Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2009"

Slow man and the real : a lesson in reading and writing

Abstract: Summary This article addresses the problems of reading Slow Man (Coetzee 2005) through tracking its engagement with various levels of the real as well as its representation of the complex relationship between author, narrator and character. The real difficulty that besets the writer trying to produce a story from an inchoate idea is explored through the concept of substitution, one of the hermeneutic keys that structure the novel. Thus I examine the continuous slippage between the “real” and representation. The novel's turning of itself inside out is read, like Rachel Whiteread's sculpture, “House”, as an absence-as-presence that also points to its overt engagement with photography.

Coetzee in/and Afrikaans

Abstract: Summary This article investigates Coetzee's complex attitudes towards the Afrikaans language, and, by extension, his views on language, translation, and the potential and performative subject positions, or “fictions of the”–enacted in and determined by a given language. It reflects on relevant passages from Coetzee's criticism (including “Achterberg's ‘Ballade van de Gasfitter’”, “Emerging from Censorship”, “What is a Classic?”, and “He and His Man”) and fiction (including In the Heart of the Country, Boyhood, Youth and Diary of a Bad Year). Partly concerned with the (auto)biographical, this essay also explores the idea of embarrassment (rather than the more frequently discussed shame) as a key affect in Coetzee's oeuvre.

Examining the Servant's Subversive Verbal and Non-Verbal Expression in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Abstract: Summary The power struggle between Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) is one based in language. While the matriarch's perspective dominates the novel, thereby presumably silencing Agaat, the servant-cum-nurse employs alternative methods of communication, or mimetic gestures, to undermine Milla's point of view. Through verbal and non-verbal measures, Agaat attempts to counteract the dying woman's story. While these communicative measures rely on their finely nuanced and insidious attributes to function, they contain an essential ambivalence, as the controlling white woman never understands the full implications of her rejected child's communication.

Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain: On Translating Agaat

Abstract: Summary This essay attempts an after-the-fact reflection on the process of translating a complex literary text, Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat. Central to the essay is the question of whether a translation should “foreignise” or “domesticate” the text, or as Umberto Eco puts it: “should a translation lead the reader to understand the linguistic and cultural universe of the source text, or transform the original by adapting it to the reader's cultural and linguistic universe?” Although it is impossible to opt for either of these positions exclusively, this essay inclines towards the former, and attempts to demonstrate from the translation of Agaat both the difficulties of negotiating a transition between two cultures, and its rewards. If much of the original culture is inevitably lost, especially where the language is itself strongly culture-specific, the translation may also gain something by its immersion in the receiving culture, establishing revitalising links with a whole new context.

Intimate Enemies: A Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel Heyns about Agaat and its Translation into English

