CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................1 I. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................2 II. THE THEORIES OF INTERTEXTUALITY................................................................6 III. MAGDA AND THE WESTERN LITERARY HERITAGE.......................................17 IV. PARODY IN FOE...................................................................................................33 V. DISGRACE AND THE ROMANTIC POETS..........................................................48 VI. CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................54 WORKS CITED...........................................................................................................58

Acknowledgments Once again I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my teacher and supervisor Dr. Paul Franssen for his assistance, kindness, valuable advice, constructive criticism and his continuous encouragement in order to bring this work to a better conclusion than it would otherwise have been. My sincere thanks go also to Dr. Ton Hoenselaars for accepting to read and comment on this work.

My special thanks go to Loes Vleeming for being generous and passionate with me these years. Last but not least I would like to thank my father for all he did for me and to whose soul I dedicate this humble paper.

I. Introduction The concept of intertextuality, which emerged during the 1960s, is one of the principal critical tools in literary criticism. Its purpose is to explain the process that makes any text to be read as an assimilation and transformation of another text or group of other texts. For Julia Kristeva, each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. Any text [] is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of

intersubjectivity, and a poetic language is read as at least double (Kristeva quoted in Friedman 147). One has to agree with Kristevas definition of intertextuality which considers every writing as a major form of inter-art or intertext. In this respect, any work of art does not emerge from nothingness, but rather interacts with, rewrites or parodies other texts. The works of J. M. Coetzee provide an example of this complex phenomenon of intertextuality as defined by Kristeva. In his novels, Coetzee cites, refers to and alludes to, implicitly and explicitly, other texts, thereby creating a sort of dialectic relationship between his texts and his sources. In the Heart of the Country (1977), for instance, reveals Coetzees strategy of intertextuality. The very idea behind Coetzees use of intertextual references is to establish a sort of affinity between the conditions of his characters and his source texts, so as to uncover womens and racial others oppression by questioning the structures of power. The novel attempts to create a dialogue between the female protagonist, Magda, and another outside the self with whom a dialogue must be established in order to create a saving plurivocity (Durrant 59). In the text, we actually find various direct and indirect hints to the Bible, Freud, Lacan, French theorists, Greek mythology, all of which have to do with Magdas psychological disorder and weak position as a woman in male dominated society. To put it in Heads words, the construction of Magda is ultimately a textual problem, in the sense that she is shown to be the product of different textual influences. Her narrative is peppered with quotations from, or allusions to, many important figures in modern Western literature and philosophy, including Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Kafka, Sartre and Beckett (59). Intertextuality is more than the presence of a text in another text. It is in fact, like parody, one of the major forms of modern self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse (Hutcheon, A Theory 2). In his essay Game Hunting in In the Heart of the Country, Ian Glenn tries to draw a link between Coetzee and his protagonist, Magda. Unlike most of

Coetzees critics, such as Gallager, Penner, Dodd and others, Glenn reads the character of Magda not as an embodiment of a typical Afrikaner female, nor as an insane colonial spinster, but rather as self-reflexive. He argues that Magdas story, in some respects, is an allegory, or an echo, of Coetzees own position, the implied authors to be more precise, concerning important issues, such as that of class, gender and colonial position. To illustrate this point, Glenn points out that Magdas early fragments are not well structured as if she were a neophyte authoress. He asserts that the style she uses takes on the effect of school essay or literary exercise on a set topic (the New Wife) that comes out overburdened by descriptives and similes (Glenn 124). J. M. Coetzees Foe (1986), is a novel which retells Daniel Defoes eighteenth-century classic Robinson Crusoe (1719) from the perspective of a female persona called Susan Barton. Coetzee employs a radical departure from the original text, Robinson Crusoe, so as to subvert the text for postcolonial and postmodern purposes. According to Helen Tiffin, Foe is a perfect example of postcolonial texts that foreground a cultural conflict and put into question the very relationship between the centre and the periphery; the coloniser and the colonised; the European self and the racial other. She argues that Foe succeeds not only to write back [] to an English canonical text, but also to the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds (98). Like In the Heart of the Country and Foe, J. M. Coetzees eighth novel, Disgrace (1999), is not only intertextually related with other novels and works, but also reacts against them. The most important borrowings are those from the English Romantic poets, especially Byron and Wordsworth. Unlike Magda, who seems to be unaware of the fact that she is quoting from the Bible, Hegel, Blake and others, David Lurie, the novels protagonist and a university teacher, is fully aware of his sources and the kind of relationship that he shares with them. In other words, David Luries relationship with the Romantic poets is not that of

borrowing words to convey his message or support his ideas, but of influence to the extent that he identifies himself with them and adopts their views towards women, desire, life and history: Having published three books of criticism, Lurie is seizedseveral years before the novel opensby the idea of writing a musical work based on the life of a poet with whom he identifies (an identification that is hardly surprising given his history of sexual adventuring): Byron in Italy: a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera (Attridge, Age 5). Lurie, however, occasionally reacts against his sources, especially towards the end of the novel, when he admits that they were bad guides: So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well (Coetzee, Disgrace 179). In this MA research project, I will discuss the strategy of intertextuality in J. M. Coetzees works, focusing more particularly on his novels: In the Heart of the Country, Foe and Disgrace. I will also try to show that Coetzees use of intertextuality serves many purposes, some of which are to establish a dialogue between his works and those from the major Western and Eastern literatures as well as reacting against them. The theories of intertextuality and parody will form the theoretical material on which I will rely in my analysis and discussion. In this respect, fFour issues will be highlighted, namely (a) the Theories of Intertextuality, (b) Magda and the Western Literary Heritage, (c) the Function of Parody in Foe, and (d) Disgrace and the Romantic Poets. In Theories of Intertextuality, I will try to throw light on the concept of intertextuality and its different forms. The achievements of the French theoreticians, like Julia Kristeva and others, will be central to this chapter. I will also discuss in detail the theory of parody as developed by Linda Hutcheon.show that Magdas problems are intimately linked with her gender; being a woman in a male society. Magdas big challenge in the novel is to question societys power structure and the various forms of male oriented systems of manipulation As for Magda and the

Western Literary Heritage, , the representation of the racial other, there I will try to find an affinity between Magdas situation and the sources she cites or quotes from. examine how theBy the Function of Parody in Foe is meant that Coetzees choice to rework Defoes text is to exploit the tension between the centre and the margin, by challenging the primacy of the Western standards that assume universality and reversing the function of the original text so that what is true becomes false and what is false becomes true and so on. The fourth and the last chapter entitled Disgrace and the Romantic Poets, focuses on the relationship between the novels protagonist, David Lurie, and the Romantic poets, especially Lord Byron and William Wordsworth.

II. The Theories of Intertextuality Since its emergence in the 1960s, intertextuality has increasingly become influential and important in the field of literary criticism. The strategies which intertextuality has developed during the last fifty years have helped in reading literary texts in relation with other texts or

groups of other texts. This relation is generally characterised by transforming and reworking some features of the original text(s) to create special effects or serve certain purposes. The concept of intertextuality, however, raised a large debate and it did not become widely accepted until it had been formulated many times. It might be difficult to separate intertextuality in its beginning from the theoretical achievements of the Tel Quel group and the journal having the same title, founded in 1960. In the golden period of Tel Quel (196669), intertextuality appeared officially among literary terms due to the publication of two influential books. The first of these books was written by Julia Kristeva, Smiotike: Recherches pour une Smanalyse (1969), in which she studied the instance of the grotesque novel Petit Jehn de Sainte for the sake of fixing what must be understood about intertextuality. The term intertextuality occurred for the first time in one of the books articles, Le Mot, le Dialogue, le Roman (Word, Dialogue, Novel) this article was published first in 1966 where she introduced the Russian theoretician and critic Mikhail Bakhtin to the French public. In another article of the Book, Le Texte Clos (The Bounded Text) first published in 1967 Julia Kristeva provided a complete definition of the term as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings (Kristeva quoted in Friedman 147). Kristevas development of the concept of intertextuality owes much to the achievements of Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristevas familiarity with the Russian language and culture, as a Bulgarian living in France, helped her to develop the theoretical foundations of intertextuality. She derives the idea for her definition of the term from the works of Bakhtin: Le mot (le texte) est un croisement de mots (de textes) o on lit au moins un autre mot (texte) [] tout texte se construit comme une mosaque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation dun autre texte (each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other

word (text) can be read. Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another) (Kristeva quoted in Samoyault 9; and in Friedman 147). The second book bears the signature of Jacques Derridas, Of Grammatology (1967), in which he investigated Ferdinand de Saussures foundational concepts of semiotics, signifier and signified. The basic premise of Derridas notion of intertextuality is that no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each element being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces (Derrida 26). Differently put, a text is not a closed system, but rather interrelated and involved in a dialogue with other texts. Understandably, then, the multiple ways that link a text with other text(s) is not a matter of influence, but an infinite network of codes that makes it to be meaningful. No concept has given rise to so much discussion among modern literary critics as that of intertextuality. Whereas the prefix inter of intertextuality can be easily defined as between, the other component, textuality, needs an elaborate explanation. In literary theory, textuality is often connected with the French Structuralists. For them, textuality is a mode of writing constituted by a play of component elements according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These factors may generate an illusion of reality, but have no truthvalue, nor even reference to a reality existing outside the literary system itself (Abrams, Glossary 301). Textuality, in short, means that the literary text is a closed signifying system which can only be analysed and interpreted in the light of its relation with the structural system of language, the typical system which designs its rules and to which it belongs.

