral logic, where it doesn’t. A morally avenging story would show Hendrik well aware that Klein-Anna has been exploited and take out the father, but one based on power logic would be well aware that to kill the father would lead to Hendrik's capture, confinement and possible death. A black man killing a white man wouldn’t be ignored, no matter how far into the wilderness it takes place. But what he can do is exercise his power on Klein-Anna and does exactly this when, after Magda shoots her father, he beats her up. As Magda says: “Hendrik is kicking rhythmically at her with his soft shoes. He does not look up at me, his face is wet with sweat, he has work to do. If there were a stick to hand he would be using it, but there are not many sticks in this part of the world, his wife is fortunate.” This comes a couple of pages after Magda thinks through the implications of shooting her father, who is still alive. “So all of a sudden here I am at the centre of a field of moral tension, they are no less…What am I going to do? When he finds his balance, Hendrik will want to know whether the accident is an eccentricity of the ruling class or whether I am culpable and can be exploited.” Magda then wonders too what Klein-Anna thinks, whether Klein-Anna will see Magda as protecting her from Magda's father, who she will fear as he insists on further abusing her, or protecting her from Hendrik, who will attack her for sleeping with Magda’s father.  

    What In The Heart of the Country makes clear is that the power dynamic in a colonial country cannot be comprehended with the moral assertiveness Gordimer offers when speaking of decent people fighting evil. Coetzee wants to show a complex psychological breakdown that allows power to shift only because of the madness the system has invoked. Magda shoots her father out of perverse jealousy: her father banishes Magda to her room and locks the door, while he takes Klein-Anna to his. She doesn’t shoot him because he is abusing another, but what she sees as the way he has maltreated her. That she can think such thoughts come out of the harrowing loneliness she has endured for many years. “Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective.” Magda understands what her father tried to ignore: that she cannot quite exist in a world where one’s relations are those of power and weakness; power over the servants; weakness with her father. “If my father had been a weaker man he would have had a better daughter, But he had never needed anything. Enthralled by my need to be needed, I circle him like a moon.” Yet she adds, "such is my sole venture into the psychology of our debacle.” She is so psychologically damaged that she hardly trusts her own diagnosis.   

        By the same reckoning, we need to extend this to the novel itself, and thus to the potential narrative incoherence Woolf and others flirted with in the 1920s. How much of what happens is Magda’s projections, fantasies and hallucinations? Three comments from Coetzee are useful here. Discussing various literary developments and his place within them, he says, “from what you call poststructuralism I have taken what I can — what I can understand, what I can adopt. How to decide whether a historical moment has passed is a task beyond me, particularly from my position at the southern tip of Africa.”  (Contemporary Literature) The second concerns the ordinary, and Coetzee believes that while he doesn’t object to writing about ordinary lives he does wonder what constitutes the ordinary and this would for him include writers who might be deemed extra-ordinary: “in the deepest sense Kafka and Beckett are writers of the ordinary. To make this point it doesn’t seem to me necessary to invoke the notion of the universal.” (Contemporary Literature) The third is the writer’s claim that Magda and Jacobus (in Dusklands) are characters who “lack the stature to transform the 'It' into a 'You', to create a society in which reciprocity exists; and therefore condemn themselves to desperate gestures towards establishing intimacy.” (Speak)  

    If a central feature of post-structuralism is the dissolution of the subject, then this can take a post-modern or modernist form.Ddoes it feature the fragility of character or the fragility of fiction, do the devices used indicate a form that will struggle to remain coherent because of the character perspective, or will the notion of character become weakened by the awareness that literature itself is a construct? These may be broad-brush approaches to the difference, and risks a too-easy conflation of the postmodern and the post-structuralist, while also insisting on features evident in modernism and not exclusive to the postmodern. As Fredric Jameson notes, there are those for whom “postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper…it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown in this or that preceding modernism.” He names, for example, Gertrude Stein and Raymond Roussel. Jameson then lists the various features he sees as postmodern: a weakening of affect, pastiche replacing parody, a nostalgic mode and the loss of a radical past that has no base upon which to act. Jameson sees in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, that “this historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past…” (Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) Ragtime was published a couple of years before In the Heart of the Country, yet Coetzee’s work doesn’t weaken affect, it doesn’t put the historical past in quotation marks and hardly suggests nostalgia. 