Abstract: Leon de Kock: Michiel, every translation has a feel about it. How did this one feel for you? Michiel Heyns: Much of the time I was stimulated, and occasionally I had to ask Marlene what she meant. As you know, Marlene's Afrikaans is not just a matter of redoing the old thing, and that was sometimes strenuous, but by and large--I'm generalising now from the experience of seven months--it was stimulating, exciting, and very seldom boring. I round it a great experience, and I think I had a very good working relationship with Marlene. I felt I could always ask her things when really in doubt. We lived about 20 km apart, and we'd meet once a week, or once a fortnight, to have an afternoon session, followed by a meal, perhaps. LdK: How would you characterise this translation? The level of co-authorship, the eo-translation here seems to be quite marked, as it was with Triomf. In such a case, I sometimes wonder whether one is beginning to talk about something more than just translation. MH: Yes, it's a collaboration; I suppose you did the same in Triomf--we attributed copyright for the translation to both of us, because Marlene had a huge share in the translation. Yes, it's not a matter of me sitting alone translating, and then presenting it to Marlene; there was an interaction all the time. I'm looking for a word for this ... Marlene van Niekerk: Co-creativity ... MH: Yes. It gave me perhaps an inkling of something you said yesterday, Leon [at Boekehuis in Johannesburg]--that sense of freedom, that I could sometimes exceed the limit because I'd checked with Marlene, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd simply been working on my own. LdK: Yes, that's the other side of my notion that you should "never translate anyone but a dead author"; (1) you have more freedom this way, whereas if you were translating a dead author, you wouldn't dare. MH: No, you would not if you honoured his memory. This is where your word "licence" comes in, in a sense, because the author can give you licence; of course the author can also deny you licence, but in this case usually the "licentiousness" that you also talked about yesterday, was indeed licensed by Marlene, so that gives one a kind of freedom. MvN: I felt that Michiel brought a whole lot of his structures and machinery of erudition to the text, took it into his structures and machinery, and, ja, I felt it was entirely gerymd. It was at some points quite explorative in its sentences and quite improvisational in its development of certain thoughts, and I thought, well, fine. If you put it into another machinery of erudition, and creativity, you'll get something that works, and I was comfortable with it because I felt it was gerymd. What is the word I'm looking for? LdK: Congruent? MvN: Congruence. Concomitant. LdK: I felt that congruence. [To MH:] You got me reading T.S. Eliot this morning, the "Four Quartets", and I felt the congruence, knowing Agaat, in the strains of "time future" and "time present". MH: Yes, and "in my beginning is my ending and in my ending is my beginning", which is an accurate description of the structure of the novel.... LdK: ... so, in a sense, it was similar to what happened in Triomft; the English version is slightly different and it's slightly, an extended version, almost ... MH: I think something potentialised. It was there to be brought out. So it's not as if you're imposing something on the original; you take a hint from the original and expand it; and because you're working in a different language and it has a different cultural tradition, you can draw on that. As I said yesterday, I hope I'm not violating the work, but I'm pleased to hear you say you also found it, reading the "Four Quartets"; it resonates for me with this novel. LdK: I love that phrase "machinery of erudition", because that's what writing is about, and it's quite unique to see this level of cooperation between two living South African writers, writing out of different languages and creating this one work, which is now . …

The Authority of Presence: Reading Judith Todd's Through the Darkness as Diary

Abstract: Summary Judith Todd's Through the Darkness (2007) is an account of her life in Zimbabwe since independence and is constructed from notes and letters written over the years. The article addresses the implications of Todd's narrative method which at times reads like a diary with the disjunctions, passing references, and more considered observations that characterise the diary as a narrative form. The article argues that these disjunctions convey something of the details of the lived life with its often random thoughts, expected and unexpected encounters, setbacks and achievements and that these slowly begin to be set against the growth of totalitarianism in Zimbabwean politics. Todd's narrative allows her to record slowly, becoming aware of how ruthlessly the party will enforce its authority and how totally it will contain and then eliminate everything that it regards as dissidence. Only by using the narrative method that she has used is Todd able to convey not only her slow disillusionment but to speak wit...

J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language

Abstract: Summary In this article, with particular reference to Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980]2000) and Disgrace (1999), I explore the ways in which Coetzee's texts confront the difficulty of bringing meaningfully into linguistic range that which appears without precedent in given language. The irruption caused by the not-yet-said has the capacity to disturb the assumption that a meaningful language, recognised and shared by addressor and addressee, is being spoken at all. Yet the enquiries set up in the worlds of Coetzee's fiction never end with the first thought that something may be beyond discursive limits, even in the recognition that the effect of subsuming difference under the homogenising effect of a dominant discourse can be just as ethically fraught. In the course of the article I suggest a link between Coetzee's ethical enquiry about the limits of language, and that of Holocaust writer, Jean Amery, in his book, At the Mind's Limits ([1966]1980).

Grondbesit in 'n postkoloniale plaasroman: Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat

Abstract: Summary Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004) can be read as a postcolonial farm novel which pays particular attention to the role of women, the representation of Coloured farm workers as well as issues relevant to landownership in South Africa. In Agaat the question of landownership is foregrounded when Agaat, a coloured woman, becomes the owner of the farm Grootmoedersdrift and when Jakkie, the only son of the white woman farmer Milla de Wet, returns to Canada to resume his work in ethnomusicology. Agaat presents a problematisation of the influence wielded by landownership on the identity of the farmer, as Milla, who dearly loves her farm, also claims the farm to achieve her emancipatory objectives as a woman. Furthermore, Jakkie's willing relinquishment of his claim to landownership contributes towards a problematisation of the identity formation of the Afrikaner farmer and his/her descendants in the farm novel. In contrast with the situation in the older farm novel, for Jakkie, landownership is no longer...

