The Body, Desire and Storytelling in Novels by J. M. Coetzee

Olfa Belgacem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429682469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Asserting that Coetzee's representation of the body as subject to dismemberment counters the colonial representation of the other's body as exotic and erotically-charged, this study inspects the ambivalence pertaining to Coetzee's embodied representation of the other and reveals the risks that come with such contrapuntal reiteration. Through the study of the narrative identity of the colonial other and her/his body's representation, the book also unveils the author's own authorial identity exposed through the repetitive narrative patterns and characterization choices.

Part I

Negotiating Power in the Other’s Flesh

1 Colonial Bodies … Resurrected?

Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Mutilation is the removal of an essential part of the body, the dismemberment of irreplaceable organs that will never grow again, organs that if cut off may cause a permanent handicap or even the death of the maimed subject who, therefore, undergoes an involuntary change of appearance. Throughout history, mutilations and markings have been part of social practice, whether in wars, as in the case of the Maori men of New Zealand who chisel patterns on their faces to look fearsome in battle with their raised tattoos (Guynup n. pag.). Such practices also are a part of rites of passage among some tribes where young men and women are submitted to all sorts of marking and maiming in order to guarantee their transition from childhood to adulthood and be fully accepted as a member of a particular society. In fact, the most famous rite of passage that targets the body is female genital mutilation in many tribes in Africa to mark the passage of young girls to womanhood (Holden n. pag.) among other reasons.

In the online Oxford Companion to the Body, James Bradley states that, “[b]odily markings came to represent the ‘exotic,’ the ‘primitive,’ and the ‘savage’—a mark of differentiation between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized worlds’ ” (n. pag.). Among Western societies, to be marked, thus, is synonymous with coming from elsewhere, belonging to another culture and having a different system of values. In other words, marked bodies are a symptom of otherness which allowed Europeans to distinguish themselves from the marked savages coming from the margins of the world. Bradley also maintains that medieval and early-modern European societies used mutilation to “inscribe punishment publicly upon the body” (Ibid.).

This practice of public punishment is the basis for Michel Foucault’s seminal book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison which draws the history and evolution of public physical punishment until the modern age when other disciplinary methods were adopted. In this study of punishment within the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault founds his study on the comparison between two major dates that stand for two mechanisms of punishment. The first date is the 1757 public execution of a regicide named Damiens whose punishment consisted of a public, horrifying torture that preceded his execution. The second is the mid nineteenth century, when in 1837 a series of reforms were adopted, thus, marking the “decline of the spectacle” and “a slackening of the hold on the body” (10). Therefore, punitive practices based on heavy corporeal punishment were superseded by timetables and exercises in prisons.¹ Foucault believes that the abolition of the amende honorable in 1791 in France marked the beginning of “the age of sobriety in punishment” (14) and the end of the perception of the convict’s body as a target of punishment. However, Foucault does not ignore the fact that a prison sentence does not spare the body from punishment as the convicts are deprived of sex, eat prescribed amounts of food not of their choice and are sometimes sent to solitary confinement. Yet, he finds it difficult to think of “non-corporal” punishment, especially for the opinions that criticized the nineteenth-century penitentiary system and thought that “a condemned man should suffer physically more than other men” (16).

This is how Foucault accounts for the “trace of ‘torture’ in modern mechanisms of criminal justice—a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system” (16). Here, Foucault alludes to the birth of the soul as the new target of judicial sentences and the birth of a new morality that has pushed the whole penal system to change vis-à-vis the definition of crimes, the judgment of the offenses, as well as the nature and role of the judges themselves. Firstly, Foucault notes how offenses started to be perceived differently, like blasphemy which ceased to be considered as a crime, or other offenses whose status changed according to the “hierarchy of their seriousness” (17). Secondly, the judgment of the offenses themselves witnessed a revolutionary change as factors other than the juridical ones came to the fore. Consequently, the convict’s passions, desires, anomalies and even environment became important in order for the judge to decide about the penalty (17–18). Thirdly, judges were no longer alone in taking decisions about sentences, but other “subsidiary authorities” came into being like psychiatrists and educationalists, while other penal authorities helped in the implementation of the sentences like the prison personnel, warders and the police (21).

Michel Foucault considers that these new factors that appeared in the nineteenth century created a different aspect of the penal system and its perception among the public as they “fragment[ed] the legal power to punish” (21) and created new purposes for the penalty itself. Having taken recourse to human sciences like psychiatry and criminal anthropology, the penal system can now have a strong hold on the individual’s soul, i.e. on his/her present as well as future nature and behavior (18). Such knowledge offered by the human sciences guarantees a nearly perfect control of the individual and, within the prison walls, a convict is constantly studied, examined and corrected. This is why Foucault is sure that “[t]oday the judge—Magistrate or juror—certainly does more than ‘judge’ ” (21). Foucault draws a cynical image of the appearance of the soul on the scenes of punishment and compares it to the beginning of a comedy:

It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.

