Abstract
Some of Coetzee’s female protagonists, notably Magda (In the Heart of the Country), and Lucy (Disgrace), have throughout been less enthusiastically received than they might merit. Why is this so, Ghosh-Schellhorn asks, in this timely revisiting of two of Coetzee’s most controversial novels. The chapter seeks for answers to this poser by invoking Hans Robert Jauss’s reader-reception postulate that aesthetically distanced texts alone succeed in extending our ‘horizons of expectation’. Coetzee’s rewriting of the South African plaasroman hence challenges us to extend our ‘horizons of expectation’ with regard to this genre. Ghosh-Schellhorn argues that, in confronting us with women who take on unprecedented agency, Coetzee asks us to reconsider the concept of the Vrou en Moeder hallowed by Boer ideology.
… mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Voltaire, Candide
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Notes
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Silverstein argues that ‘the novel’s many critics disregard the expressions of racial discourse that interpellate its protagonist David Lurie as a Jew and the function of his Jewishness in the economy of Coetzee’s novel’ (2011: 81).
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See also López (2011) for treatment of the visitation.
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Spivak, by contrast, does regard Lucy as a subaltern, but as an agent of moral change, when she writes: ‘in Lucy’s vision of “starting with nothing”, in the reproductive situation shorn of the fetishization of property, in the child given up as body’s product, the ethical moment can perhaps emerge—at least so the fiction says’ (2002: 29).
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See Kossew (2012) for a nuanced reading of the limits of representation and memory, especially with reference to Agaat’s traumatic life.
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See Samuelson (2007) for a discussion of the trope of slavery in the novel.
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In his indictment of Disgrace, Raditlhalo (a representative of one of Coetzee’s immediate implied readers) asks: ‘Is it any wonder, then, that certain North American graduate students are turning against Coetzee’s felt need to absolve white South Africa of historical responsibilities and acknowledgement of human rights abuses?’ (2012: 260). More nuanced but equally critically, Attridge states that ‘even readers whose view of the artist’s responsibility is less tied to notions of instrumentalism and political efficacy … and I include myself among these—may find the bleak image of the ‘new South Africa’ in this work hard to take’ (2000: 99–100).
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More can be said about Coetzee’s multifaceted use of the “dog” metaphor, since it holds the key to how we respond to Disgrace. Herron makes a start in this direction, even if his exclusive focus on Lurie’s response to animals (2005) leaves us with a partial answer.
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Ghosh-Schellhorn, M. (2019). Reading Coetzee Expectantly: From Magda to Lucy. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_12
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