coetzee’s estrangement

7/29/2019 Coetzees Estrangement

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Coetzees Estrangement

David Attwell

University of York

Now that it is over and done with, that life-time labour of writing,

she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool

enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her

books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as

clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place.

(Elizabeth Costello 207)

Seen from the outside as a historical specimen, I am a late

representative of the vast movement of European expansion that

took place from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century

of the Christian era, a movement that more or less achieved its

purpose of conquest and settlement in the Americas and

Australasia, but failed totally in Asia and almost totally in Africa.

I say that I represent this movement because my

intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

I am also a representative of the generation in South

Africa for whom apartheid was created, the generation that was

meant to benefit most from it.

What the correct relationship ought to be between a

representative of this failed or failing colonial movement, with

this history of oppression behind it, on the one hand, and the part

of the world where it sought and failed to establish itself and the

people of that part of the world on the other hand, is the subject

of your question .

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has

been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more

productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in

abstract terms.

When I say I have lived out the question I mean I have

lived it out not only in day to day life but in my fiction as well.

(Interview, Dagens Nyeter 7 December, 2003.)


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I

Ill begin with J.M. Coetzees Slow Man which, despite being the first of

Coetzees fictions to be set wholly in Australia, carries the marks of the authors

formation in South Africa. In is a prejudicial preposition, however, because I will

argue in fact that this formation came about because of Coetzees estrangementfrom the

country. In reading estrangement, I will rely on Nancy Ruttenbergs recent brilliant

analysis of Fyodor Dostoevskys fictionalised memoir based on his prison experience,

Notes from the House of the Dead. Estrangement is understood both in terms of place

and of aesthetics, both positionality and representation. By place I do not refer to those

places of Coetzees and South African fiction in general that are the subject of much

critical discussion: the farm, the segregated township, or more recently, the globalized

city. I mean something closer to the nation-state the way the signifier South Africa

figures inAge of Iron.

Nearly all of Coetzees fiction deals in one way or another with subjects who

reluctantly find themselves forced to engage with a particular historical situation, and

there should be no mystery about where this emphasis comes from: it comes from

Coetzees own sense of having South Africanness in various forms (as a legal structure of

citizenship, an historical identity, as well as the cultural edifice of being a South African

writer) forced upon him. A consistent premise of Coetzees writing is that one does not

choose ones history; it chooses you. A given historical situation is a bounded horizon


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within which one exercises restricted options and longs to be able to exercise others. The

source of this emphasis is partly biographical: as his memoirYouth suggests, Coetzee was

on the path of emigration soon after the Sharpeville massacre and its consequences. By

the late 1960s (a period not covered by the memoir) he would have succeeded, had it not

been for the legal constraint of being unable to achieve permanent residence in the United

States. His return to South Africa was precipitous; thereafter, South Africa, both in its

own peculiarities and as the site of a world-historical denouement of European colonial

modernity, became the primary historical condition with which Coetzee would find

himself wrestling. Each gesture of fictive displacement, or each act of imaginative

relocation, speaks of this effort in his writing to keep the country at arms length.

Michael Ks efforts to remain free and unobserved in a landscape that has been

completely mapped, fenced and policed, is representative of a general condition affecting

Coetzees authorship especially when we consider, as several critics have done, the

possibility that K himself allegorizes the practice of writing.

This situation helps to explain the tripartite architecture that surfaces in much of

Coetzees fiction: the subject (frequently a subject living in a body, often a body in pain,

marked by the contending social forces, a body from which the subject feels alienated);

history (as a field of contestations, of torsions of power, in Coetzees phrase, in which

the subject never feels at home); and language (as a field of representations which are

subject to processes of cultural obsolescence and renewal) This architecture is both

persistent and elemental, and what it lacks in social density it gains in intensity and a

capacity to speak paradigmatically of late European colonialism, or of the post-


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enlightenment subject encountering heterogeneity and difference in a previously

unimagined and radical sense.

Slow Man continues with this pattern. It deals with bodily frailty and fears of

senescence and obsolescence. The blow catches him from the right, sharp and

surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle (1). The

words are simple but their catastrophic implications define the course of the narrative,

dividing Paul Rayments life into two phases, a relatively unexamined phase even, as

he puts it, of frivolousness before the accident, and the phase of the narratives present

tense, in which because of his vulnerabilities he will discover how deeply he is at odds

with the culture in which he lives. His discoveries turn on the subject of care in a world

defined both by the corporatization of what are misleadingly called the caring

professions, and by transnational and transcultural migrations and their effects on

families. The accident, then, leads us directly to the architecture I mentioned earlier: the

subject, rendered in characteristically bodily terms; and history, which the subject

encounters in a state of shock (and lets not forget the first words ofDusklands, my

name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that. Here goes.). This history, then, smashes into

the subject, in this case in the form of the car driven by the reckless Wayne Blight.

