National Literature in Transnational Times: Writing Transition in the “New” South Africa
VILASHINI COOPPAN
Among the many changes we credit globalization with—including the increasing interconnection of nations, cultures, and economies, the rapid and widespread flows of persons, goods, information, and capital across national borders, and the production of new forms of identity and community—we may add the reconfiguration of academic disciplines from national to global frameworks. As a practice of critical thought, intellectual globalization is marked, as Anthony D. King notes, by “the rejection of the nationally-constituted society as the appropriate object of discourse, or unit of social and cultural analysis, and to varying degrees, a commitment to conceptualising ‘the world as a whole.’ ”1 But what does it mean for a discipline, particularly disciplines as rooted in the national paradigm as comparative literature and postcolonial studies, to envision the globe? Comparative literature and postcolonial studies have in common disciplinary histories that posit the nation as the founding origin, the transnational and global as the future perfect. However, disciplinary history, like history more generally, owes no special allegiance to linear plots. Indeed, scholars in both fields do most justice to the transformative energies of the present moment when, rather than taking criticism’s task as the simple bypassing of national pasts on the way toward transnational futures, they instead choose to trouble that particular trajectory that places nation first and globe after.
Frantz Fanon, perhaps postcolonial studies’ most iconic theorist, writing in the context of the Algerian war for independence, spoke of the “occult instability” of that moment, one in which he foresaw the nearly simultaneous triumph of hard-won national consciousness, its dying away, and its giving way to a global consciousness.2 Even in the mid-century apogee of anticolonial nationalism, nation already articulated itself in and to a notion of “world.” I take this imbrication of the national and the transnational, the local and the global, to be one of the founding instances of postcolonial studies. Similarly, if comparative literature finds an inaugural moment in the minute anatomies of national characters and national literatures popularized by such founding fathers (and mothers) as Taine, Herder, and Stael, it looks back equally to Goethe’s roughly contemporaneous elaboration of the expansively transnational concept of weltliteratur—texts that at once represented, traversed, and transcended particular national origins to inaugurate a literary version of global trade.3 That the rise of nationalism as a principle of differentiation coincided with a culture of cosmopolitanism in comparative literature’s history, just as the liberation of the decolonized nation coincided with the consolidation of a broader Third Worldism in postcolonial studies’ history, argues for a long historical interpenetration of nation and globe.
Earlier versions of this essay were presented in March 2000 at the “Comparative Literature in Transnational Times” conference held at Princeton University, and at the English Department of Brown University, as well as in April 2001 at Columbia University’s Southern Asian Institute. I am grateful to Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood at Princeton, Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse, Ellen Rooney, and María Josefina Saldaña at Brown, and Gauri Viswanathan at Columbia, for invitations to present this work and for generous and wise engagement with its substance. Brief portions of this essay were also presented at the “Peripheral Centers, Central Peripheries: Literature of the South Asian Diaspora” conference held at the University of Saarbrucken, August 2002, and published under the title “National Literature in Transnational Times: Achmat Dangor’s Kafka’s Curse and the South Asian South African Diaspora,” in Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diaspora(s), eds. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn and Vera Alexander (Weimar VDG, 2004). I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint those portions here.
The presence of the global in our past (and of the national, however fractured and rearticulated by globalization, in our future) reorients disciplinary history, shifting it from the diachronic line of progress to a series of more lateral connections in which the national and the transnational, the local and the global, may be seen to intersect, to overlap, and to serve as one another’s conditions of possibility. Certainly we do ourselves no favors if we so truncate the complexities of our disciplinary histories as to place ourselves in the position of having to learn, from the globalized present, interconnected ways of reading to which our disciplines have inclined us from their inception. This is not to say that in the face of the contemporary imperative to think globally, scholars of comparative literature and postcolonial studies should be content to proclaim “been there, done that.” If, like Benjamin’s famous angel, we are condemned to look backwards at disciplinary history as we are propelled forward into our disciplinary future, surely we may hope to learn something from that position.
To the extent that there exists an affinity between the concerns and rhetorics of comparative literature and postcolonial studies and those of a contemporary globalized world marked by the twin forces of nationalism and transnationalism, it is an affinity of method. Comparative literature and postcolonial studies neither prophesy the present moment nor embody it in disciplinary form. Rather, they share with it a certain imperative to recognize connection—be it the connection of nation to globe, of one national literature or cultural context to another, or quite simply of one text to another, as echo or allegory, repetition or rewriting. The world thus sketched is one in which claims of isolated purity or national distinctiveness give way to the messy, invigorating facts of cross-pollination and hybridization, interdependence and transformation. This essay takes that world to be as much a textual phenomenon as a political phenomenon, one that has not banished the category of national literature so much as redefined and rearticulated it. What is the function and form of national literature in transnational times? And how does that question begin to demarcate a new kind of comparative literature linked, on the one hand, to a set of concerns named “global” and, on the other, to a related set named “postcolonial”?
I will approach these questions by looking closely at a single national context and a discrete historical period—South Africa in the waning years of apartheid and the early years of transition—as seen in two novels by the internationally acclaimed white writer J. M. Coetzee and a novella by the less well-known Indian writer Achmat Dangor. Reading locally, I suggest, can also constitute an act of thinking globally. For insofar as the reading of individual national texts entails connecting them with times and places, cultures and worlds not their own, such reading weaves an intertextual web that is the literary equivalent of globalization’s famously interconnected world. The globalization of literary criticism demands that we work on two fronts: first, recognizing on a disciplinary level a long tradition of thinking nationally and globally in tandem; and second, identifying on a textual level the narrative strategies and reading practices that respectively express and exfoliate this imbrication of nation and globe. It is to the second project that this essay turns, seeking to find in the local case of contemporary South African writing a window onto the disciplinary formations and critical futures of comparative literature and postcolonial studies.
WORLD AND WELTLITERATUR IN LATE APARTHEID LITERATURE
The question of just how snugly South Africa fits into postcolonial paradigms is a vexed one, much debated in South African literary and cultural theory of the late 1980s and 1990s. By some accounts South Africa has been postcolonial many times over: with the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war; with the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and the birth of the apartheid state in 1948; and of course, with the historic elections of 1994 that brought Nelson Mandela’s ANC-led government to power. The obviously farcical nature of South Africa’s first two “independences” places an additional burden on the third, which must be not only genuinely representative of all national constituencies but also temporally decisive. If you listen enough times, as all South Africans who lived through 1990s did, to the phrase “the ‘new’ South Africa,” you cannot help but hear in it a deep and abiding anxiety, a rhetorical disavowal of the unspoken yet ubiquitous presence of the old. Perhaps we may speak then of “postapartheid” in a similar sense to that in which we speak of “postcolonial” or “postnational,” that is, advisedly and with reservation, ever aware of the difficulties and ironies of a prefixed “post” that prematurely announces the passing of a system of domination that actually remains, albeit in residual, reconfigured forms. These remainders include neocolonialism, neoimperialism, and multinational global capitalism for the postcolonial, the ongoing interpellative force and political presence of national identification for the postnational and racialized inequities of all manner for the postapartheid. Part of the burden of a literary-critical engagement with the South African literature of transition must thus be the learning of a kind of methodological oscillation, in which the parsing of newness goes hand in hand with the naming of oldness, in which the exploration of nationalist address goes hand in hand with the mapping of the transnational circuits that inform the nation.
