Sex, Shame and Guilt: Reflections on Bernhard Schlink's der Vorleser (the Reader) and J

   It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it
  to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from
  her mind, oblivious to the outside world (p. 14).                

   In fact it was as though the retreat to the convent was no longer
  enough, as though life in the convent was still too sociable and  
  talkative, and she had to retreat even further, into a lonely cell
  safe from all eyes, where looks, clothing and smell meant nothing
  (p. 106).                                                        

   The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the                                                                  
  Other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones,
  not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but    
  absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless I  
  sometimes find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story in order                                                                  
  to be free of it, even if I never can be (p. 216).                

   We went through the repentance business yesterday. I told you what I                                                                  
  thought. I won't do it. I appeared before an officially constituted                                                                    
  tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I                                                                  
  pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance                                                                  
  is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to
  another universe of discourse (p. 58).                            

   To each, in what will be its last minutes, Bev gives her fullest  
  attention, stroking it, talking to it, easing its passage. If, more                                                                    
  often than not, the dog fails to be charmed, it is because of his
  presence: he gives off the wrong smell (They can smell your      
  thoughts), the smell of shame. Nevertheless, he is the one who holds                                                                  
  the dog still as the needle finds the vein and the drug hits the  
  heart and the legs buckle and the eyes dim (p. 142).              

   For the sake of the dogs? but the dogs are dead, and what do the  
  dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his                                                                    
  idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat
  corpses into a more convenient shape for processing (p. 146).    

   'Lucy, my dearest, why don't you want to tell? It was a crime.    
  There is no shame in being the object of a crime. You did not choose                                                                  
  to be the object. You are an innocent party' (p. 111).            

   The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will
  read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing                                                                    
  else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence
  is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each
  other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously,    
  recollecting their exploit (p. 110).                              

   'The reason is that as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is                                                                  
  a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might                                                                    
  be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it
  is not. It is my business, mine alone.'                          

  'This place being what?'                                          

  'This place being South Africa' (p. 112).                        

   He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not                                                                  
  reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an                                                                  
  unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code                                                                  
  whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their                                                                  
  articulateness, their articulatedness (p. 117).                  

   'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point
  to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To                                                                  
  start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With  
  nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity'
  (p. 205).                                                        

   Even then, when I was preoccupied by the general numbness, and by
  the fact that it had taken hold not only of the perpetrators and  
  victims, but of all of us, judges and lay members of the court,  
  prosecutors and recorders, who had to deal with these events now;
  when I likened perpetrators, victims, the dead, the living,      
  survivors, and their descendants to each other, I didn't feel good
  about it and I still don't (p. 101).                              

   Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not  
  have, morally or legally--for my generation of students it was a  
  lived reality. It did not just apply to what had happened in the  
  Third Reich. The fact that Jewish gravestones were being defaced  
  with swastikas, that so many old Nazis had made careers in the    
  courts, the administration, and the universities, that the Federal
  Republic had not recognized the State of Israel, that emigration and                                                                  
  resistance were handed down as traditions less often than a life of                                                                    
  conformity--all this filled us with shame, even when we could point                                                                    
  at the guilty parties. Pointing at the guilty parties did not free
  us from shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through                                                                  
  on account of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into
  energy, activity, aggression (pp. 167-8).                        

22222

COETZEE, J. M.

(John Maxwell Coetzee)köˈtsē, 1940–, South African novelist, b. John Michael Coetzee. Educated at the Univ. of Cape Town (M.A. 1963) and the Univ. of Texas (Ph.D. 1969), he taught in the United States and returned home (1983) to become a professor of English literature at Cape Town. He immigrated to Australia in 2002. Several of Coetzee's novels are noted for their eloquent protest against political and social conditions in South Africa, particularly the suffering caused by imperialism, apartheid, and postapartheid violence. His books are also known for their technical virtuosity. Often melancholy and detached in tone and spare in style, his fiction treats themes of human violence and loss, weakness and defeat, isolation and survival. His critically acclaimed novels include In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), the Booker Prize–winning The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Elizabeth Costello (2003). Among Coetzee's other writings are the memoirs Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) and several essay collections. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

3333

Nyman, Jopi. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee.

by Heidi Hanrahan

Nyman, Jopi. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee. New Dehli: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2003. v + 176 pp. $19.00