Intertextuality, however, considers the literary work not as a closed network, but as an open product which contains traces of other texts. In this intertextual process, the reader obtains an important position, for he or she comes to the text with his or her horizon of expectations formed by his or her earlier readings. This means that there is no text which exists in isolation, but texts are intertextually related with each other. To put it in Roland Barthes words: We know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning ( the message of the author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culturethe writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner thing he thinks to translate is only a readyformed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. (Barthes quoted in Allen 13) The origins of intertextuality lie in the theories and philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, every text is engaged in a dialogue with other texts. In his works, Bakhtin did not use the term intertextuality, but his different studies helped in introducing the idea of the multiplicity of discourses transmitted through words. The text appears then as the space of exchange between multiple voices or discourses conditioned by the different social institutions of the community. Bakhtin does not speak here about intertextuality, but rather about the dialogical dimension of the word and the text. Bakhtin argues that every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates (Bakhtin quoted in Clayton 18). This account of words as dialogic assumes that they must be examined and interpreted as elements of this dialogue (it is important to

note here that dialogue for Bakhtin does not mean literally the conversation between characters in the novel). The Carnivalesque or Carnival proposed also by Bakhtin is another concept which allowed Kristeva and others to elaborate their views about intertextuality. The literary text, Bakhtin argues, resembles the carnival celebrations where the state authorities and the social institutions are mocked and ridiculed. This complex comparison between carnival and literary modes manifests itself in their tendencies to mingle everything together: the low culture with the high as well as the official discourse with the unofficial one. In his study on Rabelais, Bakhtin tries to investigate the manner in which ancient traditions of the carnival act as a centrifugal force promoting unofficial dimensions of society and human life and does so through a profane language and drama of the lower bodily stratum: images of huge bodies, bloated stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity are all carnivalesque images (Allen 22). These carnivalesque images seem to devalue the official discourse, especially the political and the religious, in favour of the unofficial one. The notion of the text as an open carnival implies that a text does not stand on its own, but echoes other texts and is governed by the social organisations of the participants. The philosophy of Bakhtin is based on three principles, the most important of which is the open-endedness of the text. This idea of the open-endedness of the text became the essence of the literary theory known as Deconstruction. Now we need to turn to the concept of intertextuality as practiced and defined by Julia Kristeva and other proponents of Deconstruction, like Derrida, Barthes, Bloom and Riddle. With these critics, intertextuality took a more complex dimension than Bakhtins simple form of the carnival or the grotesque. Kristevas two early articles, The Bounded Text and Word, Dialogue, Novel published later together in Smiotike, complete each other in showing the impact of Bakhtin on Kristeva and the way in which she read his works and

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developed his ideas. In her article The Bounded Text, Kristeva studied the way in which texts come to be seen as constructions of other pre-existing texts or discourses. According to her, a pure text does not exist, for everything that an author creates originates from his or her previous readings. The new text, therefore, becomes a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another (Allen 34). Like Bakhtin, Kristeva believes that texts are culturally and ideologically conditioned. In this respect, texts do not exist in isolation, but intersect with each other since they originate from the same textual and cultural material and conditions. Both Bakhtin and Kristeva share the same views about the strong affinity between the text and its cultural and ideological context. Texts, in this sense, are seen as a complex network which contains beneath its surface power relations, ideological structures and translingual relations. Jacques Derrida is another literary philosopher whose achievements have helped in establishing the concept of intertextuality. The importance of his theories can be seen in their tendencies to give a broader dimension to textual analysis. For him, the literary text contains no origins and no boundaries because meaning and language have no beginning and no end. Derrida argues that there is no final reading of a text since every reading brings about another reading and so on. This open-endedness of reading (of the text boundaries as well) which he called the transcendental signified refers in and of itself, in its essence, to no signified, would exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier (Allen 32). No doubt the achievements of Derrida in the field of intertextuality and literary theory at large are interesting and revolutionary. Yet, his argument that intertextuality means that any word the text presents has already been used in another text or context is arguable. Derrida does not speak here about citing or quoting, for instance, prose sentences or lines of poetry,

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but words which have been utilised before. It is true that by postulating this extreme form of intertextuality, Derrida wants to assert the idea of the infinity of intertextuality and interpretation, but things become definitely absurd and arbitrary as Vincent Leitch points out: Pushed to its extreme, the Derridean notion of citation meets the broader theory of intertextuality. To employ any previously used word is to practice citation. Since every word in our unabridged dictionaries has always undergone usage, possessing its own intertextual history, every word embodies and renews a potential for being cited on each occasion that it is pronounced or written. The appearance of a word extends and reactivates a history. Every word in a text holds this potential. The lines of itertextuality, when multiplied in correlation with citability, surpass all possibility of representation. The dream image of an immense cosmic network only hints at the proper model. Our formula is: the total history of citation (repetition) of each word multiplied by the number of words in a text, equals the quantity of intertextuality. Because we cannot determine the history of citation, our fake formula is useless. (161) With Roland Barthes, the situation does not differ that much from that of Derrida. Barthes asserts that there is no meaning without intertextuality. In effect this means that every text is an intertext. In his foundational article, The Death of the Author (1968), Barthes reduces the role of the author merely to a user of an already existing linguistic system which s/he did not invent, but had inherited as others did. The author is no longer seen as the originator and the creator of his own text, instead the conscious self is declared to be a construct that is itself the product of the workings of the linguistic system, and the mind of an author is described as an imputed space within which the impersonal, always-already existing system of literary language, conventions, codes, and rules of combination gets precipitated into a particular text (Abrams, Glossary 301).

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For Roland Barthes, the author functions as a scribe, an agent who relies on a huge body of inherited knowledge, citations and indications. Thus, the text becomes the space where multiple voices meet and different writings interact with each other. The text is seen by Barthes as a disordered dictionary whose words are arranged in a sequence of signs and indications that the author is forced to respect. Barthes expresses that meaning does not originate from the authors self, but from a larger linguistic and cultural system. Denied the privilege of being the source of the text, the author is reduced to a collector and organiser of already-existing forms within a particular linguistic system. These ideas are what led to the death of the author and the birth of intertextuality. Harold Bloom is best known for his linkage between intertextuality and influence. In his own theory of the Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argues that every poet suffers from an anxiety caused by his or her feeling of coming after predecessor poets. In this sense, the relationship between the poet and his or her literary tradition is labelled as an uneasy and antagonistic one. This anxiety of influence which characterises the relationship between the new and the old poets is revisionist in the sense that a poet borrows, assimilates, reinterprets, re-evaluates and revises the works written by the earlier poets. Bloom believes that this process is conducted by poets so as to rise above the anxiety of the predecessors influence and their feeling of belatedness. Blooms version of intertextuality corresponds with his views of the anxiety of influence. The very notion of resisting and struggling against the influence of the predecessors implies the inevitable presence of the latter in the texts produced by the new poets. The individual dimension takes an essential role in Blooms theory. He describes the traditional history of poetry as a struggle; an (inter)textual embattlement between creative selves or creative persons. In Blooms opinion, intertextuality does not refer to the relationship that

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exists between texts, but rather it is the principle which gives rise to the text. Bloom claims that there is nothing called poem, but inter-poems; nothing called poet but inter-poets. With Joseph Riddel, intertextuality took a deconstructive turn. Riddels theory situates the text within other texts by combining intertextuality together with textuality. For Riddel, the texts use of language, rhetoric and themes is the outcome of the preceding texts influences. The preceding texts, Riddel argues, invade the borders of the actual text by transforming it into an intertext. Actually, these pre-existing texts are in their turn incomplete, for they are related and influenced by other texts and so on. In a word, there is no first text, but all texts are invaded by other texts. To put it in Leitchs words: The resident earlier texts open out the present text to an uncontrollable play of historical predecessors. The predecessor-texts themselves operate intertextually, meaning that no first, pure, or original text ever can or did rule over or delimit the historical oscillations at play in texts. Thus all texts appear doubled: they are uncontrollably permeated with previous texts.The forces of intertextuality, in Riddels view, fundamentally infiltrate the operations of the sign, disallowing any notion of pure or nonintertextual textuality. (98). Like intertextuality, parody known also as ironic quotation, burlesque or pastiche refers to the way present representations are derived from past ones by reversing their functions so that what is received as truth becomes fiction and what is fiction becomes truth etc. Parody then must imitate the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject (Abrams, Glossary 26). In addition to these stylistic features, parody has been stretched to cover almost any intertext that is antagonistic to the original. When a text adopts the characteristics of a specific

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literary genre or parodies its features, the interpretive and reading process moves to a higher level of interpretation. This operation dictates the way of reading the text, mainly as an imitation and at the same time an exaggeration of the source text. By doing so, parody takes the authentic characteristics of the original and tries to rework, problematise and subvert them, so as to create an aesthetic distance between the original text and the new one. This parodic strategy makes the serious elements of the original become funny and odd. In this sense, parody presents two possibilities of reading and representation: the possibilities offered by the original text and those the parody presents through imitation. Whatever transformation or deformation parody adopts, it keeps a strong link with the original text. Parody does not aim to bring these two distinct forms together nor to wrest past art from its original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle. Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference (Hutcheon, The Politics 89). Eventually, parody constitutes a reaction against the classical belief that the artistic creation is unique and original. The ultimate goal of the subversive strategy of parody is surely not to underestimate the role and the importance of art, but rather to give it a different meaning and a new life. The works of J. M. Coetzee offer a good example of what I have discussed so far of the concept of intertextuality and its variations. In all his novels, Coetzee cites, quotes, imitates, alludes, parodies and engages in a dialectic relationship with other texts from the major Western as well as Eastern literatures. J. M. Coetzees Foe (1986), for instance, is generally described by critics as a parody of Daniel Defoes eighteenth-century classic, Robinson Crusoe (1917). In this novel, Coetzee takes a radical departure from Defoes account by telling the whole from the perspective of a woman, Susan Barton. In Foe, Coetzee

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does not only write back to Daniel Defoe and his canonical text, but also aims at interrogating and challenging Western cultural patterns of knowledge. Coetzees Life and Time of Michael K (1983) is another novel which is engaged in a strong relationship with other texts. Like Foe, Michael K echoes and alludes to Defoes Robinson Crusoe. Both texts tell the story of unfortunate outcasts who find themselves conducting a difficult life and trying to survive amongst hostile and harsh conditions, by taming goats and building shelters (caves/holes). In addition to Robinson Crusoe, the novel is involved also in a direct intertextual relationship with Kafka and a number of his works. For many critics, the K of the title is an abridgment of the name Kafka as it can be a borrowing from Kafkas Das Schloss and Der Prozess. There are also indirect references to other works of Kafka, namely The Hunger Artist and The Burrow. Coetzees novels, in short, presents a whole range of textual and intertextual practices which Coetzee considers indispensable to create a dialogue between the past and the present and also to provide a better understanding of how these texts function and continue to affect ones views. The use of intertextuality for Coetzee is not a matter of borrowing or lack of inspiration, but a conscious choice through which he puts into question the power structures and its discourses wherever found. His strategy of rereading, reconsidering, rewriting and borrowing from texts that are considered part of the European canonical heritage serves to subvert these texts and through them the whole discursive field in which these texts have been produced, operated and transmitted. This subversive strategy does not seek to subvert the dominant with a view to taking its place, but, in Wilson Harris formula, to evolve textual strategies which continually consume their own biases at the same time as they expose and erode those of the dominant discourse (Tiffin 96).