Finally, language, language which Rayment does not own, because it comes to him in a

state which is already culturally marked for the worse: he flies through the air with the

greatest of ease, he thinks, and Like a cat roll, then spring to your feet, ready for

what comes next (1), fragments of language that are completely inappropriate to the dire

situation he is in. The intrusion of such inappropriate discourse raises the question of

what residues of culture can be salvaged from over-use if we are to survive the history


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which is forced upon us. The novels milieu might be Adelaide but the basic narrative

situation and its inherent tensions will be familiar to many of Coetzees readers.

Not that the subjects place in history is rendered terms of sweeping, epic

narrative; it is presented in spaces of intense intimacy. After inappropriately confessing

his love for his Croatian nurse Marijana, he anticipates a response from her which he has

learned from the romantic novels his mother used to receive by mail-order from the

Librairie Hachette in Paris: If there ever was which he doubts a code of looks that

once mastered would allow one to read infallibly the transient motions of human lips and

eyes, it has gone now, gone with the wind (77). In order to decode desire, it seems, one

needs to be in possession of the right code; such codes are the products of culture and

therefore historical; as such they drift into obsolescence; if we apply them

anachronistically we become even more detached from our objects of desire than we

normally are, leaving us with only the silent spaces between us. Finding the right code in

situations of ethnographic or linguistic alterity might be doubly difficult. The final

phrases of the quotation, gone now, gone with the wind, suggest redundancy of a

romantic American, antebellum kind which is comic in its inappropriateness. If

obsolescence is ones lot, irony might be a form of survival: Paul doubts the existence of

the code that would enable him to read Marijana infallibly. Ironic self-protection as a

way of surviving obsolescence: Coetzees memoirs, especially Youth, play out this

solution repeatedly.

Paul Rayment experiences the present as a time of thinning out, of moral and

cultural impoverishment. The language of his carers is appallingly demeaning. His

collection of photographs by Fauchery expresses a desire for representations of Australia


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that have weight, distinction and pathos, and he resists digital technology which lacks

these qualities. His attraction to Marijana is based in part on the fact that she comes from

a corner of an old Europe which with his French childhood and his Catholicism, he

imagines he has some affinity. Her slow adjustment to Australian speech is part of what

makes her attractive; like her, he speaks English like a foreigner, phlegmatically, with

due deliberation. He does not have a ready language of the heart and must intuit things,

leaving him vulnerable to fantasy and wish-fulfilment. A more centred cultural existence

would give him better resources for dealing with his physical precariousness and his

longings. In all these dimensions, the exploration of Paul Rayments condition is a finely

tuned historical diagnosis which plays out the architecture of subject-history-language

with which I began.

Then, of course, there is Elizabeth Costello. What is she doing in this novel? The

novel which seems closest to Slow Man, in this respect, is Foe, where Susan Barton crafts

a narrative of her experience on the island with Crusoe and Friday, then hands it to Foe

(historically, Daniel Defoe) for rewriting, at which point the text turns on the question of

control over the narrative. Foe constructs alternative accounts of Susans story, including

an episode involving the return of a lost daughter which Coetzee takes over from another

of Defoes novels,Roxana. The peculiar episode in Slow Man involving Marianna (with

two ns) is rather obviously Costellos attempt to do something similar. Its artificiality,

tawdriness, and sheer literariness are heavy reminders of its fictionality (not unlike the

tawdry story of Roxana herself, the courtesan, whose mystique is revealed by the arrival

of her daughter). But Slow Man andFoe are also very different novels, and where one

might be willing to accept the metafictional play in Foe where there is a good deal of


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pastiche and a more obviously allegorical narrative structure, the preponderance of

ostensibly realist techniques in Slow Man makes it more difficult to accept.

