Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

David Attwell, Annalisa Pes, Susanna Zinato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429513756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame's destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

1 Writing in, of, and around Shame

J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K

David Attwell

The effects of shame quickly spiral into a malaise of constriction and paralysis. The catching at the throat, the hives on the skin, the downcast and averted gaze: since the difficulty is precisely that because these effects, and affects, are inimical to the subject’s creativity and autonomy, indeed often simply to thought, shame presents unique challenges in the domain of culture. The language of shame is notoriously blocked, recursive, and obsessive. To be released from it into a freer sociability involves a negotiation that may have to pass through abjection and rage. What does it mean, then, to enter this space as cultural practice? Can aesthetic and literary invention represent a condition of such severe diminution from the inside? Does the writing of shame inevitably follow its psychopathology, or are there ways of engaging with it that are both responsive to its social causes and aesthetically inventive? To explore these questions I follow J.M. Coetzee’s writing of shame in Life & Times of Michael K, but we might begin with Bernard Williams’s account in classical literature.

In Shame and Necessity (1993), Williams shows that necessity was an ethical catalyst in Greek tragedy because the hero is propelled into action when shame, or even its prospect, enters the picture. Not paralysis then, but action or action to avert paralysis. In a world such as that imagined in Greek tragedy, where significant choice is understood to shape destinies and social relations, the triad of shame, necessity, and action springs from an absolute investment in ethical being. Whether the other from whom one desires respect is a social being, a divine body, or an internalized presence makes no difference because shame positions the subject in a relationship not just to other people but to the very idea of community. Where there is little distinction between social death and the thing itself, shame becomes a pre-condition for all ethics.

This is all very different from the account of shame given by Timothy Bewes in his book The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011). Bewes leans towards the view that the shame of colonialism is so overwhelming and intractable that it doesn’t or can’t lead to or necessitate (in Williams’s sense) ethically productive cultural endeavour. Like Williams he is concerned with absolutes, not those that drive us to acts of self-definition but those that define the cultural-historical conditions under which we live and work as writers and critics whose world is that of postcoloniality. In theorizing from the situation of the postcolonial artist-intellectual, Bewes is a long way from Greek tragedy, but as Williams says, “shame continues to work for us, as it worked for the Greeks, in essential ways. By giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one hopes to be, it mediates between act, character and consequence” (1993, 102). This would include literary transactions: the “act” as writing; “character” as the signature, style, reach, and power of an authorship; and “consequence” as the social life of the literary.

As he broadly defines it, Bewes’s purpose is

to reframe the problematic of postcolonial studies […] as a field defined not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work. (2011, 7)

By this measure, the resistant and liberationist aspirations of so much postcolonial cultural work will always be haunted by the impossibility of their being realized. If impossibility is too strong a judgement of Bewes’s implications, then the problem is that of incommensurability, which is the term he uses. It refers to the vast difference in scale between the overbearing legacies of structural violence, bodily suffering, and epistemic conquest, and the cultural work that goes under name of postcolonialism.

The position is possibly Derridean insofar as Bewes is saying that an unreachable alterity will always be a factor driving postcolonial discourse, and in more concrete terms the position rings true. At the University of Cape Town in March 2015, when the statue of the university’s founding benefactor, the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, was loosened from its plinth by a crane, and its huge bulk swung in weightless absurdity, the face still covered in faeces (the original act of shaming was performed by a student, Chumani Maxwele, who called in the media to witness his throwing shit over the statue from a township latrine), the scene being played out was undoubtedly that of incommensurability. One could even speculate that the reason the statue was targeted was because the students needed to scale up their protest to give it historical, epistemic, and monumental reach in the face of their dwindling life-prospects and the national shame of President Jacob Zuma’s corrupt administration. In his imperial bulk, Rhodes seemed to embody the whole sorry catastrophe from the colonial past through apartheid to the dystopian present.

