Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace

Abstract

It is clear that decolonization, in its concentration on ‘process, not arrival’, and with its propensity to generate new cultural and political energies, embodies a host of ongoing challenges to given (colonial) cultural and epistemological boundaries.1 A fertile area of cross-fertilization thus emerges between the postcolonial and the Gothic, especially where the latter — a post-Enlightenment phenomenon — is conceived as less an unrestrained celebration of unsanctioned excesses and more an examination of the limits produced in the eighteenth century to distinguish good from evil, reason from passion, virtue from vice and self from other. Images of light and dark focus, in their duality, the acceptable and unacceptable sides of the limits that regulate social distinctions.2 The examination of those limits continues to prove fertile, and a fascinating locus of this interaction of the postcolonial and the Gothic is the literature of South Africa, which has a long history of treatments of repression, terror and the uncanny. Indeed, if the uncanny is accurately defined as the effect of ‘the irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual conflicts’, one might consider colonial South Africa, before as well as during the apartheid era, as an obvious place to look for instances of the postcolonial uncanny.3