       Does this mean Coetzee has missed the boat and misses the point: that literature by the mid-seventies was representatively diminished: post-structuralist philosophers and postmodern artist had destroyed the signs that literature was predicated upon? However, in his remark about using post-structuralism for his own ends, Coetzee replenishes the modernist and all but bypasses the postmodern. But this only is of value if there is some residual issue in an earlier problematic that can be taken up and renewed. In the loosest sense, this would be the post-colonial. It isn’t so much that Coetzee hasn’t got on board with the postmodern; it is instead that the post-colonial is too big a question to be readily absorbed into a given literary movement, or rather that two literary movements can coincide in time but, because of the different concerns and preoccupations of one culture or another, the literary presuppositions are quite distinct. If postmodernism often wishes to undermine the sign and turn it into play, a post-colonial might wish to turn the sign against the oppressor. They might take it lightly enough to know it isn’t set, but seriously enough to know that the sign involves a proper power struggle and not simply a ludic, semiotic game. 

            We’re offering some broad generalisations here, but what we wish to extract from them is the pertinence of Coetzee’s work, and at the same time propose its importance is both because of and in defiance of its status as post-colonial literature. Coetzee is of course a white man who for many years and while writing In the Heart of the Country, was living in a nation notorious for its Apartheid policies. The most obvious risk for a white writer would have been to condemn the regime and this might seem paradoxical in a country when the greater one would have been of course to fight it — as Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko well knew and, too, Breyten Breytenbach, a poet and artist who was jailed for seven years when he returned from Paris to South Africa in the 1970s after recruiting saboteurs for the ANC. Coetzee writes well on Breytenbach in the New York Review of Books, saying his novel Dog Heart does not pretend to be “…a report on the state of the South African nation in the 1990s. Breytenbach’s Heartland is not a microcosm of South Africa; Dog Heart has little to say about politics or black-white relations on a national scale. What it does report on, with intimate attention, is power relations between white and brown in the countryside.” Coetzee could almost be talking about In The Heart of the Country. Breytanbach was arrested for his actions, not his views, and it seems white intellectuals could speak with relative freedom (though books were banned like Andre Brink’s Kennis van die Aand) but not act with the equivalent autonomy. Yet in which country could someone actively undermine a government and escape jail, no matter if that government deserves to be undermined? Its purpose is to perpetuate itself and while it may tolerate those who disagree with it, none would be inclined to leave free those who wanted conspicuously to destroy it. 

           Coetzee was neither actively involved in fighting against the regime, nor a writer known like Gordimer and Andre Brink known for writings consistently pushing to undermine the Apartheid government. It was as if he understood that while equal rights for all might have been just, this wasn’t a question his work wished to address, as if to be caught in the history of his nation thematically would have compromised the fiction he wished to produce. The question then became one of accepting the inevitability of one’s moment, while resisting the expectations placed upon the writer by the time and space they are living in. In In The Heart of the Country, it becomes one of alienation within the context of racial injustice, but where the alienated is more important than the unjust. What Coetzee reveals is an extreme example of solitude when inequality cannot allow for mutual subjectivity, and watches as the system collapses at the same time as a person’s mind. Magda is one of many colonialist women who “stays in her room, reading or writing or fighting migraines. The colonies are full of girls like that, but none, I think so extreme as I.” She offers these remarks just after conjuring up a new bride for her father, someone who exists on the page until note 36. Here she acknowledges he hasn’t taken home a new spouse and that she consequently hasn’t murdered them with an axe. This might seem a trick better suited to a horror movie than a work of literature but Coetzee doesn’t offer it as an opportunity for gratuitous suspense; it reveals much more the intensity of Magda’s reverie. It details how far this woman has disappeared inside her head. 

     Again, this would seem a modernist problem, if we accept Saul Bellow’s claim in 1963 that “the private and inner life which was the subject of serious books until very recently now begins to have an antique and funny look.” Bellow compares the similar obsessions found in Death in Venice and Lolita and sees the seriousness of Mann’s book giving way to the mockery of Nabokov’s as “the same subject [becomes]... sadly and maliciously comical.” Bellow links this to the broader socio-political milieu and sees in many a writer that they are “…viewing modern life with a bitterness to which they themselves have not established clear title, and it is unearned bitterness that I speak of.” (The Novel Today) Magda would have an earned bitterness, no matter if she is the daughter of a colonial farmer. Coetzee shows how her life has been destroyed by colonialism and this needn’t rest on special pleading for white African citizens, but of course that colonialism destroys everyone involved in its practice. Magda may be free from back-breaking work, exploitation and imposed degradation, but she is no less the product of colonialism than Hendrik. 