In his introduction, Jopi Nyman argues that animal narratives in literature are "ways of reimagining human identities rather than stories merely narrating the lives of our furry friends." Indeed, throughout his book, Nyman shows how such stories take part in the discursive construction of concepts like race, family, and nation. Reading the texts he discusses as cultural and historical artifacts, he investigates the animal as Other, showing how this trope is "utilized to explore racial, sexual, and gendered threats to the maintenance of naturalized social hierarchies." Part One, on British colonial discourse and its role in the construction of English national identity, includes discussions of Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit" tales and Rudyard Kilping's The Jungle Book. Part Two, which shifts focus to North American texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shows how writers like Jack London use animal narratives to explore Otherness, racial mixing, and passing. Primarily concerned with late colonial and imperial writing, Part Three looks at autobiographical representations of animals. Here Nyman argues that popular books by Joy Adamson and Gerald Durrell reproduce colonialist views while simultaneously showing "ruptures and gaps" in such ideologies and suggesting "a crisis in the culture of colonialism." The final section discusses postcolonial and ethnic narratives from South Africa and the United States. In an especially interesting chapter connecting Coetzee's Disgrace with its colonial predecessor, Sir Perry Fitzpatrick's Jock of the Bushveld, Nyman shows how each work uses the animal trope to "explore a transcultural space where colonial identities are constructed as a result of negotiation and conflict." In total, Nyman succeeds in encouraging readers to reconsider these texts as not just simple animal stories, but complex representations of human identity.

44444(taken from a book chapter)

The art of the undeniable

I wish now to turn to a different tradition of South African writing - that of, political poetry and political protest literature. Waiting for the Barbarians constitutes

a protest, but it is given as a solitary one of ethical singularity rather than a collectively aligned political one. This is an issue that readings of Coetzee's work have understandably revolved around, although this very division itself could be called into question. In broad terms, South African critical debates have for some time relied on a certain opposition between 'political' writing and the 'literary', as well as on a related opposition between a socio-political realist writing and the aesthetic 'subversions' of modernism and postmodernism. Benita Parry, in 'Speech and silence in the fictions of J.M. Coetzee', argues that Coetzee's writing, for all its literary virtuosity: 'is marked by the further singularity of a textual practice which dissipates the engagement with political conditions it also inscribes'. David Atwell, responding to Parry, defines the critical issue as follows: 'The question arises: is Coetzee's "unrepresentable Africa" the same kind of disorientation that we are familiar with since at least Heart of Darkness? Or is it rather the result of contemporary political conditions which are more than usually stressful?' Atwell goes on to indicate that he sees it to be a case of the latter, where the 'literary enterprise' is considered to be threatened or constrained by the 'historical situation' of the Emergency years, an historical situation that may be said to produce a demand for a political literature of protest or resistance.

As regards the above, it is possible to see that Coetzee does write within the inherited tradition of an 'unrepresentable Africa', where this is not merely some kind of literary failure but much more widely and problematically a question of the dominant aesthetic and philosophical traditions of European modernity. Atwell sees that Coetzee's fiction is indebted to an Enlightenment thinking of ethics, particularly Kantian. As regards this, a commitment to an ethical transcendental imperative does not serve to effect a distance from a text such as Heart of Darkness but rather to underscore a shared legacy, albeit differently approached. In brief, what may have emerged from my earlier readings is that Coetzee's text offers an even more self-conscious, and thus more precise, less mystifying, awareness of the blindspots it tries to confront. Or, if Conrad's inscrutable Africa is offered in terms of an Africa that is itself bewilderingly contradictory and irrational, the inscrutability of the Other of Waiting for the Barbarians is not so hastily given to us as an essential condition of being Other - the pre-logical or illogical Other - but far more carefully as a matter of the limits or failings of the Magistrate's powers of sympathy and comprehension. Nonetheless, the Magistrate does not merely represent one individual position amongst others but, in more philosophical terms, the subject of consciousness, that which is claimed to be the Subject. Truncating this far too broad a summary, what is called 'the subject' could also be seen to be the effect of a capitalising and colonising economy in itself (the subject as 'head', as transcendental consciousness, as single origin, and so on).

With the debates identifying Coetzee's fiction as apolitical or de-politicising or as primarily ethical rather than political, the one question that is not really broached is whether this work might be relatively politically conservative - that is, relative to a liberationist and anti-colonial politics of the left, say, of socialist or communist sympathies or allegiances and with a radically democratic agenda. In

other words, the predicament of the stressful political situation that Atwell refers to could be seen as one of being faced with the overwhelming demand for a politics of the left where these political positions may not necessarily accord with the political values of the individual writer. It seems to me that the demand for a radical politics of resistance poses no real aesthetic dilemmas but exciting aesthetic challenges if that is where your political commitments do in fact lie (as I hope to give evidence of). There is possibly a certain liberal anxiety in positing Coetzee as defending a literary enterprise - literature's right to be literature - when the aesthetic freedom concerned may be more politically about the right to entertain views, values, ideals that may be at odds with a politics of the left but not thereby simply apolitical nor purely ethical. As a means of indicating this further, the discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians will be linked to a brief consideration of the recent Disgrace.