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III. Magda and the Western Literary Heritage In the Heart of the Country is a perfect example of Coetzees novels which are involved in an intertextual relationship with other works so as to reflect a situation of oppression, suffering and decay. Presenting the whole narrative from the perspective of a crazed spinster, Magda, who leads a miserable life in one of the farms in the Cape at the turn of the nineteenth century, Coetzee tries to reveal the South African colonial past as well as to give voice to those who have been silenced and marginalised throughout history, including women and the racial Others. Indeed, the novels 266 fragments do not only represent Magdas story and history, but also provide a harsh criticism of power structures in all forms wherever and whenever they existed. In his writings and interviews, Coetzee adopts a position that abstains from power. Coetzees novels are contemporaneous in incorporating a radical critique of language, of the forms of authority made possible by language, not only questioning the latter, but challenging our right to such things as epistemological certitude (Huggan & al 5). Coetzees use of the Western literary heritage is part and parcel of his critique of language because it is made in language. This use manifests itself in the numerous quotations, allusions and (in)direct references to many works which are considered essential parts of the European canon. The relationship between Magda and her sources is a relationship of dialogue in which attention is drawn to serious issues, such as those of colonialism, race, gender and class. Functioning from a marginal position as a woman in a patriarchal South African society, Magda is apt to speak about the sufferings of those who were subject to the tyranny of the colonial aggressive tools and the cultural oppressing systems. As a white person, she also has an insiders knowledge of how oppression functions. The strategy of intertextuality in In the Heart of the Country aims at re-reading, bringing into question and recycling its source texts and theories in order to give them new

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meanings and at the same time to subvert some of their hidden ideologies. Like many modern thinkers, Coetzee believes that the Western literary canon is contaminated by ideological viruses and male bias. The novel in fact succeeds in its strategy of describing the experience of its protagonist through an intertextual relationship, thereby stretch[ing] the boundaries of realism, on the one hand, by taking the stuff for its story from literature, and, on the other, by creating a narrator who is able to find evidence of her own existence only in her own writing (Briganti 34). I will discuss the strategy of intertextuality in the novel, by trying to draw a link between Magdas narrative and the fairy tales of Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, Daniel Defoes novel Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Lacans theory of the symbolic function of language, the South African farm novel, feminist theory and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels and other thinkers theories which can be applied to anti-colonialism. The notion of oppression is what links Magda and the fairy tale of Cinderella because they are both oppressed subjects. In her attempt to tell her own life, Magda on different occasions draws a link between her experience and that of characters from fiction or fairy tales. One of these famous figures is Cinderella, whom she identifies herself with: CINDRLA ES MI (Coetzee, In the Heart 144). In the fairy tale, the life of Cinderella is a continuous nightmare full of sufferings, misery and hard work. By the coming of her stepmother and her two vile daughters, shortly after her mothers death, Cinderellas bad time begins. Fortunately, Cinderella does not end up doing nasty work all her life, but she is rewarded by an easy and happy life close to the kings son who chooses her to be his wife when he discovers that she is the beautiful maiden who danced with him in the palace hall. Like Cinderella, Magdas life is not at all an easy life, for she also lost her mother while she was still young; her father marries with another woman (we are never sure of that, for it could have happened only in her fantasies); she takes care of the house and her father:

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She is the new wife, therefore the old one is dead. The old wife was my mother, but died so many years ago that I barely recall herI should have been standing ready to greet them [the father and his bride] with smiles and offers of tea, but I was not. I was absent. I was not missed. My father pays no attention to my absence. To my father I have been an absence all my life. Therefore instead of being the womanly warmth at the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors, neglected, vengeful. (Coetzee, In the Heart 2) Both Cinderellas and Magdas misery are the outcome of their fathers negligence. In the case of Cinderella, the father did nothing to protect his daughter from the mistreatment by his new wife and his step-daughters, but remained an absence throughout the story. Likewise, Magdas father is presented through her perception as the source of her problems. She describes the relationship between her and him as an antagonistic one, for Magda sees him as being responsible for her miserable life. As a white male in a patriarchal South African society, Magdas father represents a double power: the power that the male exerts over the female and that which white colonisers exert over the natives. Magdas father represents the white coloniser and the dominating master, whom the servants are afraid of and address with respect: Hendrik, you must go now, the baas will be cross if he sees you hanging around here (Coetzee, In the Heart 33). Thus, Magdas father as presented through her imagination is the ruler of the farm and its inhabitants. As still another link between the situation of Magda and fairy tale characters, one can mention the story of Hansel and Gretel. Becoming an oppressor, like the wicked old witch in Hansel and Gretel, is what links the two stories together. Close to the end of the novel, Magda recreates one of Hansel and Gretels scenes, playing the role of the bad old witch with the post boy in the role of Hansel:

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When no one answered his knock he left the house and went down to the orchard, where the orange trees stood full of fruit. It was there that I crept up on him, an old woman of the wilds. He jumped to his feet, trembling, trying to hide a half-eaten orange behind his back. And who is stealing my fruit? I said, the words dropping heavily from my lips, like stones, how strange to speak real words again to a real listener, however petrified. The child stared back goggle-eyed let me recreate the scene at the crone in the black dress flecked with foodstains and verdigris, with the big teeth pointing in all directions and the mad eyes and the mane of grey hair, knowing in that instant that all the stories were true, that worse was true, that he would never see his mother again but butchered like a lamb and his sweet flesh be roasted in the oven and his sinews boiled down to glue and his eyeballs seethed in a potion and his clean bones thrown to the dogs. (Coetzee, In the Heart 135) The situation described in this scene is a recreation of the old tale of Hansel and Gretel, the son and the daughter of a poor wood cutter whose second wife convinced him to leave his two children in the middle of a forest because he could no longer procure daily bread for the four of them. Trying to find their way back to the house of their father, they end up captives of an old witch who lay in wait for children to fatten them and eat them. Unlike the early example in which Magda associates herself with the helpless Cinderella, in this reworking of Hansel and Gretels story, Magda describes herself as if she were the bad old witch we recall from the original story. The very idea behind inscribing herself in the role of the evil witch could be defined in terms of her personal life. In other words, Magda fails to establish a reciprocal relationship with the society she lives in. Indeed, she recounts that she is raped by the servant Hendrik, but we are never sure if that really happened. These elements make her not at all at ease, but she finds herself in a complex

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network of oppressive relationships. In her attempts to set herself free from being the weak and the helpless victim, Magda attributes to herself wicked roles so as to claim power. According to Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country is about living among people without reciprocity, so that theres only an I and the You is not on the same basis, the You is a debased You (Coetzee, Speaking 23). This unequal relationship between the I and the You is behind the aggressive and futile role that Magda imagines herself fulfilling. Throughout the narrative, Magda sees herself as suffering, almost ruined by her father, Hendrik and society. In her attempt to play the role of the bad witch, Magda proves to be a duplicate version of the same oppressive system which was behind all troubles in her life. In this respect, the novel is about power which invades. That is its nature. It invades ones life (Coetzee, Age 117). The structures of power and its tradition of oppressing the weak lead to unequal relationships and hinder the establishment of a sound community where freedom, peace, love and respect prevail. Like Foe and Life and Times of Michael K, In the Heart of the Country is also another novel which alludes to Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe. On the representative level, Magda is not a castaway like Crusoe, but her life on the farm, all of which is spent in loneliness, decreases her sense of belonging to a community and being surrounded by people. The feeling she gets is more that of an outcast who lives in a world created by herself: summers and winters come and go. How they pass so swiftly, how many have passed I cannot say, not having had the foresight long ago to start cutting notches in a pole or scratching marks on a wall or keeping a journal like a good castaway (Coetzee, In the Heart 134). The famous example of a good castaway is Daniel Defoes protagonist Robinson Crusoe, who managed to survive and build a small colony on a deserted island. He also represents the superiority of European man and his ability to claim possession of and power over other races and places. He makes the native Friday his servant and starts using the tools he has found in the wrecked

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ship and his European knowledge to build up terraces, cultivate the land and tame goats. Crusoe manages to build up a colony on that virgin island. He also succeeds as a symbolic and mythic figure of the glorious and powerful European man. This notion of Crusoe as a successful empire builder is what Coetzee tries to call into question in his fifth novel Foe. In a sense, the myth of the superiority of the European race is not always true because not all Westerners are able to give directions. Westerners are superior because of their advanced weapons and expertise. Unlike Crusoe, Magda fails to become the substitute of her father and the ruler of the farm and its inhabitants. Magda cannot fulfil the role of a white mistress, nor that of the servants, but her position and role remain dubious. At the beginning, Magda is associated with the inferior position of a servant when she declares that she used to play with their children when she was a little child, though this was normal at least in rural areas in past times in South Africa. In a later stage in the novel, Magda becomes more aware of class questions and the differences between her and the servants. She no longer treats the servants as her equals, but imposes her position as a white mistress who embodies authority. After her fathers suspicious death, Magda tries to break the barriers between her and the servants, by inviting Hendrik and his wife Anna to sleep with her in the same house. By doing so, Magda attempts to attain with them the dialogue that she was originally denied because of their different social positions and a contact she could never hope to attain with her father because of his temperament and authoritarianism (Canepari-Labib 82). However, Magda failes to establish intimacy and to create a dialogue between herself and the servants. Her relationship with the servants echoes that of Crusoe and his servant Friday; an unequal relationship in which the Other, the servants in these cases, is seen as alien, inferior, yet convenient to the self. Magda also proves to be incapable of running the farm as her father did. Consequently, the life in the

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farm collapses and things and her life go out of control, which increases her feeling of loneliness. As a solution to her problems, Magda wishes for a sort of regression. That is to say, she wants to fall back into an inanimate condition; to the world where language is not needed. This makes us think of Lacan and his revolutionary concepts of the psychosexual formation of the childs patterns of personality. In his theory, Lacan distinguishes between two major periods: the imaginary stage and the symbolic one. In the imaginary stage, which is also known as the pre-linguistic, according to Lacan, the child cannot make any difference between himself/subject and other selves/object(s). It is only in a later stage, in the mirror stage, a transitory stage between the imaginary and the symbolic stages, that a child, unlike young chimpanzees for instance, recognises his or her own image in a mirror. Here the infant subject starts to construct an independent identity which alienates the self from the other. As for the symbolic stage, which takes place after the acquisition of language, the child is integrated into the symbolic order of language and its pre-existing symbols, such as man/woman, master/slave etc1. In Lacans theory, this symbolic realm of language [] is the realm of the law of the father, in which the phallus (in a symbolic sense) is the privileged signifier that serves to establish the mode for all other signifiers (Abrams 252). In Coetzees narrative, language plays an important role in constituting power. According to Lacan, language constitutes social, legal and cultural prohibitions and restrictions and it is intimately connected with power and its repressive and oppressive processes. Magdas indirect entrance into language she says she first learned a pidgin or even African language before learning Afrikaans (or English?) marks the primal split between her and the servants children: I spoke like one of them [the servants children] before I learned to speak like this (Coetzee, In the Heart 7). In this respect, language, which
1

The discussion of Lacans theory is based on Abrams entry psychological and psychoanalytic criticism in his Glossary of Literary Terms.