Bewes argues that the incommensurability of shame “is frequently apparent as a chronic anxiety towards writing itself” – “a situation in which the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of literature is experienced subjectively” (2011, 7). Necessity comes into it but in a very different sense from that which we find in Williams as “the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of writing” (7). In other words, necessity is part of the debilitating stuckness of shame, the conundrum of writing only pouring more shame upon shame. Far from prompting the subject into action, shame is an historical limit so absolute that attempts to address it only double the shame of history. One is reminded of Fredric Jameson’s formulation, in which history, which “resists thematization or reification,” can be grasped as a form of Necessity that is “to be represented in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all revolutions that have taken place in human history” (1982, 101–102).

In Jameson, this bleak outlook is of course only one side of the classic Marxist paradox that is encapsulated in Gramsci’s famous dictum that pessimism of the intellect is to be matched by optimism of the will. In Bewes, revolutionary optimism seems to have poisoned at the source, and the problem seems to lie in shame’s effects on the body and psyche, which are intractable and un-negotiable: he writes about a “block, a residue of unprocessable material,” no doubt in deference to the psychological literature. The language of Sylvan Tomkins’s Shame and its Sisters (1995) is consistent with this perspective:

If distress is the affect of suffering, shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, […] shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from an outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. (133)

Dostoevsky comes to mind, or David Lurie in Disgrace (1999), or the condition encapsulated in novels like Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) or Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002). If shame is dark and overpowering in such texts, we should acknowledge the paradoxical way in which they are also uplifting. The cumulative effect of such writing is often not to leave the reader hollowed out with exhaustion but in awe of the resilience it takes to enter such psychic spaces and survive. There is a Nietzschean will in such novels to face down the condition and its causes rather than to avert the face – we shall return to this.

The fiction of Coetzee’s early and middle years is haunted by shame, culminating in the suitably titled Disgrace. As Youth (2002) attests, as he made his way to being a writer, following his emigration to London in his early 20s, the thought of coming from South Africa made his “soul cringe” (101); nevertheless, he knows that if he were to establish himself as a writer of fiction, as opposed to surviving on the abstract ether of modernist poetry, he would have to begin with “the country of his heart” (137). Coming from South Africa was shameful, but he had no choice but to start there. The result was Dusklands (1974), in which the points of departure, and modes of address, are the apologias of a violent frontiersman and a propagandist for an imperial war. In subsequent novels, we have the magistrate’s shame in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) as he realizes that in the eyes of his captive barbarian lover, he is no different from her torturers; there is Dostoevsky, the protagonist of The Master of Petersburg (1994), whose efforts to write his dead stepson Pavel into life involve recreating the confessions of the nihilist and rapist Stavrogin in The Possessed; and there is, of course, David Lurie, defiantly composing himself before a university inquiry into his sexual conduct. The power of such texts lies in Coetzee’s steely gift for exploring the language of shame as it enters the bloodstream.

Bewes refers usefully to Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where Sartre invites his French readers into an intimacy based on shame:

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies. (1967, 11–12)

Bewes’s argument is that there are two forms of shame in Sartre’s text: one, the obvious shame of France’s actions in Algeria; the other, a performative shame that speaks not only to the feelings of shame that he is evoking but “to the materiality of Sartre’s own work” (2011, 5). What Sartre enacts “is not encompassable by its concept”; instead it is “an occasion of the suspension, even annihilation of the self in the aftermath of colonialism” (5) – Sartre’s “zombies” being apposite.

We might observe that Sartre makes strong assumptions about (that is, takes liberties with) how shame works, psychologically speaking. Despite hinting at a general paralysis (we’re all zombies) he assumes that it is transactional, that is to say, those who are shamed (Fanon shamed by coloniality and its consequences for the colonized; Sartre shamed by Fanon and by coloniality and its consequences for the colonizer) can be freed from it by passing it on by shaming others (the French reader or the public). The problem – perhaps this is part of what Bewes means – is that the psychopathology of shame tells us that there is no economy of shame, that it is not transactable in any clear sense; rather, its intensities spiral, creating halls of mirrors, a nuclear amplification for which the word contagion might well be more appropriate than economy.

