A riot of flowers

and happy…or at least colourful activities

greeted me as I strolled through the glorious Company Gardens on March 27, the day I arrived in Capetown. There were darker things too. Troubling reminders of what life used to be like here. Like these

two

benches.

Between 1950 and 1991 apartheid’s Population Registration Act classified every South African as belonging to one of at least seven ‘races,’ and accordingly granted or denied them citizenship rights on a sliding scale from ‘White,’ (full) to ‘Bantu’ (fewest). The classification was subjective, and families were torn apart when paler or darker skinned children or parents – or those with curlier hair (apparently as a test, pencils were placed in the hair and classifications were made based on whether or not it stayed there), or different features – were placed in separate categories.  For more info: www.sundaytimes.co.za/heritage

Incoming search terms:

• population registration act
• apartheid 1950

Needless to say, since arriving in South Africa I’ve been looking hard for First Editions of work by J. M. Coetzee. Got a very good deal on Disgrace and Michael K in Franshoek the other day. Purchased what I’m thinking must, judging from the publisher, be a fairly obscure title, here today in Hermanus.

Not a book by Coetzee, but Teresa Dovey’s The Novels of J.M. Coetzee, Lacanian Allegories, published by AD. Donker (?), out of Capetown, in paperback in 1988.

In her introduction Dovey provides as good an explanation of how Coetzee has used his fiction as criticism, – criticism as fiction – as I’ve come across. Her contention is that his oeuvre is a systematic, measured exploration and utilization of various known techniques and theories of writing. As she puts it:

 “…the novels constitute a profoundly unified body of work, despite the diversity of style necessitated by the adoption of previous modes of writing”

 …which would explain why Coetzee’s novels have, since the publishing of Dovey’s book, continued, over time, to become more and more experimental in nature. Despite wandering into a labyrinth peopled by the likes of Lacan, Kojeve, Derrida, and Paul de Man, Dovey’s book, from what I’ve read so far, contains a lot that is useful. Here are a few notes from the introductory chapter:

Coetzee deliberately adopts and adapts the models and theories that ‘lie to hand’ [to make writing possible], inhabiting them in a way that closely approximates  the Derridean strategy of deconstruction…just as Magda, narrator of In the Heart of the Country, puts it when describing herself as a hermit crab “ that as it grows migrates from one empty shell to another,”

Dovey identifies the following sub-genres inhabited by the novels as follows:

Dusklands: the anthropological/historical/fictional grouped together under ‘journey of exploration.’

In the Heart of the Country: romantic pastoral

Waiting for the Barbarians: the liberal humanist novel

Life & Times of Michael K: the novel of the inarticulate victim

Foe: the intersection of feminist, post-colonial and post modern discourses

The narrators in all of these novels help trace the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism and the forms of discourse which have ‘provided the legitimizing of representations of various phases of imperialism.’ 

Dovey tells us that it would be a mistake to claim that one has access to the novels’ ‘meaning,’ ‘via the ‘meaning’ of the Lacanian subject which resists reduction to a specific unified ‘meaning.’ Rather: the texts attempt to understand the necessity and the rhetorical functioning of textual ambiguity, and resist the mastery of interpretation.

“Coetzee’s novels” she says,

“deconstruct previous genres both in terms of their desire for recognition and in terms of the various forms of their failure to acknowledge the responsibility for the discourse of the Other in themselves. Coetzee’s novels themselves do make this acknowledgement of the discourse of the Other, but are articulated around the necessity and the impossibility of ‘forgiving’ this discourse.”

(A tad rich this sauce…however I’m assuming it will become more digestible upon further reading)

On the paradoxes of the Lacanian ‘split’ subject: Dovey quotes Robert Con Davis: ‘the split indicates a fundamental division in the psychic life, in selfhood, and even within the things we know. “In literary studies, it is a permanent division between within the text and narration.”

Magda speaks for all of Coetzee’s narrators when she says ‘I create myself in the words that create me.’