Such a method seeks connection where South African literary criticism has historically sought division. During the 1980s South African literary criticism commonly distinguished two major strains of national literature: a “resistance” strain associated with Sipho Sepamla, Mongane Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, and others that reached back to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and also encompassed the flood of black protest poetry, nationalist prose, and realist “people’s literature” unleashed by the 1976 Soweto uprising; and, on the other hand, a “futurist” or “apocalyptic” largely white strain dedicated to imagining the end of apartheid and epitomized by such political novels as Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) and, in the different register of the parable or allegory, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986).4 To his critics, Coetzee’s penchant for allegory implied a concomitant refusal of the historical imagination, a refusal not only of the political here and now but equally of some nascent, struggle-born future. In Gordimer’s view the allegorical form of Coetzee’s early novels emerged “out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and the daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everybody else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write … allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock.” Even a novel like Life and Times of Michael K—whose story of a deformed, displaced, abandoned man actually names South Africa as its setting unlike the earlier Waiting for the Barbarians, with its nameless, placeless, ahistorical Empire, or the later Foe, with its similarly extranational geography of desert island periphery and English metropole—commanded Gordimer’s criticism for its contentment with the play of allegorical symbols and simultaneous “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions.”5 Gordimer herself advocated a realist mode for the telling of truth to power. Writing in the explosively riven South Africa of the 1980s, she claimed that the writer’s task “can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekov demanded: ‘to describe a situation so truthfully … that the reader can no longer evade it.”6
Coetzee, by contrast, abjured this compact between world and word. Speaking in the context of his 1987 Jerusalem Prize, he characterized South African writing as “a literature in bondage,” born of a situation in which there was “too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination.”7 Faced with what he would later depict as a choice between writing that, in its reliance on truth-telling and fact, sought a supplementary status to history, and writing that sought instead to itself rival the discourse of history, Coetzee proclaimed himself obliged to choose the latter. In a 1988 essay titled “The Novel Today,” he argues that storytelling (“more venerable than history, as ancient as the cockroach”) represents an altogether different “mode of thinking,” one with its own rules and imperatives, “its own paradigms and myths.”8 In what he calls “a parable, a mode favoured by marginal groups,” Coetzee goes on to catalogue the similarities between stories and cockroaches. Both are consumable, colonizable, catalogueable, ineradicable, even instrumentalizable as the stuff of revolutions. “You can even, if you wish, dry them and powder them and mix them with high explosives and make bombs of them. You can even make up stories about them, as Kafka did, although this is quite hard” (4). Though Coetzee refers here specifically to cockroaches, the ironic disdain of his tone perfectly captures his broader reservations about the political use of literature. In a striking assertion of the distinctiveness and autonomy of literary discourse he concludes that ultimately, “there is still the difference between a cockroach and a story, and the difference remains everything.” Coetzee implies that storytelling’s difference emerges at precisely the point where the play of discourse resists interpretative efforts to corral and catch it in a set of allegorical equivalences as imprisoning as the carapace that Gregor Samsa wakes one day to inhabit. If Gordimer’s model was Chekovian realism in the service of political change, Coetzee preferred the more Kafkaesque form of a narrative that does not record historical truth but instead offers a surreal, distorted, destabilizing version of its own—a version whose literary form exceeds its political purposes.
Though Coetzee and Gordimer have customarily been understood to mark opposite poles of a writers’ debate on the place of art in politics, for the purposes of this essay I want to emphasize a relatively minor but potentially significant commonality. In the examples I have discussed, both Coetzee and Gordimer reach beyond the borders of their own national literary tradition in order to represent the unavoidable national meanings of literary expression in the 1980s. Coetzee’s Kafka and Gordimer’s Chekov are thus the signs not only of a particular crisis point in the history of one nation and its national literature, but also of a broader transnational system that, as Goethe foresaw, links nations and texts together across geopolitical and cultural divides. The existence of such a “world system” creates a context in which any attempt to think the national cannot help but simultaneously route itself through some version of the global. Whether in Goethe’s model of the cosmopolitan exchange of the great works of world literature or in the more recent paradigm of the literary encounter of colonial texts and postcolonial responses,9 both comparative literature and postcolonial studies can be seen to offer a version of what I will call literary transnationalism. The remainder of this essay explores this transnationalism at work in three South African texts: Coetzee’s 1986 Foe, Dangor’s 1997 Kafka’s Curse, and Coetzee’s 1998 Disgrace. Tracing the migratory patterns of various literary references, I reveal intertextuality to be the modality in which literary transnationalism is written. (In other words, intertextuality provides the formal expression of a geopolitical condition of modernity shaped by bordercrossing). I do not mean to suggest that transnational form is simply layered onto a uniform national archive. Indeed, as the South African case makes abundantly clear with its richly polyglot, racially and culturally diverse population, it is the very internal difference of national identity that seeks out, perhaps even requires, the external form of an intertextual transnationalism. To write South Africa in the texts considered here, it also becomes necessary to write the world.
ALLEGORIZING APARTHEID IN COETZEE’S FOE
Foe allegorizes late apartheid through a pointedly unoriginal, un-South African story made to bear the burden of local and particular meanings. Foe’s reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) would thus seem to belong alongside Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1968), and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964). All translate the internal dynamics of a contact scene in which language, subjectivity, power, history, and culture are parceled out on one side or the other of a great divide (Odysseus and the Cyclops, Prospero and Caliban, Marlow and Kurtz’s Africa, Crusoe and Friday) into textual encounters in which the element that remained silent or inchoate in the original text now speaks back. But while Foe exhibits a properly postcolonial repertoire of strategic inversion, parody, destabilizing incorporation, and unseemly echo in its relationship with its master text, Foe also pointedly shies away from any imperative to give voice to the Calibans of literature. Unlike Defoe’s Friday, a Carib Indian transformed into an Enlightenment icon of the educable native, Coetzee’s Friday, a black slave from Africa, never speaks.10
Before turning to Coetzee’s representation of his Friday, it will be helpful to establish the broader intertextual relationship between Coetzee’s text and Defoe’s. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, whose title page announces it to have been “Written by Himself,” Foe is a narrative written by a “Herself,” the half-English, half-French Susan Barton.11 Like her namesake in Defoe’s Roxana (1740), Susan is searching for her lost daughter. In the course of Susan’s more far-flung travels she is shipwrecked onto an island inhabited by a man named Cruso and another named Friday. The island is at once familiar and alien, a textually uncanny place that both conjures and banishes the ghostly presence of a literary origin. Whereas Defoe’s island is a territory teeming with constructive and nominative possibility, an Edenic colony with Crusoe as its “Adamic monarch,”12 the island in Foe is utterly lacking in natural wonder, desolately bare of things to see or do, build or make, narrate or possess. Readers of Robinson Crusoe will remember how much time and attention Defoe lavishes on the description of the felling of a tree, its dragging, cutting, planing, and eventual transformation into the fences and fortifications, tables and canoes of the settler. By contrast, the scattering of “puny” trees that Susan observes on the island represents the diminishment of the luxuriant forests that stood ready for Defoe’s Crusoe and the refusal of the descriptive imperium they occasioned. There are only two sustained activities on Coetzee’s island: Friday’s fishing, which provides the mainstay of a monotonous diet, and Cruso’s stone-by-stone construction of empty terraces, the return of the Puritan ethic of Defoe’s Crusoe as meaningless busywork. The terrace-lined hillside awaits the arrival, Cruso tells Susan, of “those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed” (33). Cruso’s fruitless labor, like his reference to himself in the past tense and his refusal to admit the slightest changes into the island’s daily regime, render him representative of the political order that was beginning to have a sense of its own looming obsolescence in mid-1980s South Africa.