The function of the metafictional elements in Slow Man would seem to be that

they turn the novel into an exploration of the relationship between authorship and its

creations. Paul Rayment is being written into being by Elizabeth Costello, but he also

resists her; in fact, her insistence that he take responsibility for the action, by acting on

his desires and by pushing the mortal envelope, as she puts it, would seem to allegorize

the kind of negative capability on which a successful narrative would depend. Elizabeth

is both predator and parasite, but she insists on Pauls taking charge. Costello is not fully

rounded, remaining insubstantial and shadowy, and the reason for this would be

Coetzees insistence that writing depends on listening to the counter-voices and

relinquishing control. However, if Pauls existence depends on his being written into

being by Elizabeth, there is a reciprocal dependency on Elizabeths part. If he has tried to

buy himself into the Platonic companionship of the Jokic family as a way of resolving

what she calls his unsuitable passion for Marijana, equally she needs Paul to help her

cope with her own infirmity and increasingly ugly mortality. The authorial self and the

self which is written are subject, it seems, to similar vulnerabilities of need, and the novel

wants to undo any mystery there might be around these two roles and present them both

in terms that are ordinary and unflattering. By the end, Elizabeths obscure authority is

re-contained and she is shown to be subject to impulses much like Pauls, such that in

ways so obscure, so labyrinthine that the mind baulks at exploring them, the need to be

loved and the storytelling, that is to say the mess of papers on the table, are connected

(238).


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The metafictional dimensions of Coetzees prose have frequently been a way of

enacting the conditions of authorship under which he writes. In this respect, the

metafiction has been a continuation of the inquiry into the relationship between the

subject and history that preoccupies much of the writing it is the same question, taken

into the self-reflexivity of art. A fine-tuned understanding of the brutalities of life under

colonialism and apartheid, together with a self-consciousness that articulates the

prevailing cultural rules and conditions and therefore the codes of its own practice, have

made Coetzee the writer he is. In Slow Man, the wider historical resonance of this mode

is less in evidence; instead, the colloquies between Paul and Elizabeth seem to reveal an

author searching for the substance of his lifes work and wondering whether it lies in the

intimate processes of authorship or in the creations which have their existence in the

public domain. Whatever the answer, these functions and the personae they entail are

stripped of mystique and re-positioned within the rather ordinary world of unexceptional

human desires and the moral dilemmas into which they can lead us. Even here, one can

discern an attempt to appease the angry gods of history.

II

Let me turn at this point to estrangement. I am alluding here to Nancy Ruttenbergs

analysis of Dostoevskys fictionalized autobiography, Notes from the House of the Dead.

Ruttenbergs essay was produced as part of a comprehensive revaluation of Victor

Shklovskys concept of estrangement or defamiliarization undertaken by the Porter

Institute in a recent issue ofPoetics Today. Ostranenie, alternatively translated as


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defamiliarization or estrangement, is given its classic formulation in Shklovskys essay of

1917, Art as Technique. It quickly became recognized as a manifesto of Russian

Formalism and subsequently, became established in Western European and American

criticism via structuralism and semiotics where it tended to be subsumed into the idea and

the critical programme of literariness-as-system. The more recent readings of Shklovsky

recontextualize him in terms of what Michael Holquist and Ilya Kliger call a historical

poetics; they place Shklovsky alongside his contemporaries in Russian politics and in

the cultural movements of Formalism and Futurism, including Bakhtin; they consider the

philosophical import of estrangement beginning with Kant; and they consider

Shklovskys ideas in relation to those of later writers on the connections between poetics

and politics, including and most especially, Hannah Arendt.

Ruttenbergs essay participates in this wide-ranging revision, exploring

Dostoevskys text as a related but distinct exercise in several kinds of estrangement. The

source of Dostoyevskys defamiliarizing narration inHouse of the Deadis the collapse of

his revolutionary assumptions about the peasantry prior to his arrest in 1849 an event

involving a bizarre but sadistically faked execution by Czar Nicholas I and subsequent

confinement in a Siberian hard-labour camp where he rubbed shoulders day-in and day-

out with representatives of the class which until then had largely been the object of his

benevolent moral gaze.

In the narration of the fictional Gorianchikov, the text stages three levels of

estrangement: the shock of encounter with the peasant-convicts who resist his habitual

expectations of and beliefs about them; secondly, the narrators hard-won conviction

that the abyss dividing the elite from the common classes can only be bridged if the


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nobleman practices a conscientious self-estrangement; and finally, a level at which the

narrator is other to himself, where the object of estrangement is that part of

Gorianchikovs consciousness which eludes his own critical regard and remains complicit

with non-seeing (721). Underscoring this final, unresolved and confessional aspect of

the text is an unintegrated self, what Ruttenberg calls an unconsummated image arising

from the unconsummated conversion of the prison experience, one in which despite his

best intentions and efforts to do so, Dostoevsky was unable to reform himself (on the

model of a religious conversion) as being in possession of an invigorated moral

consciousness. In this respect, Ruttenberg reads the prison conversion against accepted

biographical accounts, arguing that the yawning gap between Dostoevsky and the

peasantry which was opened up during his excruciating imprisonment remains the

primary object of inquiry in the text: It is the source of its complex investigation of the

psychological, epistemological, political, and spiritual problem of estrangement and the

matrix of all unconsummated images (748).