Dovey then goes on to discuss the master/slave dialectic, the Whites’ hollow mastery and the desire for recognition in which Coetzee’s novels have their genesis; Lacan’s Mirror Stage in which the infant’s first perception of identity is an alienating image of itself; self as subject and object, and the struggle for recognition in ‘intersubjective’ relationships; I and You and living among people without reciprocity, seeking in speech intimacy and response from others; literary texts as gestures of mastery, or gestures of submission to the mastery of the reader as Other; temporality, the ‘what’ of a text as an effect of the ‘how, when and why’ of its telling, aphanesis, psychoanalysis…

All manner of inconclusive yet interesting concepts and ideas about Coetzee will it seems be raised in this book. As with much that is French, I expect fruitful, if frustrating reading.

Incoming search terms:

• coetzee deconstruction
• déconstruction et coetzee
• in the heart of the country coetzee and lacan

Picked up a rather tatty copy yesterday of British historian G.M. Trevalyan’s Autobiography and other Essays (published in 1949), here

in

Kleinmond, about a two hour drive from Capetown.

From it, this:

“Guided therefore from my own experience I submit that the element of emotion, of imaginative sympathy with the actual passions of the past, may on some occasions enter into the historian’s narrative, because there is no other way of making those feelings live again for the modern reader. The past was full of passion, the motive of great doings, great virtues, great crimes. Can those passions, now long cold and dead, be fully understood and realized without occasional sympathetic warmth in the modern historian? I don’t deny the dangers of such warmth, but is there not a danger to truth in a perpetual aloofness that never permits the historian to go down among the men and women of the past as one of themselves?

The ideal history, never yet written by any man, would so tell the tale of the Civil War that the reader would not only grasp with his mind but would warmly feel in his heart what Cavaliers and Roundheads respectively felt, and would also understand what they none of them understood. The ideal history requires indeed a more various combination of qualities of heart and of head, of science and of art than any other sturdy undertaken by man. No wonder there has never been the perfect historian. His functions have to be put into commission. There have to be various kinds of history.”

Picked up a copy of The Notebooks of Samuel Butler here

last week. Here’s Samuel on Literary Sketch-Books:

"The true writer will stop everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop everywhere and anywhere to sketch. I do not see why an author should not have a sale of literary sketches, each one short, slight and capable of being framed and glazed in small compass. The would make excellent library decorations and ought to fetch as much as an artist’s sketches. They might be cut up in suitable lots, if the fashion were once set, and many a man might be making provision for his family at odd times with his notes as an artist does with his sketches."

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• writing the literary sketch

Read Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled on the plane down to Cape Town last week. Here are his three golden poetry reading and writing rules:

1. Take your Time. You can never read a poem too slowly…constantly reread them and feel their rhythm and balance and shape. Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whiskey. ‘Verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile.’ ‘Always try to read verse out loud.’ ‘We are perhaps too used to the kind of writing that contains a single message. We absorb the message and move on to the next sentence. Poetry is an entirely different way of using words and I cannot emphasize enough how much more pleasure is to be derived from a slow, luxurious engagement with its language and rhythms.’

2. Never worry about ‘meaning’ when you are reading poems…[they] are not crossword puzzles: however elusive and ‘difficult’ the story or argument of a poem may seem to be and however resistant to simple interpretation, it is not a test of your intelligence and learning…

3. As you learn new techniques and methods for producing lines of verse, practise them all the time. Doodle with words.

Incoming search terms:

• 10 rules for reading poetry
• poetry reading rules
• rules for reading poetry

Collectors Treasury is housed in an eight storey building in downtown Johannesburg South Africa. It boasts a stock of over three quarters of a million used, out of print and rare books and over two hundred and fifty thousand records. Started as a family business 30 years ago, it still trades as such.

It is the only store 1′ve seen so far that comes anywhere near close in size to King’s in Detroit. Here are the a

political

shots

Here is the political

Speaking of which, stay tuned for a post on the disconcerting good fortunes of Jacob Zuma.