LA EXPEDICION DE NORMAS CONTRARIAS A LAS REALIDADES SOCIALES Y

In all of his first three novels, Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1976), and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Coetzee engages in “speculative history” (Magda in HOC 19), creating complex characters in (pseudo-)historical settings: Eugene Dawn and the Vietnam War, Jacobus Coetzee and the early colonization of the Cape,52 Magda in the later colonial context of the Cape, the Magistrate on the frontier of a fictional Empire, and lastly Michael K in apartheid South Africa. All of these settings can be traced back to the biographical stations of Coetzee’s life, which shows his concern for his heritage and the history he comes from: “Coetzee’s doing-writing, in other words – and in words other than those employed by most contemporary historians of South Africa – provides a compellingly important encounter with the time and place of its birth.” (Macaskill 1998: 67)

While writing Dusklands and imagining Eugene Dawn sitting in a library, Coetzee was sitting in a library in the United States of America.53 _{The character John in Youth – who we}

can fairly presume to concur with the author Coetzee to a large degree – resigns from IBM shortly after discovering their involvement in a military project in the context of the Cold War. In Austin, Texas, Coetzee experienced an eruption of irrational violence when Charles Joseph Whitman, perched on the upper deck of the campanile, killed and wounded a number of people. Coetzee was at the time teaching a course in the same building complex. While writing Dusklands Coetzee also became witness to the protests against the war in Buffalo, where he was a lecturer at the time; the protest he took part in was rather against the conduct of the university administration, who had called for a strong police force to occupy the campus, than directly against the war – but one can fairly assume he was sympathetic to the students’ cause.54 Jacobus Coetzee’s and Magda’s narratives deal with the conflicted historical

52 _{For his first novel Coetzee draws on historical sources he discovered in the library of the university in Austin:} “The 1799 edition of The Journal of Hendrik Jacob Wikar includes the short account of a journey undertaken by Jacobus Coetzé in 1760 along the West Coast and through Namaqualand to the Orange River and beyond, an account that would form the basis of the second part of Dusklands, Coetzee’s first novel, which he was shortly to commence.” (Kannemeyer 2012: 159)

53 _{Kannemeyer once again points out a link to Coetzee’s own biography: “When not having to attend or give} classes, Coetzee spent his days in Austin’s spacious library. Some years later, in the first part of Dusklands, he describes Eugene Dawn working in the basement of a library, and it is not far from the bookish Coetzee’s own experience.” (Kannemeyer 2012: 157)

54 _{For a detailed account of this episode see Kannemeyer 2012: 159-162; also Scott 1997: 86. Kannemeyer’s} biography also features a satirical essay by Coetzee on the Vietnam war printed in the Daily Texan in Austin. Kannemeyer further makes available a blurb Coetzee himself had written for the publication by Ravan Press:

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past of Coetzee’s home country, South Africa; the former being written together with Eugene Dawn’s narrative in the US, the latter being mainly written after his return to South Africa. In

Life & Times of Michael K Coetzee explores a virtual present time, South Africa in a state of

emergency similar to how it was when the book was written in the 1980s.55 Coetzee’s characters are placed in their historical contexts and exposed to its contingencies. The realization how history has shaped their being rests with the reader and occurs to the characters only in brief flashes of insight, none of which they manage to hold on to. Engaging in speculative history frees Coetzee from the constraints of historical accuracy, and gives space to the unfolding of complex characters. Correspondingly, Macaskill sees Magda’s narrative as an act of “speculative linguistics” with Coetzee as scripteur, as an agent behind the voice of Magda: “Coetzee writes Magda into being both as a ‘real’ person and as paper entity, shaping her – and allowing her to shape herself – between the demands of the verisimilitude valued by historical materialism and the discursive play practiced by poststructural theories of language.” (Macaskill 1998: 73) On a more pragmatic level, Magda is placed “between the two natural languages that articulate her and that she articulates, English and Afrikaans.” (Macaskill 1998: 73) As we know from Boyhood (and Kannemeyer), Coetzee himself grew up with a similar tension between English and Afrikaans. Brian Macaskill goes on to argue that Magda desires to find a middle ground and escape the history that restricts and stunts all intersubjective relations available to her:

Here [HOC 133] Magda expresses – in writing – her hope of being a middle voice, her desire to write herself into a new existence, to escape the “old locutions” that have forced her to veer to and from the “master-talk” between mistress and servants and alternate attempts at intimate chatter with Anna and Hendrik. (Macaskill 1998: 76)

The allegorical nature of Coetzee’s early novels in particular has been discussed widely, and the vague settings invite allegorical readings.56 The universal character of the narratives can hardly be denied, but the specific allegorical framework depends largely on the reader. The South African reader will most likely relate Coetzee’s fictions to the landscape and social climate surrounding him, whereas the non-African reader might relate Waiting for

In the Vietnam Project and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee we visit the dead souls of the explorers, conquistadors, and administrators whose work it is, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands. Is it contempt for their victims, or is it fear of the damage that love may do to the screens of abstraction through which they see the world, that makes them monsters of callousness? Are they simply the barbarians of ‘progress,’ or are they creatures of the apocalypse determined to involve mankind in their personal damnation? (Kannemeyer 2012: 247)

55 _{“If it [LTMK] is set ahead in time at all, then this is done as a way of looking, as if it had come to the surface,} at what lies under the surface of the present. The harried homelessness of Michael K and his mother is the experience, in 1984, of hundreds of thousands of black people in South African squatter towns and “resettlement” camps. A civil war is going on in 1984 on South Africa’s borders, between black and white […].” (Gordimer 1998: 141)

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the Barbarians more readily to the Russian or Chinese Empires than to South Africa. The

allegorical reading ultimately rests with the reader.