(Discipline and Punish 16–17)

However, building upon Foucault’s metaphor, many of J. M. Coetzee’s novels are theaters where “the old partners of the spectacle of punishment” are the protagonists. In fact, the body occupies an important place in novels like Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron. The writer seems to have chosen to furnish them with the maimed and the crippled, with blood in the novels’ background. They bear the traces of punishment, a punishment that is either witnessed by the readers, or present through the narrator’s account, or even through the absence of such an account by the bearers of mutilation.

The “bearers of mutilation,” the characters whose bodies are ailing, are, in most cases, figures of otherness. In Waiting for the Barbarians, it is the barbarian girl who bears marks of mutilation; her people are witnessed in scenes of torture, and even the Magistrate, who is not a figure of otherness, is tortured because of his ambivalence. Foe, however, is a novel whose protagonists are a woman and a black slave. The latter’s voice is not heard partly because of a past maiming, while in Life and Times of Michael K, the protagonist, who is a young black South African, was born with a physical disfigurement and decides to starve himself as the story proceeds. Age of Iron, however, may cause some confusion as to the question of otherness and its relatedness to physical suffering; its protagonist suffers from incurable cancer but she is neither black nor marginalized. Yet, this dying woman meets a pariah whose body is maimed and abandoned and who lives among garbage. The protagonist, then, starts to pay heed to other decaying bodies around her. Therefore, the body of the other in these novels does not come to the fore as a perfect, intact, untouched body, but neither does it appear as such in colonial discourse. However, it is the purpose behind framing the body of the other as imperfect and flawed that makes all the difference between the representation of the body in colonial and post-colonial discourses.

The other has often been presented in colonial discourse as savage, barbaric and uncivilized, which allowed imperial colonization to defend its presence in the colonies as a noble mission to save the savage natives from the claws of their heathen existence. The “white man’s burden” doctrine was the wheel that drove colonialism further, every time to new colonies and more remote places in the world, so that by the 1930s, European empires had established their power over more than three quarters of the rest of the world (Ramazani 8). The body of the other, however, had been described from an ambivalent standpoint, for while it stands as a source of evil and illness in some colonial texts, it is idealized and eroticized in others. In her article “Transfiguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial Narrative,” Elleke Boehmer draws our attention to the process through which:

In colonial representation, exclusion or suppression can often literally be seen as “embodied.” From the point of view of the colonizer specifically, fears and curiosities, sublimated fascinations with the strange or the “primitive,” are expressed in concrete physical and anatomical images. The seductive and/or repulsive qualities of the wild or Other, and the punishment of the same, are figured on the body, and as body.

(269)

The body of the other is therefore “the sum of all fears”² and fascination out of which the colonizer acts towards the other.

The body of the other has also occupied an important position in the writings of some post-colonial authors and each has framed it differently. In an online article entitled “Colonial Discourses of Disability and Normalization in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’s 53 cm and Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique,” Julie C. Nack Ngue criticizes the racist regulations of some Western countries regarding third-world immigrants. The latter are obliged to undergo medical examinations before obtaining a visa. Such practices are stereotypical as they presume that these Africans are “always already ill” (Anne McClintock qtd. in Ngue n. pag.). They are labeled as thus simply because of their non-Western origins. Ngue also contends with the racism characterizing the speeches of the French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen describing the African immigrants in France as the main source of all evil, from high rates of unemployment to AIDS. Ngue notes that this antagonistic attitude towards African immigrants is translated also in their belief in the “otherness of illness and disability,” which allows Western régimes to perceive their white citizens as superior to and, at the same time, threatened by the black subjects.

The best example illustrating this “doctrine” of the “otherness of illness and disability” is probably the case of the “Hottentot Venus” in 1810, when a South African Khoi woman named Saartje Baartman was brought to Europe by a colonial physician for public display. Her female parts were thought excessive and therefore abnormal. After her death, the doctor that performed an autopsy and cut off her buttocks and genitals, put them on a plate and publicly displayed them as an example of “the freakish nature of the black female body” (n. pag.). Baartman was considered as an icon for savage female sexuality and the counterpart of normative white sexuality. The show ceased to be performed in the Musée de L’Homme only in 1976 (Ngue n. pag.).