Foe expresses its South Africanness in unlikely places. It turns the blank territory of an unnamed desert island into a temple on which a familiar story of conquest and colonization is rewritten with all the tragic absurdism that late apartheid demands and a longtime student of Beckett might elect.13 With similar disregard for national boundaries, the novel raids England for a plot synonymous with the rise of literary realism and France for a poststructuralist narrative discourse that relentlessly seeks to cut Reality, Truth, and History down to size. To this end, Foe moves away from Robinson Crusoe’s dominant genres of travelogue, adventure story, Christian conversion tale, confession, how-to manual, and emergent autobiography, all of which merge their self-authenticating registers to produce novelistic realism, and instead utilizes the equally realist but explicitly feminized forms of the memoir, the letter, and a first-person narration far too anxious about the status of the writing “I” to claim the title of autobiography.14 Coetzee’s narrator Susan is of two minds about the utility of realistic description. While on the island, she exhorts Cruso to enter the realm of what Ian Watt calls Robinson Crusoe’s “concrete particularity”:15
All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway…. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: When you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word … (18)
Following their rescue and Cruso’s death on the voyage home to England, Susan takes charge of the telling and selling of the story and explicitly eschews such authenticating details. Her memoir of island life, addressed to the famous English writer Foe in the hopes of soliciting his help in publication, constitutes the first part of the novel. It mentions daily details largely to dismiss them: “There is more, much more I could tell you about the life we lived, how we kept the fire smouldering day and night, how we made salt; how, lacking soap, we cleaned ourselves with ash” (26). The second and third parts of the novel describe Susan’s effort to write a publishable manuscript. Like Foe, Susan realizes that “the island is not a story in itself” (117). But whereas he professionally proposes that Susan flesh out her skeletal story in a swashbuckling fashion, peopling the island (as the real Defoe did) with cannibals and giving Cruso a gun, she prefers to tunnel into its most secret and hollow places. This is the zone of Friday, the tongueless, voiceless subject of a story that Susan can never know yet constantly desires, a story she pointedly refuses to invent. Friday’s story finds its only expression in the opaque dream sequence with which the novel’s fourth and final section concludes. Coetzee’s Foe thus calls up Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe precisely in order to banish it or, more specifically, to banish the species of novelistic realism (fiction passing itself off as fact) for which it serves as privileged sign. Foe’s refusal of realism is consistent with Coetzee’s oft-criticized preference for a version of history that eschews the realm of factual truth and turns instead to the alternative space of art, in which history is rendered in discourse, as story.
Foe’s politics of storytelling are nowhere clearer than in the subplot concerning Friday’s silence. Defoe’s Friday, we may remember, makes self-expression the very means of his subjection, from the submissive gesture with which he first kneels and places Crusoe’s foot upon his head in token of his servitude, to his subsequent acquisition of an initial rudimentary vocabulary (“Friday,” “Master,” “YES,” “NO,”), to his eventual mastery of enough English to proclaim his undying loyalty when Crusoe eventually offers to return him to his native island. “You take, kill Friday; (says he.) What must I kill you for? said I again. He returns very quick, What you send Friday away for? take, kill Friday, no send Friday away.”16 Friday’s words are so clearly his, so marked by the syntax of servitude, that the text’s markings of “says he” and “said I” are practically unnecessary. For Defoe’s Friday, speech enables the issuing of a phantasmal invitation to rule, an effective conversion of the speaking subject into grammar’s and dominion’s object. By contrast, Coetzee’s Friday resists all efforts to, as Susan says, “giv[e] voice” to him. Her efforts to communicate with him through drawing produce only “a long silence” (70); when given a flute he plays only the same phrase over and over; and when she seats him at Foe’s desk and tries to teach him to write, his first gesture is to fill the slate with rows of the same hieroglyphic image, a human eye upon a human foot. In response to Susan’s demand to see the slate, he wipes it clean with spit-moistened fingers, converting the gaping hole of his tongueless mouth into the means of a second silence.
Faced with the South African white writer’s perennial problem of how to record the spoken discourse of black characters in such a way as to mark that speech’s difference without altogether exoticizing it as a species of, quite literally, local color, Coetzee in Foe chooses what Gayatri Spivak and others characterize as a Derridean aporia of silence.17 Reluctant to make the racial other speak, the novel refuses to enter the domain of black language, black history, and black subjectivity. For Kwaku Larbi Korang, Coetzee’s “eccentric allegory” comes at a high cost: the simultaneous production of Friday as “the limit term of a Western historicist script” and a desubjectified, deinteriorized, agentless entity, nothing more and nothing less than “the spectacular essence, the truth, of black victimage.”18 I agree that Friday’s simultaneous representation of the inaccessibility and indeterminacy of meaning and the highly specific meaning or “truth” of racial subjugation suggests a certain political untenability in Coetzee’s own position, caught between his allegiances to white books and the overweening historical presence of black bodies, negotiating, as Korang puts it, “an impossible transition from a transcendent Europe to a descendent Africa” (190). But I would like to pursue a somewhat different set of consequences issuing from Coetzee’s deauthorizing rewriting of the white book.
Insofar as Coetzee’s Foe unsettles its textual predecessor with what Homi K. Bhabha in his influential account of colonial mimicry calls “the menace of resemblance,” it is because Foe achieves a relationship to Robinson Crusoe that is, again in Bhabha’s words, “almost the same but not quite,” “almost the same but not white.”19 To seek the vanishing point of whiteness in a novel by a South African white writer is an interpretive gesture that goes against the binarized racial schemas of South African literary criticism. Is it precisely because Coetzee’s Friday does not speak that his novel of (waning) empire may be said to be “almost the same but not [as] white” as Defoe’s novel of (rising) empire? In other words, is Coetzee’s writing not white to the extent to which it admits into its representational orbit a species of black difference that is unassimilable to the codes and imperatives of whiteness, the codes and imperatives that produce such grotesquely distorted language as Robinson Crusoe’s “take, kill Friday, no send Friday away” or the “catch ’im, eat ’im” with which Heart of Darkness graces one of its two speaking Africans? I am not saying that Coetzee is a black writer or that he voices black opposition to a white colonial order; there is too much painfully material history at stake here to play with the fire of rendering race as metaphor. To read Foe through Bhabha’s formulation of a menacing resemblance to colonial models that is “almost the same but not white” is to begin to grasp the subjective location of a writing that departs from whiteness only insofar as it acknowledges its own irrevocable, yet by no means final, placing within whiteness. Foe can thus be understood as an instance of what Coetzee calls “white writing”—“white only in so far as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African.”20
In the transitional, translational space of Foe’s white writing, empire is made to confront a silence of its own creation, the silence of subjected persons whom it can neither hear speaking nor make speak unless they speak in empire’s own voice.21 What Coetzee refuses his silent Friday is that ventriloquizing or mirroring function that Defoe accords his Friday, the ability to so flawlessly internalize the ideologies and structures of colonial address as to himself perform them. Friday’s placing of Crusoe’s foot upon his head can only be a mirror-scene, a phantasmal image in which colonialism thinks it is seeing its other, but is only seeing itself. Colonialism sees itself reflected back in the projected image of an other who either willingly offers himself up for colonial incorporation (take, kill Friday) or else presents himself in terms of such radical difference that he cries out for rule (“catch ’im, eat ’im”). Foe’s silent Friday, by contrast, merely marks the spot of something the novel cannot even begin to imagine, namely, a third possibility for the relationship of empire to its others.