I find this analysis suggestive in relation to Coetzee no one who has read

Waiting for the Barbarians carefully will fail to be struck by the resonance with that

novel of Ruttenbergs notion of the failure of unconsummated images. I need to

introduce a few qualifiers, however: there was no prior history in Coetzees case of a

revolutionary commitment that went sour, much less of a single watershed experience or

passage of his life which ushered in a mature phrase of writing as seems to have been the

case with Dostoevsky. I would suggest, though, that we recognize how important it is

that Coetzees relationship with South Africa was not one he would have chosen. On the

contrary, from the moment he left the country soon after Sharpeville, pursuing, as Youth


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recounts, a metropolitan dream, he was on the path of emigration until at least the late

sixties when his position in the United States became legally untenable. The conditions

surrounding his return in 1971 involved his being overwhelmed by circumstance (his

failure to achieve permanent residence following an arrest in an anti-war protest);

subsequently, South Africa became the unchosen but inescapable milieu in which he

would practice his art. We can conclude that there was a Dostoevskian shock of

encounter of sorts with South Africa, less with the people, perhaps, than with the whole

politico-legal environment, which would leave its mark on Coetzees sense of what the

people could and could not achieve. A pattern seems to have been established in 1971

which would remain with him for the next three decades, namely, that he would have to

live out (as he puts it in the interview withDagens Nyeter) his life and work largely in

a country with its particular legal, ethical and aesthetic superstructures from which he

had sought and failed to escape.

This tension is the basis of Coetzeean estrangement, and he has made productive

use of it, needless to say. Place in Coetzee, then, is seldom just home, nor is there the

process ofrefamiliarization that one finds in so much postcolonial writing answering

metropolitan representations of colonial space. Place for Coetzee is, indeed, a site of

Kantian epistemological dualisms, of self-other relationships, of incommensurate orders

of knowledge, and of aesthetic destruction (too much truth for art to hold, is the

expression [Doubling the Point99]). All this pushes the subject into a kind of last

horizon, which is the space of ironic, reflexive, and metafictional self-scrutiny. Coetzee

could not be further from the kind of project which is undertaken by some of the

contributors to the recently publishedA City Imagined, where the specificities of Cape


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Town are conjured into more comforting representations. The very absence of anything

like a Habermasian rational community in Coetzees sense of place, as an intrinsic feature

of his postcolony, contributes to the proliferation of what Ruttenberg calls

unconsummated images, which in Coetzee are representations which use social

incongruity as their point of departure.

III

Let me illustrate some of Coetzees practices of estrangement in the Shklovskian sense,

mainly from the early fiction. Famously, there are passages like the following in

Dusklands which connect the idea of place with a profound sense of nonbeing:

Coetzee glanced neither right nor left as he passed through the defiles of the

Khamies mountains. At night the thermometer fell below freezing point. There

was snow on the peaks. In the morning the cattle, their joints frozen, had to belifted to their feet with a pole passed lengthwise under chest and belly. At one of

their halts (August 18) the expedition left behind: he ashes of the night fire,combustion complete, a feature of dry climates; faeces dotted in mounds over a

broad area, herbivore in the open, carnivore behind rocks; urine stains with minute

traces of copper salts; tea leaves; the leg-bones of a springbok; five inches of

braided oxhide rope; tobacco ash; and a musket ball. The faeces dried in the courseof the day. Rope and bones were eaten by a hyena on August 22. A storm on

November 2 scattered all else. The musket ball was not there on August 18, 1933.

(126)

This is deixis repeated and overburdened to the point where it loses its deictic function.

The effect of such a reversal in the poetics of place is to draw attention to the subject-

position informing the practice the fragile imperial subject; indeed, Coetzee frequently

manipulates the poetics of reference in order to foreground a volatile subjectivity.