     From one perspective, this can seem like a terrible conflation. But from another, a necessary aggregation — that this is two sides of the same coin no matter if one is heads and the other tails; one a position of apparent strength and the other of inevitable weakness. Yet if we are making much of the comment Coetzee offers about the consciousness of the slave and the master, it is for at least two reasons: to see the sort of liberal decency Gordimer offers in her remark (which isn’t to say this is quite the same as the position she will necessarily take in her work), and Bellow’s understandable claim that modern literature was no longer concerned with the intricacy of an inner, life can be contested. Some would say in the context of Bellow’s comment that this inner life is still valid if the outer life demands its examination. When Bellow invokes the bad faith of the modern middle-classes he adds that very little seems to be at stake. “They can live dangerously while managing somehow to remain safe. They can be both bureaucrats and Bohemians, they can be executives but use pot, they can observe the laws while in their hearts and in their social attitudes they may be as subversive as they like.” (The Novel Today) To explore such an inner life is to reveal little more than superficial hypocrisy; not the texture of internal contradiction. It is these textured internal contradictions black African writers could offer aware that there was an enormous difference between white rule and black freedom; colonial oppression and post-colonial emancipation. Whether it would be Wole Soyinka in Ake: The Years of Childhood where a character wonders if the whites would feed and educate “a native who will only get strength to chop his head off with a cutlass?”, or a character in Ousmane Sembene’s The Money Order misguidedly trusting a fellow black because he is elegantly dressed and knows France well, many an African novel has mused over the ambivalence one may feel about a white man’s authority even it comes in a potentially positive form or an indirectly pernicious one. In Ake, Soyinka can receive a certain type of education thanks to the whites; in The Money Order, the central character can do likewise indirectly: by realising that trusting those who have been to France isn’t always a good idea. How interior the writer chooses to go is a choice within a bigger one: the colonial problematic of distancing oneself or otherwise from an oppressor who may become an educator, or from a fellow black who is nevertheless your new exploiter, are hardly thematically enervated explorations. The potential problem Bellow sees in an interior viewpoint in much fiction of the post-war years is that the characters are making the most banal of choices and so many writers keep their distance, ironising their texts or making them self-reflexive, thus making them works that fit neatly into the postmodern. 

        But where does this leave a white African writer who doesn’t want to offer right-thinking whites trying to help black characters attain greater rights and freedoms, evident in Gordimer's comment, but wishes to find a principle of ontological justice over individual, national or racial justice? Coetzee often investigates white lives fraught with crisis and collapse, people wondering what the right thing is rather than doing it. There might be a world of a difference between the titular character in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Magda, but what they both possess is a dysfunctional despair over a functional hope, even if Costello is the writer and vegetarian who gives numerous talks about the lives of animals, while Magda speaks mainly to herself. When Costello reads a book about Nazi atrocities by Paul West (both a fictional character within the novel and an actual writer), she is more than affected by the book and thinks: “Obscene! She wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes.” Anybody extracting from the novel a liberal plea would be ignoring how much despair there is in Costello as a human, as though the horror she reads about is simply augmenting the ontological terror she feels. This can be self-regard or self-abnegation according to taste but this is often the place Coetzee’s writing occupies. John Lurie in Disgrace is the complicated character Coetzee uses to navigate black rights, white entitlements and women’s bodies, a man who can say early on when seducing a student: “…a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” He also says later in the book, “the truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman and a plain one at that…” But while the reader might wish to see a pest and a misogynist, a middle-aged white man awaiting his rightful fall, Adam Mars-Jones notes that it is a book that wants to show Lurie as both a figure of ruin and one of salvation: “what follows is somehow simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse.” (Guardian)