Coetzee’s foreclosing in Foe and other novels of what Gordimer called “political and revolutionary solutions” to the atrocity of apartheid has preoccupied his critics, perhaps obscuring the extent to which his allegories are historical. As David Attwell points out, though Foe clearly privileges signifier over signified, the act of storytelling over the (his)story told, “the signifier itself is localized in allusive ways in order to make this story of storytelling responsive to the conditions that writers like Coetzee are forced to confront.” The signifier of Friday’s silence thus contains for Attwell at least three distinct traces: “the mark of Coetzee’s unwillingness to receive the canon as the natural breath of life … the mark of history, and the mark of South Africa.”22 If Friday bears the mark of the national, his very presence in Foe is also enabled by what I have called an intertextual transnationalism. Like Susan Barton, daughter of an English mother and a French father, Friday is the strangely South African progeny of the England in whose foundational novel he first appeared and the France whose emblematic theoretician provides the hidden structure of his re-presentation in Foe. As the simultaneous sign of the national and the transnational, Friday’s silence embodies a specific kind of national allegory in which South Africa emerges, as it were, through its own absence, deferral, or displacement, perpetually shuttled to the side but never wholly erased.23
To read Foe as an allegory of apartheid is in some sense to read against Coetzee, who has protested “the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history” and repeatedly distinguished narrative discourse from materialist fact. For all their allegorical correlations, “in the end there is still the difference between a cockroach and a story.”24 True to its poststructuralist roots (or routes), Foe’s model of allegory is one predicated not on closing the gap between one thing and another, but rather opening it. That endlessly open gap repeatedly resists interpretation, whether in Friday’s nonreferential sequences of open eyes and written o’s or in the novel’s final image of Friday floating underwater in a non-narrative space “where bodies are their own signs.” His open mouth issues a stream that passes out of him, over the unnamed narrator, through the shipwreck, around the island, to “ru[n] northward and southward to the ends of the earth” (157). Taking distance not closeness as its mode, privileging the ever-expanding circuit of difference over the mirror of mimesis, this is allegory that constantly de-allegorizes itself. Just as the novel seems to approach the historical referents of South Africa and its pariah mode of governance, a self-conscious skepticism about the very possibility of referring in language to history waylays the structure of allegorical equivalence (the island is South Africa, Friday its oppressed majority, Susan the well-intentioned but ineffectual white liberal) and unleashes or frees a further set of meanings that are as wide-ranging, as unfixed, and as uninterpretable as Friday’s final wordless stream.
Of course, interpretive freedom is not at all the same thing as political freedom. Even if we admit the possibility of a metaphorical connection between the two, and even if we take Foe as a particularly effective example of that connection (wildly disregarding Coetzee’s insistent opposition of word and world, discourse and history), the fact remains that the novel fails to imagine the future. In this, Coetzee is paradigmatic more than exceptional. Elleke Boehmer’s insightful survey of the endings of late apartheid narratives by white and black writers discerns a common tendency to “shut down on tomorrow,” a “tailing-off, an unwillingness or an inability to comment on what might follow.”25 For example, the final scene of Serote’s To Every Birth its Blood depicts a woman in labor while Gordimer’s July’s People concludes with the white heroine, a survivor of an apocalyptic revolution, running toward a landing helicopter bearing undecipherable markings and carrying passengers who are either “saviours or murders.” Which of the two, we will never know. No less than Serote’s and Gordimer’s realism, for Boehmer Coetzee’s allegory also short-circuits, its “imaginative challenge … finally contained within end-stopped structures.”
Turning her attention to the emergent literature of postapartheid South Africa, wondering if “[t]he best one can hope for the novel in South Africa is that it will not remain so painfully impaled on that two-pronged fork which is history versus discourse, or reality versus fantasy,” Boehmer calls for a new kind of future-directed writing (53). She anticipates “narrative structures that embrace choice,” “stories that juggle and mix generic options,” a “freeing of words” and “loosen[ing] up” of writing that will invite “greater complexity, more exploration, more cross connections, more doubt” (51, 54). Writers of the period known as the transition, she concludes, will need resources “as broad as it is possible to have, for the metamorphoses that may unfold will, if nothing else, be unpredictable and astonishing” (55).26 Achmat Dangor’s 1997 Kafka’s Curse is a case in point, taking metamorphosis as both the metaphor and the mode of transition. Written by a longtime ANC supporter who returned to South Africa from exile in order to take up a position in the new government, and first published as the title novella of a prizewinning short story collection only three years after the historic elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power, Kafka’s Curse is animated by the clearly nationalist intent of representing the “new” South Africa. The transformations that the novella describes are both political (its cast of characters mutate endlessly across the historical divides of color, culture, and community) and textual (the narrative mixes idioms, forms, and genres from within and outside South Africa). Metamorphosis thus at once writes the new nation and, in its Kafkaesque debts and broadly connective impulses, returns us—just when we think we are most securely on national terrain—to the shifting sphere of the intertextual transnational.
TRANSITIONAL FORMS AND TRANSNATIONAL ALLEGORIES
Kafka’s Curse opens by portraying its protagonist, a Muslim man of mixed descent (“Javanese and Dutch and Indian and God knows what else”) as the victim of a degenerative, form-altering disease, the “Kafka’s Curse” of the title. Containing quite literally “the roots of another being … something struggling to be born,”27 he slowly reverts to a vegetal state and eventually becomes a tree (58). This living death is the final metamorphosis of an individual who was born Omar Khan but spent his life passing as Oscar Kahn, a white Jew married to the daughter of one of the finest English families of Natal. Omar/Oscar’s grandmother was born Christian Katryn into a poor Afrikaner (Dutch-descended) family but became Muslim Kulsum when she married. Omar’s white wife Anna, the victim of childhood incest perpetrated by her brother (who now preys on his own daughters), discovers yet another skewing of her family tree: her father’s secret relationship and child with a colored woman. Omar/Oscar’s nephew Fadiel runs away to live with Marianne, a woman raised on a small farm in the Orange Free State, the heart of Afrikaner nationalism, who has since become a bohemian, a doctoral candidate and, in her family’s eyes, a miscegenator. Omar/Oscar’s brother Malik, a devout Muslim patriarch, falls in love with Amina, a woman raised as a Muslim but now married to a white, ANC-affiliated Jew. In the novella’s surreal conclusion it appears that Amina, or some hybrid incarnation of her, may have murdered many of the men in her life, including Malik, just as Anna may have murdered her predatory brother. Nothing is certain plot-wise. Formally, however, everything is certainly mixed.