I read Disgrace after having written the analysis of Waiting for the Barbarians offered earlier to experience a certain déjà vu. The later novel also concerns the desire of the father - again for (dark-skinned) prostitutes and child-like girls - and it also concerns the father figure's baffled and frustrated attempts to understand a compassion for the Other beyond the world of his own desire or a world brought into sympathy with the self. Some of what was mutedly explored in Waiting for the Barbarians - in particular, the Magistrate's vague fears of Barbarian anarchy - is treated in a harshly explicit way in Disgrace.In Disgrace, we are shown that the father's defence of his values is set up against a fear of what is thought of as a 'regressive hybridity' (in effect, a transgressive one), as explored in the previous chapter. What is striking is that the text self-consciously inscribes a rejection of political correctness in its opening and goes on to indulge itself in the crudest of racist and sexist stereotypes: in particular, the African man as rapist.

The story begins with the father's unrepentant seduction of an unwilling student, whereby he loses his academic job. He then goes to stay with his lesbian daughter in the country, and they become prey to an attack by three African men in which the daughter is multiply raped and the father set on fire. The daughter does not wish to report the rape to the police and, moreover, opts to stay on the smallholding, have the child she is pregnant with as a consequence of being raped, and live with the rapists as potential neighbours. What seems to be at stake in this is a fear of anarchy in the imaginings of 'regressive hybridity' which covers: homosexuality (male and female) as opposed to the feminine in man (man questioning Man, questionable by himself alone); the African man-European woman mixing of race (as opposed to the African prostitute or mistress of the European man); a brother-sister bonding as opposed to the father ideal; and more besides concerning ecological values and animistic philosophies. What is doubly reinforced is the 'impossibility' of the European woman's desire for the African man, as the symbolic effect of a patrilineal law of the family: not only is she raped, she is a lesbian, and so she really, really cannot desire him - impossible (where the father also endorses the phallicism of the view of lesbianism as asexual). Not only that, we are given a vicious parody of compassion or amnesty with respect to the (unlikely?) behaviour of the daughter. That

is, she could be read as being put into the position of conveying the following message: 'I am so compassionate or forgiving that you can rape me, torch my father, kill my animals, do as you please, and I will raise no complaint - I will even bear your child.' Less sensationally, the point to be made is that the question of compassion for the other seems to be only understood as a form of masochism, even, yet again, as a death drive. It is repeatedly that which is formulated in terms of: Destroy me. Problematically with this, while there may be sympathy for the self-same (as in Hegel's discussion of affect), compassion for the other seems only to be imaginable here as a masochism based on the suspicion that the other feels but hatred for the self. Compassion on these grounds does seem unthinkable: identifying with another's hatred of yourself.

In the stark terms of Disgrace, it would seem that the predatory, aggressive, self-maximising, self-perpetuating drive of a masculine libido is seen to be fundamental. The text could be aligned with a Freudian metaphysics here, in which the so-called 'life instincts' are colonised and capitalised in terms of a phallic libido beyond which there can then only be a supposed death drive. This is further naturalised in vaguely Darwinian terms. The father comes to understand his transgression as follows: 'On trial for his way of life. For broadcasting old seed … If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species?' And, he comes to understand the rapists as follows: 'Rapists rather than robbers, Lucy called them … Lucy was wrong. They were not raping, they were mating. It was not the pleasure principle that ran the show but the testicles, sacs bulging with seed aching to perfect itself' (p. 199). In this biological drive would be the 'seeds' of idealism: will-to-self-perfection. What is odd about this is that it decriminalises rape along the lines of the masculinist defence of 'uncontrollable natural male drive'. Or, whilst the father does want the rapists to be identified as criminals, the nature of their crime would seem not to be the rape of a woman but the mating with his daughter, ostensibly a racial crime more than a sexual one. With respect to the above two citations, sexual harassment and rape are not considered as crimes in terms of women's rights to freedom of choice and freedom from abuse and violation but only in terms of an ethics of man's perpetuation of his species or 'race'. The rape of the daughter is given more as a crime against the father than as a crime against the daughter. With respect to the analyses offered by Fanon as discussed earlier, the father's desire for young girls could be seen to raise the anxiety of the taboo against father-daughter incest which then takes the form of a Negrophobia: the unconscious criminal desires of the father are phobically projected onto African men. Negrophobia would also seem to concern the paranoid supposition of 'the Other hates me'.

There used to be some speculation within a feminist psychoanalysis, as to what the castration threat means with respect to women. It would seem, as far as the daughter goes at least, to be a matter of a rape threat: if you do not obey my desires, you will be forced to obey them. In the novel, the rape happens 'off-stage', it is not represented as such. In certain respects it occupies a phantasmatic space, the space of what is not known but is imagined or strongly suspected whereby a kind of paranoia is implied. While the law of the father

could imply this rape threat, it is delivered in paranoid style in the text: if my law is not upheld, he will rape you. As for the desire for young girls and prostitutes, this would seem to be because they are counted on to fit in with the man's desire whereby he does not have to negotiate with the desire of the other: rapeless rape or phantasmatic rape (the crime of which the father stands accused).