Introduction: The Power of Autobiography in Southern Africa

Abstract: Biography became an important method of reconstructing the past in Britain and America only in the nineteenth century and by the second quarter of the twentieth century it had, in radical circles at least, come to be regarded as inferior historiography. The cult of the great leader or the record of a person possessed of exceptional qualities may once have justified life stories but in a discipline that was becoming preoccupied with the movements of classes, races and nations, all of which could be shown to be the productions of history and which would in turn shape history, the individual, however outstanding, was interesting only in his or her typicality of some larger collective. Sociology and economics were history's natural disciplinary allies and few historians in consequence sought in literary narratives models for recounting the lives of the people who were busy shaping the pasts that the historians were reconstructing. In practice of course, although biography may have lost academic respectability among historians, it was produced as energetically and consumed as voraciously throughout the twentieth century as it had been in the nineteenth. As a genre--and this includes autobio-graphy as well--it satisfies the very human curiosity that we possess about other people. If we know or knew them as public figures, we look to biography for information about other selves that the public personae succeed in masking and if media gossip or their own creations have aroused our curiosity about them, biography or autobiography offers us the illusion of familiarity because the genres provide details of their lives as they lived them or are living them. The recent surge of academic interest in biography and autobiography grows out of the preoccupations of postmodernism which theorise the experiences of a world whose material realities as much as its ideologies call into question the teleologies of class and nation and in the southern African experience of race. As metanarratives of the past and the present are overwhelmed and finally subverted by a vast diversity of different experiences of apparently similar pasts and presents, we turn for understanding to the local, the particular, and finally the personal. If postmodernism alerts us more to disjunction than to continuity and registers difference rather than similarity, individual lives interest us not primarily because of their typicality but because of their distinction. Even while we register our interest in the particularity of lived lives, however, we cannot remain indifferent to the way in which those lives have been inscribed by the larger contexts in which they are lived and in southern Africa this preoccupation with context is more pronounced perhaps than in most parts of the world. Only the young, if they are very fortunate, have had no experience of a southern Africa that encouraged us to exist in our own minds and in the minds of others as products of region, race and ethnicity. And, in any case, wherever we live, we are never free from the pressures of global history. In one of the great southern African autobiographies, Under My Skin, which is largely set in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing ponders whether a forceps birth may have shaped what she was to become and then with sudden certainty pronounces, "I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying all over the world--that was important. How could it not be?" (Lessing 1994: 8). As the title of her sequal, The Children of Violence, suggests, Lessing was to register the influence of the violence of that and the following world war in five novels, and empire in its local manifestation, Southern Rhodesia, added another dimension to her experiences of violence. Lessing refuses to separate her individual story from the various historical contexts through which she has lived but at the same time as she sees herself as a product of war and empire, she insists on her particularity. …

Ruth in Marlene Van Niekerk's Agaat

Abstract: Summary Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006), which was translated from the Afrikaans into English by Michiel Heyns, examines the relationship between a dying white woman and her Coloured carer. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that the themes of (post)colonialism, race relations and gender dynamics are being explored; however, the means through which they are conveyed are through the complicated, distressing and moving relationship between the two protagonists, which exemplifies the relationship between white Afrikaners in particular (and by extension whites generally in South Africa) and Coloureds in particular (and by extension the racial other). Religion is a crucial aspect of the changing dynamics between these two representative characters. In this paper I examine the striking parallels between the novel and the Book of Ruth, particularly with regard to the relationship between the two female protagonists. I analyse van Niekerk's critique of supremacist religion, especially during apartheid...