If Coetzee’s Foe is, in Benita Parry’s trenchant observation, “little touched by the autochthonous, transplanted and recombinant cultures of South Africa’s African, Asian, and Coloured populations,” Kafka’s Curse is everywhere touched by them.28 Its characters compose a nation made from transnational movements: the Dutch settlers, English colonials, and Jewish refugees who came in successive waves to the southern tip of Africa, and the Cape Malays and Indians who were brought by the global systems of Dutch slavery and British indentured labor. The narration of individual chapters from the perspectives of different characters, each multiply inscribed by the codes of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class, effects a polyphonic form that refuses singular, homogenizing, or omniscient perspectives. The narrative’s heteroglossia further extends to its incorporation of several of South Africa’s fourteen official languages, including English, Afrikaans (in both its white and colored versions), Hindi, and Arabic. In a signal example Marianne, the Afrikaner free spirit, speaks to Terry, formerly Tertius, like herself a refugee from Afrikaner culture. Terry peppers his English comments with Afrikaans expressions, driving Marianne to exclaim: “this afrikaans thing of yours, you know, every sentence juiced up with your favourite pampoenspreekwoordjies [country proverbs], it’s becoming too much. I’m really dik [fed up] of it.” Marianne, fully aware of the irony in her recourse to an Afrikaans word to express her frustration with Terry’s hybridized or metamorphosized idiom, goes on to imagine the reasons for Terry’s linguistic switching. Perhaps, she muses, he was
[t]aught this language with a precision that hurts, no verb out of line, no inappropriate adjectives, no plurals used to multiply single meanings, and an absolute must—never, never, get your genders mixed up. Anyone who used a “hy” for a “hom” or confused “syne” and “haarne” was given the cold-eyed third degree: it shrivelled you up inside and made you doubt your ancestry. Ja-nee, somewhere in this creature lurks a twisted Hotnot-tongue gene. So, like a child remembering those hateful piano lessons—this key for that scale, but the tone is all wrong, supple fingers wasted in their rigid passage over inert black and white keys—Terry delights in creating discord and clash in his language, a low-toned Capie English lit up by flashes of Afrikaans donder-en-bliksem [thunder and lightning]. (183–84)
This meditation on the undoing of a home language—performed in a novel written in English by an Indian from a Gujarati-speaking family—poignantly expresses the pain and possibility of transition and translation. Miniaturizing the method of Dangor’s text, Marianne’s description of the breaking of syntactical law mirrors the novella’s formal breaking of apartheid’s emblematically “black and white” law; a law that sought to keep ethnicities apart, languages separate, and communities firmly racialized.
If we take Benedict Anderson at his word, and accept an intimate bond between the imaginative constructs of novels and nations, then the interweaving of black, white, Indian, and colored characters and voices in Kafka’s Curse teaches us, through the preoccupations of its novelistic form, to reenvision the South African nation itself.29 Mixing up and bleeding together those same categories of identity whose minute differentiation in racial classifications and Immorality Acts constituted the very underpinnings of the apartheid state, Kafka’s Curse portrays metamorphosis as both curse and blessing, both the cultural wages of a history scarred by the unspeakably violent politics of purity and the future promise of a diverse and democratic nation. Such a vision flirts with utopianism, particularly when contrasted to the decade following the ANC’s 1994 electoral victory, a period marked on the one hand by official state discourse’s celebration of the nonracialist “rainbow nation,” and on the other, by the paradoxical recrudescence of differentialist ethnocultural identification.30 The challenge facing both Kafka’s Curse and the nation it represents is that of finding a middle ground between apartheid’s confining binaries of black vs. white, volkstaat vs. the world, and some postmodernist democratic idyll where the plenitude of endlessly mobile and mutating difference recuperates the schisms of a brutally divided history. Metamorphosis is Kafka’s Curse’s answer to this problem, its version of a politics of transitional translation or translational transition in which persons and texts can be seen doubly, both as the possessors of lives, histories, and voices firmly their own and as the agents of recombinant processes continually yielding something rich and strange. Kafka’s Curse extends its metamorphic mode from the crafting of individual sentences in which competing national idioms—English, Afrikaans, Hindi, Xhosa—are rendered contiguous with one another, and of plot lines in which family trees similarly hybridize, to the larger construction of national stories of markedly mixed origins.
It is to this task that the very first chapter of the novella turns, recounting a tale of star-crossed love that Omar/Oscar, a Cape Malay Muslim passing for a white Jew, once told to his white wife Anna. In its original form, written by the renowned twelfth-century Arabic poet Niz_m_, the romance of Layl_ u Majn_n describes a mad lover who allows himself to be so thoroughly consumed by passion that when his beloved finally, after several years of waiting, appears before him, he cannot reconcile the real woman with his idealized image and rejects her, leaving her to die of grief.31 Traditionally the lover Majnun is associated with the sterile desert where he flees to wait for his beloved Layli, herself associated with the fertile gardens of her father’s kingdom. Although “desert triumphs over garden” in the original version, as Julie Scott Meisami observes, in Omar/Oscar’s prescient retelling of the tale the reverse holds true.32 In the version Anna remembers Omar/Oscar telling, Majnoen is a gardener who falls in love with the king’s daughter, arranges to meet her in a forest so that they may elope, and when she does not arrive, waits for days, weeks, months until he eventually becomes a tree. In a subsequent chapter of the novel, narrated in her husband’s own voice, he admits to “l[ying] a little more than necessary.” Yes, he acknowledges, there are no forests in Arabia, and yes, no one in the original Arabic romance becomes a tree.
“So,” he asks himself, “what are the real origins of the legend? A trivial incident, sentimentalised and exaggerated to heroic proportions by slaves from India or Java or Malaysia to sustain themselves? A coping mechanism—that’s what you call it, no? It might have been African? This continent is fecund—yes, fecund—with the kind of foliage which gives birth to the secret lives that are the very substance of magical parable.” (21)
In this version of the romance it is not the Arab woman but the African continent that is associated with fertility and fecundity. Such a gesture typifies magical realism’s popular premise that the very nature of certain parts of the world forces the word to transform itself in order to capture their descriptive abundance and fantastically protean histories. Omar/Oscar’s voicing of the hypothesis that the legend “might have been African” appears to shape his story to fit a generic model first advanced by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, canonized by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and turned into a veritable industry by the Indian Salman Rushdie. But Omar/Oscar pulls back from this particular set of transnational affiliations and the style of national reading they enforce. If his wry allusion to an Africa “fecund—with the kind of foliage which gives birth to the secret lives that are the very substance of magical parable” ventriloquizes the metropolitan will to find magical realism, no less than national allegory, in the Third World text, his subsequent statement arrests that desire. “Making this tale African would have been too obvious. Everybody wants to make our little room theirs, make their destiny ours. It was Muslim, that much I know” (22). To make the tale African would be to nationalize it first in order to transnationalize it second. Read thus, Kafka’s Curse becomes yet another instance of the creeping spread of an expressive genre turned global literary commodity and the historical and cultural specificities of its local content become a mere footnote to the homogenizing sameness of its global form.33 As dangerous as the possibility that critics may globalize too much in their reading of national literatures, it is equally dangerous that they may not globalize enough, that they may focus so intently on the national character of these allegories that they miss their transnational cast. Once again, it is Kafka’s Curse’s contribution to find the middle ground.
Ironically, in Dangor’s South African novella it is the sign of Arabia not Africa that nationalizes. Omar/Oscar’s self-proclaimed “Muslim” tale intertextually cites an Arabic tradition outside South Africa that is also a powerful force in the Indian and Cape Malay populations inside South Africa. To say the tale is Muslim is thus tantamount to saying it is South African, part of a nation defined by the histories and identities of a diverse and diasporic citizenry. This transnational circuitry in the opening pages of a novella dedicated to the imagining of a new nation also in its way constitutes a metamorphosing, a conscious blurring of oppositional schemas that render the national and transnational, the local and the global, as one another’s antagonists. As a national allegory, Kafka’s Curse repeatedly requires transnational form, from the Arabic romance whose metamorphosized retelling fuels one subplot, to the magical realist techniques that inform the larger story of Omar/Oscar’s metamorphosis into a tree, to the implied historical border crossings that bring Afrikaners and Cape Malays, Indians and the English, blacks and Jews together to mix on South African soil. What Kafka’s Curse ultimately accomplishes is a boundary-breaking, binary-confounding instance of writing that declassifies itself, writing that is neither white nor black, neither myth nor history, neither nationally territorialized nor globally deterritorialized, but rather flits between being both, all, and none in the same moment and often in the same sentence. In this mobile address and double vision, the fruit of what I have called the novella’s metamorphic mode, lies its deepest debt to Kafka and all he signifies in South African and world literature.