In short, since I wish to move on, in this limited reading of the text (for justice is not being done to its ambiguities), the story is primarily told from the perspectives of a Creon for whom the ethics of the sister-daughter and outlaw brother are unthinkable and whose alliance is perceived as that which could only be anarchy. Justice, in its entirety, is that of a law of the father: 'I am Lucy's father. I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to want justice?' (p. 119). It is interestingly put for it could be condensed to: I am, thus I want, and my wants and desires must be the law. Of course, the desire for justice (supposedly that which the daughter does not have) is not wrong; what is at least questionable is the equation of the universality of justice with the desire of the father, a law based on the sole or supreme legitimacy of the desire of the heterosexual European father. The new South Africa is represented in a play that the father sees, a play whose politics and humour, he confesses, are not to his taste: it shows an unrepressed homosexuality in the context of a multiracial hairdressing salon (p. 23; p. 191). Set up against this 'crude' or earthy egalitarianism, there is the father's self-idealising sense of his own superiority which also undercuts itself and which manifests itself, as usual, in an ironic self-consciousness given a further ironic twist in the novel when the daughter voices her complaint against this eternal paternal irony, an ironic consciousness he (ironically non-ironically) professes ignorance of (p. 200). It may be noted here that the consciousness of the father is not the same as that of the text, which may be said to be somewhat detached from the 'mask' of the father. The consciousness of the text comes across at times as even a demoniccomic one in the 'scandals' it risks or provokes.

Indeed, in such a bleak text it is striking that there is a kind of silent laughter in it. It is a laughter directed not at the daughter or the enemy, but rather at the hypocrisies of liberal evasions. The text seems to laugh at its liberal audience of would-be politically correct defenders: try defend this.

With respect to the position of the father, 'justice' may be read in terms of the paternal identification with, and auto-sublimation of, the sacredness of the renewal and perpetuation of life, so that this becomes a capitalising and colonising immortalisation of the self - or, in other terms, an onto-theology. It is the onto-theological defence against what Fanon sees Negrophobia as symptomatic of, the fear of the biological. Beyond this, it is justice equated with monolineage, begging the question of other inheritances. It is worth recapitulating Mandela's critique of Creon addressed in the previous chapter. Mandela maintains that Creon's concept of justice is flawed in that justice should always be tempered with mercy. The cunning of Disgrace is that it serves to defend a justice without mercy against a mercy supposedly without a sense of justice, in that the violent criminality of its mini-African-tribe (extended family) cannot be

sympathised with. Nonetheless, the father is shown to struggle with his prejudices in trying to grasp what are for him the 'elusive' notions of 'mercy' or 'compassion' and to learn something of a new humility.

While there would be much more in the text to work through, the point of the above is to suggest that, politically speaking, Coetzee's writing serves, bravely and honestly, to explore and to question a certain conservatism. Could not Disgrace even be seen as confronting the taboo of taboo topics in the context of a liberal or radical South Africa - namely, the desires of or for white heterosexual male supremacy that have not been disentangled from a thinking of justice and where a thinking of justice cannot simply be isolated from an understanding of questions of power? As Derrida points out in 'Racism's Last Word', apartheid is not something that can simply be set apart from the legacies of European culture and thought, which does nothing to excuse it and serves to suggest the need for an analysis (separating out, sifting through) of this rather than an ignorance of it (something that Coetzee's work may be said to engage with). Whilst Coetzee draws on a European philosophical legacy, what is of interest is how this is pictured by the literary text in a South African context. Pictured, the 'father ideal' ('justice') is not just abstract and universal but, in the texts considered, seen as represented by the European heterosexual male. Whilst deconstruction may be said to affirm the fetishism (a kind of homosexuality) of narcissism and ghostliness of the ideal, Coetzee's writing draws attention to the foreclosed paternal body and the desire of the father as part of its approach to a scrutiny of the father ideal. Lacan praises the figure of Antigone in terms of not giving into nor giving up on her desire. This seems to be a question that Coetzee revolves in relation to the desire of the father. Disgrace ends with the father sending a dog to be slaughtered, the act phrased in these words: 'Yes, I am giving him up'. This can be read in terms of the father giving up on his own desire, the dog as symbolic of this desire. Or, it could be read in terms of the father reasserting his law in a final disavowal of (his) animal being or feeling for other being. He sacrifices and/or saves himself. With respect to the stark oppositions of Hamlet and Antigone, the lesson seems to be all round that there be should be neither an absolute desire, nor an absolute sacrifice of desire.