Reading the Zimbabwean National Anthem as Political Biography in the Context of Crisis

Abstract: Summary The aim of this article is to render thinkable the idea of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe, as a political biography. Biographies are people's lives narrated by others. However, the act of writing the lives of the nation in the form of an anthem, and then projecting these experiences as epitomising the lives of the individuals within the nation, is in fact marked by a disjuncture. This happens because by their very nature, acts of narrating individual or collective identities should always be viewed as approximations of that lived reality. Furthermore, national anthems as wish lists are based on some selected themes deemed of national importance by others and not everybody. This problem is at the heart of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem as a political biography. This article argues that if it is remembered that the lyrics of Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe were composed by a literary figure, and selected and adopted by the Government of Zimbabwe, amongst other ...

Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo’s The Story of My Life

Abstract: Autobiographies are personal histories and stories of one’s life, and they tend to lay claim to objective truth. However, the “migration” of a personal story from the individual to the community, from the local context of its production to the global arena of reception is one that is fraught with contradictions. First, within the genre of autobiography, what should be questioned is the claim to the subjectivity of a single voice that constructs and accesses a single objective reality. Second, autobiographies or accounts of the self are also, in the words of Coetzee, “autre-biography [or] an account of another self” (Coetzee in Coulliee et al. 2006:1). Third, an account of “another self” can manifest itself in autobiography, through what the story teller has not included, or as a result of perceptions that readers bring when inter-acting with the autobiography as political and literary artefact. These different ways of writing the self in autobiography often collide with each other, resulting in unstable identities being codified in autobiography “Accordingly, auto/biographical accounts can function as sites of governmentality that produce sanitised subjectivities as well as practices that hold the promise of emancipation and autonomy” (Coulliee, Meyer, Ngwenya and Olver 2006:3). Autobiography can also “become the door through which the marginalized enter into the house of a non-familiar tradition of literature or culture, often irreparably modifying the genre in combination with other cultural forms” (Gready 1994:165).

Cracking the Code: Translation as Transgression in Triomf

Abstract: Summary This article has been braided from two main strands: first, my arguments probe the conditions that pertain to the project of literary translation in South African letters, both in the light of my own research into and observations of conditions in the field, and my own experience as a working translator, a participant in a domain that I regard as extraordinarily rich but also highly problematic. Second, the argument considers aspects of my own translation of Marlene van Niekerk's paradigm-busting novel, Triomf (1994, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2004), as a case history which serves as possible corroboration of my arguments in the first part.

J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of Africa

Abstract: There are two obvious positions in the polemics suggested by this title, which I shall begin by naming in order to open other possibilities. The first would be that in J.M. Coetzee’s writing the African subject or African humanity is under-represented and under-valued, and to this extent Coetzee’s work exhibits the mentalite of the settler colonial. The kind of evidence that is ready to hand for this argument would be that in Foe (Coetzee 1986) Friday is mutilated and voiceless; in Disgrace (Coetzee 1999) Petrus is a schemer who connives in Lucy’s rape; in Age of Iron (Coetzee 1990) the revolutionized youth and their mentors, Florence and Thabane, allow their war with the regime to become a war on the very concept of childhood. This position finds it regrettable that the novels tend to place resistance in question rather than representing it positively; where it is represented it is displaced onto faceless subjects like the barbarians, or marginal characters like Michael K. whose refusals are unrecognizable in terms that have any connection with the African experience of colonialism. Especially awkward in this view is the indubitably seedy figure of Emmanuel Egudu, the Nigerian novelist in Elizabeth Costello who manufactures authenticity by celebrating the ersatz orality of the African novel to sustain himself in the Western literary marketplace.

Mimesis, Memory, Memorandum

Abstract: Summary Memorandum: A Story with Paintings (2006b) explores the complex relationship between memory and mimesis. Written in response to Adriaan van Zyl's photographic realism, Marlene van Niekerk's metafiction provokes thought about the affinities between writing and painting.

Inleiding: “Om kommunikasie op gang te kry”: Die begin en einde van Marlene van Niekerk se oeuvre

Abstract: Van Niekerk's novels are characterised by the special attention that is drawn to the use of language. This article focuses on the ways in which the mimetic possibilities of language are investigate...