In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proclaim their desire to free Kafka from his interpreters, whom they blame for reducing a truly revolutionary body of writing to three “themes”: the transcendent power of the law, the interiority of guilt, and the subjectivity of enunciation. In contrast to this interpretive focus on tribunal, self, and speech, Deleuze and Guattari insist that Kafka’s texts cannot be interpreted. They must instead be seen to function as “assemblages” of desire, marked, like all minor literatures, by the following: a minority’s seizure of a major language, free-floating or “deterritorialized” language, the “connection of the individual to a political immediacy,” and a “collective assemblage of enunciation.”34 In “The Metamorphosis,” a tale of Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a bug, or “A Report to the Academy,” a parable of an ape who becomes human, or the meditative reflections of an anthropomorphized canine in “Investigations of a Dog,” Deleuze and Guattari find that an identifiable subject of enunciation—Gregor, ape, dog—gives way to a nonspecific “circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming, in the heart of a necessarily multiple or collective assemblage” (22). This becoming or, as they also call it, “becoming other” is not an end in itself. For Gregor becomes other, breaks out of his mind-numbing social world of work and family, and, in their terminology, deterritorializes himself, only to die quite humanly from the grief of familial abandonment. Deleuze and Guattari read this moment precisely as Oedipal reterritorialization. Neither it nor the previous deterritorialization should be taken as the “end” of metamorphosis, they insist, for metamorphosis is less a trajectory from state A to state B than a ceaseless movement or flux between A and B.
In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin places Gregor within a larger Kafkaesque “tribe,” all of them “beings in an unfinished state … neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but rather, messengers from one to the other.” In the peregrinations of this tribe Benjamin discerns the symbolic presence of the law, “oppressive,” “gloomy,” and inescapable.35 For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the movement of metamorphosis names a textual process, not a textual meaning. Lacking a stable figurative meaning, “[m]etamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (22). I would not want simply to shout back “metamorphosis is metaphor” while waving a copy of Kafka’s Curse. But surely there is a need and a way to name how metamorphosis operates as a metaphor for national transition, how the becoming-other of Dangor’s characters describes that radical becoming-other which each South African citizen must allow if national culture is to emerge from the territorialized, classification-mad history of apartheid. Deleuze and Guattari’s model of a critical engagement that tries to free the literary text from its interpreters with their themes and symbols, metaphors and allegories, certainly lends itself to the South African context where literary criticism has worked in apartheid’s shadow, relentlessly binarizing, racializing, temporalizing, and territorializing cultural production into black writing/white writing, late apartheid writing/postapartheid writing, national writing/non-national writing. But to critically deterritorialize contemporary South Africa’s “minor literature” we must be willing to reterritorialize it. This is to say that there can be no reading of the transformative energies at play in a text like Kafka’s Curse without prior location of the national signifier. That these energies often route themselves through the intertextual transnational in order to return to the national suggests the necessity of learning to see neither the one nor the other but rather their moving, middle ground. For all the limitations of a theory of minor literature that largely dismisses the question of oppositional politics and relegates the Third World to the metaphorical status of a “linguistic zone,”36 Deleuze and Guattari’s focus on metamorphosis as movement nonetheless also allows us to begin to name a new kind of reading process.
At its best, this reading aspires to grasp the oscillatory movement of texts back and forth between the national and the transnational, the territorial local and the deterritorialized global. What bedevils such reading is the dilemma of how to read metaphoric meanings without claiming for certain literatures the status of metaphor per se. Transnational approaches to literary analysis can sometimes simply denationalize their objects, effectively decoupling texts from their national contexts and tacitly conglomerating them as instances of some version of the global, be it the curiously placeless, abstractly subversive concept of the “minor” or the equally amorphous “Third World.” Yet the assertion of a collective, protoglobal category like “Third World” can also reinstantiate a national analytic lens, as in Jameson’s notorious claim that all Third-World texts “necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory.”37 Jameson’s critics, exercised over his claim for a necessary nationalism to Third-World literatures, perhaps discount his rethinking of allegory, which arguably contains a more complex model for such literature’s simultaneous nationalism and globalism, particularism and universalism.38
Jameson distinguishes his concept of allegory from the traditional model of two sets of figures and symbols read in a one-to-one correspondence and ultimately tending towards a certain fixity and unity of meaning. Instead, he claims: “[T]he allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol … the capacity of allegory [is] to generate a range of distinct meanings or messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places….” (74). In the national allegory, a “ ‘floating’ or ‘transferable’ structure of allegorical reference” connects the realms of the public and the private, the national and the individual, the political and the libidinal in a set of equivalences that “are themselves in constant change and transformation” (78, 73). The body politic imagined in Kafka’s Curse, with its polymorphous sexual crossings, physical alterations, and multiple social and linguistic metamorphoses, well deserves the label of national allegory. But that label brings its own set of problems, foremost among them the suggestion that some literatures—Third-World literatures—are more national and others—First-World literatures—more universal. Ultimately, however, Kafka’s Curse finds a mobility in allegory that allows it to resist such formulaic equations in the writing of newness. Here again, Jameson’s theory of allegory provides a model. Arguing that it is only through allegory’s “complex play of simultaneous and antithetical messages, that the narrative text is able to open up a concrete perspective on the real future,” Jameson highlights dialectical movement as allegory’s central feature, the structure that most powerfully enables its writing of the future (77). As I have suggested in my reading of Kafka’s Curse, that movement is both temporal, linking the national past to the national future, and spatial, connecting the national to the transnational.
Literary transnationalism thus is not the denationalization or universalization of texts so much as a critical mode with movement at its heart, a mode that seeks to understand how and why one must sometimes look outside the nation in order to write its transition, transformation, and future. Deleuze and Guattari’s pointedly nonallegorical, nonmetaphoric version of Kafka provides one model of literary transnationalism, Jameson’s allegorical Third-World literatures another. A third, indigenous, example emerges from Coetzee’s reflections on Kafka.
Commenting on an essay he wrote on Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” Coetzee identifies narrative’s imperative to “create an altered experience of time.”39 This imperative has particular resonance in the South African context where, Coetzee notes, time has been “extraordinarily static” since the 1948 triumph of Afrikaner nationalism, which sought to remake history and the future in its own image.40 Kafka for Coetzee represents an alternative to this regime, an unprecedented inhabiting of language that yields a unique disordering of time. Turning his linguist’s eye on Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” Coetzee catalogues the inconsistencies of verbal tense and aspect that narrate a bunkered creature’s anxious anticipation of external attacks that may come at any moment. In the story, Coetzee observes, time moves differently: there are no “transition phases” but rather “[t]here is one moment and then there is another moment; between them is simply a break.” Constantly in a state of crisis, time exists as a “repeatedly broken, interrupted iterative present,” a radically discontinuous zone in which actions are not causally linked and history’s teleological plot is unavailable (227–28). Coetzee compares this uncertain temporal state of “The Burrow”’s bunkered animal to that of Gregor Samsa, who will never know how and why he has been transformed into an insect. “[B]etween the before and the after there is not stage-by-stage development but a sudden transformation, Verwandlung, metamorphosis” (228). Coetzee’s connection between “The Burrow”’s time without transition and the nontransitional metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa begs connection with Dangor’s effort to turn Kafkaesque metamorphosis into the very image of political transition.