Yet, this question of the desire of the father remains a troubling one. The ending of the text could also suggest the very necessity of a choice. If I were to reply to the questioning ambivalence of the text's ending, I would say that if the father - as symbolic of justice - wishes to enforce a disciplinary law, then he must give up his desire. It is in the conflation of a law-of-the-father with the desire-of-the-father that there would be at least something of fascism. This literalisation of the symbolic phallus seems to be projected onto the criminal thugs of the text, where this serves to deflect the question of state terrorism onto a terrorism associated with the dispossessed and a politics of the left. The nightmare of apartheid was the very coupling of the law with criminality (the law as phallic jouissance), whilst the thugs of the novel are not acting in the name of the law of the state and thus cannot be made to signify or be the scapegoats of a fascist or totalitarian violence. And, it also needs to be stated, of course, that the

politics of the dispossessed and of the left cannot simply be aligned with a thuggish violence and thereby discredited: that would be to go the way of Conrad's The Secret Agent. The political context of Disgrace would seem to be the criminal attacks on white farmers. While such lawless violence is to be condemned, the grievances against the beliefs and practices of white supremacy, the demands for land redistribution, and so on, still need to be heard and addressed.

The fear of an anarchic South Africa is related to a fear of communism, as will be explored at the end of the chapter in a reading of La Guma's 'A Walk in the Night'.

Whilst Coetzee's fiction is seen as a defence of the freedom of 'literary' expression (yes, but this could be problematically to equate 'literature' with a universally 'straight' self-expression, amongst other things, and to beg the whole question of other aesthetics), a political and protest literature of the left is often denied a literary status, or simply critically ignored, possibly in that it may not reflect a desired narcissism, constructed or deconstructed. And yet, I want to maintain that such writing is often undeniably art and constitutes an art of the undeniable (what is sometimes otherwise said to be insufficiently ambiguous, undecidable) that has its own understandings of irony and uses of undecidability. It also, no doubt, has its narcissisms or versions of narcissism. There is, though, a different relation to the logos, as the creative word of the father. What is at stake here is a writing that is at the service of other voices, as discussed at the outset of Chapter 1 with respect to how the figure of Antigone serves as writing. In Waiting for the Barbarians, such other voices are given as hard to hear or as muffled: 'I strain to pierce the queer floating gabble of their voices but can make out nothing' (p. 10); 'I hear, muffled by the steamy warmth, voices, soft chatter, giggles' (p. 32). I want now, before considering other texts, to turn to a few poems, beginning with the poetry of Jeremy Cronin. His is a poetry that is much concerned with being the bearer of such other voices, where it has had some recognition for being at once literary and political.

Cronin was a colleague of Coetzee's at the University of Cape Town, Coetzee lecturing in English, as well as writing fiction, and Cronin lecturing in political philosophy. Cronin was also a political activist, and was detained and imprisoned for some years for his political activities in his participation in the African National Congress (then banned). It was in prison that he became a poet. In order to show how his poetry attempts to bear the voice of the other, this brief fragment from a poem entitled 'Lullaby' will be offered:

This poem, of which only the last stanzas have been given, concerns the many 'deaths', killings, of prisoners in detention for which prison authorities gave patronising and ridiculous explanations. It makes ironic use of a Xhosa lullaby to show a mother trying to quieten a child where the resonances go beyond this particular scene. Inasmuch as children are those who want to know and do not observe the proprieties of the truth, the voice of the questioning child relates to all the South Africans who want the authorities to tell the truth. The, at first, protective and cajoling voice of the mother is expressive both of a desire to save the child from painful knowledge of adult cruelties and of a need to hush things up. The tension built up in the poem is that while the lies of the South African officials can be seen through, the intimidation is such that the desire to confront them brings the fear of being tortured in turn. There is also the fear on the part of parents for the lives of their potentially more defiant offspring. The tension is built up throughout a number of stanzas as the mother tries repeatedly to quell her child's questions as she also directs his or her attentions to the daily hardships of life and the need to sustain strength and grow up strong. This could carry the meaning of building up a strength of resistance for a morrow of political struggle whilst learning clandestine evasions: 'Ssssssshh! Sleep and grow strong'. The poem relies very much on tone and a subtle interplay of innuendos and pauses to get its layered messages and various emotions across. And, it carefully manages to combine a language of evasion and non-judgementalness with an unambiguous protest against the brutality and lies of apartheid. It documents the lies by listing some of the actual excuses offered for deaths in detention, most famously, 'Only a bar of soap' ('he slipped on a bar of soap'). It combines, too, despair at present helplessness with hope for the future. The final, how hear it - exasperated, desperate, resolute - Thula, Thula, Thula, quiet, quiet, quiet, shows both the intimidating force of imposed censorship while it is anything but quiet and resigned. Even as it cannot make direct accusations, it is not complicit with the disavowals of the state in that it exposes the murders. The poem manages to be testimony, archival record of the facts of deaths in detention, and a rallying cry, all at once. It is also yet a lullaby because it brings the comfort of a voice quietly speaking out against injustice whereby the solitude of silent, censored questionings of the state is relieved. In the poem, the names of those killed reveal different ethnic groups - Johannes, Solomon, Ahmed, Joseph, Steve, Looksmart (where some names of famous activists are echoed, such as that of Steve Biko) - revealing a solidarity in the struggle. The poem also becomes a kind of elegy. While it could be read on the intimate and personal level of a struggling mother trying to put a slightly impossible child to bed, it also allows