Writing a Life in Epistolic Form: Bessie Head's Letters

Abstract: Summary In this article Bessie Head's letters – mainly those published in the two collections, Vigne's A Gesture of Belonging (1991) and Cullinan's Imaginative Trespasser (2005) along with extracts from her letters quoted in Eilersen's biography of Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995) – are used to suggest that in these texts we have a broken or intermittent autobiography. As the quotations illustrate, Head's published letters (almost all dating from her Botswana years) demonstrate certain recurrent patterns: particularly her perceptions of social exclusion and the psychic strategy of surmounting these obstacles to make of them her vantage point from which to observe and evaluate the human limitations and possibilities of her time and place – but widely seen, hence the image of living “on an horizon” that she wished to invoke in the autobiography she had intended writing. Because of Head's relative social isolation in Botswana, the letters afford her the opportunity of constituting a self in epistolic rep...

“Born Out of My Ownself”: (Re)claiming the Self in Doris Lessing's Under My Skin, Volume 1, 1919-1949

Abstract: Summary This paper seeks to explore how self-identity is (re)constructed through the narrative act of autobiography in Doris Lessing's Under My Skin, Volume 1, 1919-1949 (1995). The paper argues that the authentic self is born in the process of narrative writing and that the self coexists with other selves that are a result of socialisation. It also seeks to interrogate how this process of identity formation is realised through the prisms of memory, history, culture and social environment and the unconscious self. The fluid or provisional nature of identity, and the subjective nature of the above factors will be critically examined in an attempt to better understand the nature of life narratives in the broad scope of literary study. Opsomming Hierdie verhandeling poog om die (re)konstruksie van selfidentiteit deur die outobiografie as narratiewe handeling te ondersoek aan die hand van Under My Skin, Volume 1, 1919-1949 (1995). Daar word aangevoer dat die ware self uit die narratiewe skryfproses gebore word, en dat die self en die ander selwe wat uit sosialisering voortgespruit het, naas mekaar bestaan. Daar word ook ondersoek ingestel na die vorming van identiteit deur die prismas van geheue, geskiedenis, kultuur, sosiale omgewing en die onbewuste self. Die veranderlike of voorlopige aard van identiteit en die subjektiewe aard van die bogenoemde faktore word krities ondersoek om 'n beter begrip te vorm van die aard van lewensnarratiewe binne die groter bestek van literatuurstudie. Introduction Doris Lessing's Under My Skin (1995) is an autobiographical text that, true to its genre, attempts to mark the identity indices of its subject, not only from time of birth, but from genealogical roots up to age thirty. The text delves two generations into the narrator's ancestry before it focuses on her birth and early childhood. It further explores the development of the narrator's identity through adolescence and early adulthood within the contexts of the family, settler community and the colonial environment in general. The narrative also critically explores the responses of the subject narrator to the various influences from those people in her life, the ideologies of her day, literary consciousness and the effect of the two World Wars. These are critical factors in the construction of the narrator's self-identity. The thrust of this present endeavour is to critically examine how the identity of the self is constructed both in temporal and spatial terms as revealed in this life narrative. The main objective is to critically examine the state of flux that is engendered upon the self in time and through time, and in different environments, by the various experiences that the narrator goes through. This is a particularly intriguing project as the volume under analysis covers the first twenty-nine years of Doris Lessing's life, and in spatial terms involves movements from England to Persia (now Iran), then back to England, to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and back to England. In between these major sojourns are trips to Cape Town, South Africa. Self-identity is always in the making, and how the self is negotiated and constructed in diverse cultural and geopolitical environments over a period of three decades calls for close scrutiny. Such a scrutiny of necessity must preoccupy itself with the critical question of agency, that is, how the subject of these experiences author and authorise her lived reality and self-identity. Lived experiences are subject to different interpretations at different times and in different contexts. The genre of autobiography, which is a product of retrospection, involves construction and reconstruction of lived experience by the individual who is the subject of the narrative. In doing so the individual subject will be constructing a certain projection of the self out of the many possible "selves" that can be drawn out of those lived experiences. …