     It is this tension Coetzee often insists upon: that self-improvement isn’t easily separated from self-hatred and anyone who proposes the former, without incorporating an aspect of the latter isn’t quite to be trusted. In an essay on Alan Paton and Helen Suzman, he notes how Suzman describes various South African politicians. “P. W. Botha was an irascible bully…spiteful and retributive”, while F. W. De Clerk was “a pragmatic, intelligent man.” While admiring Suzman’s huge importance, Coetzee also says that in her memoir In No Uncertain Terms she isn't one for analysis when offering such descriptions. What is missing is “…an insider’s insight into how pious, respectable family men could decade after decade have hardened their hearts to the daily suffering they were causing…” (Stranger Shores) It is this type of inner contradiction Coetzee often explores and partly why he would be unlikely to give up on the interiority Bellow believes became ridiculed. He isn’t interested in the hypocrisy of character that Bellow recognises, but in the contradictions of self that may lead one to be both capable of the best and unlikely to avoid the worst. When Costello is horrified by the Nazi deeds, this isn’t assured despair but culpable outrage: the difference between an awareness of others’ misdeeds and the recognition that we are part of the same DNA. Anybody who wants to claim very understandably that we are all part of the same family, going back 300,000 years, and wishes to feel the warm glow of collective genealogical existence, also needs to accept that we share the same nerve tissue with the rapists, murderers and terrorists, all part of this homo sapien heritage. Coetzee’s interest in the ambivalence of human morality is exemplified in that Hegelian passage. 

     But where does this leave Magda? In the final note, she says “I am corrupted to the bone  with the beauty of this forsaken world” and concludes with “I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy.” It is as though the hymn can only cover half the self and how could someone corrupted to the bone begin to countenance a being that isn’t internally divided? This might be a question for many a text caught between the righteous and the damned, but Coetzee isn’t chiefly a theological writer, even if his concerns may coincide with them. He is better understood as a figure living with Apartheid who wrote texts that neither, of course, praised its existence nor, however, determined to prioritise the condemning of it. To do the latter might have been a little like the hymns Magda refuses to write. Instead, Coetzee wrote novels determined to comprehend the internal mechanisms of power over its unequal distribution. This doesn't leave the writing any less critical of Apartheid, but it does insist upon trying to understand the principles that could allow such divisions to take place. It is as if Coetzee was never first and foremost interested in Apartheid South Africa, nor even chiefly interested in colonialism. But he was interested in using the facts of his existence, his reality as a white man in Africa, and more specifically South Africa, to make pertinent notions that could seem superfluous in another late 20th-century context. 

       When Magda says “all my life there has been enough time, more than enough time, too much time, I have panted for the breath of life in the thin medium of our time”, this isn’t the bored interiority of an American suburban housewife the novelist can mock. It is the desperate subjectivity of a woman whose life has been predicated on an injustice that she hasn’t only been practising but has also been subject to: a broader oppression that might leave the black as its unequivocal victim, but leaves equivocal victims as well. Magda would be an ostensibly freer person than Hendrik or Klein-Anna, capable of what might seem the relative liberty of a white woman in South Africa, but this is where Coetzee needs to offer her from the inside. One understands just how difficult her life has been given the useless thoughts it has accumulated in the context of an existence which has been of little use. This doesn’t only include an extended reverie about her father taking a new wife and Magda killing them both, it is in the constant asides that show how much time she has on her hands that become thoughts she has in her head, and often resentful, self-hating ones. “All my life I have been left lying about, forgotten, dusty, like an old show, or when I have been used, used as a tool, to bring the house in order, to regiment the servants.” “I toss about in the dark whipping myself into distraction. Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective.” 

      A country that has created first and second-class citizens, also produces a communicative limitation and an addled subjectivity. Over the years, it is clear Magda hasn’t had people to talk to but only to talk down to, and the result is evident in the book Coetzee has written. It isn’t at all a blistering attack on white oppression (that would be taken as a given). It is an account of a woman’s collapse in the face of a system that perpetuates injustices and that manifest themselves as psychoses. If a system of inequality creates winners and losers that is one thing, and can at least be defended by the winners. But Coetzee proposes that in such a system there are no winners or losers, just reified objects, people alienated from each other, and likely to find themselves rattling around in their heads even when they are oppressors. In that italicised quote, it may be the slave’s consciousness that constitutes the master’s certainty of his truth but, at the same time, there is a constant threat of its failure. This needn’t only come about through the oppressed comprehending their power but, too, from weaknesses of mind that the oppressor has helped generate by the very alienation from others they have insisted upon. Magda isn’t a victim as many blacks in Africa under white rule have been. But she is a victim nevertheless, and Coetzee explores this inevitability with a recognition that the type of interiority no longer deemed relevant to modern literature was very relevant indeed. 


© Tony McKibbin