for a very wide audience to feel itself addressed by the poem's invocation of a political constituency in support of those who risk their lives in fighting apartheid. Its sympathies could be said to lie with the each and every one struggling against apartheid, including the most solitary, as it affirms the possibility of a shared vision.

While more could be said about the poem, hopefully the above serves to make the point that Cronin's poem is both undeniably art and an art of the undeniable. The desire to write a poetry that carries and makes audible a plurality of the nation's voices is the theme of Cronin's 'To learn how to speak'. The poem needs to be read in its entirety, for its effect is cumulative, and it needs too to be read aloud for it is particularly musical in its effects. I will just cite its conclusion:

The poem is written in English, of course, but apart from bringing in a few non-English words, it breaks the English language up into morsels, syllables, phonemes, as if these could be even further divided and endlessly recombined in the historical and everyday materialism of people's lives. Or, it allows for the parcelling out of the language so it can be remade by a multitude of accents and energies. The fact that it uses clusters of fricative syllables calls for some effort in pronouncing the lines and this effort creates the emphases and stresses of an energetic expenditure. This, together with its other semiotic elements, means that the poem is felt physically, conveying the sense of the body as not just the medium of the voice but as that which is inseparable from the voice. In just the cited section of the poem, there is township street slang and nicknames, the South African English of the urban worker, the song of the mine workers: 'stompie' as cigarette but and nickname; 'golovan' as a mine trolley; 'songololo' as a millipede. The poem works with the semiotics of sounds and rhythms to give precedence to its love of the energetic materiality of the word, and beyond that of the body and being that utters it. The love of language and its possibilities thus extends to a love of the living bodies that shape, mould, chew - Johannesburg

as 'Chwannisberg' - spit, gurgle, groan - lolo, low, glow - rapid fire and slicken it - just, boombang, just - the language of 'this land.'

The poem seems to me to be a love poem, one of an unconditional love for the creative and living energies of the workers and thereby speakers of the land. Furthermore, the poem offers itself as a preparatory sampling of what is yet to come: to learn how to speak.

We will now look at a poem by the political poet and novelist, Sipho Sepamla, entitled 'Measure for Measure'.

Sepamla is playing with the title of Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure, and by giving his own poem this title, he asserts, seriously and mischievously, his right to be taken seriously as a writer. Moreover, Shakespeare's play is very much about themes broached in Waiting for the Barbarians, such as the abuse of the law, a state of surveillance, the perverse desires of the father-leader and paternal voyeurisms. However, Sepamla is, of course, speaking from a different place in regards to all this. With 'measure' the poem entertains a concept of the law, and in 'measure for measure' a notion of retaliation. Moreover, the poem is written as a critique both of the racism of the law, with its acts and actions of discrimination, and as a critique of the pseudo-scientific laws of racism in which human beings are measured in order to concoct essential differences: 'measure the

amount of light into a window/ known to guarantee my traditional ways'. This refers to the keystone of apartheid ideology, namely, separate development, which is plainly made absurd in the poem by the amount of interference into and control over a black working force that the state is clearly dependent on and thus unable to separate itself from. The 'measure' of the poem addresses the fact that apartheid paternalism (addressed in the last of the couplets) and its racial measures are really an economic issue, where the capital ideal of the father, the time of the father, is allied with capitalism and the measurement of labour-time: 'count the number of days in a year/ and say how many of them I can be contracted around'. The poem parodies the laying down of the law and the order upon order with its use of imperatives - go, count, measure, and so on - whilst in using imperatives itself it shows that there is an attitude that is not cowered by the bullying. 'Measure for measure' implies a standing up to the oppressor as and in equal measure, this being reinforced by the use of couplets where the lordly imperative of the first line is ironically countered, counter-balanced, or undercut in the second line. The poem also has something of the structural effect of a Shakespearean sonnet in that the final stanza performs the twist to the whole poem that the final couplet of a sonnet does. In summation of all that can be counted, creamed off and administered - 'and when all that is done' - the orders give way to an imperative of allowance of freedom of speech and another authority - 'let me tell you this' - the distance between them will be beyond measure or immeasurable - 'you'll never know how far I stand from you'. The last line is at once conclusive and open in that the incalculable distance could be great or small. It is also the kind of spacing that the law - of the father, time, capital - cannot measure. Beyond that measure, it may concern other laws and other values, those of life itself perhaps and respect for it, a respect that allows space for the other. The last line is also a political statement: 'you'll never know how far I stand from you' (and what you stand for). I do not read this as a claim to being essentially inscrutable, to being an enigmatic other, for this is just a matter of the oppressor's ignorance. The poem is factual and irreverent in its tone which suggests that the 'inscrutability' in question is a matter of a disavowal of the facts. A few more words could be said about this.