Shklovsky delineates a similar practice in Tolstoy, where the withholding of the referent


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equally, the pretence that one is seeing the referent for the first time produces the

main desired effect. One of Shklovskys examples is drawn from Tolstoys story

Shame, where the idea of flogging is treated in this way: to strip people who have

broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, to rap on their bottoms with switches, to

lash about on the naked buttocks, followed by the dry remark, Just why precisely this

stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other - why not prick the shoulders or

any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise [sic], or

anything like that? Or in another example, Shklovsky cites the story Kholstomer,

where the narrator is a horse, and the horse's point of view makes the content of the story

unfamiliar. Here is the horse on the institution of private property:

I understand well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was

absolutely in the dark. What's the meaning of his own, his colt? From thesephrases I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection between me

and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only

much later, when they separated me from the other horses, did I begin tounderstand. But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called

me mans property. The words my horse referred to me, a living horse, and

seemed as strange to me as the words my land, my air, my water. But the

words made a strong impression on me. I thought about them constantly, and onlyafter the most diverse experiences with people did I understand, finally, what they

meant. They meant this: In life people are guided by words, not by deeds. Its not

so much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is thepossibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various

topics. Such are the words my and mine, which they apply to different things,

creatures, objects, and even to land, people, and horses. They agree that only onemay say mine about this, that, or the other thing. And the one who says mine

about the greatest number of things is, according to the game which theyre

agreed to among themselves, the one they consider the most happy. (In Victor

Shklovsky, Art as Technique.)

Coetzee uses the practice of withholding the obvious referent and/or pretending to

encounter it for the first time in the first paragraph ofWaiting for the Barbarians:


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I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his

eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind

eyes. But he is not blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but

he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. They protect oneseyes against the glare of the sun, he says. You would find them useful out here in

the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches.

Look. He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. No wrinkles. He replaces theglasses. It is true. He has the skin of a younger man. At home everyone wears

them. (1)

Colonel Jolls personal vanity and dark glasses are, of course, clichs of the security

officer familiar with interrogation and torture. Coetzee defamiliarizes the clichs simply

by having a narrator who seems to be unfamiliar with them. By the time the magistrate

speaks of dark glasses (in the third paragraph) it is as if he had invented the term himself.

The object, the glasses, are freed from their conventionalized meanings (habituation is of

course Shklovskys term for this) and then recontextualized, such that, in this case, the

glasses some to signify the relationship between province and metropolis at home

everyone wears them and it is this relationship that will overwhelm the magistrate

during the course of the novel and re-introduce the time of Empire as a reign of terror.

There would many examples of this practice in Coetzee of withholding common

knowledge in order to produce estrangement. InLife and Times of Michael K, the kind of

naivety we find in Tolstoys horse is put into the consciousness of K himself, whose

simplicity and detachment become the main vehicle for that novels nightmarish

representation of late apartheid.

Holquist and Kliger, taking the longer philosophical view, show that Shklovskys

defamiliarization seeks to overcome the primary Kantian division between ourselves and

the meaning or meaningfulness of objects. Coetzees practices of estrangement have the


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same philosophical pedigree. Both the drama of epistemological separation and the

capacity of art to restore newness to objects are explicitly captured in the Postscript to

Elizabeth Costello, where writing in the voice of Lady Chandos, wife of Lord Chandos in

Hugo van Hoffmannsthals Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon (1902), Costello

says,

All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A

dog sitting in a patch of sun licking himself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at thenext a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of

our Creator (our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we

interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I

ask you can I live with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night,

drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeperinto revelation how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, not I nor

you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun. (ElizabethCostello 229).

Here, Costello is seeking to renounce the intensity of defamiliarization, suggesting that

the literary life itself is beginning to pall for her; however, her cries articulate some of the

philosophical reaches of Coetzees practice where there is always an undercurrent of

anxiety about being denied contact with the world and where the subject has to improvise

representational or linguistic solutions to overcome the separation.

IV

Holquist and Kliger dwell on the role of Von Humboldt in approaching Kants

phenomenological dualism via the question of language. Von Humboldts great work,

they argue, was to overcome Kantian alienation by positing representation through


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signs as the means by which humans could simultaneously experience andthinkthe

world:

He sought to solve the riddle of the I think by transposing the problem into an

investigation of the I speak. He began by supposing, together with Kant, that the

gap between the categories that ruled perception in the mind, on the one hand, and theexistence of the worldoutside the mind, on the other hand, could not be overcome

absolutely. But by negotiating the simultaneity of sign and signified in language,

something very like a parallel negotiation mind and world could be accomplished.(emphasis in original; 623)