Coetzee himself attempts something of the sort in Disgrace, winner of the 1999 Booker Prize.41 In contrast to the late apartheid concerns and strategies of Foe, Disgrace locates itself in the difficult moment of postapartheid South Africa. The novel seeks a narrative temporality that will be adequate to the task of representing this particular “transition phase” in national history. Coetzee’s protagonist, David Lurie, a onetime professor of modern languages and now professor of communications at Cape Technical University (formerly Cape Town University College), feels himself bypassed in the new political order. Dismissed from his academic position over a sexual harassment incident, he finds himself in the rural Eastern Cape where his daughter runs a small farm. By his own admission, David is far from the life he has spent in academia, “explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion” (71). Later, after his daughter’s farm is attacked by three young African men, after Lucy has been raped and David locked in a bathroom and set on fire, the perfective returns in the text’s description of David’s “tender” scalp, “[b]urned, burnt” (97). The novel concludes by describing the corpses of the abandoned dogs that David, with new-found sympathy, for the suffering of others, has put to sleep and then incinerated—“burnt, burnt up” (220).
In the task of writing the transitional phase of a “new” South Africa, Coetzee does not turn to Kafka’s repeated iterative present nor to the prophetic future of nationalism which, in Fanon’s description, “stops short, falters, and dies away on the day independence is proclaimed.”42 Coetzee instead employs the perfective, the tense that at once belongs to the past and calls its finality into question. Apartheid in Disgrace is an action not yet carried through to its conclusion. Transition is the moment that lives the difference between the apartheid “then” and the postapartheid “now” as a break, a discontinuity between states of being rather than an either/or choice between the prefigurative fulfillment of an anticipated identity and the burial of an obsolete one. So David’s “burned, burnt” scalp slowly grows hair although his scars remain, and the pathos of the final image of the dogs “burnt, burnt up” by a loving hand coexists with Lucy’s decision to bear the biracial child of her rapist. With a nod to the Gramscian epigraph of Gordimer’s July’s People (“the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms”), Disgrace ends by oscillating between times and states, death and birth, the past of the completed perfective and the unknown yet hopeful future to come.
Although Coetzee’s sparse, minimalist prose and Dangor’s lush and hallucinatory magical realism could not be more different, their common roots in Kafka’s syntactic and symbolic universe make them twin representatives of what I have termed the intertextual transnationalism of national literature. Read through Coetzee’s reading of Kafka, Kafka’s Curse emerges as a national allegory of political transition that is also a particular kind of temporality, one that does not move forward in what Coetzee calls “the smooth course of narrative development” so much as veer back and forth in the oscillation “between then and now,” an oscillation, he adds, that “is always a break.”43 This movement, for Coetzee the hallmark of metamorphosis, reconceptualizes the political moment of transition not as history’s vaunted “end” but as a rupture in progressive temporality altogether. In this regard, Kafka’s Curse gives up on the comforts of the teleological plots of history and fiction, of national reigns and generic evolutions. In their place it constructs a more lateral set of connections through which to map not the national rise of the novel but its transnational spread, not the forward movement of the nation but the more shifting psychic, social, sexual, and linguistic passages of its citizens across the divides of their past in that moment of national emergence described by Fanon as a zone of “occult instability.”
The double placing of Kafka’s Curse (or of Foe and Disgrace), as an instance of minor literature within national literature as well as a product of a transnational circuitry of literary influence, carries a further lesson.44 The temporal location of Kafka’s Curse in South Africa’s putatively nonracial, postapartheid present might, if we let it, instruct us to read it as a text whose fundamental concern is newness. The novella’s hybrid thematics and transnational patterns (would thus seem to) trumpet forth such categories of disciplinary renewal as the much vaunted “hybridity” that appears to rescue postcolonial studies from the charges of nationalist thinking, or the “transnationalism” that would save comparative literature from the calcifications of nation-based analysis. I began this essay by suggesting that disciplinary history does not sanction this reading. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of disciplinary presentism, and if we are to read in the literary texts of today something more than an unanchored, free-floating “newness,” we might consider taking metamorphosis as our theoretical guide. In the shifting forms of Kafka’s Curse lies an invitation to envision a practice of movement or critical metamorphosis that, rather than seeking out a place for comparative literature and postcolonial studies to go (the transnational, hybrid future), would instead apprehend the possibilities of disciplines that once again, as in their founding moments, shuttle across and between the spaces of the national and the transnational, the local and the global, the particular and the hybrid. Seeking to articulate a sense of national identity through a distinctly transnational ideology of literary form, Kafka’s Curse proposes the intertextual transnational as a species of literary hybridity. Such hybridity changes the form of national fiction as much as that of the national subject. Protean, moving, metamorphosing, this national story and the selves it depicts recounts “something struggling to be born” (58) that more than a tree within a man, might just well be the transnational nation.
1. Anthony D. King, “Introduction,” Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. King (Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton Press, 1991), p. ix.
2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 227.
3. For a sampling of Goethe’s fragmentary accounts of the ideal of weltliteratur, see Goethe, “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature,” in Comparative Literature: The Early Years, eds. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philip Rhein (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 3–11. For critical explications of the ideal, see: Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949); John Pizer, “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization,” Comparative Literature 52(3), Summer 2000, pp. 213–27; and my two essays, “World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium,” Symplok_ 9(1–2), 2001, pp. 15–43; and “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41(1), 2004, pp. 10–36.
4. There are various critical versions of this narrative. See, for example: Stephen Clingman, “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), pp. 41–60; Michael Chapman, Colin Gardner, and Es’kia Mphahlele, eds., Perspectives on South African Literature (Johannesburg: AD. Donker, 1992), especially essays by Mphahlele, Chapman, Green, Rabkin, Strauss, Visser, Ndebele, and Kunene; and Michael Vaughn, “Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies,” in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), pp. 50–65. A concise summary of the period and its racial and textual divisions can be found in David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 9–34.
5. Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee” (review), New York Review of Books 31 (February 1, 1984), pp. 3–6, rpt. in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Kossew, pp. 139–44, 139, 143.
6. Nadine Gordimer, in “The Essential Gesture,” in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), pp. 285–300.
7. J. M. Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 96–99, 99.
8. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,”Upstream (South Africa) 6(1), 1988, pp. 2–5, 3. Subsequent references appear parenthetically.
9. Peter Hulme explores this method in an excellent series of local readings in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1792 (London: Methuen, 1986). A more generalized presentation of the paradigm can be found in Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Stephen Slemon, The Empire Writes Back (New York: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion of Coetzee’s Foe as an instance of “writing back,” see Tiffin, “Postcolonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9(3), 1987, pp. 17–34.
10. Coetzee specifies the racial difference between Defoe’s Friday and his own in “Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987,” interview with Tony Morphet, Triquarterly (South Africa) 69, 1987, pp. 454–64.
11. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). J. M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Penguin, 1987). Subsequent references appear parenthetically.
12. Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as quoted in David Medalie, “Friday Updated: Robinson Crusoe as Sub-Text in Gordimer’s July’s People and Coetzee’s Foe, ” Current Writing (South Africa) 9(1), 1997, pp. 43–54, 44.
13. Coetzee wrote his 1969 University of Texas–Austin doctoral dissertation on “The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis.”
14. On the emergent realism of Robinson Crusoe see: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 60–92; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 315–37; and Maximillian Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
15. Watt, Rise, p. 29.
16. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, pp. 163–64.