The poem might seem to address the farcical and absurd - 'ensure the shape suits tribal tastes' - but, actually, these are the facts of apartheid: the emphasis on ethnic-racial separateness; the prescribed work areas; the restricted education; the exploitation and the slums. So, it is dealing with the 'nonsense' of apartheid by rubbing its nose in the disavowed facts of its policies. I love this empirical spirit in South African political poetry, a spirited and witty (as in esprit) empiricism that is found in much African poetry and literature. It is the undeniable art of the undeniable. When Hegel and others approach Africa with their back to the facts and to African spirit, then it is an astute measure for measure to get back to facts. It is also a broader issue of post-colonial, anti-colonial strategies. The Indian writer, Cyrus Mistry, in a paper given at the University of Kent, referring to Arunduthai Roy's The God of Small Things, made the point that we (some) need the facts more than ever and should make the Basic Facts, capitalised, a slogan.

This factuality in political writing is not dry and unliterary but, as claimed above, witty and astute and spirited. It is also an irony beyond the ironies of self-consciousness. The latter could be said to constitute a Western masculine irony, given that it is of that subject, and to concern the undecidable. It concerns, as discussed with reference to Glas on Hegel, the feminine in man provoking doubt, self-questioning, undecidability. The same could be said of Waiting for the Barbarians, where the girl serves to prompt the self-doubts of the Magistrate. The daughter in Disgrace may be said to serve as a similar impetus. This other irony, an African one, a feminine one, an African-feminine one - as could be shown more widely - could be said to perform an about-face in which questionable laws and truths are made to face, confront, the undeniable. As regards Sepamla's poem, legalised apartheid and all its measures renders the law questionable as law - it is legal but not just - no doubt about this dubiousness, but beyond that there are the law's disavowals. In the poem, facts are not statistics, measurements, as such: these can be manipulated and used to manipulate, as the poem well shows. I want rather to say that facts are avowals and acknowledgements of what can be known and said to be the case. Factuality would thus concern the ignorance, the zones of ignorance, of the supposedly one-and-only all-thinking subject. Masculine self-doubt and its aesthetics of undecidability, together with its ethics of a self-questioning idealism, are fine and to be welcomed (given some of the alternatives) as long as we are able to remember when to say, in an artful feminine way, in an African way, perhaps especially in an African-feminine way, Killjoy-wise: what nonsense. Or, as Head writes in A Question of Power: 'Admittedly, it had taken her a year of slow, painful thought to say at the end of it: "Phew! What a load of rubbish!"' The undecidable also opens out onto the undeniability of the other as subject.

This reading of African poetry will conclude with a poem by Mafika Gwala. When I titled this chapter, 'From Hegel on Africa Towards a Reading of African Literature', I had in mind 'reading' in the sense of 'poetry readings' or readings from works. That is, in the sense of allowing the writers to step forward, or the writing to come forward and speak for itself. So, I will now just step aside:

In Defence of Poetry 

5555.(from a bookPublication Information: Book Title: Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Contributors: Rita Charon - editor, Martha Montello - editor. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2002)

Consider the less dramatic question of whether a professor’s or doctor’s sexual pursuit of a student or patient is ever defensible. In three novels I’ve recently read—and there are probably scores more—the hero/professor has sex with a girl student. In Robert Hellenga’s The Fall of a Sparrow, the protagonist, a professor of English, has sex with a beautiful “foreign” student, is discovered, and is kicked out by his college. All of the moral judgments by the implied author, many made explicit by the narrator, are against the college administrators for their blind moralism. There is not a word about the ethical conflict between lust and abuse of academic power. And there is no hint that the protagonist thinks he has committed an act genuinely subject to ethical objection.

In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, we find a somewhat more honest confrontation. A South African professor of English is caught imposing sex upon a beautiful student enrolled in his “Romantic Literature” course. When he first proposes that she “spend the night” with him, she asks “Why?” and he answers, “Because you ought to.”

“Why ought I to?”

“Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it….”

“And what if I already share it?”…

“Then you should share it more widely.” 12 

She resists this first advance and leaves him. The author then intrudes a moral judgment against his protagonist: “That is where he ought to end it.” But the “hero” does not. He goes on pursuing her. And shortly later, he forces sex on her. “She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes.”