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contains the fathers laws, restrictions and prohibitions, lead to the irredeemable rupture between her and the servants; between the Self and the Other. Before getting access to the fathers language, Magda says that she used to be herself, living in a sort of paradise in which there is no distinction between slave and master. As a reaction against her fathers laws, Magda tries to be free from the world of language by regressing to a pre-linguistic state. She rejects the idea of being a product and a consumer of language and its laws: The lips are tired, I explain to him [Hendrik], they want to rest, they are tired of all the articulating they have had to do since they were babies, since it was revealed to them that there was a law, that they could simply part themselves to make way for the long aaaa which has, if truth be told, always been enough for them, enough of an expression of whatever this is that needs to be expressed, or clench themselves over the long satisfying silence into which I shall still, I promise, one day retire. (Coetzee, In the Heart 91) Magdas regression to a state of no language ties in with the idea of passing from the imaginary, baby language, to a symbolic phase or adulthood. Differently put, in the prelinguistic state, the baby feels with the mother, whereas in the later stage the child follows the law of the father. Language, thus, is central to ideology, manipulation, authority and power. In the Heart of the Country is a novel which is deeply engaged with gender issues as it conveys a direct criticism of the Afrikaner patriarchal system and through it to the whole discourse which guarantees its hegemony and supremacy. In a similar way, the novel in its very choice of setting its events in a deserted Cape farm echoes the features of the South African traditional plaasroman, known also as farm novel. In this type of fiction, rural life is presented as an ideal natural condition. In several of his essays, Coetzee shows a great interest in the genre of the South African plaasroman. For

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Coetzee, the main characteristic of the plaasroman, as he claimed in Lineal Consciousness in the Farm Novels of C. M. van den Heever, is for the protagonist to go beyond time and place and unite with nature and become part of a farmers long line of successors. Coetzee points out that the plaasroman transcends: [The] awareness of being doomed to die while the world lives on [this] is attained via conscious acceptance that the unit of life is the lineage, not the individual [] Into the myth of the good farmer and his marriage with his farm are drawn many of the energies of European Romanticism, many of the feelings of cosmic identification and engulfment which in the first place were attributed to the relation not of farmer to farm but of man to the wilderness, to forest and moor and mountain. (Coetzee quoted in Dovey 183) Being a woman, Magda is not the right person to be the holder of the plaasromans tradition because she can be part of nature, but not one of the farmers successors. The very choice of setting the action of the novel in a farm is in a way a parody of the plaasroman, which can be traced back to Olive Schreiners The Story of an African Farm (1883). According to Coetzee, the plaasroman is an aesthetic form of the colonisers hegemonic discourse, which aims at associating the social conditions with the land as a property concept. It is mainly this simplistic vision of this kind of novels and their very usefulness in representing the South African conditions which Coetzees novel tries to call into question. Paul Rich makes the point that In the Heart of the Country emerges as an anti-pastoral novel in that it takes an idealised rural situationand subjects it to a merciless scrutiny in order to try and reveal some inner truth about the nature of real social reality (70). According to Rich, the novel is an anti-pastoral, in a broader sense, and an anti-plaasroman, in a narrow one, for it tries to suggest a more complex reading of the rural life, more particularly the South African condition.

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Another thing worth mentioning is that Magdas narrative is prototypical of lEcriture Fminine, known in English as feminine writing or writing the body, which is associated with a number of French theoreticians, such as Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray and many others. LEcriture fminine draws upon Lacanian achievements by developing a feminist theory which tries to map out a possible feminine writing which has its origin in the imaginary stage, the stage of the mother-child relation, before the infant gets access to the father-oriented language. This pre-linguistic experience comes to be reflected in a later stage in feminine writings by trying to disrupt the dominant rules and logic of the phallocentric language. Magda challenges her fathers monolithic discourse by undermining the existing oppressive systems of the law-of-the-father, which forced her to fulfil the role of the subaltern, silenced and helpless victim. In her narrative, Magda expresses her rejection of the role she is consigned to by the phalocentric culture. Central to lEcriture fminine is the idea of writing the body or using bodily identifications so as to communicate with the other. In the novel, Magda attempts to go beyond the fixed signifying systems of language to the realm of the symbolic space of the prelinguistic stage: Oh father, father, if I could only learn your secrets, creep through the honeycomb of your bones, listen to the turmoil of your marrow, the singing of your nerves, float on the tide of your blood, and come at last to the quiet sea where my countless brothers and sisters swim, flicking their tails, smiling, whispering to me of a life to come! I want a second chance! Let me annihilate myself in you and come forth a second time clean and new. (Coetzee, In the Heart 77) This example shows Magdas ultimate wish to regress back to the pre-linguistic stage where no language is needed. To do so, she tries a sort of physical unity with her father, by making a journey back to her very beginning when she was still a sperm. In a similar example of

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writing the body, Magda seeks to demolish the barriers between master and slave and becomes one with Klein-Anna as she declares in this passage: I want a cave, a hole to snuggle in, I want to block my ears against this chatter that streams endlessly from and into me, I want a home somewhere else, if it has to be in this body then on different terms in this body, if there is no other body, though there is one I would far prefer, I cannot stop these words unless I cut my throat, I would like to climb into Klein-Annas body, I would like to climb down her throat while she sleeps and spread myself gently inside her, my hand in her hands, my feet in her feet, my skull in the benign quiet of her skull where images of soap and flour and milk revolve, the holes of my body sliding into place over the holes of hers, there to wait mindlessly for whatever enters them, the song of birds, the smell of the dung, the parts of a man, not angry now but gentle, rocking in my bloodwarmth, laving me with the soapy seed, sleeping in my cave. (Coetzee, In the Heart 118) Still another feminist image that can be traced in Magdas account is the notion of the mothers womb. In many occasions in the narrative, Magda imagines herself playing the role of the mother, though being unproductive. After her fathers dubious death, Magda describes the removal of his body in maternal terminology as if she were giving birth to a new being, a new life for herself: how fortunate at times like these that there is only one problem, a problem of cleanliness. Until this bloody afterbirth is gone there can be no new life for me (Coetzee, In the Heart 16). The mother as a symbolic image is not associated in the story with Magda only, but with earth as an emblem of fertility and life. In the passage where Magda dug up a grave to bury her father, she described the action as if she were bringing him back to the mothers womb: The bundle, hauled out again, lies like a great larva at the graveside, and I, its tireless mother, instinct-driven, set again about stowing it in the safe place I have chosen (Coetzee, In the Heart 101).

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The portrayal of Magdas character stems from the views of some feminists, such as Luce Irigaray, who regards the displacement, subversion, of the phalocentric subject as essential for the emergence of the suitable conditions for the expression of female thoughts. Womens position of inferiority makes them ideal for any attempt at subverting the dominant patriarchal discourse. In one of Coetzees interviews, he noted that one ought to question [power] from its antagonist position, namely the position of weakness (Coetzee quoted in Martuz 90). In this context, the feminine turns out to be a form of resistance. Magda in her narrative tries to write the self and to make her voice heard, though she knows that her words are echoes of her fathers language: I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective. It was my father-tongue. I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distance, but it is all we have (Coetzee, In the Heart 106). It is true that Magda is fully aware of the fact that she is the product of her father and his laws, but she is at the same time eager to reverse roles and become the dominant in turn. Magdas insistence on describing her experience in terms of intertextual relationships highlights this search for subjectivity and overcoming the limitations implicit in her situation. In her stone messages to the sky-gods, for instance, Magda represents herself in a series of broken languages, first, as a helpless Cinderella-like woman who is appealing for rescue and, later, as a creative woman; an authoress who sees in poetry a medium, a signifying system, through which she can assert her own existence. Her very aim behind her plea in stones is a way to suggest a language of her own that differs from the language of the father and also to add her own experience to other experiences which took place in the land [of South Africa] a page on which the generations write their story (Coetzee, White 66). Moreover, the adaptation of the white female perspective is relevant to the discussion of the notion of marginality. The in-between position of white women in South Africa, standing between the colonial masters and the colonised natives, makes them apt to

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undermine the systems of power which do not only suppress women, but also, even more intensely, the racial others. Coetzees treatment of the theme of race in this novel stems from the achievements of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and, especially George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels dialectic of the self and the Other or the master and the slave. For Hegel, the relationship between master and slave is based on mutual dependency. The master needs a slave to do the work for him, and the latter serves the former to save his life. So what we get is two distinct self-consciousnesses: One is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman (Steinhart 3). Like women, the racial others are a repressed group; even more repressed than women, in the novel, are the servants. The racial others, Hendrik and Anna, are represented as passive figures, who belong to a different race, yet convenient to and wholly dependent on the ruling and powerful Afrikaners. According to the British theoretician, Stuart Hall, any text contains a discourse, a complex network of social, political and cultural relations in which become apparent the ways by which language, at the level of signs, is produced as a representation, carrying beneath its surface ideological and cultural implications. These ideological and cultural representations in literary texts help in fixing, propagating and reproducing the power structures of a particular society. In this respect, representation is a crucial element of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things (Hall 15). The difference between the self and the other occurs also in terms of language. As stated by Magda, the language of the servant is a language which is different than the one the whites speak. This kind of division creates a sort of hierarchy in terms of binary oppositions:

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white versus black; servant versus master; coloniser versus colonised. In many occasions in the novel, Magda expresses her discomfort with this ideological construction, created by language and power structures: At the feet of an old man I have drunk in a myth of a past when beast and man and master lived a common life as innocent as the stars in the sky, and I am far from laughing (Coetzee, In the Heart 7). In the narrative, there is no room for compromise between the self and the other. The gap between the novels two races, Afrikaners and Hottentots, remains unbridged, despite Magdas many efforts. Magdas attempts to be close to Anna and to eliminate the formalities between them were doomed to failure, since the distinction between their distinct categories is irrecoverable: We are all little to begin with, arent we. I was once also little Magda. But now I am just Magda, and you are just Anna. Can you say Magda? Come Say Magda for me. No, miss, I cant (Coetzee, In the Heart 111). Likewise, Magda fails to transform her relationship with Hendrik from a merely sexual one into an emotional level. In other words, she fails to make him think of her in the same way he does about Anna. Coetzees very choice to stress Magda's failure in bringing the two races together recalls the diseased South African situation under Apartheid. In an interview with J. M. Coetzee, he declares that his protagonist fails because she lack[s] the stature to transform [the] 'I' into a 'You,' to, so to speak, create a society in which reciprocity exists; and therefore condemn[s herself] to desperate gestures towards establishing intimacy (Coetzee quoted in Attwell 68). Many critics, however, find Coetzees use of recent theoretical issues debatable. For one thing, at the representational level Magda is described as a farmers daughter who has no academic degrees or strong intellectual knowledge of the major European languages or theoretical achievements. For another thing, the action of the novel, which may be situated between the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century, precedes these

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theoretical achievements and some of the intertextual references. Dominique Head summed up the situation as follows: The construction of Magda is ultimately a textual problem, in the sense that she is shown to be the product of different textual influences. Her narrative is peppered with quotations from, or allusions to, many important figures in modern Western literature and philosophy, including Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Kafka, Sartre and Beckett. The fact that she is versed in contemporary literary theory makes her seem, in the words of Ian Glenn, a kind of Emily Dickinson with Therapy and a thesis in critical theory. (59) Clearly, the use of intertextuality helps in highlighting the dominant themes of the novels. I have argued that the intertextual references, allusions and citations are not the outcome of Coetzees lack of inspiration or imagination, but rather a way to engage in dialogue with these source texts as well as to reveal their underlying ideologies. I showed that part of Magdas problem is her gender; being a woman in patriarchal South Africa. Magdas narrative involves a critical questioning of the power structures of the dominant patriarchal culture. Magdas struggle to liberate herself from her fathers laws and restriction is meant to challenge the existing patterns of domination which govern the relationship between sexes as well as races. Magda fails in establishing her own identity without being dependent on her father. She fails also in inhabiting the position of powerful mistress, the position left empty after the death of her father. In the short period when she possesses a powerful position after the alleged death of her father, she proves to be a product and a duplication of him in dealing with those who are under her rule. The representation of the racial other supports Fanon, Sartre and Hegels theories of master/slave dialectic. I have showed how the racial others have been seen and dealt with as inferior beings who are dependent on Whites and are there to serve them and to satisfy their desires. The novel stresses the idea that the dichotomies

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between self/other, servant/master govern the power structures, and any attempt to bring the two extremes together is doomed to failure. In the novel, the servants are completely silenced as they are only seen through Magdas point of view. They are not allowed any space to speak about their experience or to comment about the narratives events. Coetzees reliance on modern texts and theories, which take place after the novels main events, is what made him subject to harsh criticism. Yet, In the Heart of the Country, like all Coetzees works, is a landmark in the contemporary English literature which succeeds in profiting from the Western literary heritage and at the same time questions its hidden discourses, by putting under scrutiny the power structures of patriarchy as well as the colonial enterprise and its processes.

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IV. Parody in Foe In the previous chapter, I have argued that Coetzee in In the Heart of the Country tries to subvert, among other things, the South African literary genre known as the plaasroman. In Foe, he deals with a broader issue, namely the question of the rise of the novel. To do so, he writes back to Daniel Defoes classical work Robinson Crusoe, retelling Crusoes story and history from the viewpoint of a female castaway called Susan Barton. Sharing with Crusoe and Friday the experience of the island, Susan tells the story anew. This radical departure from the original text aims at putting under scrutiny the basic assumptions of the British canonical text, Robinson Crusoe, and examining the texts many complexities such as the issue of (hi)story, credibility, representation and the notion of authority. Foe is widely regarded as a parody of Defoes Robinson Crusoe. Central to my discussion in this research paper is the function of parody in Foe. By the function of parody, I mean that Coetzees reason to rework Defoes text is to exploit the tension between the centre and the margin. In other words, Coetzee in Foe challenges the primacy of the Western standards that assume universality. It comes to mean that present representations which are derived from past ones tend to reverse the function of the original text so that what is true becomes false and what is false becomes true. To Coetzees critics, Foe is a good instance of postcolonial texts that put into question the very relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. For Helene Tiffin, Foe manages to write back not only to Robinson Crusoe, but also to the entire discursive system that guarantees the supremacy of Western canonical works (98). Likewise, Dominic Head in his article The Maze of Doubting: Foe states that Coetzee has tried in Foe to write back also to Ian Watt and his classic work, The Rise of the Novel, which regards Defoe as the first novelist in the English history of the genre. Head argues that Robinson Crusoe is seen by Coetzee not as a canonical English text Defoe is the father of the English novel in

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conventional accounts but as an embodiment of the great myth of Western imperialism, an enthusiastic narrative of the project of civilizing virgin territories against indigenous peoples, even against all odds (113). In The Rise of the Novel, Watt discusses the achievements of the founding fathers of the English novel, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, as well as the different elements which contribute to the rise of the English novel at the beginning of the eighteenth century, especially the increase of the middle class reading public. The enrichment of the social groups which were concerned with commerce and industry, Watt argues, have altered the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficiently to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time (Watt 53). Watt believes that Defoes success in establishing his literary career and becoming a representative of the emerging reading public has to do with the fact that he belonged to this middle-class category, which made him able to come up with stories which attracted their attention. Watts choice to devote the opening chapter of his book to the discussion of Realism as a predominant novelistic expression during the beginning of the eighteenth century is significant. According to Watt, Defoes main achievement in Robinson Crusoe is his attempt to create a world with a realist effect, by presenting the whole in the form of an autobiographical memoir. As stated in the preface to Robinson Crusoe, the account of the story is supposed to be a real one: the editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it (7). The suggestion here is that the story is a real historical account of an adventurous shipwrecked person. The story of this shipwrecked man referred to as Robinson Crusoe, Watt claims, is used allegorically by Defoe to describe his own life experience. Watt states that: the story though allegorical, is also historical: it is based on the life of a man alive, and well-known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes, and to

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whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes; and Defoe hints that he is himself the original of which Robinson Crusoe is the emblem; that it is his own life which he is portraying allegorically. (100) Foe is a novel that examines this very notion of veracity in Defoes account. Foe marks a metafictional journey back to the island to reveal the hidden terrain of his source text and to question the claim that the novel represents true events. To illustrate this idea, Coetzee deprives his Cruso the heroic qualities of the original character we recall from the original story. Derek Attridge mentions that Coetzees Cruso is a parodic version of Defoes Crusoe because Cruso has made only minimal attempts to improve the quality of his life, he has kept no journal (he does not even notch the passing days on a stick) and has no desire to leave the island. He spends most of his time levelling the islands hill into terraces (175). Taking this claim into consideration, Foe is going to problematise Defoes tale by accusing Foe of telling lies and lacking logic: I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, and no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy. (1112) What is worth mentioning in this extract is that Susan Barton, Coetzees narrator, finds what is supposed to be Crusos hidden stories so various and hard to reconcile one with another because of the psychological disunity of the many years he spent on the island, particularly those spent in isolation. Moreover, the stress of age on his memory makes Cruso unreliable as he is unable to distinguish between what is truth, what is fancy. Coetzees most significant deviation from Defoes texts is the use of the female narrator. Marni Gautier points out that what brings fiction and history together is the fact that

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they are both narrative discourses and man-made constructs. As such, the writing of fiction and history is selective and subjective at the same time. Gautier attests that J. M. Coetzees novel Foe foregrounds the absence of the female voice and the irretrievability of the subaltern voice from the largest part of written history (1). This suggests that Coetzee significantly and consciously puts into question the very notion of veracity in Defoes account. Gautier suggests that Defoe is in a sense symbolic of a wider phenomenon that is of the largest part of written history. Foe is a reaction against those texts which are considered as part of the process of fixing relations between Europe and its others, of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the same time as it inscribed the fixity of that alterity, naturalising difference within its own cognitive codes (Tiffin 98). The reception of Robinson Crusoe in Europe and elsewhere in the world was various and distinct. The traditional receptions, Watt argues, have highly estimated the work as an evidence of the greatness and superiority of European man. Robinson Crusoe has been seen and received as homo economicusso economic man symbolized the new outlook of individualism in its economic aspects, for he succeeds in building a successful empire even in isolation thanks to the tools he recovered from the shipwreck and also to his stock of knowledge and skills (Watt 69). Gallagher points out that Defoes story has been considered as an eighteenth-century testament to the superiority of rational civilization over nature and savagery, a dramatization of the Puritan spiritual autobiography, and a celebration of the value of hard work and faith (169). This tendency to mythologize Crusoes experience is meant to set him as the new model of the successful European man enterprise with the mission and ambition of civilising brutes, exploring new colonies and cultivating virgin territories. The modern reception, however, rejects the supremacy and the peculiarity of Defoes Robinson Crusoe as part of the Western canon and with it the long history of colonial and imperial practices. In challenging this centrality of the European models, the use of parody