Therefore, the imperialist powers study the body of the other in order to set it apart as a foil to the superior, perfect white body that has to be protected from the imminent dangers of the black body. The Hottentot Venus example certainly illustrates the “Western fascination with and revulsion for the woman of color and her excessive sexual parts” (Ngue n. pag.), but it is not the only example of how colonialism has made use of the human sciences to justify its domination and subjugation of the colonized. Certainly, there has been a myriad of “scientific” hypotheses and experiments which examined the body of black subjects, measuring it against the white body and claiming that it does not meet the “norm”—the norm being nothing else but the white body’s characteristics. One can think of Georges Cuvier, whose study of the human species can only be racist and unempirical, as he classifies the different races and their characteristics according to what geography and “the hand of nature” have given them. For instance, he argues that civilization was destined for the European continent because of its “[m]ild climate, soils abundantly supplied with moisture … and the happy privileges” of nature (96), something which made the Caucasians “the handsomest natives of the earth.” On the other hand, he claims that the vast deserts and arid climate of the African continent on which blacks live resulted in a scarcity of food as well as their hostile character, making them, thus, attack one another for food. Cuvier refers to them saying:

[Their] characters are, black complexion, woolly hair, compressed cranium, and flattish nose. In the prominence of the lower part of the face, and in the thickness of the lips, it manifestly approaches to the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this variety is composed have always remained in a state of complete barbarism.

(97)

Such “sciences” like craniometry and anthropometry justified the subjugation of the colonized because they were measured against the “norm”³ of the Caucasian race.

Other scientific observations have established a solid ground for colonialist discourses of subjugation and assimilation. Carl von Linné’s racist theories still reverberate in the walls of history with his classification of humans into four main races. “Americans, regulated by custom; Europeans, regulated by laws; Asians, governed by opinion; and Africans, governed by caprice” (qtd. in Thompson 3). Malte Hinrichsen comments on Carl von Linné’s influence on generations of scientists who have advocated racist theories that have placed the white race on top of all the other races:

Linné made no secret of his intermingling of cultural and biological observations. Thus, in systematizing religious and philosophical concepts of inequality, he inspired generations of scientists who tried to scale the alleged deviations and who frequently located Africans in between apes and mankind, regarding them as a kind of missing link in the order of beings. Being reflected in numerous pseudo-scientific visualisations and popular illustrations of fictional and factual literature, skin colour hierarchies and legends of animalistic Africans left the ivory tower of academia and sowed the seeds for everyday racism of the next centuries.

(Racist Trademarks 27)

Hinrichsen, building upon Pickering’s study of racial stereotypes, observes how whiteness has become the “somatic norm” (Pickering’s phrase) against which individuals are either prized or excluded. He also notes how blackness has been marked with a certain ambiguity, for while it has connoted strength and beauty in sports and music, it has been associated with evil and crime (13–14).

This ambivalence has characterized the imperialist gaze towards the colonized. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for instance, the narrator refers to the African subjects in a very ambivalent way. He describes them as a source of illness saying, “They were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” (42). They are deprived of their human, earthly nature and acquire a new mystic but portentous identity. These subjects, however, take on another aspect when the narrator refers to the “black fellows” on board of his ship saying, “Their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast” (33). The readers who might oppose the narrator’s racist revulsion for the facial traits of the “black fellows” cannot overlook his fascination for their black strength and wild stamina.

The same ambivalent tone is found in the narrator’s description of Mr. Kurtz’s black mistress, who is “wild and gorgeous,” “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent, there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress” (167–168). The narrator’s ambivalence is obvious when describing this exotic enchantress. She is desirable, yet dangerous. Her erotic aspect is mixed with a possible threat, and this is probably why she has a silent presence in the novel; a beauty that is not allowed to speak, a creature that looks like humans but “not quite,” to borrow Homi Bhabha’s phrasing when he refers to the “ambivalent world of the ‘not quite/not white’ ” (The Location of Culture 92). White colonists, while acknowledging the resemblance of black subjects to their own race, do not perceive them as equal. This is what Bhabha refers to as the “ambivalence of mimicry” (86), which is well illustrated in Joseph Conrad’s description of the ape-like figures dangling from the trees:

Suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roots, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the drop of heavy and motionless foliage… . No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough.

(Heart of Darkness 51–52)

Conrad’s narrator’s eye/I seems to be keen on perceiving the inhuman “aspect”—only as impression—of the African other. The creatures he describes are human beings, to his shock. The awe comes from the realization of his kinship to them. He could neither accept their being human, like him, nor could he overlook their striking semblance to animals, in their dangling, clapping and howling, which are expressions of a language with which he is not familiar.

In the Victorian writer H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure, the narrator expresses his fascination with how handsome the white men he meets at university look saying, “ ‘Good gracious!’ I said to my friend, with w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Negotiating Power in the Other’s Flesh
• Part II White Voices/Black Bodies: A Politics of Displacement
• Part III Beyond the B(lo)ody Politics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index