We might turn again to events in 2015 in Cape Town to illustrate the uncertain outcomes of generally enacted, politicized shaming. After “Shackville,” an altercation with campus security following the students’ refusal to remove a shack built on a thoroughfare (it had been erected in protest against inadequate student housing), students burnt both the shack and the artwork pulled off the walls of neighbouring residences, proclaiming (in the words of one protester) to be “burning whiteness.” (The problem of incommensurability certainly surfaces again here.) Later developments involved a move on the artwork in the university library, including iconic pieces by well-known anti-apartheid artists that were defaced or covered over if they were judged to demean black subjects. When the university acted to prevent further damage by removing or covering the remaining art, some of the artists were outraged at what they saw as the university’s acquiescence to censorship in the name of an unreflective identity politics. One such artist was the poet-activist and former prisoner under apartheid Breyten Breytenbach, who wrote,

I hereby declare my willingness to publicly put to the torch the three paintings that I had produced during the years of political blindness when I did not know what I was doing. I shall be naked, as behoves a penitent. I’m willing to grovel and kiss the smartphones of the revolutionaries. (I can’t promise to flagellate myself, being something of a coward.) … Yours in abject contrition.¹

A spiral of shame and rage, rather than any kind of dialectical progress.

A related question is taken up in the dialogues between Coetzee and the psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz, which are published as The Good Story (2015). Coetzee refers to the problem of moral “doublethink” that prevails in settler-colonial societies, in which, for example, white Australians tell themselves that the atrocities that were committed on the aboriginal people were possible not because their ancestors were inherently bad but because they were children of their times or prisoners of their Zeitgeist. It does not occur to them, says Coetzee, that future generations will find the actions of present-day Australian governments in relation to asylum seekers just as reprehensible as they find the actions of their colonial ancestors. There is therefore a split view of the past: we exempt ourselves from the values of our ancestors, who we regard as children, in order to preserve our continuity with them. The position is incoherent and surely must manifest itself in psychic terms, Coetzee argues. Kurtz’s reply is to say, “It may be a logical impossibility to imagine being born out of nothing, being without origins or history, but it is not a psychic impossibility.” Most people will hold a benign view of their forebears, while a minority will hold a “morbid preoccupation with another, more disturbing view,” a view that only a minority can sustain: “A split in understanding something of real importance to a social body is, I think, what produces subversion or an underground movement” (2015, 89–90). Where, following Bewes, what we are calling ethical incommensurability prevails as a normal condition of social life, a downward spiral to morbidity settles into the culture.

Étienne Balibar provides a more hopeful account of such a situation in his Wellek Lectures, which were collected and published under the title Violence and Civility (2015). Balibar’s thesis is not well served by the term civility, commonly understood to mean politeness, nor even by his original French civilité, which, though similar, also carries the more accurate implication of public-mindedness. The thesis (which is close to Clausewitz’s dictum that politics is the continuation of war by other means) is that politics as social process involves the conversion of violence into public-democratic discourse, retaining the possibility and indeed the likelihood of civil conflict. Civility in this sense involves a conversion that is never wholly complete but that changes the way the various actors, who are certainly interpolated differently by their pasts, interrelate in the present. Such active citizenship is not non-violent but anti-v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Shame, Literature, and the Postcolonial
• 1 Writing in, of, and around Shame: J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K
• 2 Cursing the Fathers’ Curse: A Tragic Reading of White Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron
• 3 Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things
• 4 “Unfinished Business”: Digging up the Past in Christine Piper’s After Darkness and Cory Taylor’s My Beautiful Enemy
• 5 Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction
• 6 Contemporary Australian Refugee Policies and Shame as Reflected in A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City (2015)
• 7 American Postcolonial Shame, Fiction, and Timothy Bewes
• 8 “Like solemn Afro-Greeks avid for grades”: Individual and Historical Shame in Walcott’s Earlier Poetry
• 9 Shame, Justice, and the Representation of Violence in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Caryl Phillips
• 10 Afterword: A Swarm of Locusts Passed By
• Index