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seeks to destabilise the fences that these models surround themselves with to guarantee their hegemonic force and the self-evidence of their patterns. For many postcolonial critics, such as Lewis Nkosi, Gayatri Spivak and many others, Robinson Crusoe is a colonialist and imperialist text that praises the culture of racism, oppression and colonisation. Nkosi claims that in Robinson Crusoe the element of myth regarding the painstaking industry of building a civilization from nothing, ex nihilo, is inseparable from the story of colonization, of subjugation, exploitation, and finally Christianization (Nkosi quoted in Ghallagher 170). Like Nkosi, Coetzees very attempt to rework the story of Crusoe aims at rereading, reconsidering and rewriting one of the famous examples of European historical and fictional records in order to dismantle its hegemonic process and to problematise the whole discursive field in which this record has been produced, operated and transmitted. This subversive strategy does not seek to subvert the dominant with a view to taking its place, but, in Wilson Harriss formulation, to evolve textual strategies which continually consume their own biases at the same time as they expose and erode those of the dominant discourse (Tiffin 96). The element of parody in Foe is manifested in the experience of the island. That is to say, parody connects a story which is supposed to be of a true account (Robinson Crusoe) with another one which is symbolic (that of Susan Barton). This is achieved through reversing the content of the original: Crusoe Friday The island Robinson Crusoe Defoe versus versus versus versus versus Cruso Friday The island Foe Foe

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To illustrate this point, Coetzee brings his reader in a journey from Crusoes island to Crusos island. Through the perspective of Susan Barton, the white English female, Coetzee expresses his opinion about the complex relationship between history and truth. During the various stages of the narrative, Susan is seen to be haunted with telling the truth. As an example, Susan tells Cruso in a vociferous quarrel that it is not worth-while to try to remember the past events because it will not help, and if it helps it will lack authenticity as he has no written records: you are mistaken!...the truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of the sea-monster and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which totally may seem of no importance (17-18). Susan demands realism, too. She insists that truth must be documented with a detailed registration to be considered as truth otherwise it is no truth. Thus, the relationship between history and truth is is problematic. As a parody, Foe reverses not only the content of the original text, but also challenges our conception of certain issues, such as that of Otherness. A case in point is Defoes Friday, who is described as tawny with rather delicate features: the colour of his skin was not quite black, but very tawnyhis hair was long and black, not curled like wool (202). This statement is the source of Coetzees description of Friday as being black: a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool (5). Part of the parody here is that the reader knows Defoes Friday with an agreeable face, thin lips, white teeth and very good mouth almost as a European, whereas Coetzees Friday is described with the characteristics of a non-European Other. Foes deviation from Defoes representation of Friday is to assert his reality as a black African. Gallagher comments that Coetzees transformation of the light-skinned, European-featured native of Robinson Crusoe into a woolly-haired, thick-lipped, dark-complexioned Negro both

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reveals the true African hidden in Defoes account and suggests Fridays kinship with the indigenous people of South Africa (181). As Foe points out, what is lacking in Defoes book is a sexual element. This leads one to say that there is an implicit sexual connotation in the original text. Watt mentions that love of women plays a subordinate role in Crusoes narrative and that he seems to be satisfied with the company of a slave man rather than of a woman: When Crusoe does notice the lack of society there, he prays for the solace of company, but we observe that what he desires is a male-slave. Then, with Friday, he enjoys an idyll without benefit of woman (77). To take Friday as a common point between the two texts, one can wonder why is Foes Friday impotent? To come back to Defoes description of Friday: he was a comely, handsome fellow [] his hair was long and black [] he had a very good mouth [] yet he had all the sweetness and softness of a European (Defoe 202). One can notice that this Friday is feminised to please Crusoes unconscious sexual desires. In showing Friday as a slave unmanned, Coetzee wants to draw attention to the absence of Fridays phallus and, ironically, to his passivity and powerlessness (119). The choice of giving Friday no voice highlights the idea of the lost truth. In an interview, Coetzee was asked why Friday has no tongue. Coetzee answers that nobody seems to have sufficient authority to say for sure how it is that Friday has no tongue (Coetzee quoted in Martuz 90). Coetzees statement sheds light on the concept of authority, which is part of the problem. Fridays coming to the island is covered in mystery, as that of his roots and his desires. In the narrative, Friday is seen through the eyes of Susan Barton. Susan tries unsuccessfully to communicate with Friday by using pictures, music and signs, in the hope that he can tell something of his story. Being unable to respond to Susans actions, Friday is going to lead Susan and the writer Foe to fabricate a story for him because his silence poses difficulties for Susans and Foes project of telling the story of the island: Friday has no

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command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others (Coetzee, Foe 121). Fridays silence, as a sign of his powerlessness, is used as a justification of hierarchal authority: For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish (Coetzee, Foe 148). Unlike Susan who wants to decipher the silence of Friday so as to tell or let him tell his reality, the writer Foe thinks that Fridays silence is simply a puzzle that exists in the heart of every story and all they need is to solve it in their own way. Susan disagrees with Foes suggestion. She believes that it is their duty to interpret the silence of Friday in a proper way. In his discussion of the politics of canonisation in Foe, Derek Attridge argues that Fridays silence is not a passive silence, but a resistant one to all efforts of the dominant discourse to describe this silence in linguistic figures. He says: For her [Susan Barton], there can be no assurance that all silences will eventually be made to resound with the words of the dominant language, and to tell their stories in canonised narratives not because there is an inviolable core of silence to which the dominant discourse can never penetrate, but because the most fundamental silence is itself produced by at the same time as it makes possible the dominant discourse (181). Foes most significant challenge to Defoes canonical account is not only the rejection of the ego- and Eurocentric representation of the racial Other, Friday, but also the exclusion of women from most parts of the original story. For Crusoe, everything is based on the notion of profit. A male slave is more beneficial in a deserted island than a woman. It is this notion of marginalising and silencing women, as well as racial others, and treating them as inferiors, yet convenient to the male self, that Coetzee reconsiders in Foe. The logic of exclusion that characterises the original story and with it a great deal of human intellectual heritage is central to Coetzees arguments in Foe.

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In the novel, Susan is seen struggling to make her story told, by seeking help from the professional writer Foe to do the work for her. Susan, however, ends up writing a narrative of her own. This option is meant to challenge Foes literary power and through him the authors authority which has systematically and (un)consciously excluded women from the rights of subjectivity in a great deal of their written records. As Gallagher puts it: Susans and Fridays inability to tell their own stories demonstrates how the literary tradition has long silenced and marginalised those defined as Other. In one sense, Coetzees Foe grants voice to the silenced through writing and the word: Susan Barton has been written out of Robinson Crusoe in the same way that women have been written out of literary history, but in Coetzees fictional world she appears and relates her own story. (186) Throughout the narrative, Susan resists being treated as a helpless victim. This resistance manifests itself in her strong will not to fulfil the traditional role of woman by refusing to be the captains mistress and to provide free labour for Cruso and be a fictitious character in Foes story. She insists that she is a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire (Coetzee, Foe 131). The use of names adds to the discussion of authority in the novel. To start with the title Foe, one can notice that the word foe is generally described in English language dictionaries as the equivalent of enemy. In addition to this denotative significance, the label Foe contains a symbolic function as it refers to the real name of Daniel Defoe before he added the prefix (De) to his name in 1695 (Gallagher 171; Attridge 177). (De)Foes position as author and holder of authority makes him a foe par excellence not only of Susan and Friday, but of all liberal humanists, including Coetzee himself. The very idea behind reducing the father of the English novel into a mere fictive character in a story highlights the discrepancy between truth and representation; between what Coetzee calls illusionism

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(realism) and anti-illusionism (Coetzee, Doubling 27). To put it differently, Coetzees inscription of the famous author Daniel Defoe under his real name aims at dispossessing him of the status of author, a symbol of authority, subjectivity and power. Another instance which highlights this relationship between naming and authority, is the name Susan. Most of Coetzees critics agree that Foes protagonists name echoes Susan, the hidden name of Roxana, who is the heroine of another novel by Daniel Defoe (Durrant 33-34; Attridge 188). Like Susan Barton, Roxana is a mother who denies motherhood. She abandons her daughter and in a later stage she looks for her daughter to recover her. When the found daughter tries to uncover Roxanas reality as a prostitute, Roxana gets rid of her. She is murdered by the maid, Amy, who appears in the third chapter of Foe: then Mrs Amy looked at her watch and exclaimed how late it was (Coetzee, Foe 136). The analogy between the characters of Susan and Roxana serves as a reaction against the negative representation of Roxana in Defoes novel and through it the questioning of the position of women and the power of discourse in the Western canon at large. In Coetzees narrative, Mr. Foe wants Susan Bartons story to be told from his own point of view. In telling the story, he is tempted to provide events which never happened in order to highlight the tales credibility for the sake of literary fascination and also to satisfy his own desires. Moreover, the pen as a symbol of the phallus is used as a metaphor for authorship. Susan manages to overcome her anxiety of authorship only when she uses Mr. Foes pen: your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine when I write with it, as growing out of my hand (Coetzee, Foe 66-67). Her claim of possession of Mr. Foes pen as a phallus opens for her the realm of literary power. Susans success as the authoress of her own story challenges (De)Foes authority which has negatively affected women, by reducing them to mere subjects to the various forms of male-oriented systems of manipulation. Susans success

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becomes Roxanas success and Susan Bartons story the one she does not want told Derek Attridge argues, becomes Defoes Roxana (177). Susan interrogates not only (De)Foes authority, but also Cruso(e)s. In both Coetzees and Defoes accounts, the image we have of Cruso(e) is prototypical of a successful European man who manages to establish an empire by building a colony on a deserted island in line with modern European models and by using the colonial Other, Friday, as a labour force which costs him nothing. Cruso(e)s very act of appropriating the islands space and the enslavement of Friday makes him stand as a symbolic figure of colonial and imperial processes which utilise their military, cultural and intellectual authority to dehumanise, Europeanise and Christanise the natives and defamilarise and demolish their territories and culture. In this context, authority becomes not only a property of authors subjectivity, but also of a larger scale of imperialistic practices that characterises modern human history. The negative impact of both authorial and imperial authority is harshly condemned in Foe. In his interviews and writings, Coetzee constantly opposes the negative use of power, and objects to being classed with authors such as Daniel Defoe. As a reaction against Tony Morphets hints of associating him with the authoritative Foe, Coetzee claims that: Foe in the book, or Daniel Defoe in real life, is the type of successful author. Am I being classed with Foe, though my interest clearly lies with Foes foe, the unsuccessful author worse authoress Susan Barton (Coetzee quoted in Martuz 90). The very act of describing authorship in parallel with colonialism and imperialism implies that subjective and textual as well as institutional and operational authority which produces and naturalises the structures of power is to be questioned and challenged. To elaborate on this idea in the novel, I will use Stephen Slemons diagram representing the debate over the nature of colonialism (46):