“So-hede wat die tong uit die mond jaag agter benoeming aan, elke keer weer, tot in ewigheid”: Marlene van Niekerk oor haar skryfwerk

Abstract: Willie Burger: Milan Kundera is liefdaarvoor om te skryf, n.a.v. Bloeh, dat die roman moet ontdek wat slegs die roman kan ontdek. Die roman moet dus volgens hierdie beskouing nie 'n ondersoek van idees wees op dieselfde manier as filosofie nie. Jy kon die keuse maak oto 'n D in filosofie te skryf of 'n roman. Jy het (dankie tog!) die roman gekies. Wat dink jy kan jy deur die roman doen wat jy nie met filosofie sou kon doen nie? Marlene van Niekerk: In die eerste plek dink ek dat ek die skryf van 'n roman bo die skryf van filosofie kies omdat ek myself beter kan verras daarmee. Ek wil verras word. Die filosofietjies wat bokant Triomfhang, net soos die psigologietjies wat bokant Agaat hang is geblaas soos ou gloeilampies. As ek hierdie ideetjies in die instrumentele taal van die filosofie of die diskoers van psigologie sou moes opskryf, sou almal gaap en weggaan en se: Ag nee wat, kom ons vier die nag, kom ons steek kerse op en bedryf die liefde. Fiksielesers hou van die nag. Gelukkig is daar filosowe soos Cioran en Kierkegaard (+"diacritics") wat nagfilosfie skryf. Wat die pret, en soms verrukking, en soms iets soos "geluk" verskaf vir my as skrywer is om konkretiserings en dramatiserings van idees te versin en hulle dan half toeoe agter my eie rug in werking te probeer stel, "weird" klein masjientjies wat huile eie sout maal. Die konkretiserings (soos die Benades se huis wat raas en blaas en uitmekaarval in Triomf) en dramatiserings (soos die toneel waar Lambert die Superbee skilder) moet nie alleen die sogenaamde idees beliggaam nie, maar moet ook die karakterontwikkeling en die handelingsverloop en die ruimtebeelding "dien". Sodra hierdie meganismes van konkretisering en dramatisering so verselfstandig begin raak dat ekself in HULLE diens moet tree, dus agter HULLE begin aanskryf om te sien wat volgende gaan gebeur, dan is ek myns insiens op die regte spoor. Nie dat 'n mens nie uiteindelik moet kies tussen verskillende moontlikhede wat sigself aanbied tydens die skryf nie. So daar is 'n formele struktureringswerk wat moet plaasvind wat mens met die "kliewende dagbewussyn" moet doen. Ek is dikwels as ek skryf bewus daarvan dat ek in die verskillende ritmes en teksture van die dag en die nag meedein, of miskien verbeel ek my dit maar in 'n aanval van grandiositeit! Maar dis 'n troostende gedagte, die daglewe is die uitputtingslag, die nag is die tyd om jou in die afgronde te verdool. Soos in daardie lied van Brahms: "Uber mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum"; die boom waarin, by ons weliswaar nie die nagtegale nie, maar die tarentale, die dolle tarentale, deurnag louter liefde roep! Alles wat ek hierbo gese het is erg moeisaam geformuleer; regte filosowe sal dit veel meer gesofistikeerd kan uitdruk, want hierdie is ook glad nie nuwe idees oor die skryfproses nie. Ek voel altyd dat ek die verkeerde woorde kies as ek begin verduidelik wat ek doen as ek skryf. Ek, as kommentator op my skrywende self, weet nie ailes wat ek doen as ek daar in die warmplek van die skryf self verkeer nie. As ek hier antwoorde gee op jou vrae is ek nie op dieselfde plek skrywer nie as wanneer ek in die nag "gejaagd worden en als wolven jagen/achter de taal aan de tong uit de mond/... nergens wonen verdwaasd bivakkeren/tussen klanken van nachtelijke oorsprong" (Hans An&eus). Ek probeer trouens so hard as wat ek kan om dan nie alles te weet wat ek doen nie. Ek moedig myself aan om my sogenaamde idees roekeloos in die vuur en in die vloed van taal te gooi en agter hulle aan te spring. Ek gooi die vensters oop vir die bedwelming van die seringe in Oktober, ek speel musiek totdat ek in 'n soort beswyming kom, ek assosieer so vry as wat ek kan. Mens moet so half jou eie sjamaan word om in kontak te kom met die wolwe van Andreus. (Natuurlik moet jy dan soggens met jou redigeerstok die hare en die kwyldruppels en die gehuil na die maan bietjie dresseer.) Skrywers wat alles wil weet (of dink dat huile alles weet) wat hulle doen, is dominees of propagandiste en huile idees staan vierkant in die wei soos koeie van porselein. …