And then come the ambiguous moral judgments (it’s not entirely clear whether the author intends to share them with the hero): “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration….” When she then sends him away, “He obeys, but then, when he reaches his car, is overtaken with such dejection, such dullness, that he sits slumped at the wheel unable to move.

“A mistake, a huge mistake. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him” (p. 25).

After more sexual encounters, the scandal of it hits the campus, and he is, like the hero of Hellenga’s novel, kicked out by the administration. The reader is not left, as in Hellenga’s hands, with no hint of any moral problem; the implied author obviously shares the hero’s regrets about his “mistakes.” But there is no clear encounter with the question: Why is it wrong for a professor to succumb to lust with one of his students? And of course there is no hint about whether reader Booth is wrong to admire Coetzee more than Hellenga, as artist, because he at least addresses the moral issues.

For a third example, consider Philip Roth’s latest book, The Dying Animal now receiving mixed reviews. Even though I knew that it would be full of sexual encounters, I expected no moral judgments about it. Most of Roth’s earlier works provide little hint that fulfilling certain kinds of lustful drive can be judged as vicious. In this book, very early on, to my surprise, after the hero-narrator reports how sexually attractive he finds one of his students, he suddenly inserts what sounds like a strong moral judgment, one that could be taken as a critique of Hellenga and even of Coetzee:

Now, I have one set rule of some fifteen years’ standing that I never break. I don’t any longer get in touch with them [my female students] on a private basis until they have completed their final exam and received their grade and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of temptation—or even a clear-cut signal to begin the flirtation and make the approach—I haven’t broken this rule since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door. (p. 5)

But then he quickly wipes out what has appeared as a moral code and turns it into a “set rule” that is mere self-protection: “I don’t get in touch with them any earlier so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life” (p. 5).

And of course he never gets caught and kicked out of his teaching position: he has adopted not a moral code but a self-protective code, with almost no hint, throughout the book, of how his aggressive pursuits of woman after woman has

harmed them (he feels harmed himself, when one of them leaves him for another lover, but who cares how much he hurts them?). His infidelities are simply the product of a lust that, by implication, ought not to be inhibited except when it might get him into trouble.

Of course no reader can be sure whether Roth intends us to join the narrator’s views with his implied author’s moral positions. It could be that Roth is mocking his hero for pretending to make a moral judgment that is really only an act of self-protection. We’ll never know.

I bring in these three non-medical examples to dramatize the question: Do I believe that their different ways of addressing or ignoring moral questions should affect our judgment about the aesthetic quality of each novel? Yes, of course. For me, Coetzee rises a bit above the others because he addresses moral issues throughout. But do I think that Hellenga’s and Roth’s reveling in student sex, without a hint of moral inquiry, utterly destroys their aesthetic quality? Of course not; it only diminishes but need not destroy my admiration. It is simply that I learn more about life when an author like Coetzee or Henry James takes me into his way of coping with the ambiguities and tensions that moral judgments lead to. James teaches me more about how to grapple with moral complexities than any formal philosopher I have read.

Three: When we turn from ethical criticism of all kinds of literature back to literature that deals with medical problems, we meet similar issues—issues that are not as widely discussed as are those about sex. How can literature, when dealt with ethically, teach us more not just about sexual morality but about how doctors and patients should live—more than we learn from the handbooks concerning medical ethics?

Well, as readers here know, there has been a flood of novels and memoirs written—mainly by those who have faced life-threatening disease—addressing ethical problems of medicine. Most of them are written from the patient’s point of view, often revealing just how much difference can result from the diverse ethical stances that doctors take as they perform their treatments. And too many of them, from my “moralistic” perspective, follow Hellenga and Roth in failing to address the complex issues that their stories reveal. However, unlike Hellenga and Roth, they work hard to underline this or that moral point, ignoring the ambiguities and complexities.

The possible candidates for the role of “genuine educators about medical ethics and the ethics of dying” are innumerable. Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Richard Powers’s Gain or Wandering Soul, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (the final section, really a report on Bellow’s own illness), Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing, François Mauriac’s Knot of Vipers, and so on.

For the sake of brevity, consider a brilliant recent novel now receiving rave reviews, David Lodge’s Thinks…. Because the heroine and her would-be lover dispute, often quite profoundly, about the contrast between literary and scientific treatment of human consciousness, the whole book could be considered relevant to this essay. But I must concentrate on only one moment, hoping that my discussion will not spoil the book’s plot for those who have not yet read it. Helen, the novelist who has to her own surprise finally fallen in love with Messenger, the dogmatically mechanistic cognitive scientist, suddenly learns that he may have fatal liver cancer. In their long discussions of how to deal with his illness, she is shocked by his request that if the diagnosis turns out to be positive, she must, if she loves him, provide some kind of assisted suicide. He insists that he will not face the miseries of extended painful and pointless treatment of the kind the heroine of Wit received.

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