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Institutional Regulators (colonialist educational apparatuses) (De)Foe Authorial &Imperial power Cruso(e) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Friday Robinson Crusoe Foe Susan Barton

The semiotic field (textuality)

In Stephen Slemons discussion of the problematic of post-colonialism, he mentions that colonialism is a left-to-right process of domination. With the line Cruso(e), standing for both Defoes and Coetzees Cruso(e), Slemon represents the coloniser who oppresses and claims power over the colonised, the representative of which is Friday. The role (De)Foe, as subjective authority, serves the function of manufacturing and representing the colonised subject. The danger of this systematic strategy of producing theories which glorify the Self at the expense of the Other is a double edged operation. The two arrows placed close to authorial and imperial power indicate that the relation between institutional and intellectual authorities (placed at the top of the diagram) and the whole field of representation (placed at the bottom of the diagram) are intimately connected. In the novel, (De)Foe uses his literary and cultural knowledge and skills (the top of the line) so as to produce textual representations Robinson Crusoe of racial Others (bottom of the line) as aliens, inferiors and dependent on the European Self. As a parody of Defoes text, Foe, re-using the same semiotic field of Robinson Crusoe, reverses the content of the original text, so what is real becomes false and vice

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versa. To fulfil its function, Foe follows the same patterns as Robinson Crusoe, but this time the whole is told from the perspective of a woman, a voice elided in the original. I referred in the diagram to the absence of the female voice by the sign . Central to the character of Susan is not only the revelation of womens oppression and the exclusion of the feminine from Defoes account, but also the interrogation of power and the challenge of authority. Unlike (De)Foe, Susan, as an author, uses her knowledge to tell the true story of the island and try to make Friday tell his own by trying to be in contact with him through the use of different forms of communication, such as music, words, pictures, but with no success. The inclusion of Susan as a new character in Crusoes story affects Coetzees Crusos credibility, for he becomes no longer that confident island dweller we recall from Daniel Defoes earlier novel on the same subject (Nichols 95). Consequently, Foe addresses the question of who get(s) left out, silenced and exploited for artistic, cultural and ideological sake. Nonetheless, the claim that Foe is an ironic and exaggerating imitation and revision of Daniel Defoes island story is not always applicable. That is to say that the story of Foe on many occasions becomes puzzling by creating its own and dependent world, thereby resisting the idea of being read only as an ironic exaggeration of the features of the original story. This notion of puzzlement is manifested basically in ambiguity, which is not a characteristic of Foe alone, but also of all of Coetzees writings. Coetzee in one of his conversations said: Yes, I am indeed cutting myself off, at least from todays readers, nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining contact (Coetzee quoted in Easton 587). This unfulfilled contact with Coetzees characters is what is striking in Foe. It might seem to the reader that Coetzee enacts the meaning of his novel by asking: who is (s)he? To some extent, Coetzee succeeds in Foe to give an answer to the question of who is she, Susan, but not of who is he, Friday. I argue that the whole project of Foe is based on providing a voice and powerful position to its protagonist to become the author of her own

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story so as to assert her own freedom and identity. Yet, nothing is heard of Friday, for all we know about him is presented through the gaze and the views of others. This makes him unable to present his version of his own reality as well as that of the island. The big and still open question of the story is whether Fridays silence is a negative element or a positive one. On the one hand, the very choice of presenting Friday as a mute character makes him helpless against all attempts to claim authorising views of him and being reshaped according to the desires of others. In this sense, he turns into a symbol of the Others, [Those] other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded, the [Others] were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moral political admonishment. The [Other] was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien. [Others] were rarely seen or looked at: they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined, or as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory taken over. (Said 207) On the other hand, Fridays lack of linguistic abilities can be read as a form of resistance against all forms of assimilating him into Western norms. Differently put, the acquisition and use of the language of the coloniser by the colonial subject makes the latter become part of the imperialist system and its rules, as Michael Marais points out: as soon as [the Other] attempts to recapture selfhood by appropriating the language of the coloniser, [it] loses its alterior status and reinscribes itself within imperialist discourse (74). In this sense, Fridays mutilation becomes a positive and powerful silence, for his reality and identity remain his own, outside the reach of any form of expression. To sum up, J. M. Coetzees Foe succeeds in providing a radical revision of Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe and revealing the complex discursive field surrounding Defoes

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narrative. It has been argued that Coetzee in Foe was concerned with issues of dominance, power and truth. The function of parody as a discursive strategy adopted in analysing this work helps to interrogate one of the founding texts of the British canon through the vantage point of a woman. Likewise, the investigation of the novels structure reveals the hidden terrain of Defoes narrative, by exposing Robinson Crusoes underlying assumptions and dismantling them. The representation of Friday as a powerless, mute and mysterious character makes him an emblem of those who have been silenced by the power structures wherever and whenever they existed. The discussion of authority in its different forms shows how subjective as well as institutional authorities use their power so as to manipulate and subordinate those who are described as Others, including women and colonial subjects. It has been argued that Susans struggle to write her story and that of Roxana is a way to assert her and womens freedom as free beings and challenge this very notion of authority which is one of the properties of male subjectivity. I have mentioned that the text of Foe becomes sometimes perplexing as it resists being dealt with in relation to Defoes original texts. I have expressed my inquiry about the representation of the silence of Friday which carries positive and negative significance. This does not mean that the book has failed to choose a clear position, but rather adds to its literary value, for it deliberately succeeds in raising gender and racial issues as well as criticising the European colonial enterprise and its institutio

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V. Disgrace and the Romantic Poets In my discussions of In the Heart of the Country and Foe, I have argued that the strategy of intertextuality serves specific purposes. In the case of In the Heart of the Country, for instance, the relationship between Magda and her source texts lies in the situation of decay and suffering that she shares with other fictional characters. It has also been noticed that Magda seems to be unable to figure out what brings her together with the texts she cites. Likewise, Susan Bartons struggle to bring to light her own experience of the island story is marked by an antagonistic struggle with those who possess power and authority, namely the writer Foe and the island dweller Cruso. The relationship between Lurie and the Romantic poets, however, is neither of ignorance nor of antagonism, but based on influence and identification. Differently put, the impact of the Romantic poets on Lurie goes beyond the literary and aesthetic function of art in general to the adoption of their ideas and views about major life issues, such as women, desire and society. J. M. Coetzees Booker Prize winning novel, Disgrace (1999), is the first which deals with the post-Apartheid South Africa and the sensibilities and complexities of the Apartheid era. The use of intertextuality helps to establish a link between the world of the novel and its sources, so as to comment on this transitional phase of post-Apartheid South Africa. Central to this debate is the association made between the protagonist, David Lurie, and the English Romantic poets, especially Byron and Wordsworth. Being an expert in Romanticism, Lurie is intending to write an opera about Byron in Italy, which celebrates the relationship between Byron and one of his mistresses, namely the young Teresa Guiccioli. Luries artistic project also reflects on his identification with Byron, who was passionate and often surrounded by women, for he was a good-looking fellow. What brings them together, is that they act [not] on principle but on impulse (Coetzee, Disgrace 33). In this sense, Lurie, like Byron, comes

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to see himself as a servant of desire; immensely superior in his passions and wholly manipulated by his uncontrollable impulses. At the core of Coetzees Disgrace is the impact of desire characterised in Luries ideas about love and sex. In the narrative, Lurie is seen as being wholly self-centred in his relations with others, especially women. For him, women are passive creatures and objects of desire. His feeling towards them is described as snake-like, impassionate, dry and cold: In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake. Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest (Coetzee, Disgrace 2-3). Sex is seen not as an intimate act, but rather as a physical need that must be obeyed and satisfied and a problem to be solved. For one thing, Luries relationship with the Moslem prostitute, Soraya, conveys this idea of passivity. In the opening statements of the narrative, we are told that Lurie used to visit Soraya every Thursday at two p.m. These customary visits, Lurie thinks, provide the best solution to his problem of sex (Coetzee, Disgrace 1). In his sexual relation with Soraya, no emotions are involved, for he has never been passionate, and she has been not emotionally engaged with him either, but quiet and docile (Coetzee, Disgrace 1). Even worse, Luries sexual experience with Melanie, a student in his Byron class, is suggestive of rape. Like Soraya, Melanie is quite passive in bed. Besides, she is too young, unwilling and inexperienced. These elements make Lurie enjoy love with her very much because what he looks for is to exercise his male power and domination: Though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion (Coetzee, Disgrace 19). Luries self-satisfaction governs his relationship with women; what he desires is neither passion nor reciprocity, but domination.