The Self-Invention of Hugh Masekela

Abstract: Summary This article examines the self-invention of Hugh Masekela as a troubadour of music and the frames through which the construction of the memory process is allowed to unfold. It argues that unlike straightforward resistance autobiography, Masekela's Still Grazing (2004) is an odd mixture of resistance autobiography, minstrel selfinvention, skollie impishness and the internationalisation of his self. This odd mixture hides as much as it reveals about the subject intent on an ongoing process of selfinvention. The text abounds with the celebration of Eros, debauchery and discursive manoeuvres of the exilic condition. In the process, the idea of national identity and crises is subsumed by the skollie metaphor to distance hideous episodes, which it craftily records and rationalises. In the true fashion of the skollie framing, the autobiography ends on a note of reform, borne by a serious confessional mode for past indiscretions and yet another reinvention frame as survivor of the ravages of time.

Double Entendre: Listening for Angels

Abstract: Summary This article is an interpretation of the figure of the double across several of J.M. Coetzee's works. It argues that the double serves principally as a metaphor for meaning and investigates the way in which Coetzee's works position themselves on the threshold of meaning, exploring how literary characters enter into, or remain excluded from, a world of discourse and representation. The peculiar and paradoxical narrative space Coetzee creates is one peopled by lives without stories, one where “life” and “story” or “meaning” seem to be mutually exclusive categories. Coetzee explores how lives ostensibly outside meaning become storied. This advent of meaning, or passage into meaning, I suggest, is also a metonymy for the passage of extradiscursive and extraliterary characters into history, into literature and into truth. By positioning his characters at the boundaries of meaning, and interrogating the “conditions of messengerhood”, Coetzee is able to express his ambivalence about the success or even t...

Long Walk to Freedom and the Mutating Face of the Epic.

Abstract: Summary The encounter with Nelson Mandela's voluminous Long Walk to Freedom (1994) in a vibrant post-apartheid society that is effervescent with the “Rainbow” identity and the “Renaissance” spirit, easily beckons the critical examination of such a work to establish its exact value and relevance, if any, to this post-independence state, Renaissance South Africa. To ascertain the significance of Long Walk in presentday South Africa, this article therefore first seeks to establish the generic family of Long Walk before exploring its actual impact in the era of its epiphany. Using the hypothesis that Long Walk is not only an autobiography but is also an epic, this article employs a comparative approach to highlight the epic qualities of the text, first for literariness and then for comparison with similar “classical” literary writings in other societies such as England, Italy and Mali with the view to foreground the text's primordial social function. The aim is to canvass for the recognition of this autograph...

Breaking the Silence: An Examination of the Single Mother's Voice in an HIV Environment-Tendayi Westerhof's Unlucky in Love

Abstract: Summary Trends have shown that writing is a male domain, and the act of writing alone is a positive development on the part of the woman. The writing of an autobiography by Tendayi Westerhof opens a new avenue on contemporary women's issues. The narrative tackles the challenges of single motherhood, career/celebrity experiences of a woman as well as HIV. Westerhof also goes a yard further by harnessing activism to her work. Not only does she offer a personal testimony, but she also takes the initiative to spread awareness regarding the pandemic and the vulnerability of women. Being HIV positive, Westerhof lends a voice to the voiceless women by exploring their experiences in a number of ways; through the conventional, ordinary woman/growing girl, the woman as a single mother, the woman and HIV, the woman in a mixed marriage and the woman as a survivor. Hers is a complex narrative which offers insights into the challenges that contemporary women face. She brings to the fore the stigma that is often associa...