Coetzees intellectual formation via linguistics at a time when linguistic theory

(structuralism, especially, and to a lesser extent generative grammar) seemed to figure

centrally in the humanities positioned him in a way that enabled him to enact Von

Humboldts solution to Kantian dualism. Every novel foregrounds a particular mode of

address in which this parallel negotiation of mind and world is undertaken in a self-

consciously significatory language. Our being drawn, as readers, into the precarious

space of the inner speech of the subject, where we are given little else but signs to

negotiate a decidedly hostile milieu, accounts in large measure for the sense of

compulsion that typically drives us through the Coetzee text. The epistemological drama

is in part a drama of survival, where the language of the subject is framed by what

Costello calls the mortal envelope. It is this situation, orplight, we might say, that

makes Coetzees work resonate so frequently with the fortunes of Crusoe: outside of

ordinary social conventions, language is reinvented to ensure the survival and the agency

of the subject. But what I wish to emphasize is that this drama is developed not only out

of linguistic self-consciousness; it is also as an effect ofplace, or estranged place. To the

Kantian legacy we must add the effects of history: in Coetzees writing, the postcolony is


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an epistemologically divided space, a space of incommensurability where the subject is

forced by circumstance into living out an historical end-game. The question being

addressed in the first novel,Dusklands both The Vietnam Project and The Narrative

of Jacobus Coetzee - is how does this subject survive, as the heir of the Enlightenment

certainly but now on the point of superannuation as the representative of imperialisms

last fling: My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that. Here goes. It would be

difficult to separate the philosophical from the historical forms of estrangement that

develop from this point of entry in the oeuvre. Consider Magda inIn the Heart of the

Country, offering to the servant, Klein-Anna, what she calls colonial philosophy:

My eye falls idly on objects, odd stones, pretty flowers, strange insects: I pick them

up, bear them home, store them away. I am heir to a space of natal earth which myancestors found good and fenced about. To the spur of desire we have only one

response: to capture, to enclose, to hold. But how real is our possession? The flowers

turn to dust, the land knows nothing of fences, the stones will be here when I havecrumbled away, the very food I devour passes through me. I am not one of the heroes

of desire . (114)

In Shklovsky, defamiliarization brought out what he called the stoneness of stones,

therefore what Magda offers to Klein-Anna is a kind of Shklovskian lament, in which

objects fail to become renewed though she defamiliarizes them by taking them into new

contexts, and they fail the test of renewal because her ancestors and what they represent

have corrupted the impulse for renewal at its core. In other words, there is no renewal of

vision outside of history and historical relationships. The colonial provenance of desire

ensures that our Kantian alienation from the meaningfulness of objects is always passed

through the Hegelian dualism of master and slave. This point is driven home poignantly

by the rhetorical context of Magdas speech, which is addressed to Klein-Anna as an


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appeal for understanding but in the clear knowledge that such comfort will not be

forthcoming. Famously, to Klein-Anna die Mies is die Mies.

Age of Iron begins with the following two sentences: There is an alley down the

side of the garage, you may remember it, you and your friends would sometimes play

there. Now it is a dead place, waste, without use, where windblown leaves pile up and

rot (1). In the next few paragraphs, we learn that Vercueil has taken up residence in this

alley on the day that Mrs Curren learns about her terminal condition. The alley is a

featureless place which in the past was rendered meaningful by the play of the daughter

and her friends; now it is a space of waste, a dead place, where windblown leaves pile

up and rot. This, too, is a renewal of sorts, a renewal of representation in which

meaningfulness returns in an unexpected if unwelcome way; the interruption which

causes the estrangement in this instance is the presence of death the news of Mrs

Currens cancer, the appearance of Vercueil, and the absence of the daughter. It is

against this dark background of morbidity that Cape Town in the mid-1980s will be

reassessed; a defamiliarization of place so complete that a re-examination of social

relationships including the possibility of love between Mrs Curren and her daughter,

and between Mrs Curren and the uncompromising young men who will inherit the new

social order can be exploredde novo.

Works Cited

Svetlana Boym, Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah

Arendt, Poetics Today 26, 4 (Winter 2005): 581-611.


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19

J.M. Coetzee. Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg, 1990.

Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1974.

Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003.

In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977.

Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker and Warburg, 1980.

Michael Holquist and Ilya Kliger, Minding the Gap: Towards a Historical Poetics of

Estrangement, Poetics Today 26, 4 (Winter 2005): 613-636.

Nancy Ruttenberg, Dostoevskys Estrangement, Poetics Today 26, 4 (Winter 2005):

719-751.

coetzee’s estrangement

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