17. In a review of Foe Dennis Donoghue trenchantly observes that the character Foe, a writer given to statements on the multiple meanings of words, “has evidently been reading Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie.” Dennis Donoghue, “Her Man Friday,” New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1987, p. 26. Several critics have taken Friday’s silence as the occasion for more substantive explorations of Foe’s debt to French poststructuralism. See David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing; Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1988); Michael Marais, “ ‘Little Enough, Less than Little, Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement and Change in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “South African Fiction after Apartheid,” ed. David Attwell, 46(1), 2000, pp. 159–82, 164; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/ Roxana, ” English in Africa 17(2), October 1990, pp. 1–23; and, for a forceful critique of Spivak, Kwaku Larbi Korang, “An Allegory of Re-Reading: Postcolonialism, Resistance, and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe,” World Literature Written in English 32(2), 33(1), 1992–93, rpt. in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Kossew, pp. 180–97, 183, 194, n. 8.
18. Korang, “Allegory,” pp. 188, 193.
19. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92.
20. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 11.
21. I take this to be a central point of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
22. Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, pp. 104, 105.
23. I provisionally distinguish this version of national allegory from that famously defined by Fredric Jameson, in which Third World texts find a fulsome equivalence between the fictional stories they tell and the story of the nation: “[I]t is this, finally, which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture, where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.” Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88, 85–86. I will return to the implications of Jameson’s model later.
24. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” pp. 3–4.
25. Elleke Boehmer, “Endings and new beginnings: South African fiction in transition,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, eds. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 43–56, 45, 50.
26. Boehmer’s vision of the future builds on ground laid by several South African commentators. In a widely cited 1990 address entitled “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” the veteran white ANC stalwart Albie Sachs called for a five-year moratorium on the saying “culture is a weapon of struggle.” The dictum, he claimed, had “impoverish[ed]” art, “narrow[ed] down” themes, “extrud[ed]” “all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic,” and “shut out” ambiguity and contradiction, effectively trapping a nation in “the multiple ghettoes of the apartheid imagination.” Albie Sachs, “Preparing ourselves for freedom” (1989), rpt. in Writing South Africa, eds. Attridge and Jolly, pp. 239–48. The black writer and critic Njabulo Ndebele similarly described a South African literature unhappily imprisoned by the demands of the spectacular, the superficial, and the slogan—a Manichean world of good and evil, black and white, worker and boss, that refused all depth, interiority, complexity. Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994). The white South African postcolonial critic Benita Parry urges critics of antiapartheid and postapartheid civil society not to forget the work of language, urging them to look beyond the dicta of “committed writing” to the intricacies of literary form, rich in all manner of defamiliarization, creolization, reappropriation, and subversion. Parry, “Some Provisional Speculations on the Critique of ‘Resistance’ Literature,” in Altered State? Writing and South Africa, eds. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, Kenneth Parker (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994), pp. 11–24. Also see Parry, “Black Writing,” review essay in Southern African Review of Books, December 1989–January 1990. For a parallel writer’s view on the need to envision a liberation of writing from the burden of political representation, see André Brink, “Reinventing the Real: English South African Fiction Now,” New Contrast 21(2), June 1993, pp. 44–55.
27. Achmat Dangor, Kafka’s Curse (New York: Vintage International, 2000), p. 14. Subsequent references appear parenthetically.
28. Benita Parry, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee,” in Writing South Africa, eds. Attridge and Jolly, pp. 149–65, 160.
29. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Although in its first South African edition (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1997) Kafka’s Curse appeared under the label of a novella in a collection that also included three shorter stories, the 2000 Vintage International edition repackaged the novella as an autonomous novel. Such marking of Dangor’s narrative offers a marketplace version of Anderson’s critical equation of novel and nation as necessarily linked forms.
30. This intensified sense of differentialist consciousness can be seen in the white Afrikaner Freedom Front’s campaign for a separate white Volkstaat throughout the 1990s; in the highly effective efforts of the National Party (the party that invented apartheid) to bring in colored and Indian voters in the 1994 elections on an overt platform of common linguistic-cultural and economic interests and a covert appeal to reject black affiliations; and in the formation in the late 1990s of a new parliamentary Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious, and Linguistic Communities. Proclaiming their distance from apartheid while preserving and retooling its differentialist imaginary, these initiatives are in sharp contrast to rainbowism’s image of a nation in which the identities of particular groups will be individually celebrated yet collectively unified. For a forceful iteration of rainbowism’s trans-ethnic consciousness, see Yunus Carrim, “Minorities together and apart,” in Now That We Are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa, eds. Wilmot James, Daria Caliguire, and Kerry Cullinan (Cape Town: IDASA, 1996), pp. 46–51. For broad historical context see Julie Frederiekse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990).
31. I am indebted to María Rosa Menocal’s discussion of the medieval text and its many derivations in Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 142–83.
32. Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 159–62. The trope of the garden in late apartheid and postapartheid South African literature probably deserves its own exegesis. Here I confine myself to simply noting the bare outlines connecting Coetzee’s Michael K, quietly gardening in the face of social abandonment; Gordimer’s musings on the poverties of allegory and the social and metaphorical possibilities of gardening in her review of Life and Times of Michael K (cited in note 5); Coetzee’s exploration of the garden trope in South African literature in White Writing; and the figure of Marianne in Kafka’s Curse, lapsed citizen of a dying empire who retreats from her family’s farm to the back garden of a house in the southern Cape, where she waters the plants naked and couples with her colored lover.
33. An intriguing alternative is suggested by André Brink, who asserts that the traditions of black orature have produced a peculiarly African (both black and white African) strain of magical realism. André Brink, “Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature,” in Writing South Africa, eds. Attridge and Jolly, pp. 14–28, 25–27.
34. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaia, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 18.
35. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” in Illuminations, pp. 111–40, 117.
36. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 27. For examples of this critique, see Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Samia Mehrez, “Azouz Begag: Un di zafas di bidoufile or The Beur Writer: A Question of Territory,” special issue of Yale French Studies, “Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms,” eds. Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, 82(1), 1993, pp. 25–42. In the same issue, Lisa Lowe finds a more salutary possibility, citing the theory of nomadic movement as a strategic, heterogenizing interruption of the binary schemas of colonialism, nationalism, and nativism. Lowe, “Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism: Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun,” pp. 43–61.
37. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” p. 69.
38. See Aijaz Ahmad’s well-known and forceful critique in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 95–122. Réda Bensmaia offers a contrasting model that is more attentive to the work of allegory in “Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories?,” special issue of Research in African Literatures 30(3), Fall 1999, pp. 151–63.
39. Coetzee, “Interview” and “Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow,’ ” in Doubling the Point, ed. Attwell, pp. 202–32, 203.
40. In the same interview Coetzee observes:
“I was born in 1940; I was eight when the party of Afrikaner Christian nationalism came to power and set about stopping or even turning back the clock. Its programs included a radically discontinuous intervention into time, in that it tried to stop dead or turn around a range of developments normal (in the sense of being the norm) in colonial societies. It also aimed at instituting a sluggish no-time in which an already anachronistic order of patriarchal clans and tribal despotisms would be frozen in place.” (209)
41. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999). Subsequent references appear parenthetically.
42. Fanon, Wretched (203).
43. Coetzee, “Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow,’ ” p. 229.
44. I do not want to elide the historical differences between Foe and the later texts. The literary strategy of intertextuality is differently available and does different work in a late apartheid moment as opposed to a postapartheid moment. What remains consistent is the basic function of intertextuality that I have sought to emphasize here, namely its connection of the project and practice of a national literature to the world beyond.