The Writing Business: “He and His Man”, Coetzee and Defoe

Abstract: Summary This article explores the complexities of mimesis in J.M. Coetzee's Nobel lecture, “He and His Man”, discovering in the authorial doubling of Coetzee and Defoe, and of Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, a further doubling of mimesis without an original – which lies at the heart of what, in Coetzee's lecture, Robinson Crusoe calls “the writing business”.

'n “Paradise Lost”: 'n Ondersoek na swart arbeid en wit ongemak in stedelike Suid-Afrika: Marlene van Niekerk se kortverhaal “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit”

Abstract: Summary Marlene van Niekerk's short story “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit” (2001) confronts the ambivalence inherent in the legacy of Madamhood which is coupled with a post-apartheid sense of white displacement. This “small finger exercise on the notion of hybridity” offers a productive site to investigate theories of whiteness as an empty signifier and as a social construction. In this article, I trace manifestations of the reification of whiteness and suggest ways in which the narrative reveals the crises of whiteness and paradoxes upon which it is built. I argue that van Niekerk's deployment of layers of self-ironisation evident in her use of first-person narration, and the focalising perspective of the character “Marlene” allows her to examine her own duplicity in resisting and perpetuating normative Western whiteness inscribed in social narratives. This paper examines the narrator's multiple encounters with coloured and black domestic labourers and their white employers. Tracin...

Legitimising the Status Quo through the writing of Biography: Ngwabi Bhebe's Simon Vengayi Muzenda & the Struggle for and Liberation of Zimbabwe

Abstract: Summary Simon Vengayi Muzenda & the Struggle for and Liberation of Zimbabwe (2004) is a biography written by historian Ngwabi Bhebe in honour of illustrious Zimbabwean nationalist and politician, the late Vice President Simon Muzenda. The book calls for debate on the way it was constructed and its assumptions about the writing of biography and the larger questions concerning national identity and unity. Human society is differentiated along various variables such as social classes, ethnic and racial groups, gender, age and even geographical environment. Individuals and social groups hence are heterogeneous due to these variables. The individuals and social groups have differing, often conflicting, needs and interests and occupy different and at times dissimilar positions of socioeconomic and political power and status. These groups have values, opinions and attitudes towards other individuals, groups and the world that they articulate or express in literature and the media. These expressions can reveal di...

“King of the Amphibians”: Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee's Metamorphoric Fictions

Abstract: Summary This article analyses the multi-generic and protean formal properties of Elizabeth Costello (2003) in order to illustrate how Coetzee's experiments with literary form constitute a distinctive intervention in contemporary political, philosophical and aesthetic debates.

The Human Document

Abstract: Summary “The Human Document” examines the representation of reading in Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) as an amoral “conspiracy” or “breathing together” of reader and fictional character. Reading so conceived erases the difference between real and fictional persons, permitting a fluid and promiscuous interpenetration of experience that a reader, at the moment of reading, is powerless to refuse. This circumstance challenges the premise of recent ethical theories of the novel. These propose that the reader conscientiously agrees to bracket his or her own values or experience while reading so as to allow a full experience of a character's alterity unconstrained by judgment or other preconceptions. In contrast, Elizabeth Costello proposes that the reader's experience while reading precludes consent or any other exercise of free will essential to an ethical act. Reading amounts instead to the involuntary activation of a synapse between reader and character which challenges the reader's foundational a...

Challenging Aids Denialism-Khabzela: Life and Times of a South African

Abstract: Summary This article argues that the biography Khabzela: Life and Times of a South African (Mc Gregor 2005) repositions Aids sufferers at the centre of the current HIV and Aids debate. The article shows that, through the tragic representation of its subject, the biography advocates the supply of ARVs to prolong the lives of those who are infected with the virus.