J. M. Coetzee and the Postcolonial Rhetoric of Simultaneity

Having published nine novels and won such prestigious literary awards as the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1980), the Booker Prize (1983, 1999), and the Jerusalem Prize (1987), J. M. Coetzee has become one of the most important late twentieth-century authors to emerge from South Africa, and the reputation Coetzee enjoys is due, in part, to the international appeal of his novels. Since the publication of Dusklands (1974), Coetzee seems to favor what we may call a rhetoric of simultaneity, one that emphasizes the importance of considering South African colonial trauma not as an isolated and autonomous event, but as one that relates to, and must therefore be juxtaposed with, similar human conditions outside South Africa. This essay offers an analysis of Coetzee's rhetoric of simultaneity as exemplified in the novels Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Foe (1986), and Age of Iron (1990); it first explores how Coetzee negotiates the boundary-crossing between postcolonial writing and allegorical writing followed by an examination of how Coetzee brings the issue of writing to bear on the status of being. Coetzee's inclination to demystify regional colonial suffering has empowered his novels to address dilemmas facing both South Africa and the larger international community. In an effort to translate his rhetoric of simultaneity into corresponding narrative forms, Coetzee has chosen to write not about the "provincial" but about the "universal" that, "purged of uniqueness and alterity,"(1) can express "a spiritual and moral truth beyond politics or culturally determined structures of signification."(2) As Laura Di Michele notes, Coetzee's novels clearly "expose the difficulties in reconciling the idea of belonging to a nation, or `imagined community,' with the wish to express singular cultural identities and differences."(3) For example, in Dusklands, Coetzee juxtaposes the twentieth-century American invasion of Vietnam and the eighteenth-century Dutch occupation of South Africa, a strategy he later uses to parallel colonialism, writing, and being in Foe. Similarly, in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee defuses its local color by situating the novel in an elusive geographical context. All of these textual designs demonstrate Coetzee's consistent effort to free his novels from being ensnared by the cultural, ethnic, and ethical insularity implicitly embodied in the nativism, negative nationalism, and Euro-American multiculturalism that have informed postcolonial writing.(4) Accordingly, Coetzee's novels mark the emergence of a new mode of postcolonial writing characterized by postcolonial authors' willingness to de-essentialize the uniqueness of colonial oppression by bringing it to bear on similar human experiences outside the historical specificity of colonialism. Coetzee's fifth novel, Foe, offers a typical example of this new mode of postcolonial writing. In the novel, Coetzee presents three highly fluid motifs--history, writing, and being--and emphasizes their simultaneous significations by showing that these motifs are transferable to and shareable by one another. By negotiating the transfer of meaning between Coetzee's notions of history, writing, and being as expressed in Foe, Coetzee effectively dissolves the novel's linguistic and philosophical boundary between the historical and the allegorical, between writing and being, and between the self and the other. One result of this dissolution is that Foe poses resistance to conventional categorical criticism; for example, Coetzee's refusal to give prominence to the feminist issue has been (mis)understood as "trouble negotiating a gender position" and as "discomfort in imagining a woman."(5) The narrator of Foe is Susan Barton, a female castaway who washes up on the island inhabited by Cruso, an English adventurer, and Friday, an African slave. After an uneventful stay on the island, the three of them are rescued by the crew of a Bristol-bound ship. …