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Luries domineering personality causes him big troubles in his life. As the outcome of his immoral relationship with Melanie, Lurie loses his reputation and his job at the university. He moves to live with his daughter in her farm in Salem near the Cape. Again we find parallel with Byron, who was forced to flee overseas on April 25, 1816. He was ostracised because of his incestuous relations with his half sister, Augusta Leigh (Abrams, Norton 482). In his refuge, Lurie does not only seek peace and quiet, but also tries to finish his opera on Byron. Neither of these wishes is realised. Lurie and Lucy are attacked by three black men and the opera shows no signs of progress. In fact, the project of Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage (Coetzee, Disgrace 214). Byron, especially in the first half of the novel, is seen as the role model for Lurie, in his male egotism and disregard of all the rules. However, Lurie starts to think again when he sees what the ultimate consequences of such behaviour are in his own daughter. The latter was raped by three black men, who succeeded to get inside her house, by pretending that they need to use her phone for an urgent call. As long as they got inside, the three young men started beating Lurie and they locked him in the lavatory. After that they raped Lucy, took few things from the house and left in Luries car. This traumatic incident leads Lurie to the conclusion that Byron and the other Romantic poets were not a good example because they did not help him to get on in his life: So much of the poets, so much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well (Coetzee, Disgrace 179). As post-Apartheid era , the Romantic period was also a turbulent and a transitional era. Politically speaking, it is connected with the revolutionary and radical spirit of the French Revolution: Marked by the declaration of The Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned political offenders, [it] evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike (Abrams, Norton 1). Socially, it witnessed the change from an

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agricultural society, where the power and wealth were in the hand of landowners, to an industrial community, in which the working-class took the political, economic and social lead. The association between the contemporary South Africa and the Romantic period is to be traced in the novel, but in an implicit way. The message that the novel tries to transmit is that in present South African society everything becomes possible and impossible at the same time. That is to say, it is true that much has changed since the fall of the Apartheid system, yet it seems difficult or impossible for whites and blacks to live together without being haunted by the devastating memories of the past. In a broader sense, if the boundaries of everything are changing, then, the whites are left with no other choice, but either to yield to the wind of change, or give up everything and accept the new rules of the political game. At least, Coetzee, like his protagonist, could not; therefore, he emigrated to Australia. Another Romantic poet with whom the novel is involved in an intertextual connection is Wordsworth. Among the books that Lurie has published during the course of his career is one on Wordsworth, called Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past. Therefore, Lurie might have taken the name of his daughter, Lucy, from one of the characters of Wordsworth. Lucy shares with Wordsworths Lucy not only the name but also other affiliations, such as the connection with nature and affinity with death. In 1799, during his stay in Germany, Wordsworth wrote four poems that his critics gave the name of Lucy Poems: Strange fits of passion have I known; She dwelt among the untrodden ways; Three years she grew; and A slumber did my spirit Seal. In the same year, Wordsworth wrote a poem called Lucy Gray, which commemorates the death of a young girl. This Lucy, however, is not necessarily the same person as the one described in the Lucy Poems; all we have is speculations. The one certainty is that Lucy is strongly associated with Nature. In the poems, Lucy dies at the age of three as promised by Nature: Three years she grew in sun and shower,

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Then Nature said, A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own. (Abrams, Norton 154). Like Wordsworths Lucy, Lucy in Disgrace is associated with nature, too. She is presented as leading a simple life among the black locals at her farm. The character of Lucy represents the new spirit and policies of a country in transition. Being a woman, she becomes a victim of the male aggression, domination and supremacy which marked South African history. Petrus, the black local, is a token of patriarchal culture and a representative figure of those who possess power in post-Apartheid South Africa. The suggestion is that he is behind the rape incident, so as to force Lucy to yield to his wishes and to fulfil his material ambitions to add her farm to what he owns. She willingly accepts to become one of his wives and properties: Dear David, You have not been listening to me. I am not the person you know. I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life. All I know is that I cannot go away [] Yes, the road I am following may be the wrong one. But if I leave the farm now I will leave defeated, and will taste the defeat for the rest of my life. (Coetzee, Disgrace 160). The rape experience has broken Lucys life to such an extent that she comes to see herself as a dead person. This affinity with death is a common point that Coetzees Lucy shares with that of Wordsworth. Mike Marais points out that Wordsworths Lucy Poems signal the failure of power of imagination and its ability to grasp the spiritual presences of absent things and to arouse the sensual from their sleep/ Of Death (85). He mentions that what brings the two figures together is the feeling of death in life or what he calls the tension between presence

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and absence (85). In associating his Lucy with death like Wordsworths Lucy Coetzee aims at commenting on the present-day South Africa and the difficulty of co-habitation between Whites and Blacks without being ruined by the flaws of the past. To conclude, Disgraces allusion to Romantic ideas and poets helps to define the character of Lurie and to comment on the transitional phase of South African society. Luries views of women and desire are made compatible to that of Byron. Like Byron, Lurie does not seek in women passion and mutuality, but to exercise his male power on them. For him, sex is not a shared feeling and experience between a couple, but a problem that has to be solved. These characteristics make him resemble Byron and also his heroes. It has been mentioned that the events of the novel can be read symbolically. That is to say, as a reflection of contemporary South Africa. Power systems in new South Africa are much the same as the old ones, with a slight difference that the Blacks hold the power now. Racial struggle and the ghost of the past will remain the countrys big foe that neither the Truth Commission, nor democratic reformations can solve because disgrace and the flaws of the past reside deep in the heart of the country.

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VI. Conclusion Since the 1960s, intertextuality has increasingly influenced the field of literary criticism. It has helped in dealing with literary texts in relation with other texts or groups of other texts, by transforming and reworking some features of the original text(s) in order to create special effects or serve certain aims. I have indicated how J. M. Coetzee in all his novels engages in a relationship with other theoretical and literary works, by creating a strong link between his texts and the ones he cites or alludes to; a link based, on the one hand, on a dialogue and, on the other, on challenging and questioning the discursive field on which the source texts operate. In the section about In the Heart of the Country, I have discussed how the strategy of intertextuality helps in accentuating the major themes of the novel. In this context, the intertextual borrowings and allusions serve the function of engaging in a dialogue with Magdas narrative and different other texts, by uncovering their hidden ideologies and discourses. I have also tried to illustrate that the gender of Magda forms an essential element of her problem; being a female in a society based on the rule of patriarchy. Central to Magdas narrative is the interrogation of the patterns of domination that guarantee the supremacy of male values and the subordination of the female. Magdas very attempt to set herself free from the chains of the law of the father and all its musts, restrictions and Nos is meant to challenge the governing systems of power which regulate the relationship between those who possess power and the rest. Magdas quixotic attempt to establish her own identity, independent from the rule of the father, is doomed to failure. In the same way, her attempt to be in the position of power after the dubious death of her father fails as well. Magda cannot manage to be anything else but the product and other version of her father. When she takes over the farm after her fathers alleged death, Magda becomes her fathers duplicate, for she treats the servants who are under

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her rule in the same inappropriate way as her father. In addition to the questions of gender and power, the issue of race is a dominant theme of the novel. The representation of the colonial subjects is marked by an aggressive passivity. I have shown that the inferior position which the racial others inhabit and their complete subjugation to and dependency on the powerful Whites supports Hegels and others theories of master/slave relationships. The relationship between the self and its other, or what Hegel calls lord and bondsman, is based on dependency and inequality. The novel, however, fails to do justice to the racial others, for they are not given much rather no space to express themselves or to tell about what happens around them. Our knowledge about them is wholly dependent on what the imagination of Magda allows. Everything is presented through Magdas perspective and gaze. This does not mean that the novel shows no interest in racial otherness nor does it accentuate the long humanist tradition of silencing those labelled as inferior and Other. It rather makes it clear that it is difficult, and even inappropriate to speak on behalf of others. Part of the novels success is its choice to bring into debate Western literary texts as well as theoretical ones, so as to put into scrutiny their hidden discursive strategies, namely patriarchy and its rules and colonialism and its mechanisms. As for Foe, I have argued that Coetzees radical departure from and reworking of Daniel Defoes famous novel Robinson Crusoe aims at interrogating the whole discursive field in which such a text functions. It has also been mentioned that Coetzees main aim behind the narrative of Foe is to question power and its systems of domination. Parody in Foe, as a discursive strategy, helps in uncovering the texts many embedded assumptions and ideologies through the use of the female perspective. I have also tried to illustrate how women, like any marginalised group, are affected and manipulated by the dominant patriarchal culture. Like Magda, Susan Barton tries her best to make her version of the Island

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story be heard without being dependent on the writer Foe. By doing this, she challenges male authority and literary domination. Susan succeeds at the end not only in writing her own experience, but also in freeing herself, particularly, from the chains of Foes dominance and, broadly, from the power systems which have silenced women throughout history. I have also argued that the issue of race is as important as that of gender. The representation of Friday in Foe does not differ that much from that of the servants in In the Heart of the Country or the rest of Coetzees novels. Being a racial Other, Friday represents the oppressed and silenced group, for he is and remains the big absence of the novel. Differently put, Fridays missing tongue, story and history demonstrate how aggressive, brutal and barbarian the systems of power can be. It is this devastating nature of power that Coetzee sets himself against. Power, for Coetzee, remains power that has to be constantly criticised and challenged. To apply this formula to the South African context, or any other one, one can safely say that the struggle between Whites and Blacks is a vicious contest, for it is a struggle to claim power. To claim power means the decline of an old power and the emergence of a new one which in its turn will cultivate its own oppressive systems and rules; an idea which forms the central theme of Coetzees post-Apartheid novel Disgrace. Coetzees Disgrace is his first novel which deals with post-Apartheid South Africa and the transition of power to the Black majority. I have mentioned that the relationship drawn between the novel and Romanticism serves the function of spotlighting the character of Lurie and his views about sentimental issues as well as reflecting on present-day South Africa. I have said that Lurie is a sort of Byronic figure because he is emotionally disturbed. His treatment of women fits within the traditional patriarchal frame in which women are considered as inferior creatures and objects of desire. Part of Luries problem is this feeling of male superiority. What is important for him is not passion, but to satisfy his sexual desire, which he considers as a problem. I have mentioned that women in the novel are associated

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with the new spirit of post-Apartheid. The message that the novel tries to transmit is that in present South African society everything is possible and impossible at the same time. That is to say, it is true that much has changed since the fall of the Apartheid system, yet it seems difficult or impossible for Whites and Blacks to live together without being haunted by the devastating memories of the past. To conclude, Coetzees engagement in intertextual dialogue with the European canon shows that the relevance of the whole tradition is limited to the South African situation. For Coetzee, Western civilisation is not that super human heritage that by necessity should be set as a model and standard for the rest of the world. For Coetzee, the use of the European heritage serves as a way to justify Whites exploitation of the land and the people. This does not mean that European civilisation is a corrupt or evil one, but rather our dealing with it is so. Often we take the European models and try to apply them to alien contexts and situations, without taking into account historical, cultural, social, political differences and specificities. This is mainly what Coetzee tries to say in these three books and in the rest of his novels. That his views remain limited in time, space, gender and race.

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