From the Standpoint of Redemption: Aesthetic Autonomy and Social Engagement in J. M. Coetzee's Fiction of the Late Apartheid Period

Abstract

From the Standpoint of Redemption:Aesthetic Autonomy and Social Engagement in J. M. Coetzee's Fiction of the Late Apartheid Period Michael Marais (bio) During the 1980s, a perennial criticism of Coetzee's fiction was that it did not engage with the depredations of apartheid. Thus, for instance, Michael Vaughan complained that this writing downplays "material factors of oppression and struggle in contemporary South Africa" (1982, 126), and Michael Chapman attacked Foe for failing to "speak to Africa" and simply providing a "kind of masturbatory release . . . for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie" (1988, 335). Many critics have responded to the crude literalism of this argument. David Attwell's J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, for instance, is a sustained attempt to place what he refers to as Coetzee's "situational metafiction" in its historical context and thereby expose the nature and extent of its engagement with the realities of apartheid (1993). More recently, Derek Attridge has questioned the instrumentalist assumptions that underlie this critical debate by arguing that Coetzee's writing is aware of and sensitive to literature's singular relationship to an otherness which seeks constantly to enter and change the cultural formation. While Attridge contends that the reader's encounter with the alterity of the work must needs have a tangible impact on the lifeworld, he maintains that since the other in question [End Page 229] is always wholly indeterminate, literature's effects are "not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program" (2004, 4). Although I agree with the general tenor of this argument, I feel that one of the conclusions towards which it tends, namely that we need "no Coetzee to tell us that the white world's subjection of other races has been brutal and dehumanizing" (30), risks disregarding the urgent desire to engage with precisely the brutalisation of life under apartheid that is self-reflexively articulated in Coetzee's fiction of this period. In this paper, I trace the expression of this desire in Life & Times of Michael K, Foe and Age of Iron. Drawing on Adorno's aesthetic theory, whose relevance to an understanding of the resistive nature of Coetzee's writing has been noted by Neil Lazarus (1987), I show that, for Coetzee, the literary work's capacity to engage with its context is not simply a given, a matter of the author's political proclivities. If it is to criticise society and to suggest the possibility of a better world, the work must wrest itself from the very domain in which it is ineluctably located. Finally, I relate the ontogenetic anxiety that is a feature of Coetzee's writing of this period to his attempt to negotiate this apparent aporia. Coetzee's self-reflexive preoccupation with the literary representation of violence is arguably most evident in Age of Iron. Alluding as it does to the violence which, in Hesiod's account in Works and Days, is a feature of "the age of the iron race" (1983, 103–4), this novel's very title indicates a concern with the damaged nature of life in apartheid society. On a number of occasions, the protagonist, Mrs Curren, even suggests that the spiritual deformation of South Africans by the social and political structures of apartheid has a physical corollary. "How ugly we are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves!" she exclaims at one point (1990, 121). And when Mr Thabane shows her the spectacle of state-instigated violence in Guguletu, she remarks as follows on its effect on him: "His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts" (1990, 95). The material existence of this novel, of course, attests to an aesthetic concern with such violence, degradation, and suffering. Indeed, in the Guguletu scene to which I have just referred, this concern is self-reflexively staged when Mr Thabane insists that Mrs Curren represent the violence and suffering that she has witnessed:1 "When you see a crime being committed in front of your eyes, what do you say? . . . What sort of crime [End Page 230] is it...